Yad Vashem Publications

Edited by Sharon Kangisser Cohen

Mary Fulbrook

Hans Oppenheimer and Others

Forgotten Stories of individual Jewish Resistance in Nazi Germany

Wolf Gruner

Through the stories of Hans Oppenheimer and others, this research reassesses Jewish resistance in Nazi Germany and emphasizes that courage existed in all elements of the Jewish population. Jewish men and women acted against the Nazis and their policies, regardless of age, social status, education, profession, religious belief, and political conviction. Wolf Gruner asserts that by applying a broader lens regarding resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, we will be able to tell a richer story of Jewish agency and responses during the Holocaust and bury the wrong assumption of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust once and for all.

In the historiography of World War II and the Holocaust, letters and diaries are often used to provide insight into the perspectives of the time. In this volume, Jürgen Matthäus uses the often-neglected source of photo albums created by German soldiers during and immediately after the war. These albums provide a rare insight into the mindset of ordinary Germans, their knowledge of the crimes committed, and how their perspectives changed during the war.

László Bernát Veszprémy 

  Olga Ungar

 Jovana Cvetićanin

Paul Sanders

Anikó Boros

Translated from the German by Christopher Reid

Christian Ingrao

Dirk Rupnow

Dan Michman

Gerhard L. Weinberg | Series Editor: Dan Michman

Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi

Zofia Brzezińska

Elisheva (Elka) Rubinstein

Dan Michman

Edited by Dan Michman

During the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the focus of research was directed at the actions of the murderers and at resistance. That situation changed gradually during the 1960s and 1970s. The rescue of Jews, a major aspect of Holocaust history, started to attract the attention of scholars. Still, the focus was mostly on governments and organizations. The initiation of Yad Vashem’s recognition program for the Righteous Among the Nations also drew public attention to the acts of individual rescuers in areas under Nazi control. Over the course of the last three decades, important studies have been published that investigated the rescuers and their acts. Yet even today, many aspects of the rescue activities require further research. Moreover, the aspect of Jewish initiatives and individual experiences deserves more attention. Yad Vashem’s eighteenth biannual conference, titled “Hiding, Sheltering and Borrowing Identities as Avenues of Rescue during the Holocaust,” brought together a large number of international scholars to discuss new approaches and the current state of research on the topic. This volume, based on a selection of papers that were presented at the conference, aims to provide an overview of the multi-faceted landscape of academic studies on the rescuers and the rescued.