argumentative research paper topics about the holocaust

150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for good titles for a Holocaust project? This is one of the most tragic parts of WW2 that is definitely worth studying.

🔝 Top 10 Holocaust Questions for Essays

📝 holocaust essay: how to write, 🏆 holocaust essay examples & topics, 📌 holocaust thesis ideas, ✍️ holocaust essay topics for college, 💡 most interesting holocaust topics to write about, ❓ holocaust essay questions.

The most popular Holocaust essay topics are:

• The Holocaust and its causes
• Nazi human experiments as a part of the Holocaust
• Jewish ghettos in Poland
• The establishment of Auschwitz concentration camp
• The consequences of the Holocaust

Below you can find much more ideas. In this article, we’ve collected Holocaust thesis ideas and questions for essays. They will suite for middle school, high school, and college-level assignments. You’ll also find tips on writing your introduction, conclusion, and formulating a thesis statement, together with Holocaust essay examples. Write an ️A+ paper with us!

• What were the ideological causes of the Holocaust?
• How was anti-Jewish legislation in Germany established?
• What were the goals of the Nazi Euthanasia Program?
• How and where were the largest ghettos created?
• How did the concentration camp system expand across Europe?
• What were the three types of ghettos?
• How did the resistance efforts in the ghettos look like?
• Who were the key opponents of Nazism inside and outside Germany?
• How did the US government respond to Nazism?
• What were the consequences of the Holocaust?

The Holocaust has affected millions of people around the world. It is one of the most tragic and problematic topics of history. Holocaust essays help students to understand the issue better, analyzing its causes and consequences.

Organizing an essay on the Holocaust may be challenging, as there are many aspects to cover. We have developed some tips to help you through the process.

First, choose the Holocaust issue you want to discuss. Select one of the titles to work on. Some of the Holocaust essay topics include:

• Concentration camps in today’s Europe
• Lessons from the Holocaust: Fostering tolerance
• Present and future of the Holocaust research
• The causes of the Holocaust and discrimination against Jewish people
• How could people have stopped the Holocaust?
• Political issues behind the Holocaust
• The effects of the Holocaust on its survivors
• The factors and issues that contributed to Nazism

You can choose one of these holocaust essay questions or ask your professor for suggestions. Once that you have selected the topic of your essay, you can start working on the paper.

A well-developed structure is highly significant for an outstanding essay. Here are some tips on how to develop a structure for the paper:

• Think of the Holocaust essay prompts you want to discuss first. You can do preliminary research to see what issues you should cover.
• Ask your professor about the type of essay you should write. If it is an argumentative essay, you will need to leave space for at least one refutation paragraph and a rebuttal paragraph.
• Include an introductory paragraph (or several paragraphs if you are working on a longer essay). This paragraph should include the background information on the Holocaust and the problem you have selected. Discuss the goals of the paper and state your main claim at the end of this section.
• The main arguments of your paper will comprise body paragraphs. You may want to dedicate at least one separate paragraph for each of your claims. The number of body paragraphs is up to you, however, we would recommend including at least three of them. Hint: Make smooth transitions between paragraphs to make your paper look more organized.
• Remember that at least one body paragraph should state the general information about the Holocaust, its causes, and effects. You may discuss statistical data, global consequences, and primary victims.
• While working on a refutation paragraph, do not forget to prove that your arguments are more reasonable that the opposing perspectives. You can dedicate a separate paragraph for a rebuttal.
• A concluding section or a summary should state your main arguments again. You can also include a recommendation if necessary.
• Important tip: Do not make your paragraphs too short or too long. We would recommend writing between 65 and 190 words per paragraph and not more than 35 words per sentence. Making all body paragraphs of similar length is also a good idea that will make your paper look more professional.
• Ask your professor whether you need to include a title page and table of contents. Remember that a reference page is a must, as it includes all sources from the essay.
• If you are not sure that the selected structure is good, search for the holocaust essay titles and examples online and see how other students organize their papers. Avoid copying the works you will find.

Remember to look at the samples on our website to get some ideas for your excellent paper!

• The Holocaust: Poem “Tears of Blood” The extermination of the Roma was part of the general policy of the National Socialists to destroy political opponents, homosexual people, terminally and mentally ill, drug addicts, and Jews.
• Holocaust and Bosnian Genocide Comparison The current paper aims to compare some of the most notable genocides in history, the Holocaust, and the Bosnian mass murder in terms of their aims, death tolls, tactics, and methods.
• Critique of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust Book “Night” Like many books on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel’s Night is a dramatic picture of the horror times in the history of humankind and particularly in the history of the Jewish people.
• Holocaust: Nazi Anti-Jewish Policies and Actions The major policy that the Nazi implemented was the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service that excluded Jews from government jobs.
• US Holocaust Policy During World War II However, the anti-Nazi campaign was not successful, and the main reason for this was the harsh foreign policy of the USA.
• Reasons Why the Jews Failed to Resist the Holocaust The award-winning book brings the readers to the lives and experiences of Vladek Spiegelman, a holocaust survivor, and his father during the period.
• Discussion of Holocaust and Immigration In “Holocaust Education and Remembrance in Australia,” Suzanne D.and Suzanne H.discuss the adverse effects and after-issues of immigration among the Jewish community and how it led to the concept that the Holocaust had a long-lasting […]
• The Holocaust and the Nakba: Tragedy and Trauma The Nakba refers to the destruction of hundreds of cities and towns and the Palestinian people’s cultural, economic, political, and social backgrounds.
• Holocaust Commemoration in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum This paper is relevant to the understanding of virtual exhibit since it highlights the major notions of memorialization that are included in the exhibition.
• Holocaust: Traditions and Encounters He was the only presenter in the video: he revealed the question about Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust and answered questions from the audience.
• Holocaust: Taking Steps Toward Evil To the Nazi leader, the Jews were an inferior race and were an alien threat to the German racial purity. The Germans blamed the Jews for having lost the World War 1 and accused them […]
• A Visit to the Holocaust Museum Houston The museum emphasizes the perils of intolerance, bigotry, and apathy by drawing on the lessons of the Holocaust and other massive genocides.
• “Holocaust Horror…” by Moore A considerable number of young people do not have the correct knowledge, and the most disturbing fact is that the Holocaust started to be interpreted in different ways.
• The Relationship Between Epigenetics and the Effects of the Holocaust Tests are most likely to identify existing changes of DNA and the proteins related to DNA, which are responsible for the structure of the DNA and the availability of other elements related to the DNA.
• The Terror of the Holocaust in the Book “Hana’s Suitcase” by Karen Levine The story “Hana’s Suitcase” by Karen Levine is not fiction, where heroes and the plot are the imagination of the author; it is a documentary story where the situation and named people are real, they […]
• The Holocaust and Schindler’s List: Transforming the Human Perception of Violence The World War II genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, changed both the Jewish history and the history of the world, transforming the human perception of violence and religious conflicts.
• The Holocaust as a History-Cultural Phenomenon The Holocaust in the narrow sense represents the persecution and mass extermination of Jews who inhabited the German lands, the territories of Hitler’s allies, and the areas occupied during the war.
• Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel “Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale”: Author’s Understanding of the Holocaust Spiegelman uses mice to represent Jews because of the oppression they experienced while in Hitler’s concentration camps. The mistreatment the Jews experienced is similar to what mice experience in the presence of cats.
• Holocaust Museum Exhibition “State of Deception” Generally, evaluating a variety of facts from different sources, it becomes evident that the exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum can be seen as rather […]
• Holocaust: Ethnic and Cultural Diversity and the Real Face of Prejudice The holocaust refers to the murder of six million European Jews in the course of the Second World War. The holocaust was the highest level of prejudice in society during the time.
• German Attitudes Towards Third Reich and Holocaust Commemoration The Goldhagen debate represents a shift in the attitude of the Germans regarding the commemoration of the Third Reich and the remembrance of the holocaust.
• Jewish Holocaust and the Humour During the Dark Times This is the Jewish long tradition of jokes in Judaism that dates back to the Midrash and the Pentateuch but it generally refers to the more recent group of verbs that were first used in […]
• Human Response to Holocaust in “Nightfather” and “Fugitive Pieces” It is his memory of the nightmare that keeps him imprisoned, he appears in the camp again and again by the volition of his memory that is eager to play painful tricks with him.
• Holocaust Denial: Dynamics of Ethics While keeping this in mind, we will analyze the introduction of “holocaust denial” criminal charges into the penal code of many Western countries that simultaneously take pride in the fact that their democratic form of […]
• American’s Reaction to Jewish Holocaust Later when America joined Russia in the war against the Nazi Regime, the action was selective in that it failed to protect the Jews from genocide.
• Holocaust: From Discrimination to Concentration Camps The discrimination as said at workplaces and other areas was later to escalate to actual killing with the taking of power by the Nazi party establishing legal backing of their activities with the enactment of […]
• Jewish Family’s Experiences During the Holocaust Piecing together everything that I learned from my grandparents and parents, I have come to realize that I was shaped early on by the experience of my ancestors in the Holocaust and in Russia.
• Censorship, Holocaust and Political Correctness In this paper, we will focus on exploring different aspects of formal and informal censorship, in regards to a so-called “Holocaust denial”, as we strongly believe that people’s ability to express their thoughts freely is […]
• The Holocaust: Auschwitz Concentration Camp History In an attempt to dehumanize the victims of the Nazis and as a testament to the resilience of a few of the inmates of the camps, the mentality of the brutal Nazis is worth a […]
• Vatican and Holocaust: Did Pope help Jews The couple later stated that they never wanted the Pope to come out in the open and state that he was against the Nazis because then he will become the center of attention and to […]
• Holocaust: What Were Its Causes and Effects? After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazis, the goal of the Nazis was to murder every individual of Jewish origin, which the Nazis defined as anyone with a trace of Jewish “blood” dating […]
• Henry Orenstein: Holocaust Survivor and Entrepreneur The Nazi regime, were under the impression that the Germans were ‘racially superior’ to the Jews and believed that the Jews were somehow lesser than them.
• The Holocaust: Historical Analysis The Holocaust, now the example of Jewish pain, has long stopped to be a piece of history, and is now regarded by spiritual and material alike, as a piece of divinity – a sacred text […]
• The Holocaust: Planned Physical Extermination In this essay, we are going to concentrate particularly on the point of the Holocaust in the countries of Eastern and Western Europe, namely the extermination of Jews that took place in Romania and France […]
• Holocaust Tragedy in Nazi Germany Since the forties of the twentieth century, another such theory, called the Holocaust, came into use in the context of the mass extermination of Jews in Europe by the Nazis. It is the education of […]
• The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation The sanctity of life should therefore be respected at all costs and so humanity should strive to coexist in peace and harmony in a manner that is sustainable to prevent the reoccurrence of such atrocities […]
• A Visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC People visited the museum to learn about the atrocities caused to the Jews by the Nazi administration, headed by Hitler. The other piece I learned is that in the museum there was a video of […]
• Holocaust in “Maus” Graphic Novel by Art Spiegelman It is quite peculiar that Spiegelman uses only the black-and-white color perhaps, this is another means to emphasize the gloomy atmosphere of the Nazi invasion and the reign of the anti-Semite ideas.
• Post-Holocaust and Imprisonment Literary Works It is possible that Celan uses repetition to express the feelings of repetitiveness that he and the other people felt during the imprisonment.
• Virginia Holocaust Museum’s Genocide Presentation In terms of the educational objective, I aimed to learn the aspects and details of the Holocaust through the artifacts, objects, and things that belonged to people experiencing these events’ atrocities.
• Virginia Holocaust Museum Trip and Experience I wanted to make sure that I could listen to myself and truly feel what the Holocaust was for humanity and is for me. I felt outraged that someone could think they had the right […]
• Virginia Holocaust Museum Field: Trip Reflection I must admit that the very fact of listening to the voice of somebody who went through the horrors of the Holocaust proved to be at least as revealing as all of the artifacts and […]
• The Poetry of the Holocaust Period In conclusion, it seems appropriate to state that Sutzkever is a metaphysical poet as his creative thought focuses on the beauty of nature and the truthful presentation of events.
• The Public Memory of the Holocaust In addition to his pain, Levi concerns the increasing temporal distance and habitual indifference of hundreds of millions of people towards the Holocaust and the survivors1 It causes the feeling of anxiety that was fuelled […]
• History of the Holocaust They can be outlined as follows: the historical legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe, the particulars of the German national character /the fact that the Nazis did succeed in dehumanizing the Jews, and the irrational hatred […]
• Holocaust and Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt This paper is devoted to the analysis of the Holocaust in general and the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in particular. The judges represented the states which were the main winners in the war: Great Britain, […]
• Holocaust Memorial Museum Textiles, for example, badges, uniforms, flags, costumes, and banners are also housed in the museum. Other types of materials housed in the museum are works on paper, such as announcements, posters, broadsides, and maps.
• Holocaust in “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi Another issue that needs to be discussed is that the economy of Germany was hurt because of the World War I, and it has affected the pride of the nation.
• 1942-1945 Holocaust: Nazi Germany’s Political Reasons Started in 1942 and taking place until the end of the war, the Holocaust was the genocide of Jewish people arranged by Hitler and implemented by the Nazi army.
• Holocaust vs. Japanese Colonial Era in Korea The Holocaust in the history of Jewish people, as well as Japanese occupation in the history of Korean people, was one of the greatest tragedies.
• Holocaust, Antisemitism, and Propaganda That is why, nowadays great attention is given to issues which led to the death of millions of people. Being a part of the ideology of Nazism, it led to the elimination of a great […]
• The Holocaust Effects: Books “Tzili” and “Wartime Lies” The natural experiences of growing up are changed and twisted by the war and its horrors, but the specific developments, their perceptions, and impacts are affected by the children’s personalities and circumstances of their lives, […]
• Nazi Medical Experiments During the Holocaust The information is maintained by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This photograph is maintained and produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• The Holocaust and Jehovas Witnesses The concept of “spiritual resistance” in the case of members of Jehovah’s Witness during the era of the Nazis in Germany focused primarily on continuing the acts associated with their faith despite the persecution they […]
• Holocaust and Nazi’s Racial Imperialism The scholar argues that the event was a result of the racial imperialism championed by the Nazi Party in the country.
• Adolf Hitler and a History of the Holocaust Before going any further it is important to point out the kind of mindset that the German people had back then that made it easier for Hitler to convince them to join him in a […]
• The Holocaust History: the Jewish Community Destruction To achieve its objective, the paper will expound on why the Nazi government targeted the Jews, why did these attacks come during this specific period, the role that average German citizens played and the overall […]
• Holocaust History, Its Definition and Causes Also notable about racism is the fact that it may take several forms and it is not just limited to the literal meaning of racism like the skin color, the size of the eyes, and […]
• Holocaust Experience in the Book ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel Eliezer’s depiction in the story as the main character in the story is that of a humble and religious young man.
• The Jewish Holocaust Novel ‘Night’ by Eliezer Wiesel Generally, Eliezer admired the fact that his father was prayerful and he kept his utmost faith in God even in the time of oppression.
• History of the Jews and the Holocaust The Nazi regime and its partners became the pioneers of the Holocaust. That being the case, the anti-Semitism ideas and prejudices experienced in Germany before the Second World War led to the infamous Holocaust.
• Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah Lipstadt The book is divided into chapters that focus on the history and methods that are used to distort the truth and the memory of the Holocaust.
• The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Since its inception in 1993, the museum has served as the nation’s reminder when it comes to issues of the holocaust.
• Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Holocaust and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Position As such conflict would put a serious threat to the safety of the region, the policy aims at the acceptance of nuclear deal and the development of the effective course of actions aimed at eliminating […]
• Liberal Democracy, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust The Nazis and other populist political movements in Germany believed that the Jews had undue influence in the country through their prominent positions in the media and the financial system4.
• Was the Holocaust the failure of or the product of Modernity? The date that traditionally marks the beginning of modernist era is 1453, when the City of Constantinople was conquered by the Turkish Ottoman Empire, as far as this date symbolized the end of the Byzantine […]
• Reconsidering the History: Holocaust Denial. The XXI Century Prospects Despite the fact that Holocaust was one of the hideous crimes against the humanity that is never to occur again, some tend to represent the tragic event as the stage of the history that people […]
• Nazi Germany & Holocaust The Nazi movement is a revolutionary movement that was associated with the mass murder of Jews and Communists in an attempt to restore the reputation of Germany at the international level. The Nazi regime under […]
• The Holocaust and Nazi Germany The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 led to the establishment of thousands of concentration camps, which were centers of mass murders of Jews.
• The Holocaust and Jews Extermination The Nazis perceived Internationalism in the context of the Holocaust to be a global perspective primarily held and advocated by Jews who were using it as a method designed to dominate the whole world.
• The Holocaust: Analysis of Life in the Kovno, Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos Due to the continued capturing and shooting of the Jews at the forts, Rabbi Shapiro felt that the Jews should be separated from the Lithuanians to live into the Ghetto and thus a seven member […]
• How Holocaust Has Been Projected by the Different Historians Over the Years? Several historians claimed that it was unfair as it was an act of barbarism and it promoted wicked behavior with the innocent people of Jewish community while on the other hand, it was said that […]
• Jewish Insight of Holocaust Holocaust, the extermination of Jews from the European land was the example of brutality and viciousness of the Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, many historians were observing the situation critically and wanted to present their ideas about […]
• Shooting At the Holocaust Museum According to the incident report, von Brunn entered the museum and shot the guard. His motive was to hold the board members who were in the building hostage for the economic difficulties that the country […]
• The Nazi Holocaust’s Effects This study aims at analyzing the claim that social and psychological effects of the Holocaust linger in areas of political systems in which the survivors of the holocaust currently reside.
• The History of the Holocaust Hitler said that the root cause of the problems were the despicable Jews of Europe. The direct victims were the Jews but the rest of the world understood the consequences of inaction and the lack […]
• Holocaust and the Cold War Cold war refers to the military and political tension between the United States of America and the Soviet Union immediately after the World War 2.
• Reinhard Heydrich’s Role in the Holocaust With the help of his boss: Himmler[7], they used political forces to influence the police in an attempt to ensure the consolidation of the Nazi administration in the entire nation of Germany[8].
• Doris Bergen: Nazi’s Holocaust Program in “War and Genocide” The discussion of the Holocaust cannot be separated from the context of the World War II because the Nazi ideology of advancing the Aryans and murdering the undesirable people became one of the top reasons […]
• The ‘Banality’ of Abstraction: Western Philosophy’s Failure to Address the Moral Implications of the Holocaust Additionally, I would like to address the relationship of Arendt and Heidegger in the context of The Holocaust, and the effect that it had upon their philosophical works.
• Conduction of The Holocaust Propaganda against Jews The common media the Nazis used for the campaign against the Jews was the Weekly Nazis newspaper, “The attacker”.
• Does Global English Mean Linguistic Holocaust? It is not difficult to find examples of the extinction of languages in the wake of the introduction of English. Some of the most active areas of extinction include the American West, where a variety […]
• The Horror of the Holocaust in Different Styles of Writing One of the thematic thread that unites these three works of the writers from different countries is their attempt to reproduce how cruel and unfair the actions of the Nazi were. The Holocaust, the judgment […]
• Peter Eisenman; Building Germany, the Holocaust Memorial The Jews were not the Nazi’s only victims during the holocaust, other casualties were the weak and disabled people in the society, who were killed on the pretext of the Euthanasia program.
• The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide deals with one of the most debatable issues of the history of the twentieth century, i.e.
• The Holocaust: Religion, Race and Ethnicity Discrimination
• Holocaust Resistance: The Largest Jews Revolt Holocaust
• The Violent Conditions and Dehumanization Faced by the Jewish People During the Holocaust
• Analysis of the Causes of the Holocaust in Germany
• The Anger and Bewilderment of Holocaust Survivors
• Racist and Hate Crimes During the Holocaust
• The Long-Lasting Impact of the Holocaust on the Survivors
• The Holocaust, and the Statistics of the Tragic Events
• General Information About the Holocaust Was Genocide Against the Jewish Race
• The Causes and Effects the Holocaust Was Responsible for the Death of 6 Million
• Overview of the Chinese Holocaust and Experiments on Living People
• The Goals and Impact of the Holocaust Camps in Germany
• General Information About the Horrible Events That Took Place During the Holocaust
• The Different Killing Methods Used by the Nazi Germans During the Holocaust
• The U.S. Government’s Disregard of the Jewish Holocaust
• Survivor’s Syndrome Among Holocaust Survivors
• The German Holocaust: Treatment of the Germans After WWII
• Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Time, Methodology and Memory
• The Link Between Nazi Propaganda and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Bewilderment and Anger
• Stolen Art Literature and Music of the Holocaust
• The Genesis and History of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany
• The Knowledge About the Holocaust To Avoid the Same Experience
• Analysis of the Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior
• The Horrific Experience and Fate of the Children During the Holocaust
• How Did the Holocaust Affect the Jewish Community?
• How Does the American Holocaust Show the Huge Decline of Native Americans?
• Was German “Eliminationist Anti Semitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?
• How Were Jews Treated During the Holocaust?
• What Is the Relationship Between Holocaust and Genocide?
• How the Holocaust Took Away the Rights of Jewish People?
• What Was the Strength of the Nazis During the Holocaust?
• With Whom Does Responsibility for the Holocaust Ultimately Lie?
• How the Pope Affected the Holocaust?
• What Events Led to the Holocaust in Germany?
• How Was Survival Possible in the Death Camps of the Holocaust?
• Were the Jehovah’s Witnesses Really Affected by the Holocaust?
• Why Does God Permit Tragic Events Like the Holocaust Terrorist Attacks?
• What Was Hitler’s Role in the Holocaust?
• Why Is Peter Eisenman Building a Memorial to the Victims of the Holocaust in Germany?
• How Does the Holocaust Compare to One Other Form of Modern Genocide (Kurdish Genocide)?
• What Are the Problems Between Jews and Christians That Caused the Holocaust?
• How Did Oskar Schindler Act During the Holocaust?
• What Prejudices Were There During the Holocaust?
• How Did People Avoid Removal During the Holocaust?
• What Kind of Medical Experiments Were Carried Out During the Holocaust?
• How Did the Holocaust Affect Ordinary People?
• What Are the Proposals for Preventing a New Holocaust?
• How Did the U.S. React to the Holocaust in Germany?
• Why Was the World Silent During the Holocaust?
• How the Holocaust Affected Its Jewish Victims?
• What Are the Consequences of the Holocaust and Its Consequences for the Jews and the Rest of the Population?
• How the Holocaust Explodes the Concept of Mass Crime?
• Why Are Jews Demanding Compensation for Holocaust Damage?
• What Economic and Social Conditions Led to the Holocaust?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). 150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/holocaust-essay-examples/

