Bauer is considered one of the world’s most eminent historians of the Holocaust. In this book he tackles an array of issues across eleven chapters, each devoted to a specific area. These include defining the Holocaust, questions of Jewish agency, theological responses, historiography and interpretation. His appraisal offers readers an understanding of some of the most complex debates that surround the Holocaust. This book helped me to develop my understanding of the Holocaust in a brand-new way, illuminating gaps in my understanding and in my teaching. Bauer is able to take a wide-angle view of the Holocaust while keeping this rooted in personal stories and maintaining a humanised perspective of the events, and the many interpretations of them. This is a must-read for complex questions around Holocaust history and thinking.

Ordinary Men gives a chilling insight into the nature of what Holocaust scholars often refer to as the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’ while also conducting a study of human behaviour that raises troubling questions on the nature of responsibility and humanity. Using personal testimonies from the reserve policemen’s post-war interrogations, Browning gives a detailed account of this battalion’s actions from 1942, including how they liquidated multiple Jewish villages and slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews. He goes on to analyse this evidence and discuss the motives of these ‘ordinary men’, who, in many cases, had never fired a gun before, nor grew up under the Nazis in Germany, to attempt to find out how they could go from being well-educated, law-abiding, peaceful citizens to perpetrators of genocide, even when given the choice not to participate. This book looks at the Holocaust from a completely different perspective to the common camp-focused narrative, and it engages with the difficult question of why normal people were willing to participate in mass murder. A must-read for history and social science teachers.

Franz Stangl was an Austrian-born police officer who became a member of the SS, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Following the Second World War, he escaped to Brazil but was arrested in 1967 and tried in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1970. Following his guilty verdict, Sereny conducted some 70 hours of interviews with him and spent a further 18 months researching his story and the wider development of the Holocaust to produce this incredible account. More than simply a biography, this book is an investigation of Stangl’s mind, his role in the Holocaust and the wider contexts that allowed this genocide to happen. This book brings new understanding to how the Holocaust happened and looks at a situation that defies reason: how human beings became instruments of mass murder.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) was formed in 1998 and consists of 34 member countries. Their recommendations for teaching and learning about the Holocaust were written by a group of international experts and designed to help educators by giving a set of principles for teaching the complex and nuanced history of the Holocaust in an educationally sound manner. Their recommendations cover questions of why, how and what to teach, giving clear guidance on the need to look beyond the iconic spaces of the Holocaust and engage with its complexity. I found this incredibly helpful as a tool to measure my planning and teaching against. In many ways, these recommendations can be read as principles for teaching any difficult subject.

Another example of racism-based exploitation the Nazis reserved to the people they considered less worthy of respect.