Although the history of the Holocaust has ignited intense historiographical debates in the past half century, some interpretations have prevailed and are now regarded as established fact among historians and the broader public alike. Dan Stone, a leading historian in the field, has recently referred to the Holocaust as an “unfinished history.” Indeed, the participants in this session agree that there are some common tropes about the history of the Holocaust that need to be revisited.

Teresa Walch’s paper challenges the widely accepted divide between East and West in Holocaust historiography. Standard accounts place eastern Europe, as home to the majority of European Jews and location of notorious ghettos and camps, at the center of this history. Often, however, this neat dichotomy obscures more than it elucidates. Walch complicates this divide between East and West by showing how, regardless of geographic location, Nazi officials perceived of Jewish districts as sites of contagion and implemented policies to “cleanse” them. Two case studies, the destruction of the “Old Port” in Marseille, France and the demolition of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland illustrate this argument.

Barry Trachtenberg reconsiders the triumphalist narrative of Holocaust liberation, often depicted as a story of Allied victory and magnanimity. This interpretation is insufficient, first, because it depicts liberation as a contained moment of deliverance rather than the multi-staged and conflicted process that it typically was. Second, it robs prisoners of their own agency in the process. Scholars have recently underscored the agency of Jewish victims, highlighting activities that include maintaining religious practices, sexual bartering strategies, and organized resistance. New work highlights not only how prisoners managed to assert their humanity but also their agency in making life-or-death decisions. In terms of liberation, rarely were German troops or SS guards present when Allied troops arrived. Rather, prisoners had been abandoned in camps, trains, and on death marches as their German overseers had fled. As Trachtenberg argues, this liminal moment allowed prisoners opportunities to liberate themselves.

Helene Sinnreich’s paper similarly emphasizes the critical agency exhibited by Jewish prisoners in the most extreme of situations—during the “selection” process at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which determined whether they would be allowed to remain alive as slave laborers or sent to their deaths in the gas chambers. Through an impressive reading of postwar testimonies, she outlines in detail how a group of adolescent boys during a specific “selection” in autumn 1944 deftly navigated the situation. Many understood the parameters of the selection and utilized this knowledge to their advantage and mobilized their social networks within the camp to survive.

Our panel aims to speak not only to historians of the Holocaust and World War II but also hopes to engage AHA historians working in myriad fields and in diverse settings (universities, secondary education, and public history, e.g.) by addressing broader questions about: (1) the relationship between ideology and practice, (2) individual and collective agency under dictatorships and during genocide; (3) the critical use of memoirs and testimonies as scholarly sources.