Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948, Stockholm, Sweden) American author and illustrator whose Holocaust narratives Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991) helped to establish comic storytelling as a sophisticated adult literary medium.

Spiegelman immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1951. The family settled in Queens, New York, and Spiegelman, inspired by the clever artwork and subversive humour of Mad magazine, studied cartooning. As a teenager, he attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and he embarked on a career as a professional artist, selling illustrations to the Long Island Post. He began a two-decade run as a contributing artist and designer for Topps Chewing Gum, during which he helped develop the wildly successful Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages trading cards. Spiegelman attended the State University of New York at Binghamton from 1965 to 1968, and he explored the alternative comics scene—most notably, the work of counterculture icon R. Crumb. After his mother’s suicide in 1968, Spiegelman left college without obtaining a degree, and he spent the early 1970s contributing to the flourishing comics underground. In 1972 he published two strips that represented a break from his previous work. The first was Maus, originally a three-page story that appeared in cartoonist Justin Green’s Funny Animals anthology. The second, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, was an attempt to understand his mother’s suicide through panels that evoked the bold intensity of German Expressionist woodcuts. These strips, along with other works, were collected in Breakdowns (1977).

In 1980 he cofounded Raw, an underground comic and graphicsanthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly. In it the pair sought to present graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience) to a wider public. Recognized as the leading avant-garde comix journal of its era, Rawfeatured strips by European artists as well as previewed Spiegelman’s own work. Beginning in Raw’s second issue (December 1980), Spiegelman resumed the story of Maus, in which he related the wartime experiences of his parents, Vladek and Anja, both survivors of the Auschwitz death camp. Compelling in its ironicanthropomorphic animal depictions—the Jews and Nazis are drawn with the faces of mice and cats, respectively—its historical veracity, and its personal accounts, the story is made more complex by its contemporary framework. Spiegelman portrays himself as the adult Artie Spiegelman, who is attempting to understand and reconstruct his parents’ past while coping with the legacy of his mother’s death, his aging and often difficult father, and his own sense of guilt. The literary quality of Raw and Maus pushed comix into the mainstream, and their success led to Spiegelman working as a New York Times illustrator, a Playboy cartoonist, and a staff artist and writer for The New Yorker.

The commercial and critical success of Maus earned Spiegelman a “Special Award” Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and a solo exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In addition, Maus II became a New York Times best seller. Initially appearing on the fiction list, it was moved to nonfiction after Spiegelman appealed for the transfer on the basis of the book’s carefully researched factual scenes. The two Maus volumes were translated into more than 20 languages, and they were published together as The Complete Mausin 1996.

In 2000 Spiegelman and Mouly launched Little Lit, a comics anthology for children that collected work from comics creators Chris Ware, Neil Gaiman, and Daniel Clowes, children’s authors Maurice Sendak and Lemony Snicket, and humorist David Sedaris, among others. Although Spiegelman achieved success with lighthearted fare for young readers—his Open Me…I’m a Dog! (1997) was well received—he was inspired by the events of September 11, 2001, to return to the comix format. Stating that “disaster is my muse,” Spiegelman published In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a collection of broadsheet-sized meditations on mortality and the far-reaching consequences of that day. In 2008 he released Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, which repackaged his long out-of-print Breakdowns collection as part of a longer graphic memoir. In MetaMaus (2011) Spiegelman described the story behind Maus. Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, an overview of his career, was published in 2013. Spiegelman was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005.

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany, established on March 10, 1933, slightly more than five weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Built at the edge of the town of Dachau, about 12 miles (16 km) north of Munich, it became the model and training centre for all other SS-organized camps.

During World War II the main camp was supplemented by about 150 branches scattered throughout southern Germany and Austria, all of which collectively were called Dachau. (This southern system complemented the camps for central and northern Germany, at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.) In the course of Dachau’s history, at least 160,000 prisoners passed through the main camp, and 90,000 through the branches. Incomplete records indicate that at least 32,000 of the inmates died there from disease, malnutrition, physical oppression, and execution, but countless more were transported to the extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.

