Dr.
Arnold Leder with the
assistance of Delaina
Toothman
Texas State University @ https://www.txstate.edu
Please Note: Covid-19 Case Reporting and Response Steps
All students, faculty, and staff are urged to look at
the information for
Covid-19 Case Reporting and Response Steps
provided by Texas State University
@ https://www.txstate.edu/coronavirus/road-map/reporting-processes.html
Password protected materials for this
course can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll to the section on "The Holocaust/Shoah". Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the
course.
For the online link to this web syllabus as well as links to
posted web syllabi for other courses taught by Dr. Leder see:
http://www.arnoldleder.com/.
Department Of Political Science/Texas State
University
http://www.polisci.txstate.edu/
UAC/Undergraduate Academic Center 355; Telephone
number: (512) 245-2143; Fax number: (512) 245-7815
Office: UAC 363 Office Hours: Office Hours for Distance
Learning Format Courses:
Flexible mutually agreed on appointment days and times with
individual students using Zoom, FaceTime, email, or
telephone. Communication for appointments through email. Dr. Leder's email address: al04@txstate.edu
Documentary Film on the history of anti-Semitism:
European Antisemitism from Its Origins to the
Holocaust" (13 minutes) United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum @ https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/european-antisemitism-from-its-origins-to-the-holocaust
An introduction to the history of
antisemitism from the days of the early Christian church until
the era of the Holocaust in the mid-20th century.
In his last letter, written to his friend
Elsa before he was murdered by the Nazis in Vilna in 1941,
Holocaust victimDavid Berger wrote, simply,
“I should like someone to remember that there once
lived a person named David Berger.” He
expressed his fervent desire to be remembered as an
individual human being. (boldface and underline
added)
Marion Samuelan eleven-year-old girl
murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.
See: A review of: Götz
Aly/Into
the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt 2008).
From the Book Description at amazon.com:
A generous feat of biographical sleuthing by an acclaimed
historian rescues one child victim of the Holocaust from
oblivion When the German Remembrance Foundation established
a prize to commemorate the million Jewish children murdered
during the Holocaust, it was deliberately named after a
victim about whom nothing was known except her age and the
date of her deportation: Marion Samuel, an eleven-year-old
girl killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Sixty years after her
death, when Gtz Aly received the award, he was moved to find
out whatever he could about Marion's short life and restore
this child to history. In what is as much a detective story
as a historical reconstruction, Aly, praised for his
'formidable research skills' (Christopher Browning), traces
the Samuel family's agonizing decline from shop owners to
forced laborers to deportees. Against all odds, Aly manages
to recover expropriation records, family photographs, and
even a trace of Marion's voice in the premonition she confided to a school
friend: 'People disappear,' she said, 'into the tunnel.'
A gripping account of a family caught in the tightening grip
of persecution, Into the Tunnel is a powerful reminder that the
millions of Nazi victims were also, each one, an
individual life. (boldface added)
"This is a weighty little book, as easy to read as it is
difficult to forget...
For Marion Samuel, the future was a brief life and a
brutal end, followed by years of obscurity...Götz
Aly has accomplished a remarkable feat: he has vividly conjured up and
restored to history the beginning of a life that was not
to be. If only this work of commemoration could be done
for all those who disappeared into the tunnel." (boldface
added) — from the preface by Ruth Kluger, author of Still
Alive:
A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. See: http://www.ushmm.org/research/publications/academic-publications/full-list-of-academic-publications/into-the-tunnel-the-brief-life-of-marion-samuel-19311943 ___________________________________________________________________________________
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A seminar devoted to intensive
reading and writing about and discussion of The Shoah (The
Holocaust). Topics covered include: Efforts to
Understand The Holocaust; The Evolution of anti-Semitism in
Germany; The War Against the Jews; Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust; Ordinary Poles and The Holocaust; Representing
The Holocaust in fiction, film, and poetry; and post
Holocaust "New anti-Semitism".
PURPOSE OF THE
COURSE
The purpose of this course is to provide
a basis for examination of several critical dimensions of
The Holocaust. These dimensions include: the views,
motivations, and actions of the murderers; the experiences
of Jewish victims; Anti-Semitism; alternative explanations
of the causes and nature of The Shoah and the challenge to
scholarship; the issue of remembering The Holocaust; and
the significance of the "New Anti-Semitism".
COURSE ORGANIZATION & STUDENT
RESPONSIBILITIES-Distance Learning Format
Zoom class meeting times will be flexible. Generally,
Zoom meetings will occur once every week. The day and time
for these meetings will be announced.
Attendance at webinars is encouraged. Given the
difficulties faced by many students and faculty at this time
attendance at webinars will not be mandatory.
Grades This course includes two formats. One
is lecture when appropriate and the other is a webinar
format when course materials make this suitable. Determinants of Course Grade: Required short papers, likely
no more than 3, on assigned readings and viewing
materials.Length
and specifics of these papers TBA. Dates for
submission of each of these short papers TBA.
Oral Reports & Presentations and Webinar Participation
when circumstances and conditions permit.
Student Conduct
Texas State University policy in regard to student conduct
is located at the end of the syllabus.
Students
with Disabilities:
Qualified students with disabilities are entitled to
reasonable and appropriate accommodations in accordance with
federal laws including Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation
Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and the
university policy UPPS 07.11.01. Students with special needs
(as documented by the Office of Disability Services) should
identify themselves at the beginning of the semester.
For an excerpt from this statement see the end of this syllabus.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COURSE CONTENT
Note On Course & Syllabus Materials: Students may
find books, articles, links, websites, and other materials
provided in this syllabus useful and of interest. Their
listing in this syllabus, including those which are required
and recommended, does not necessarily indicate endorsement of
or agreement with any views or positions on any issues found
in these materials, websites, or on other sites to which they
may provide links.
Note on Browsers: For direct access to the
Texas State University Library Chrome is recommended. NOTE: See
CANVAS/Political Science 4313/The Holocaust@https://discovery.canvas.txstate.edu/on
Texas State University website for select posted materials
from this syllabus in pdf (portable document format).
A Texas State University User Name/ID and password
are required for student access to CANVAS.
Note: For Daniel Goldhagen's explanation of his book, view
this March 2017 video: Professor Goldhagen,
Hitler's Willing Executioners
@ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNzcInVPMEc
(1hr. 23min.)
Note: See also: Daniel
Goldhagen, "Motives, Causes, and Alibis: A Reply to My
Critics", The New Republic, December 23, 1996 (pdf) Note: This link opens on a Google search page with
the link to this Goldhagen essay indicated as the first item
at the top of the page. Additional Note: This Goldhagen essay is also
accessible as Goldhagen, "A Reply to My Critics" in the
FILES section of the CANVAS site for Political Science 4313
The Holocaust.
From Stig Hornshoj-Moller's Introduction to his
collection of papers (noted immediately above)
'Der Ewige Jude' ('The Eternal Jew'):
" 'Der Ewige Jude' ('The Eternal Jew') is
the most famous Nazi propaganda film. It was produced at the
insistence of Joseph Goebbels, under such active supervision
that it is effectively his work. It depicts the Jews of
Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they
are an alien people which have taken over the world through
their control of banking and commerce, yet which still live
like animals."
Stig
Hornshoj-Molleer, "Using Authentic Nazi Propaganda in
Teaching the Holocaust: Problems, possibilities, dangers
and experiences"
Note the author's discussion of having students view the
Nazi propaganda film 'Der
Ewige Jude' ('The Eternal Jew') teaching
The Holocaust.
Paper presented at the 27th Annual Scholars' Conference on
the Holocaust and the Churches, University of South
Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA, March 2-4, 1997
@ https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/tampa-19970302.shtml
This essay (listed immediately above) is accessible in pdf
in the Files section of the CANVAS site for Political
Science 4313/The Holocaust.
For an examination of the Nazi
regime's use of propaganda films, see: Katie Trumpener,
"Drowning out the Newsreel", London Review of Books, 12 March
2009. This
article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll to the section on "The Holocaust/Shoah" and
look for the author and title of this article. This location is password protected.
Password and user name for access will be provided to students
in the course.
For a backgrounder on Jud Süss, see: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/judsuss.html.
Fateless (2006) [2
hrs. & 20 min./Hungarian, German, with English
subtities]
This film is based on the Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész's
novel, Fatelessness
(Vintage 2004), about a young Jewish boy's deportation
in 1944 from Budapest, his struggle to survive in the
concentration camps, and his perceptions and feelings when he
returns home. (Hungarian and German with English
subtitles.)
"Set in 1944, as Hitler's Final Solution becomes policy
throughout Europe, Fateless is the semi-autobiographical tale
of a 14 year-old Jewish boy from Budapest, who finds himself
swept up by cataclysmic events beyond his comprehension. A
perfectly normal metropolitan teen who has never felt
particularly connected to his religion, he is suddenly
separated from his family as part of the rushed and random
deportation of his city's large Jewish population. Brought to
a concentration camp, his existence becomes a surreal
adventure in adversity and adaptation, and he is never quite
sure if he is the victim of his captors, or of an absurd
destiny that metes out salvation and suffering arbitrarily.
When he returns home after the liberation, he missed the sense
of community he experienced in the camps, feeling alienated
from both his Christian neighbors who turned a blind eye to
his fate, and the Jewish family friends who avoided
deportation and who now want to put the war behind
them." From: the dvd cover for the film.
German Citizens' Role In The Holocaust
(September 08, 1996)/[1 hr. & 31 min./German and English
with English voice translation of the German.
View video @ https://www.c-span.org/video/?77679-1/german-citizens-role-holocaust
This video is a production of C-SPAN based
on an original television broadcast by ZDF, a major German TV
network. The video is stored at Purdue University Public
Affairs Archives.] It records a public discussion of
Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing
Executioners , with Daniel
Goldhagen responding to a number of his German critics held
before a German audience. This video is now available in
dvd format. From the c-span archives:
"During the German promotion tour for his new book, Hitler's
Willing Executioners, Mr. Goldhagen participated in a
panel discussion with German historians, a Holocaust survivor
and a German World War II veteran sponsored by German television
in Aschaffenburg, Germany. The debate focused on his arguments
about the role of ordinary Germans from virtually all
backgrounds in the murder of Jews and the character and
intensity of German anti-Semitism. He also took a few questions
and comments from the audience. Translation of all remarks but
Goldhagen's from German to English was by voiceover".
For discussions with Daniel Goldhagen on his
talks in Germany and his book see these posted interviews:
The Open Mind: Hitler's Willing
Executioners, Part I (July 9, 1996)
The Grey Zone (2001) [1hr. & 48
min.]