"150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/holocaust-essay-examples/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/holocaust-essay-examples/.

1. IvyPanda . "150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/holocaust-essay-examples/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "150 Holocaust Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/holocaust-essay-examples/.

• Genocide Essay Titles
• Famine Essay Titles
• Civil War Titles
• Cold War Topics
• Youth Violence Research Topics
• Nazism Topics
• Iraq War Research Ideas
• Pearl Harbor Paper Topics
• Vietnam War Paper Topics
• World War 1 Research Ideas
• Hiroshima Topics
• World War 2 Essay Topics
• Social Justice Essay Ideas
• Disaster Essay Titles

126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles

The Holocaust is one of the most tragic events in world history, and writing an essay about it can help you understand it better. Among these Holocaust essay topics, you can find ideas for different types of middle school or college essays. Use them as the Holocaust essay titles or as a starting point for your dissertation research.

🕎 TOP 7 Holocaust Essay Topics

🏆 good titles for holocaust essays, 🎓 most interesting holocaust research paper topics, 💡 simple holocaust essay ideas, ❓ holocaust questions for essays, 📝 holocaust argumentative essay topics, 🔎 holocaust topics for research paper, ✍️ more holocaust essay titles.

• Holocaust in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” Film
• Turning Points of the Holocaust
• Escape from Sobibor: World War 2 Holocaust
• World War II: Holocaust and Discrimination of the Jews
• Holocaust: Jewish Women’s Experiences
• World History: Researching of Holocaust
• “Children in the Holocaust and World War II” by Holliday
• Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers During the Holocaust The Holocaust was prevalent, with cruelties, tragedies, and atrocities directed at various groups defined by diverse characteristics.
• Holocaust and Its Physical and Mental Consequences This paper is a detailed and thorough study of the physical and mental consequences of the Holocaust on people who survived this terrible period of history.
• The Holocaust Impact on Jewish Theology Holocaust had a major impact on Jewish theology by providing an earth-shattering tragedy the likes of which the Jewish have never seen in the past, to explain.
• Holocaust and War in “Hiroshima” by John Hersey This paper provides a review of John Hersey’s accounts of the holocaust on “Hiroshima” and provides an understanding of how to handle incidences of war.
• Wiesel’s Holocaust Experiences Eliezer Wiesel’s view of human nature and understanding of God radically changed due to his experience of the Holocaust.
• Behavior of Witnesses in “Holocaust by Bullets” by Desbois Desbois’ book “Holocaust by Bullets” documents in detail the experience of witnesses to the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
• Holocaust and Moral Objectivism: “Surviving Auschwitz” “Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah” by WSGVU is a documentary that follows two Holocaust survivors as they visit their hometown and concentration camps.
• The Extent of the Holocaust as a Christian Problem The events of the Holocaust are considered a regrettable lapse in judgment on the part of the German Christian population and should be remembered to prevent such events.
• Holocaust and the United States To the most basic facts, the holocaust saw the death of approximately eleven million people, six million of these being Jews.
• The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust Comparing the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide the latter is much simpler in terms of cause, method, and outcome. The Holocaust is the direct result of anti-Semitism.
• Third Reich and Holocaust Commemoration The commemoration of the Third Reich and the holocaust through negative publicity like in Goldhaggen and crimes of the Wehrmacht gives the world a chance to ridicule the country.
• Facts of the Holocaust Holocaust was one of the most terrible events in history if the world marked by extreme violence and hostility.
• American Influence on Stopping Holocaust Had America been involved early and acted accordingly, millions of Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust.
• Holocaust and Genocide Analysis The ideology provided by Nazi underlined the descent of the German people from the Aryan race and rejected all other nations.
• “I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” and “American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World”: Comparison The book titled “I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala” is an autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú that is written in the form of the testimonio.
• Herero Holocaust Among European Colonial Genocides The source identifies a pattern of events that preceded the holocaust in Germany. As Ter-Matevosyan notes, the holocaust is one of the worst historic moments in modern history.
• US Holocaust Memorial and American Indian Museums In this paper, I will evaluate the National Museum of the American Indian and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Holocaust in “Night” Novel by Elie Wiesel While exterminating Jews, the Nazis were also trying to humiliate the ‘chosen people’ in every way possible. Wiesel’s book Night illustrates the validity of this suggestion.
• Antisemitism Controversy and Holocaust Denial Antisemitism has existed for centuries and taken different forms. This is a very dangerous phenomenon as it often resulted in cruel pogroms and even legal persecutions.
• Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism Ideas Antisemitism has existed for centuries and taken different forms. This is a very dangerous phenomenon as it often resulted in cruel pogroms and even legal persecutions.
• “Night” a Book by Elie Wiesel about Holocaust Literature Analysis Night is a book written by Elie Wiesel that focuses on his experiences while imprisoned in one of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
• Night by Elie Wiesel: A Memoir About the Holocaust Experiences Night by Elie Wiesel describes the little boy Eliezer. In his teens, Eliezer is a perfect embodiment of a child growing up in a perfect society.
• The Rwandan Genocide as One of the Devastating Genocides Since the Holocaust The historic Rwandan Genocide, organized by Hutu hardliners, resulted in the merciless murder of approximately one million individuals after a three months rampage in 1994.
• Environmental Studies: The Global Warming Holocaust Global climate change is a social issue that has captured the imagination of the world’s population. This issue is discussed in mass media and social media platforms.
• Concentration Camps During the Holocaust
• Saving Jews From the Holocaust Examined in Terms of Cognitive Dissonance Theories
• Nazi Beliefs and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Bewilderment and Anger
• Life During the Holocaust in the Eyes of Jean Amery
• Comparing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin During the Holocaust
• Christian Churches Should Have Opposed the Nazi Holocaust
• Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Asian Genocide
• Stolen Art Literature and Music of the Holocaust
• German Anti-Semitism Was Responsible for the Holocaust
• Political Ideology and Other Factors Leading to the Holocaust
• Dehumanization During the Holocaust and Iranian Revolution
• Holocaust and Its Sociopolitical Causes
• American Foreign Policy During the Holocaust
• Moral Indifference, the Holocaust & the Directive for Genocide
• Croatia Before and After the Holocaust and World War II
• Death and Concentration Camps in the Holocaust History
• Nazi Propaganda During World War Two and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Victim’s Retribution and Reparations
• Nazi Germany and Virginia Holocaust Museum
• Medical Experiments During the Holocaust
• Pre Nazi Holocaust and the Civil War
• Holocaust and Bosnian Genocide Comparisons
• German Battalion 101’s Role in Perpetuating the Holocaust
• Hypothesis Concerning Holocaust Presented by David Cole
• Emotional Changes During the Holocaust
• Jewish Resistance During WWII and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Bystanders: Placing the Blame on Surrounding Citizens and Allied Nations
• Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust
• Japanese Internment Camps and Holocaust Concentration Camps
• Holocaust and the Response of the American Catholic Church
• Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust
• Holocaust Denial Political Agenda
• Nuclear Holocaust United States
• Advancing the Individual’s Knowledge of the Holocaust
• Holocaust: Monuments, Memorials, and Public Demonstrations
• Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Holocaust
• Challenges Facing the Nazis and Other Jews in the Holocaust
• Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Time, Methodology, and Memory
• American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
• How Did the Holocaust Affect the Development of Military Literature?
• How Did the Native American Removal Compared to the Holocaust?
• How Did the Nazis Use Propaganda During the Holocaust?
• How Ordinary Germans and Their Foreign Allies Willingly Participated in the Holocaust?
• How the Holocaust Affected It’s Jewish Victims?
• Were German Citizens Aware of the Holocaust?
• What Did the Holocaust and Japanese Relocation Act Have in Similarities?
• What Theological Questions Relevant to the Study of Judaism Are Raised by the Holocaust?
• What Was the Involvement of Ordinary Germans in the Holocaust?
• Why Germans Scientist, Engineers and Doctors Asked To Participate in the Holocaust?
• Why Should Future Generations Know About the Holocaust?
• Were the Jehovah Witnesses Really Affected by the Holocaust?
• Was German “Eliminationist Antisemitism” Responsible for the Holocaust?
• What Is Meant by Term the Holocaust Industry?
• Why Does God Permit Tragic Events Like the Holocaust Terrorist Attacks?
• Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?
• What Is the Environmental History of the Holocaust?
• Why Did the World Keep Silent During the Holocaust?
• What Is the Treatment of the Holocaust in High School History Textbooks?
• What Is the Culpability of Accounting in Perpetuating the Holocaust?
• Did Gender Matter During the Holocaust?
• What Are the Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust?
• Can There Be a Political Science of the Holocaust?
• How Did Holocaust Show the Problems of Historical Representation?
• Why the Holocaust Does Not Matter to Estonians?
• Bystanders during the Holocaust: should they be morally responsible for not intervening?
• Did the Nuremberg trials achieve justice for Holocaust victims?
• Should teaching the history of the Holocaust be mandatory in schools?
• Should Holocaust denial be legally punishable?
• Does the Holocaust illustrate the dangers of unchecked government power?
• Should Holocaust restitution claims be limited to a specific timeframe?
• The Holocaust and the problem of evil: does this genocide contradict the existence of a benevolent God?
• Should non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust be commemorated equally to Jewish victims?
• Should Holocaust museums adopt a truthful or sensitive approach to showing Holocaust atrocities?
• Is it justifiable for Holocaust victims to seek financial restitution from companies collaborating with Nazis?
• The Holocaust denial: the motivations behind it and its consequences.
• What were the motivations of people participating in the Holocaust genocide?
• The impact of the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies on understanding the history.
• The role of the Holocaust in countering modern hate speech and prejudice.
• Similarities and differences between the Holocaust and other genocides.
• How did the Nazi propaganda incite violence during the Holocaust?
• Evaluating the effectiveness of resistance movements during the Holocaust.
• The psychological effects of the Holocaust on survivors.
• Children’s experiences of separation and survival during the Holocaust.
• Non-Jewish people’s rescue efforts during the Holocaust.
• The ethical challenges involved in the artistic representation of the Holocaust.
• The role of international law in preventing genocide after the Holocaust.
• Beyond Auschwitz: lesser-known Holocaust concentration camps.
• How is the Holocaust remembered and commemorated today?
• The role of ordinary citizens in perpetrating the Holocaust.
• The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and its impact on the Jewish resistance.
• The portrayal of the Holocaust in literature and movies.
• The Holocaust and gender: unique experiences of male and female victims.
• Challenges that followed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
• The effects of the Holocaust on the victims’ descendants.

