How Did It Happen? - Understanding the Holocaust

In this compelling book, Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite holds a frank conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann.. Her searching exchanges with Dieckmann illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the causes and consequences of the Holocaust.

List of contents

Prologue
Ruta Vanagaite
1 Why This Book?
2 People Had a Choice
3 Germany's Trauma
4 Lithuania's Trauma
5 The Jew Is the Devil
6 Small and Radical
7 Plans for Mass Murder
8 "Blitzkrieg": Local Helpers Needed!
9 Lithuania's Dream of Independence
10 An Easy Occupation
11 Controversies of the Uprising
12 Enter the SS
13 Jews in Panic
14 Lithuanian Border Strip: The First Shootings
15 Pogroms
16 The First Mass Shooting of Jews in Kaunas
17 The Road to Ponar
18 Vigilante Lithuanian Courts
19 Ghettoization in the Provinces
20 Robbing the Living
21 Lithuanian Fascists Take Over
22 "Kill Them All!"
23 The "Final Solution" in the Provinces
24 The Oral Orders
25 The Lithuanian Road Killers
26 100,000 Trapped City Jews
27 Life in the Ghettos: Hunger, Poetry, Death
28 Choiceless Choices
29 The Accidental Death of European Jews
30 Forgotten Victims: Soviet POWs
31 Forgotten Victims: The Soviet Evacuees
31 Slavery
33 No to the SS Legion
34 To Die as Free Fighters
35 Survival and Terror
36 The End: Vilnius
37 The End: Šiauliai
38 The End: Kaunas
39 The Murdered "Others"
40 Burning the Bodies
41 To Save a Jew
42 The Silence of the Church
43 The Brief Story of Lithuanian Resistance
Epilogue
Selected Bibliography
About the Authors

About the author

By Christoph Dieckmann and Ruta Vanagaite

Product details

• Authors: Christoph Dieckmann, Christoph Vanagaite Dieckmann, Dieckmann Christoph, Ruta Vanagaite
• Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.11.2023
• EAN: 9781538189283
• ISBN: 978-1-5381-8928-3
• No. of pages: 412
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social & cultural history, HISTORY / Jewish, World War Two period (c 1939 to c 1945), Jewish Studies, Second World War, The Holocaust, Relating to Jewish people & groups, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / World War II / General, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust