Review of Raețchi, Ovidiu: Istoria Holocaustului: Desființarea omului: de la ascensiunea lui Hitler până la execuția lui Eichmann, Bucharest: Litera 2022. ISBN: 978-606-33-8351-9, 720p.

Authors

  • Emanuel Marius Grec University of Heidelberg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0123/rev_egre01

Keywords:

Holocaust in Romania, History of the Holocaust, Genocide, Romania, Romanian history

Abstract

Ovidiu Raețchi’s book on the History of the Holocaust (in Romanian) tries to navigate these choppy research waters by constructing a philosophical or, one might say, existentialist inquiry: how does dehumanization affect a society’s inner fabric and how does this lead to mass murder? Starting with the volume’s subtitle on the destruction of man, Raețchi succeeds in writing a massive volume that not only leaves its reader with more existentialist questions than answers, as any good book should, but also manages to offer a balance in analysis between Nazi Germany’s leadership role in a genocidal endeavor and the roles played its allies that made the Holocaust the European destruction program what it was.

Author Biography

Emanuel Marius Grec, University of Heidelberg

Emanuel Marius Grec is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Heidelberg, and from September 2021 to August 2023 he was a Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies at the Claims Conference. He is currently working on his dissertation titled “The Perpetrators of the Odessa Massacre: War-Crimes Trials in Postwar Romania (1944–1948)”. In this, he examines the ways in which perpetrators and war criminals were portrayed in Romanian war crimes trials between 1944 and 1948. In particular, the dissertation focuses on the clusters of defendants who were responsible for the Odessa Massacre of 1941. Grec earned a BA in History from Vasile Goldiș Western University of Arad in 2013, an MA in Comparative History from the Central European University in Budapest in 2016, and an MA in Jewish Civilizations from the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien in Heidelberg in 2019. He also obtained a fellowship from the Central European University in 2014 for his MA work, and a research fellowship from Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. Additionally, he is the recipient of two consecutive research fellowships from Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES) in Germany, both for his MA (until 2019) and his PhD (until 2021), as well as of the Yad Vashem Scholarship for Doctoral Students from the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, in 2022.

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Published

2023-06-07

How to Cite

Grec, Emanuel Marius. 2023. “ 720p”. S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 10 (1):112-15. https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0123/rev_egre01.

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2023): S:I.M.O.N. – SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION.

Section

REVIEWS

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Emanuel Marius Grec

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