The International Journal of Human Rights covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of human rights issues: human rights and the law, race, religion, gender, children, class, refugees and immigration. In addition to these general areas, the journal publishes articles and reports on the human rights aspects of: genocide, torture, capital punishment and the laws of war…

In The Genocide Contagion, Israel W. Charny asks uncomfortable questions about what allows people to participate in genocide – either directly, through killing or other violent acts, or indirectly, by sitting passively while witnessing genocidal acts. Charny draws on both historical and current examples such as the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, and presses readers around the…

SS photographers took pictures of what happened to the Hungarian Jews in 1944. This photoseries has been preserved in the Auschwitz Album. For a long time the album was perceived as the only photoseries about Auschwitz-Birkenau that was made during the Second World War. However, in 2007 a second album with photos from Auschwitz-Birkenau was…

This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most…

When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact; Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillinly depicted by Ralph Fiennes…

In this pioneering biography of a frontline Holocaust perpetrator, Alex J. Kay uncovers the life of SS Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Filbert, responsible as the first head of SS Task Force 9, a mobile killing squad, for the murder of more than 18,000 Soviet Jews – men, women and children – on the Eastern Front. He…

In 2009, Harper’s Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in…

The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that…

The twentieth century has been called, not inaccurately, a century of genocide. And the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen little change, with genocidal violence in Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Why is genocide so widespread, and so difficult to stop, across societies that differ so much culturally, technologically, and politically? That’s the…

From the very moment of the liberation of camps at Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald, Germans have been held accountable for the crimes committed in the Holocaust. The Nazi regime unleashed the most systematic attempt in history to wipe out an entire people, murdering men, women and children for the simple ‘crime’ of being Jewish. After…