View The Grey Zone video @ https://therokuchannel.roku.com/watch/90e5af44b23b52cf8c388110f19892db
Based on real life events, this film
depicts a unit of Auschwitz's Sonderkommando, special
squads of Jewish prisoners who worked in the death camps. "The Grey
Zone, a most unenchanting
depiction of the grisly experiences of the Sonderkommandos,
the Jews who were forced to burn the bodies in Auschwitz,
failed miserably at the box office when it was released in
2002, and closed in many theaters within days. There was
nothing uplifting about this film; no Jews who were saved in
it, no children of survivors who, in living color, marched
past the grave of the man who had saved their parents, and
no fable about a man’s love for his son. This film wasn’t
without its flaws; but a large audience would have learned
something true about the Holocaust had it not been scared
off by reports of the film’s graphic honesty. That honesty
was made clear in a review in the New York Times,
in which the reviewer concluded that The Grey Zone
was an honorable film. 'But honorable,' the reviewer warned,
'is not always watchable.'[11] And, in the end, it turned
out that almost no one watched."
From: https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/the-use-and-abuse-of-holocaust-memory/
Image Before My Eyes
View video @ https://vimeo.com/93183984
[88 min./dvd release date April 2006]
"A stunning commemoration of Jews in
Poland before the two World Wars IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES pays
homage to the dynamic and vibrant society of 3.5 million
people that was destroyed during the Holocaust.Unearthing
the stories of Jewish villagers aristocrats socialists
Zionists and artists who fashioned a thriving civilization
with a 900-year history this triumphant films draws on the
sacred and rare artifacts of a crushed world-home movies
forgotten song recordings and the evocative memories of
survivors-to recreate Jewish Poland. Tracing the subtle
contours of Jewish Diaspora IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES visits
people as varied as a former mayor of Scarsdale New York
describing his youthful Polish patriotism and a Brooklyn
housewife who touchingly sings the Yiddish songs of teachers
tradesmen and beggars she learned as a child in Warsaw.From
the bucolic traditional shtetls of the countryside to the
freewheeling cultural revolution in the cities led by
freethinkers award-winning director Josh Waletzky (Partisans
of Vilna) masterfully memorializes a proud culture that
still inspires hope and reverence". Review posted @
amazon.com.
"Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass):
The November 1938 Pogroms". Scholars discuss the events
of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a series of
violent attacks against Jews in Germany, Austria, and part of
Czechoslovakia in November, 1938.
View video @ https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/kristallnacht-november-1938-pogroms
Note: Access to this video on Kristallnacht may
require a new or recent version of your browser.
Luboml:
My
Heart Remembers (2003) [57 min./cinemaguild.com]
(Direct link to video.)
A documentary which uses rare film
footage, archival photos, and interviews with former
residents to re-create the fabric of daily life in the
predominantly Jewish market town, or shtetl, of Luboml in
prewar Poland. The video reveals Luboml as a vibrant
town where religious tradition and community life
coexisted. No quaint rural village, Luboml was an
important regional market town, complete with theater, a
cinema, electric lights, sports teams, numerous trades and
businesses, and factories and workshops. In 1941-1942,
German forces destroyed Luboml's Jewish community and
murdered nearly all of its Jewish citizens.
For backgound information on the
Jews of Poland, see: Rebecca Weiner, "The Virtual Jewish History
Tour: Poland" @http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Poland.html.
Memory Of The Camps/PBS-Frontline
(1985- includes original film footage from 1940) [57 min.]
View video @ https://www.thirteen.org/programs/frontline/frontline-memory-camps/
"For more than thirty years this film of the Nazi death camps
had been stored in a vault of the Imperial War Museum, London.
Today it is recognized as one of the most definitive and
unforgettable records of the 20th century's darkest hour."
...
"Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces
liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have
tortured the world's conscience ever since. As the troops
entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic
film record of what they saw. Work began in the summer of 1945
on the documentary, but the film was left unfinished. FRONTLINE
found it stored in a vault of London's Imperial War Museum and,
in 1985, broadcast it for the first time using the title the
Imperial War Museum gave it, Memory
of
the Camps." (May 3, 2005).
Night And Fog (1955) [32 min.] (French
with English subtitles)
View video @ https://vimeo.com/189672641 Note: Look at the English subscript for the
French narration beginning at 30 minutes near the end of the
film. The narrator suggests that others may (in our own day)
commit similar crimes (universalizing the Shoah?).
"[Night And Fog] turns all the victims of
Nazism into heroes of the Resistance, thereby using
heroism as a means to incorporate the genocide of the Jews
into the larger tale of European sacrifice, and burying
the singular memory of the Shoah under a rhetorical
mountain of generalized sorrow and official bombast".
From: Omer Bartov/The "Jew"
In Cinema: From The Golem To Don't Touch My Holocaust
(Indiana University Press 2005), p. 178.
The Quarrel (1990) [1hr. 30 min.]
This video, The Quarrel, is accessible on
the recording of the Zoom meeting for this course at or near
the end of the semester on the CANVAS site for Political
Science 4313/The Holocaust.
"Montreal 1948. On Rosh Hashanah, Chaim
(a Yiddish writer) is forced to think of his religion when
he's asked to be the tenth in a minyan. As he sits in the
park, he suddenly sees an old friend whom he hasn't seen
since they quarrelled when they were yeshiva students
together. Hersh, a rabbi, survived Auschwitz and his faith
was strengthened by his ordeal, while Chaim escaped the
Nazis, but had lost his faith long before. The two walk
together, reminisce, and argue passionately about
themselves, their actions, their lives, their religion,
their old quarrel, and their friendship." From amazon.com -
synopsis of the film.
The Round Up/La Rafle [original French title of
film] (2010/French with English subtitles 2hrs, 5min.)
"In the early hours of July 17th, 1942,
more than 13,000 Jews were taken from their homes in occupied
Paris and detained at the Velodrome d’Hiver. They were held
there for a few days before being shipped off to a holding
site, and finally to the concentration camps, of which only 25
survived. The military force that undertook this disgusting
act was not German. No, the men who so enthusiastically
enforced the act of cleaning the Jews from Paris were French." From: Movie Review: The Round-Up (2010)
Colin Harris, October 11, 2010 @ http://thecriticalcritics.com/review/2010/10/11/movie_review-the_round-up.html
Official website for the film (in
French): http://www.larafle-lefilm.com/
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Round_Up_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1382725/officialsites
Shoah (1985) [See Part I ] /The complete film/video
is 9hrs. & 23 min.]
View the first part of this lengthy documentary film (with
English subtitles)
@ https://hdclump.com/shoah-holocaust/
This video may be accessible @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n7_gSUVCwc
[Part I - 4hrs. 21 min.]
Parts of this film are accessible in various locations on
the Web. English subtitles are not always available.
Widely regarded as a masterpiece and the classic
documentary film on The Holocaust.
From the review @ amazon.com:
"To write a review of a film such as Shoah seems an impossible
task: how to sum up one of the most powerful discourses on
film in such a way as to make people realize that this is a
documentary of immense consequence, a documentary that is not
easy to watch but important to watch, a documentary that not
only records the facts, but bears witness. We are commanded
"Never forget"; this film helps us to fulfill that mandate,
reverberating with the viewer long after the movie has ended.
Yes, Holocaust films are plentiful, both fictional and non-,
with titles such as The Last Days, Schindler's List, and Life
Is Beautiful entering the mainstream. But this is not a film
about the Holocaust per se; this is a film about people. It's
a meandering, nine-and-a-half-hour film that never shows
graphic pictures or delves into the political aspects of what
happened in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, but talks with
survivors, with SS men, with those who witnessed the
extermination of 6 million Jews.
Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years tracking people down,
cajoling them to talk, asking them questions they didn't want to
face. When soldiers refuse to appear on film, Lanzmann sneaks
cameras in. When people are on the verge of breaking down and
can't answer any more questions, Lanzmann asks anyway. He gives
names to the victims--driving through a town that was
predominantly Jewish before Hitler's time, a local points out
which Jews owned what. Lanzmann travels the world, speaking to
workers in Poland, survivors in Israel, officers in Germany. He
is not a detached interviewer; his probings are deeply personal.
One man farmed the land upon which Treblinka was built. "Didn't
the screams bother you?" Lanzmann asks. When the farmer seems to
brush the issues aside with a smile, Lanzmann's fury is
noticeable. "Didn't all this bother you?" he demands angrily,
only to be told, "When my neighbor cuts his thumb, I don't feel
hurt." The responses, the details are difficult to hear, but
critical nonetheless. Shoah tells the story of the most
horrifying event of the 20th century, not chronologically and
not with historical detail, but in an even more important way."
- Jenny Brown
Omer Bartov on Shoah:
"Lanzmann [in his film Shoah]
allows the victims to become human again by interviewing them
several decades after the event. Lanzmann allows the victims to
speak about their unique, individual fates, and thereby he
rescues them from being mere representatives of the 'Jew'." (Omer Bartov/The "Jew"
In Cinema, p. 49.)
"... in Lanzmann's film [Shoah]
each witness is given a face, an individual experience, and
reflects what happened only through his or her own account,
without juxtaposing these accounts with the distorted images,
produced by the Nazis; they exist as human beings rather than as
an accusative choir. In this manner they escape from History
(with a capital 'H') and reconstruct their own very personal
history, which is the true fabric of the human experience." (Omer Bartov/The "Jew"
In Cinema, p. 57.)
Two Barns" (video
- 1 hour 2 minutes) A film by Haim Hecht (August 27, 2014).
The documentary film 'Two Barns' examines the human soul,
delving into the question what caused 1,600 Christian Poles
to burn their 1,600 Jewish neighbors, with whom they lived
for more than 800 years? @ https://vimeo.com/104504131
Triumph of the Will
View video @ https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6uajey
(1934) [1hr. & 50 min.] [German with
English subtitles]
A Nazi propaganda classic directed by the infamous Leni
Riefenstahl.
The Wannsee Conference (1984)
[1hr. & 27 min./German with English subtitles]
View video @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ave9RHTqkI
A German "docudrama"
portraying the historic Wannsee Conference (January 20,
1942) of high ranking German officials and their
discussion of the extermination of Europe's Jews. On
January 20, 1942 one of the most macabre conferences in
history took place at an idyllic lakeside house Am Großen
Wannsee 56/58 in Wannsee near Berlin. The subject was the
organisation of the 'Final Solution', the destruction of
all 11 million European Jews. In the relaxed and
distinctively upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS
guest-house fifteen highly placed German officials met and
discussed the best strategy for genocide, over a glass of
good cognac.
Jacob The Liar
(1999) [2 hrs.]
Based on a novel by a German-Jewish
author, this film tells the story of combatting depression
in the Warsaw Ghetto through fictitious news bulletins, from
a radio which does not exist, on Allied advances against the
Germans.
