Best Podcasts on the Holocaust

Thirteen episodes tracing the full history of the HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht in 1938 which destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany and Austria. The war began in 1939; with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a qualitative shift occurred. The Einsatzgruppen — mobile killing squads — followed the German advance, shooting Jews and others in mass executions; at Babi Yar outside Kyiv, 33,771 Jews were shot in two days in September 1941. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution across the German bureaucracy; purpose-built extermination camps — Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek — processed and murdered hundreds of thousands of victims monthly. The killing extended across occupied Europe, from France to Greece, from the Netherlands to the occupied Soviet Union, coordinated by German agencies with varying degrees of local collaboration. By May 1945, approximately six million Jews had been murdered — two-thirds of European Jewry. The Romani people, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners were also killed in large numbers; the Jews were targeted for total extermination. The Holocaust has generated more historical scholarship than any other event in the twentieth century, and yet certain questions retain their analytical and moral difficulty. The debate about perpetrators — whether ordinary men became mass murderers through obedience to authority and peer pressure (Browning) or through a specifically German eliminationist antisemitism (Goldhagen) — remains unresolved, with most historians finding partial truth in both positions. The question of bystanders — ordinary Europeans who knew what was happening and did not intervene — raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between knowledge and complicity. The question of uniqueness — whether the Holocaust was singular in character and should be considered distinct from other genocides, or whether it can be compared without minimising either event — has generated genuine scholarly and political controversy. None of these debates diminishes the Holocaust’s centrality to any serious engagement with the twentieth century; they reflect the difficulty of thinking adequately about events of this magnitude. — from Himmler’s early camp system and SS ideology through the Wannsee ConferenceWannsee Conference Full Description:A meeting of senior Nazi officials held in a Berlin villa in January 1942. Contrary to popular belief, this was not where the decision to murder the Jews was made, but where the logistics of the “Final Solution” were coordinated among various government ministries to ensure bureaucratic efficiency. The Wannsee Conference represents the moment genocide became the official policy of the entire German state apparatus. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the meeting brought together civil servants from the Foreign Office, the Justice Ministry, and the railways to align their efforts with the SS. The minutes of the meeting are chilling for their use of euphemisms and the business-like manner in which the destruction of 11 million people was discussed. Critical Perspective:Wannsee is the ultimate example of “desk murder” (Schreibtischtäter). It illustrates that the Holocaust was not carried out solely by sadists in camps, but by highly educated lawyers and bureaucrats sitting around a conference table. They did not discuss whether to kill, but how to do it most efficiently, proving that the machinery of the modern state is capable of facilitating absolute evil while following proper procedure.
Read more and the industrialisation of murder, to Auschwitz, the genocide across occupied Europe, and the long reckoning of memory and de-Nazification that followed.

Part One: Persecution and the Camps Before the War (1933–41)

The Nazi concentration camp system was built before the genocide. From Dachau in 1933 onward, the camps served as instruments of political terror and SS training grounds — the infrastructure that would later be repurposed for industrialised murder.

Himmler’s Orders and the SS Camp System 1933–39

In the pre-war camp system, Himmler imposed strict regulations on prisoner treatment — not out of humanity, but to ensure that violence was centrally organised and directed. This episode examines the institutional culture that made genocide possible.

SS Training and the Nazi Camp System

The camps as proving ground — how the SS used the camp system to train and brutalise a generation of men who would later perpetrate the Holocaust. The culture of sadism that the pre-war camps deliberately cultivated.

Part Two: The Road to Genocide (1939–42)

The Holocaust did not begin with a single decision. It evolved through a sequence of escalations — the murder of Soviet POWs at Sachsenhausen, the establishment of death camps in occupied Poland, the Wannsee Conference, and the shift from mass shooting to industrialised gassing. These episodes trace that terrible evolution.

Sachsenhausen, Soviet POWs and the Origins of the Final SolutionThe Final Solution Full Description: The code name used by the Nazi administration for the specific phase of the Holocaust characterized by systematic, industrial extermination. It was adopted as the ultimate strategy only after earlier policies of forced emigration and territorial displacement had been deemed failures by the regime.The Final Solution represents the lethal culmination of the Nazi policies towards Europe’s Jews. It was not the regime’s initial policy; rather, it emerged after the failure of earlier “territorial solutions.” Initially, the Nazi leadership pursued plans to expulse the Jewish population to a “reservation” in the East (the Nisko Plan) or to the island of Madagascar. However, as the war dragged on and British naval superiority made the Madagascar Plan impossible, the regime turned to Generalplan Ost—a colossal colonization project for Eastern Europe. When the logistics of this plan collapsed—creating a “bottleneck” where ghettos were overcrowded and the army could not be fed—the bureaucracy shifted its strategy from expulsion to total annihilation to solve the self-imposed “problem” of “surplus” populations. Critical Perspective:This evolution highlights the terrifying logic of the modern state. The genocide was not merely an outburst of ancient hatred, but a “rational” bureaucratic response to logistical challenges created by the war. When the state could no longer “ship” people away, it decided to “process” them instead. The term “Solution” itself reveals this mindset: human beings were viewed not as people, but as a logistical variable that needed to be eliminated to balance the books of the ethno-state.

In 1941, Sachsenhausen became the first existing concentration camp to become a site of mass killing — 9,000 Soviet POWs murdered by gas or shooting. This episode examines how Himmler used these experiments to develop the methods that would later be applied to Europe’s Jews.

