VOLUME I
A Curriculum Guide for Grades 9–12
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education 2003 Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: THE BETRAYAL OF HUMANITY A Curriculum Guide for Grades 9–12
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education 2003
INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ■ ■ ■
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Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Letter from Chairman, N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education . . . . . . . . . . To The Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ● Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ● What Does the Mandate Require? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ● Why Teach About the Holocaust and Genocides? A Rationale. . . . . . . ● N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education’s Rationale for Holocaust And Genocide Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ● Structure of the Curriculum Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ● How to Use This Curriculum Guide: Suggestions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Design of Rationale Statements for Teaching the Holocaust and Genocides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Identifying the Placement of the Subject in the Curriculum . > Selection of Unit Goals and Performance Objectives . . . . . . . > Selection of Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities. . . . > Selection of Instructional Materials/Resources . . . . . . . . . . . > Assessment of Student Progress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity Second Edition, 2003, Goals and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
UNIT I:
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AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Unit Goal, Performance Objectives, Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities, and Instructional Materials/Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 Readings Included in This Unit (list). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Reprints of Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
UNIT II: ■
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AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: VIEWS OF PREJUDICE AND GENOCIDE . . . . . . . . . 141 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Unit Goal, Performance Objectives, Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities, and Instructional Materials/Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Readings Included in This Unit (list). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Reprints of Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
TABLE OF CONTENTS - volume i
TABLE OF CONTENTS
UNIT III:
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Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Unit Goal, Performance Objectives, Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities, and Instructional Materials/Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Readings Included in This Unit (list). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Reprints of Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
UNIT IV:
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THE RISE OF NAZISM IN GERMANY: PRELUDE TO THE HOLOCAUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: THE HOLOCAUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Unit Goal, Performance Objectives, Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities, and Instructional Materials/Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Readings Included in This Unit (list). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 Reprints of Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396
INTRODUCTION
“WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING”
Introduction
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
he review and revision of The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity, is the culmination of a process that spanned the period from September 1999 through September 2002. That process included a thorough review of the original curriculum guide published by the Commission in 1994, a review of the feedback from educators who used the original edition in their work in schools, an examination of new information, research and resources of all kinds and the direct involvement of classroom teachers who made the final recommendations that shaped the changes reflected in this curriculum guide. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education extends its commendations and gratitude to those who served on the Holocaust Curriculum Review Committee. This committee, made up of volunteers and part time staff from the Commission, held formal meetings monthly during the developmental process. Most meetings were conducted during after-school hours, with occasional full day meetings made possible with the support and cooperation of the school districts represented by the teachers on the committee. Members of the committee whose professional knowledge, pedagogical expertise, creativity and commitment to quality curriculum on the Holocaust and genocides who are hereby acknowledged include the following: • • • • • • • • • •
REBECCA AUPPERLE, Runnemede School District, Runnemede, N.J. DOUG CERVI, Oakcrest High School, Mays Landing, N.J. RICHARD F. FLAIM, Committee Chairman, N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education SUSAN GENZER, Gloucester Township Public Schools CHRISTOPHER GWIN, Haddonfield High School, Haddonfield, N.J. ROBERT F. HOLDEN, Ocean City Public Schools, Ocean City, N.J. BARBARA PORDY, Gloucester Township Public Schools DR. PHILIP ROSEN, Goodwin Holocaust Museum, Cherry Hill, N.J. MARLENE RUBIN, Gloucester Township Public Schools ARLENE SHENKUS, Paulsboro High School, Paulsboro, N.J.
The Commission also acknowledges the support provided to the committee by Dr. Paul B. Winkler, Executive Director of the N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education; Richard F. Flaim, Chairman of the Curriculum and Education Committee, who guided the multi-year process of updating this guide; Murray Laulicht, Esq., a past chairman and present member of the Commission, whose expert editing enhanced the quality of this guide; Dr. Sy Siegler, Holocaust Resource Center, Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, N.J., and Nancy Schmidt, of NSCHMIDT Dezign Group, for her professional work on the layout, design and formatting of the guide. Finally, special recognition is offered to the Vineland Public Schools and the Educational Improvement Resource Center (EIRC) in Sewell, N.J. for the use of their facilities and technical support.
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State of New Jersey
COMMISSION ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION P.O. Box 500 Trenton, New Jersey 08625 Web Site: http://www.state.nj.us./njded/holocaust Email: [email protected] nj.us JAMES E. McGREEVEY Governor WILLIAM L. LIBRERA Commissioner of Education DR. JAMES E. SULTON, JR. N.J. Commission on Higher Education
COMMISSION MEMBERS PHILIP KIRSCHNER, ESQ. Commission Chairman MARKUS I. BARTH, O.D. MAUD DAHME STEPHEN J. DRAISIN, ESQ. MARGIT FELDMAN GERALD A. FLANZBAUM, ESQ.
January, 2003 Dear Educator: The newly updated curriculum guide, The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity, Grade 9–12, is the culmination of a process that began three decades ago and involved educators, the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, and many others. Those educators who contributed to this update of the original curriculum guide that was developed and disseminated by the Commission in 1995 are listed in the acknowledgment page. Primary direction for the guide’s development was provided by the Commission, its past Chairs, and Chairperson of the Commission’s Curriculum and Education Committee, Richard F. Flaim, under the direction of Executive Director, Dr. Paul B. Winkler. The Commission’s first Chair, Gerry Flanzbaum, established a firm interest and commitment to the teaching of the Holocaust and genocides and helped to make the Commission a viable entity. His guidance established the foundation for the future, including the development of the curriculum and related materials designed to guide educators in their design of effective instruction for students. Murray Laulicht, Esq., guided the Commission as it became a permanent body and through the legislative process that mandated the inclusion of instruction on the Holocaust and genocides at the elementary and secondary levels in all New Jersey schools. Based on his own personal interest and guidance, in 1995 along with present and past members, in particular Sister Rose Thering and Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg, the first curriculum was developed. Laulicht also provided invaluable editing assistance in the development of the new guide.
HARRY FURMAN, ESQ. HERB GILSENBERG PARIS HOVNANIAN LYSA J. ISRAEL
Steven Some, the Commission’s next Chair, extended the Commission’s activities into the international arena, with the introduction of such topics as Hate Speech, Hate Crimes and Hate on the Internet. Through his encouragement, Richard F. Flaim and Commission member Harry Furman, developed a new curriculum guide, The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World, published and disseminated by the Commission in 2002 and designed for use in upper middle and high schools. This guide is available from the Commission.
MURRAY J. LAULICHT, ESQ. JEFFREY MAAS DR. RUTH MILLMAN RABBI NORMAN R. PATZ MARVIN RAAB MARTHA RICH STEVEN E. SOME DR. ROSE THERING, O.P.
Hela Young, who served from June 2001 until her untimely death in early 2002, provided inspiration to the Commission and to school districts throughout New Jersey, as reflected in what she wrote following the tragic events of September 11, 2001. She wrote: “I know you will agree that educating our students on the range of issues related to prejudice, discrimination, bigotry and hatred are increasingly important, particularly at a time when our country has endured the hate-motivated terror attack on our people…It is our hope that, together, we can help our students learn the benefits of living in a democratic society and the responsibility we share to respond in meaningful ways to counter acts that threaten the human rights of all people.” As the current Chair of the Commission, I strongly believe this newly updated curriculum guide will serve your students well. It will facilitate the teaching of tolerance, an appreciation for diversity and an aversion to bigotry and hatred. Please utilize it in your curriculum.
SHELLY M. ZEIGER
The State of New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education stands ready to assist you in any way. Please do not hesitate to contact the Commission.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Sincerely, Philip Kirschner, Esq. Chairperson New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
DR. PAUL B. WINKLER Office: (609) 292-9274 Fax: (609) 292-1211 RICHARD F. FLAIM, CHAIR Curriculum Committee
Introduction
TO THE TEACHER INTRODUCTION
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n April of 1994, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman signed legislation that mandated the inclusion of instruction on the Holocaust and genocides in the curriculum of all elementary and secondary school students in the State. This legislation supported the pioneering role that New Jersey educators had played in the development of curricula designed to facilitate effective teaching and learning of the history of the Holocaust and genocides. In anticipation of the mandate, the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education published comprehensive curriculum guides for use at the elementary and secondary levels. These guides, The Holocaust and Genocide: Caring Makes a Difference (Grades K-8), and The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Mankind (Grades 7-12), were disseminated to all school districts in New Jersey in 1995. In 1998, a survey of school districts was conducted by the Commission to determine, in part, the degree to which these curriculum guides were useful to teachers in their effort to design and implement curricula on the Holocaust and genocides. The results overwhelmingly revealed that the guides were perceived to have been useful to teachers. As a consequence of the positive response, in September of 1999, the Commission created two committees and charged them with the responsibility to enhance and update the elementary and secondary curriculum guides. Both committees were made up of New Jersey educators who have had extensive classroom experience with the content and pedagogy associated with the Holocaust and genocides. The current curriculum guide, re-titled The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity (Grades 9-12), is the result of an extensive two-year review process. The changes reflect the latest scholarship, learning activities and resources available in the field of Holocaust and genocide education. It is not intended to be implemented in its entirety, but as a resource from which educators can select those goals and objectives that will form the basis for their curricula, and then identify and select from the many recommended learning activities and resources those that best meet the needs of their students. Thus, this document is not intended to be, nor could it be, effectively taught in its entirety within the structure of a school’s curriculum. One of the challenges that confronted the committee was the nature of the legislative mandate, which requires the inclusion of the subject “in an appropriate place in the curriculum of all elementary and secondary school pupils.” Thus, schools have the latitude to include the teaching of the subject in any course, combination of courses and at any grade level, which at the secondary level, is grades 9-12. Schools have responded by incorporating lessons, units or full courses on the Holocaust and genocides into art, music, literature, world history, United States history, European history, psychology, sociology, science, law and other courses in the curriculum. While the flexibility enables local school districts to tailor their curricula on the Holocaust and genocides to the needs of their students and communities, it required the committee to assure that the curriculum guide contains a sufficient variety of activities and resources that could be useful to the broadest range of local needs and decisions. This has resulted in a document that is larger than would have been necessary with a more narrowly targeted mandate.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
WHAT DOES THE MANDATE REQUIRE? The Holocaust and genocide education mandate, signed into law in 1994, specifies the following requirement of every board of education in New Jersey: • Every board of education shall include instruction on the Holocaust and genocides in an appropriate place in the curriculum of all elementary and secondary school pupils. (See Section 2.a. in the legislation in Appendix A.) • The instruction shall enable pupils to identify and analyze applicable theories concerning human nature and behavior; to understand that genocide is a consequence of prejudice and discrimination; and to understand that issues of moral dilemma and conscience have a profound impact on life. The instruction shall further emphasize the personal responsibility that each citizen bears to fight racism and hatred whenever and wherever it happens. (See Section 2. b. in the legislation in Appendix A.) This legislation also defines the mission of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education “to study and recommend curricular material on a wide range of genocides. The Holocaust Commission is an ideal agency to recommend curricular materials to local districts.” (See Section 1.e. in Appendix A)
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Thus, while the current curriculum guide itself is not mandated, it is recommended by the Commission to local school districts as a rich resource in their efforts to design and implement curricula that satisfy the mandate.
WHY TEACH ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES?: A RATIONALE Efforts to design and implement successful curricula must begin with an examination of the most compelling reasons for teaching a given subject. These reasons constitute the rationale that forms the basis for the development of goals, objectives, activities, and the selection or development of content and instructional resources. A well-designed rationale also enables educators to develop effective strategies and methods of assessment. The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education offers the following rationale that supports the development of its curriculum guide The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity. This rationale draws from New Jersey’s legislation that mandates the teaching of the subject in its schools, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust,” as well as the ideas of the New Jersey educators who assisted in the development of this curriculum guide. This section is also informed by “The Significance of Rationale Statements in Developing a Sound Holocaust Education Program,” by Samuel Totten, Stephen Feinberg and William Fernekes, Teaching and Studying the Holocaust, Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2001.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Introduction
Teachers are encouraged to consider the rationale statements carefully and to shape and further refine them to better reflect their own visions and perspectives on the teaching of the Holocaust and genocides. The rationale statements that are developed will ultimately guide the curriculum development and implementation processes.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education’s Rationale for Holocaust and Genocide Education 1. The teaching of tolerance must be made a priority if New Jersey’s cultural diversity is to remain one of the State’s strengths. (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994) Study of the Holocaust assists students in developing understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping in any society. It helps students develop an awareness of the value of pluralism, and encourages tolerance of diversity in a pluralistic society. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) 2. National studies indicate that fewer than 25% of students have an understanding of organized attempts throughout history to eliminate various ethnic groups through a systematic program of mass killing or genocide. (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994) 3. Instruction shall enable students to identify and analyze applicable theories of human nature and behavior. (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994) 4. Students need to understand that genocide is a possible consequence of prejudice and discrimination. (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994) 5. A study of the Holocaust and genocides can help students understand that issues of moral dilemma and conscience have a profound impact on life. (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994) 6. Students need to learn that each citizen bears personal responsibility to fight racism and hatred wherever and whenever it happens (State of New Jersey legislation, April 4, 1994). 7. The Holocaust was a watershed event, not only in the 20th century but in the entire history of humanity. (Parsons and Totten, 1993, p.1. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) 8. It is important for students to understand those factors that contributed to the gradual and systematic process that led to what the Nazis termed The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem, and that the Holocaust was preventable. 9. The Holocaust provides a context for exploring the dangers of remaining silent, apathetic, and indifferent in the face of others’ oppression (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). 10. Holocaust history demonstrates how a modern nation can utilize its technological expertise and bureaucratic infrastructure to implement destructive policies ranging from social engineering to genocide. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
11. A study of the Holocaust and genocides helps students think about the use and abuse of power, and the role and responsibilities of individuals, organizations and nations when confronted with civil rights violations and/or policies of genocide. 12. As students gain insight into the many historical, social, religious, political and economic factors that cumulatively resulted in the Holocaust, they gain a perspective on how history happens and how a convergence of factors can contribute to the disintegration of civilized values. Part of one’s responsibility as a citizen of a democracy is to learn to identify the danger signals and to know when to react.
STRUCTURE OF THE CURRICULUM GUIDE The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity (Grades 9-12) is structured into seven units: 1. An Introduction to a Study of the Holocaust and Genocides: The Nature of Human Behavior 2. An Introduction to a Study of the Holocaust and Genocides: Views of Prejudice and Genocide 3. The Rise of Nazism: Prelude to the Holocaust 4. From Persecution to Mass Murder: The Holocaust 5. Resistance, Intervention and Rescue 6. Genocide 7. Issues of Conscience and Moral Responsibility
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Each of • • • • • •
the above units contains the following components: Introduction Unit Goal Performance Objectives Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities Instructional Materials and Resources (List) Copies of Select Recommended Readings
At the conclusion of the curriculum guide, Appendices include support materials that may be useful to educators in the curriculum development process. The appendices include the following items: • New Jersey Legislation Mandating Holocaust Education • Holocaust Memorial Address by N.J. Governor James E. McGreevey • Holocaust Timeline • Glossary • Holocaust Statistics • The Holocaust: A Web Site Directory / Internet Sites • New Jersey Holocaust Resource Centers and Demonstration Sites • Resource Organizations, Museums and Memorials • Oral History Interview Guidelines (Excerpts). (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) • Child Survivors: Suggested Questions • List of Vendors
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Introduction
HOW TO USE THIS CURRICULUM GUIDE: SUGGESTIONS The following suggestions are offered in an effort to assist educators in their design or redesign of curricula on the Holocaust and genocides using this curriculum resource guide.
