This chapter concerns the situation of Jewish families, focusing on physical and emotional experiences and reflecting on elements of daily life. It emphasizes familial roles, hierarchies, and relations: between spouses, among children, and between children and parents. It tracks the phenomena of family solidarity and family atomization.

Nazi Germany’s policies profoundly altered both private and public lives of religious Jews in Germany and then across Europe. Despite targeting Jews as a “race,” anti-Jewish measures forced the Jewish religious leadership to seek new ways to assist their communities. Maintaining Jewish religious practices during the Holocaust became increasingly challenging and eventually impossible for most Jews.

The chapter introduces Agnew’s three-fold definition of place – as location, locale, and sense of place – to structure its reflections. Over the last thirty years, a digital revolution has transformed what it is possible to map since Martin Gilbert first produced his Atlas of the Holocaust. The rich array of printed and digital maps now available serve both historiographical and memorial purposes. In terms of location, the terrain depicted has shifted eastwards in the wake of the end of the Cold War, and often homed in on meso- and micro-regions, representing spaces long neglected in older surveys. Moving on to locale, the chapter introduces recent work on the Nazi understanding of “Raum” and on the place of the Holocaust in the colonial imagination. Other studies have explored the spatial patterns of arrests and deportations, the multiple border changes of ghettos, or the creation and destruction of new kinds of spaces for concentrating and murdering human beings. Finally, historians of victim experience have used a variety of means to convey victims’ sense of place and space both at the time and as conveyed through testimony.

This chapter explains the antecedents and scope of “Aktion Reinhard” and its linkages to other aspects of Holocaust perpetration; discusses the interrelation between anti-Jewish measures in ghettos, camps in occupied Poland, and central planning (including Jews from Slovakia); and reflects on the importance of correlation between deportations and pre-/post-deportation in-situ mass violence (”Jew hunts”) in “the East.”

The Introduction focuses on the experiences of victims of the Holocaust rather than perpetrators. It addresses victims’ perceptions, understandings, reactions, self-help and varied attempts at resistance. It also concerns Roma, mentally and physically challenged individuals, Slavs and Soviet POWs, and homosexuals. Finally, it addresses historiography, as do most of the chapters in this volume.

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.

This chapter uses space as an analytical category to examine the living situation of inmates of ghettoes in occupied Poland, exploring the efforts by Jewish ghetto residents to secure and uphold vestiges of privacy under the conditions of dangerous overcrowding imposed by the Nazi authorities. Drawing on personal letters and diaries kept by ghetto inmates, it distinguishes between the initial phase of ghettoisation, involving radical upheaval and shock for those involved, and a subsequent phase of temporary relative stability, in which ghetto inmates developed a variety of social practices for coping with privation, including the deprivation of privacy.