The Holocaust and the General Government in Occupied Poland

Drawing on Nikolaus Wachsmann’s research in KL, this episode traces the path to genocide through the Nazi occupation of Poland — the General Government, the ghettos, and the transformation of persecution into systematic mass murder.

The Wannsee Conference

In January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich convened senior Nazi officials at Wannsee to coordinate the extermination of all of Europe’s Jews. This episode explores what the conference decided — and what it reveals about the nature of Nazi decision-making.

The Development of the Holocaust 1941–42

From Barbarossa to Wannsee, the Holocaust developed through a series of chaotic, contradictory escalations. This episode — based on Wachsmann’s KL — examines why the decision-making process was so fragmented, and what that tells us about the structure of the Nazi state.

Part Three: Auschwitz and the Death Camps

Auschwitz-Birkenau was both extermination camp and slave labour site — a place where Himmler’s ideological aims and the Third Reich’s economic needs intersected in the most murderous way possible. These episodes examine the Auschwitz complex from multiple angles: ideology, economics, and the testimony of those who ran it.

Himmler and Auschwitz

In July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz-Birkenau intending it to serve both as an extermination site and a slave labour complex. This episode examines his intentions and the economic logic that shaped the Holocaust’s most notorious site.

LebensraumLebensraum Full Description:Meaning “Living Space,” this was a central tenet of Nazi ideology. It argued that the German people needed to expand eastward to survive, necessitating the displacement, enslavement, and extermination of the indigenous Slavic and Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. Lebensraum was a colonial fantasy applied to the European continent. Hitler viewed the East (Poland, Ukraine, Russia) much as 19th-century Americans viewed the West: a frontier to be conquered and settled. The indigenous populations were viewed as “superfluous eaters” who occupied land that rightfully belonged to the Aryan “master race.” Critical Perspective:Critically, this concept situates the Holocaust within the broader history of imperialism and settler colonialism. The war in the East was a war for resources (grain and oil) and land, justified by racial theory. The genocide of the Jews was inextricably linked to this colonial project, as they were viewed as the primary obstacle to the Germanization of the East.
Read more, Genocide and Nazi Colonial Utopias 1941–45

Hitler and Himmler envisioned a transformed Eastern Europe — vast German cities, Russian slave labour, and the destruction of the existing population. This episode places the Holocaust within the broader Nazi colonial project and its murderous logic.

IG Farben and the Holocaust

In 1947 the last Nuremberg trial prosecuted the industrialists of IG Farben, who used slave labour at their Auschwitz Monowitz factory. This episode examines the complicity of German industry in the Holocaust and what it reveals about capitalism, genocide, and accountability.

Rudolf Höss: The Auschwitz Commandant

When Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz 1940–43, was tried in 1947 he gave remarkably open testimony about the process of genocide. This episode uses that testimony to examine both the mechanics of mass murder and the attitudes of those who carried it out.

Part Four: The Holocaust Across Europe and Memory

The Holocaust was a continental crime — carried out with the complicity of local police, governments, and citizens across occupied Europe. And in its aftermath, the reckoning was slow, incomplete, and shaped by Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. politics. These episodes examine the Holocaust beyond Germany and the long struggle to remember.

Romania, Communism and the Holocaust

Romania was deeply involved in the Holocaust — its own nationalist aggression driving pogroms and deportations long before German occupation. This episode examines Romania’s complicity and how the communist era suppressed rather than confronted that history.

Dramatising the Diary of Anne Frank

In conversation with Adam Langer of the Forward podcast, this episode explores the history of how Anne Frank’s diary has been dramatised — and the complex politics of Holocaust memory on either side of the Iron CurtainIron Curtain iron-curtain Winston Churchill’s phrase, coined in a speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, for the division of Europe between the Soviet-dominated East and the democratic West. It became the defining metaphor of the Cold War’s European dimension. Churchill delivered his ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman on the platform, declaring: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’ The phrase captured something real: Soviet-installed governments in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were eliminating non-communist parties and establishing one-party states; the East German zone was becoming a separate political entity; the division of Europe was hardening from temporary occupation zones into permanent political systems. Churchill was not the first to use the phrase — Goebbels had used it about Soviet-occupied Europe in 1945, and others before that — but his speech gave it canonical status. The Iron Curtain was not literally an iron curtain: it was a political and ideological boundary enforced by military force, secret police, and travel restrictions, punctuated physically by walls, watchtowers, and minefields at the most sensitive points — most famously the Berlin Wall from 1961. It divided families, separated economies, and created two distinct political cultures that remained different in significant ways even after the curtain’s fall in 1989–91. The Iron Curtain’s most important legacy is not the division it enforced but the asymmetry it revealed. Western Europeans could look eastward across the frontier and see a system their governments told them was totalitarian and impoverished; Eastern Europeans could look westward and see (or imagine) prosperity and freedom. This asymmetry — enforced by the curtain itself — shaped the Cold War’s ideological dimension in ways that favoured the West: the side that had to build a wall to keep its people from leaving was at a systematic propaganda disadvantage, whatever the real social conditions on either side. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 — driven by East German citizens demanding the right to travel — was an event of extraordinary symbolic power precisely because it reversed the dynamic: the curtain came down not through military force but through the accumulated desire of ordinary people to move toward what the West represented, and a state that could no longer maintain the will to shoot them for it..

De-Nazification

How did Germany deal with the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust? This episode examines the de-Nazification process, comparing West and East German approaches to a history of crimes that neither society was fully ready to confront.

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