1. Design of Rationale Statements for Teaching the Holocaust and Genocides It is recommended that the design of curricula on the Holocaust and genocides begin with a discussion and eventual development of a series of statements that define the most compelling reasons for including this subject in the curriculum. This process should involve a cross-section of stakeholders, ideally including teachers, administrators, supervisors of instruction, parents, members of the general community and high school students. To facilitate this process, it may be helpful to review the various rationales that are currently available, including, but not limited to, the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education’s rationale above and the rationale developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in its “Guidelines for Teaching About The Holocaust.” It is also recommended that educators consult “The Significance of Rationale Statements in Developing a Sound Holocaust Education Program,” by Samuel Totten, Stephen Feinberg and William Fernekes, in Teaching and Studying the Holocaust, Samuel Totten and Stephen Feinberg, Eds., New York: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. While such sources can be useful guides in this process, ultimately the rationale for teaching this subject must reflect the beliefs and commitments of those at the local level. The rationale statements form the foundation that will guide the design or selection of unit goals, performance objectives, teaching and learning activities and materials/resources. The rationale statements should (1) enable educators, students and the community to understand why this subject is being taught; (2) assist teachers in prioritizing the time allotted to various topics and issues; (3) assist in defining intended cognitive and affective student outcomes; (4) facilitate the difficult task of choosing which among the vast volume of available resources and materials to use with students; and (5) guide the development of appropriate student assessments.
2. Identifying the Placement of the Subject in the Curriculum The Holocaust and genocides mandate provides districts with the flexibility to include these subjects in any appropriate place in the secondary curriculum. Thus, after the rationale statements are agreed upon, it is recommended that the local committee identify the placement of the subject in the curriculum. The following questions could serve as a guide to this process: Should the subject be a part of existing courses? If so, identify them. Should the subject also be offered as a half or full-year elective? What experiences have students had with this subject in previous grades? Should an interdisciplinary approach be used with teams of teachers collaborating in the implementation of the subject? • Given the amount of content currently included in mandated United States and world history courses, how can these courses be effectively restructured to allot a reasonable amount of time to this subject in those courses? • • • •
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
3. Selection of Unit Goals and Performance Objectives After determining the placement and time allotments available for the inclusion of Holocaust and genocide curriculum and using the adopted rationale statements as a guide, review the unit goals and performance objectives in the curriculum guide. The unit goals represent the broad understandings that students will be expected to acquire as a result of their study, while the performance objectives form the basis for more specific student outcomes as a consequence of instruction. Select or adapt those unit goals and performance objectives that relate most directly to your rationale and prioritization of topics.
4. Selection of Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities After selecting the unit goals and performance objectives, consult the center column of the curriculum guide, Teaching/Learning Strategies and Activities. This column contains an extensive list of choices for teachers from which they may select those strategies and/or activities that they believe are most appropriate for their students. It is not intended that teachers use all the recommended strategies and activities.
5. Selection of Instructional Materials/Resources
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When specific learning strategies and activities are selected, teachers may refer to the third column in the guide entitled Instructional Materials/Resources. This column contains multiple materials and resources that are directly related to the selected strategies and activities. In some cases, copies of recommended materials and resources are provided in the curriculum guide. These are identified in the Instructional Materials/Resources column as (Reading #16), for example. That source may be found by consulting the table of Readings Included in Unit at the beginning of the respective unit. Other resources are listed but copies are not included in the guide. In selecting materials and resources, teachers should be aware that no attempt has been made to categorize them regarding level of difficulty for students. All recommended materials, unless specified otherwise, are deemed appropriate for use at the high school level. However, given the range of student interest and reading abilities that is represented in typical high schools, teachers must determine whether specific materials and resources are appropriate for their students. Thus, teachers are urged to review the recommendations carefully prior to their use with students. Teachers should exercise special care in the selection of recommended sites on the Internet. This medium has enabled teachers and students to have instant access to information of all kinds that relates to the Holocaust and genocides. While this access has the potential for positive learning and should be used, teachers must be aware that students will require guidance in becoming critical consumers of the information that is provided. For example, there are sites on the Internet that present the views of deniers of the Holocaust and numerous groups that promote hatred and
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Introduction
bigotry. Also, even sites that offer legitimate and accurate information sometimes contain links to sites that are promoting hatred. Thus, it is recommended that teachers themselves become familiar with the sites they recommend and provide clear guidance to students so they can become critical consumers of Internet sites and information. It is also suggested that teachers preview, in advance of their use with students, all films, videos and reading materials that are selected. Because of the nature of the issues and subject matter, some materials may contain graphic images or language that may be offensive to some students. Thus, teachers must use discretion in the selection of materials and consider the ageappropriateness and maturity of students during the materials/resources selection process. When selecting materials that may be offensive to some students, it is also recommended that students be advised of this in advance, allowing them the option of using alternative resources related to the performance objective. While it is not always feasible to notify parents of all materials that may be offensive or upsetting to some students, the establishment and dissemination of a policy regarding the use of potentially controversial materials in the classroom, and the options described above, could serve to properly inform parents and students, and avert misunderstandings. Such a policy can respect the academic freedom required by teachers as well as the values and sensitivities of students and their families.
6. Assessment of Student Progress The New Jersey State Department of Education has included content on the Holocaust and genocides and related topics in the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards. This content will also be assessed in the Statewide Assessment Program that will test students in the various content areas on the HSPA in grade 11. It is recommended that teachers review the Standards and the related Pupil Progress Indicators and ensure that these are included in the curriculum and instruction. While some of the content on the Holocaust and genocides will be assessed in the State assessment, the Commission recognizes that assessment is an essential part of effective instruction on a daily basis in our classrooms. Thus, it is recommended that in planning for daily instruction, teachers “begin with the end in mind.” In other words, ask What kinds of evidence will be required to determine that students have achieved the performance objectives? The evidence could include performance tasks of all kinds, including artistic creations, musical performances, volunteer work, individual and group projects, as well as traditional pencil and paper tests, quizzes and exercises. This “evidence” becomes the assessment, a combination of multiple sources of information. No final assessment should be based upon the results of any single test or piece of evidence. In addition, the Commission has published under separate cover, a document that is designed to assist teachers in the creation of test items related to the Holocaust and genocide. Teachers may use the items in this publication as a resource in the creation of pencil and paper tests or quizzes on the subject. As stated above, however, such items should be only a part of an effective system of assessment.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
Finally, much of the intended student learning as a result of Holocaust and genocide education relates to the development of individual students’ attitudes and behaviors. Teachers must assess these affective areas, which are not assessed on the Statewide Assessment Program, on standardized tests or on many traditional teacher-made tests, as a part of instruction. Some strategies may include student self-assessments, journals or learning logs, reflective essays, and teacher observation of specific behaviors related to the affective goals of the curriculum. In addition, Unit I concludes with an objective that asks students to develop a generalization that reflects their views of human nature. Students are asked to reassess their initial generalizations at the conclusion of each succeeding unit. These generalizations may be one source of evidence of student change in the affective areas.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Goals and Objectives
The Holocaust and Genocide: The Betrayal of Humanity Second Edition 2003
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
UNIT 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES: THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR Students will develop an understanding of various theories of human nature and behavior. Performance Objectives: 1. Students will discuss general theories of human nature and relate these to personal experiences. 2. Students will examine aggression and cruelty as parts of human nature. 3. Students will examine the positive and negative behaviors associated with obedience, conformity and silence. 4. Students will recognize the positive behavior associated with acts of courage, integrity and empathy. 5. Students will compare and contrast the behavior of the perpetrator, victim, collaborator, bystander, resister and rescuer. 6. Students will develop generalizations that reflect their individual views of human nature.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
UNIT II AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES: VIEWS OF PREJUDICE AND GENOCIDE Students will understand that genocide is a possible consequence of prejudice and discrimination.
Performance Objectives: 1. Students will define and explain the nature of prejudice as a universal human phenomenon. 2. Students will define and examine contemporary examples of prejudice, scapegoating, bigotry, discrimination and genocide. 3. Students will define and examine the history of anti-Semitism from ancient times to 1933. 4. Students will investigate current extremist groups and examine whether advanced education and culture reduce the potential for genocide. 5. Students will reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of their study of prejudice and genocide.
UNIT III THE RISE OF NAZISM: PRELUDE TO THE HOLOCAUST 14
Students will understand the global and domestic conditions that led to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Performance Objectives: 1 . Students will analyze and form conclusions about the late 19th and early 20” century German politics that provided the seedbed for the rise of Nazism. 2. Students will demonstrate a factual knowledge of the life of Adolf Hitler with an emphasis on his personality traits. 3. Students will form a generalization about Jewish life in Europe prior to the Holocaust. 4. Students will assess and form conclusions about events that affected the collapse of the Weimar Republic and contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany. 5. Students will determine why Nazi philosophy, ideology and government policies appealed to certain aspects of human nature and behavior. 6. Students will examine the role of the media and propaganda in promoting Nazi ideology. 7. Students will reassess their views of human nature in light of new knowledge they acquired about Hitler’s life and the Nazi Party in Germany.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Goals and Objectives
UNIT IV FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: THE HOLOCAUST Students will understand that the Holocaust was an evolutionary process of Nazi state policy from persecution to mass murder.
Performance Objectives: 1 . Students will examine policies, laws and teachings in the years immediately following the Nazi assumption of power that led to the Holocaust. 2. Students will describe the changes that took place in Germany after the Nazis came to power and interpret the impact of the Nuremberg Laws on Jews living in Germany. 3. Students will investigate the escalation of Nazi policies of persecution which include the following: Kristallnacht; Eugenics Program; Euthanasia Program; Isolation and Deportation of Jews; Einsatzgruppen; Wannsee Conference; and The Final Solution. 4. Student will examine the origins, establishment, conditions and operations of the Nazi concentration camps and death camps. 5. Students will examine the effects of the living conditions in the ghettos, concentration camps and death camps on the victims as reflected in literature, art and music. 6. Students will investigate the roles of the business, industrial, legal, scientific and medical communities, as well as the role of the Church in the Holocaust. 7. Students will analyze the involvement with and responses to Nazi persecution policies by Germans and collaborators from other nations. 8. Students will evaluate the continuing role of mass media and propaganda in Nazi Germany including the use of the “Big Lie” and the corruption of language. 9. Students will research the reasons why specific groups were victimized by the Nazis. 10. Students will analyze the response to the Holocaust by the United States and the Allies, the world media and the American Jewish community when knowledge of the Holocaust was revealed to the world. 11. Students will identify the importance of eyewitness testimony in the study of the Holocaust. 12. Students will develop a chronology of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945. 13. Students will reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of the events of the Holocaust.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
UNIT V RESISTANCE, INTERVENTION AND RESCUE Students will understand the various forms of resistance, intervention and rescue that occurred during the Holocaust.
Performance Objectives: 1. Students will define resistance. 2. Students will examine the major obstacles to defying and resisting Nazi authority. 3. Students will analyze various forms of spiritual and religious resistance. 4. Students will identify and analyze the various forms of Jewish and non-Jewish unarmed resistance. 5. Students will analyze Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust. 6. Students will demonstrate insight into the reasons why non-Jewish rescuers risked their lives to save Jews, 7. Students will investigate countries that responded to the plight of the Holocaust victims and offered refuge. 8. Students will reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of their understanding of resistance, intervention and rescue.
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UNIT VI GENOCIDE Students will understand the nature of genocide and the causes, manifestations and efforts at prevention.
Performance Objectives: 1. Students will develop and articulate a definition of genocide. 2. Students will explain the political difficulties involved in labeling an occurrence genocide. 3. Students will analyze the root causes of events other than the Holocaust that have been identified as genocides. 4. Students will analyze the work of non-governmental agencies and the creation of a permanent international criminal court in relation to the establishment of an early warning system for the prevention of genocide. 5. Students will reassess their generalizations about human nature in light of their study of genocide.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Goals and Objectives
UNIT VII ISSUES OF CONSCIENCE AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY Students will analyze society’s moral codes and assess issues of conscience and moral responsibility and their effect.
Performance Objectives: 1. Students will analyze the concepts of responsibility, values and morality. 2. Students will be able to differentiate between a crime and a war crime. 3. Students will examine the organization and set up of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, and compare and contrast the sentences given to the 22 original Nazi defendants. 4. Students will study and analyze the wider issues of conscience beyond the scope of the first set of Nuremberg Trials. 5. Students will assess the relationship between the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. 6. Students will discuss individual and collective responsibility for the Holocaust. 7. Students will evaluate the uniqueness and universality of the Holocaust. 8. Students will assess the reality of attempts at Holocaust denial and formulate appropriate responses to such attempts within the principles of a democratic society. 9. Students will examine post-Holocaust persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe. 10. Students will examine the impact of the Holocaust upon post-Holocaust life of survivors, their children and their grandchildren. 11. Students will reflect upon and demonstrate the meaning of their study of the Holocaust and genocides for their future and that of society. 12. Students will reevaluate their previous generalizations about human nature. Affective Objectives: Effectively taught curricula on the Holocaust and genocides should result in student attainment of the following affective objectives: I . Students will demonstrate behaviors that are respectful of individuals regardless of differences based upon factors related to race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender, disability, economic status, or sexual orientation. 2. Students will demonstrate awareness of the principles of a democratic society and the personal and collective responsibility necessary to preserve them. 3. Students will demonstrate a sense of empathy with those who have suffered violations of their human rights, such as victims and survivors of the Holocaust and other historic and contemporary genocides. 4. Students will demonstrate a willingness to take appropriate action when observing or becoming aware of a violation of human rights. 5. Students will be aware of and sensitive to the personal and universal consequences of indifference to the preservation of human rights. 6. Students will demonstrate an awareness of how government can preserve or violate human rights.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
7. Students will take appropriate action when confronted with information intended to distort or deny history, such as that presented by deniers of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. 8. Students will become critical consumers of information from the various sources available to them in our technological world, including the Internet. 9. Students will demonstrate an appreciation for the courageous and heroic behaviors demonstrated by many whose human rights were violated in modern history, including victims and survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. 10. Students will make a commitment to continue their learning about the Holocaust and genocides as a means of furthering their understanding and helping them to work toward the creation of a more humane and more just world. 11. Students will increase their voluntary involvement in causes designed to fight bigotry and hatred, and promote and preserve human rights. 12. Students will continue to reassess their understanding of human nature and apply their newly acquired understandings to the way they lead their lives
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
“FLAME”
UNIT I
AN INTRODUCTION TO A
Unit I
UNIT I AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES: THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
T
he Holocaust refers to the period of history, from 1933-1945, during which approximately six million Jews became victims of Nazi Germany and its collaborators throughout Europe. In their attempt to annihilate all Jews in Europe, the Nazis, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, developed a systematic plan that they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” During the Holocaust, millions lost their lives through starvation, shooting, torture and gassing in camps built for the purpose of killing people. As Nazi control of various parts of Europe progressed during this time period, millions of other innocent people became targets of their wrath, with approximately five million deaths among them. A study of the Holocaust and genocides is complex and requires students to examine a range of factors in an attempt to improve their understanding of the fundamental causes and vast implications involved. The units in this curriculum deal with these factors with progressively increasing scope and depth. Following the current unit, the study will include views of prejudice and genocide; the rise of Nazism; the progression from persecution to mass murder; resistance, intervention and rescue; genocide; and issues of conscience. This study begins by focusing the student’s attention, not on the Holocaust per se, but on a more generic analysis of human behavior. In Unit 1, students will be asked to examine (1) various theories about human nature and behavior, and to grapple with issues concerning the human potential for good and evil. They will examine the degree to which people are independent beings acting primarily on their intentions, or, at the other end of the spectrum, mere reflections of their environments. Students will examine (2) aggression and cruelty, (3) the positive and negative behaviors associated with obedience, conformity and silence; (4) the positive behavior associated with acts of courage, integrity and empathy, and (5) the behavior of the perpetrator, victim, collaborator, bystander, resister and rescuer in various circumstances, both historic and contemporary. They will be encouraged to relate these concepts and topics to their existing knowledge and life experiences.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
At the conclusion of this unit, (6) each student will write a generalization that reflects his or her view of human nature. This generalization will be revisited at the end of each succeeding unit and, where deemed necessary, revised by the student to reflect possible changes in view as a result of newly acquired knowledge. It must be noted that Unit I and any of its activities, in and of themselves, do not constitute “Holocaust and Genocide Education,” but are designed to help students begin to think about some of the key concepts and issues they will explore in greater depth as their study progresses. The development of a greater understanding of the Holocaust and genocides requires an in-depth study of the topics found in the remaining units of this curriculum guide.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I
UNIT I:
AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDES: THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR
UNIT GOAL: Students will develop an understanding of various theories of human nature and behavior. PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Note: The notation (READING #) in this column indicates that a copy of the article is included in this curriculum guide.