The composition of the inmates reflected the Nazis’ changing choice of victims. The first inmates were Social Democrats, Communists, and other political prisoners. Throughout its existence, Dachau remained a “political camp,” in which political prisoners retained a prominent role. Later victims included Roma (Gypsies) and homosexuals, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jews were brought to Dachau after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Initially, Jews could be freed if they had a way out of Germany. When the systematic killing of Jews began in 1942, many were sent from Dachau to the extermination camps. Dachau received Jews again after the “death marches” of the winter of 1944–45. These marches, following the forcible evacuation of the extermination camps, were one of the final phases of the Holocaust.

Dachau became the prototype of Nazi concentration camps. Its first commandant, Theodor Eicke, created the organizational structure for the camp. When he was appointed inspector general of all camps, the Dachau system became the model for the other camps.

A gas chamber was built in 1942 but never used. Those who were to be gassed were transported elsewhere, as were the sick, who were sent to Hartheim, one of the killing centres of the T4 Program, established to “euthanize” the infirm and disabled.

Dachau was the first and most important camp at which German doctors and scientists set up laboratories using inmates as involuntary guinea pigs for such experiments as determining the effects on human beings of sudden increases and decreases in atmospheric pressure, studying the effects of freezing on warm-blooded creatures, infecting prisoners with malaria and treating them with various drugs with unknown effects, and testing the effects of drinking seawater or going without food or water. Continued throughout World War II, such experiments and the harsh living conditions made Dachau one of the most notorious of camps. After the war, the scientists and doctors from this and other camps were tried at Nürnberg in the “Doctors’ Trial”; seven were sentenced to death. (See Nürnberg trials.)

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Dachau was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945. Among their most-gruesome discoveries were railroad cars filled with Jewish prisoners who had died en route to the camp and had been left to decompose. American and British media coverage of Dachau and other newly liberated camps—which included photographs published in magazines and newsreel footage shown in cinemas—profoundly shaped the public’s understanding of the atrocities that had occurred.

Ravensbrück, Nazi German concentration camp for women (Frauenlager) located in a swamp near the village of Ravensbrück, 50 miles (80 km) north of Berlin. Ravensbrück served as a training base for some 3,500 female SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) supervisors who staffed it and other concentration camps. There were 34 satellite camps attached to Ravensbrück, many of them at military industrial plants.

Set up in 1938, it was designed to accommodate 6,000 inmates, but by the end of World War II it housed more than 36,000. About 50,000 women died at Ravensbrück from disease, starvation, overwork, and despair. Some inmates were used in medical experiments. For example, in 1942 and 1943 selected inmates were infected with gas gangrene or other bacteria and given a series of “cures” that often resulted in death or crippling. In 1944 inmates were subjected to experimental bone transplants and amputations.

Killing techniques at Ravensbrück evolved over time. At first, prisoners were shot in the back. Later, women were transported to a T4 Programkilling centre or to Auschwitz for gassing. Prisoners at Ravensbrück were also killed by lethal injection and cremated in the nearby resort town of Fürstenberg. In late January or early February 1945, some 2,200 women were killed in gas chambers constructed next to Fürstenberg’s crematorium.

In early April 1945, the camp was evacuated and about 24,500 prisoners began a death march. As Allied troops approached, German prisoners were set free, and 500 women were handed over to the Red Cross. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army on April 29–30. Some 3,500 female prisoners were still alive.

Gross-Rosen, small Naziconcentration camp established in August 1940 near the German town of Striegau in Lower Silesia (now Strzegom, Dolnośląskie province, Poland) that sent many prisoners to a killing centre for the T4 Program. Under the orders of Nazi official Heinrich Himmler, it received prisoners seized under the Night and Fog Decree. Gas chambers (eventually employing the virulent Zyklon-B) were established nearby in late 1941 or in 1942 and were used to exterminate concentration camp inmates from throughout Germany. (The gas chambers at Dachau and Theresienstadt were never put into operation.) Beginning in January 1942 the camp was also the site of a laboratory for human medical experiments using inmates. Gross-Rosen was also a killing site for Soviet prisoners of war, who died of starvation. Soviet troops liberated the camp in early May 1945.

Geoffrey H. Hartman (born August 11, 1929, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany—died March 14, 2016, Hamden, Connecticut, U.S.) was a German-born American literary critic and theorist who opposed Anglo-American formalism, brought Continental thought to North American literary criticism, and championed criticism as a creative act. His works treat criticism and literatureas mutually interpenetrating discourses and consider the greatest writing as infinitely interpretable.