Cite this post

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2022, May 10). 126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/

"126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." StudyCorgi , 10 May 2022, studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) '126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles'. 10 May.

1. StudyCorgi . "126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." May 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." May 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "126 Holocaust Essay Topics & Research Paper Titles." May 10, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/holocaust-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Holocaust were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 21, 2024 .

My Homework Done

Expert Writing Services

• How It Works
• Buy homework
• Ace my homework
• Homework writers
• Homework help
• Assignment writing
• Homework Solutions
• Homework Answers
• No Need To Study
• High school
• McGraw-Hill Connect
• Myaccountinglab
• Precalculus
• Word Problem
• Computer Science
• Language arts
• Engineering
• Biochemistry
• Microbiology

Homework is easy with expert tips and advice. And even easier when you have an expert to do it for you.

80 Deep Holocaust Research Topics To Explore

Be it history or the sciences, the holocaust has played a key role in shaping theories and ideologies. How do you make your paper on the holocaust standout? What is it that you would be keen to know and research on? If you are finding it hard to put things in perspective, here is a list of topics on concentration camp research paper. It aims to help students and create a resource they can consult for writing research papers on the holocaust.

Table of Contents

Classic holocaust topics for research, holocaust argumentative essay topics, holocaust writing prompts for cause and effect, topics for comparison and contrast, art-based research papers on holocaust.

These holocaust research paper topics have inspired many students across the world. Go through these questions or topics to get inspired. They are sure to help you create interesting papers on the event.

To write a holocaust research paper use these topics as a foundation to start with and build upon.

• Ann Frank’s father — A Detailed character sketch
• Milestones in the life of Adolf Hitler
• Childhood events that shaped Adolf Hitler
• Prosecution of tribunes and war criminals during the Second World War
• The liberation of the concentration camps
• The heroic acts of Oskar Schindler
• Anti-Jew laws adopted in Nazi Germany
• The Schutzstaffel and their role during the holocaust
• The resistance of Denmark and the rescue of Jews of Danish origin
• Role of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust
• Countries that have adopted laws of Holocaust Denial and why
• The heroic acts of Irena Sendler during the holocaust
• Does the Holocaust question God’s existence?
• Why is it important for young people to visit Holocaust memorials?
• Christian and catholic community – their responses on the holocaust, then and now
• The persecution of homosexuals during the holocaust
• Twin experiments during the holocaust
• How and why did the Germans allow a phenomenon like a holocaust to occur?
• Holocaust – The various stages
• What initiated the Holocaust?
• Deprivation of basic human rights in concentration camps
• The personal history of Eva Braun
• Insights into the life of a Holocaust Survivor
• What do German schoolchildren learn about the Holocaust?

These holocaust research questions present two perspectives of a given topic. They focus on the concentration research camp paper, as well as, the papers on arts and science during the holocaust. The argumentative holocaust paper topics give you a lot of scope for research.

• Should holocaust be addressed in college and classrooms?
• Arguments that debunk the holocaust denial.
• Holocaust lessons for humanity
• Is one person responsible for the holocaust?
• Holocaust: Result of war or a systematically planned action?
• Would the international community intervene if a Holocaust was to repeat itself today?
• Were all Nazi soldiers, pro-genocide?
• Why must we remember the Holocaust?
• Could early destruction of concentration camps by allies have prevented the horrors of the Holocaust?
• The holocaust is the result of Hitler’s ideologies about race. Is this statement entirely true?
• What makes the Holocaust unique?
• Did stereotypes have any role to play in the Holocaust?
• Could more resistance from European citizens and Jewish people have stopped the Holocaust?
• Events contributing to the rise of Hitler
• Is it possible for the recurrence of the Holocaust in modern times?
• Was inaction the sole contributor for mass genocide during World War II?

These holocaust research topics look into the massive effects of the Holocaust. Some of these can be felt even today.

• What were the consequences of the Holocaust?
• Provide a holocaust thesis statement on the effects of the Holocaust on Modern Europe.
• The effect of the holocaust on Jewish people
• The effect of the holocaust on other minorities
• Did the Holocaust impact the formation of the EU?
• How did the Holocaust affect Israel?
• Origins and reasons for the Anti-Semitism ideology.
• The effect of the bystander effect on social attitudes towards WWII.
• The effect of the Holocaust on Western civilization.
• The role of anti-Semitism in the Holocaust.
• Increase in atheism after WWII
• Perception of Jewish people after WWII.
• Effects of the Holocaust on modern social ideologies.
• The role of the Holocaust in history
• The perception of Germany post Holocaust

These holocaust research topics compare similar events and ideologies that are connected to the holocaust.

• German Holocaust versus the American Indian Holocaust.
• Compare the lives of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel in concentration camps.
• Jewish and Black Holocausts
• Japanese Internment camps in the USA versus concentration camps in Germany
• Rwanda genocide versus Holocaust
• Dachau versus Auschwitz
• Similarities between the Holocaust and slavery
• Jewish refugees versus modern Syrian refugees.
• Cambodian genocide versus the Holocaust
• Jewish partisan and spiritual resistance.

These holocaust research questions delve into the artistic representation of the Holocaust.

• Schindler’s List: A representation of Holocaust
• Character sketch of Nechama Tec in the book “Dry Tears”
• Influence of concentration camps on characters in the book, “Night”
• Review of the Pianist
• Holocaust’s famous monuments
• Do movies trivialize the genocide?
• Do Holocaust movies reduce racial discrimination in modern society?
• How literature honours Holocaust victims.
• “March to Freedom” by Edith Singer and human resilience.
• Review of “Dry Tears” by Nechama Tec
• Guilt concept in the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman
• Review of “The diary of Anne Frank”
• How personal diaries changed the perception of the Holocaust.
• Is it moral to create art about the Holocaust?
• Can holocaust movies prevent its recurrence?

For more prompts and writing help in various styles, get in touch with our skilled professionals today.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history

ISSN 1749-8155

Debates on the Holocaust

Scholarly research on the Holocaust, carried out in many disciplines but especially in the field of history, is dynamic and­­ constantly progressing; several giant leaps in its expansion can be discerned, mainly since the end of the 1970s. Testifying to the vibrancy and ‘the sheer scale of contemporary Holocaust historiography’ (as Tom Lawson rightly points out in his introduction to the book reviewed here) is the fact that the library of Yad Vashem, Israel's research and memorial institution for the Holocaust, has in the last two decades enriched its collection with some 4000 titles every year! Consequently, historiographical overviews of the interpretational debates, schools, stages in the development and the impact of political, social and cultural developments on research etc. are much needed – both for scholars in, and students entering, the field, as well as for the growing audience interested in the topic, both laymen and educators (Lawson states that ‘this book is primarily designed as an introductory text for students and teachers’ (p. ix)). Nevertheless, the number of such overviews, especially analytical ones, has remained limited (1) , perhaps as a result from the fear by scholars ‘that any attempt to interrogate its history can only be partial and incomplete’ (p. 1). Therefore, first of all, Lawson should be lauded for his courage in attempting this challenge; but then he has also succeeded in writing a quite comprehensive – though not unproblematic – analysis of most of the major debates in the field, while colligating an abundance of literature into his most readable narrative.

Lawson's book is part of a series called Issues in Historiography , which takes on diverse historical ‘events’ (the Norman Conquest, The French and English Revolutions) and processes (the American Civil War era, the rise of the British Empire, black civil rights in America). As such, by showing ‘the ways in which the Holocaust has been rendered and represented as History’, that is, by revealing ‘the complexity of historians efforts to uncover the Holocaust past’, the field of Holocaust research is used as a test-case ‘to demonstrate that historians and history-writing have an enduring social and political relevance’ (p. 2); Lawson emphasizes this point because he believes that the Holocaust has been left outside the notion which is by now a historical consensus in the West, that ‘past and present collide in their markedly provisional narratives’. He is right to a considerable extent in stating this point and it is justified by both in the need to explore the vast area of ‘sub-events’ in the Holocaust (i.e. in establishing what should be included in it) and in the quite unique accompanying phenomenon of Holocaust denial; nevertheless, since the end of the 1980s there are definitely enough Holocaust historians who deal with the topic while subscribing to the above-mentioned historiographical consensus. In this context, it would have been rewarding for the readers if Lawson had dedicated in the introduction at least a paragraph to the path-breaking conference organized by Saul Friedländer in 1990, later published in the volume Probing the Limits of Representation (1992): it dealt extensively with these issues, and most of the articles in that volume are still of relevance today.

The book consists of eight chapters, each dealing with a major challenge of Holocaust historiography which led to debates and controversies. The chapters follow a certain chronology, from the mid-1940s through to recent years, because different challenges became dominant in different periods. This issue is important for emphasizing the varying relevance of the Holocaust in different contexts, yet the analysis of each such challenge often moves freely between earlier and later periods when the author felt that it suited the argument being made.

Chapter one deals with the first post-1945 attempts to conceptualize the understanding that the persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era had some special characteristics which made them stand out among the many other atrocities carried out by that regime. (2) Lawson rightly refutes the quite common observation that there was an ‘absence’ of historiography ‘or at least a silence’ (here he quotes historian Dan Stone and refers to others, among them Michael Marrus). He shows convincingly that much was written already at the time; however, the scholarly studies were mostly written by social scientists and legal theoreticians (some had been written already during the war itself, for example by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’,), not by historians; the prosecution of Nazi war criminals also served in shaping first depictions of the Holocaust. However, these methodologies generalized about psychological motivations and the social and historical context, thus trying to universalize the Jewish suffering. Lawson explains that the tendency to render universal meaning to the persecution of the Jews – thus starting in fact a first debate about ‘the universality or specificity of the genocide of the Jews’ (p. 24) – had already begun during the Second World War, and resulted from the policy developed by Jewish leaders and intellectuals to try to draw the attention of the leaders of the free world to the Jewish fate and to encourage them to undertake rescue activities by showing that these atrocities were of relevance to humanity in general.

This interesting insight might be true for the wartime period, but does not explain the universalist approaches explored by scholars during the first decade after 1945 – and Lawson does not elaborate on this further. This reviewer believes that it had to do on the one hand with the social scientific methodological tools used (as it is their nature to generalize and develop models), but also with the fact that many of these scholars were Jewish refugees of assimilated German Jewish origins, some of them belonging to the Frankfurt School, who shied away from emphasizing the specific Jewish aspects of the atrocities. Lawson also deals in this chapter with the important volume of historical works written by survivor historians, focusing on the activities of Polish Jewish survivors – in Poland, the USA and Israel. This phenomenon, however, was much broader and varied than presented by Lawson, going far beyond this group and these countries. (3) Similarly, Lawson does not deal with the historiography that emerged in Germany, especially around the Institute for Contemporary History ( Institut f ür Zeitgeschichte ) in Munich, established in 1952 (this institution is mentioned in chapter two, but in a different context), and the Centers for Political Education ( Zentrale f ür politische Bildung ), which were established as a result of the Allied demand from West-Germany on its inception in 1949 to embark on the re-education of the German people. (4)

Chapter two takes the Eichmann Trial, conducted in 1961 in Israel, as its starting point, claiming that ‘approaches to the understanding of the Holocaust did change around the time of the Eichmann trial’ (p. 53). Lawson subtitles this chapter ‘war crimes prosecutions and the emergence of Holocaust narratives’ and interprets the account presented by the prosecution in the Eichmann trial, and Hanna Arendt's famous counter-account Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as presenting and even shaping to a large extent the two interpretational poles of Nazism and anti-Jewish policies nicknamed later intentionalism and functionalism by historian Tim Mason. Lawson contends that ‘the former emphasized Nazi ideology in its explanation of both the emergence and then prosecution of genocide; the latter was more concerned by the cultural and structural preconditions and determinants of mass violence’ (p. 53). The intentionalism/functionalism debate has been described and analyzed by many historians (and Lawson comes back to it in a later chapter), but the way Lawson presents its basics is – though challenging - not convincing in my eyes. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil cannot be detached from her 1951 path-breaking study The Origins of Totalitarianism ; her approach fits in neatly with the universalizing approach so well-presented by Lawson in chapter one. Arendt emphasized the disastrous impact of the totalitarian state on the conduct of the individual, while the functionalists emphasized the escalating effect of structural bureaucratic rivalries and fights over competencies. Arendt attributed much of the power of the totalitarian state to modern anti-Semitism, while for the functionalists this was of minor importance. In Arendt's totalitarianism approach the leader also plays a role, while in the view of extreme functionalists such as Hans Mommsen Hitler was a weak dictator and in fact of minor importance in the unleashing of the Holocaust, which bubbled up and crystallized thanks to the bureaucracy. Although starting with the Eichmann trial, Lawson is obliged to chronologically go back into the 1950s and even into the 1940s in order to find the origins of the prosecutions of war criminals and the metanarratives created by them and in historical works of that period (such as Leon Poliakov's Harvest of Hate , 1951). Here he includes also Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews , published at the same time of the Eichmann trial (1961) but written in the decade before. (5) Thus the weight of the literature published before that trial is so important, that the question arises why the trial was chosen at all as a starting point for this chapter. Moreover, this pre-1961 literature overlaps with the literature analyzed in chapter one, thus undermining the chronological division between these periods as presented by Lawson. Another problem in this chapter is that throughout it Lawson uses the term ‘genocide’, which in those years was hardly in use. When he then emphasizes ‘that the label 'Holocaust' helped fix the genocide of the Jews in popular memory … There is seldom any need to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews as the Jewish Holocaust’, he is definitely right; but when he states that ‘there is no doubt to what one is referring when one uses the word’ he is not, because both historiography and popular discourse grappled with the problem of the exact periodization and the precise nature of the Holocaust. (6)

Chapter three focuses on the ‘bystanders to the Holocaust’, rightly starting with German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy ( Der Stellvertreter ) first staged in 1963. This play accused Pope Pius XII of having known of the tragedy that befell the Jews and refraining from serious action. The deliberately controversial play paved the way to a path of research which examined the role of those who were neither the perpetrators nor the victims. Lawson focuses on ‘the Pius [XII] Wars’ and ‘the Allies and the Holocaust’ and gives an excellent comprehensive analysis of these issues (though missing some important studies such as Shlomo Aronson's Hitler, the Allies and the Jews , 2004), but entirely leaves out of the discussion the bystanders inside Nazi-ruled Europe. Lawson explains that he disagrees with Michael Marrus' questioning if bystander historiography, which is often tainted by ‘political, theological and moral immanence’, is history-writing at all. Lawson argues ‘almost the opposite, that it is in this immanence, in the reality that the bystander debate is a discourse about now, that we may find … the “meaningfulness of history”‘ (p. 113). I agree with him. But for those who do not look upon the Holocaust only through the angle of the English sphere of language but also through the scholarly and popular literature written in Europe, especially since the end of the 1960s (after the students revolts), the lack of an overview and analysis of the debates in Europe is a major flaw: it is precisely in Europe, first in the West and since the 1990s in the East, that the local ‘bystander’ attitudes to the persecutions of the Jews, have been and still are the major reason behind the ever-expanding interest in the Holocaust; coping with this historical chapter has been the prism of self-evaluation and soul-searching for entire societies (especially in The Netherlands, France and Poland). Lawson relates to these countries (and others) briefly in chapter five, when focusing on the 1990s and suggesting a breakdown of metanarratives into (among other things) ‘National Holocausts’, yet there the focus is on active collaboration and that does not cover real 'standing by’. In this category of ‘bystanders’ also Jewish bystanders should have been included, that is the Jewish communities and leaders in the Free World. The fierce debates inside these communities, especially in Israel (since the 1950s) and the United States (since the end of the 1970s), have sometimes been the dominant issues in their entire discourse on the Holocaust (such as in the so-called ‘Post-Zionist Debate’ in Israel in the 1990s). (7)

Chapter four returns to the intentionalism/functionalism debate at its height, in the 1970s and 1980s. The analysis here is helpful in general, yet one finds a somewhat strange inversion of the development: usually functionalism is seen as a reaction to intentionalism, which had emerged after 1945 as the first major interpretational tendency; yet Lawson deals with intentionalism as a reaction to functionalism. In reality, the development was complicated: early intentionalism preceded functionalism, and is alluded to as such in chapter two; a later, more sophisticated version of intentionalism’(the leading scholar of this approach being Eberhard Jäckel) emerged vis-à-vis the functionalist challenge, and it is with this intentionalism that Lawson deals in this chapter – but he does not clarify this distinction.