1. Students will discuss general theories of human nature and relate these to personal experiences.
A. Prior to your study of the Holocaust, reflect upon and discuss your view of human nature.
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1.
Read and discuss the article My Name is Adolf Eichmann.
Bruce, Lenny. “My Name Is Adolf Eichmann.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #1)
2.
Read article, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Use the questions at the end of the article as a catalyst for writing your reflections in a journal; or conduct a discussion in a small group, reporting and discussing your group’s findings.
2.
Frankl, Victor. “Man’s Search for Meaning.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #2)
3.
Administer and discuss results of The Human Nature Survey.
3.
Furman, Harry ed. “The Human Nature Survey.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #3)
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES B. Compare and contrast various theories of human nature reflected in the articles and excerpts that follow. 1.
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
2.
Man is Rational, John Locke
3.
Man is Evil, Thomas Hobbes
4.
Man is the Product of His Environment, B.F. Skinner
C.
View the video or select excerpts from To Kill a Mockingbird, and discuss the impact of prejudice in the 1930’s in the United States. What do the character traits of the main characters reveal about human behavior?
24
D. Read the book or excerpts from Profiles in Courage, which relates to modern men and women of courage.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Chartock, Roselle, and Jack Spencer, Eds. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 47-55. (READING #4)
C. Resources for Section C: 1.
Harper, Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner, 1982. Or, the video of the same title.
D. Resources for Section D: Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. New York: Harper Perennial Library, 2000.
Analyze the issues confronted by these people, their attitudes and actions taken, and determine why they acted as they did. Present your findings in a panel discussion, an essay or in a class discussion.
E.
Find theories and expressions reflected in the lyrics of modern music that relate to human nature. Share the lyrics and/or play the
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
E.
Resources for Section E:
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
music for the class, and lead a discussion on what the lyrics seem to reveal about the views of human nature that are depicted. In addition to the following examples, you may identify your own.
2. Students will examine aggression and cruelty as parts of human nature.
1.
Pressure, by Billy Joel
1.
Joel, Billy. The Stranger. Audio CD. Sony/Columbia.1998 (READING #5)
2.
Pieces of You, by Jewel
2.
Jewel. Pieces of You. CD. Atlantic Recording Corp. 1996 (READING #6)
3.
Doctor My Eyes, by Jackson Browne
3.
Browne, Jackson, Doctor My Eyes. CD. Elektra Entertainment Group: Division of Warner Brothers,1997. (READING #7)
4.
Willing to Fight, by Ani De Franco
4.
Di Franco, Ani. “Willing to Fight.” Living In Clip. Live Concert Album. Righteous Babe Records. 1997
A. Define aggressive behavior and provide examples to illustrate this definition, using the resources listed below. Express your view on whether aggressive behavior is a natural part of human behavior.
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
View the video or read the book Lord of the Flies, a popular novel of the 1950’s, in which English school children are air-wrecked on an island and become involved in aggressive behavior.
1.
Golding, William. “Beast from Water.” Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin USA, 1999.
2
View and discuss the video Set Straight on Bullies. Relate the damaging effects of bullies on all
2.
Set Straight on Bullies. Videocassette. New York: Anti-Defamation League.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
concerned and share personal experiences you may have had with bullies. 3. Read Sources of Aggression and summarize the theories of aggression that are described and discuss which of these theories may be supported by your own observations.
4. Discuss the dilemmas inherent in the following:
3.
Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan, and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1984. (READING #8)
4a. Furman, Harry, ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #9)
a.
The Mayor’s Choice
b.
The Milgram “Shock” Experiment
4b. Milgram, Stanley. “The Milgram ‘Shock’ Experiment” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 9-10 (READING #10)
c.
Project X (the video)
4c. Milgram Experiment. Dir. Dr. Stanley Milgram. Film. Penn State Audio-Visuals. 800-826-0132, 1962.
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Project X. Dir. Jonathan Kaplan. Perf. Matthew Broderick, et. al. Videocassette. 1987. Rating: PG d.
Auschwitz: If You Cried You Died (Documentary video on the journey of two Holocaust survivors who revisit Auschwitz.)
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
4d. Auschwitz: If You Cried, You Died. Perf. David Mandel and Mike Vogel. Videocassette. Moore Foundation, 1991. (1-317-848-5134).
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 5.
Read the article Columbine Teens Found Validation In Reprogrammed Hi Tech Games and the poem written by an anonymous student from Columbine High School. Follow-up activities could include:
•
Discuss with the class what the article suggests.
•
Write reactions to the poem and share these in small groups.
•
From the poem, write a resolution to inform and assist classmates in need.
•
Discuss whether computer games can contribute to the development of aggression and cruelty in young people.
6.
View the film Blue Eyed, and use the following questions as a guide for analysis, writing activities and/or discussion.
•
What is being done to the people with the collar? Why?
•
How do you feel about what is happening to them?
•
At what personal cost has Jane Elliot done her work?
•
What effect did it have on her 3rd grade class in their adult life?
•
What does she say is the only thing that makes people change?
•
What insights did you gain from watching the tape?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 5a. “Columbine Teens Found Validation in Reprogrammed Hi Tech Games.” Response: Simon Wiesenthal Center World Report. Summer/Fall 1999. (READING #11) 5b. “Anonymous Poem by Columbine High School Student,” placed on the Internet (READING #12)
27 6.
Blue Eyed. Videocassette. San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel. (149 8th Street, Suite 420, San Francisco, CA 94103, 415-621-6196)
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
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What can you do to help end prejudice?
(NOTE: Jane Elliot became concerned about how people are treated in the United States after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She had been heavily influenced by a book about Nazi doctors during the Holocaust and could not understand how highly cultured people could act so inhumanely. She taught in a white community in Iowa and decided to conduct a two-day experiment with her third grade class to have them better understand what prejudice does both to the victim and to the perpetrator. This led to the film The Eye of the Storm and to national attention for her blue eyed/ brown eyed classroom exercise. It resulted in her lifelong work to help people feel and understand prejudice, and to help stop it in their own lives.)
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES B. Read and interpret experts’ views on aggression, using the following resources as a basis:
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Man Is Innately Aggressive, by Robert Ardrey
1.
Ardrey, Robert. “Man Is Innately Aggressive.” Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 53. (READING # 13 )
2.
The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi
2.
Levi, Primo. “The Drowned and the Saved.” Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Macmillan, 1996. (READING # 14 )
3.
Conformist Aggression, by Eric Fromm
3.
Fromm, Eric. “Conformist Aggression.” The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. (READING # 15 )
4.
3. Students will examine the positive and negative behaviors associated with obedience, conformity and silence.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Memory of the Camps (Recommended for mature high school seniors, only.)
4.
Memory of the Camps. Frontline. WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, Boston, The Documentary Consortium, 1993.
A. Examine the concepts of obedience, silence and conformity, using the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1.
In small groups, identify examples in your lives when obedience, silence and conformity have been beneficial to the individual, and when they have been beneficial to society. Group conclusions should be shared with the class followed by a teacher-led discussion.
Student-generated resources.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
Read the lyrics, and/or listen to the song, The Sounds of Silence, by Paul Simon.
•
Write your interpretation of the lines: “People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening.” Discuss your interpretation with the class.
•
What is the “neon god to which people pray?”
•
Are the lyrics as relevant today as they were when Simon introduced this song in the 1960’s?
3.
Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the Nazi era who was imprisoned for speaking out against Nazi racial policies. Read the Quotation from Pastor Niemoller and discuss its meaning for society.
•
Research current world events to determine whether the quotation is relevant to today.
•
What are the implications for the individual? for society?
4.
Read the poem, The Hangman, by Maurice Ogden.
•
Describe who the Hangman is and what is symbolized.
•
Does this poem have relevance to our lives today? Explain, using specific examples.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2.
Simon, Paul. The Sounds of Silence. Warner Bros., 1968. (Lyrics found in Furman, Harry, ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #16)
3.
Locke, Hubert and Marcia Sachs Littell, eds. “Quotation from Pastor Niemoller,” Remembrance and Recollection. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990. (READING #17)
4.
Ogden, Maurice. “The Hangman.” Margot Stern Strom and William Parsons, eds. Facing History and Ourselves. Brookline, MA: FHO, 1984. (READING #18); and The Hangman. Videocassette (12 min.). Carlsbad, CA: CRM Films (1-800-421-0833).
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 5.
Read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski, and discuss how people can rationalize and “cover” their participation in horror in order to survive. Write an essay in which you explain how this author effectively uses words to explain the unexplainable. Use quotations from the story to illustrate your points. An alternative essay topic: Analyze the strong will of human beings to survive, using examples from current events.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 5.
Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin USA, 1992. or Brown, Jean E., Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, eds., Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology. Lincolnwood, Ill.: National Textbook Company, 1997.
B. Discuss the consequences of silence as reflected in the following readings:
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
The Dying Girl That No One Helped, by Loudon Wainwright. This is the classic story of Kitty Genovese who was assaulted and eventually murdered outside a New York apartment complex while neighbors took no action. Use the questions at the end of the reading as a guide.
1.
Wainwright, Loudon. “The Dying Girl That No One Helped.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING # 19)
2.
An Olympic Athlete’s Dilemma: What Would You Do? (This dilemma story focuses on a decision by an American Olympics athlete to participate in, or withdraw from, the 1936 Olympics held in Munich, Germany. Excellent discussion questions accompany the reading, which can be used for class discussion, small group discussions, or writing assignments.)
2.
Furman, Harry, ed. “An Olympic Athlete’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING # 20 )
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 3.
Discuss The Bad Samaritan, a 60 Minutes piece about David Cash, who saw a young girl being assaulted and murdered by a friend in May of 1997 and did nothing.
•
What options were open to Cash? What were the probable consequences of each available choice?
•
How do you feel about his explanation of what he chose to do?
•
What is our responsibility in situations like this?
•
Contrast Cash’s action with that of David Kaczynski, who led the FBI to his brother, Ted (the “Unabomber”), whom he suspected of being the infamous terrorist.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3a. “The Bad Samaritan.” 60 Minutes. 28 Sept 1998 3b. Pitts, Leonard. “Of man and beast: Two men, two killers, one conscience.” The Press. Atlantic City. 13 Sept 1998 E5 (READING #21)
C. Examine the dangers of conformity and obedience practiced by cults through the following activities:
C.
1.
View the video, The Wave, and/or read the book: Playlet: The Wave.
1a. The Wave. Videocassette. Films Incorporated (312-878-2600)
•
Explain why students in the experiment complied with the directions.
1b. Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine, 7 Oct 1981. (READING #22)
• In small groups, grapple with the question, “Might we have responded any differently? Why or why not?”
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Resources for Section C:
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
•
A follow-up discussion of the groups’ findings may conclude this activity.
2.
Read and discuss The Ashes of Waco about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. Why has there been much questioning of the government’s actions in this tragedy?
2.
“Children of the Cult.” Newsweek. 17 May 1993: 48-54. and Reaves, Dick. The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988.
3.
Locate articles on the Bob Jones People’s Temple, a cult that encouraged 1000 people to take their lives on November 18, 1978.
3.
Consult The New York Times Index; Infotract Index to Magazines; or the Internet, using Keyword: cults.
•
Write a short report comparing this cult with either the Branch Davidians or Heaven’s Gate (below).
•
How do you account for the suicide of those in the People’s Temple?
4.
Read the two New York Times articles on cults, using the following questions as guides for analysis and discussion:
•
What did Heaven’s Gate demand of its members that a mainstream religion would not?
•
How did Heaven’s Gate practice mind control?
•
Account for the secrecy of the cult’s activities.
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4.
Bruni, Frank. “Odyssey of Regimentation Carried Cult Over Decades.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997, and “The Overview: Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997. (READING #23)
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
•
Why do you think anyone would join such a group?
5.
Read The Power and the Glory, about Alfons Heck, a bright, promising and enthusiastic sixyear old German boy who lived on a Rhineland farm when the Nazis took power in 1933. The selections in this reading trace Alfons’ journey in the Hitler Youth. Determine what seduced Alfons to join this militaristic organization at age 10. Write your conclusions and share them in class discussion.
5.
Ayer, Eleanor H., Alfons Heck and Helen Waterford. “The Power and the Glory.” Parallel Journeys. New York: Atheneum. 1995. (READING #24)
6.
View the video Heil HitlerConfessions of a Hitler Youth. Identify and discuss the major factors that attracted young people to Hitler Youth and the feelings that are reflected in this video.
6.
Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth. Videocassette. HBO, 1991. (30 minutes) Ambrose Video Publishing, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2245, N.Y., NY 10019
7.
View the video Swing Kids, about youthful resistance and the consequences of choices in Nazi Germany. Discuss and/or write your reactions to the choices made and the consequences.
7.
Swing Kids. Dir. Thomas Carter. Perf. Robert Sean Leonard, et. al. Videocassette. 1992. (Rated PG-13.)
8.
Read and discuss I Was a Violent Skinhead, about Frank Meeink, a former neo-Nazi skinhead, who regrets his violent past and is trying to make up for it.
8.
Meeink, Frank, as told to Laura D’Angelo. “I Was A Violent Skinhead.” Scholastic Scope, 4 Oct 1999. 18-20. (READING #25)
•
Who do you think is responsible for Frank becoming a skinhead?
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
4. Students will recognize the positive behavior associated with acts of courage, integrity and empathy.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
If Frank’s cousin had been a baseball star instead of a skinhead, do you think Frank would still have become a skinhead?
•
Evaluate Frank’s attempt to make up for his violent past. Is there anything else he could or should do?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Drawing from the following sources, interpret the meaning of courage, integrity and empathy. Express your interpretation through a visual medium (poster, chart, PowerPoint, for example.)
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Bystander’s Dilemma Series:
1.
•
Era of McCarthyism
•
Era of slavery
•
Youth gangs
The Bystander’s Dilemma— Thinking Skills and Values Exploration in the Social Studies. Zenger. (READING #26) [Six (6) reproducible case studies, available from Social Studies School Service.]
•
Heidi’s dilemma (See Reading #26)
2.
Conversion or Emigration: What Would You Do?
2.
Furman, Harry ed. “Conversion or Emigration: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING #27)
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
3.
His Name Was Jackie Robinson (One-act play)
3.
“His Name Was Jackie Robinson.” Creative Classroom. Jan./Feb. 1993. (READING # 28)
4.
Complete a project in which you depict community examples of people caring for others: examples may include soup kitchens, clothing drives, homeless, senior citizens, etc. Sample projects include the following:
4.
Teacher and student created resources.
•
Keep a journal to record examples of community caring activities.