I. The
Shoah (The Holocaust): Terms, Thoughts, & Images
(Note on films/videos in each of the sections
below: A number of directly accessible links to several
of the videos listed in each section below are
provided. Other videos are generally found on
Netfix, Youtube, and other video streaming sites.
Films/videos for which direct links are provided may be
located among the films/videos listed at the beginning
of this syllabus.)
1.On Use Of The Terms "Shoah" &
"Holocaust" "(in Hebrew, sho'ah), the name
used in English to refer to the systematic destruction of
European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
The word Holocaust comes from the Greek word holokauston,
which
is a translation of the Hebrew word olah.
During
Biblical times, an olah was a type
of sacrifice to God that was totally consumed or burnt by fire.
Over time, the word holocaust came to be used with reference to
large-scale slaughter or destruction.
The
Hebrew word sho'ah, which has
the connotation of a whirlwind of destruction, was first used
in 1940 to refer to the extermination of the Jews of Europe,
in a booklet published in Jerusalem by the United Aid
Committee for the Jews in Poland. The booklet was titled Sho'at
Yehudei Polin (The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland).
It included articles and eyewitness reports on the persecution
of Eastern European Jewry that began when World War II broke
out in September 1939. The reports were written or dictated by
Jews who had seen what was going on and escaped, including
some prominent Polish Jewish leaders. However, the term sho'ah
was hardly used until the spring of 1942. Instead,
many Yiddish-speaking Jews used the term churban,
which also means destruction or catastrophe, and
historically refers to the destruction of the ancient Holy
Temples in Jerusalem, both in 586 BCE and in 70 CE.
In
the spring of 1942 a historian in Jerusalem, Ben-Zion Dinur,
used the word sho'ah with
reference to the extermination of European Jewry, and called
it a "catastrophe" that showed how different and unique the
Jewish people were from the rest of the world. Other Jews in
Palestine soon began using the term sho'ah
to describe the destruction of the European Jewish
community. By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be
employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by
the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with
reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis,
strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the
heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the
generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the
Holocaust." (boldface added)
The above description of the use of the terms Shoah and
Holocaust is posted online at Yadvashem Shoah Resource
Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies
@ https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/microsoft%20word%20-%206419.pdf
For a discussion of the terms Shoah and Holocaust, see:
Philologus, "Best Way To Say the Unsayable", Forward August 31,
2001.
This article is accessible in pdf in the Files section of CANVAS
for Political Science 4313 The Holocaust. Note also Bernard Harrison's remarks on"redefining the term holocaust":
"... there is no good and much harm, to be done by, in
effect, redefining the
term holocaust in such a way as to allow the concrete
specificity of the Nazi genocide, and with it everything which
links it to enduring aspects of European culture and politics,
to fade from view. For that is what would happen if we
were to allow ourselves to be led, through a persuasive
reassignment of the descriptive content and reference of the
term holocaust in the direction of greater generality, to
imagine that every great evil done by human beings to one
another ... is a
phenomenon of exactly the same kind as the Nazi
Holocaust. Everything is what it is and not another
thing. Evil is not a single recurrent feature of human
life, eternally self-identical in its nature. There are many kinds of evil,
springing from many different causes ... If we are to
think rationally about these matters, if our response to human
evil is not to be reduced to futile and sentimental hand
wringing, we need a vocabulary which allows us to keep track
of the differences."(boldface
added) Bernard
Harrison, The
Resurgence Of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, And Liberal Opinion
(2006), pp. 125-126.
2. Images of The
Shoah
Films/Videos:
Night
And Fog (1955) [32 min.] (French with English subtitles) Note: Look at the English
subscript for the French narration beginning at 30
minutes near the end of the film. The narrator
suggests that others may (in our own day?) commit
similar crimes (universalizing the Shoah?).
View Night and Fog video @https://vimeo.com/189672641
Readings (on the film "Night and
Fog"): Charles Krantz, "Teaching
[the film] Night and Fog: History and Historiography", Film
& History , February 1985, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 2-15.
@
Texas
State University permalink. A valid Texas State
University User Name and password are required.
(Note: It is
recommended that this article be read after viewing
the film "Night and Fog".)
This
article is posted in pdf in the Files/Resources section
of the CANVAS site for this course Political Science
4313/The Holocaust.
"[Night And Fog] turns
all the victims of Nazism into heroes of the Resistance,
thereby using heroism as a means to incorporate the genocide
of the Jews into the larger tale of European sacrifice, and
burying the singular memory of the Shoah under a rhetorical
mountain of generalized sorrow and official bombast".
From: Omer Bartov/The "Jew"
In Cinema: From The Golem To Don't Touch My Holocaust (Indiana
University Press 2005), p. 178.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in
Skokie (Illinois) is characterized by the participation of
survivors, both a strength and, paradoxically, a potential
weakness.
"... We wouldn’t expect a museum about World War II to end with
lessons about the evils of all wars. We wouldn’t expect an
examination of American slavery to end with platitudes about the
many despicable ways people treat others as objects. Why then
here? Why the reluctance to
study history in its context instead of diluting it with
generalities and vague analogies? This path also ends up
encouraging those always ready to invoke wild comparisons to
Nazism and the Holocaust. (boldface added)
None of this undermines the sheer force of the chronicle to
which we have been exposed, but by making the overall
perspectives so personal — and this institution is not alone —
the museum may also prevent us from fully understanding other
aspects of the history. If we want to find a lesson in the
events, for example, is it that individuals should not be
bystanders or that nations should not be appeasers? Is the
lesson that everybody should have a social conscience, or that a
different kind of political action is needed when such forces
emerge? Was the Holocaust a product of intolerance or an
expression of more specific archetypal hatreds?
One of the challenges faced by
Holocaust museums as survivors die is to understand their
experience by seeing it through more than their eyes, to examine the past without
homogenizing it with platitudes, to offer history without
homily." (boldfaced added)
Edward
Rothstein/Making
the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils/NYT April 29, 2011
The Museum of Tolerance is symptomatic of how the Holocaust is
being generalized to tie together all kinds of evils.
This article is posted in pdf in the
Files section of the CANVAS site for this course Political
Science 4313/The Holocaust.
"Though Yad Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington have remained relatively immune to
such sweeping moralizing, in most institutions and curriculums,
the Holocaust’s lessons are clear: We should all get along,
become politically active and be very considerate of our
neighbors. If not, well, the differences between hate crimes and
the Holocaust — between bullying and Buchenwald — are just a
matter of degree.
...
The impulse to tell the Holocaust story only in the context of
elaborate generalizations has also helped justify its inclusion
in school curriculums and helped obtain public financing for
museums: The goal was not particular but general, not
Judeocentric but humanitarian. The Museum of Tolerance, for
example, runs an extensive series of education programs,
including “Tools for Tolerance for Professionals Programs”:
sensitivity training for educators, law enforcement officers and
corporate leaders.
... And the deeper one looks at the
Holocaust itself, the more unusual its historical
circumstances become. The cause of these mass killings was not
“intolerance,” but something else, still scarcely understood.
Making sense of the Holocaust would mean first comprehending
the nature of hatred for Jews, surveying the place of Jews in
European societies and dissecting the blindness of many
Germans and most Europeans to the ambitions Hitler made so
explicit. (boldface added)
...
These killings were not in the context of war over contested
terrain; they often took precedence over the very waging of war.
And they were accomplished not primarily through individual
murders by sword or rifle, as so many other ethnic massacres
before and since have been, but rather by harnessing the
machinery of the era’s most advanced industrial society.
...
And how central is intolerance to genocide anyway? Many
intolerant societies don’t set up bureaucratic offices to
supervise efficient mass murder.
... Finally, the homiletic approach
to the Holocaust has broken down almost all inhibitions in
using the Holocaust as an analogy, even though the eagerness
to do so is a sure sign of misuse. And judging from recent
history, the analogies that have already been established, far
from making genocide unthinkable, have helped make it seem as
commonplace a possibility as schoolyard bullying."
(boldface added)
Walter Reich, "The Use and Abuse of Holocaust
Memory", November 14, 2005
This article is posted in pdf in the Files section of the CANVAS
site for this course Political Science 4313/The Holocaust.
This article by Walter Reich is accessible to
students in the course.
This same article by Walter Reich may also be accessed @ https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/the-use-and-abuse-of-holocaust-memory/.
Note: This is a gated site. For some users it
may be necessary to disable the block cookies option on your
browser.
"Death of Anne Frank & Her Life in Secret Annex in the
Shadow of Nazi Regime"
From Cynthia Ozick's essay:
"Yet any projection of Anne Frank as
a contemporary figure is an
unholy speculation: it tampers with
history, with reality, with deadly
truth. 'When I write," she confided, 'l can shake off
all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are
revived!' But she could not shake off her capture and
annihilation, and there are no diary entries to register and
memorialize the snuffing of her spirit. Anne Frank was
discovered, seized, and deported; she and her mother and sister
and millions of others were extinguished in a program calculated
to assure the cruelest and most demonically inventive human
degradation. The atrocities she endured were ruthlessly and
purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo to systematic
starvation to factory-efficient murder. She was designated to be
erased from the living, to leave no
grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind. Her fault-her
having been born a Jew and as such she was classified among
those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as
an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves. The military and
civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to
obliterate her as a contaminant, in the way of a noxious and
repellent insect. ZykIon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the
gas chambers, was, pointedly, a roach poison. (boldface added)
Anne Frank escaped gassing. One month before
liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever an acute
infectious disease carried by lice".
See also:
Catherine Chatterley, Canadian Institute for the Study of
Antisemitism, "A Critique Of Holocaust Universalization In
Honour Of Anne Frank", April 24, 2012
@ http://canisa.org/blog/a-critique-of-holocaust-universalization-in-honour-of-anne-frank
This essay by Catherine
Chatterley is also accessible
in the Files section of CANVAS for Political Science
4321/The Holocaust. From Catherine Chatterly's essay: "The primary approach of
Holocaust education has been to universalize (and, in
some cases, to Christianize) the experience of Jewish
suffering in an attempt to make the subject matter
accessible and meaningful to non-Jews. (boldface
added)
... There is no doubt that
Holocaust education has had a positive influence on Western
society. It has helped to create our contemporary concern
with fighting racism and promoting human rights and has
helped generate our current interest in the historical and
contemporary problems of genocide and war crimes. The problem,
however, is that Holocaust education has not produced a
corresponding concern about, or awareness of, antisemitism
(boldface for this phrase appears in the
essay).Rather, what we have produced
in contemporary Western culture is a general conviction ...
that we have learned the 'lessons of the
Holocaust' (boldface and underline
for the phrase 'lessons of the Holocaust' has been added
here) when in fact few people outside the academic field
know anything in particular about the Nazi Final Solution, its systematic destruction of
Jewish Europe, and the nature and history of the
antisemitism responsible for this catastrophe, which
continues to evolve and is now in fact a global phenomenon.
Given this
problematic reality, one wonders if Cynthia Ozick is correct
when she suggests at the end of her critique of The Diary of Anne Frank that it may have been better
for Anne’s diary to have been lost, and thereby 'saved from a world that made of
it all things, some
of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth
of named and inhabited evil.' "
See also these observations by Bernard
Harrison: "... there is no good and much harm, to
be done by, in effect, redefining
the term holocaust in such a way as to allow the concrete
specificity of the Nazi genocide, and with it everything which
links it to enduring aspects of European culture and politics,
to fade from view. For that is what would happen if
we were to allow ourselves to be led, through a persuasive
reassignment of the descriptive content and reference of the
term holocaust in the direction of greater generality, to
imagine that every great evil done by human beings to one
another from slavery to intertribal massacre ... is a phenomenon of exactly the
same kind as the Nazi Holocaust.
Everything is what it is and not another thing. Evil
is not a single recurrent feature of human life, eternally
self-identical in its nature. There are many kinds of
evil, springing from many different causes, some of them sui
generis."(boldface
added) Note: A lengthier excerpt from Bernard Harrison's book
The
Resurgence Of Anti-Semitism (2006)
is provided in Section
XI of this syllabus.
3. "Reading The
Shoah" "... the events of the Holocaust remain for some of
their [a reference to scholars who have studied the
Holocaust] most dedicated students as morally and
intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at
their first rumouring.
... I have written neither for specialists nor for those for
whom the Holocaust was a lived actuality, but for perplexed
outsiders like myself, who believe with me that such
perplexity is dangerous.
In the face of a catastrophe on this scale so deliberately
inflicted, perplexity is an indulgence we cannot afford."
(boldface added) Inga
Clendinnen/Reading The Holocaust (Cambridge
UniversityPress 1999) , Chapter 1, "Beginnings", pp. 4
and 5. Readings: Clendinnen/Reading
The Holocaust, Chapters 1, 2.
For a limited
preview of these first two chapters in Inga Clendinnen's
book,
with a few pages excluded, see : https://www.google.com/books/edition/Reading_the_Holocaust/schciHrtx9oC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover Note: Pages 6 and 7 of Inga Clendinnen's
book are accessible in the FILES section of the Texas State
University CANVAS site for this course Political Science
4313/The Holocaust.
For a review of this book, see: Milton
Goldin/Clendinnen, Reading The Holocaust
Eric
Lichtblau,
The Holocaust Just Got
More Shocking (w/maps & photo), NYT, Sunday
Review, March 3, 2013
The Germans had vastly more work camps and ghettos than anyone
knew. From this article:
"The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish
ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps;
500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other
camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing
forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting
victims to killing centers.
In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps
and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.
... a co-researcher,
said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German
citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the
war, must have known about the widespread existence of the
Nazi camps at the time.
'You literally could not go
anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps,
P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,' he said. 'They were
everywhere.' ” (boldface added)
Vasily Grossman, "The Hell of Treblinka". This essay was
initially published in the November 1944 issue of the mothly
magazine Znamya (Banner) and later
reprinted as a very small hardback book and distributed at
the Nuremberg Trials held
at
the the end of
World War II. Vasily Grossman's essay "The Hell of Treblinka" is included in Robert
Chandler
(ed.), The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays
(New York Review of Books Classic 2010). Read
the
Introduction to this book which
includes
biographical information on Vasily Grossman. The various
writings of Vasily Grossman in this book are translated from the
Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Olga Mukovnikova.
Vasily Grossman's essay "The Hell of Treblinka" is posted on the Texas State University CANVAS site for
this course Political Science 4313/The
Holocaust.
For more on Treblinka see: Treblinka
See also these review essays:
Maxim D. Shrayer, "Lucky Grossman", Jewish Review of Books,
Spring, 2011, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 17 & 19. This is a
review essay of The Road
edited by Robert Chandler. Maxim Shrayer's review essay
will be provided to students. Leon
Aron,
"The Age Of The Wolfhound", The New Republic, April 28,
2011, Vol. 242, Issue 6. A review
essay
of The Road edited by
Robert Chandler.
Texas State University
permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name
and password are required.
Vasily
Grossman's The Hell of
Treblinka "is an account of no more than two or
three hours, from the moment the victims alighted from their
'transport' at 'Ober-Majdan' to when their bodies were
packed on trolleys to be delivered along the narrow-gauge
rails to the giant ravines, deepened and widened around the
clock by giant excavators. Grossman's
piece was probably the first detailed account of the
systematic mass murder of Jews published in any language".
- from: Leon
Aron, "The Age Of The Wolfhound", p. 37.
Yankel
Wiernik/A
Year in Treblinka (w/photos) Forward April 17, 2009
‘An Epic Tale’ of Frightening Suffering, Told By One Who
Escaped
"In 1944, the Forverts, the Yiddish forebear of this newspaper,
published Yankel Wiernik’s early and unparalleled account of the
systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Nazi
death camp called Treblinka.
The newspaper described Wiernik’s story, “A Year in
Treblinka,” as the first eyewitness account of the gas
chambers. In great detail, he described the brutality of the
Nazis in what was later realized to be the murders of more
than one in four Jews living in Poland at the time. Historians
estimate that between 700,000 and 870,000 Jews were put to
death at Treblinka between June 1942 and the fall of 1943.
There were fewer than 100 known survivors.
One of those was Wiernik, a carpenter by trade, who was 52
years old in April 1942 and residing in the Warsaw Ghetto when
he was caught in a roundup, and, like hundreds of his
neighbors, deported by rail to Treblinka. He survived by his
wits, and because the Nazis needed his master carpentry skills
to build more gas chambers, a laundry, a laboratory and
watchtowers. Wiernik escaped in an inmates’ revolt in August
1943 that brought down the camp."
For background material on the discovery and publication of
Petr Ginz's diary, and photos, see: Ashley
Parker/A
Youthful Chronicle Of Wartime In Prague (See photos slide
show)/NYT- Arts Section pp. B1 & B8/April 10, 2007
"The first sign that things aren’t quite right comes when
Jews are required to wear a badge, a black and yellow star of
David, on the outside of their clothes. And yet 13-year-old Petr
Ginz remains wryly amused, writing in his diary: 'When I went to
school, I counted sixty-nine ‘sheriffs.’ ... Such is
the life of a young Czechoslovakian Jewish boy living in Prague
in 1941, and it is a life that Petr meticulously documented in
his diary until he was sent on a transport to Theresienstadt
and, ultimately, to his death in an Auschwitz gas chamber two
years later. ... The publication adds another adolescent
voice to the literature of the Holocaust. If Anne
Frank's
diary is her friend and confidante, full of
flowery prose and hopes and dreams, Petr’s offers an
unsentimental perspective on his changing world, and one that
fits his personality: half scientist, half reporter and all,
still, little boy."
2. Faith After The Shoah "Jews are not permitted
to hand Hitler a posthumous victory. Jews are commanded to
survive as Jews lest their people perish. They are commanded to
remember the victims of Auschwitz lest their memory perish. They
are forbidden to despair of God lest Judaism perish . . . For a
Jew to break this commandment would be to do the unthinkable--to
respond to Hitler by doing his work." --- Emile Fackenheim
"Well, Rutka, you’ve probably gone completely crazy. You are
calling upon God as if He exists. The little faith I used to
have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would
have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive
into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with
butt of guns or be shoved into sacks and gassed to death. ... It
sounds like a fairy tale. Those who haven’t seen this would
never believe it. But it’s not a legend; it’s the truth. Or the
time when they beat an old man until he became unconscious,
because he didn’t cross the street properly." These are the words of of a 14
year-old Jewish girl, Rutka Laskier, from her recently
recovered diary. Rutka perished in Auschwitz in 1943. Thomas
Vinciguerra/As
the Nazis and Adolescence Took Hold/NYT June 10, 2007
(includes photo of Rutka with her family)
"Do Jews still have a right to anger over the Shoah?
(boldface added)
Enter Elie Wiesel, who seemed to have come to
comfortable terms with the cause of rage. Who has long been
a model of deportment. Sad, sad—but quietly sad. Not a
troublemaker. Not one to make the world look in the mirror
and see the face of a murderer. How angry should one get,
how long, how much should one care? Was Wiesel’s quietism a
wise, self-protective coming to terms with a world that
could just as well kill the Jews again?
Was Wiesel’s good behavior a painful realism—or one
that represents a form of Holocaust denial? Speaking of
which, denial—how much should we feel hurt, angry, enraged
by denial, by this doubled-down scabrous rhetoric?
I think these are important questions, all too rarely
asked, not easily answered; perhaps they are unanswerable.
Perhaps that is the secret, subtle reason for Wiesel’s near
universal acclaim: He gave the impression he had found an
answer to these questions. That he found a dignified stance.
But I’m speaking here not just of anger at
the perpetrators, most of them long dead, not just of anger
at the world that stood silent, when not actively
collaborating. But chiefly anger at God. (boldface
added) The God to whom Jews pray and praise for His
everlasting protectiveness of his Jewish supplicants. And the
little-noticed fact was that it had always been there in
Wiesel’s work, at least intermittently, in flashes. He is not
remembered for it because—I think—we just don’t want to be
summoned to it again. It was not what one thought of when one
thought of Wiesel—as a diminishing number did. In his somber
suits of dignified black, he gentrified the Holocaust. Telling
us in an unspoken but clear way that it was OK to get beyond
it, it would be better for everyone."
...
"... the gentrification of Night
can also be seen as something Wiesel took from his
translator, the French Catholic existentialist François
Mauriac. And there is no more dramatic instance of it than the
treatment of the story of the hanged boy, a framing that
transformed Wiesel’s account of Nazi cruelty into a
parable of Christian transcendence and God’s Love."
(boldface added)
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
A famous portion of Death Fugue ,
including the best known phrase (underlined above for
emphasis), from the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan
(1920-1970). For more on Celan see
the section in this syllabus on Representing The Shoah.
Frank
Bajohr,
"The 'Folk Community' and the Persecution of the Jews: German
Society under National Socialist Dictatorship, 1933-1945", Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, Fall, 2006, Vol. 20, No. 2.
Texas State University
permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name
and password are required. Abstract:
A systematic analysis of the behavior of
German society toward the Jews under National Socialism reveals
a complex process that eludes static and one-dimensional
explanations. Neither antisemitism nor dictatorial pressure
alone, the author believes, can explain the dynamism in the
rapid social exclusion of Jews. Instead, the process of
persecution should be understood as a dynamic interaction
between state and society—one that was shaped by four
determinant factors: antisemitism, the conforming of personal
interests to the norms propagated by the Nazi regime, the
activation of social interests (in particular by the economic
exclusion of Jews) and the growing consensual support for the
regime after 1933.
