During the Nazi era, about three million Jews – half the victims of the Holocaust – were deported from the German Reich, the occupied territories, as well as Nazi-allied countries, and sent to ghettos, camps, and extermination centers. The police and the SS also deported tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma, mainly to the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp, where most of them were killed. Deportations were central to National Socialist persecution and extermination. In November 2020, an international conference organized by the Arolsen Archives focused on the various historical sources, their research potential, and (digital) methods of cataloging them. It also explored new (systematizing and comparative) approaches in historical research. This volume features over 20 contributions by scholars from different countries and with a variety of perspectives and questions. The main geographical focus is on deportations from the German Reich and German-occupied Southeastern Europe.

Of the countless stories of resistance, ingenuity, and personal risk to emerge in the years following the Holocaust, among the most remarkable, yet largely overlooked, are those of the hundreds of Jewish deportees who escaped from moving trains bound for the extermination camps. In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands alone over 750 men, women and children undertook such dramatic escape attempts, despite the extraordinary uncertainty and physical danger they often faced. Drawing upon extensive interviews and a wealth of new historical evidence, Escapees gives a fascinating collective account of this hitherto neglected form of resistance to Nazi persecution.

Finland's Holocaust considers antisemitism and the figure of the Holocaust in today's Finland. Taking up a range of issues - from cultural history, folklore, and sports, to the interpretation of military and national history - this collection examines how the writing of history has engaged and evaded the figure of the Holocaust.

This book reveals untold living history of thirty ethnic German survivors who finally broke their silence and talked about their heart-breaking experiences of forced deportation, expulsion, and flight during WWII and its aftermath. They were deported from their homes in Romania and Yugoslavia; expelled from their homes in Czechoslovakia; and had to flee from their homes in Poland and all the Eastern provinces of Germany, These ethnic German survivors tell of their weeks-long treacherous over-crowded cattle-train transports, back-breaking work in forced labor camps, starvation and homelessness during bitter cold winters, witnessing mass rapes and beatings to death. They are among the fifteen million Germans who were expelled from their homes in East-Central Europe during the largest forced mass migration of the twentieth century. These now aged survivors, who experienced humanities darkest side but have no malice toward their perpetrators, exemplify the unbreakable and indelible human spirit.

Follows the Nazis' attempts at a large-scale deportation system after its invasion of Poland in 1939 as it sought to reclaim territory and repatriate that space with an ever-expanding population of ethnic Germans. Standing in the way, however, were millions of ethnic Poles. Rutherford recounts the strenuous efforts and unexpected obstacles to the deportations, which in many ways were a dress rehearsal for the Final Solution.

Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.