•
Develop a scrapbook of articles and photographs depicting examples of people caring for others.
•
With a partner, videotape various aspects of several community service projects or activities. Include interviews with the service providers and those who benefit from the service. Edit and present the final videotape to the class.
•
Invite several people who are involved in community service projects (those who volunteer their services, as well as those who receive the service) to class to discuss the meaning derived from the projects.
5.
Study the lyrics to, and listen to the songs, We Are the World, and Imagine and write responses to the following questions in your journal:
5.
We Are the World (Lyrics). USA for Africa. Family of God. Audio CD. 1991. (READING # 29) Imagine (Lyrics). John Lennon. Bag Productions Inc., 1971. (READING # 30)
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
What kind of world is envisioned?
•
What would people have to do to achieve this vision?
•
Will this be difficult to achieve?
•
What do you believe is needed for real change to occur in the world? Do you believe this is possible?
•
See questions on Imagine at the end of the reading.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Note: You may choose to perform or play these songs for the class prior to a class discussion of the lyrics. 6.
If you have read or viewed one or more of the following sources, discuss or write about the role model behavior exhibited by the real people and/or fictional characters portrayed:
•
Inherit the Wind
•
To Kill a Mockingbird
•
Red Badge of Courage
•
Profiles in Courage
•
The Scarlet Letter
•
Of Mice and Men
7.
Read “Marion Pritchard,” from The Courage to Care, using the questions provided at the end of the reading to guide a class discussion.
6.
Consult the books you have read.
7.
Rittner, Carol, and Sondra Myers, eds. “Marion Pritchard.” The Courage To Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 28-33. (READING # 31)
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
38
5. Students will compare and contrast the behavior of perpetrator, victim, collaborator, bystander, resister and rescuer.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
8.
Identify three personalities of the present, or historical figures, who you admire and consider to be positive role models. Discuss reasons why you selected these examples.
8.
Teacher and student-identified resources.
9.
Select and report on three current events and issues within the last three months that reflect positive behavior of courage, integrity or caring.
9.
Teacher and student-identified resources.
A. Brainstorm and reach consensus on the meaning of the following terms using one or more of the sub-topics and resources listed:
A. Resources for Section A:
1. Perpetrator
1.
Perpetrator:
a.
Star Wars Trilogy (video)
a.
Star Wars Trilogy: Star Wars; The Empire Strikes Back; and Return of the Jedi. Written and directed by George Lucas. Fox Video, 1983. (Rated PG)
b.
Child Abuse
b.
Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti. Videocassette. Crowing Rooster Arts, 1996. (National Labor Committee, 275 7th Avenue, New York 10001. 212-242-0986)
c.
The death in 1998 of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming college student. (Note: The article by Wypijewski is a provocative analysis of the brutal death of Shepard, and the prejudice, bigotry and homophobia reflected in the perpetrators.)
c.
Roebuck, Karen. “The Why in Wyoming.” U.S. News and World Report. 29 March 1999. 40. (READING # 32)
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Wypijewski, JoAnn. “A Boy’s Life: For Matthew Shepard’s Killers, What Does it Take to Pass as a Man?” Harper’s Magazine September 1999.
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES d.
Streisand, Betsy. “Death in the Prairie.” U.S. News and World Report. 26 October 1998. 23-25. (READING # 33)
2. Victim
2.
Victim
a.
Same examples as above in #1 may be used.
a.
Same as in #1 above.
b.
Examples from the Holocaust years.
b.
Friedman, Ina R. “The Reichstag is Burning.” Escape or Die: True Stories of Teens Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Yellow Moon, 1991. (READING # 34) and Friedman, Ana R. and Ina R. Friedman. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
d.
Murder of James Byrd, Jr.: Jasper, Texas Case June 7, 1998
3.
Collaborator
3.
Collaborator
a.
“The Human Lives Behind the Labels” (A teacher describes his efforts to help students examine the issues regarding the use of “global sweatshops.”)
a.
Bigelow, Bill. “The Human Lives Behind the Labels: The Gobal Sweatshop, Nike and the Race to the Bottom.” Rethinking Schools: An Urban Educational Journal. Vol. 11, No. 4, Summer 1997. (http://www.rethinkingschool s.org/Archives/11_04/swetm.h tm)
b.
See Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti.
b.
See reference above, 5 A1b
4.
Bystander
4.
Bystander
a.
“Miami Man Dies at Hands of Gunman”
a.
Pitts, Leonard, Jr. “Miami Man Dies At Hands of a Gunman—But Hands of Passersby Are Bloody, As Well.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. 17 April 1997 (READING # 35)
39
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
b.
“The Dying Girl That No One Helped” (referenced above)
b.
Furman, Harry, ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (SEE READING #19 REFERENCED ABOVE.)
c.
“The Indifferent Ones”
c.
Furman. Ibid. “The Indifferent Ones.”(READING # 36)
d.
“Anna’s Dilemma”
d.
Furman. Ibid. “Anna’s Dilemma.” (READING # 37)
e.
Bystanders’ Dilemma Series
e.
Referenced above, 4. A. 1.
f.
Use current school-based examples.
f.
Teacher and student-identified
g.
Outside of a Small Circle of Friends (Phil Ochs) Lyrics: O look outside the window There’s a woman being grabbed They’ve dragged her to the bushes And now she’s being stabbed Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain But Monopoly is so much fun I’d hate to blow the game And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends
g.
Ochs, Phil. “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends.” There and Now. Rhino Records, Inc., 1990.
5.
Resister
5.
Resister
a.
Anti-Vietnam War Protestors. “The Unknown Nonsoldier” should have particular interest to students in New Jersey because it is about New Jerseyan, John F. Khanlian, who, as a student at Columbia University in the late
a.
Davis, Peter. “The Unknown Nonsoldier.” Esquire. December 1983.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
1960’s, chose to resist our government’s Vietnam War policies through peaceful protest. In the year 2002, educator Khanlian is employed by the N.J. State Department of Education. The reading provides an excellent overview of the turmoil of the times and Khanlian’s life and role in the protest movement as a person of conscience. (Note: This extensive article may be the focus of an assignment for several students.)
b.
c.
“Rosa Parks.”
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (See Questions for Analysis and Discussion at the end of the reading.)
b.
c.
Levy, Peter B., ed. “Rosa L. Parks: Recollections,” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. (READING #38) and Ferguson, Cynthia, Melissa J. Greenwald and Randall M. Miller, eds. “Brown, Buses and Bombs.” Is There A Dream for Today? A Civil Rights Curriculum Resource. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998. (READING # 39) Levy, Peter B., ed. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. (READING # 40)
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
6.
Rescuers
6.
Rescuers
a.
Assignment: Rescue-The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. (Available in paperback and videocassette.) Fry was an American who volunteered to go to Marseilles in 1940, following the fall of France, for the Emergency Rescue Committee. Originally sent to rescue only the most famous European intellectuals from possible surrender to the Gestapo, Fry saved over 2000 refugees, despite opposition by the Vichy France and U.S. authorities. He was expelled from France in 1941 “for helping Jews and antiNazis”. His story illustrates what one person can do to help others in need even under adverse conditions.
a.
Fry, Varian. Assignment: Rescue: An Autobiography by Varian Fry. New York: Scholastic, Inc., published in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 1999. Assignment: Rescue—The Story of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee. Narrated by Meryl Streep. A Richard Kaplan Film. Varian Fry Foundation Project/IRC. Videocassette. 1999. Assignment: Rescue—Study Guide and Resource Guide. Fourth Edition. Varian Fry Foundation Project/IRC. Menlo Park, CA, 1999. (Lesson plans for middle and high schools can be found on the website: http://www.holocaust-trc.org).
b.
Doctors Without Borders is an organization of 2000 men and women who volunteer to put their lives on hold to help victims of war and other disasters, and are making a real difference in numerous hot-spots in the world, from Kosovo to Afghanistan to Sudan, where they are saving lives as volunteers.
b.
Kindermans, Jean-Marie. “Introduction to 1999 Activity Report” Webplaced: Doctors Without Borders. 14 December 1999, and “1999: Year in Review.” Web site: http://www.doctorswithoutbor ders.org
42
After reviewing “Introduction to 1999 Activity, and 1999: Year In Review,” on their web site, write your reflections regarding why you believe these volunteers become involved. Your reflections may be in the form of a reflective essay, a poem, or expressed through a medium such as art. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES B. Choose one of the following to illustrate your understanding of perpetrator, victim, bystander, resister and rescuer. 1.
Individual essay
2.
Discussion
3.
Group work
4.
Collage, play or poem
5.
Original art work
6.
Original lyrics/song
7.
Photographic essay (print, video or computer)
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES B. Resources for Section B: Student-identified sources.
43
The above works can be displayed prominently in the school’s auditorium, cafeteria, web site, all-purpose room, library, etc.
6. Students will develop generalizations that ref lect their individual views of human nature.
A. As a culminating activity to Unit I:
1.
Discuss your views about human nature. Do you believe that human beings are basically good or basically evil?
2.
In your journal or notebook, write a generalization that reflects your view of human nature. Throughout your study of the Holocaust and genocides, you will encounter additional
A. Resources for Section A: Student-developed generalizations.
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES information that may either reinforce your initial view of human nature or cause you to revise your generalization. Keep your generalization handy for future reference.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Unit I
READINGS INCLUDED IN UNIT I Reading#
Title/Reference
1. Bruce, Lenny. “My Name Is Adolf Eichmann.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 2. Frankl, Victor. “Man’s Search for Meaning.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 3. Furman, Harry, ed. “Human Nature: Opinion Survey.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 4. “The Prince” by Niccolo Machiavelli; “Man Is Rational” by John Locke; “Man Is Evil” by Thomas Hobbes; and “Man is the Product of His Environment” by B.F. Skinner; in Chartock, Roselle, and Jack Spencer, eds. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 47-55. 5. Joel, Billy. “The Stranger.” Audio CD. Sony/Columbia.1998. 6. Jewel. “Pieces of You.” CD. Atlantic Recording Corp. 1996. 7. Browne Jackson, “Doctor My Eyes.” CD. Elektra Entertainment Group: Division of Warner Brothers, 1997. 8. Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan, and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1984. 9. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Mayor’s Choice: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 10. Milgram, Stanley. “The Milgram ‘Shock’ Experiment.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 11. “Columbine Teens Found Validation in Reprogrammed Hi Tech Games.” Response: Simon Wiesenthal Center World Report. Summer/Fall 1999. 12. “Anonymous Poem by Columbine High School Student,” placed on the Internet. 13. Ardrey, Robert. “Man Is Innately Aggressive.” Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 53.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: The Betrayal of Humanity
14. Levi, Primo. “The Drowned and the Saved.” Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Macmillan, 1996. 15. Fromm, Eric. “Conformist Aggression.” The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. 16. Simon, Paul. “The Sounds of Silence.” Warner Bros., 1968. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. 17. Locke, Hubert and Marcia Sachs Littell, eds. 'Quotation from Pastor Niemoller,' Remembrance and Recollection. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996. 18. Ogden, Maurice. “The Hangman.” Margot Stern Strom and William Parsons, eds. Facing History and Ourselves. Brookline, MA: FHO, 1984. 19. Wainwright, Louden. “The Dying Girl That No One Helped.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. 20. Furman, Harry, ed. “An Olympic Athlete’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
46
21. Pitts, Leonard. 'Of man and beast: Two men, two killers, one conscience.' The Press. Atlantic City. 13 Sept 1998. E5. 22. Playlet: “The Wave.” Scholastic Magazine, 7 Oct 1981. 23. Bruni, Frank. 'Odyssey of Regimentation Carried Cult Over Decades.' The New York Times. 29 March 1997, and 'The Overview: Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly.' The New York Times. 29 March 1997. 24. Ayer, Eleanor H., Alfons Heck and Helen Waterford. “The Power and the Glory.” Parallel Journeys. New York: Atheneum. 1995. 25. Meeink, Frank, as told to Laura D'Angelo. 'I Was A Violent Skinhead.' Scholastic Scope, 4 Oct 1999. 18-20. 26. “Heidi’s Dilemma.” The Bystander's Dilemma—Thinking Skills and Values Exploration in the Social Studies. Zenger. 27. Furman, Harry, ed. 'Conversion or Emigration: What Would You Do?”' The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 28. “His Name Was Jackie Robinson.” Creative Classroom. Jan./Feb. 1993.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I
29. We Are the World (Lyrics). USA for Africa. Family of God. Audio CD. 1991. 30. Imagine (Lyrics). John Lennon. Bag Productions Inc., 1971. 31. Rittner, Carol, and Sondra Myers, eds. “Marion Pritchard.” The Courage To Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 28-33. 32. Roebuck, Karen. 'The Why in Wyoming.' U.S. News and World Report. 29 March 1999. 40. 33. Streisand, Betsy. 'Death in the Prairie.' U.S. News and World Report. 26 October 1998. 23-25. 34. Friedman, Ina R. 'The Reichstag is Burning.' Escape or Die: True Stories of Teens Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Yellow Moon, 1991. 35. Pitts, Leonard, Jr. 'Miami Man Dies At Hands of a Gunman- But Hands of Passersby Are Bloody, As Well.' The Philadelphia Inquirer. 17 April 1997. 36. Furman, Harry, ed. 'The Indifferent Ones: In Germany” (by Ellen Switzer) and in Hungary (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 37. Furman, Harry, ed. 'Anna's Dilemma: What Would You Do?' The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 38. Levy, Peter B., ed. 'Rosa L. Parks: Recollections,' Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. 39. Ferguson, Cynthia, Melissa J. Greenwald and Randall M. Miller, eds. 'Brown, Buses and Bombs.' Is There A Dream for Today? A Civil Rights Curriculum Resource. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998. 40. Levy, Peter B., ed. 'Letter from Birmingham Jail.' Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
47
Unit I: READING #1
My Name is Adolf Eichmann Lenny Bruce In this selection by satirist Lenny Bruce, which he adapted from a poem by Catholic theologian Thomas Merton, Adolf Eichmann defends his role in the Holocaust. Eichmann was a “Jewish expert” in the Nazi SS who was responsible for the administration of the murder of the Jews of Europe. His argument raises disturbing questions about the nature of human evil and our own possible participation in such events.
M
48
y name is Adolf Eichmann The Jews came every day to vat they thought vould be fun in the showers. The mothers were quite ingenious They vould take the children and hide them in bundles of clothing. Ve found the children, scrubbed them, put them in chambers, and sealed them in. I vatched through the portholes as they vould daven and chant “Hey, mein Liebe, Heyyyy.” Ve took off their clean Jewish love-rings, removed their teeth and hair— for strategic defense. I made soap out of them, I made soap out of all of them; and they hung me, in full view of the prison yard. People say, “Adolf Eichmann should have been hung” Nein. Nein, if you recognize the whoredom
in all of you, that you vould have done the same, if you dared know yourselves. My defense? I vas a soldier. People laugh “Ha ha! This is no defense that you are a soldier.” This is trite. I vas a soldier, a good soldier. I saw the end of a conscientious day’s efforts. I saw all the work that I did. I, Adolf Eichmann, vatched through the portholes. I saw every Jew burned und turned into soap. Do you think yourselves better because you burned your enemies at long distances with missiles? Without ever seeing what you’d done to them? Hiroshima…Auf Wiedersehen…
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is Adolf Eichmann’s defense for his actions? 2. Does Eichmann’s description of himself as a soldier make any difference to you? Explain. 3. How do you react to Eichmann’s comparison of his actions with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the United States in World War II? 4. Is a man like Eichmann “evil”? Do you believe that there are certain human acts that are absolutely “good” or “evil” under any circumstances? What, then, is your definition of “good” and “evil”? DEFINITIONS Holocaust: liebe: daven: auf wiedersehen: SS:
from the Hebrew word “olah” which means “burnt offering.” The term is used to describe the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. German word meaning love. Yiddish word meaning to chant or pray. German word meaning goodbye. Nazi elite corps that was involved in the mass murder process.