Nira
Rousso/Finding
a 60-year-old treasure/ynetnews.com/April 15, 2007 "... the
incredible story of a collection of 178 family pictures,
which were hidden in the walls of a house in Poland just
before the Holocaust, only to be found some 60 years later
and be returned to their rightful owners. ...
Chelm's Jewish
community was one of the oldest in Poland, with artifacts
dating it as far back as the twelfth century. ...
The pictures are another heartbreaking example of a
thriving, vibrant Jewish community, later erased by the
Nazis. One can peek into an entire world of young, normal
Jewish life: bike rides, parties, romance and fun, strolls
in the woods, ice skating ..."
Images
of
a Lost Jewish Community[180 photos] (Chelm,
Poland)/ynetnews.com/April 15, 2007
"Searching for faces that disappeared in the Shoah: A year ago, Zvi Lander participated in a
ceremony in the town of Chelm, in Poland. There, a local
history teacher gave him a recently uncovered treasure: 180
photographs that were discovered hidden in a wall of her home
when it was torn down for renovations. The pictures show a
large Jewish family, along with many friends."
"Two Barns" (video - 1 hour 2 minutes) A
film by Haim Hecht (August 27, 2014).
The documentary film 'Two Barns' examines the human soul,
delving into the question what caused 1,600 Christian Poles to
burn their 1,600 Jewish neighbors, with whom they lived for more
than 800 years?
See also: Jakub
Kloc-Konkolowicz/Waking a Polish Demon/signandsight.com
January 21, 2008.
This
article originally appearedin German in
the Frankfurter
Rundschau on January 18, 2008 as "Polish
Antisemitism: A New Chapter". From the
introduction to the article and the first paragraph:
Jan Tomasz Gross has taken on the difficult task of removing
blind spots in Polish history. His new book "Fear", Jan Gross/Fear:
Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (Random House
2006), has sparked an
emotional debate in the country of his birth, where
anti-Semitism is not a popular subject.
In recent days a new chapter in the emotional debate over
Polish anti-Semitism has opened in Poland. The occasion is the
Polish edition of a new book by the Princeton historian of Polish origin Jan
Tomasz
Gross. The book with the punchy title "Fear.
Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz" (New York 2006)
revolves around a central question: "How was Polish
anti-Semitism possible after Auschwitz?" According to the
reports by Holocaust survivors cited by the author, rather
than being welcomed with open arms, Polish Holocaust survivors
were met in their hometowns by the cynical question "Are you
still alive?!"
Julian Barnes, "Even Worse Than We
Thought", The New York Review of Books, November 19,
2015, Vol. LXII, No. 18, pp. 31-33.
@ http://www.nybooks.com.libproxy.txstate.edu/articles/archives/2015/nov/19/jedwabne-even-worse-we-thought/.
Texas State University permalink. A valid User Name
and password are required for access. Note: The Julian Barnes review
essay cited immediately above is accessible in the Files
section of CANVAS for Political Science 4313/The
Holocaust/Shoah.
The essay by Jules Barnes cited
above is a review of the book The Crime and the
Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime
Jedwabne by Anna Bikont. See: http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Silence-Confronting-Massacre/dp/0374178798
(This book was originally published in Polish in 2004 and
translated into English in 2015. It won the European
Book Award in 2011.) Note Julian Barnes' comparison of
Anna Bikont's book to "one of the greatest documentaries of
the last fifty years", Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah
and his reference to the book Neighbors by Jan
Gross. From this review essay: "... Bikont's book ...
is meticulous in its procedures, absolute in its commitment
to truth ..."
See also: Louis Begley, 'The Crime and the Silence',
Sunday Book Review, NYT, November 4, 2015 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/the-crime-and-the-silence-by-anna-bikont.html?_r=0
From this review: "One hopes - without much
confidence - that those who complained about Gross's book being
inadequately documented blushed with shame when they came face
to face with Bikont's impeccable research." Note: This review essay by Louis
Begley, cited immediately above, is accessible in the Files
section of CANVAS for Political Science 4313/The
Holocaust/Shoah. Posted links on CANVAS are listed
alphabetically. Scroll to this author's first name Louis
(Louis Begley).
Alex Duval Smith, "Polish Move to strip
Holocaust expert of award sparks protests", The Guardian,
February 13, 2016 @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/14/academics-defend-historian-over-polish-jew-killings-claims.
Princeton University professor Jan Tomasz Gross faces losing
Order of Merit over comments Polish villagers were complicit
in massacre of Jews. From the article:
"Academics have rallied to the defence of one of the world’s
leading Holocaust historians after reports that Poland intends
to strip him of a national honour because he claimed that Poles were complicit in Nazi war crimes.
Princeton University professor Jan Tomasz Gross, 69, was
awarded the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 1996.
He is best known for his 2001 bookNeighbors, which
describes in graphic detail the 1941 massacre by Polish
villagers of up to 1,600 Jewish men, women and children. The
book inspired Aftermath (Pokłosie), a 2012 film
directed by Władysław Pasikowski."
Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg, "Deadly
Communities: Local Political Milieus and the Persecution of
Jews in Occupied Poland", Comparative Political
Studies, March 2011, Vol. 44 (3), pp.259-283 @ http://cps.sagepub.com.libproxy.txstate.edu/content/44/3/259.full.pdf+html.
Texas State University Library permalink. A valid User Name
and password are required for access.
For a study of the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church
in Poland to the book Neighbors, see: Laurence
Weinbaum/Penitence
and Prejudice: The Roman Catholic Church and Jedwabne/Jewish
Political Studies Review 14:3-4, October 2002
"... those elements within the Church that demonstrated the
greatest sympathy for Jews were among the most eloquent voices
calling for contrition. Those who generally viewed the Jews
with suspicion found additional reason to give expression to
their antipathy. In that respect the Church and the broader
community of believers that identifies with it reflects the
society in which it is rooted."
Katrin
Steffen/Disputed
memory: Jewish past, Polish remembrance/eurozine.com
November 27, 2008 Abstract:
Before WWII, over 3 million Jews lived in Poland. Almost all
of them were killed during the Shoah. The Communist regime
forbade commemoration of Jews as a special group of victims.
That has changed since 1990, but remembrance of Jews still
polarises Polish society. That is shown by the debate over
Jedwabne and the post-war pogroms. There exists a competition
of victims between Jews and Poles. A mythological and symbolic
figure of "the Jew" is still at work in Polish memory.
Moreover, a "virtual Jewry" has come into being at former
sites of Jewish life.
For a study of the role of the local non-Jewish population
in the Shoah elsewhere in Europe, see: Leonard
Rein,
"Local Collaboration in the Execution of the 'Final
Solution' in Nazi-Occupied Belorussia", Holocaust and Genocide
Studies , Winter 2006, Vol. 20, No. 3.
Texas State University
permalink. A
valid Texas State University User Name and Password are
required Abstract
In many cases, especially in the Nazi-occupied Soviet
territories, the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"
unfolded before the eyes of the non-Jewish local residents.
One can and should ask about the role that such witnesses
played in this process. The sheer extent of the killing may
lead us to the conclusion that local collaboration was indeed
an important aspect of the Holocaust and that the role played
by the local non-Jewish populations was more than that of mere
extras or bystanders. In this article, the author focuses on
the case of Belorussia, analyzing various forms of
participation as well as the motives for collaboration in the
genocide.
Films: Luboml
Image Before My Eyes - A History of Jewish Life in Poland Before The
Holocaust
View video @ https://vimeo.com/93183984
[88 min./dvd release date April 2006]
On the one hand, it seems heartless to deny Mr.
Lévi-Leleu repossession of this poignant relic, one that
might help him to assuage a loss suffered more than six
decades ago. On the other hand, the collective memory of the
Holocaust has been partly constructed in Auschwitz through
personal effects — clothing, shoes, combs and hairbrushes,
eyeglasses, razors and buttons, as well as suitcases — left
by victims.
Similar arguments have been mobilized in the case of
seven watercolor portraits of Gypsy prisoners that now hang
in the Auschwitz museum. They were painted in 1943 by
another prisoner, a young Czechoslovak Jew, Dina Gottliebova
Babbitt, now 83 and living in California, who wants to
recover them. But the museum has refused, saying the
portraits serve 'important documentary and educational
functions' by testifying to the genocide of Gypsies.
Who owns memory? Or, perhaps more pertinently, who
selects memory?"
See also: George
Gene
Gustines/Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust
Artist/NYT August 9, 2008
"... the tale of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who
survived two years at the Auschwitz concentration camp by
painting watercolor portraits for the infamous Nazi Dr.
Josef Mengele.
... the colorful mural that Mrs. Babbitt painted in the
children’s barracks there. She started with Walt Disney’s
version of Snow White, but her audience clamored for the
Seven Dwarfs as well, and some farm animals. The original
mural is believed to have been destroyed, and the story uses
a re-creation Mrs. Babbitt painted last year."
See the illustrated Comics
for
a Cause (pdf) that recounts the experience of Dina
Gottliebova Babbitt at Auschwitz in World War II, and her
recent efforts to reclaim her art.
The Round Up/La Rafle
[original French title of film] (2010/French
with English subtitles 2hrs, 5min.)
"In the early hours of July 17th, 1942, more than
13,000 Jews were taken from their homes in occupied Paris
and detained at the Velodrome d’Hiver. They were held there
for a few days before being shipped off to a holding site,
and finally to the concentration camps, of which only 25
survived. The military force that undertook this disgusting
act was not German. No, the men who so enthusiastically
enforced the act of cleaning the Jews from Paris were
French." From: Movie
Review: The Round-Up (2010) Colin Harris, October 11, 2010 @
http://thecriticalcritics.com/review/2010/10/11/movie_review-the_round-up.html
Official website for the film (in French): http://www.larafle-lefilm.com/
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Round_Up_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1382725/officialsites
See also the text (in English translation) of French
President François Hollande's speech to commemorate the
seventieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup on July 16
and 17, 1942, when the French police arrested 13,152 Jewish
men, women, and children from Paris and its suburbs, and
confined them to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in
Paris. They were later deported to German concentration
camps. Eight hundred and eleven survived the war. President
Hollande delivered his speech at the site of the demolished
velodrome on July 22, 2012. The English translation of
the text is accessible @ http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/aug/18/france-hollande-crime-vel-d-hiv/.
The ‘Crime Committed in France, by France’, in The New York Review of
Books, September 27, 2012.
The cruel treatment and deportation of thousands of Jews without
Bulgarian citizenship in 1943 from the territories of Yugoslavia
and Greece occupied by Bulgarian soldiers and their allied
German soldiers to the concentration camp and killing center of
Treblinka
in German occupied Poland is documented with
detailed information, including links and photos, at the United
State Holocaust Museum
@https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-in-macedonia-deportation-of-monastir-jewry
See also:
"Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass): The November 1938
Pogroms". Scholars discuss the events of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a
series of violent attacks against Jews in Germany, Austria, and
part of Czechoslovakia in November, 1938.
