Overcoming the idea of victims’ experiences as universal and undifferentiated often attracts criticism from both scholars and survivors of the Holocaust. When studying the Holocaust, many academics still consider gender and sexuality as marginal categories of analysis that risk distracting from the main motivation behind the genocide of the European Jews: race. However, a gendered approach does not question the centrality of racism in the Holocaust. In fact, gender and sexuality, together with other categories of analysis such as class, disability, and age can favor the production of rather valuable intersectional studies of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The volume edited by Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă gathers a series of groundbreaking essays that aim to present men “not as unmarked bearers of normality” but rather as “gendered beings whose choices, actions, mind-sets, feelings, capacities, and incapacities are motivated or impeded by cultural and social discourses on masculinity” (297). This book invites scholars in Holocaust studies to take up the challenge and use the gender and sexuality lens in order to dissect how the Holocaust impacted in different ways millions of men. The contributors to this volume, making use of a variety of sources (archival documents, memoirs, interviews, oral testimonies, and visual material) convincingly argue that masculinities—and I emphasize the importance of the plural—are socially, culturally, and historically constructed. Scholars participating in this project do not want to challenge the racist core of the Holocaust, but they invite us to be more intersectional and approach the history and legacy of the genocide of European Jews “through the varied experiences of men as gendered experiences” (1).

This volume brings together eleven contributions and an epilogue. After a theoretical introductory essay by Krondorfer, about the importance of making men “present” in Holocaust studies by dissecting the experiences of both victims and perpetrators as individuals, the book focuses on specific case studies.

The first part—“Genocide”—scrutinizes histories and experiences of Jewish victims and German perpetrators during the Holocaust. Robert Sommer sheds light on the intricate relationships among masculinity, sexuality, and death in the Nazi camps. Lisa Pine analyzes how male survivors memorialized their experiences in Auschwitz differently from their female counterparts, talking about autonomy, independence, courage, strength, and the importance of working to live. Michael Becker and Dennis Bock offer a new interpretation of the so called Muselmänner. Becker and Bock present them not as “passive victims of starvation, exhaustion and violence” (130), but rather as prisoners with an agency who participated in the life of the concentration camps and had a major impact on the socioeconomic organization of the camp inmates’ societies. Monika Rice, analyzing memoirs and diaries of Jewish doctors in ghettos, argues that it is possible to observe the ways in which male and female autobiographical accounts diverged, with the men highlighting how they overcame difficulties encountered in their practice and the women more focused on forming empathetic relationships with their patients. Two essays in this section are dedicated to German soldiers. Edward B. Westermann analyzes the relationships among masculinity, alcohol, sexual predation, murder, and violence during the Holocaust. Lauren Faulkner Rossi illustrates how German Catholic seminarians—fighting willingly in the Wehrmacht and for Hitler's war aims—interpreted the war as a way to prove their masculinity and nationalism, and above all to defeat Bolshevism and defend Catholicism.

The book's second part—“Aftermath”—examines postwar contexts, concentrating on the ways in which the Second World War and the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis affected the lives of both Jewish and non-Jewish men. Benedikt Brunner demonstrates how the Third Reich and the war affected discourses about Protestant identity and masculinity. Carson Phillips explores how the process by which Austria moved from “victimhood” to “shared responsibilities” in the war and the Holocaust deeply shaped the Austrian constructs of masculinities, particularly after the Waldheim case in the 1980s. Patrick Farges, looking at the experiences of German-speaking Jewish refugees in Canada and Israel after 1933, underlines that these men constituted a very inhomogeneous group, that they expressed their masculinities in different ways in their adoptive homes, and that Canadian and Israeli societies deeply affected the ways in which these men constructed their gendered selves. Finally, Sarah Imhoff dissects the ways in which representations of Jewish men in media and popular literature were received and understood by the American public between the end of the Holocaust and the Six-Day War in 1967. She emphasizes in particular that the concept of “redemptive masculinity” (276)—reflecting America's foundational values (hard work, sacrifice, optimism, and courage)—is a useful analytical tool to explain why the post-1967 image of heroic Jews and Israelis resonated so vigorously in the United States.

The essays by Pine, Becker and Bock, and Sommer—looking at the lives of men in the Nazi concentration camps—and the chapter by Farges—investigating, among other topics, the experiences of the so-called Camp Boys in Canada—are remarkably fascinating. Sommer's chapter in particular confirms how sexuality can be a very powerful analytical tool to study the past. His essay scrutinizes how Nazis aimed at destroying individuals by eliminating their sexuality and how camp inmates tried to resist such destruction by reconstructing and preserving their sexualities. Despite prohibitions, sexual relationships—homosexual and heterosexual—happened in concentration camps, ranging from consensual sex to rape. The ability to have sex, Sommer argues, was “not only a strategy of rebuilding one's human identity but also a symbol of male power” (53). When, in 1942, the Nazis introduced brothels in ten concentration camps, the right to sexual intercourse was granted as a privilege only to a limited number of male prisoners. Jews, Soviet POWs, Sinti, and Roma were excluded at all times. Sexuality, Sommer claims, was “a status symbol among prisoners and a sign of power inside the camp” (71). For many men and women, bodies became “capital in the economy of sexual barter” (71). They secured food and protection through sex. The inner rules of the concentration camps forced many to suspend their personal moral values. According to Sommer, for many inmates “tolerating sexual abuse … became a survival strategy” (71). Sexual activities were instrumentalized, economized, and, only on rare occasions, complemented by mutual love. The study of sexuality in the concentration camps, as Sommer's essay shows, allows us to understand further the complexity of the Holocaust.

Although the scholarship regarding women and the Holocaust has grown in the last twenty-five years, and books and articles about male perpetrators are copious, scholarship on Jewish masculinities is scant. For this reason, The Holocaust and Masculinities is a significant contribution to a field of study that is still rather unexplored. By bringing together Holocaust studies and critical masculinity studies, this collection of essays successfully investigates “the experiences of men as gendered beings” (1) and critically analyzes “men's variegated roles, behaviors, attitudes, conduct, and choices during the Holocaust” (1). As both Krondorfer and Thomas Kühne underline in this volume, critical approaches to masculinity, by looking at individual male experiences and going beyond essentializing generalizations, can offer new ways of understanding and conceptualizing the Holocaust. This edited volume emphasizes how, in Kühne's words, masculinity “operates in the mode of plurality” and multiple masculinities “coexist and compete in any given society, at any given time” (298). By making male experiences “visible,” by destabilizing the idea of a single masculinity, and—as Kühne claims—by “discarding vernacular concepts of manhood as never changing” (287), historians can present more nuanced analyses of perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust.