The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia (book)

Lokale Initiativen, zentrale Entscheidungen, jüdische Antworten, "Persecution of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: Local Initiatives, Central Decisions, Jewish Responses") is a book by the German historian Wolf Gruner on the Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech-majority parts of Czechoslovakia partially annexed into Nazi Germany during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

He argues that the role of Czech collaboration and local initiatives was greater than has been conventionally assumed, and also that Jewish resistance to persecution was substantial.

[1] An English translation by Alex Skinner, The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses was published by Berghahn Books in 2019, as part of the "War and Genocide" series.

[4] The author, Wolf Gruner, is a German historian who holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California, where he founded the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the USC Shoah Foundation.

[5][6] Organized in chronological order, the book starts with a chapter on the situation of minorities in Czechoslovakia,[2] in which Gruner argues against the common perception that the First Czechoslovak Republic was less antisemitic than neighboring countries.

[11]: 151  Michal Frankl concurs, criticizing the "selective use of sources"—Gruner did not do enough research in Czech archives, in his opinion—which led the book to conclusions he considered erroneous.

[12] German historian René Küpper praised the book, which he says analyzes new sources and fills in previously unknown details about Jewish lives in the Protectorate.

"[16] The book was second place in the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and won one of the prizes for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social sciences in 2017, awarded jointly by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort [de] and the German Foreign Office.