Chapters five and six deal with perpetrator history of the 1990s and the beginning of the first decade of this millennium. Chapter five, which is subtitled ‘the end of the Cold war and the breakdown of Holocaust metanarratives’, rightly sees in the downfall of the communist bloc in 1989–90 a major turning point in the historiography. Indeed, ‘during the 1990s a group of younger German scholars working in the archives of the former communist bloc challenged the metanarratives which had dominated the study of the Holocaust since the 1960s’ (p. 154). They enriched knowledge about the Holocaust with a real wave of studies, pointing to possible additional motivations for the mass murder, to tensions between centre and periphery and the problematic nature of decision-making, to the involvement of local populations in the implementation and sometimes even the initiation of murder campaigns (8) , and hence questioned the role of ideology. However, did this really mean the breakdown of metanarratives as Lawson suggests? It is precisely towards the end of the 1990s, that – on the basis of the broader knowledge gained by the newly uncovered sources – several major metanarratives emerged in the form of comprehensive studies: by Saul Friedländer (in part one of his Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-1939: The Years of Persecution , which came out in 1997; part two, Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination was published ten years later, in 2007), by Peter Longerich in his Politik der Vernichtung (1998; recently translated into English and updated: Holocaust , 2010), and by Ian Kershaw in his two-volume magnum opus on Hitler ( Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris , 1998; Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis , 2000; amazingly, Lawson does not analyze this integrative and influential study by Kershaw). All three attribute, though in different ways, a central place to anti-Semitism, that is, to ideology and cultural images (Friedländer coines the term ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’) as well as to Hitler. All three also identify the relevant period as 1933–45, that is, they identify the entire period of the Nazi regime with its destructive anti-Jewish policies, not limiting ‘the Holocaust’ to the comprehensive murder campaign of the Jews since 1941.

Chapter six is called ‘”Ordinary men”: rethinking the politics of perpetrator history’. In this chapter Lawson takes Christopher Browning's well-known study from 1992 on Order Police Batallion 101 and its murderous itinerary as the starting point. The chapter follows that on the assumed breakdown of the metanarratives in the wake of the collapse of the Communist bloc. However, it becomes clear after several pages that here too the origins are to be found in a much earlier period (the 1970s), with the emergence of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life). Lawson’s analysis in the first part of this chapter is excellent, though I would have placed it earlier in the book, precisely because this approach started in the 1970s. In a tour de force , and under the heading of ‘The politics of modern perpetrator history’, Lawson combines the historiography of the idea of political religion and – in a much too short and uncritical mode – the more recent interpretational courses of colonialism and genocide. Lawson, according to his introduction and the formulations in this sub-chapter, seems to embrace these interpretations. He writes that ‘to some scholars … comparison with colonial genocide is anathema because it seems to lessen the particularity of Jewish suffering’ (p. 225). He does not deal with what should have been pointed out in a book emphasizing the interwoven-ness of history-writing with current contexts, namely how politicized the field of genocide studies has become, and how indeed this course of explanation in fact detracts major parts of the understandings of the Holocaust so meticulously built up over decades. It therefore does not ‘lessen the particularity of Jewish suffering’, as Lawson formulates it, but lessens – or even (sometimes intentionally!) downplays the scope and enormity of the Nazi anti-Jewish project (such as for instance the importance of the Holocaust in western Europe; it also provides no convincing explanation of the Nazi obsession to deport to Auschwitz, by means of boats and trains, at a late stage such as August 1944, a remote and tiny Jewish community as the one of Rhodes). Moreover, the evolution of genocide studies since the beginning of the 1980s and its current relationship with Holocaust studies deserves a chapter by itself: genocide studies started as an offspring of Holocaust studies and so to say under its auspices, but has developed in recent years into an independent field, sometimes even clashing with Holocaust studies; this parting of ways was recently demonstrated by the fact that in the series of Oxford Handbooks two separate volumes appeared, one of Holocaust Studies , the other of Genocide Studies . (9)

Chapter seven changes the focus to debates on Jewish responses to Nazism. Lawson touches upon some of the major issues (resistance, ghettos, Jewish Councils), but it is in many respects the weakest chapter of the book. He states that ‘the historiography of Jews and Jewish behavior under the “Final Solution” has therefore developed problematically since the end of the war … this is an historiography defined almost by its absence’. This is a gross misrepresentation: although less voluminous then perpetrator history, a lot has been written on issues not only of resistance and collaboration, but also about the fate of emancipation, questions of Jewish solidarity (or not) and social cohesion (or not), class struggle, religious life and theological responses and much more. Indeed, the major part of studies on these aspects is to be found in Hebrew, Yiddish and European languages; once again, the absence of non-English studies in this chapter is most striking.

The last chapter (eight) shifts to the debated role of testimonies and memoires (Lawson does not really differentiate between the two genres) in Holocaust historiography and memory. His is a fair representation of some of the dominant approaches and challenges in this field – the issue of the blurring of fact and fiction, and the stands taken by scholars against and in favor of using these as historical sources – but much more can and should be said. Lawson rightly concludes that ‘whichever way we turn, we are brought back to the position that using testimony is problematic’ (p. 299). However, it is of major importance to emphasize that witnesses claim in their testimonies and memoires to present historical reality, sometimes even expressing their anger that ‘historians do not really understand’ the reality of the time. Therefore, there is not only a question of how to use these sources, but there is often a clash between ‘memorial history’ and ‘academic history’. On the other hand, the volume of oral and written Holocaust testimonies and memoiristic literature is so vast and has been so much studied in the last three and a half decades, that sophisticated use of this kind of source material has been developed by Holocaust historians and scholars from other disciplines, and has consequently become a model for similar use in other fields of history, especially in genocide studies.

As can be understood, this book has left me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, Lawson has taken up an enormous challenge and his is the only attempt to write a comprehensive overview of Holocaust historiography in one narrative since Michael Marrus's The Holocaust in History (1987); his awareness of the aspects of historical writing and actual relevance is similarly most important, although the declared goal to contextualize the debates is not upheld throughout the entire book. On the other hand, and as pointed out above, the analyses are often problematic (even if thought-provoking) from chronological and thematical points of view, and omit important debates and aspects. The lack of an in-depth discussion of the emergence of the terminology Shoah (actually: The Shoah), Holocaust, cataclysm, Khurbn , Judeocide and genocide itself, and the competition between the terms as representing both conceptual debates on the nature of the event and the importance of the media (cinema, TV) and politics (such as the Middle East peace process as a catalyst for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) in promoting understandings and images, is in my eyes a major deficiency. Add to this the almost complete disregard of non-English research literature (except for what has been translated into English), the slovenly proofreading (10) and some factual mistakes (11) – and one will understand my deep reservations too.

• The most notable ones are: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1981); The Historiography of the Holocaust , ed. Israel Gutman and Gideon Greif  (Jerusalem, 1988); Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London, 1989); Ulrich Herbert, ‘Vernichtungspolitik: Neue Antworten und Frage zur Geschichte des “Holocaust”’, in Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen , ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt, 1998), pp. 9–66; Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (London, 2003); The Historiography of the Holocaust , ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke, 2004); Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements , ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2008); and most recently: The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies , ed. Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Oxford, 2010). Of course, there are more overviews of Holocaust historiography in different countries (such as West Germany, East Germany, The Netherlands and Israel) and on certain issues (such as ghettos or rescue), sometimes in the form of introductions to studies or in encyclopedias; short overviews are sometimes given also in literature on the historiography of Nazism and the Third Reich. Nevertheless, altogether the volume of this genre is meager. Back to (1)
• I regret the fact that Lawson chose to skip the period of the Nazi state itself (1933–45) as a first period of research and debates (although he makes several observations on pp. 23–6): in fact, scholarly attempts to document and analyze what was happening started as early as 1933: the Wiener Library, mentioned by him as one of the post-war institutions, started its activities already in 1933 in Amsterdam, as part of the Dutch Jewish ‘Committee for Special Jewish Interests’; surveys were made by refugee committees throughout; and articles were published in scholarly journals such as Jewish Social Studies . Back to (2)
• See Holocaust Historiography in Context . Back to (3)
• For an extensive and penetrating analysis of this historiography see: Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen, 2003). Back to (4)
• Unfortunately, although Hilberg's book was published in 1961 and is dealt with by Lawson as a product of that period, he used a much later edition of the book, in which Hilberg altered several formulations; see one quote on p. 73. Back to (5)
• See Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective , pp. 11–40. Back to (6)
• Only in two notes on p. 264 Lawson refers to this issue. Back to (7)
• Lawson entirely disregards the importance of the European unification process on this issue. Back to (8)
• The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies ; The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies , ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford, 2010). Back to (9)
• There are many typos and misspellings - for instance, on p. 21: Musselman, instead of Muselmann; p. 41, sentence without an end; p. 50, note 111: Zbiniew instead of Zbigniew; p. 202 – missing word in a sentence 22; p. 313: book by Mosse misses place of publication; and more. Back to (10)
• For instance: Yad Vashem was not established in 1957 (p. 32) but officially by a Knesset bill in 1953, and had already a first incarnation in the period 1946–1950; the SS rank SS- und Polizeif ü hrer is never written in the documentation as Schutzstaffeln- und Polizeif ü hrer (p. 21), although SS is an acronym for Schutzstaffeln ; Raul Hilberg and Ernst Nolte are defined as historians, although both were political scientists; etc. Back to (11)

Author's Response

First I would like to thank Professor Michman for taking the time to read and engage with my book so thoroughly. It is clear that he would have written a very different book to the one that I produced, and I hope it is not too trite a response to say that this perhaps bears out the founding observation of Debates on the Holocaust (and it is hardly an original thought) that historians read and write History in very different contexts. As I say on page nine ‘this book might be nothing more than an autobiographical account of the development of my understanding of the Holocaust’. It is hardly less trite to reiterate that surveying Holocaust historiography in some 300 pages is an impossible task and as such anyone undertaking it is bound to fail. This is not least because there are some major contributions to Debates on the Holocaust which have been published since my book, including of course Professor Michman’s extraordinary study of ghettoisation. As such it is inevitable that reviewers will to a certain degree focus on what is not in the book, and in doing so they will highlight deficiencies which are to an extent unavoidable because the exercise of writing a book like this demands some form of selection. In this case I do rely almost entirely on English language scholarship.

As such in my response I am not going to deal with the account of what is not in Debates on the Holocaust but to try and explore further what the book tries to do and say. To deal first with what seems to me to be Michman’s most serious criticism of my work, that my attempt to survey scholarship which deals with Jewish responses to Nazism contains ‘a gross misrepresentation’. It is disappointing that he uses this intemperate phrase after a quotation which misses out a qualifying sentence, and in doing so obscures the argument that I had been trying to make. Michman suggests that I state ‘the historiography of Jews and Jewish behaviour under the “Final Solution” has therefore developed problematically since the end of the war … this is an historiography defined almost by its absence’. In doing so he suggests that my argument is that there has been no scholarly engagement with Jewish society under Nazism. Of course that would be absurd. But that is not what I was trying to argue at all. Instead this chapter claims that there was a discernible tendency (more prevalent in the immediate aftermath of war when many documents such as ghetto diaries were first published) to represent documentary material produced inside victim communities without apparent scholarly intervention, as offering somehow a simple window through which we can access the past. That the publication of such material often disguised substantial editing seems to me to be evidence of a perceived need to deny the necessity of scholarly interpretation (from whatever discipline) and allow the past somehow to speak for itself. This argument is made within the context of a wider discussion throughout Debates on the Holocaust of how Holocaust scholars use the documents and traces of the past with which they work. So what I actually say on page 263 of Debates on the Holocaust is ‘the historiography of Jews and Jewish behaviour under the “Final Solution” has therefore developed problematically since the end of the war. The documentary material was treated with understandable reverence , and as such this is an historiography defined almost by its absence’ (emphasis added). This may well be clumsily phrased, but I am certain that the reader would understand the interpretative point that was being made, if only because of the discussion the preceded it. Now that argument may well be wrong, that is for others to decide, but I think it important that it is properly represented.

One of the great challenges in writing any work of history is how one imposes order on the chaos of the past. In Debates on the Holocaust I chose to do this by using particular texts or ideas that represented particular moments in time, in order to convey some sense of the development of Holocaust studies. But I was acutely aware that a chronological narrative is as impossible as it would be misleading, so the chronological development of the book is subverted deliberately throughout. This is not done just, to quote Dan Michman to ‘suit the argument being made’ but to try and give some sense of the context in which some important works should be read and to make the (perhaps painfully obvious) point that forward marching narratives just don’t work. At the same time the historian also has to traverse a landscape which has been drawn by others before. Because of this it seemed impossible to avoid Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem not least because it has so frequently been identified by others as a turning point in Holocaust studies – as the moment when ‘the silence’ was breached. But of course my book rejects the idea of a post-war silence and as such my use of Arendt was not to suggest that her interpretation somehow came out of a clear blue sky but that she gave voice to some of the scholarship of the previous decades, in other words to make precisely the point that Professor Michman suggests that I don’t make: that Eichmann in Jerusalem cannot be divorced from the scholarship of the immediate post-war era. Locating Eichmann in Jerusalem does indeed ‘undermine the chronological division’ of the book, that is in fact the whole idea. That this argument has been obscured by the division of the book into separate chapters perhaps says something powerful about the impact that the form of representation has on understanding of its content.

However, something did change for Holocaust studies around the time of the Eichmann trial, even if the characterization that it somehow broke the silence is misleading. And it would be impossible to deny that Eichmann in Jerusalem had a forward resonance too. What changed was the emergence of the idea of the Holocaust as a particular epoch (the word event is misleading), and alongside this the emergence of particular ‘metanarratives’ to explain it. The court-room, it seems to me, offers a way into understanding those narratives, which to some extent emerged from attempts at prosecution and of course defence. Intentionalism was related to a search for personal responsibility, and functionalism to an extent to an evasion narrative. This does not mean that I am suggesting Arendt’s Eichmann bequeathed ‘functionalism’ indeed I acknowledge that her analysis is ‘somewhat awkwardly’ related to it on p. 53. Rather I am offering the reader a way into understanding an interpretative position which emphasises structure above agency.

