By Dagmar Herzog. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The…

Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. This book explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times. Germany’s twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for…

Edited by  Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier and Anne-Laure Porée.  Established in 1979 in the premises of the Khmer Rouge prison S-21 in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (TSGM) has had a turbulent history, mirroring Cambodia’s social and political transformations. The book brings together academics and practitioners from multiple fields who offer novel perspectives and sources on the…

By Ned Curthoys. The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age argues that the humanist ideal of Bildung, the cultivation of the potentialities of the self through self-reflection, travel, and varied social intercourse, has been revitalized in an age of genocidal violence. It examines the Bildungsroman as a flourishing intermedial genre encompassing contemporary historical fiction, historical feature films, and children’s and YA…

By Andrej Angrick. Mit dem Überfall auf die Sowjetunion nahmen auch Heydrichs mobile Mordverbände – die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD – ihre Tätigkeit auf. Andrej Angrick zeichnet das mörderische Vorgehen der Einsatzgruppe D zwischen dem Schwarzen und dem Kaspischen Meer nach und analysiert Tatmotive und Tatumfeld, Handlungsspielräume und Eigeninitiativen der Akteure sowie die…

By Randall Collins. This sequel to Randall Collins’ world-influential micro-sociology of violence introduces the question of time-dynamics: what determines how long conflict lasts and how much damage it does. Inequality and hostility are not enough to explain when and where violence breaks out. Time-dynamics are the time-bubbles when people are most nationalistic; the hours after a…

By Christopher Harrison. Genocidal Conscription examines how some states have employed mandatory military service as a tool to capture and kill the victims of genocide by recruiting the perpetrators from other minorities, and shifting blame away from the state. The book highlights several unique intersections that connect military history, Holocaust studies, and genocide. The study details…

By Alette Smeulers. The 9/11 attacks, as well as the ones in Madrid, London, Paris and Brussels; the genocides in Nazi Germany, Rwanda and Cambodia; the torture in dictatorial regimes; the wars in former Yugoslavia, Syria and Iraq and currently in Ukraine; the sexual violence during periods of conflict, all make us wonder: why would…

By Mary Fulbrook. In this powerful and revelatory new work, historian Mary Fulbrook takes on one of the most fraught issues in modern times: the role of ordinary Germans in enabling the rise of Nazism and with it the exclusion, persecution, and then extermination of millions of people across Europe. The question often asked of…

Edited by Martina Bitunjac and Julius H. Schoeps. Complicated Complicity is about the forms, motives, and spectrum of actions of European collaboration with the Nazis. State authorities, local military organizations, and individual players in different countries and areas including France, Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Italy, Portugal and the countries of the former Yugoslavia…