Primary Sources on Nazism and the Holocaust: Europe Under the Nazis

Lucie Aubrac (1912-2007), of Catholic and peasant background, was teaching history in a Lyon girls' school and newly married to Raymond, a Jewish engineer, when World War II broke out and divided France. The couple, living in the Vichy zone, soon joined the Resistance movement in opposition to the Nazis and their collaborators. Outwitting the Gestapo is Lucie's harrowing account of her participation in the Resistance: of the months when, though pregnant, she planned and took part in raids to free comrades–including her husband, under Nazi death sentence–from the prisons of Klaus Barbie, the infamous Butcher of Lyon.

In this "autobiographical report," Drach describes his flight from the Gestapo through France and the years of his emigration. After breathtaking confrontations with Nazi murderers and their collaborators he succeeds in hiding out in a mountain village hear Nice until Allied troops arrive.

Leading historians reviewed over 700 books and periodical articles in this selective annotated bibliography of the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. Donna Evleth selected the most important works, including official documents and proceedings of colloquiums printed in book form, studies, memoirs, biographies, novels, and periodical articles. She provided both factual and critical information for these works, and she identified authors in relation to the subject covered for each book.

Written during the years of France's occupation by the Nazis, Jean Giono's Occupation Journal reveals the inner workings of one of France's great literary minds during one of the country's darkest hours. This journal records his musings on art and literature, his observations of life, his interactions with the machinery of the collaborationist Vichy regime, as well as his forceful political convictions.

Jean Guéhenno's Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1945 is the most oft-quoted piece of testimony on life in occupied France. A sharply observed record of day-to-day life under Nazi rule in Paris and a bitter commentary on literary life in those years, it has also been called "a remarkable essay on courage and cowardice" (Caroline Moorehead, Wall Street Journal). Guéhenno was a well-known political and cultural critic, left-wing but not communist, and uncompromisingly anti-fascist. Guéhenno's diary often includes his own reflections on the great texts he is teaching, instilling them with special meaning in the context of the Occupation.

Ernst Jünger was one of twentieth-century Germany's most important–and most controversial–writers. As a Wehrmacht captain during World War II, Jünger faithfully kept a journal in occupied Paris and continued to write on the eastern front and in Germany until its defeat–writings that are of major historical and literary significance. Jünger's Paris journals document his Francophile excitement, romantic affairs, and fascination with botany and entomology, alongside mystical and religious ruminations and trenchant observations on the occupation and the politics of collaboration.

From 1940 to 1944, Werner Lange served as a Lieutenant of the Propagandastaffel, the German propaganda service in Paris, overseeing visual artists still living in France. This fascinating memoir includes Lange's encounters with renowned artists like Pablo Picasso, Kees Van Dongen, Aristide Maillol, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Cocteau.

Two books by Maurice Rajsfus, a French activist and former investigative journalist for Le Monde, who shares his research and personal recollections in order to shed new light on France's role in the Holocaust. In the first volume, "Operation Yellow Star," Rajsfus meticulously analyzes archival documents, demonstrating the extent of police collaboration with the Vichy regime and how it facilitated the persecution, deportation, and ultimately the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Examining long-unseen arrest records and transcripts, Rajsfus seeks to understand how and why many average French citizens resisted Nazi occupation while others were willingly complicit. In the second book, "Black Thursday," Rajsfus recounts his own experiences of July 16, 1942, when he and his family were arrested as part of the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, the largest ever in France, of 13,000 Jews. While most of those detained during the two-day sweep eventually died in Auschwitz, the author survived and has spent the rest of his life grappling with his country's betrayal.

In 1939, the 65-year old French political economist Charles Rist was serving as advisor to the French government and consultant to the international banking and business world. As France anxiously awaited a German invasion, Rist traveled to America to negotiate embargo policy. Days after his return to Paris, the German offensive began and with it the infamous season of occupation. Retreating to his villa in Versailles, Rist turned his energies to the welfare of those closest to him, while in his diary he began to observe the unfolding of the war. Here the deeply learned Rist investigates the causes of the disaster and reflects on his country's fate, placing the behavior of the "people" and the "elite" in historical perspective. Though well-connected, Rist and his family and friends were not exempt from the perils and tragedies of war, as the diary makes clear.

This book examines the varied responses of six French authors to war, the French occupation and imprisonment. Each of these authors sought to maintain the spirit of the Resistance, bear witness to the times, and contribute to the future, using literature as their instrument.

This text provides an insight into the conflict from the view of a young Polish girl. Anna Dadlez recounts her true-life tale of wandering amid the aftermath of war on her journeys from Poland through to post-war Britain.

After sixty years, Kristine Keese is finally able to share the memories of her years spent in the Warsaw Ghetto as a small child. She owes her survival, and that of her young uncle, to the striking resourcefulness of her mother.

Testimony of the author's experience, hardships, suffering, and survival of the Nazi occupation of Poland. Includes photographs and reproductions of documents such as false birth certificate, `true-passage' document, false travel document made by the underground, false train ticket made by the underground, example of anti-Semitic propaganda flier.

This volume sheds light on two brilliant but lesser known ghetto journalists: Josef Zelkowicz and Peretz Opoczynski. An ordained rabbi, Zelkowicz became a key member of the archive in the Lodz ghetto. Opoczynski was a journalist and mailman who contributed to the Warsaw ghetto's secret Oyneg Shabes archive. While other ghetto writers sought to create an objective record of their circumstances, Zelkowicz and Opoczynski chronicled daily life and Jewish responses to ghettoization by the Nazis with powerful immediacy.

Retrieved after World War II from metal boxes and milk cans buried beneath the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Oyneg Shabes-Ringelblum Archive was clandestinely compiled between 1940 and 1942 under the leadership of historian Emanuel Ringelblum. Members of the secret Oyneg Shabes organization gathered thousands of testimonies from natives of Warsaw and refugees from hundreds of other localities, creating a documentary record of the wartime fate of Polish Jewry. Now housed in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the archive comprises some 35,000 pages, including documents, materials from the underground press, photographs, memoirs, belles lettres, and much more.

In 1943, against utterly hopeless odds, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up to defy the Nazi horror machine that had set out to exterminate them. One of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, which led the uprisings, was Yitzhak Zuckerman, known by his underground pseudonym, Antek. Decades later, living in Israel, Antek dictated his memoirs. Unlike Holocaust books that focus on the annihilation of European Jews, Antek's account is of the daily struggle to maintain human dignity under the most dreadful conditions.

A story of one of the few survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of an underground existence in the non-Jewish part of the city during the Second World War. Based entirely on the author's original diary, rediscovered twenty years after the war, Michael Zylberberg tells of the ghetto uprising and the Polish uprising of General Bor-Komorowski; of the moral conflicts of the Poles who helped the Jews and those who betrayed them.