When it comes to implementing Nazi Germany’s Final Solution, few places were more successful than Nazi-occupied Lithuania. More than 90 percent of the country’s wartime Jewish population of 250,000 was murdered in the Holocaust.

Wendy Lower has used the Visual History Archive to uncover how women contributed to the Nazi Party and helped perpetrate the crimes of the Holocaust.

Those who openly deny the Holocaust are either apologists for the Nazis, right wing radicals, religious extremists, and all are antisemites, even if they deny that too.

When I visited Nazi death camps in 2014, I viewed spaces filled with the spirits of so many lives lost and witnessed the end result of evil, intolerance, and hatred. I left the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek that summer thinking that the sick, twisted ideology that drove the Nazis and was fueled by hatred and ignorance no longer existed in the 21st Century, especially in the United States. I naively believed Nazi ideology had ceased to exist with the end of World War II and the Holocaust.

During her month in residence at USC Shoah Foundation, Walch will research the exclusion of German Jews from their own homeland during the Holocaust through Nazi policies restricting Jewish spaces and architecture.

Jewish resistance to the Holocaust took many forms, and four testimony clips in this activity explain how many people – men, women and children – found ways to retain their humanity and subtly thwart Nazi persecution.

We are saddened to learn of the recent passing of Arkadii Vaispapir, one of few people ever to have survived the Sobibór death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. He was 96.

Instead of factories of death, these black-and-white stills convey the idea that soldiers are happy and prisoners are mere criminals serving a sentence. A research fellow with USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research discussed his findings on this topic in a lecture.

Professor Peter Hayes, world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, will serve as the 2019-2020 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

USC Shoah Foundation is announcing the release of Lala, a virtual reality film and educational resource that tells the true story of a dog that brightened the lives of a family interned by the Nazis in a ghetto in Poland during the Holocaust.

The USC Casden Institute hosted a discussion with Stephen Smith and Steven Luckert of USHMM about the power of Nazi propaganda.

A new Video Building Activity, “The Power of Propaganda,” and a Mini Quest, “The Rights of Children,” have been published on IWitness. Each activity is also aligned with the Echoes & Reflections units on Antisemitism and The Children and Legacies Beyond the Holocaust, respectively.

The Holocaust collection in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive contains nearly 53,000 testimonies; however, only a mere six of those testimonies are from survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for being gay: one in English, three in German, one in French, and one in Dutch. There are other gay survivors we have in the Archive, but they were persecuted by the Nazis for the greater sin of being Jewish; Gad Beck being one of them. The meager number says a lot about the history of the gay men who lived through the Nazi regime and who came out the other end willing and unafraid to speak about their lives.

We continue our 10-part Echoes and Reflections series with Lesson 2: Antisemitism.

The news about a group of teenagers throwing a Nazi salute at a party in Orange County is a startling reminder that knowledge of the Holocaust is fading. Here are four free online classroom-ready activities on IWitness that address the topics of antisemitism, bystanders and hatred.

On Tuesday, March 10, 2015, the USC Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted a lecture from Dr. Peter Hayes who spoke before a packed room at USC on the complex relationship between anti-Semitism and homophobia exerted in Nazi-occupied territories during World War II. The Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University specializes in 20th-century German History, writing extensively on German industry under the Nazis. Monday's lecture, however, focused on the evolution of his views on a comparison that he was previously reluctant to address.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been chosen as the 2017-2018 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence.

The award-winning author of ‘In the Name of Humanity: the Secret Deal to End the Holocaust’ was an interviewer for USC Shoah Foundation.

UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies will host Wolf Gruner and other Holocaust and genocide scholars in a panel discussion Thurs., Feb. 12.

At a first glance The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany is a book about the Holocaust. But in fact, it was published in 1936, after just three years of Nazi rule — and a full five years before the first gas chambers were commissioned for the murder of European Jewry. The authors spend 287 pages detailing a series of laws and actions taken against the Jews. Their conclusion was that the “legal disability” being imposed by the Nazis upon the Jews ultimately would result in their elimination. (Originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.)

It’s hard to imagine I’m even typing this sentence, but an avowed Holocaust denier on Tuesday became the official Republican nominee for an upcoming congressional election in Illinois. Arthur Jones won the primary despite the fact that he once led the American Nazi Party and has freely shared his antisemitic views. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that Arthur Jones received more than 20,000 votes, according to preliminary results.

The Jewish Museum in Prague has teamed with USC Shoah Foundation to provide a new testimony-based lesson plan for teachers in the Czech Republic. The lesson, “International Committee of the Red Cross and Terezín,” is about the Terezín ghetto and its use as a source of Nazi propaganda in a 1944 International Red Cross report.

Professor Marion Kaplan, world-renowned scholar of German-Jewish history, will serve as the 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research after being awarded its most esteemed fellowship. Professor Kaplan will deliver a public lecture and spend one week in residence at the Center this Spring.

USC Shoah Foundation is partnering with the American Sephardi Federation and other organizations to undertake the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish Testimony Collection, a new initiative to document the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience during World War II and the Holocaust.

Korb's research will investigate how local authorities in southern and eastern Europe, particularly Croatia, Serbia and Greece, collaborated with the Nazis and carried out their own acts of mass violence outside the epicenter of Nazi Germany.

Harry Reicher, USC Shoah Foundation’s first-ever Rutman Teaching Fellow, wrapped up his four-day fellowship today with a talk that revealed how exceptionally valuable the Visual History Archive will become to his teaching.

USC Shoah Foundation’s project to record testimonies of Jews who experienced persecution while living in the Middle East and Africa during the Holocaust will be a topic of discussion at the "Jews of the Middle East in the Shadow of the Holocaust" conference Jerusalem on April 5, 2016.

In this blog, Center visiting scholar Robson Bello discusses his focus on play during his month of research. 

Laszlo Csatary, a former Nazi commander and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s third Most Wanted Nazi War Criminal, died August 12 while awaiting trial in Budapest. He was 98.

For the sixth time, the Freie Universität Berlin will offer a free summer course for international and visiting scholars about USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. This summer, the topic of the course is memories of the Nazis’ forced laborers.