Source: Bruce, Lenny. “My Name Is Adolf Eichmann.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #2
Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl The story of daily life in the concentration camps has been recorded in many books of testimony. Camp inmates were subjected to long days of arduous work while surviving on a diet of thin soup and moldy bread. Always subjected to continual humiliation from the SS guards, inmates had to learn to withstand an environment created to dehumanize them before they were killed. This selection by Dr. Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, begins to answer the question of how the inmate adjusted to life in the concentration camp. Frankl argues that the inmates had to find meaning in their suffering as a reason to go on living. Those who lost faith in the future were those most likely to die. Yet Frankl’s testimony goes far beyond the issue of survival in camps to the larger question of how humans deal with life itself.
T
he prisoner who had lost faith in the future — his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment — not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds…No blows. no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sickbay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta. and nothing bothered him any more. I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. My senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: “I would like to tell you something. Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me…I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.” “And when did you have this dream?” I asked. “In February, 1945,” he answered. It was then the beginning of March. “What did your dream voice answer?” Furtively he whispered to me. “March thirtieth. When F— told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew
nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty ninth, F— suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirtyfirst, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. The ultimate cause of my friend’s death was that the expected liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his body’s resistance against the latent typhus infection. His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness—and thus the voice of his dream was right after all. Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all…efforts regarding prisoners. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life. no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost… What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us…Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross… When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his
Source: Frankl, Victor. “Man’s Search for Meaning.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit I: READING #2
50
single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to be no chance of coming out of it alive. There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that… A very strict camp ruling forbade any efforts to save a man who attempted suicide. It was forbidden, for example, to cut down a man who was trying to hang himself. Therefore, it was all important to prevent these attempts from occurring. I remember two cases of would-be suicide. which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing. not a person. This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed
to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child’s affections. This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Why did the senior block warden die on March 31st? 2. What is meant by Nietzsche’s statement. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” 3. What does Frankl say about crying? 4. How can Frankl’s comments about suicide in the camps relate to the issue of increasing suicide today? DEFINITIONS furtively: slyly psychohygiene: the relationship between individual health and state of mind
Source: Frankl, Victor. “Man’s Search for Meaning.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #3
Human Nature: Opinion Survey What do you think the nature of human beings is? Are we born good or evil—or with a “blank page”? Based on your reading and on your own thinking, complete the survey below. Respond to each of the following statements with:
(AS) Agree Strongly (A) Agree (D) Disagree (DS) Disagree Strongly
_____ 1. Life is a constant struggle. Those not powerful enough to rise to the top deserve whatever they get.
_____12. Most people would want to avoid truth because it can cause pain.
______2. Most people are more likely to do evil rather than good. _____ 3. Most people are weak and lazy.
_____13. Since conscience can cause personal suffering, most people do not act from conscience. _____14. War is the natural outgrowth of human nature.
_____ 4. Most people cannot handle freedom. _____5.
Most people would prefer miracles rather than depend on the fruits of their own hard labor.
_____15. Most people need an authority to tell them what to do. Given your responses, summarize your own feelings about human nature and behavior.
_____ 6. Most people need something to worship. _____ 7. We should not hold high expectations about the capacity of people for compassion and kindness to each other. _____ 8. Most people would prefer not to make difficult decisions involving good and evil and the way in which society operates. _____9.
Most people are likely to conform rather than to maintain their individuality.
_____10. Most people cannot be trusted. _____11. Most people are indifferent and uninvolved about issues that involve social responsibility.
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Human Nature Survey.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit I: READING #4
INTRODUCTION
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he reading selections contained in this section are submitted in order to enable the student to put the Holocaust in a more personal context as to the nature of Man and see in himself the potential for evil. The High School student must decide, or at least grapple with, the question “Is Man basically good or evil?” Only by discussion of this profound question will the student understand the depth of human depravity that could produce and still does produce genocide(s). The intended outcome of this intellectual quest is the cessation of present genocide(s) and the prevention of future ones. These readings are presented in a variety of disciplines: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Political Science Philosophy Philosophy Psychology Psychology
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Man is Evil and Warlike by Thomas Hobbes Man is Rational by John Locke Man is a Product of His Environment by B.F. Skinner Man is Innately Aggressive by Robert Ardrey
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Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #4
THE NATURE OF MAN “the prince” Niccolo Machiavelli Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) (“The Prince”) was an Italian statesman and writer who is regarded as the first political philosopher of modern times. Among his writings are: The Prince and The Art of War. He believed In government by the people but felt that the Italians of his day were unfit to rule themselves. He Is concerned with the use and abuse of power.
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his, then, gives rise to the question “whether it be better to be beloved than feared, or to be feared than beloved.” It will naturally be answered that it would be desirable to be both the one and the other; but as it is difficult to be both at the same time, it is much more safe to be feared than to be loved when you have to choose between the two. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful and fickle, dissemblers, avoiders of danger, and greedy of gain. So long as you shower benefits upon them, they are all yours; they offer you their blood, their substance, their lives, and their children, provided the necessity for it is far off; but when it is near at hand, then they revolt. And -the prince who relies upon their words, without’ having otherwise provided for his security, is ruined; for friendships that are won by rewards, and not by greatness and nobility of soul, although deserved, yet are not real, and cannot be depended upon in time of adversity. Besides, men have less hesitation in offending one who makes himself beloved than one who makes himself feared; for love holds by a bond of obligation which, as mankind is bad, is broken on every occasion whenever it is for the interest of the obliged party to break it. But fear holds by the apprehension
of punishment which never leaves men. It being necessary then for a prince to know well how to employ the nature of the beasts, he should he able to assume both that of the fox and that of the lion; for while the latter cannot escape the traps laid for him, the former cannot defend himself against the wolves. A prince should be a fox, to know the traps and snares; and a lion, to be able to frighten the wolves; for those who simply hold to the nature of the lion do not understand their business. A sagacious prince then cannot and should not fulfill his pledges when their observance is contrary to his interest, and when the causes that induced him to pledge his faith no longer exist. If men were all good, then indeed this precept would be bad; but as men are naturally bad, and will not observe their faith toward you, you must, in the same way, not observe yours to them; and no prince ever yet lacked legitimate reasons with which to color his want of good faith. Innumerable modern examples could be given of this; and It could easily be shown how many treaties of peace and how many engagements, have been made null and void by the faithlessness of princes; and he who has best known how to play the fox has ever been the most successful.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION Investigate some classic approaches in The Holocaust Years to explaining human behavior. Discuss: 1. Is the human animal intrinsically good or bad? 2. Do we need to be controlled by authority? 3. Why do we accept authority? 4. Under what circumstances is authority necessary? 5. What insights can be gained from studying these philosophers and scientists? 6. How do the thoughts of people writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries apply to our present condition?
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
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Unit I: READING #4
THE NATURE OF MAN “man is evil and warlike” Thomas Hobbes Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) (“Man Is Evil and Warlike”) was an English political philosopher whose critical and negative perceptions of man were often unpopular. In his famous work Leviathan he was so critical of his government that this work was condemned by the British House of Commons in 1666 and Behemoth was censored. He also wrote The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic.
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rom this equality of ability arises equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies, and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavor to destroy or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to pass that where an invader has no more to fear than another man’s single power, if one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united to dispossess and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labor, but also of his life or liberty. And the invader again is in the like danger of another. And from this diffidence of one another there is no way for any man to secure himself so reasonable as anticipation—that is, by force or wiles to master the persons of all men he can, so long till he see no other power great enough to endanger him; and this is no more than his own conversation requires, and is generally allowed. Also, because there be some that take pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires, if others that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defense, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of
dominion over men being necessary to a man’s conservation, it ought to be allowed him. Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary, a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all. For every man looks that his companion should value him at the same rate he sets upon himself; and upon all signs of contempt or undervaluing naturally endeavors, as far as he dares (which among them that have no common power to keep them in quiet is far enough to make them destroy each other), to extort a greater value from his contemners by damage and from others by the example. So that in the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: first, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first makes men invade for gain, the second for safety, and the third for reputation. The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name. Hereby it is manifest that, during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #4
THE NATURE OF MAN “Man is rational” John Locke John Locke (1632-1704) (“Man Is Rational”) was an English philosopher who believed in civil liberty, religious tolerance, the power of reason, and the value of experience. His works include: Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Two Treatises on Civil Government and Essays on the Law of Nature.
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he state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. Men living together according to reason without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, are properly in the state of nature.
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Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
Unit I: READING #4
THE NATURE OF MAN “Man is a product of his environment” B. F. Skinner B. F. Skinner (b. 1904) (“Man Is a Product of His Environment”) is a professor of psychology at Harvard and a researcher who has won several awards for his contributions in the area of human behavior. He is the author of Walden Two, Science and Human Behavior, Verbal Behavior, and Beyond Freedom & Dignity.
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Q: Suppose that people who read your book, and take its message seriously, realize that they are controlled. Will they lose their feelings of freedom? Skinner: I don’t know. I certainly believe that my own behavior is entirely a function of three things—my genetic endowment, my past history as an individual (my family, my religious experience, my government, my schooling, the physical environment in which I have lived. and so on), and the present situation. I am absolutely sure that that is all there is in the determination of what I’m going to do at this very moment. But I don’t feel discouraged or unhappy about it at all. Q: You don’t feel like a puppet? Skinner: I don’t feel the least bit like a puppet. Operant conditioning is not pulling strings to make a person dance. It is arranging a world in which a person does things that affect that world, which in turn affects him. Q: When you come into the classroom and make children want to come to school, would you be controlling their behavior? Skinner: That’s right. A girl who teaches in a Kentucky sixth grade told me a good example. Her students were not doing their homework; they would not sit down and study; they ran around the room and talked a great deal. She decided to try some operant conditioning. Every Friday afternoon she held a lottery, and the child whose name was drawn out of a jar got a prize. Every Monday morning she would put the week’s prize on the wall. One week it was a Halloween costume, another a transistor radio. Whenever a pupil brought in his homework, he could write his name on a ticket and drop it in
the jar. Whenever he finished an assignment in class, he could do the same. The system changed the girl’s life as a teacher completely. Her pupils did all their homework; they sat quietly and listened to her, because something she said might be just the thing they could use to get another ticket with their name in the jar. Q: A number of your attackers charge that behavior modification is being used in China today, and they are horrified at the very thought that we might apply it that way in this country. Skinner: Yes, it is said that the word “fascism” surfaces frequently in discussions of my book. The critics are usually good enough to say that I am not fascist, but that I give aid and comfort to fascism. But every fascist state I’ve heard of uses aversive control. Its citizens behave as the government dictates because they are afraid not to do so. I’ve spent my life looking for alternatives to punitive control and arguing in their favor. I oppose standard totalitarian techniques and I want people to feel free and enjoy what they’re doing. But it may be true that I give aid and comfort to those who want to make any way of life more effective. What worries me is that in some curious way the struggle for freedom and dignity has made it impossible for us to take advantage of what we’re discovering about human behavior. If that proves to be the case, there has been lethal mutation in our culture that may bring it to an end. A fascist way of life might then gain an advantage, but I’m doing what I can to prevent it.
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #5
pressure Words and Music by Billy Joel You have to learn to pace yourself Pressure You’re just like everybody else Pressure You’ve only had to run so far So good But you will come to a place Where the only thing you feel Are loaded guns in your face And you’ll have to deal with Pressure You used to call me paranoid Pressure But even you can not avoid Pressure You turned the tap dance into your crusade Now here you are with your faith And your Peter Pan advice You have no scars on your face And you cannot handle pressure
Source: Joel, Billy. “Pressure.” Stranger. Audio CD. Sony/Columbia, 1998.
All grown up and no place to go Psych 1, Psych 2 What do you know? All your life is Channel 13 Sesame Street What does it mean? Pressure Pressure Don’t ask for help You’re all alone Pressure You’ll have to answer To your own Pressure I’m sure you’ll have some cosmic rationale But here you are in the ninth Two men out and three men on Nowhere to look but inside Where we all respond to Pressure Pressure All your life is Time Magazine
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Unit I: READING #6
PIECES OF YOU Music and Lyrics by Jewel She’s an ugly girl. Does it make you want to kill her? She’s an ugly girl. Do you want to kick in her face? She’s an ugly girl. She doesn’t pose a threat. She’s an ugly girl. Does that make you feel safe? Ugly Girl. Ugly girl. Do you hate her, ‘cause she’s pieces of you?
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She’s a pretty girl. Does she make you think nasty thoughts? She’s a pretty girl. Do you want to tie her down? She’s a pretty girl. Do you call her a bitch? She’s a pretty girl. Did she sleep with your whole town? Pretty girl. Pretty girl. Do you hate her, ‘cause she’s pieces of you? You say he’s a faggot. Does it make you want to hurt him? You say he’s a faggot. Do you want to kick in his brain? You say he’s a faggot. Does it make you sick to your stomach? You say he’s a faggot. Are you afraid you’re just the same? Faggot. Faggot. Do you hate him, ‘cause he’s pieces of you?
Source: Pieces of You. Jewel. CD. Atlantic Recording Corp., 1996. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
You say he’s a Jew. Does it mean that he’s tight? You say he’s a Jew. Do you want to hurt his kids tonight? You say he’s a Jew. He’ll never wear that funny hat again. You say he’s a Jew. As though being born was a sin. Oh Jew. Oh Jew. Do you hate him, ‘cause he’s pieces of you? Do you hate them, ‘cause they’re pieces of you?
QUESTIONS FOR PIECES OF YOU BY JEWEL 1. Why did Jewel use these four examples in her song? 2. Why is the song called, Pieces of You? 3. What do you think is the meaning of the line in the first verse, “Does that make you feel safe?” 4. What does Jewel mean in the third verse, with the line, “Are you afraid you’re just the same?” 5. How does the song address the issue of violence and hatred? Is violence the only final result to one’s reaction to these people?
Unit I: READING #7
doctor my eyes Music and Lyrics by Jackson Browne Doctor, my eyes have seen the years And the slow parade of fears without crying Now I want to understand I have done all that I could To see the evil and the good without hiding You must help me if you can Doctor, my eyes Tell me what is wrong Was I unwise To leave them open for so long
Doctor, my eyes Tell me what you see I hear the cries Just say if it’s too late for me Doctor, my eyes Cannot see the sky Is this the prize For having learned how not to cry
As I have wandered through this world And as each moment has unfurled I’ve been waiting To awaken from these dreams People go just where they will I never noticed them until I got this feeling That it’s later than it seems
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Source: Browne, Jackson. The Best of Jackson Browne. Elektra Entertainment Group. A Division of Warner Communications. 1997 [cd]
Unit I: READING #8
sources of aGgression
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ggression is so common that it can seem as a natural a part of human behavior as speaking or walking. Some theories have taken the view that aggression is universal in humans, an integral part of our nature. These theories have come both from psychoanalysis and biology, while social psychology has suggested that aggression is a reaction to the common human predicament of frustration.
Instinctual and Biological Theories Many writers have viewed humanity as inherently violent and have suggested that human behavior is determined by instincts that are the result of natural selection. An instinct is an inborn behavior pattern that is common to all members of a biological species. Early explanations of human aggressive behavior relied upon this concept of instinct. Aggression was viewed as innate—and inevitable.