View video @ https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/kristallnacht-november-1938-pogroms
Note: Access to this video on Kristallnacht may require
a new or recent version of your browser.
Edward
Rothstein/Nazis'
'Terrible Weapon', Aimed at Minds and Hearts (w/slide
show)/NYT February 23, 2009
For an example of the posters/images on display, see: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/02/24/arts/24muse_CA0.ready.html.
For the complete slide show, see: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/02/24/arts/design/20090224-museum-slideshow_index.html.
"The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they
short-circuit argument. To suggest that perhaps this caricatured
figure was not to blame for the war would be like insisting on
an alternate universe. The accusation could be rejected only if
everything were rejected. Exorcism and murder were not a policy;
they were a responsibility. They all flowed out of these posters
and their associated beliefs.
...
Nazi propaganda was something different in kind, not just
degree. It created a world that had no foundation except in
myth, even attributing the Nazi desire for extermination of the
Other to the Other. Nazis accused the Jews of having a secret
plan to exterminate the Germans and, as evidence, ...
...
... what was so powerful about Nazi propaganda: It didn’t just
distort reality to make an argument; it reshaped it. It tapped
into mythic beliefs about Jews being genocidal and inhuman, thus
spurring retaliation."
"Lord, I ascribe it to thy grace,
And not to chance as others do,
That I was born of Christian race,
And not a Heathen, or a Jew."
From: Isaac Watts, Divine
Songs for the Use of Children Song 6: Praise for the
Gospel [June 18, 1715].
For an example and some discussion of 18th century
Christian hostility to Jews with a reference to the popular
hymns by Isaac Watts, see: Michael
Marissen/Unsettling
History of That Joyous 'Hallejuah'/Arts & Leisure
Section-Music/NYT
Sunday,
April 08, 2007, pp. 24 & 30.
"... Messiah
lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for
Christmas but for Lent, and that the Hallelujah chorus was designed not to honor
the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the
destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For
most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was
construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to
accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.
... To create the Messiah
libretto Charles Jennens, a formidable scholar and a friend of
Handel’s, compiled a series of scriptural passages adapted from
the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the
Bible. As a traditionalist Christian, Jennens was deeply
troubled by the spread of deism, the notion that God had simply
created the cosmos and let it run its course without divine
intervention. Christianity then as now rested on the belief that
God broke into history by taking human form in Jesus. For
Jennens and others, deism represented a serious menace. Deists
argued that Jesus was neither the son of God nor the Messiah.
Since Christian writers had habitually considered Jews the most
grievous enemies of their religion, they came to suppose that
deists obtained anti-Christian ammunition from rabbinical
scholars. The Anglican bishop Richard Kidder, for example,
claimed in his huge 1690s treatise on Jesus as the Messiah that
“the deists among us, who would run down our revealed religion,
are but underworkmen to the Jews.
... Jennens took his reading from Henry Hammond, the great
17th-century Anglican biblical scholar, whose extended and
fiercely erudite commentary on Psalm 2 suggests the advantage of
'nations' over 'heathen: 'Nations' can readily include the Jews.
In the 18th century no one would have uncritically used the King
James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer’s word 'heathen' for
Jews or Judaism. Even children would have known this, from the
famous hymn writer Isaac Watts’s wildly popular Divine Songs for the Use of
Children, which includes the verse 'Lord, I ascribe it
to thy Grace, /And not to Chance, as others do, /That I was born
of Christian race, /And not a Heathen or a Jew'. "
Ray Fisman, "The
Persistence
of Hate" Slate
June 1, 2011
German communities that murdered Jews in the Middle Ages were
more likely to support the Nazis 600 years later.
"The authors of the new study ... examine the
historical roots of the virulent anti-Semitism that found
expression in Nazi-era Germany. In a sense, their analysis can
be seen as providing a foundation for the highly controversial
thesis put forth by former Harvard professor Daniel
Goldhagen in Hitler's Willing
Executioners. Goldhagen argued that the German
people exhibited a deeply rooted 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism
that had developed over centuries, which made them ready
accomplices in carrying out Hitler's Final Solution."
See immediately below for the study, "Persecution
Perpetuated:
The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany",
referred to in this article.
Voigtländer,
Nico
and Voth, Hans-Joachim, "Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval
Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany" (May 27,
2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1824744
(pdf 57 pages) Note: This article (listed immediately
above) is accessible in pdf in the Files section of the CANVAS
site for Political Science 4313 - The Holocaust/The Shoah. Abstract:
How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on
anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level
over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit
Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the
population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed
the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of
their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish
communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator
for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a
strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the
1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that
saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation
rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues
damaged or destroyed in the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, and
their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor
of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.
From the Introduction
(p.2.):
"Germany’s persecution of Jews during the early 20
century has been a topic of intense research interest. While
some have argued that it can never be rationally explained (Levi
1979), others have pointed to underlying economic and political
causes (Glaeser 2005, Arendt 1994, Cohn 2007). That a deep-rooted history of
anti-Semitism was ultimately responsible for a wave of hatred
has been argued by Goldhagen (1996). He observed that
'... the most telling evidence supporting the argument that
antisemitism has fundamentally nothing to do with the actions of
Jews, and … nothing to do with an antisemite’s knowledge of the
real nature of Jews, is the widespread historical and
contemporary appearance of antisemitism, even in its most
virulent forms, where there are no Jews, and among people who
have never met Jews.' Several mechanisms for the perpetuation of
hatred have been emphasized, including the role of religion.
Passion plays, for example, often portrayed Jews as engaged in
deicide (Glassman 1975). Anti-Semitic sculptures
decorated churches and private houses, and book printing
distributed these images widely.2 Several tracts of Martin
Luther are strongly anti-Semitic (Oberman 1984)." [boldface
added] Sources cited by the
authors:
Levi, Primo, 1987. If This is
a Man and The Truce. London: Abacus; Glaeser, Edward,
2005. “The Political Economy of Hatred.” Quarterly Journal of
Economics; Arendt, Hannah, 1994. The Origins of
Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Inc., New York; Cohn, Samuel
Kline, 2007. “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews.” Past & Present
196 (1): 3-36; Glassman, Bernard, 1975. Anti-Semitic Stereotypes Without
Jews: Images of the Jews in England, 1290-1700.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press; Oberman, Heiko A., 1984.
The Roots of Anti-Semitism in
the Age of Renaissance and Reformation. Philadelphia:
Fortress Press.
From the Conclusion:
"Our findings lend qualified
support to theories that explain anti-Semitism based on deep
cultural roots." (See footnote 52 below.) [boldface
added]
Footnote 52 "Goldhagen (1996)
argued that the Holocaust reflected widespread,
‘exterminationist’ anti-Semitic beliefs. We find that local
precedent mattered, but this does not lend direct support to
Goldhagen’s wider argument." (p. 30.) [boldface
added]
"One question for future research is how common the long-term
persistence of inter-ethnic hatred is. There is anecdotal
evidence that it is not rare. For example, England, France, and
Spain expelled their Jews during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless,
anti-Semitism lingered. Until recently, Spanish children played
a game called ‘Killing Jews’ around Easter – in a country where
Jews have been almost entirely absent since 1492." (pp. 30-31.)
[The authors' source
for the report on the game played by Spanish children
is given as: Perednik, Gustavo, 2003. “Naïve Spanish
Judeophobia”, Jewish
Political Studies Review 15(3- 4).]
Stig Hornshoj-Molleer, "Using Authentic
Nazi Propaganda in Teaching the Holocaust: Problems,
possibilities, dangers and experiences"
Note the author's discussion of having students view
the Nazi propaganda film 'Der
Ewige Jude' ('The Eternal Jew')
teaching The Holocaust.
Paper presented at the 27th Annual Scholars'
Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches,
University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA,
March 2-4, 1997
@ https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/tampa-19970302.shtml
This essay
(listed immediately above) is accessible in
pdf in the Files section of the CANVAS site
for Political Science 4313/The Holocaust.
Vasily Grossman, "The Old Teacher", in
Robert
Chandler
(ed.), The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays
(New York Review of Books Classic 2010), pp. 84-115.
Read
the
Introduction to this book which
includes
biographical information on Vasily Grossman. The various
writings of Vasily Grossman in this book are translated from the
Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Olga
Mukovnikova. Vasily Grossman's short story "The
Old Teacher" was first published in the September and
October 1943 issues of Znamya.
It is "among the first works of fiction about the Shoah in any
language." Robert
Chandler
(ed.), The Road
(p. 75.). Vasily Grossman's short story, "The
Old
Teacher", will be provided to students.
Jewish Resistance Edward
Rothstein
Resisting the Nazis Despite the Odds (includes photos)/NYT
Arts Section pp. B1 & B2, April 16, 2007
"... the gradually tightening grip that held European Jews;
the impressions that couldn’t fully foreshadow what was to come;
the human impulse toward hope being slowly stifled. 'How does
one respond,' an introductory film asks, 'when the future is
unknown?' ...
'Who can you turn to?' asks the label text. 'Who will speak for
you when your government turns enemy and neighbors turn away?'
'Is it better to lie low or stand tall?' And another question:
'To stay or to go?' ... When the scale of the Nazi
ambition starts to become clear, it is beyond comprehension. ...
In the show’s companion book, the historian David Engel suggests
that at first Jews saw the Nazi phenomenon as a recurrence of
earlier traumas, as part of the cycle of Jewish historical
experience. Jews, after all, had received full German
citizenship only in 1871, so if they were deprived of benefits
in 1933, it was more a regression than a cataclysm. ...
The sense of repetitive cycles was reinforced by the literal
medievalism of German oppression: the ghettos, the yellow stars,
the governing Jewish councils. These historical echoes, Mr.
Engel suggests, made Jews less likely to see clearly what was
happening and made resistance less likely."
Walter
Reich/'We
Are All Guilty'/NYT Sunday Book Review May 17, 2009.
A review of Richard
J.
Evans/The Third Reich At War (The Penguin Press 2009).
"The public’s memory of what Nazi Germany was and did has
been, in recent years, mangled and trivialized. Widely seen but
misleading films and politicized accusations of countries
perpetrating “holocausts” against various groups have debased
people’s sense of the real nature of the Germans’ deeds during
World War II.
...
Yet another strand is the way in which German forces — the SS
but also the regular army — carried out that vision of racial
reordering and extermination. Having been indoctrinated by Nazi
propaganda, they murdered and brutalized Slavs and even more
methodically exterminated Jews. Gypsies, too, became targets for
mass murder. In the name of genetic purity they even killed
their own handicapped citizens. Everything was to be done
ruthlessly, pitilessly. Raw violence was at the core of who the
Nazis were and what they did.
