- Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 - 30 April 1945) was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (The Nazi party). He was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and became FAhrer (leader) [2] in 1934, remaining in power until his suicide in 1945.
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
(born October 28, 1956) is the 6th and current president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He became president on 6 August 2005 after winning the 2005 presidential election. Ahmadinejad's current term will end in August, 2009, but he will be eligible to run for one more term in office in 2009 presidential elections. Before becoming president, he was the Mayor of Tehran. He is the highest directly elected official in the country, but, …
- Anne Frank
Annelies Marie "Anne" Frank (June 12, 1929 – early March 1945) was a Jewish girl who wrote a diary while in hiding with her family and four friends in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Frank and her family moved to Amsterdam in 1933, after the Nazis gained power in Germany, and were trapped by the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
- Elie Wiesel
Eliezer Wiesel, KBE (commonly known as Elie Wiesel, born September 30, 1928) is a Romania-born American novelist, political activist, and Holocaust survivor of Hungarian Jewish descent. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is "Night", a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps. Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.
- Oskar Schindler
Oskar Schindler (28 April 1908 - 9 October 1974) was a Sudeten German industrialist credited with saving almost 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust, by having them work in his enamelware and ammunitions factories located in Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. He was the subject of the book "Schindler's Ark", and the film based on it, "Schindler's List".
- Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (born 1959) is an Jewish-American political scientist. He is best known for his book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (1996), which posits that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist" antisemitism in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries.
- Christopher Browning
Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian of the Holocaust.
- Walter Laqueur
Walter Zeev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany (modern Wrocław, Poland), to a Jewish family. In 1938 Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, died in the Holocaust. He lived in Palestine/Israel 1938-53 and since then in the UK and USA. He wrote the foreword to Wilhelm Wulff's book "Zodiac and Swastika".
- David Ahenakew
David Ahenakew (born July 28, 1933) is a Canadian First Nations politician, and former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. He came to national and international attention in December 2002, after telling a reporter from the Saskatoon StarPhoenix that Jews were a disease and that Hitler was trying to "clean up the world" when he "fried six million of those guys." In connection with the remarks, which were made on tape with his knowledge, …
- William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. (June 11 1925 - November 1 2006) was an eminent American novelist and essayist. Before the publication of his memoir "Darkness Visible" in 1990, Styron was best known for his novels which included * "Lie Down in Darkness" (1951), which he wrote at age 25; * "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt; and * "Sophie's Choice" (1979), …
- Kurt Gerstein
Kurt Gerstein was a German SS officer and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS. He witnessed mass murders in the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Treblinka. He contacted the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter as well as members of the Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII in order to inform the international public about the Holocaust. In 1945 he wrote the "Gerstein Report" about this. Afterward he committed suicide.
- David Cesarani
Professor David Cesarani, O.B.E. (born 1956) is an English historian who specialises in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He has also written several biographies, notably "Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind".
- Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz, was an American historian, and an author of books in modern Jewish history in particular the Holocaust.
- Rudolf Vrba
Rudolf 'Rudi' Vrba, born Walter Rosenberg, was a professor of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. In April 1944, Vrba and his friend Alfréd Wetzler became the second and third of only five Jews to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp and pass information to the Allies about the mass murder that was taking place there.
- Saul Friedländer
Saul Friedländer is a Israeli historian of German-Bohemian origin. A former member of the clandestine militant Zionist group Irgun, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Geneva in 1963. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Born in Prague to German-speaking Jews, Friedländer grew up in France and survived the German Occupation of 1940-1944.
- Emil Fackenheim
Emil Ludwig Fackenheim, Ph.D (June 22, 1916 – September 18, 2003) was a noted Jewish philosopher and rabbi. Born in Halle, Germany, he was arrested by the Nazis on the night of November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht. Briefly interned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1938–1939), he escaped to Great Britain where his parents later joined him. Emil's older brother, who refused to leave Germany, was killed in the Holocaust.
- Leon Poliakov
Léon Poliakov was a historian who wrote extensively on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Born into a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire, Poliakov lived in Italy and Germany until he settled in France. During World War II, he established the Centre de Documentation Juive (1943) and after the war, he assisted Edgar Faure at the Nuremberg Trial. He served as director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
- Ion Antonescu
Ion Victor Antonescu was the prime minister and "conducător" (Leader) of Romania during World War II from September 4, 1940 to August 23, 1944.
- Gitta Sereny
Gitta Sereny (born March 13 1921) is a Hungarian-born British biographer, historian and journalist whose writing focuses mainly on the Holocaust and abused children. She is a stepdaughter of the economist Ludwig von Mises.
- Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945, Donaueschingen) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials like straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the theological concepts of Kabbalah. Kiefer ranks among the most well-known and most successful, …
- Eva Hoffman
Eva Wydra Hoffman is a writer and academic. She was born as Ewa Wydra July 1, 1945 in Kraków, Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in Ukraine. When she was an adolescent, her family immigrated to Canada in 1959 and her named changed to Eva, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied at Rice University, Texas (English literature), the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University, …
- Esther Jungreis
Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis is the founder of the international Hineni movement in America. A Holocaust survivor, she has made it her life's mission to bring back Jews to Orthodox Judaism.
- Paul Spiegel
Paul Spiegel was leader of the Zentralrat der Juden (Central Council of Jews) in Germany and the main spokesman of the German Jews. He was widely praised for his leadership of the German Jewish community, which had grown from the remnants left by the Nazis into the third largest Jewish community in western Europe.
- David Kranzler
Dr. David Kranzler is a researcher and historian specializing in those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Kranzler was born in Germany. To avoid imminent danger from the Nazis, his family left for the United States. He is living in New York since his childhood. He studied for BA and MA at Brooklyn College, for M.L.S. degree at Columbia University, and for his doctorate at Yeshiva University.
