Seminar Questions:

• Why do some historians use the term "War of Annihilation"?

• How were the warfare and the mass killing of the European Jewry connected?

• What were the main stages of the mass killings?

• What place has the Holocaust in our understanding of the Third Reich?

Reading List:

Required Reading:

• Jane Caplan, 'Foreign Policy in Peace and War' in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (OUP, 2008)
• Hannes Heer, "The Logicof the War of Extermination" and Christian Gerlach "Men of 20 July and the War against the Soviet Union" in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-44, eds. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), pp. 127-45. (Please read both chapters)
• Florent Brayard, “TO BE EXTERMINATED AS PARTISANS”, Politix 2008/2 (No 82 ), p. 9-37.

Further Reading:

• Michael Thad Allen, The business of genocide: The SS, slave labor, and the concentration camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
• Omer Bartov, ‘Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust’, American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 2 (June 1998), pp. 771-816.
• ___________, The Eastern Front 1941-45 : German troops and the barbarisation of warfare (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
• ___________, Hitler's army : soldiers, Nazis, and war in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
• Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell UP, 1991).
• Doris Bergen, "Occupation, Imperialism, and Genocide, 1939-1945" in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (OUP, 2008), pp. 219-245
• ___________, War and Genocide (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002)
• Richard Bessel, Nazism and War (Random House, 2004)
• Ralf Blank, Jörg Echternkamp, Karola Fings and Jürgen Förster, Germany and the Second World War, Volume IX/I: German Wartime Society 1939-1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival (2008)
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Harper Perennial, 1992).
• Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London, 2008).
• Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007-08).
• Christian Gerlach, "The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews", Journal of Modern History (70, 4, 1998), pp. 759-812.
• ___________, „Annexations in Europe and the Persecution of Jews, 1939-1944“, Central European History (39, 2012), pp. 137-156.
• Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941-44 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000).
• Ulrich Herbert (ed), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (Berghahn Books, 2000).
• Raul Hilberg, The destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols.
• Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford UP, 1999).
• Ian Kershaw, Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale, 2008)
• Frank McDonough, 'Mapping Historiographical Trends in Recent Scholarship on the Holocaust', European History Quarterly, 42:2 (2012), pp. 315–327
• Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Meridian, 1984).
• Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008)
• Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New edition) (2006), pp. 386-400
• ___________, War and Economy in the Third Reich (1994)
• ___________, Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997)
• Detlev Peukert, ‘The Genesis of the “Final Solution from the Spirit of Science”’, in D. Crew (ed.), Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945 (Routledge, 1994), pp. 274-99.
• Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (Jonathan Cape, 2005).
• Hester Vaizey, "Empowerment or Endurance? War Wives' Experiences of Independence During and After the Second World War in Germany, 1939-1948", German History, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2011), pp. 57-78
• ____________, Surviving Hitler's War (Palgrave, 2010)
• David G. Williamson, The Third Reich, 4th Edition (2013), Chapters 9 and 10.