Derek Niemman and Noemie Lopian work together. Two people from very different backgrounds, they tour the world telling people about their family stories. Author and writer Derek Niemann discovered only a few years ago that the grandfather he never knew had been an SS officer, in charge of slave labourers in the Nazi concentration camps. Dr Noemie Lopian is the daughter of Holocaust survivors: at the age of 10, her mother had a Gestapo pistol pointed at her head. Her father survived four years of slave labour and concentration camps. Noemie translated her father's gripping and deeply humane memoir of those years - The Long Night. The crimes committed by and against their forebears have drawn Noemie and Derek to form a highly unusual and indeed possibly unique partnership. In 2019, Noemie and Derek began sharing their stories as a warning of the perils of extremism and to inspire greater understanding.
In 1940 the Polish resistance decided it needed to send an agent to Auschwitz concentration camp. They were desperate to find out what was going on in a place that even by that stage of the war had an evil reputation. Historian Jack Fairweather tells the story of Witold Pilecki the Pole who volun...
In the Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, Nazis systematically murdered some 6 million European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, around two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe were killed. Jews were part of a larger group that included anyone the Nazis considered to be ‘Untermenschen’, o...
Professor Mary Fulbrook's book Reckonings won the 2019 Wolfson History Prize for its unique approach to the Holocaust, and in particular, those who perpetrated the atrocities. Fulbrook claims that the West German justice process was far too lenient on many ex-Nazis, who had condemned thousands or...