- George Jonas
George Jonas is a Hungarian-Canadian poet-born and raised in Budapest and educated at the Hungarian Liberal Arts Faculty-who immigrated to Canada in 1956, settling in Toronto. Poet, novelist, playwright, director of TV drama, producer, editor and journalist, his poetic voice has been heard since the 60s.
- Serge Thion
Serge Thion (born 1942) is a controversial French sociologist known for his Holocaust denial. Thion worked as a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1971 to 2000. Most of his research focused on Cambodia and Vietnam. Thion was the subject of some controversy when he wrote that "genocide" was, technically, not a proper description of what happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule, …
- John Hersey
John Richard Hersey was an American writer and journalist. Born in Tientsin, China, to missionaries Roscoe and Grace Baird Hersey, his family returned to the United States when he was ten years old. Hersey attended the Hotchkiss School, followed by Yale University and graduate study as a Mellon Fellow at Cambridge. He obtained a summer job as a secretary for Sinclair Lewis in the summer of 1937, and, that fall, started work at "Time".
- Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) was a Polish writer and journalist, and a Holocaust survivor. Tadeusz Borowski was born in 1922 into the Polish community in Zhytomir, Ukraine, then part of the USSR. His parents became victims of the USSR spy-hunting psychosis. In 1926, his father, whose bookstore had been nationalized by the communists, was sent to a gulag in Karelia. His mother was arrested later the same year and sent to a gulag in Siberia, …
- Michael Marrus
Michael Robert Marrus (born February 3, 1941) is a Canadian historian of France, the Holocaust and Jewish history. He was born in Toronto and received his BA at the University of Toronto in 1963 and his MA at the University of California in 1964. He teaches at the University of Toronto. He married Randi Greenstein in 1971 and has three children. Marrus is an expert on the history of French Jewry and anti-semitism.
- Henry Friedlander
Henry Friedlander (1930-) is an American historian of the Holocaust noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of victims of the Holocaust. Born in Berlin, Germany to a Jewish family, Friedlander came to the United States in 1947 and obtained his BA in History at Temple University in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and 1968. Starting in 1975 until his retirement in 2001, …
- Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer (June 19, 1926 -) is Luxembourg-born American historian of modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust. A self-proclaimed "left dissident Marxist", Mayer's major interests are in modernization theory and what he calls "The Thirty Years' Crisis" between 1914 and 1945. Mayer received his education at the City College of New York and Yale University. He has been professor at Wesleyan University (1952-1953), Brandeis University (1954-1958), …
- Nelly Sachs
Nelly Sachs was a German poet and dramatist whose Nazi experience transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Her best-known play is "Eli: Ein Mysterienspiel vom Leiden Israels" (1950); other works include the poems "Zeichen im Sand "(1962), "Verzauberung" (1970), and the collections of poetry "In den Wohnungen des Todes" (1947), "Flucht und Verwandlung" (1959), …
- Itzhak Stern
Itzhak Stern was a Jewish accountant to German industrialist Oskar Schindler. He worked alongside Schindler as the accountant for his Enamelware company (Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik) in Kraków and greatly helped in running the company. He is credited with typing the list of names known as "Schindler's list"; a list of Jews who survived the holocaust because of Oskar Schindler's intervention.
- Gerda Weissmann Klein
Gerda Weissman Klein (b. May 8 1924 in Bielsko, Poland) is a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust. She has written several books about her experiences. Her story was made into a film, "One Survivor Remembers", which won an Academy Award in 1995.
- Dieter Wisliceny
Dieter Wisliceny was a member of the Nazi SS, and a key executioner of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the final phase of the Holocaust. Joining the Nazi Party in 1933, and enlisting in the SS in 1934, Wisliceny eventually rose to the rank of Hauptsturmführer. During implementation of the Final Solution, his task was the ghettoization and liquidation of several important Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, including those of Greece, Hungary and Slovakia.
- Mel Mermelstein
Mel Mermelstein is a Hungarian-born Jew, sole-survivor of his family's extermination at Auschwitz concentration camp who defeated the Institute for Historical Review in an American court and had the occurrence of gassings in Auschwitz during the Holocaust declared a legally incontestable fact. Before World War II broke out, Mermelstein lived in Munkacs, in Ukraine. On May 19, 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz along with the rest of the Jewish community.
- Rudolf Kastner
Rudolf (Rezső) Kastner (Kasztner), also known as Israel (Yisrael) Kastner was the "de facto" head of a small Jewish organization in Budapest known as the "Va'adat Ezrah Vehatzalah" ("Vaada"), or Aid and Rescue Committee, during the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II. As the head of the "Vaada", he was one of the conduits between the Nazis and the Jewish community in Hungary.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (born July 18, 1933) is a Russian poet. He also directed several films.
- Yonassan Gershom
Yonassan Gershom is a Rabbi and a follower of Breslov Hasidism. He was associated with the early days of the B'nai Or movement (in which he was ordained by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in 1986), although he is not in agreement with the direction that organisation has taken in more recent years. He lives on a farm in rural Minnesota. He serves on the Advisory Board of Jewish Vegetarians of North America(JVNA) and is active in the vegetarian and animal welfare movements.
- Joel Brand
Joel Brand (April 25 1906-July 13 1964) was a Hungarian Jew who played a prominent role in trying to save the Hungarian Jewish community during the Holocaust from deportation to the German death camp at Auschwitz. Described by historian Yehuda Bauer as a brave adventurer who felt at home in "underground conspiracies and card-playing circles," Brand teamed up with fellow Zionists in Hungary, in or around 1942, to form the Aid and Rescue Committee, …