As a child Hartman was sent by the Kindertransport to England, where he spent six years before joining his mother in the United States; he became a U.S. citizen in 1946. After studying at Queens College, New York City (B.A., 1949); the University of Dijon, France; and Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (Ph.D., 1953), he embarked on a university teaching career, most of it (1955–62 and 1967–2009) at Yale.

In his first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954), Hartman argued that poetry mediates between its readers and direct experience, much as religion did in more religious eras. Romantic poetry especially interested him, and he wrote several books on William Wordsworth, including Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (1964; rev. ed., 1971) and The Unremarkable Wordsworth (1987). He also edited a collection of Wordsworth’s writings titled Selected Poetry and Prose (1970).

Aside from his sophisticated rethinking of literary Romanticism, Hartman was known for his historical and more speculative writings on literary criticism and theory. In his essay collection The Fate of Reading (1975), Hartman argued that history, like literature, is open to many interpretations and therefore is also a kind of “critical energy.” In Criticism in the Wilderness (1980), he called for uniting the studies of literature, history, and philosophy and disputed the common notion of criticism as a form separate from and inferior to creative writing. Hartman contributed to the Yale school’s deconstructive manifesto, Deconstruction and Criticism (1979), yet he is only loosely associated with that school. Through his criticism he was always engaging and modifying a variety of stances and theoretical assumptions.

Among Hartman’s later writings are Easy Pieces (1985), Minor Prophecies(1991), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), The Fateful Question of Culture (1997), and Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2002). A Critic’s Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958–1998 (1999) is a collection of essays. Hartman was a 2006 recipient of the University of Iowa’s Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004) and in 1972 became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Judenräte, Jewish councils established in German-occupied Poland and eastern Europe during World War II to implement German policies and maintain order in the ghettos to which the Nazis confined the country’s Jewish population. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of NaziGermany’s Gestapo, established the Judenräte (singular: Judenrat) by decree on September 21, 1939, three weeks after the German invasion of Poland. No aspect of Jewish behaviour during the Holocaust was more controversial than the conduct of the Judenräte.

The Judenräte were composed of up to 24 Jewish men, chosen from “remaining authoritative personalities and rabbis.” When the Judenräte were first established, the Jews did not know the ultimate intensions of the Germans toward them nor, according to most scholars, were the intentions of the Germans yet clear. Jewish leaders assumed that their responsibility was to provide for the needs of Jews, who they assumed would remain in the ghetto indefinitely. The Judenräte became a municipal authority providing sanitation, education, commerce, and food for their increasingly beleaguered community. With meager resources at their disposal, they struggled to meet the basic needs of starving ghetto residents and to make life bearable. Their German oppressors provided the basis of their power. At first unaware of their people’s fate, in time they understood their role in maintaining communities destined for annihilation.

The Judenräte relied on forms of taxation to support their activities. Jewish police forces were established to enforce Judenräte decrees and provide order in the ghetto. The individual Judenräte used different models of governance. In Warsaw, the largest of the ghettos, laissez-faire capitalism was the rule under Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniaków. Private enterprise continued for as long as possible. In Łódź, under the chairmanship of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, authority was more centralized. Commerce, trade, and all municipal services, including the distribution of food and housing, were tightly controlled.

The level and tenor of interaction between the Judenräte and the Germans differed ghetto by ghetto, leader by leader, and meeting by meeting. Some meetings with Nazi officials were courteous and might even appear friendly, others were harsh and threatening. Generally, the Germans would make demands of the Judenräte, who, in return, would beg for supplies and relief on behalf of their beleaguered populations.

Among the ghetto residents, the Judenräte often drew anger. Many viewed their role in enforcing German decrees and conditions as indistinguishable from the role of the Germans who had ordered them. This anger grew when conditions in the ghettos deteriorated under an intensified German campaign of deprivation.

Perhaps the defining test of the courage and the character of Judenrat leaders occurred when the Germans ordered lists drawn up indicating those to be protected by work permits and those to be deported to concentration camps. Judenrat members knew that deportation meant near-certain death. Thus, while the Judenräte used tactics such as bribery, postponement, importuning, and appeasement to secure work permits for as many residents as possible, only a specified number of work permits were available and decisions were required. This became especially wrenching when it came to children and the elderly, who were incapable of working.

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In Łódź, Rumkowski cooperated with the deportations. He argued, “I must cut off the limbs to save the body itself. I must take the children because if not, others will be taken as well. The part that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be given away.” Similar decisions were made by Judenrat leaders in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) and Sosnowiec.