The narrative of the book breaks down again in chapter three when I move attention away from the perpetrators and perpetration of the Holocaust to the so-called ‘bystanders’. As someone who came to the study of the Holocaust through its bystanders, I am acutely aware of the problems of this term. As a consequence I think it is vital that we achieve some conceptual clarity when we use it, as to who the ‘bystanders’ are in the past. As I say in the book, I cannot accept the implied definition that the ‘bystanders’ were simply all who were neither victims or perpetrators (as if those are entirely inelastic categories anyway). As such I operate a clear and narrow definition of the ‘bystanders’ as those who looked on and stood by from afar. I think it entirely plausible to consider the international community, including the Vatican, in one category (whether one accepts the terminology bystander or not). But I think it stretches the boundaries of that categorisation to meaninglessness to include those ordinary citizens who were literally the witnesses to destruction inside Nazi-occupied Europe. As I say on p. 89 it is not helpful to include the residents of Mauthausen in the same moral, historical and political schema as the officials of the British Foreign Office. As such when Professor Michman suggests that they are not present in this chapter he is quite right, and this is deliberately so. The omission of European debates about those who were present on the ground, the witnesses to the deportation and destruction may be a shortcoming of the book, but I cannot accept that they should have been included at this particular point. It is worth noting that I do point to work which is recreating those kind of intimate histories of the Holocaust, but towards the end of the book.

The rest of the book concerned with the perpetrators and perpetration of the Holocaust tries to chart the extraordinary impact of global political changes on Holocaust studies and posits that this has led to the breakdown of ‘metanarratives’ of the Holocaust. Professor Michman does not agree, but I am not convinced that any of the works that he suggests propose the kind of singular all-encompassing explanations for the Holocaust that I have defined as ‘metanarratives’. Indeed, I am attracted to Wulf Kansteiner’s interrogation of Saul Friedlander’s work as a radically destabilising text. Equally it seems to me the extraordinary statistic that Michman provides at the beginning of his review, that Yad Vashem’s library is augmented by 4000 items a year, is evidence enough that singular characterizations of the Holocaust can no longer survive.

What I have tried to do is suggest that what we have seen in Holocaust studies in recent years is also a rediscovery of the different contexts in which the Holocaust can be understood. One of those contexts is provided by comparative work on colonialism and genocide. Professor Michman is probably correct when he says that I deal too quickly with scholarship in this area and on the relationship between genocide and Holocaust studies. Indeed that does seem perhaps the urgent challenge, and the need I point to on p. 310 to ‘integrate studies of the Holocaust into a general understanding of the history of genocide’ does to my mind remain, despite recent important work. However, I cannot recognize his characterisation that a politicised field of genocide studies, and particularly the emphasis on colonialism, is somehow detracting from the understanding of the Holocaust that has previously been established. This is not a judgment of historical interpretation but an historiographical one. The point that Debates on the Holocaust is trying to argue above all else, is that Holocaust history-writing has always been (and is, and will remain) in the widest sense of the word, political in some ways. This is, as I stress in the book (probably rather repetitively), not to say that Holocaust history-writing has no relationship with the past or anything as silly as that, but that it is anchored in, and speaks to, the present. As such the book, is an attempt to chart the political contexts in which some history writing has been written and articulated. It seems to me as much a political and ethical judgment, for example, to say the Holocaust should not be considered in a certain context, as it is clearly to say that it should. As such it is not that the field of genocide studies has become politicised but that the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies always have been and remain political.

Professor Michman is of course correct when he identifies my sympathies with recent efforts to integrate the Holocaust into histories of colonialism and to explore the relationship between colonialism and genocide. Indeed, my latest project investigates a case of genocide in the British Empire and then charts its memory down to the present day, including its interactions with memories of the Holocaust.

The importance of teaching and learning about the Holocaust

On the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day , commemorated each year on 27 January, UNESCO pays tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and reaffirms its commitment to counter antisemitism, racism, and other forms of intolerance. 

In 2017, UNESCO released a policy guide on Education about the Holocaust and preventing genocide , to provide effective responses and a wealth of recommendations for education stakeholders.

What is education about the Holocaust?

Education about the Holocaust is primarily the historical study of the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

It also provides a starting point to examine warning signs that can indicate the potential for mass atrocity. This study raises questions about human behaviour and our capacity to succumb to scapegoating or simple answers to complex problems in the face of vexing societal challenges. The Holocaust illustrates the dangers of prejudice, discrimination, antisemitism and dehumanization. It also reveals the full range of human responses - raising important considerations about societal and individual motivations and pressures that lead people to act as they do - or to not act at all.

Why teach about the Holocaust?

Education stakeholders can build on a series of rationales when engaging with this subject, in ways that can relate to a variety of contexts and histories throughout the world. The guide lists some of the main reasons why it is universally relevant to engage with such education.

Teaching and learning about the Holocaust:

• Demonstrates the fragility of all societies and of the institutions that are supposed to protect the security and rights of all. It shows how these institutions can be turned against a segment of society. This emphasizes the need for all, especially those in leadership positions, to reinforce humanistic values that protect and preserve free and just societies.  
• Highlights aspects of human behaviour that affect all societies, such as the susceptibility to scapegoating and the desire for simple answers to complex problems; the potential for extreme violence and the abuse of power; and the roles that fear, peer pressure, indifference, greed and resentment can play in social and political relations.  
• Demonstrates the dangers of prejudice, discrimination and dehumanization, be it the antisemitism that fueled the Holocaust or other forms of racism and intolerance.  
• Deepens reflection about contemporary issues that affect societies around the world, such as the power of extremist ideologies, propaganda, the abuse of official power, and group-targeted hate and violence.  
• Teaches about human possibilities in extreme and desperate situations, by considering the actions of perpetrators and victims as well as other people who, due to various motivations, may tolerate, ignore or act against hatred and violence. This can develop an awareness not only of how hate and violence take hold but also of the power of resistance, resilience and solidarity in local, national, and global contexts.  
• Draws attention to the international institutions and norms developed in reaction to the Second World War and the Holocaust. This includes the United Nations and its international agreements for promoting and encouraging respect for human rights; promoting individual rights and equal treatment under the law; protecting civilians in any form of armed conflict; and protecting individuals who have fled countries because of a fear of persecution. This can help build a culture of respect for these institutions and norms, as well as national constitutional norms that are drawn from them.  
• Highlights the efforts of the international community to respond to modern genocide. The Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was the first tribunal to prosecute “crimes against humanity”, and it laid the foundations of modern international criminal justice. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, under which countries agree to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, is another example of direct response to crimes perpetrated by Nazi Germany. Educating about the Holocaust can lead to a reflection on the recurrence of such crimes and the role of the international community.  

What are the teaching and learning goals?

Understanding how and why the Holocaust occurred can inform broader understandings of mass violence globally, as well as highlight the value of promoting human rights, ethics, and civic engagement that bolsters human solidarity. Studying this history can prompt discussion of the societal contexts that enable exclusionary policies to divide communities and promote environments that make genocide possible. It is a powerful tool to engage learners on discussions pertaining to the emergence and the promotion of human rights; on the nature and dynamics of atrocity crimes and how they can be prevented; as well as on how to deal with traumatic pasts through education.

Such education creates multiple opportunities for learners to reflect on their role as global citizens. The guide explores for example how education about the Holocaust can advance the learning objectives sought by  Global Citizenship Education  (GCED), a pillar of the Education 2030 Agenda. It proposes topics and activities that can help develop students to be informed and critically literate; socially connected, respectful of diversity; and ethically responsible and engaged.

What are the main areas of implementation?

Every country has a distinct context and different capacities. The guide covers all the areas policy-makers should take into consideration when engaging with education about the Holocaust and, possibly, education about genocide and mass atrocities.  It also provides precise guidelines for each of these areas. This comprises for example curricula and textbooks, including how the Holocaust can be integrated across different subjects, for what ages, and how to make sure textbooks and curricula are historically accurate.  The guide also covers teacher training, classroom practices and appropriate pedagogies, higher learning institutions. It also provides important recommendations on how to improve interactions with the non-formal sector of education, through adult education, partnerships with museums and memorials, study-trips, and the implementation of international remembrance days.

Learn more about UNESCO’s on Education about the Holocaust .

More on this subject

Other recent news

Academic Research

About the mandel center.

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is a leading generator of new knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, inspiring us to continually reexamine and grapple with fundamental problems of human nature and societies. By working with partner institutions and producing publications and programs, we support researchers and faculty worldwide, especially young scholars, to create the next generation of professors, authors, and researchers to ensure the continued growth and vitality of Holocaust studies.

Museum fellowships support research about the Holocaust from scholars of all disciplines.

Our seminars assist faculty members who are teaching or preparing university-level courses on the Holocaust.

The Center offers a variety of programs to help ensure the development of future generations of Holocaust studies scholars.

Publications

The Mandel Center makes significant contributions to Holocaust studies through the publication of some of the most important works in the field:

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos - This groundbreaking reference work documents the vast Nazi camp and ghetto system.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies - This scholarly journal features research articles, interpretive essays, book reviews, and more.

Explore different ways to conduct research using the Museum’s resources.

Use this comprehensive search tool to access records across the Museum’s collections.

This tool allows instructors and students to engage directly with primary sources related to the Holocaust.

Mandel Center Initiatives

Learn more about opportunities to engage with the Museum below.

Campus Outreach

Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust

Global South

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union

Stay Connected

Sign up for our mailing list to receive updates on future programs.

This Section

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies is a leading generator of new knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust.

• Collections Search

Holocaust Resources: Resources on the Holocaust

• Resources on the Holocaust
• Holocaust Bibliographies
• Holocaust and Genocide Bibliographies

Primary Sources on the Holocaust

• Archives Unbound: Holocaust Studies This link opens in a new window A collection of historical digitized materials to support research in a specific topic area. The Holocaust Studies collection includes primary source materials covering topics such as: correspondence from German concentration camps and prisons, German anti-Semitic propaganda, Jewish emigration, Nazi finances, Nazi looting, Nazi war crimes, U.S. relations with the Vatican and the Holocaust, and Jewish underground resistance.

Holocaust Journals

• Holocaust and Genocide Studies Holocaust and Genocide Studies is the premier forum for work on the extensive body of literature and documentation on the Holocaust and genocide. It features essays and reviews that cut across the disciplines of history, literature, economics, religious studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, and others. HGS is the only publication to address the related study of how insights into the Holocaust apply to other genocides. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Videos on the Holocaust

• Academic Video Online: Premium (AVON) This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online (AVON) delivers more than 70,000 video titles spanning the widest range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film and more. AVON includes every kind of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, field recordings, commercials, and raw footage. Users will find thousands of award-winning films, including Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners as well as the most frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
• Films on Demand: Master Academic Package This link opens in a new window A collection of over 35,000 academic videos from a variety of producers, including A&E, PBS, BBC Learning, National Geographic, ABC News, NBC News, CNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, HBO Documentary Films, PBS NewsHour, Open University, Bill Moyers, California Newsreel, Annenberg Learner, TED, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, and more.

Paper Clips and the Children's Holocaust Memorial

• One Clip at a Time - The Paper Clips Project A Holocaust education class designed to teach tolerance to middle schoolers in a small town in Tennessee grew into a movement that culminated with the dedication of the Children's Holocaust Memorial, and a moving documentary about the project called Paper Clips.

Institutions and Organizations that Study the Holocaust

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
• Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
• The Anne Frank House
• Holocaust Museum LA
• The Wiener Holocaust Library The Wiener Holocaust Library is one of the world’s leading and most extensive archives on the Holocaust, the Nazi era and genocide. The Library’s unique collection of over one million items includes published and unpublished works, press cuttings, photographs and eyewitness testimony.
• Holocaust Museum Houston See their research starter guides on a variety of Holocaust and genocide topics.

The USC Shoah Foundation

About the Institute

USC Shoah Foundation develops empathy, understanding and respect through testimony. By recording and preserving audiovisual testimonies of eyewitnesses to genocide and crimes against humanity, we give voice to survivors and share their life histories and experiences with the world. While the witnesses guide us through the darkness of humanity, they also shed light on the possibilities for every individual to counter hatred. We are inspired by their hard-fought hope. We believe testimony has a positive influence on people to be more kind, empathetic and humanistic. We listen deeply, consider carefully, and place testimony in context.

Through academic programs and research at our Center for Advanced Genocide Research, we build knowledge and insight. Our education programs deliver practical digital tools and resources via our award-winning website IWitness for our partners and their audiences from primary through university-level instruction. We evaluate our work.

The Institute’s efforts are rooted in the Visual History Archive, a repository containing 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide and crimes against humanity. The vast majority of the documented experiences are about the Holocaust. The Archive also includes hundreds of eyewitness testimonies of genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Guatemala, and Rwanda, the Nanjing Massacre, and most recently anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar and current antisemitic violence in Europe and the United States.

Conducted in 63 countries, the testimonies average a little more than two hours each in length. The Archive contains more than 115,000 hours of testimony — the equivalent of 13 years. Its powerful search engine enables users to key in on specific moments of interest.

The Institute has also pioneered how history can be preserved and experienced in the digital age, inventing an interactive biography project called Dimensions in Testimony. The project enables people to have question-and-response sessions with pre-recorded video testimonies of genocide survivors. Dimensions in Testimony offers a way to preserve the ability to have real-time conversations with witnesses to history. To date, 19 testimonies have been recorded in this manner. The Institute also has produced several award winning documentary films, including two filmed in 360-degree virtual reality.

Ultimately, our work centers around a worldwide effort to bring testimony to light, to preserve the faces and voices of the people who witnessed history, allowing their firsthand stories to inspire action to build a more positive world for generations to come. 

USC Shoah Foundation

Visual History Collection Online   

You can search the Visual History Archive Online to view one of the more than 3,000 interviews available in the online repository  VHA Online

The complete archive of more than 55,000 interviews is available in our area at Northwestern University.  Information about access for the general public in in this LibGuide  Guide to using the Visual History Archive from the Shoah Foundation Institute at the Northwestern University Library.  (Note: The library is currently operating under limited access restrictions due to the ongoing public health crisis.  Check the library website or telephone for the most up-to-date information.)

More information about the USC Shoah Foundation is available through this USC LibGuide  USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive: Introduction   

• Next: Holocaust Bibliographies >>
• Last Updated: Mar 1, 2024 9:34 AM
• URL: https://library.elmhurst.edu/holocaustresources

Directions | Directory | For Library Staff | Portal | About

630-617-3160 | Reference: 630-617-3173 190 Prospect Ave., Elmhurst, IL 60126

Search the Holocaust Encyclopedia

• Animated Map
• Discussion Question
• Media Essay
• Oral History
• Timeline Event
• Clear Selections
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Português do Brasil

Featured Content

Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics

Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically

For Teachers

Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust

Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust

Timeline of Events

Explore a timeline of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust.

• Introduction to the Holocaust
• Invasion of Poland, Fall 1939
• Mass Shootings at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar)
• World War II: In Depth
• What does war make possible?
• The British Policy of Appeasement toward Hitler and Nazi Germany
• Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
• The Role of Academics and Teachers
• University Student Groups in Nazi Germany

An Overview of the Holocaust: Topics to Teach

Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust.

• remembrance

This content is available in the following languages

The objective of teaching any subject is  to  engage the intellectual curiosity of students in order  to  inspire critical thought and personal growth. With this in mind, it is helpful  to  structure a   lesson plan on the Holocaust by considering questions of rationale or purpose. Find more information on why to teach about the Holocaust . 

Historical Background

The Path to Nazi Genocide  provides general background information on the Holocaust for the instructor and for classroom use. 

