Raul Hilberg

Bystanders and Upstanders In society, one can play two roles in situations that need to be acted upon: a bystander or an upstander. A bystander, or onlooker plays an important role in any given situation. They choose to stand by and not take action, or involve themselves in the situation in some way. An upstander will take action and include themselves in a certain circumstance. Because of this, the Bystander Effect has been developed over time from casual everyday situations to big events in…

The Holocaust of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe during World War II under Hitler’s Third Reich is one of the most well documented horrors of the 20th century. The extermination of six millions Jews shocked and disgusted the world. However anti-Semitism, the prejudice against, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews as an ethnic, religious, or racial group, was not something birthed in the twentieth century with the rise of Hitler. World War II did not invent anti-Semitism, the historical…

The idea of intentionalism, in relation to the Holocaust, explains that Adolf Hitler had the initial idea of the mass execution of the European Jews as a solution to the Jewish question years before he came into power. It is believed that he had a preconceived notion that the only way to truly rid of the Jewish population was through extreme genocidal acts. Historians have debated over the idea of intentionalism vs. functionalism, but no real answer has ever been found, and perhaps never will be…

Pioneering studies by scholars such a Raul Hilberg and Leni Yahil in the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, show that by the 1960s Holocaust literature was rather substantial, albeit secularised as Polish, Israeli and Jewish niche history. The lack of significance suggests that there was a void…

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah', was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its collaborators. Some historians use a definition of the Holocaust that includes the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders, bringing the total to approximately eleven million. Killings took place throughout Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories. From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in a genocide, one of…