The following resources help audience members and educators further explore the topics raised in Americans and the Holocaust following their visit.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teach Page - View all the resources available from the Museum, including customized recommendations from Museum educators.

Teaching Materials on Americans and the Holocaust - Lesson plans tailored specifically to the exhibition.

Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow - Delve deeper into the parallel movements of racism and antisemitism unfolding during the 1930s in Germany and the United States using the lesson plans listed below:

• Black Americans and the Nazi Olympics
• ‘The Nazi Olympics Berlin 1936: African American Voices and “Jim Crow” America 
• “Racial “Science” and Law in Nazi Germany and the United States”

Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context - Make connections between people and events through primacy sources - read diary entries and letters, view film footage and photographs, and examine original documents with side-by-side translations provided.

Holocaust Timeline Activity - Adaptable classroom lesson recommended for Grades 7 - 12

History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust - Explore what average Americans were reading about the Holocaust during the 1930s and 1940s in newspapers from across the country.

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933 - 1945 - in collaboration with Project MUSE, this collection of materials spans seven volumes and catalogs the vast network of persecutory sites operated by the Nazi regime and its allies before and during World War II.

Collections Search - Use the search tool to discover nearly 300,000 artifacts and records held in the Museum's collection.

Video Testimonies

Fortunoff Video Archive - The Fortunoff Archive currently holds more than 4,400 testimonies, which are comprised of over 12,000 recorded hours of videotape. Testimonies were produced in cooperation with thirty-six affiliated projects across North America, South America, Europe, and Israel. The Fortunoff Archive and its affiliates recorded the testimonies of willing individuals with first-hand experience of the Nazi persecutions, including those who were in hiding, survivors, bystanders, resistants, and liberators. Testimonies were recorded in whatever language the witness preferred, and range in length from 30 minutes to over 40 hours (recorded over several sessions).

 

Documentaries

 

The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022, 3 episodes, 7 hours total; produced and directed by Ken Burns, with the assistance of Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein)
 

The Path to Nazi Genocide (38 minutes, produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Also available to watch free of charge directly at the USHMM website here).

 

Biographies and Memoirs
 

Survivor’s Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz by Michael Bornstein and Debbie Bornstein Holinstat (Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

 

50 Children: One Ordinary America Couple’s Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany by Steven Pressman (Harper, 2014)

 

  

All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein (Hill and Wang, 1995) (re-issue)

 

 

No-No Boy by John Okada (University of Washington Press, 2014) (re-issue)

 

After Long Silence: A Memoir by Helen Fremont (Dell Publishing, 2000)

 

 

Night by Elie Wiesel (Hill and Wang, 2006) (re-issue)

 

 

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper, 2022)

 

Non-Fiction

 

 

Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader by Daniel Greene and Edward Phillips (Rutgers University Press, 2022)

 

The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)

 

 

FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman (Harvard University Press, 2013)

 

 

The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help by Faris Cassell (Regnery, 2020)

 

 

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen (Random House, 2022)

 

 

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew Delmont (Viking, 2022)

 

 

The Unwanted: America, Auschwitz, and a Town Caught in Between by Michael Dobbs (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

 

  

Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe by Rebecca Erbelding (Doubleday, 2018)

 

 

Why? Explaining the Holocaust by Peter Hayes (W.W. Norton, 2017)

 

The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning by James Edward Young (Yale University Press, 1993)

 

Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice by Simone Schweber (Teachers College Press, 2004)

 

Teaching and Studying the Holocaust edited by Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg (Allyn and Bacon, 2001)

 

 

Sons and Soldiers: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned for Retribution by Bruce Henderson (William Morrow, 2017)

 

 

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larsen (Crown, 2011)

 

 

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (Crown, 2023)

 

 

Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power by Andrew Nagorski (Simon and Schuster, 2012)

 

Wanted!: The Search for Nazis in America by Howard Blum (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977)

 

 

Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 by Lynne Olson (Random House, 2013)

 

 

Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II by Richard Reeves (Henry Holt and Co, 2015)

 

 

Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics by Jeremy Schaap (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)

 

 

Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States by Bradley W. Hart (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2018)

 

Holocaust Project: From Darkness Into Light by Judy Chicago (Penguin Books, 1993)