...
Evans’s central figures are, of course, the moral monsters we
expect to encounter in such a history — Hitler, Himmler,
Goebbels, Göring, Bormann, Heydrich, Eichmann, Rosenberg, as
well as the many others who made up the Nazi elite. We also meet
the monstrous German officials — propagandists, military
leaders, bureaucrats and death-camp commanders — who made sure
the Nazi machine did its grindingly destructive work. But Evans
also introduces us to others we’ve never met — German soldiers,
civilians, true believers and occasional doubters.
From reports by soldiers methodically shooting Jews at the edges
of pits, as well as the boasts by German leaders about the
glorious and necessary exterminations, the documentation of the
gassing operations, the testimonies of witnesses and the diaries
of the victims themselves, Evans gives us a dynamic sense not
only of this ferocious drama’s bloody landscape but also of the
characters who created, inhabited and were swallowed up by it.
If the racial reordering of
Europe was the heart of the Nazi animating vision, the
Holocaust was that heart’s left ventricle. Evans shows
how, with the invasion of the Soviet Union, the mass murder of
the Jews began. German killing squads fanned out to shoot them.
One SS man who methodically murdered Jews and watched as “brains
whizzed through the air” wrote: “Strange, I am completely
unmoved. No pity, nothing.” Soldiers and SS men took snapshots
of the executions, some of which were found in their wallets
when they were killed or captured by the Red Army.
(boldface added)
Eventually, this program of murdering individual Jews by
shooting was replaced by a program of mass gassings. The early
killing factories — Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor — were set up
primarily to exterminate Poland’s Jews. Others were added,
including the largest one of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where
many of the Jews of Western Europe, as well as Hungary, were
gassed. Evans agrees with the estimate that the number of Jews
murdered in the Holocaust was at least 5.5 million and probably
about six million. He quotes one German Army officer whose diary
we follow through the book. Wilm Hosenfeld was stationed in
Warsaw and knew what was happening at nearby Treblinka. He was
utterly extraordinary in his feelings of shame for what his
country did. “With this terrible murder of the Jews,” Hosenfeld
wrote in June 1943, “we have lost the war. We have brought upon
ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be
lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.”
Evans settles the case that
the extermination of the Jews was the product of Hitler’s
wishes — that he set the guidelines about the need to
'destroy, remove, annihilate, exterminate the Jews of Europe.'
Himmler interpreted Hitler’s genocidal impulses, and officers on
the ground put them into effect." (boldface
added)
"One such factor
(Note: for killing Jews - this phrase inserted for
clarity. It is not part of the following quoted
excerpt.) was the justification for killing provided by the
anti-Semitic rationales to which the policemen had been
exposed since the rise of Nazism, rationales reinforced by the
battalion's officers. The Jews were presented not only as evil
and dangerous but also, in some way, as responsible for the
bombing deaths of German women and children. Another factor
was the process of dehumanization: abetted by Nazi racial
theories that were embraced by policemen who preferred not to
see themselves as killers, Jews were seen as less than people,
as creatures who could be killed without the qualms that would
be provoked in them were they to kill fellow Germans or even
Slavs."
For an analysis of Stanley Milgram's studies, referenced by
Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Germans,
see:
Cari Romm, "Rethinking One of Psychology's
Most Infamous Experiments", The Atlantic, January 2015
@ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
"In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed
that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But
recently, researchers have begun to question his conclusions—and
offer some of their own".
Cass
Sunstein,
"The Thin Line", The New Republic, May 21, 2007, Vol. 236, No.
4, 183, pp. 51-55.
Texas State University
permalink. A valid Texas State University User Name
and password are required.
Cass Sunstein's essay is a review of the book The
Lucifer
Effect: How Good People Can Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
(March, 2007). "Why do human
beings
commit despicable acts? One answer points to individual
dispositions; another answer emphasizes situational pressures.
In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed the
importance of individual dispositions in describing terrorists
as "simply evil people who want to kill." Situationists reject
this view. They believe that horrible acts can be committed by
perfectly normal people. The most extreme situationists insist
that in the right circumstances, almost all of us might be led
to commit atrocities. ... What emerges is a clear challenge to the most
ambitious claims for situationism, and a more complicated
understanding of the relationship between individual
dispositions and social situations. And there is a final point.
Zimbardo shows that the very assumption of a particular social
role automatically conveys a great deal of information about
appropriate behavior: consider the roles of nurse, first
officer, and prison guard. But social roles are not fixed.
Nurses and first officers need not think that they should always
follow doctors and captains, and prison guards need not feel
free to brutalize prisoners. Perhaps the largest lesson of
Zimbardo's experiment involves the importance of ensuring that a
constant sense of moral responsibility is taken to be part of,
rather than inconsistent with, a wide range of social roles."
Peter
Longerich/Holocaust:The
Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford Univerity
Press, 2010)
Referring to the Goldhagen-Browning debate, Longerich sees a
need for more complex explanations of the Holocaust that do not
rely heavily on "situational" factors (Browning) or previous
dispositions prevalent in German society (Goldhagen). He
notes the tendency of recent research to examine the mindset of
the individual, the individual's capacity for independent
initiative, and the room for manoeuvre available to that
individual. (p. 3)
Neil
A.
Lewis/In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic/NYT
September 19, 2007
"... a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of
Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl
Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than
showing the men performing their death camp duties, the
photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men
singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist,
Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a
cadre of young SS women frolicking
(photo)
and officers
relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break. ...
... the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific
reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1
million died. ...
For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944,
shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS
communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries.
One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because
she has finished her portion. ...
On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust
museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau
site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work,
the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers. ...
Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was
captured by the British he was carrying false documents
identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of
Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down
Höcker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a
bank official. ...
He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his
release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker
died in 2000 at 89. "
For photos from Karl Höcker's album, see: http://www.ushmm.org/research/collections/highlights/auschwitz/
... In an anomalous twist on Christopher R. Browning’s
groundbreaking 1992 book, “Ordinary Men,” it appears that
thousands of German women went to the eastern territories to
help Germanize them, and to provide services to the local ethnic
German populations there.
They included nurses, teachers and welfare workers. Women ran
the storehouses of belongings taken from Jews. Local Germans
were recruited to work as interpreters. Then there were the
wives of regional officials, and their secretaries, some from
their staffs back home.
For women from working-class families or farms in Germany, the
occupied zones offered an attractive opportunity to advance
themselves, Ms. Lower said.
There were up to 5,000 female guards in the concentration camps,
making up about 10 percent of the personnel. Ms. Grese was
hanged at the age of 21 for war crimes committed in Auschwitz
and Bergen-Belsen; Ms. Koch was convicted of participating in
murders at Buchenwald.
Mr. Browning’s book chronicled the role of the German Reserve
Police Battalion 101, which helped provide the manpower for the
elimination of most Polish Jewry within a year. The book
mentions one woman, the young, pregnant bride of one of the
captains of the police battalion. She had gone to Poland for a
kind of honeymoon and went along with her husband to observe the
clearing of a ghetto.
Only 1 or 2 percent of the perpetrators were women, according to
Ms. Lower. But in many cases where genocide was taking place,
German women were very close by. Several witnesses have
described festive banquets near mass shooting sites in the
Ukrainian forests, with German women providing refreshments for
the shooting squads whose work often went on for days."
Recommended:
Gellately/BackingHitler,
"Introduction", Chapter 3 "Concentration Camps & Media
Reports", Chapter 6 "Injustice & the
Jews", Chapter 9 "Concentration Camps in Public Spaces", and "Conclusion".
Victor Klemperer/I
Will Bear Witness 1933-1941: A Diary Of The Nazi Years
(Modern Library Paperback 1999) Victor Klemperer/I
Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary Of The Nazi Years
(Modern Library Paperback 2001) Michael
Kimmelman/No
Laughs, No Thrills, and Villains All Too Real (A comic book to
teach The Holocaust in German schools w/excerpt from comic
book)/NYT February 27, 2008 A new textbook shows that the Holocaust has
come a long way as a topic to be freshly considered by a new
generation of German teenagers.
"The other morning (in Berlin) Jens Augner, slight and owlish, a
schoolteacher in his 40s, quizzed his eighth-grade class of 13-
and 14-year-olds at the Humboldt Gymnasium, a local school. As
part of a trial program, he has just introduced a new history
textbook into the curriculum: to be exact, a comic book about
the Holocaust, calledThe Search.
... Among other things, the book shows how far comics have come
as a cultural medium taken seriously here, but also that the
Holocaust has come a long way too, as a topic to be freshly
considered by a new generation of German teenagers.
... With the Second World War passing from living memory, the
Holocaust remains a subject taught as a singular event and
obligation here, and Germans still seem to grapple almost
eagerly with their own historic guilt and shame. That said, few
German schoolchildren today can go home to ask their
grandparents, much less their parents, what they did while
Hitler was around. The end of the war is now as distant from
them in time as the end of the First World War was from the
Reagan presidency.
... Paradoxically, this seems to have freed young Germans —
adolescent ones, anyway — to talk more openly and in new ways
about Nazis and the Holocaust. Passing is the shock therapy,
with its films of piled corpses, that earlier generations of
schoolchildren had to endure.
... In the comic Esther recounts to her grandchildren what
happened to her family, and in the process facts emerge about
Hitler’s rise, about deportations and concentration camps.
Without excusing anyone or spreading blame, the story, rather
than focusing on Hitler and geopolitics, stresses instances
where ordinary individuals — farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers,
prison guards, even camp inmates — faced dilemmas, acted
selfishly or ambiguously: showed themselves to be human. The
medium’s intimacy and immediacy help boil down a vast subject to
a few lives that young readers, and old ones too, can grasp."
Excerpt From Death Fugue Black milk of daybreak
we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all
sparkling
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the
ground
he orders us strike up
and play for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair
Margeurite
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in
the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up
and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the
dancing
(Translated by John Felstiner)
George
Gene
Gustines/Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust Artist/NYT
August 9, 2008
"... the tale of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who
survived two years at the Auschwitz concentration camp by
painting watercolor portraits for the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef
Mengele.
... the colorful mural that Mrs. Babbitt painted in the
children’s barracks there. She started with Walt Disney’s
version of Snow White, but her audience clamored for the Seven
Dwarfs as well, and some farm animals. The original mural is
believed to have been destroyed, and the story uses a
re-creation Mrs. Babbitt painted last year."
See the illustrated Comics
for
a Cause (pdf) that recounts the experience of Dina
Gottliebova Babbitt at Auschwitz in World War II, and her recent
efforts to reclaim her art.