This 38-minute film examines the Nazis’ rise and consolidation of power in Germany. Using rare footage, the film explores their ideology, propaganda, and persecution of Jews and other victims. It also outlines the path by which the Nazis and their collaborators led a state to war and to the murder of millions of people. By providing a concise overview of the Holocaust and those involved, this resource is intended to provoke reflection and discussion about the role of ordinary people, institutions, and nations between 1918 and 1945.

[caption=9d75bfc0-bcb4-4f5e-a0a1-73b3cda83c71] - [credit=9d75bfc0-bcb4-4f5e-a0a1-73b3cda83c71]

This film is intended for adult viewers, but selected segments may be appropriate for younger audiences. The final 8 minutes of the film present very graphic material.

Start with  Overview of the Holocaust (PDF)  for  materials and discussion questions that provide students with an introduction to the history of the Holocaust.

The encyclopedia articles below provide background and more context on the Holocaust. 

Context for Understanding the Holocaust

• Antisemitism
• Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust
• World War I
• Nazi Rise to Power
• Dictatorship under the Third Reich
• Early Stages of Persecution
• The First Concentration Camps
• World War II in Europe
• Murder of the Disabled (Euthanasia Program)
• Persecution and Murder of Jews
• Mobile Killing Squads ( Einsatzgruppen )
• Expansion of the Concentration Camp System
• Killing Centers
• Additional Victims of Nazi Persecution
• Jewish Resistance  
• Non-Jewish Resistance
• United States
• Death Marches
• Postwar Trials
• Displaced Persons Camps  

If You Have One Class Period

Provide a historical overview of the history through use of the Path to Nazi Genocide film or other materials.

Based on your rationale, choose one or more topics to highlight. Include personal testimonies from the Museum's ID Cards  or oral history excerpts as appropriate.

Critical Thinking Questions

The most visited articles in the Holocaust Encyclopedia include critical thinking questions to encourage reflection on connections to contemporary events and genocide prevention, analysis of the range of motivations and behaviors, and further research on key topics.

The following are examples of articles with critical thinking questions. You'll find these questions at the foot of each page:  

• Nazi Propaganda
• Anne Frank: Diary
• Josef Mengele

Discussion Questions

New in the Holocaust Encyclopedia, these Discussion Questions aim to provide a framework for understanding how and why the Holocaust was possible. 

• What conditions and ideas made the Holocaust possible?
• How and why did ordinary people across Europe contribute to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors?
• How did German professionals and civil leaders contribute to the persecution of Jews and other groups?
• How did the Nazis and their collaborators implement the Holocaust?
• How did the United States government and American people respond to Nazism?
• How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust?
• Which organizations and individuals aided and protected Jews from persecution between 1933 and 1945?
• How did postwar trials shape approaches to international justice?
• What have we learned about the risk factors and warning signs of genocide?

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors .

Articles on Holocaust

Displaying 1 - 20 of 197 articles.

Russia’s fanning of anti-Israeli sentiment takes dark detour into Holocaust denialism

Peter Rutland , Wesleyan University

How the social structures of Nazi Germany created a bystander society

Ellen Pilsworth , University of Reading

The Zone of Interest: new Holocaust film powerfully lays bare the mechanisms of genocide

Archie Wolfman , Queen Mary University of London

The battle of Waterlooplein: how Amsterdam’s Jews fought back against Nazi occupation in 1941

Ben Braber , University of Glasgow

Nazi genocides of Jews and Roma were entangled from the start – and so are their efforts at Holocaust remembrance today

Ari Joskowicz , Vanderbilt University

Why some descendants of Holocaust survivors choose to replicate a loved one’s Auschwitz tattoo – podcast

Gemma Ware , The Conversation and Dale Berning Sawa , The Conversation

Descendants of Holocaust survivors explain why they are replicating Auschwitz tattoos on their own bodies

Alice Bloch , University of Manchester

Holocaust Memorial Day shouldn’t be about ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’ – unsung, ordinary people made the biggest difference

Tony Kushner , University of Southampton

Australia is still reckoning with a shameful legacy: the resettlement of suspected war criminals after WWII

Jayne Persian , University of Southern Queensland

Schindler’s List at 30: a look back at Steven Spielberg’s shattering masterpiece

Ben McCann , University of Adelaide

Holocaust comparisons are overused – but in the case of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel they may reflect more than just the emotional response of a traumatized people

Avinoam Patt , University of Connecticut and Liat Steir-Livny , Sapir Academic College

Kindertransport’s complex legacy: saving children from the Nazis while leaving their families behind

Andrea Hammel , Aberystwyth University

A brief history of the US-Israel ‘special relationship’ shows how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state

Fayez Hammad , USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

The potential of psychedelics to heal our racial traumas

Vinita Srivastava , The Conversation

Is it time to reconsider the idea of ‘the banality of evil’?

Matthew Sharpe , Australian Catholic University

Good Jew, Bad Jew: new book explores why the west views brutality against Ukrainians and Palestinians differently

Steven Friedman , University of Johannesburg

10 books to help you understand Israel and Palestine, recommended by experts

Dennis Altman , La Trobe University ; Daniel Heller , Monash University ; Ghassan Hage , The University of Melbourne ; Ian Parmeter , Australian National University ; Jan Lanicek , UNSW Sydney ; Jumana Bayeh , Macquarie University ; Micaela Sahhar , The University of Melbourne ; Ned Curthoys , The University of Western Australia , and Ran Porat , Monash University

Jewish women’s illustrated memoirs of the Holocaust cover matrilineal relationships

Ruth Panofsky , Toronto Metropolitan University

Kristallnacht, 85 years ago, marks the point Hitler moved from an emotional antisemitism to a systematic antisemitism of laws and government violence

Michael Scott Bryant , Bryant University

Jewish response to Hamas war criticism comes from deep sense of trauma, active grief and fear

Dov Waxman , University of California, Los Angeles

Related Topics

• Antisemitism
• Jewish history
• Nazi Germany
• World War II

Top contributors

Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, University of Essex

Associate Professor of Sociology, Rowan University

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

Anthropologue, Maîtresse de conférences à l'Université de Strasbourg, Université de Strasbourg

Professor of Russian Culture and Film, Queen Mary University of London

Professor Emeritus in Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University

PhD in History, Durham University

Faculty, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Gratz College

Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Connecticut

Professor of Social History, University of Bristol

Professor of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape

Associate Professor of Modern Continental European History, University of Warwick

Senior Lecturer of History, Wayne State University

Professor of Film Studies, Bangor University

Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Cardiff University

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

Read our research on: Abortion | Podcasts | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

What americans know about the holocaust.

Last year, Pew Research Center conducted its second U.S. religious knowledge survey , designed to gauge Americans’ familiarity with a variety of religion-related facts. (The first was conducted in 2010 .) This time, we also included a few questions aimed at measuring how much Americans know about the Holocaust, resulting in this report.

The new data is based on a survey of 10,971 U.S. adults conducted in February 2019. Most of the people surveyed (10,429) were members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel. An additional 542 respondents were sampled from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel – all of them Jewish, Mormon or Hispanic Protestant, to bolster the samples for these subgroups. Both the online survey panels used as a basis for this study recruited panelists by phone or mail via random sampling to ensure that nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. Recruiting panelists this way gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (watch our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling).

To further ensure that each survey reflects a balanced cross-section of the nation, the data are weighted to match the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology and the methodology for this report .

Most U.S. adults know what the Holocaust was and approximately when it happened, but fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

When asked to describe in their own words what the Holocaust was, more than eight-in-ten Americans mention the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people or other related topics, such as concentration or death camps, Hitler, or the Nazis. Seven-in-ten know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. And close to two-thirds know that Nazi-created ghettos were parts of a city or town where Jews were forced to live.

Fewer than half of Americans (43%), however, know that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany through a democratic political process. And a similar share (45%) know that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed.

While the survey cannot answer this question directly, the data suggests that relatively few people in this group express strongly negative feelings toward Jews. On a “ feeling thermometer ” designed to gauge sentiments toward a variety of groups, nine-in-ten non-Jewish respondents who underestimate the Holocaust’s death toll express neutral or warm feelings toward Jews, while just one-in-ten give Jews a cold rating. Similar shares express cold feelings toward Jews among those who overestimate the number of Holocaust deaths (9%) and among those who say they do not know how many Jews died in the Holocaust or decline to answer the question (12%).

These are among the key findings of a survey conducted online Feb. 4 to 19, 2019, among 10,971 respondents. The study was conducted mostly among members of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults recruited from landline and cellphone random-digit-dial surveys and an address-based survey), supplemented by interviews with members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

A previously published report on this survey explored the public’s answers to 32 knowledge questions about a wide range of religious topics, including the Bible and Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, atheism and agnosticism, and religion and public life. In addition to the 32 questions about religious topics, the survey included five factual questions to test knowledge of the Holocaust: one open-ended question and four multiple-choice questions.

The four multiple-choice questions also were included in a separate survey of approximately 1,800 U.S. teens (ages 13 to 17). Overall, the teens display lower levels of knowledge about the Holocaust than their elders do. Like the adults, however, teens fare best on the questions about when the Holocaust occurred and what ghettos were. About half or more of teens answer those questions correctly. By comparison, 38% of teens know that approximately 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, and just one-third know that Hitler came to power through a democratic process. See here for details.

The Holocaust knowledge questions were designed to measure some basic facts about the Holocaust, including when it happened and who it involved. However, the questions were not meant to include all of the most essential facts about the Holocaust.

Just 3% of Americans mention something else, and an equal share say they don’t know. One-in-ten decline to answer the question.

Jews, atheists and agnostics get more questions right about the Holocaust

Nearly nine-in-ten U.S. Jews (90%), agnostics (90%) and atheists (87%) know that the Holocaust happened between 1930 and 1950. Similarly, an overwhelming majority of agnostics (87%), Jews (86%) and atheists (84%) know that ghettos were parts of a town or city where Jews were forced to live.

U.S. Jews are more likely than atheists and agnostics to know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Nearly nine-in-ten Jews know that about 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, compared with two-thirds of agnostics (64%) and atheists (63%) who get this question right. By contrast, more atheists and agnostics than Jews correctly answer the question about how Hitler became chancellor of Germany: Three-quarters of atheists (76%) and seven-in-ten agnostics know Hitler became chancellor through a democratic political process, compared with 57% of Jews.

Education, visiting a Holocaust museum and knowing someone who is Jewish are strongly linked with Holocaust knowledge

Another factor linked with how much Americans know about the Holocaust is whether respondents have ever visited a Holocaust memorial or museum. U.S. adults who say they have visited a Holocaust memorial or museum (27% of all respondents) correctly answer 2.9 questions right out of the four multiple-choice questions about the Holocaust. By comparison, those who have never visited a Holocaust memorial or museum answer 2.0 questions right, on average.

The survey included a question that asked respondents whether they personally know someone who is Jewish. Compared with those who say they do not know anyone who is Jewish, Americans who know a Jewish person answer about one additional question right, on average (2.6 vs. 1.5).

Older adults display slightly higher levels of Holocaust knowledge

In addition, Americans ages 65 and older correctly answer an average of 2.5 questions about the Holocaust, compared with 2.2 right answers among those under the age of 65. And U.S. adults who live in the West, Northeast and Midwest perform slightly better than those who live in the South.

Politically, Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party (2.3) correctly answer about as many Holocaust knowledge questions as Democrats and Democratic leaners do (2.2).

U.S. teens’ levels of Holocaust knowledge similar to those of adults without post-secondary education

Like adults, more teens know when the Holocaust occurred (57%) and what Nazi-created ghettos were (53%) than know how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust (38%) or how Hitler became chancellor of Germany (33%).

On average, teens correctly answer slightly fewer questions than U.S. adults do (1.8 vs. 2.2, on average). This may reflect disparities in education. Among adults, those with a college degree correctly answer about one question more than those with a high school degree or less. Of course, teens between the ages of 13 and 17 have not yet had a chance to pursue post-secondary education. Overall, U.S. teens correctly answer about the same number of questions (1.8, on average) as adults whose formal education ended with high school (1.7).

However, one difference between teens and adults is the relationship between gender and Holocaust knowledge. While adult men answer slightly more questions right than women, teen boys and girls correctly answer a similar number of questions about the Holocaust (1.8 each, on average).

Previous Holocaust knowledge surveys

There are several important differences between Pew Research Center’s 2019 Holocaust knowledge questions and the other two surveys that make it so that they are not directly comparable (and thus unable to gauge whether levels of knowledge about the Holocaust have changed over time).

The respondents also took the surveys in different ways. The 2019 Pew Research Center survey was administered online on the American Trends Panel, a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults. By contrast, the survey discussed in the 1993 AJC report was administered by interviewers in respondents’ homes. The 2018 Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was administered mostly by interviewers over the phone, but also included some interviews administered online. Sometimes when the same question is asked in different modes, such as over the phone and online, there is a difference in results that is attributable to what survey methodologists call a  mode effect . In other words, the presence of a live interviewer may encourage people to answer questions differently than they would if no one was observing their (self-recorded) responses.

• For more information, see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “ Holocaust deniers and public misinformation .” Holocaust Encyclopedia. ↩
• Responses to this question were coded to prioritize knowledge of the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. For example, if a respondent said that the Holocaust refers to the attempted elimination of Jews by Hitler and his followers during World War II, that answer was coded into the “annihilation of Jews” category but not the Hitler or World War II categories. If the respondent did not mention Jews or the killing of Jews, the answer was coded to reflect any other aspects of the Holocaust that were mentioned (such as Nazis, Hitler or concentration camps) or the context in which the Holocaust occurred (for example, World War II). If a respondent mentioned more than one of these other aspects of the Holocaust (for example, “Hitler and the Nazis”), the first one mentioned was coded (in this example, Hitler). ↩
• Men get more questions right, even after controlling for religious affiliation, education level, race and ethnicity, age, region, and marital status. One possible reason that men correctly answer more religious knowledge questions than women do is that men tend to be more likely to guess , even when they are unsure about the correct answer to knowledge questions. ↩
• Golub, Jennifer, and Renae Cohen. 1993. “What Do Americans Know About the Holocaust?” American Jewish Committee. ↩

Sign up for our Religion newsletter

Sent weekly on Wednesday

Report Materials

Table of contents, striking findings from 2023, americans’ views of the israel-hamas war, discrimination experiences shape most asian americans’ lives, americans are more pessimistic than optimistic about many aspects of the country’s future, most americans say being a man helps a person get ahead in the u.s., most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

HIST B323 History of the Holocaust

• Finding Books
• Sources for Researching the Holocaust
• Develop a Research Question
• Primary Sources
• Cite Sources
• Scholarly vs Popular
• Thesis Statements

See subsections for help:

Developing a research question, distinguishing primary and secondary sources, citing sources, distinguishing scholarly and popular articles, developing thesis statements.

Page created by Scott Libson.

• << Previous: Sources for Researching the Holocaust
• Next: Develop a Research Question >>
• Last Updated: Jan 11, 2024 12:48 PM
• URL: https://guides.libraries.indiana.edu/holocaust

Social media

• Instagram for Herman B Wells Library
• Facebook for IU Libraries

Additional resources

Featured databases.

• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) OneSearch@IU
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) Academic Search (EBSCO)
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) ERIC (EBSCO)
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) Nexis Uni
• Resource available without restriction HathiTrust Digital Library
• Databases A-Z
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) Google Scholar
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) JSTOR
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) Web of Science
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) Scopus
• Resource available to authorized IU Bloomington users (on or off campus) WorldCat

IU Libraries

• Diversity Resources
• About IU Libraries
• Alumni & Friends
• Departments & Staff
• Jobs & Libraries HR
• Intranet (Staff)
• IUL site admin

Local artists portray the generational pain of the Holocaust

The colors in “Art and the Demands of Memory: Works by Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors” are mostly muted or dark, evoking loss and devastation. But the multimedia works by 10 local Jewish artists, curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine, are brightened by glimmers of color and light, often signifying hope or gratitude.

