If you were a U.S. prison warden trying to figure out how to kill people with an electric chair in the ‘80s, there was basically one guy to call. His name was Fred A. Leuchter Jr. He ran a business out of his house in the Boston suburbs, providing consulting or execution equipment to at least 27 states between 1979 and 1990. Some of Fred Leuchter’s equipment is still in use today, which is why I wanted to talk to him.
Henry Orenstein survived three years in concentration camps before creating Transformers and poker cameras.
Heather Morris’s bestselling novels ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ and ‘Cilka’s Journey’, and the problem of truth in historical fiction.
On what is recorded and what is left out.
Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?
On the history of the Bund, an armed, socialist anti-Zionist group that was once the most popular Jewish party in Poland until they were murdered in the Holocaust.
A conversation with 97-year-old Ben Ferencz.
A discovery in a Lithuanian forest brings a tale of survival back to life.
Thinking about the right thing to do, now and in the imaginable future.
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it.”
Oskar Groening, an SS officer whose duties included counting confiscated money, describes his time posted to Auschwitz.
Editor’s note: At age 94, Groening was convicted yesterday of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to four years in prison.
December 1944, Auschwitz.
Arts Crime History World Movies & TV
On Benjamin Murmelstein, the head of the council of elders at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Rethinking Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
“And the Holocaust trumps art every time.”
The quiet life of Brigette Höss, 80, whose father ran Auschwitz.
Horst von Wächter confronts - and rationalizes - a difficult family legacy.
How the Ovitzs, a family of Jewish dwarves from Transylvania, survived Auschwitz.
An anonymous essay on time spent in “protective custody” at a Nazi camp.
All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.
The search for the missing Holocaust hero began in 1945. The unending quest tore his family apart.
Arnold Weiss escaped Germany as a kid in 1938, leaving his family behind. He returned seven years later, now a U.S. intelligence officer tasked with tracking down fugitive Nazis. The ultimate revenge story.
A Holocaust detective story: could a lampshade pulled from the ruins of Katrina really be Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?
The few who got to view Jerry Lewis’s notorious The Day the Clown the Cried, set at Auschwitz, piece together memories of their surreal personal screenings.
The inner workings of a surprisingly amiable Holocaust denial conference.
