Prof. Yehuda Bauer

Prof. Bauer on the cause of World War II

Murderous mutation of anti-Semitism On the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the USSR, Yad Vashem Academic Advisor Prof. Yehuda Bauer proposes a theory to explain the reason why the Fuehrer led his people into war. The full article ran in Haaretz this weekend. The article is based on remarks Prof. Bauer delivered at the Symposium held by Yad Vashem's International Institute for Holocaust Research last week. Continue reading

Jewish Baranowicze in the Holocaust

This monograph on Baranowicze has two aims—first, to describe the town and its history during the Holocaust, and, second, to provide a basis for comparison with other towns and cities in Poland and Lithuania.1 Baranowicze is unique in several respects. Unlike most towns in these countries, which could boast of long histories, Baranowicze was not founded until the late nineteenth century. In 1941, Baranowicze had a relatively large number of Jews for a town its size (about 12,000, which was... Continue reading

Did Pioneering Palestine Try to Reach Poland After Liberation?

The facts show clearly that the Bericha was established by partisans, ghetto fighters, and persons who returned from Central Asia to Poland. Palestinian emissaries, in uniform or not, linked up with them only after they had reached the emissaries on their own. The idea of an organized mass exit, necessarily illegal, therefore originated in the Diaspora and not in the Yishuv. In Palestine, as Aharon Hoter-Yishai testifies, the Yishuv believed there was no one left in Europe to escape, no one... Continue reading

Zionism from lack of Choice

Of close to 300,000 Jews in the DP camps and in Central Europe in 1947/8, roughly two-thirds ultimately arrived in Israel; one-third went to the US, Latin America and elsewhere. Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Tabenkin, Yachil, Ya’ari and many others expressed great fears between 1946 and 1948 that the survivors would undergo two parallel processes; demoralization and dispersion in the Diaspora. There were good reasons for these apprehensions: the survivors’ stay in DP camps, where they... Continue reading

Yisrael — In Memoriam

Our backgrounds were completely different: Yisrael’s parents were lower middle-class Warsaw Jews and they died in the ghetto, leaving Yisrael in charge of his little sister, whom he managed to place in Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. He then had to watch, helplessly, as she was marched together with Korczak and all the other children to the trains headed for Treblinka. I made aliyah from Czechoslovakia with my parents in 1939, on the eve of the war, and while Yisrael was dealing with the loss... Continue reading

Franklin H. Littell – In Memoriam

I first met Franklin Littell at Wayne State University in Detroit, in 1970, at one of the first conferences on the Holocaust that was held anywhere. It had the title “The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust” and was organized by Hubert G. Locke and Franklin H. Littell. Both were Protestant clergymen, and both wellknown academics (Hubert Locke is a sociologist, and was the first Afro-American Provost of the University of Washington in Seattle). The two men remained close. I was... Continue reading

Remembrance and Beyond

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration and death camp of Auschwitz. This was not the end of the slaughter of World War II, which cost the lives of some 35 million people, most of them civilians. The war was to continue for over three months more. Some ten days prior to the liberation of Auschwitz, 58.000 inmates were marched away because the Nazis did not want them to fall alive into the hands of the liberators; instead, they had to go on what has become known as the... Continue reading

Some Thoughts on Radical Islam

Yad Vashem, as you know, is dedicated to memorialization, education, and research on the genocide of the Jews, which we call Holocaust, or Shoah, a word which means ‘catastrophe’. The denial of the Holocaust as proposed by the ‘conference’ that just took place in Tehran, has been with us since the Holocaust itself, when, as we know from testimonies of survivors, the concentration guards used to tell the inmates that even if they survived, no one would believe in their testimonies. The... Continue reading