Color struggles to assert itself in pieces by Mindy Weisel, who was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany to parents who were Auschwitz survivors. She covers a canvas and a 1940s-vintage suitcase with bright hues that she then largely submerges beneath black pigment. Scrawled on the suitcase is “A3146,” which was tattooed on her father’s arm. The number, like the colors visible through the black, is a testament to disaster but also endurance.

In Dalya Luttwak’s site-responsive installation, a root structure made of painted steel radiates from a building pillar. All the roots are black save one, whose glimmering gold represents the artist’s father, the only member of his immediate family not to be killed by the Nazis.

Luttwak was born in the British mandate for Palestine, the daughter of refugees from Czechoslovakia, on the eve of World War II. She has long made steel models of roots, and “I always knew that roots had to do with family,” she allowed in February at a group artists’ talk. But this piece is more specific and her “most personal” artwork ever, she said.

Even more directly autobiographical is a triptych painting by Kitty Klaidman, the only one of the artists who’s a first-generation survivor. Her moodily realistic picture depicts the attic in Czechoslovakia where she, her brother and their parents were hidden by a Catholic family.

The 1991 painting was the result of a trip back to the places where she lived as a young girl, a visit that yielded work that Klaidman at the artists’ talk called “the greatest catharsis of my life.” The light that filters through two slitted windows is a hint of the outside world forbidden to the cloistered family, but Klaidman said the illumination also symbolizes the people who harbored them.

The most explicitly documentary works are monochromatic photographs by Michael Steiner Borek and Coos Hamburger, who were born after the war in Prague and Amsterdam, respectively. Hamburger’s images are mostly of Israel, although they include a picture of a pot used by his mother and grandmother while imprisoned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Borek’s photos depict everyday scenes in the hometown of his father, who survived Auschwitz as a youth. The pictures have an aching emptiness that evokes the many Jews who were deported and did not return.

Stories of those who died persist as fragments and vestiges in the work of Trudy Babchak, Chaya Schapiro and Miriam Mörsel Nathan. Babchak, who was born to two Polish survivors just after the war, makes drawing-paintings that position ghostly figures in nearly abstract settings. Schapiro, whose parents were Poles who barely survived the war as exiles in Siberia, paints intricate abstractions that seem to be constructed of tiny stones; these recall the pebbles traditionally left on Jewish gravestones.

Nathan recounts a tale that’s both collective and individual in “Zdenka,” named for her mother. While her father found refuge in the Dominican Republic, where Nathan was ultimately born, her mother-to-be was sent to Theresienstadt. Although it was not an extermination camp, many people died there, and often were cremated. Nathan’s mother was among the inmates ordered to transport human remains in paper urns to the river, where they were dumped. The artist memorializes this sorrowful process with an assemblage of cardboard boxes, jumbled on the floor as if abandoned suddenly when the Soviet Army arrived in 1945.

Two of the artists, Micheline Klagsbrun and Margot Neuhaus, join Luttwak in making effective use of the premises. Klagsbrun presents another of her “night boats,” inspired by her father’s 1941 voyage from Portugal to Britain, where the artist was born. These sculptures are made of torn and battered materials, suggesting the fragility of her parents’ fates as they fled Poland. But this rendition is much larger than its predecessors and is suspended high above the gallery, giving it an epic quality. The journey is perilous but triumphant.

Also overhead is Neuhaus’s “Rays,” a fluttering series of yellow and gold paper banners. The artist, born to Polish refugees in Mexico, has often executed minimalist gestures, but usually in the martial hues of red and black. Here she turns to cheerful colors, inspired by Chilean singer and composer Violeta Parra’s song “Gracias a la Vida” — thanks for life. Amid all the shadows and mourning, the exhibition offers a place for sunlight and gratitude.

Art and the Demands of Memory: Works by Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors

American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum . 202-885-1000.

Dates: Through May 19.

Prices: Free.

The Point Conversations and insights about the moment.

• Share full article

Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

James Carville on the Reasons Hillary Clinton Lost

When my column about the Democratic strategist James Carville was published last weekend, a lot of readers were transported back to the Clinton era. Carville was a key strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992 and an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful one in 2008.

Naturally, the prolix politico had more to say than I had room for. Here are some of his comments that didn’t make it into the column:

“ When you look back at why Hillary lost,” I asked Carville at one point, “do you think it was mostly sexism, or we underestimated Trump, or they didn’t listen to Bill, or what?”

“ Certainly some of it was sexism,” he replied. “I’d never deny that. Some of it. They made the wrong calculation. Their calculation was there’s more of us than there are of them, and if our people come out, that women, particularly white women, are going to find it totally unacceptable, and that will overcome any deficiencies that we have, and they didn’t go to Wisconsin.”

“I could go on and on,” he said. “To be honest with you, I think she knows. Everybody knows that it was believing in an algorithm as opposed to something else. Here, it was destroyed by an algorithm,” referring to ways that the Clinton campaign (and other political campaigns) used big data to try to anticipate and shape voter behavior — as the 2012 Obama campaign did as part of its winning strategy. “That’s just not how people think.”

“I don’t dislike Robbie Mook,” Carville said, referring to Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016. “He’s a nice man, but he had a flawed view of what American politics was…. It was just an unfortunate confluence of events.”

Opinion Editorial Assistant

Shakira Plays It Safe

Shakira’s “ Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran ” — her first album in seven years, released on Friday — has all the ingredients to be a downright explosive comeback. After splitting from retired soccer star Gerard Piqué in 2022, she released a diss track directed at Piqué and his new girlfriend. Fans reeled, and Shakira enjoyed her biggest commercial success in years.

But all those elements — an icon reveling in her legacy, a media-commanding breakup narrative and commercial clout — can’t compensate for uninspired music. This album lacks what has long made Shakira a daring artist: her devotion to sonic eclecticism that cuts against the pop landscape’s typical riskless pablum.

Shakira knows how to concoct genre-bending bangers. Her first English record borrowed from Nirvana’s guitar riffs . The Wyclef Jean collaboration “ Hips Don’t Lie ” has a reggaeton beat and a sampled salsa intro. And there may never be a World Cup song that tops the Soca-infused “ Waka Waka .” Her transnational sound can sometimes feel more like mélange than cohesion, but, more often, Shakira’s go-for-broke attitude captivates.

On this album, her maximalist approach to genre is channeled into collaborations with a new generation of Latin hitmakers who have taken over pop music in the last few years. When Shakira crossed over to Anglo audiences in the early 2000s, she carved a path for artists like Karol G and Rauw Alejandro. Now, she’s bringing in her descendants to help turn her “ pain into productivity .”

Unfortunately, even Shakira’s collaborators cannot lift her tracks to electrifying heights. From the disco-pop “Cohete,” which lusts for new passion, to the slow-drip reggaeton “TQG,” which boasts about post-breakup self-love, many tracks are devoid of Shakira’s typical interplay between sound and word. That’s why it’s particularly telling that her new album takes its name from the lyric “Las mujeres ya no lloran, las mujeres facturan” (“Women don’t cry anymore, they cash in”). The album promised to be an opus on catharsis and perseverance. Instead, it relies on the safety of bankability.

At her sharpest, Shakira can write poetic, oddball lyrics and play with the musical zeitgeist to create timelessness. An example is “ Inevitable ,” her 1998 grunge-y ballad about letting go of toxic love. It’s a live-show mainstay because her audience still loves the way the acoustic confessional verses burst into the raucous, raw chorus.

But this time, Shakira doesn’t seem to aim for emotional sharpness. Instead of transcending the zeitgeist, she’s allowed herself to fade into the most boring version of the pop scene. The she-wolf is nowhere to be found.

Advertisement

Joanna Pearlstein

Opinion Senior Staff Editor

Florida Protects Children From Social Media but Not Measles

Parents know what’s best for their kids, except when the State of Florida does.

When Florida passed a law prohibiting children younger than 14 from having social media accounts, lawmakers crowed about the move, claiming they had to act because children don’t have the brain development to see the harm in addictive platforms.

In other words, under the new law, even if parents want their tweens to have a social media account, they’re out of luck. Florida knows better. (The state doesn’t allow parents to decide about the merits of gender-affirming care for their kids either.)

But Florida is happy to let parents make decisions about other matters of vital importance to children’s well-being. Consider: When measles broke out in an elementary school in Weston in February, Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, let parents determine whether to keep their unvaccinated children at home.

Those measles cases “received disproportionate attention for political reasons,” according to a March 8 statement from the Florida Department of Health. Or maybe it was statistical ones: So far this year the United States has recorded 64 cases of measles (more than in all of 2023); 11 of those were in Florida. Meaning that a state with 6.5 percent of the nation’s population has hosted 17.2 percent of its measles cases.

Still: “Once again, Florida has shown that good public health policy includes personal responsibility and parents’ rights,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis in the March 8 statement. About 92 percent of students in Florida are fully vaccinated, according to health officials; the state is one of 45 that let parents skip their children’s shots for religious or moral reasons.

Because measles is so transmissible — nine of 10 unvaccinated people in a room will get the disease if one infected person sneezes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — scientists estimate that 95 percent of a population needs to be immunized in order to achieve herd immunity.

Protecting children from social media is a laudable goal. It won’t be easy to kick children off social media platforms; the tech companies acknowledge they don’t really know how old their users are, and they’ve yet to fully roll out long-promised age-verification systems.

That leaves parents to rely on their elected officials, who have empowered themselves to safeguard children from digital boogeymen. But not viral ones.

Jesse Wegman

Editorial Board Member

An Anti-Abortion Case Too Far-Fetched for the Supreme Court

Even the hard-right Supreme Court has its outer limits, it seems.

On Tuesday morning, a majority of justices appeared very likely to vote to throw out the first big challenge to abortion rights to reach the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. (Wait, didn’t they promise us that the ruling would end abortion litigation at the court, sending the issue instead back to the states, where it rightfully belongs? But I digress.)

The current case was brought by a group of doctors who are morally opposed to abortion and are seeking to severely limit the distribution of the nation’s most used abortion drug — mifepristone, which women obtain to end about 650,000 pregnancies a year, or nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the country. They challenged the F.D.A.’s approval of the drug as well as recent regulatory changes that have made it easier for women to obtain and use.

These claims were dubious on their face, given that the F.D.A. has produced reams of evidence and explanation for its approval and treatment of mifepristone, one of the safer drugs on the market — far safer than, say, Viagra. But the justices were more troubled by the plaintiffs’ inability to show any concrete injury to themselves, a requirement, known as “standing,” that must be met before the court can consider any case.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Erin Hawley, was given several opportunities to demonstrate how this requirement was satisfied by her clients, none of whom had ever prescribed mifepristone or even had to treat a patient experiencing complications from using it. She offered nothing other than generalized concerns that they might one day have to do so.

That raised the related question of how these plaintiffs, given their extremely tenuous connection to the focus of their lawsuit, nevertheless managed to win a nationwide injunction against the drug’s use. (Short answer: They went judge-shopping .)

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out this extreme mismatch and the fact that there is already a federal law exempting health-care providers who oppose abortions from participating in them.

“‘Because we object to being forced to participate in this procedure, we’re seeking an order preventing anyone from having access to these drugs at all,’” Jackson said, summarizing the doctors’ argument. “How could they possibly be entitled to that?”

Good question. This time, at least, the Supreme Court seems poised to answer it the right way.

Opinion Writer

Accidents Like the Baltimore Bridge Collision Are Far Too Common

It’s standard practice in engineering — as well as common sense — to design a system so that it stands up even if something goes wrong. An engine failure on a cargo ship is a foreseeable problem. It should not have been enough to bring down an entire bridge span, as happened on Tuesday, when a ship leaving the Port of Baltimore lost power and plowed into a pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing it to collapse. Six workers who had been patching potholes on the bridge were missing.

Diagnosing precisely what went wrong in Baltimore will take months or years. I expect investigators will zero in on a few obvious questions. One is why the vulnerable piers of the bridge, which opened to traffic in 1977, were so exposed. The buffers around the piers failed. If the piers had been buffered by wider concrete bases or giant piles of rocks or both, the errant ship might not have done the damage it did. If the lack of a thick buffer was intended to save money, it was a costly mistake, though the bridge was designed before the modern era of gigantic ships.

It also appears that the ship wasn’t escorted by tugboats, which could have kept it on course after it lost power. That would also appear to be a cost-saving decision. I can’t judge whether it was a mistake or not, but it clearly needs to be looked into.

@nytopinion “Damaging collisions between ships and bridges are all too common. There were 35 major ones worldwide between 1960 and 2015, killing 342 people, of which 18 occurred in the United States, according to a 2018 tally by the engineering consultant firm Moffatt & Nichol. “As ships have gotten bigger, the damage has gotten worse. I found a 1983 report by the National Research Council that said that vessel collisions are far more frequent causes of damage to bridges than storms or earthquakes. “The date of the report tells you that this is a well-known problem. A bridge engineering handbook published in 2000 made clear the concerns. The stomach-churning video of the Baltimore collapse brings home just how fragile a bridge can be in comparison to a giant cargo ship. It’s an irresistible force meeting a very movable object,” says Opinion writer Peter Coy. #baltimorebridge #bridgecollapse #nytopinion ♬ original sound - New York Times Opinion

Damaging collisions between ships and bridges are all too common. There were 35 major ones worldwide between 1960 and 2015, killing 342 people, of which 18 occurred in the United States, according to a 2018 tally by the engineering consultant firm Moffatt & Nichol.

As ships have gotten bigger, the damage has gotten worse. I found a 1983 report by the National Research Council that said that vessel collisions are far more frequent causes of damage to bridges than storms or earthquakes.

The date of the report tells you that this is a well-known problem. A bridge engineering handbook published in 2000 made clear the concerns. The stomach-churning video of the Baltimore collapse brings home just how fragile a bridge can be in comparison to a giant cargo ship. It’s an irresistible force meeting a very movable object.

Steering a cargo ship beneath a bridge isn’t easy even when the engine is running. The captain can’t slow down too much because the ship needs a certain amount of speed to be steerable. So vessels keep colliding with bridges, bridges keep collapsing and people keep getting killed. Something needs to change.

Congestion Pricing Is a Victory for Millions of Transit Riders

On Wednesday, New York may finally become the first city in the nation to adopt congestion pricing, a plan to get cars and trucks off city streets and raise funds for public transit by charging drivers a premium for entering Manhattan’s busiest areas.

The ambitious plan was stymied for nearly two decades, mostly because politicians were wary of challenging the city’s car culture, but if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority approves the final proposal on Wednesday, as expected, the program could start in June. It will be a resounding victory for New York’s economy and for roughly 5.5 million people who ride the region’s subways, buses and commuter rails every day.

The money raised from truck and car tolls in Lower and Midtown Manhattan is expected to add about $1 billion each year for the region’s public transit system, which needs significant investment, especially after taking a hit in ridership during the height of the pandemic.

Cities like London and Singapore, both with excellent transit systems, have had tolling programs like this for years. But lawsuits and Albany gridlock delayed the program, and it’s still disappointing to see groups like the city’s teachers’ union and a local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P . fighting the program in court. The reality is that the city’s economy relies heavily on a fully functioning transit system, and a majority of residents living in poverty in New York City depend on that transit system.

“This isn’t just a fight about tolls,” Janno Lieber, the M.T.A. chief, who has championed the plan, told me. “Nobody speaks for the people who can’t get in the train station because there’s no elevator,” he said. “We’re going to have cleaner air, safer streets, better traffic, and we’re going to invest in transit.”

In the final accounting, supporters of the plan — a group that over the years has included New Yorkers from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to ordinary subway riders who voiced support to the M.T.A. — appear to be the stronger coalition. In recent months, Gov. Kathy Hochul has pushed hard for the plan, too. If it succeeds, it will be a refreshing example of the progress that good government and steady civic pressure can bring.