This has been the route taken by most English-language
films about the Holocaust, and also some of their slick
European counterparts ... represent another strain in European
and Israeli film, one that may reflect a deeper cultural
difference. In the United
States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the
obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic
strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it
remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out — in
art, in politics and in the society as a whole.
It seems right that movies about a difficult subject
should themselves be difficult. But the fate of difficult
movies with subtitles, usually, is to slip in and out of
American theaters without leaving much of a trace. The big
Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an
impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a
history that they nonetheless keep at a safe, mediated
difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the
process. We don’t have to
ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer
that question for us.
For American audiences a
Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or
a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic — part of a genre
that has less to do with history than with the perceived
expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least
the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in
memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting." (boldface added)
Readings:
In Loshitzky
(ed.)/Spielberg's Holocaust, these articles:
Loshitsky, "Introduction"
Bartov, "Spielberg's Oskar:
Hollywood Tries Evil"
Horowitz, "But Is It Good for the
Jews?..."
Doneson, "The Femininization of the
Jew"
Weissberg, "The Tale of a Good German"
Cheyette, "The Uncertainty of Schindler's
List"
Fact Sheet on the Elements of Anti-Semitic
Discourse: Common Motifs & Markers for Anti-Semitism, The
Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
Institute for the
Study of Contemporary Antisemitism: Indiana
University - Bloomington /Links to various resources,
scholarly materials, lectures, and news of events and
developments.
Ruth R. Wisse, "The
Functions of Anti-Semitism", National Affairs,
Number 33, Fall 2017
@ https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-functions-of-anti-semitism
"The study of anti-Semitism properly belongs to the study
of politics, though it has rarely been taken up this way.
...
Politics organized against the Jews has been practiced, at
one time or another, in every Western society and
throughout the Middle East for more than a century. This
organizing principle has been adapted to the purposes of
communism, fascism, pan-Arab nationalism, and
progressivism, and it has persisted as an anti-liberal
force that appeals to extremists on the right and the
left. Not in the name of special pleading on behalf of the
Jews, its proximate target, or the liberal order, its
larger enemy, but even simply because anti-Jewish politics
is such an enduring and ubiquitous force, and because it
has not yet been adequately studied as a political
strategy, it is time for scholars of political and social
life to bring to it the same urgency and rigor they have
brought to virtually every other meaningful political
phenomenon. That is what real awareness would require."
Bernard
Harrison/The
Resurgence Of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, And Liberal Opinion
(Rowman & Littlefield 2006)(This book is highly recommended.) "... certain
words like 'Democracy' are surrounded, as it were, by an aura of
positive emotional connotation for a majority of hearers.
This feature gives such words a certain value when it comes to
securing agreement in a political debate. The thought is,
that if one can convince one's hearers that the policy one is
proposing is the 'democratic' one, while one's opponent's
policies are 'undemocratic', that in itself will give one an
edge in debate. That gives one a motive for bringing the
word democracy over to one's side in the argument, as it were,
by subtly shifting its descriptive content and reference
('persuasively redefining' it) while leaving its emotional aura
unchanged. Something
like this is happening in the debates we have been
investigating with the word holocaust. ... The
thought is: 'Why should the Jews have sole use of this
wonderful word, which draws so much sympathy, and money,
to them. Why shouldn't we - my people, me and my
political friends - have the use of it too?' It is this
impulse which leads to the kind of attempt we have been
witnessing to broaden the use of the term, to make the term more 'inclusive,' first by making
it synonymous with 'genocide,' then by broadening its
reference further to cover any massacre, then still further,
... to cover such phenomena as famines, or slavery.
There is in all of these attempts at persuasive redefinition,
... a slight but perceptible edge of anti-Semitism, the sense
that having established, as it seems to the objectors, sole
ownership over the word holocaust, those wretched conspirators
'the Jews' have once again 'gotten away with something,'
stolen other people's light, used their sufferings, real as
those may be, to cast into the shade the sufferings of
others." (boldface added)
... The slight edge of anti-Semitism I'm talking about is
... a subtext, something haunting ... the margins of
discourse. ... there is implicit in the observance
of Holocaust Day (the reference here is to the UK), as it
stands, a tacit assumption that the life of of a Jew, the
sufferings of a Jew, are 'worth more' than the lives and
sufferings of others.
... there is no good and much harm, to be done by, in
effect, redefining the
term holocaust in such a way as to allow the concrete
specificity of the Nazi genocide, and with it everything which
links it to enduring aspects of European culture and politics,
to fade from view. For that is what would happen if we
were to allow ourselves to be led, through a persuasive
reassignment of the descriptive content and reference of the
term holocaust in the direction of greater generality, to
imagine that every great evil done by human beings to one
another from slavery to intertribal massacre ... is a phenomenon of exactly the same
kind as the Nazi Holocaust. Everything is what it
is and not another thing. Evil is not a single recurrent
feature of human life, eternally self-identical in its
nature. There are many kinds of evil, springing from many
different causes, some of them sui generis. If we are to
think rationally about these matters, if our response to human
evil is not to be reduced to futile and sentimental hand
wringing, we need a vocabulary which allows us to keep track of
the differences." (These remarks are from Bernard
Harrison, The
Resurgence Of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, And Liberal Opinion,
Chapter 6 "Fascism and the Idea of Total War", pp.
124-126. To view the complete text of Bernard Harrison's
remarks and more, see Excerpts
from
Bernard Harrison's book. On this site, enter a
phrase in the search option {labeled "Search in this book"} such
as "sole use of this wonderful word" [p.124] or "once again
gotten away with something" [p.125]. Then click on the
page number that appears immediately below.)
*Note:
In this section of his book, Bernard
Harrison acknowledges his intellectual debt to
the philosopher C. L. Stevenson whose book Ethics and Language
(Yale University Press, 1944), especially its material on
"persuasive definition", provided the basis for Harrison's
discussion of the term holocaust. (Stevenson was
Harrison's teacher.)
This is a brief excerpt
from a 1938 article by C. L. Stevenson on persuasive
definitions. See also these brief excerpts from Chapter
VI (persuasion) and Chapter
XIII (function of definitions) of C. L. Stevenson's book Ethics and Language.
Eve Garrard, "The pleasures of antisemitism", Fathom,
April 26, 2013 @ http://fathomjournal.org/the-pleasures-of-antisemitism/.
"... as Tolstoy and others have noticed, we often hate people in
proportion to the injustices which we have done them. It's
very hard for Europe to forgive the Jews for the Holocaust, ..."
Godwin's
Law (Source: Wikipedia)
Paraphrased from source: Godwin's law
asserts that as an online discussion goes on long enough, (regardless of topic or scope) sooner
or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler
or Nazism.
Promulgated
by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990, Godwin's
law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup
discussions.It is now applied to any threaded
online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and
comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other
rhetoric where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.
In 2012, "Godwin's law" became an entry in the third edition of
the Oxford English Dictionary.
Minimizing the Jewish Connection to Jerusalem
Edward Rothstein, "Jerusalem Syndrome at the
Met", Mosaic Magazine, February 2017 @ https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2017/02/jerusalem-syndrome-at-the-met/.
"An exhibition on the diverse multiculturalism of medieval
Jerusalem has been ecstatically received. There’s just one
problem: the vision of history it promotes is a myth.
...
The show’s refusal to confront history in
any serious way; the failure to find artifacts that match its
multicultural thesis; the depiction of the Jewish presence
in Jerusalem as an “absence”—all of these contribute to the
impression that, for the organizers of this exhibition, the
undeniable facts of ancient Jewish history were the very
things that could never be acknowledged. (As, in an
opposite way, were the undeniable facts of medieval Islamic
history.) Better by far to imagine Jerusalem in this fantasy
as an international city without a hint of historical Jewish
sovereignty, and a mythical place in which all faiths
enjoyed equivalent standing". (boldface added)
See also Robert Irwin's response to Edward
Rothstein's essay "Jerusalem Syndrome at the Met", February 6,
2017 (The link to Edward Rothstein's essay is located
immediately above.)
Academic Honesty
Statement
Learning and teaching take place best in an atmosphere of
intellectual freedom and openness. All members of the academic
community are responsible for supporting freedom and openness
through rigorous personal standards of honesty and fairness.
Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty undermine the
very purpose of the university and diminish the value of an
education.
Academic Offenses
Students who have committed academic dishonesty, which includes
cheating on an examination or other academic work to be
submitted, plagiarism, collusion, or abuse of resource
materials, are subject to disciplinary action.
a. Academic work means the preparation of an essay, thesis,
report, problem assignments, or other projects which are to be
submitted for purposes of grade determination.
b. Cheating means:
1. Copying from another student?s test paper, laboratory report,
other report or computer files, data listing, and/or programs.
2. Using materials during a test unauthorized by person giving
test.
3. Collaborating, without authorization, with another person
during an examination or in preparing academic work.
4. Knowingly, and without authorization, using, buying, selling,
stealing, transporting, soliciting, copying, or possessing, in
whole or part, the content of an unaministered test.
5. Substituting for another student?or permitting another person
to substitute for oneself in taking an exam or preparing
academic work.
6. Bribing another person to obtain an unadministered test or
information about an unadministered test.
c. Plagiarism
means
the appropriation of another's work and the unacknowledged
incorporation of that work in one's own written work
offered for credit. (Emphasis Added)
d. Collusion means the unauthorized collaboration with another
person in preparing written work offered for credit.
e. Abuse of resource materials means the mutilation,
destruction, concealment, theft or alteration of materials
provided to assist students in the mastery of course materials.
Penalties for Academic Dishonesty
Students who have committeed academic dishonesty may be subject
to:
a. Academic penalty including one or more of the following when
not inconsistent:
1. A requirement to perform additional academic work not
required of other students in the course;
2. Required
to withdraw from the course with a grade of F. (Emphasis
Added)
3. A reduction to any level grade in the course, or on the exam
or other academic work affected by the academic dishonesty.
b. Disciplinary penalty including any penalty which may be
imposed in a student disciplinary hearing pursuant to this Code
of Conduct.
Please also note: Civility
in the classroom is very important for the educational
process and it is everyone’s responsibility. If you
have questions about appropriate behavior in a particular
class, please address them with your instructor
first. Disciplinary procedures may be implemented
for refusing to follow an instructor’s directive, refusing
to leave the classroom, not following the university’s
requirement to wear a cloth face covering, not complying
with social distancing or sneeze and cough etiquette, and
refusing to implement other health and safety measures as
required by the university. Additionally, the instructor,
in consultation with the department chair/school director,
may refer the student to the Dean of Students Office for
further disciplinary review. Such reviews may result
in consequences ranging from warnings to sanctions from
the university. For more information regarding conduct in
the classroom, please review the following policies
at Section
03: Courteous and Civil Learning Environment, and number
II, Responsibilities of Students, Section 02.02: Conduct
Prohibited".