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The deportation of 1,755 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Cos in July 1944, shortly after the last deportation from Hungary, was the last transport to leave Greece for Auschwitz and brought to a close the last significant phase of the genocide of Europe's Jews (notwithstanding the death marches). Within six weeks of their deportation, the Germans were retreating from Greece and the Balkans as Hitler's empire shrank. This last deportation is frequently acknowledged in Holocaust literature but its significance for our understanding of the Nazi genocide of the Jews remains largely overlooked. The timing of the transport, when it was clear to the German military elite that Nazi Germany had lost the war, raises important questions in relation to long-term ideological Nazi goals and the immediate contingency thrown up by war.
Anthony McElligott, in this account of the last Greek transport of Jews to Auschwitz, tells a compelling story of this previously underexplored event and sheds light on an important aspect of the Holocaust through an in-depth study of one Eastern Mediterranean community.
This book was a finalist for the 2025 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.
Sommario
Illustrations
Maps
Tables
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
1: The Holocaust in its Aegean Context
2: Inside the Juderia
3: Italians and Jews
4: The Germans on Rhodes
5: Deportation
6: Auschwitz and Other Camps
7: The Spoils of Deportation
8: Return to Life
9: A 'lost world' remembered and remade
Epilogue
Sources
Info autore
Anthony McElligott is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His most recent books are Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916-1936 (Bloomsbury, 2014) and (editor with Jeffrey Herf) Antisemitism before and since the Holocaust. Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives (2017). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1999 and to the Royal Irish Academy in 2015.
Riassunto
The first dedicated study of the final transport of the Jews to Auschwitz from Rhodes and Cos in 1944, examining the event in relation to the decline of Hitler's empire.
Relazione
The Last Transport is a masterpiece of scholarship. This meticulously researched and evocative book presents the full story of the Jews of Rhodes before, during, and after World War II. A vital and ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and the end of Sephardi life in the Eastern Aegean. Aron Rodrigue, Professor of Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University, USA