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Freud’s Theory. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud hypothesized that all humans possess a death instinct, an aggressive urge, that must sometimes be expressed. According to Freud, society’s function is to control the expression of this death instinct, channeling the aggression into socially acceptable behaviors whenever possible. Playing football, for example, might be a socially acceptable substitute for more violent expressions of the death instinct. In developing his theory, Freud was influenced by the overwhelming violence in World War I. In trench warfare at Verdun, France, for example, over a million men were killed in a battle that decided nothing. To Freud it seemed that the death instinct had spilled out of the normal boundaries, that it was out of control. However, there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a death instinct. The Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that watching theatrical tragedies purged the viewers of their violent emotions and passions. Using this idea, Freud hypothesized that socially acceptable
aggression could be used to reduce the tension produced by repression of the death instinct. (When people repress a thought, they unconsciously stop thinking about it and avoid remembering it.) He called this process by Aristotle’s term, catharsis. Freud’s idea of catharsis was later overgeneralized, and some writers suggested that anything you could do to “get it out of your system” would reduce your aggressiveness. Research, however, does not support this idea. A review of the literature in this area indicates that watching scenes of violence (such as on TV or a film), attacking inanimate objects (such as breaking a window), and verbally attacking others do not reduce aggressive behavior (Baron, 1983). In some cases these acts make people more aggressive. The idea that engaging in socially acceptable, aggressive sports — another form of catharsis — will make people generally less aggressive is also not true. Engaging in or observing aggressive sports or viewing media violence typically leads to increased rather than decreased aggression (Quanty, 1976). Aggression against others who have provoked one sometimes does lead to reduced aggression, but only for a short period, and even this effect has not been found in all studies (Baron, 1983). Evidence supporting the idea of catharsis is outweighed by considerably more evidence showing that it either has no effect or actually leads to more aggression. Freud’s theory of a death instinct has not stood the test of time, and his theory of the beneficial effects of the direct expression of hostility is also unsupported by the research data. But his theory of the relationship between aggression and humor is still viable. Freud argued that although people repress their aggressive urges, these urges constantly strive for expression, and when they can be expressed in a socially acceptable manner, they will be. Is aggressive humor funnier than nonaggressive humor? In one study a group of people, both students and nonstudents, were asked to rank a series of cartoons from the New Yorker magazine according to their funniness. A second group ranked the cartoons
Source: Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott Foresman and Co., 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #8
according to their aggressiveness. There was a strong correlation between the two rankings. Aggressive cartoons were thought to be funnier (McCauley, Woods, Coolidge, & Kulick, 1983). Freud’s theory is not the only one that predicts this outcome, though, and the data do not conclusively show that his theory is better than others on this point. As the authors of this study note, “Serious study of the nonserious is no laughing matter.” Ethology. The study of animal behavior patterns is called ethology. In King Solomon’s Ring (1952), Konrad Lorenz, one of ethology’s founders, described an incident involving two mourning doves confined to a small cage. While Lorenz was away one of the birds pecked the other to death, a feat that must have required several hundred pecks, since the birds were small and not strong. Lorenz realized that such attacks rarely lead to death in natural settings because the victim can flee its attacker. He reasoned that fighting between members of a species such as the mourning dove serves to scatter its members, thus allowing them to take better advantage of land and food resources. Aggression has also been credited with promoting the survival of the fittest animals, with only the quickest or strongest mating and carrying on the species. Lorenz suggested that humans have a basic aggressive instinct and that this instinct enables the human species to survive. According to his theory, aggression has become undesirable in humans because we have developed weapons that may have catastrophic consequences. He suggested that animals born with powerful weapons, such as huge jaws or claws, are genetically programmed with inhibitory mechanisms that stop them from killing each other. When two wolves fight, for example, the loser at a critical point deliberately bares his throat, whereupon the victor stops attacking. Lorenz argued that, although we have developed powerful weapons, humans have no such inhibitory mechanism to control their use. Like Freudian theory, the ethological position presents a sweeping theory of human aggression. But humans fight for a much wider range of reasons than do animals, and human aggression is affected by
Cartoons with aggressive content are rated as more humorous, perhaps because laughing at them is a socially acceptable way of releasing hostility.
cultural factors. This does not deny that there are biological influences on human aggression. The physiological processes of aggression may be the same in humans and other mammals. But in humans these processes interact with higher mental processes, especially with people’s past learning and with their appraisal of a situation (Lagerspetz, 1981). Even when a biological condition, such as the presence of androgens in the bloodstream, is shown to have specific effects on the aggressive behavior of animals such as rats, the results cannot be directly generalized to humans because of the moderating influence of social learning and thought (Benton, 1981). Identical aggressive behavior in humans can have different causes. Ignoring the effects of culture and of social learning upon humans leads to what has been called the “myth of the beast,” the idea that we are just like our less complex relations in the animal world.
Frustration and Aggression A common-sense explanation of Jack McGarrity’s fighting in the football game is that he was frustrated. His team was losing, he was upset, his father was yelling at him, and he was being hit. It was just too much. When the pile-up brought him face-to-face with a boy on the other team, he started a fight. The idea that frustration leads to aggression was introduced in 1939 by a group of psychologists at Yale University (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939). They defined frustration as the blocking of goal-directed activity. People want or expect their actions to lead to a certain goal or
Source: Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott Foresman and Co., 1984.
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Unit I: READING #8
weak (Geen & Berkowitz, 1967) or if the person thinks that aggression is appropriate in the situation (Burnstein & Worchel, 1962). Football players usually do not fight during games, where fighting is specifically discouraged and the participants are likely to be ejected from the game. By contrast, fighting between players during hockey games is a common occurrence. It is more or less expected, and the punishment for fighting is less severe — one is merely benched for a short period. Frustration can lead to aggression, then, but does not necessarily do so. One of the factors that influences whether people will become aggressive following frustration is their past learning history. Inanimate objects often become the targets of aggression when people cannot control the actual source of their frustration.
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reward, and something or someone gets in the way. The theorists proposed the frustration-aggression hypothesis initially suggesting that frustration is the only cause of aggression. Whether or not one inhibited aggression following frustration depended upon the amount of punishment one expected as a consequence of the aggression: “…all frustrating situations do not produce overt aggression. Few arrested motorists jeer at policemen; guests at formal dinners do not complain when the meat is tough; German Jews do not strike Nazi stormtroopers.” (p. 32). According to Dollard and his colleagues, if people could get away with it, aggression would follow frustration. If people cannot directly attack the source of their frustration, they will show displaced aggression, directed toward some person or thing other than the source of frustration. Though frustrated people may indeed behave aggressively, they may also react in other ways. They may become resigned or depressed, or may vow to overcome the source of their frustration. Intense frustration often does lead to aggression, but low or moderate frustration does not (Harris, 1974). Given a frustrating situation, whether aggression is specifically encouraged or discouraged has important consequences. Frustration is more likely to lead to aggression if the inhibitions against aggression are
Learning to be Aggressive Mr. McGarrity reinforced his son’s aggressive behavior at the football game. The rougher Jack played, the louder his father cheered. He punished Jack by yelling at him when the team was losing. He also modeled aggression by arguing with other parents and shouting insults at the referees and the other players. Jack probably had many opportunities to see his father behaving aggressively. He may have been rewarded many times for aggression and punished for nonaggressive behavior. He came to the understanding that when the going got rough, he could “solve” the problem by fighting. Models and Rewards for Aggression In Chapter 4 we described the social learning theory, which holds that sex roles develop through rewards, punishment, and modeling. Social learning theory can also be used to explain the development of aggression. People learn to be aggressive through the reinforcement of their aggressiveness, through punishment for nonaggression, and by seeing people model aggressive behavior (Bandura, 1973; Zillmann, 1979). Several classic experiments by Albert Bandura and his colleagues have demonstrated that after children watch an aggressive adult model, they engage in more aggressive behavior themselves (Bandura, 1965; Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963a, 1963b). Nursery-school children watched an adult punch, kick, and yell at a life-sized inflated plastic toy
Source: Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott Foresman and Co., 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #8
called a Bobo doll. The doll was weighted with sand on the bottom, and moved dramatically when hit. In some experiments the children saw the model in person; in others they watched a film. The children were then taken to another room where they were given a chance to play with a variety of toys, including a Bobo doll. Compared to a control group of children who had not seen the aggressive model, the subjects were consistently more aggressive. They copied the adult’s behavior, punching and yelling at the doll themselves. But Bobo dolls are just dolls. Will children imitate an aggressive adult model whose target is a real person? To answer this question, one group of researchers used a filmed version of an adult insulting and attacking a real-life clown with a plastic mallet and a toy machine gun. Boys who had seen the film were compared to a group of boys who had not. As predicted, the boys who had seen the person modeling aggression toward the clown acted more aggressively themselves when the clown appeared, and were also more aggressive toward a Bobo doll (Hanratty, Liebert, Morris, & Fernandez, 1969). The implication is that experiments with Bobo dolls can be generalized to real-life aggression. To study the effects of both modeling and reinforcement upon aggression, researchers expanded upon Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments. Preschool children were shown a filmed model of a person hitting and kicking a Bobo doll. Some of the children saw a model abusing an unrestrained doll that rocked all the way to the floor when it was hit hard. Others saw a model hitting a doll that was restrained by a hidden post and rocked only a few inches when hit. To be reinforcing, an action must produce some consequences. If you hit a doll and nothing happens, the aggression is not reinforced. The children were later provided an opportunity to play with either a restrained or a free-moving Bobo doll. The children exhibited the modeling effect, imitating the aggression of the adult. When their aggressive behavior was reinforced with a freemoving doll, they were more aggressive. Children whose aggression was not reinforced—that is, the doll moved very little when hit—were less aggressive (Hayes, Rincover, & Volosin, 1980) (see Close-up 11.1).
This finding helps explain how a model of aggression that a child sees on television might have a dramatic effect upon some children, but not upon others. Some children who imitate the model will have their aggression reinforced, but others will not, or may even be punished for their aggression. Frustration affects which models a person notices. In the natural world there are many different people setting examples of aggressive and nonaggressive behavior. Which model does a person pay attention to? One recent study showed that when male subjects were frustrated, they were more likely to pay attention to a person modeling aggressive behavior and were better able to remember aggressive acts they had witnessed (Parker & Rogers, 1981).
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Children learn aggressive behavior by imitating aggressive models. Here, a young girl in Beirut learns how to hold an automatic weapon.
Source: Watson, David, Gail Tregerthan and Joyce Frank. “Sources of Aggression.” Social Psychology. New York: Scott Foresman and Co., 1984.
Unit I: READING #9
THE MAYOR’S CHOICE What Would You Do? Choices. Whether to make a saving phone call. Whether to deliver electric shocks to an innocent stranger. Whether to obey an authoritarian leader. Choices. This anthology is filled with sharp examples of people compelled to make choices. Often these decisions are agonizingly difficult, but they cannot be avoided. Yet, the choices we make do matter and therefore they should be examined carefully. The following clear example of a decision immediately immerses the reader into the real world of brutal decision making.
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t is the year of 1944. The Second World War is still in full fury and Germany occupies much of Europe, including Greece. The Greek people are unhappily resigned to the Nazi invaders, but there are small pockets of underground resistance. Occasionally, a German soldier is killed by Greek partisans. Consequently, the Germans institute a basic rule. For every German soldier killed by civilians in an occupied village, twenty men from that village would be immediately executed. One clear evening, three Greek commandos from a neighboring village enter a village and kill four German soldiers. Soon they are all caught and held by the Nazis. The German commanding officer asks to see the mayor of the village. The mayor is an unusual man. He is a pacifist, a man who does not believe in any killing, even in war. The officer explains to the mayor about the twenty-to-one rule of German occupying forces. In compliance with this rule, eighty Greek males from the village had been rounded up. The officer states that they will all be shot at sunrise the next morning. These same men are right now digging a large ditch in the village courtyard. Tomorrow morning, they will descend into that ditch,
which will be surrounded by machine guns. At the officer’s signal, the eighty men will all be executed. The mayor is horrified by this suggestion and pleads for the lives of his townspeople. The German officer smiles and then offers the mayor a deal. He informs the mayor that he can save the lives of his people only if he agrees to the following action: On that same morning, the three partisans will be placed near the ditch with their hands tied behind their backs. The German officer will take an empty rifle and hand it to the mayor. If the mayor wishes to save the lives of his townspeople in the ditch, he must bash in the heads of the three rebels until they are dead. The German officer explains that the mayor will have the night to consider his offer. The next morning, the scene is set just as the German officer pictured it. Eighty men look up from the ditch and wonder what will happen to them. The courtyard is filled with weeping wives and confused children. All wait for the mayor’s decision. ‘This story is adapted from the movie version of John Fowles’ The Magus.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1 . What alternatives were available to the mayor? What goal could have been achieved by any of the mayor’s actions? What should the mayor have done? 2. Are the partisans ultimately responsible if any of the townspeople die? 3. Suppose the following happened: The mayor took the gun from the German officer and readied himself to strike one of the partisans. It is clear that all of the partisans have been beaten up badly. But through his bloodied mouth, one of the partisans yells “Long Live Greece” just as the mayor is about to hit him. The mayor realizes that he cannot kill these people, throws aside his gun, and places himself with the partisans, expecting to die. The order is given and the German machine gunners execute all the men in the ditch. Then, the three partisans are shot. But, the mayor is left to live with the memory of his choice. Not three, not eighty, but eighty-three men have died. If this occurred, what judgment would you make? Is the mayor a coward?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Mayor’s Choice: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #10
THE Milgrim “Shock” experiment Stanley Milgram The Holocaust forces us to ask how people could obey orders that ended in the murder of millions of people. The issue of mass obedience has produced heated debate. Stanley Milgram’s controversial laboratory research described below was designed to compare German and American levels of obedience. Milgram found a human capacity to obey destructive orders that had little to do with any instinct for aggression. He used Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” to describe the results of the experiment. In the experiment, ordinary persons imparted electric shocks to the victims not from any aggressive tendencies but out of a sense of obligation. Thus, ordinary people, by simply doing their jobs, chose to participate in a destructive process.
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he Nazi [murder] of European Jews is the most extreme instance of…immoral acts carried out by thousands of people in the name of obedience. Yet in lesser degree this type of thing is constantly recurring: ordinary citizens are ordered to destroy other people, and they do so because they consider it their duty to obey orders…In order to take a close look at the act of obeying, I set up a simple experiment at Yale University. Eventually, the experiment was to involve more than a thousand participants and would be repeated at several universities…Two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated as a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is conducted into a room, seated in a chair, his arms strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode attached to his wrist. He is told that he is to learn a list of word pairs; whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity. The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, he is taken into the main experimental room and seated before an impressive shock generator. Its main feature is a horizontal line of thirty switches, ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts, in 15 volts increments. There are also verbal designations which range from SLIGHT SHOCK to DANGER—SEVERE SHOCK. The teacher is told that he is to administer the learning test to the man in the other room. When the learner responds correctly, the teacher moves on to the next item; when the other man gives an incorrect answer, the teacher is to give him an electrical shock. He is to start at the lowest shock level (15 volts) and to increase the level each time the man makes an error, going through 30 volts, 45 volts, and so on.
The “teacher” is a genuinely naive subject who has come to the laboratory to participate in an experiment. The learner, or victim, is an actor who actually receives no shock at all. The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a…situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim. At what point will the subject refuse to obey the experimenter? Conflict arises when the man receiving the shock begins to indicate that he is experiencing discomfort. At 75 volts, the “learner” grunts. At 120 volts he complains verbally; at 150 he demands to be released from the experiment. His protests continue as the shocks escalate, growing increasingly vehement and emotional. At 285 volts his response can only be described as an agonized scream… For the subject, the situation is not a game; conflict is intense and obvious. On one hand, the…suffering of the learner presses him to quit. On the other, the experimenter, a legitimate authority to whom the subject feels some commitment, enjoins him to continue. Each time the subject hesitates to administer shock, the experimenter orders him to continue… There are, of course, enormous differences between carrying out the orders of a commanding officer during times of war and carrying out the orders of an experimenter. Yet…one may ask in a general way: How does a man behave when he is told by a legitimate authority to act against a third individual?… A reader’s initial reaction to the experiment may be to wonder why anyone in his right mind would administer even the first shocks. Would he not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory? But the fact is that no one ever does. Since the subject has come to the laboratory to aid the experimenter, he is quite willing to start off with the procedure…Despite the
Source: Milgram, Stanley. “The Milgram ‘Shock’ Experiment.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League,1983.
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Unit I: READING #8 fact that many subjects experience stress, despite the fact that many protest to the experimenter, a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator. Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out.. A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of “obedient” subjects, and that they represented ordinary people…the argument becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contended that the prosecution’s effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an uninspired
bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job…it was felt that the monstrous deeds carried out by Eichmann required a brutal, twisted, and sadistic personality…After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—..—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become…clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Describe the Milgram “shock” experiment. 2. Did the participants feel uneasy about what they were doing? Erich Fromm in his book, Anatomy of Destructiveness, has suggested that we should emphasize the difficulty people had in obeying Milgram’s orders. 3. What do you think would have been your reaction if you had been the teacher? How does the issue of “responsibility” play a role in the subject’s decision to shock the learner? 4. Is the capacity for obedience an innate part of human nature? Can humans be taught to disobey orders that lead to the infliction of pain on others? How could this be done? 5. Are there times when it is important or necessary to obey without question or hesitation? Give examples. 6. What is meant by the “banality of evil”? DEFINITION enjoins: commands
Source: Milgram, Stanley. “The Milgram ‘Shock’ Experiment.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League,1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #11
columbine teens found validation in reprogrammed hi-tech games
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ric Harris who, along with Dylan Klebold, was responsible for the massacre of 13 fellow classmates at Columbine High, maintained a web site which depicted Harris as an avid player of Doom. The wildly popular computer game involves players who stalk their opponents and try to kill them with high-powered weapons. Klebold helped Harris create hyped-up versions of Doom II that created not a game of skill and competition, but of massacre. One student recalls that Harris introduced a level with the same layout as the high school called “CHS.” “The game was basically kill everything that moves,” he said. Wiesenthal Center researchers encountered another disturbing aspect of Harris’ “game.” As characters lay bleeding from gunshots, they shout out, “My Lord, why did you do this to me?” — similar to Harris and Klebold asking fellow students if they believed in God before shooting them. Said Rabbi Cooper, “There is no question that this was kind of the precursor for what they acted out in real life.” In fact, Center researchers had come across the Harris web site several months before the shooting, “What we remembered was how we got to that site,
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. (Reuteers/Ho/Archive Photos)
which was by looking at various anarchy and bombmaking listings,” said Rabbi Cooper. At that time, however, there were no threats that merited contacting law enforcement officials or enough hate language to be listed on the Center’s hate site list.. In a related development, just weeks before Columbine, the Center’s Digital Hate 2000 CD revealed that racist versions of the Doom game were available online.
Source: “Columbine Teens Found Validation in Reprogrammed Hi-Tech Games.” Response: Simon Wiesenthal Center World Report. Summer/Fall 1999.
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Unit I: READING #12
anonymous columbine student’s poem The following was written by a Columbine student and put on the Internet:
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paradox in our time of history is we have taller buildings but shorter tempers; wider freeways but narrower viewpoints; we spend more but have less. We have bigger houses and smaller families; more conveniences but less time; we have more degrees but less sense; more knowledge but less judgement; more experts but more problems; more medicine but less wellness.
These are the times of tall men and short character; steep profits and shallow relationships.
We have multiplied our possessions but reduced our values. we talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often, we’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life; we’ve added years to life not life to years.
It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom; a time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can either choose to forward this message and make a difference…or just hit delete.
These are the times of world peace but domestic warfare; more leisure but less fun; more kinds of food but less nutrition. These are the days of two incomes, but more divorce of fancier houses but broken homes.
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor; we’ve cleaned up the air but polluted the soul; we’ve split the atom, but not our prejudice. We have higher incomes but lower morals; we’ve become long on quantity but short on quality.
Source: Anonymous Columbine High School Student. Posted on Internet 1999. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #13
THE NATURE OF MAN “man is innately aGgressive” Robert Ardrey Robert Ardrey (b. 1908) (“Man Is Innately Aggressive“) is a lecturer in the natural sciences and on anthropology. He is also a dramatist or playwright. In 1955 he began his African travels and studies and wrote African Genesis (1961), a personal investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man.
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n the past 30 years a revolution has been taking place in the natural sciences. It is a revolution In our understanding of animal behavior, and of our link to the animal world. In sum, therefore, the revolution concerns that most absorbing of human entertainment, man’s understanding of man. Yet not even science, as a whole, is aware of the philosophical reappraisal which must proceed from its specialists’ doings. Assumptions concerning the nature of man, today unquestioned by education, by psychiatry, by politics, by art or even by science itself, are being eroded by the tiny streams set loose from obscure scientific springs. And few of us, scientists or laymen, know. That the contemporary revolution in the natural sciences has proceeded thus far in almost total silence must not be regarded as too great a wonder. Other and noisier revolutions have overwhelmed our unquiet time. As compared with the fortunes of the totalitarian state, of nuclear physics, of antibiotics or the longplaying record, the fortunes of the paleontologist may seem remote from our daily life. And the work of the revolution has been accomplished by such extreme specialists that it has been recorded only in such inaccessible pages as those of the American Journal of Anthropology or the Biological Symposia. Such heralds gain few hearers in the modern market place. Still more important than the obscurity or specialization of the revolution has been its suddenness. When in 1930 I emerged from a respectable American university as a respectably welleducated young man, no hint had reached me that private property was other than a human institution evolved by the human brain. If I and my young contemporaries throughout the following years wasted much of our fire on social propositions involving the abolition of private ownership, then we did so in perfect faith that such a course would free
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mankind of many a frustration. No part of the curriculum of our psychology, sociology, or anthropology departments had presented us with the information that territoriality—the drive to gain, maintain, and defend the exclusive right to a piece of property—is an animal instinct approximately as ancient and powerful as sex. The role of territory in general animal behavior lies today beyond scientific controversy; then it was unknown. We of the Class of 1930 had to emerge into a world of tumultuous evaluation without benefit of this most salient observation. Similarly, we could not know, as we bemused ourselves with the attractions of the classless state, that hierarchy is an institution among all social animals and the drive to dominate one’s fellows an instinct three or four hundred million years old… We, the approximate Class of 1930, today furnish trusted and vital leadership to world politics,
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
Unit I: READING #13 world society and to whatever may exist of world hope. But we do not know that the human drive to acquire possession is the simple expression of an instinct many hundreds of times older than the human race itself. We do not know that the roots of nationalism are dug firmly into the social territoriality of almost every species in our related primate family. We do not know that the statusseekers are responding to animal instincts equally characteristic of baboons, jackdaws, rock cod, and men. Responsible though we may be for the fate of summit conferences, disarmament agreements, juvenile delinquents and new African states, we do not know that the first man was an armed killer, or that evolutionary survival from his mutant instant
depended upon the use, the development, and the contest of weapons. We do not know those things, since they are conclusions to be drawn from the contemporary revolution in the natural sciences. We should know, however, that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and that within a species every member is born in the essential image of the first of its kind. No child of ours, born in the middle twentieth century, can differ at birth in significant measure from the earliest of Homo sapiens. No instinct, whether physiological or cultural, that constituted a part of the original human bundle can ever in the history of the species be permanently suppressed or abandoned.
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Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #14
survival in auschwitz the nazi assault on humanity Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi (1919-1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist in Turin, Italy. During World War II, he founded an Italian anti-Fascist resistance movement. In 1943, when he was 24 years old, he was captured by fascist militia and sent to Auschwitz. Because of his chemical training he was assigned to a satellite camp, Monowitz, attached to the chemical corporate giant I.G. Farben. After liberation, Levi wrote a number of memoirs about his ten-month concentration camp experience. The article below is an excerpt from his last complete book, The Drowned and the Saved.
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HAT WE HAVE so far said and will say concerns the ambiguous life of the Lager. In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this question we feel that we have to reply in the affirmative. We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing. We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment. Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs, and which is much more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life. We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction: that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the Häftling is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.
But another fact seems to us worthy of attention: there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men—the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations. This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbors; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is the significance of the title of this article? 2. Do you agree with Levi’s position? Explain.
Source: Levi, Primo. “The Drowned and the Saved.” Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Macmillan, 1996.
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Unit I: READING #15
CONFORMIST AGGRESSION FROM
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Eric Fromm
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onformist aggression comprises various acts of aggression that are performed not because the aggressor is driven by the desire to destroy, but because he is told to do so and considers it his duty to obey orders. In all hierarchically structured societies obedience is perhaps the most deeply ingrained trait. Obedience is equated with virtue, disobedience with sin. To be disobedient is the arch crime from which all other crimes follow. Abraham was willing to kill his son out of obedience. Antigone is killed by Creon for her disobedience to the laws of the State. Armies, especially, cultivate obedience, since their very essence is built on an absolute reflexlike acceptance of commands that precludes any questioning. The soldier who kills and maims, the bomber pilot who destroys thousands of lives in one moment, are not necessarily driven by a destructive or cruel impulse, but by the principle of unquestioning obedience.
Conformist aggression is sufficiently widespread to deserve serious attention. From the behavior of boys in a juvenile gang to that of soldiers in an army, many destructive acts are committed in order not to appear “yellow,” and out of obedience to orders. It is these motivations, and not human destructiveness, that are at the root of this type of aggressive behavior, which is often wrongly interpreted as indicating the power of innate aggressive impulses. Conformist aggression might as well have been classified as pseudoaggression; the reason for not doing so is that obedience as a consequence of the need to conform will in many cases mobilize aggressive impulses that otherwise might not have become manifest. Furthermore, the impulse not to obey or not to conform constitutes for many a real threat, against which they defend themselves by performing the required aggressive act.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. According to Fromm, what is conformist aggression? 2. What motivates conformist aggression, according to the author? 3. Can you cite examples of conformist aggression that you have witnessed? 4. Do you agree with Fromm’s view? Explain.
Source: Fromm, Eric. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #16
the sounds of silence Paul Simon One ever-present theme of our study is the effect of silence. Children grow up knowing that “silence is golden,” and they learn to “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.” Tragically, many respond to the events of suffering in just this manner. We should ask why we so often choose the role of spectator. Paul Simon’s classic, “The Sounds of Silence,” comments on this indifference of people to what is happening all around them…we cannot forget that “silence like a cancer grows.”
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People writing songs that voices never shared No one dared
Within the sounds of silence In restless dreams I walked alone Narrow streets of cobblestone ‘Neath a halo of a street lamp I turned my collar to the cold and damp When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a Neon light It split the night
Disturb the sound of silence Fools, said I, you do not know Silence like a cancer grows Hear my words that I might teach you Take my arms that I might reach you But my words like silent raindrops fell And echoed the will of silence And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they made And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming And the sign said: The words of the prophets are Written on the subway walls And tenement halls And whispered in the sound of silence
ello darkness my old friend I’ve come to talk with you again Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains
And touched the sound of silence And in the naked light I saw Ten thousand people maybe more People talking without speaking People hearing without listening
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is your reaction to the lines: “People talking without speaking People hearing without listening”? 2. What is the “neon god” to which people pray?
Source: Simon, Paul. The Sounds of Silence. Warner Bros., 1968, in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit I: READING #17
QUOTATION FROM
PASTOR MARTIN NIEmöller Martin Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who was imprisoned by the Nazis for speaking out against their atrocities. An historically accurate version of a famous quotation from Pastor Niemöller (c. 1946) follows. Numerous versions of this quotation have appeared over the years, many of which have contained inaccuracies. After reading the quotation, discuss the questions for discussion.
They (the Nazis) first came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I was not a communist; They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist; They came for the union leaders (Gewerkschaftler), and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a union leader; 74
They came for the Jews, and I did not speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Conduct research on the background of Pastor Martin Niemöller to determine how and why his attitude toward the Nazis changed over time. 2. What is the meaning of Pastor Niemöller’s quotation? 3. Does it have relevance in today’s world? If so, identify world events to which it could apply. Identify personal experiences to which it may apply. 4. What are the implications of this quotation for the individual? for society?
Source: Locke, Hubert G. and Marcia Sachs Littell, Eds. Remembrance and Recollection. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #18
Holocaust and human behavior volume III
“the hangman” Margot Stern Strom and William S. Parsons FILM: “THE HANGMAN” This film provides an effective way to introduce the themes of this chapter. “To sin by silence when they should protest makes, cowards of men.” —Abraham Lincoln This short animated film is complex. The teacher should show the film and lead a discussion: students will have difficulty understanding the complexities after only one viewing. Still some students will be able to guess at the message of the film. “He who serves me best.” said he. “Shall earn the rope on the gallows tree.” Clarify questions such as: • What is happening in the town? • How did the townspeople respond to the Hangman? • What does the Hangman represent? • Who was hung on the gallows? • What do the contracts represent? • Can you identify some of the symbols and the meaning they suggest? For example: the gallows tree takes root — the animated people become paper dolls, the shadow grows on the courthouse wall. The symbolism in the film provides for an effective lesson on metaphors and the technique of comparing unlike things. Show the film a second time. While students are recording the things they want to remember for the discussion, the teacher should copy two of the main quotations from the film and post them in the room. Students should return to the quotations and to this film throughout the year. How does this film relate to what we are studying? obedience obligation — responses — group behavior — fear? The following study guide and the accompanying text might help in dealing with the film:
“THE HANGMAN” STUDY GUIDE 12 minutes Color 1964 Study Guide by: Rabbi Ronald Kronish Directed by: Los Goldman Paul Julian Music by: Sorge Hovan Narrated by: Herschel Bernardi Narrative poem by: Maurice Option Content of the Film: “The Hangman” in a small town decides to choose victims for execution. Paradoxically, he announces that he intends to hang only those who serve him best. First he chooses a foreigner. The townspeople—out of relief for not having been chosen themselves—and out of respect for “The Hangman”—do not object. On the second day, after it becomes clear that The Hangman intends to choose another victim, one man accuses him of being a murderer—and that man is executed. Out of fear of “The Hangman”—no one objects. During the night. the gallows grow to a grotesque height. The third victim is a Jew. The fourth, a black man. There is a fifth, a sixth, and each time the townspeople ask: is this the one who serves you well? As the hangings increase, the people cease asking even this. Finally, one man is left alone in the town. When called by “The Hangman,” he believes that he is being asked to help pull down the scaffolding. As “The Hangman” prepares to execute him, the victim claims that he has been tricked. “The Hangman” denies this and implicates him directly by explaining that he did no more than the cowardly man let him do. He is hung in the town square.
The problem of indifference is not as simple as we might think. Are there not times in which we are forced to be indifferent to social problems if they conflict with personal or family problems? Don’t universalistic concerns sometimes conflict with particular concern? How can we maintain a continual sense of social responsibility? Are there ever times when we ought to be indifferent? Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books. 1978
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Unit I: READING #18
The Hangman Maurice Ogden
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nto our town the Hangman came. Smelling of gold and blood and flame And he paced our bricks with a diffident air And built his frame on the courthouse square. The scaffold stood by the courthouse side, Only as wide as the door was wide; A frame as tall, or little more, Than the capping sill of the courthouse door. And we wondered, whenever we had the time, Who the criminal, what the crime, That Hangman judged with the yellow twist Of knotted hemp in his busy fist. And innocent though we were, with dread We passed those eyes of buckshot lead: Till one cried: “Hangman, who is he For whom you raise the gallows—tree?”