Nicholas Kristof and Patrick Healy

What Most Surprised Us About the Outbreak of Deepfake Porn

Patrick Healy , Deputy Opinion Editor

Nick, you’ve reported deeply for years about exploitation, abuse and trafficking of women and girls. Your latest column on deepfake nude videos showed us new ways that technology has become a vile weapon against them. What did you learn in reporting the piece that surprised you?

Nicholas Kristof , Opinion Columnist

What startled me the most was simply the failure of regulators, lawmakers and tech companies to show much concern for the humiliation of victims, even as sleazy companies post nonconsensual fake sex videos and make money on them. Women and girls are targeted, yet the response from the tech community has mostly been a collective shrug. Why should Google, whose original motto was “don’t be evil,” be a pillar of this ecosystem and direct traffic to websites whose business is nonconsensual porn?

Even when underage victims go to the police, there’s usually no good recourse. We’ve effectively armed predators and exploitative companies with artificial intelligence but denied victims any defense.

Patrick Healy

You write: “With just a single good image of a person’s face, it is now possible in just half an hour to make a 60-second sex video.” Is there any way people can protect themselves?

Nicholas Kristof

Some experts counsel girls or women to avoid posting images on public Instagram or Facebook pages. That strikes me as unrealistic. Some of the victims are prominent women whose images are everywhere — one deepfake site appropriated a congresswoman’s official portrait. Or sometimes an ordinary woman or girl is targeted by an ex-boyfriend or by a classmate, who will probably have photos already.

Because it’s so difficult for individuals to protect themselves, we need systemic solutions, like amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that there is less immunity for badly behaved tech companies. End impunity, and incentivize companies to police themselves.

Among the statistics that froze me was this one: “Graphika, an online analytics company, identified 34 nudify websites that received a combined 24 million unique visitors in September alone.” These numbers are enormous. What does this say to you about our society?

A generation ago, there was an argument that social networks were going to knit us together. In fact, I think we’ve become more atomized, with screen time substituting for people time. Some experts think that in an age of social isolation, porn is becoming an easy way to avoid the complexity and frustration of dealing with real people. Meanwhile, the casual cruelty we see on social media is paralleled by the cruelty we see in deepfake sites showing actresses, princesses, singers or politicians being raped.

It’s hard to view these exploitative, nonconsensual videos and not perceive misogyny — both in the videos and in a system that tolerates them and provides victims with no remedy.

Photograph by Larysa Shcherbyna/Getty Images

Boeing Needs New Leadership With the Right Kind of Experience

Has Boeing finally gotten the message that its very future rests on restoring faith in the safety of its products? I hope so.

Trust in the aircraft manufacturer was shaken nearly five years ago, after the crashes of two 737 Max 8 planes killed nearly 350 people. Then in January, just when it seemed that the company had put its safety problems behind it, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane midair during an Alaska Airlines flight. Fortunately, there were no major injuries.

If Boeing’s current management had tried to ride out this storm, it would have shown a sense of impunity and a lack of remorse. The people at the top aren’t the only problem at Boeing, to be sure, but leadership matters.

So it was a step in the right direction on Monday when Boeing announced that David Calhoun had chosen to step down as chief executive officer, Stan Deal would retire as president of the commercial airplanes division, and Larry Kellner would not stand for re-election as chairman of the board.

That’s not enough, though. To show that it means what it says, Boeing needs to find a new chief executive officer who has lived and breathed manufacturing and understands how to manage giant projects. That’s a rare commodity. Few projects are as big and complex as designing and building a commercial airliner.

Thomas Black, an opinion columnist for Bloomberg, mentions Larry Culp, who is the chief executive of General Electric as well as G.E. Aerospace, one of the three companies that will survive as G.E. breaks itself up. But Culp might not want the job.

Another step that would impress aircraft purchasers and passengers would be clawing back some of Calhoun’s bonus pay, or at least not paying out awards that haven’t vested yet. I asked Boeing about that and was told that details on that issue are coming in a few weeks.

When Calhoun took over as chief executive in 2020, he vowed to produce jets at a pace the factory can handle, instill discipline, hunt for bad news and act on it, according to a profile in The Times. “If I don’t accomplish all that,” he said, “then you can throw me out.”

They just did.

Daniel J. Wakin

For All His Brilliance, Pollini Could Be a Supreme Romantic

Maurizio Pollini, the great Italian pianist who died on Saturday at 82, could never escape adjectives like cool and cerebral and remote. Perhaps some critics and listeners found him that way. Certainly there was no dispute over his technique, considered to be among the most brilliant of any pianist who flourished in the second half of the last century. He was also an intellectually searching man, interested in art and literature.

Pollini’s virtuosity was evident from the beginning. Artur Rubinstein, who led the jury that awarded him first prize at the Chopin competition in 1960, reportedly said , “That boy plays better than any of us jurors.” Pollini was 18.

Pollini’s brilliance was marked by precision and clarity. He excelled in complex modernist scores by Stockhausen, Nono and Boulez — especially Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2. For some, his Beethoven was exceptional. He was a master of Schumann. Brahms, Schubert and Debussy were in his repertoire. Mozart too, although the accolades here were a bit quieter.

I once asked Pollini, in an interview , about his reputation for aloofness in his playing. He did not answer directly. “One can only think what music should give to a listener,” he said. “Certainly a strong emotion.”

It is in Pollini’s Chopin performances that the whole discussion over his coolness becomes, for me, a little pointless. Few composers are as poetic as Chopin, and oddly, Pollini — so often described as overly intellectual — performs Chopin in a way that feels truly lyrical. I’m convinced it is Pollini’s brilliant control over technique that helps make it so (not to mention a formidable musical intelligence). His keyboard mastery allowed him to transmit, without mediation, Chopin’s romantic intentions. (In the interview, the pianist called Chopin “innately seductive.”)

On news of his death I went back to a recording of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1984, to hear that technique in service of poetry. It was there in the vaguely ominous oscillating undercurrent passages, the crystalline rippling configurations and the devilishly fast passages that never seemed rushed. It was there in the purity of touch in plaintive melodies, the élan of dashed-off broken chords, the patrician, elegant tone and the perfectly paced crescendos. The common denominator? An uncommon clarity.

A Trump Criminal Trial Really Could Start This Year

Don’t hold your breath, but as of Monday, the American people are just a few weeks away from maybe, possibly, witnessing the first ever criminal prosecution of a former American president. It might even end before Election Day.

That prospect — once a near certainty, given that Donald Trump faced 91 ( now reduced to 88 ) felony charges in four separate trials — has been looking increasingly dodgy of late. One trial has been delayed by an inexperienced, Trump-friendly judge . Another has been delayed by an indiscreet, overstretched prosecutor . Yet another, the federal Jan. 6 trial, which was supposed to start three weeks ago, has been delayed by an absurd hail-Mary legal argument by Trump that the Supreme Court has decided to take seriously .

Through it all, the former president has reveled openly in his unmatched ability to turn the justice system’s great strengths — deliberation and due process — against it. “We want delays, obviously,” Trump told reporters in February before a hearing in the fourth case, involving hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels, a porn star, in the hope of influencing the outcome of the 2016 election.

On Monday, however, Juan Merchan, the New York judge in that case, set the trial to start on April 15 . This was itself a delay from the original start date of March 25, which had to be postponed after a last-minute document dump by federal prosecutors. Merchan was not impressed by Trump’s lawyers’ flailing attempts to exploit the new evidence and ask for yet more time to prepare. “For whatever reason, you waited until two months before trial” to seek out these documents, he lectured them.

(Trump did get a break on the $557 million bond he owes for a separate civil fraud judgment against him. Earlier on Monday, a New York appeals court cut that amount by almost $400 million and gave him 10 days to come up with the cash.)

It’s been argued that the New York case — technically about falsifying business records — is the weakest of the four against Trump. But it may also be the most fitting. Falsification, after all, is the essence of Trump. And it sets the stage for the broader arc of criminal charges — from before, during and after his presidency — that define the Trump era to date.

The man is a walking crime scene. The American people deserve to see the end of the show.

Serge Schmemann

The U.S. Is Using the Security Council to Pressure Israel

How the United States deals with U.N. Security Council resolutions on Israel has long been a barometer of Washington’s feelings about its close ally. America’s record of at least 55 vetoes on Israel’s behalf over half a century, often standing alone with Israel, has made those times when the United States abstains or even votes against Israel noteworthy and newsworthy.

So when the Biden administration produced a tough resolution last week calling for a cease-fire and then allowed a similar measure to pass by abstaining on Monday, the signal was unmistakable. It was a way of broadcasting what President Biden has made abundantly clear in other ways in recent weeks: He is tired of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defiance of American and global calls to ease up on an offensive that threatens famine on a Gazan population whose homes and lives have already been cruelly devastated.

Security Council resolutions are binding in international law but have no enforcement mechanism. In Israel’s case they have been used as a diplomatic cudgel that the United States has usually blocked and Israel has usually ignored. This time, the administration’s demonstration of frustration with Netanyahu was all the sharper, since Washington vetoed three earlier resolutions calling for cease-fires. Netanyahu, whose survival in office depends on the support of two extremist parties, has resisted all entreaties to order a pause in the brutal Israeli offensive.

Last Friday, the administration offered its own draft calling for an immediate cease-fire, but it was vetoed by Russia and China, America’s primary adversaries on the global stage, which were not prepared to allow Washington to have its way. Nor were Republicans prepared to give Biden any slack over the Middle East, assailing him for turning on an ally in the middle of a war.

But historically, Republicans have been at least as critical of Israel as Democrats, at least by the barometer of the Security Council. Every president since 1967 except Donald Trump has allowed at least one Security Council resolution critical of Israel to pass, and by far, the most were under the administrations of Richard Nixon (15) and Ronald Reagan (21). Barack Obama had the fewest: one, when shortly before leaving office he abstained on a resolution critical of the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

An earlier version of this article misstated details of the history of U.N. Security Council resolutions about Israel in relation to presidential administrations. It is not the case that every president since 1967 has allowed a few Security Council resolutions critical of Israel to pass or that the Obama administration had the fewest critical resolutions. No such resolutions passed during the Trump administration.

How we handle corrections

Zeynep Tufekci

Who’s to Blame for Those Kate Middleton Conspiracies?

A British government source, reportedly, told the British newspaper The Telegraph that “hostile state actors” — China, Russia and Iran — are “fueling disinformation about the Princess of Wales to destabilize the nation.” British morning shows promptly picked up the story, comparing it to election interference.

It’s certainly possible that countries with a history of online conspiracy mongering played some role in amplifying the most salacious rumors about Catherine, the Princess of Wales. But it’s also undeniable that large numbers of people — and celebrities and newspapers and everything else — were intensely interested in the princess’s whereabouts.

The claim about foreign bots and the Princess of Wales is just the latest of similar claims of foreign interference or social media manipulation made without convincing public evidence. Young people are dissatisfied with President Biden’s policies over the Israel-Hamas war? Blame TikTok . Consumer sentiment soured amid high inflation and housing prices? Must be social media!

If our institutions turn foreign meddling on social media into the new “the dog ate my homework,” it will become an easy excuse to ignore public dissatisfaction with divisive policies. And how will such claims be believable when they actually involve consequential foreign meddling in elections?

There is nothing mysterious about the Kate Middleton rumors and conspiracies. She completely disappeared from view amid conflicting claims about her whereabouts. Then photo agencies conceded that the one photo the palace released of her and her children was doctored. Because the royals cultivate a headline-grabbing parasocial relationship with the public, the topic merged with the global water cooler chat online and rumors ran wild.

But there is a lesson. Kensington Palace is the latest institution to discover that lying to the public will make people suspicious. Mistrust will swirl on social media, as valid questions and bonkers conspiracies percolate.

It was true for the pandemic and for the war in Gaza. It’s true in the royals’ case, too. Western institutions should first worry about shoring up their own behavior. Then they can talk about meddling — with evidence, please.

Deputy Opinion Editor

Assessing Presidential Candidates by the Company They Keep

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

You can learn a lot about presidential candidates by the company they keep. In the first campaign I covered as a reporter, in 2004, then-Senator John Kerry came alive on the trail when he invited Edward M. Kennedy to join him in Iowa; Teddy loosened Kerry up, and those Kennedy stemwinders gave Kerry energy. By contrast, Kerry was never excited by his slick No. 2, John Edwards. In 2008, Hillary Clinton seemed happiest and heartiest when Bill Clinton was around, making her laugh, rooting her on — but they did relatively few joint appearances, with the Big Dog casting a long shadow. In 2016, if Donald Trump had a friend, I never saw it. He was a man who liked being alone with his own press clippings, and seemed happiest talking to journalists about his poll numbers.

This week, consider the company the candidates keep. Today, the No. 1 reality of Trump’s life — unending legal problems — will be in sharp relief as his lawyers grapple with a Manhattan court date in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, and as they fight the seizure of his assets in the New York civil fraud case. Yes, Republican leaders are falling in line behind Trump, but few want to be in his company in public. Trump stands before us not only friendless and family-less — the company he keeps is the company of lawyers.

On Tuesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will announce his running mate in his independent bid for the presidency. Kennedy’s choice — the company he keeps — will tell us plenty about his campaign’s strategic imperatives ; does he go with someone who has governing experience, or does he choose someone with celebrity flash or with deep pockets who can help finance signature collections to qualify for the November ballots?

Then there’s President Biden, who is focusing on the Democratic base. He held a call on Saturday with former President Barack Obama, the former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and supporters celebrating the anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, and will join Obama and Bill Clinton at a big fund-raiser Thursday. Obama and Clinton are two of the party’s best communicators; though they have lost some popularity, I think they’ll be big assets for Biden and unfurl some good lines on his behalf. If Trump can prosper from misplaced nostalgia for his economic record, surely Biden can prosper from genuine nostalgia among a lot of Democrats and swing voters for the Clinton and Obama visions for hope and change. Plus, they’re fun company.

For Putin, Even a Terrorist Attack Is a Chance to Spread Misinformation

The horrific terrorist attack on people gathering for a concert at Moscow’s cavernous Crocus City Hall was a brutal reminder that Russia has long been a target of Islamist terrorists. From the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, through Moscow’s long and savage campaign to crush Chechen separatists, and Russia’s support of the Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, Moscow has been at least as despised a foe of Islamist extremists as the United States for all of Vladimir Putin’s years in power.

In the past the Kremlin acknowledged its opponent and dealt ruthlessly with Islamist extremists. This time, however, Putin made no mention of the organization that credibly claimed responsibility, an Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State known as ISIS-K, and instead cast indirect and utterly unsubstantiated suspicion on Ukraine.

He said the criminals acted like the Nazis invaders who once slaughtered helpless civilians to intimidate the population, a charge meant to echo Putin’s regular depiction of the Ukrainian leadership as neo-Nazis. And the four attackers who were apprehended, he said, were moving in the direction of Ukraine, where he said a “window was prepared” for their escape.

It was not a particularly believable story — the Russia-Ukraine border is arguably among the most militarized on earth. But the claim reflected Putin’s problem: coming on the heels of a staged election which was intended to glorify him as the only leader who can assure the Russians security against sworn enemies in Ukraine and the West, the attack was an obvious and devastating failure of intelligence and policing.

The failure was all the more acute since the United States had warned him that it had intelligence of an impending attack in Russia, a warning Putin dismissed.

Many expatriate Russian bloggers — a population that has swelled with Putin’s repression — warned from the outset that Putin would seek to implicate Ukraine and the West in the attack. After that, many surmised, he would use the attack to rally people behind the government and to launch another mobilization of men for the Ukraine war.

Domestically, many reactions on the internet seemed to embrace the Kremlin’s conspiracy theories. One preposterous version, quoted by Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, said it made sense that Washington would deflect blame from Ukraine, since the U.S. helped create ISIS.

The post may well have been part of a Kremlin propaganda offensive, but it would likely find many believers in Russia, where Putin turns even murderous attacks to his advantage.