Accounting for the Holocaust: Enabling the Final Solution reveals how accounting practices allowed the attempted annihilation of Jews by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists to be carried out with machine-like efficiency and devoid of any moral considerations. This largely hidden aspect of the Holocaust will allow a wide range of readers, both academic and across many sectors of the general population, to understand how the systematic murder of more than six million Jews was expedited by accounting practices and the information that these produced by allowing the humanity of those killed to be denied when they became mere numbers in a process. Readers will gain a new understanding of how the enactment of the scale of the Holocaust was made possible by the way in which accounting practices as “technologies of death” were used to reduce Jews to a life without value. The numerical calculations, techniques, and reports that constitute accounting practices allowed the systematic murder of Jews to be drained of any considerations that would imply that the numbers and costings were related to prescient human beings. These technologies of death also allowed those who managed and organised the murder of Jews to absolve themselves of the actual killings.

Described as an "application of historical sociology, not a work of conventional history", the work assesses why the destruction of the Jews was not uniformly effective throughout Europe. Three factors determined Nazi success - the extent of German control, the activity of national resistance movements, and the extent of antisemitism in the prewar period. Pt. 1 (p. 3-194) discusses the will of the Germans to annihilate the Jews, and its origins; the role of the Allies, the European neutrals, and the Church in failing to prevent the Holocaust; and conditions in the occupied countries. Pt. 2 deals mainly with the responses of the Jews.

Poses new theories concerning reasons why the genocidal campaign against the Jews started and why it differed greatly from country to country, using the diaries of Nazi victims to recreate the social and psychological history of Jewish communities

Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust and looted Jewish assets currently valued at between $230 billion and $320 billion. As Hitler's power grew, many Jewish families and businesses took advantage of the promise of secrecy and protection and deposited their funds in Swiss banks. For over half of a century, these funds remained in Swiss banks, protected by a veil of Swiss banking secrecy, concealed by coordinated bank obfuscation. In 1996 and 1997, Holocaust survivors' class actions lawsuits against leading Swiss banking institutions were assigned to Chief Judge Edward R. Korman, who has written an introduction to this volume. In 2000, Judge Korman approved an historic settlement of $1.25 billion. Judge Korman's opinions were affirmed on seven occasions by the Second Circuit. Judge Jose Cabranes, who has written a preface to the volume, was a member of each appellate panel. A Final Accounting introduces, organizes, explains, and evaluates this complex litigation, frames the case in a larger historical and jurisprudential context, and examines the limits of court awards as an instrument to rectify horrific wrongs. In his preface, Judge Cabranes writes: "Leonard Orland, [has provided an] ... informed account of the epic litigation and settlement of the claims of Holocaust victims against Swiss banks. He has written a clear-headed and sympathetic account based on an intimate knowledge of the record of these extraordinary cases, which ended by bringing a measure of justice to victims of Nazi murder and plunder and the denial of their rightful claims by Swiss financial institutions. In successive chapters, he presents a concise history of Nazi depredations and Swiss denials of responsibility for accounts maintained by victims of the Holocaust, and of the litigation in American courts to vindicate long-ignored claims. "Professor Orland's account permits a reader to understand the claims asserted in this massive litigation as well as the unique role of the American judicial system in managing and resolving human rights class actions. This important and praiseworthy book will deserve the attention of students of the American justice system, and of the persistence of memory of the Holocaust, for generations to come."

Based on an exploration of both pre-Nazi and Nazi theory and practice, Pete Kakel challenges the dominant narrative of the murder of European Jewry, illuminating the Holocaust's decidedly imperial-colonial origins, context, and content in a book of interest to students, teachers, and lay readers, as well as specialist and non-specialist scholars.

“[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).