Scholars dismiss the Russian leader's claims as a "mythical use of history." For one: Ukraine overwhelmingly elected a Jewish president, and has a relatively small right-wing movement.

Descendants of Holocaust victims are in a race against time to preserve oral histories and artifacts before the last survivors are gone. One such effort is that of Alli Allen of Atlanta, who is donating hundreds of letters sent by her great-grandparents Blanka and Max Hartstein in Germany to her grandparents Paula Hartstein Marx and Hugh Marx, who’d fled to the United States in 1938, just one week before Kristallnacht.

A study seeks to learn how hundreds of thousands of Jews, crammed in the ghetto by the Nazis, halted an outbreak of epidemic typhus. Some — including survivors alive today — say frame of mind was key.

Researchers are still digging into the question and sharing their findings decades after the Nazis sacked the homes of Jews during World War II.

Hollywood's Golden Age and the rise of fascism in Europe were happening at the same time, a world apart. Those worlds collided when Hollywood decided to...