In Warsaw, Czerniaków committed suicide rather than participate in the deportation of children and the liquidation of the entire ghetto. “They have asked me to kill the children with my own hands,” he said in despair. To some Jews, Czerniaków’s suicide was an act of integrity. Others saw it as a sign of weakness and condemned his failure to call for resistance.

Leaders who openly refused to cooperate in delivering their own people to concentration camps soon paid with their lives. Dr. Joseph Parnas, first Judenrat leader of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine), refused an order to deport thousands of Jews and was shot, as were several other Judenrat leaders. Megalif, the leader of the Judenrat at Nieśvież (now Nesvizh, Belarus), marched to his death rather than participate in the deportation.

When the Germans ordered the final liquidation of the ghetto, there could be little pretense that many Jews could be saved. The Jewish resistance in several ghettos began to take control. While some Judenrat leaders, such as Dr. Elchanan Elkes of Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuania) and his counterpart in Minsk (now in Belarus), Eliyahu Mushkin, cooperated with the underground and the resistance, most Judenrat leaders considered the resistance a threat to their efforts to maintain order and sustain the ghettos. As a consequence, Judenrat leaders and Jewish police were often the first to be assassinated by the Jewish resistance, even before direct battle with the Germans.

At the end of the war, virtually all Judenrat leaders, regardless of their level of accommodation with the Germans, were dead. Rumkowski, who perhaps tried the hardest to cooperate with the Germans to save “the body” of his ghetto, met the same fate as that body—death at an extermination camp.

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt revived the controversy over the role of the Judenräte by implying that their complicity actually increased the Holocaust’s death toll. She wrote, “The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” Her work triggered a storm of controversy but also provoked research that yielded a more subtle understanding of the impossible task these leaders faced in confronting the Nazis’ overwhelming power and fervent, disciplined commitment to annihilate the Jewish people.

Reinhard Heydrich (born March 7, 1904, Halle, Germany—died June 4, 1942, Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia [now in Czech Republic]) was a Nazi German official who was Heinrich Himmler’s chief lieutenant in the Schutzstaffel (“Protective Echelon”), the paramilitary corpscommonly known as the SS. He played a key role in organizing the Holocaustduring the opening years of World War II.

Heydrich’s father, who directed a musical conservatory and sang Wagnerian roles in the opera, exposed his son to the cult of Richard Wagner, and his mother was a stern disciplinarian; the family was falsely suspected of partial Jewish ancestry. Heydrich joined a Freikorpsparamilitary unit in 1919 and entered the German navy in 1922. Commissioned as a naval officer, he was discharged in 1931 after a naval court of honour found him guilty of misconduct (for refusing to marry a shipyard director’s daughter with whom he had had an affair). That same year he joined the SS. Soon after a chance introduction to Himmler, Heydrich was entrusted with the organization of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; “Security Service”), the intelligence and surveillance arm of the SS.

After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Heydrich was appointed chief of the political department of the Munich police force, and he helped bring the political police forces throughout Germany under Himmler’s control. Heydrich rose rapidly through the ranks of the SD. Because Himmler was only four years older than Heydrich, Heydrich’s hopes for advancement could be realized only with his specialization. He was appointed SS chief for Berlin in 1934, and when Himmler became chief of all German police forces in 1936, Heydrich took charge of the SD, the criminal police, and the Gestapo.

Heydrich played a role in the 1938 purge of the German army high command and planted false information that led to a similar purge by Stalinof the Red Army. As head of the Gestapo, Heydrich could incarcerate enemies of the Reich at will. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, Heydrich ordered the arrest of thousands of Jews by the Gestapo and the SS and their imprisonment in concentration camps. In 1939 Heydrich became head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”), which was in charge of all security and secret police in the Third Reich.

Heydrich masterminded the fake “Polish” attack on the Gleiwitz radio transmitter that provided Hitler with a pretext for invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Soon afterward Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann began organizing the first deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to ghettos in occupied Poland. Heydrich also organized the Einsatzgruppen(“deployment groups”), mobile killing squads that murdered almost one million Soviet and Polish Jews in German-occupied territories. To increase German control of the ghettos, he ordered the establishment of Judenräte(“Jewish Councils”) to implement German directives in the Jewish ghettos of German-occupied Poland.

Heydrich was instrumental in the Nisko and Lublin plans to confine Jews to limited districts set up to contain them and in the proposed deportation of all European Jews to the island of Madagascar, a plan that was never implemented. Some historians believe that the impracticality of this plan encouraged the Nazi course of mass murder.

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On July 31, 1941, Hermann Göringcommissioned Heydrich to carry out a “final solution to the Jewish question,” authorizing him to take all organizational and administrative steps necessary for the extermination of the Jews. Heydrich chaired the notoriousWannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), whose participants discussed the logistics of the “final solution.”

In September 1941 Heydrich had been appointed Reichsprotektor(governor) of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). He combined repressive measures and mass executions with an attempt to mollify Czech peasants and workers by improving social and economic conditions. His success in “pacifying” the Czech population lulled Heydrich into a false sense of security, and on May 27, 1942, two Free Czech agents mortally wounded him with a bomb while he was riding in his car without an armed escort. He died June 4 in a Prague hospital. Gestapo officials retaliated for his death by executing hundreds of Czechs and wiping out the entire village of Lidice.

Majdanek, Nazi German concentration camp and extermination camp on the southeastern outskirts of the city of Lublin, Poland. In October 1941 it received its first prisoners, mainly Soviet prisoners of war, virtually all of whom died of hunger and exposure. Within a year, however, it was converted into a death camp for Jews, transported first from Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic) and then from Poland, the Netherlands, and Greece.

Like Auschwitz, Majdanek was not a death camp alone but also a prison camp and a work camp. With seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, and some 227 structures in all, it was among the largest camps. In September 1943 the Nazis added a large crematorium containing five ovens.

In the first months of killing, Nazi firing squads executed prisoners in a nearby forest, but afterward victims were herded into the gas chambers for mass executions. The bodies were cremated. In time, the Nazis added nearby branch camps, such as Travniki.

During its almost four years of existence, some 500,000 persons from 28 countries and of 54 nationalities passed through Majdanek. According to the most reliable estimates, about 360,000 died there. Of these, some 60 percent died of starvation, torture, or disease, and some 40 percent were murdered by firing squad or in the gas chambers. Like those employed at Belzec, Majdanek’s first gas chambers used carbon monoxide; later, on the Auschwitz model, the Nazis installed gas chambers using Zyklon-B, which produced quick-killing hydrogen cyanide fumes.

The Soviet Red Army entered Majdanek in late July 1944, a full 6 months before the liberation of Auschwitz and 10 months before American and British troops entered concentration camps in Germany and Austria. Only a few hundred prisoners remained alive. In the days before the Soviets arrived, the Germans had hastily evacuated Majdanek and burned documents, several buildings, and the large crematoria. The gas chambers and many of the prisoner barracks remained intact. After visiting the Soviet-occupied camp in August 1944, W.H. Lawrence, a reporter for The New York Times, opened his article on Majdanek with the words, “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth,” and proceeded to describe the death camp’s operation. Because they came as the result of a Soviet liberation and there was no film documentation, these revelations were discounted. Only 10 months later, when photojournalists entered the concentration camps with Western troops, did the liberation of the camps receive worldwide attention.

Plaszow, Nazi German concentration camp near Kraków, in German-occupied Poland, used chiefly as a forced-labour centre.

Opened in June 1942, the camp was the main forced-labour camp for Jews rounded up from the general region of Kraków and, later, for Jews from Hungary. At its peak, it held some 20,000 or more inmates, including hundreds of Roma (Gypsies) and Polish prisoners from the Warsaw Uprising (August-October 1944). Brutal labour in local industries and stone quarries, together with poor food and sanitation, caused a heavy death toll. During the final deportation of the Jews of Kraków in March 1943, Plaszow was used as a mass burial centre. Although most of the Jews of Kraków were sent to Belzec, where they were murdered, approximately 8,000 were sent to Plaszow. Attempting to erase evidence of the camp in the final months of 1944, the Nazis deported many prisoners to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, burned some 9,000 exhumed bodies, and destroyed many of the installations. When the Soviet army arrived in January 1945, only about 600 prisoners remained alive, though the German entrepreneur Oskar Schindler had saved another 1,100 inmates by transferring them to a safer camp in 1944. The commandant of Plaszow, Amon Göth, an SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) officer, was tried and executed in 1946.