How Did It Happen?

Understanding the Holocaust

Christoph Dieckmann, Ruta Vanagaite

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781538150320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

In this compelling book, Lithuanian author Ruta Vanagaite holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann. His exploration of the causes and consequences of the
Holocaust in Lithuania provides the first overview for general readers that considers the perspectives of all the central groups involved—Jews, Lithuanians, and Germans. Drawing on a rich array of sources in all the key languages—Yiddish, Ivrit, Lithuanian, and German—Dieckmann considers not only the Berlin-based orientation of the German perpetrators but also the space where the Shoah took place—Lithuanian society with its Jewish minority under German occupation. He contends that this "space" of mass crimes is always linked with warfare and occupation. The Holocaust was unprecedented, but he makes a powerful case it cannot be isolated from the other mass crimes that took place at the same time in the same space against thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and forced refugees from the Soviet territories.
Dieckmann shows that the Holocaust could not have unfolded throughout German-dominated Europe without the conditional cooperation of non-Germans in each occupied country. Existing antisemitism was radicalized from the 1930s onward, turning Jews, under the enormous stress of unrelenting warfare and often instable conditions of occupation, into what were perceived as deadly enemies. The Holocaust, its history and memory, can only be understood through this broader context. The authors' searching exchanges illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Why This Book?
• People Had a Choice
• Germany’s Trauma
• Lithuania’s Trauma
• The Jew Is the Devil
• Small and Radical
• Plans for Mass Murder
• “Blitzkrieg”: Local Helpers Needed!
• Lithuania’s Dream of Independence
• An Easy Occupation
• Controversies of the Uprising
• Enter the SS
• Jews in Panic
• Lithuanian Border Strip: The First Shootings
• Pogroms
• The First Mass Shooting of Jews in Kaunas
• The Road to Ponar
• Vigilante Lithuanian Courts
• Ghettoization in the Provinces
• Robbing the Living
• Lithuanian Fascists Take Over
• “Kill Them All!”
• The “Final Solution” in the Provinces
• The Oral Orders
• The Lithuanian Road Killers
• 100,000 Trapped City Jews
• Life in the Ghettos: Hunger, Poetry, Death
• Choiceless Choices
• The Accidental Death of European Jews
• Forgotten Victims: Soviet POWs
• Forgotten Victims: The Soviet Evacuees
• Slavery
• No to the SS Legion
• To Die as Free Fighters
• Survival and Terror
• The End: Vilnius
• The End: Šiauliai
• The End: Kaunas
• The Murdered “Others”
• Burning the Bodies
• To Save a Jew
• The Silence of the Church
• The Brief Story of Lithuanian Resistance
• Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors