A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust

Authors

George Eisen, California State Polytechnic University

Files

Page Count

408

Language

English

Description

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets.

The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate of these Hungarian Jews and their local coreligionists, A Summer of Mass Murder transcends conventional history by introducing a multitude of layers of politics, culture, and, above all, psychology—for both the victims and the executioners.

The narrative presents an uncharted territory in Holocaust scholarship with extensive archival research, interviews, and corresponding literature across countries and languages, incorporating many previously unexplored documents and testimonies. Eisen reflects upon the voices of the victims, the images of the perpetrators, whose motivation for murder remains inexplicable. In addition, the author incorporates the long-forgotten testimonies of bystander contemporaries, who unwittingly became part of the unfolding nightmare and recorded the horror in simple words.

This book also serves as a personal journey of discovery. Among the twenty thousand people killed was the tale of two brothers, the author’s uncles. In retracing their final fate and how they were swept up in the looming genocide, A Summer of Mass Murder also gives voice to their story.

ISBN

9781612497785

Publication Date

Winter 12-15-2022

Publisher

Purdue University Press

City

West Lafayette

Keywords

Holocaust, Final Solution, Shoah, genocide, mass murder, WWII, Galicia, Gestapo, Kamenets-Podolsk, Jeckeln, Himmler, Hungary, Ukraine, extermination, gas chamber, Nazi, Germany, socialism, World War II

Disciplines

European History | History | Holocaust and Genocide Studies | Political Science

Comments

This book is made available Open Access (CC-BY-NC) thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched, www.knowledgeunlatched.org

Recommended Citation

Eisen, George, "A Summer of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal for the Hungarian Holocaust" (2022). Purdue University Press Books. 64.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/64