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Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye. And he gave us a riddle instead of reply: “He who serves me best.” said he, “Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree.” And he stepped down, and laid his hand On a man who came from another land— And we breathed again, for another’s grief At the Hangman’s hand was our relief. And the gallows—frame on the courthouse lawn By tomorrow’s sun would be struck and gone. So we gave him way, and no one spoke. Out of respect for his hangman’s cloak.
2 The next day’s sun looked mildly down On roof and street in our quiet town And, stark and black in the morning air. The gallows-tree on the courthouse square. And the Hangman stood at his usual stand With the yellow hemp in his busy hand: With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike And his air so knowing and businesslike. And we cried: “Hangman, have you not done. Yesterday, with the alien one?” Then we fell silent and stood amazed: “Oh, not for him was the gallows raised..” He laughed a laugh as he looked at us: “…Did you think I’d gone to all this fuss To hang one man? That’s a thing I do To stretch the rope when the rope is new.” Then one cried “Murderer!” One cried “Shame!” And into our midst the Hangman came To that man’s place. “Do you hold.” said he. “With him that was meant for the gallows—tree?” And he laid his hand on that one’s arm, And we shrank back in quick alarm, And we gave him way, and no one spoke Out of fear of his hangman’s cloak. That night we saw with dread surprise The Hangman’s scaffold had grown in size. Fed by the blood beneath the chute The gallows-tree had taken root; Now as wide, or a little more. Than the steps that led to the courthouse door, As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall. Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books. 1978 New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #18
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The third he took—we had all heard tell— Was a usurer and infidel. And: “What” said the Hangman, “have you to do With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?”
Then through the town the Hangman came And called in the empty streets my name— And I looked at the gallows soaring tall And thought “There is no one left at all
And we cried out: “is this one he Who has served you well and faithfully?” The Hangman smiled: “It’s a clever scheme To try the strength of the gallows—beam.”
For hanging, and so he calls to me To help pull down the gallows—tree.” And I went out with right good hope To the Hangman’s tree and the Hangman’s rope.
The fourth man’s dark, accusing song Had scratched our comfort hard and long; And “What concern.” he gave us back, “Have you for the doomed—the doomed and black? “
He smiled at me as I came down To the courthouse square through the silent town, And supple and stretched in his busy hand Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again: “Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?” “It’s a trick” he said, “that we hangmen know For easing the trap when the trap springs slow.”
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap And it sprang down with a ready snap— And then with a smile of awful command He laid his hand upon my hand.
And so we ceased, and asked no more. As the Hangman tallied his bloody score: And sun by sun, and night by night, The gallows grew to monstrous height.
“You tricked me, Hangman!” I shouted then, “That your scaffold was built for other men And I no henchman of yours,” I cried, “You lied to me, Hangman, foully lied!”
The wings of the scaffold opened wide Till they covered the square from side to side; And the monster cross—beam, looking down, Cast its shadow across the town.
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye: “Lied to you? Tricked you?” he said, “Not I.” For I answered straight and I told you true: The scaffold was raised for none but you. “For who has served me more faithfully Than you with your coward’s hope?” said he, “And where are the others that might have stood Side by your side in the common good?” “Dead,” I whispered: and amiably “Murdered.” the Hangman corrected me: “First the alien, then the Jew.. I did no more than you let me do.” Beneath the beam that blocked the sky. None had stood so alone as I— And the Hangman strapped me, and no voice there Cried “Stay!” for me in the empty square.
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books. 1978
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Unit I: READING #19
The dying girl that no one helped Loudon Wainwright In the 1960s, folksinger Phil Ochs wrote a song called “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” with these lyrics: “0 look outside the window There’s a woman being grabbed They’ve dragged her to the bushes And now she’s being stabbed Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain But Monopoly is so much fun I’d hate to blow the game And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends.” The lyrics were a reminder of the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, an incident that began a national debate about the responsibility of the average citizen to come to the aid of people in danger. A young woman was brutally murdered in a New York residential area while at least 38 people watched. Ever since, professional students of human behavior and amateurs alike have attempted to explain why no one was willing to become involved. In this selection, Loudon Wainwright briefly records the feelings of some of those who saw Kitty Genovese killed.
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o judge from the bitter example given us by the good folks of a respectable New York residential area, Samaritans are very scarce these days…if the reactions of the 38 witnesses to the murder of Catherine Genovese provide any true reflection of a national attitude toward our neighbors, we are becoming a callous, chickenhearted and immoral people…An examination of the pitiful facts of Miss Genovese’s terminal experience makes very necessary the ugly personal question each of us must ask: What would I have done? The story is simple and brutal. As she arrived home in the early morning darkness, Kitty Genovese, a decent, pretty young woman of 28, was stalked through the streets close to her Kew Gardens apartment and stabbed again and again by a man who had followed her home and who took almost a half hour to kill her. During that bloody little eternity…Kitty screamed and cried repeatedly for help.. “Oh, my God!” she cried out at one point. “He stabbed me! Please help me! Someone help me!” Minutes later, before the murderer came back and attacked her for the final time, she screamed, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” The reason the murderer’s actions and his victim’s calls are so well documented is that police
were able to find 38 of Kitty’s neighbors who admitted they witnessed the awful event. They heard the screams and most understood her cry for help. Peeking out their windows, many saw enough of the killer to provide a good description of his appearance and clothing. A few saw him strike Kitty, and more saw her staggering down the sidewalk after she had been stabbed twice and was looking for a place to hide. One especially sharp-eyed person was able to report that the murderer was sucking his finger as he left the scene, he had cut himself during the attack. Another witness has the awful distinction of being the only person Kitty Genovese recognized in the audience taking in her final moments. She looked at him and called to him by name. He did not reply. No one really helped Kitty at all. Only one person shouted at the killer (“Let that girl alone!”), and the one phone call that was finally made to the police was placed after the murderer had got in his car and driven off. For the most part the witnesses, crouching in darkened windows like watchers of a Late Show, looked on until the play had passed beyond their view. Then they went back to bed… On the scene a few days after the killer had been caught and confessed, Police Lieutenant Bernard
Source: Wainwright, Loudon. “The Dying Girl That No One Helped.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #19 Jacobs discussed the investigation. “The word we kept hearing from the witnesses later was ‘involved,’ “ Jacobs said…“People told us they just didn’t want to get involved,” Jacobs said to me. “They don’t want to be questioned or have to go to court.” He pointed to an apartment house directly across the quiet street. “They looked down at this thing,” he went on, “from four different floors of that building.”…“It’s a nice neighborhood, isn’t it?” he went on. “Doesn’t look like a jungle. Good, solid people. We don’t expect anybody to come out into the street and fight this kind of bum. All we want is a phone call. We don’t even need to know who’s making it. “You know what this man told us after we caught him?” Jacobs asked. “He said he figured nobody would do anything to help. He heard the windows go up and saw the lights go on. He just retreated for a while and when things quieted down, he came back to finish the job.” Later, in one of the apartment houses, a witness to part of Kitty Genovese’s murder talked. His comments…indicate the price in bad conscience he and his neighbors are now paying. “I feel terrible about it,” he said. “The thing keeps coming back in
my mind. You just don’t want to get involved. They might have picked me up as a suspect if I’d bounced right out there. I was getting ready, but my wife stopped me. She didn’t want to be a hero’s widow. I woke up about the third scream. I pulled the blind so hard it came off the window. The girl was on her knees struggling to get up. I didn’t know if she was drunk or what. I never saw the man. She staggered a little when she walked, like she had a few drinks in her. I forgot the screen was there and I almost put my head through it trying to get a better look. I could see people with their heads out and hear windows going up and down all along the street. …Every time I look out here now,” he said, “it’s like looking out at a nightmare. How could so many of us have had the same idea that we didn’t need to do anything? But that’s not all that’s wrong.” Now he sounded betrayed and he told what was really eating him. Those 38 witnesses had, at least, talked to the police after the murder. The man pointed to a nearby building. “There are people over there who saw everything,” he said. “And there hasn’t been a peep out of them yet. Not one peep.”
79 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION I . What were some of the reasons given by the spectators for not becoming involved? Do you blame the spectators for what they did not do? 2. Does this incident tell us anything about human nature? 3. Do you feel that there should be laws requiring citizens to come to another person’s aid? 4. Does thinking that everybody would act as did these thirty-eight people make it easier for the rest of us to be indifferent to pain and danger experienced by others? Why? DEFINITION Good Samaritan:
someone who comes to the aid of a person in need
Source: Wainwright, Loudon. “The Dying Girl That No One Helped.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983.
Unit I: READING #20
An olympic athlete’s dilemma: what would you do? Harry Furman, Kenneth Tubertini and Richard F. Flaim There are few situations in life that do not have as a component the necessity to make a decision on moral and political values.
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nthony Peterson is 21 years old and a sprinter at the University of Pennsylvania. Anthony has been in training for over two years for the day he will participate in the 1936 Olympics in Munich, Germany. He is very excited about representing his country and about the glory that may be his. However, much controversy surrounds this Olympics. Adolf Hitler has become Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis have been persecuting Jews and all sorts of leftist political groups. Hitler has been gearing up for the Olympics where he intends to prove that the Germans are the most physically perfect “race” in the world. The Olympics will be a great propaganda event for the Nazi German government.
Anthony has been approached by a group of athletes who have been reevaluating the situation. They tell Anthony that they should not participate in the Olympics in Germany because to do so is to legitimize Hitler’s policies. After all, America’s participation in the world Olympics is not as important as taking a moral stand against the Nazi policies. Anthony must decide what to do. Should he participate in the 1936 Olympics?
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What alternative courses of action are available to Anthony? What are the consequences of each alternative? 2. Does Anthony have a responsibility to his teammates? To himself? 3. Relate this dilemma to the decision faced by American Olympic athletes who were asked by their government to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. What are the similarities and contrasts? What should American athletes have done? 4. Some critics argue that “sports boycotts” are symbolic, meaningless substitutes for real action that can be taken by governments. Such people believe that a boycott of the 1936 or 1980 Olympics would not have accomplished anything. How do you react to this argument? 5. At the 1972 Olympics held in Munich, Germany, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli pavilion and murdered twelve members of their Olympic team. In response to this event, Olympic officials held a ceremony in the stadium in which there were two minutes of silence in memory of the slain Israeli athletes. How do you react to this response?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #21
Of man and beast: two men, two killers, one conscience Leonard Pitts Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist, writes regularly for the Miami Herald.
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his is a column about two men and two murderers. The first man is David Kaczynski. Two years ago, in an act of astounding moral courage, he led the FBI to his brother, Ted, whom he suspected — rightly — of being the terrorist Unabomber. Late last month, the FBI announced that it was giving Kaczynski a $1 million reward. He, in turn, has promised to give most of the money to the families of his brother’s victims. The second man is 19-year-old David Cash. Sixteen months ago, he saw a little girl being murdered. The alleged killer was a friend he has compared to a brother. And Cash didn’t do a damn thing. It was a little before 4 in the morning in late May 1997 that Cash walked into a women’s restroom at Primadonna, a casino near the California-Nevada border. He was looking for his friend, 18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer, who had gone in there after 7year-old Sherrice Iverson. Cash says he found them in a toilet stall; Strohmeyer was struggling with the little girl, holding his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams. Cash tapped his friend on the head to get his attention, asked him to stop. But to no avail. Cash later told a grand jury that Strohmeyer simply stared at him, “like he didn’t care what I was saying.” So Cash left. Made no further attempt to intervene. Didn’t summon help. A few minutes later, Strohmeyer came out of the bathroom. Cash asked him what happened. He told grand jurors that Strohmeyer gave him a direct look and replied, “I killed her.” Strohmeyer, said Cash, went on to describe how the child bled from the vagina when he molested her with his fingers. Cash, according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, wanted to know if this had sexually aroused her. Sherrice was found an hour later, stuffed in a toilet bowl, her neck broken. Now Strohmeyer is in jail, facing a possible death sentence. But Cash is free to continue his studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He committed no crime — at least not in the legal sense. Last week, protesters vented their rage in a
demonstration on campus. Cash has been, for the most part, unrepentant. He’s told the Los Angeles Times he’s not going to “lose sleep” over someone else’s problems. Told the Press-Telegram that he’s looking forward to the financial opportunities his notoriety creates. “I’m no idiot” he said. “I’ll (expletive) get my money out of this.” Reminds me that every time you think you’ve reached the bottom, you find you’re just standing on a trapdoor. I wonder how it lives with itself, this little scrap of putrefaction called David Cash. So here we stand. Some folks are pushing for a law that would punish anyone who witnesses sexual assault against a child and ignores it. That is, after all, what we do in America when something offends our sense of what is good and right: We pass ourselves a law. That way, we can assure ourselves that the suffering had a higher purpose. That the agony was not in vain. I don’t mean to make light of what they’re trying to do. Maybe it’s a good idea. Certainly it’s an appropriate memorial. And yet.. Anyone who needs a law to comprehend his duty to a child in Sherrice’s predicament is so morally retarded, so ethically stunted, I have to wonder: What’s the point? It’s sickening to think we share the planet with such creatures. Heartening to realize that we share it, too, with men like David Kacyznski. I can’t pretend to know the emotional anguish his ordeal has cost him. But that’s precisely the point: Doing the right thing often requires a sacrifice of pain or profit or peace. But that doesn’t change the fact that it IS the right thing. It’s called conscience. Having one and acting upon it is one of the things — the precious few things — that distinguishes us from the beasts. And it’s the reason David Kacyznski is something I suspect David Cash will never be. Human.
Source: Pitts, Leonard. “Of man and beast: Two men, two killers, one conscience.” The Press, Atlantic City, N.J. Sunday, September 13, 1998.
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Unit I: READING #22
The Wave The experiment was supposed to explain the Nazi movement. But it became THE WAVE. Main Characters Narrator 1 Narrator 2 Mr. Ross Laurie Saunders David Robert Christy Ross
Supporting Characters Amy Brian Eric Brad Andres Group of Students Mr. Saunders Mrs. Saunders
SCENE ONE
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Narr 1: In a high school classroom Mr. Ross has just finished showing his students a film about Nazi Germany. Narr 2: As the film ends, many students sit in horrified silence, the memory of human skeletons and gas chambers fresh in their minds. Mr. Ross: The people selected for extermination by the Nazis were herded into concentration camps located all over eastern Europe. The life expectancy of the prisoners was only 270 days. They were worked, starved, and tortured. They were exterminated, using gas chambers, and their remains were disposed of in ovens. The Nazis exterminated more than 10 million men, women, and children in these concentration camps. Narr 1: As Mr. Ross turns the lights back on, he notices one student. Robert, has fallen asleep. Mr. Ross snaps the shade open, startling Robert awake. Narr 2: But Robert is the exception. Many students have not taken the film lightly. Several hands are raised. Ross: Amy. Amy: Were all Germans Nazis? Ross: As a matter of fact, less than 10 percent of the German population belonged to the Nazi party. Amy: Then how come nobody tried to stop them? Ross: People said they didn’t know it was happening. (pause) Eric. Eric: How could you kill 10 million people without somebody noticing? Amy: Yeah, that can’t be true. Ross: After the war, the Germans claimed they knew nothing of the concentration camps or the killings. (pause) Laurie. Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Laurie: Eric’s right. How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all aroundand say they didn’t know about it? How could they say that? (bell rings, class exits) Ross: That was a very good question, Laurie. Narr 1: At lunch that day. Laurie can hardly eat still upset over the film. David: That film really got to you, huh? Laurie: Yeah. Doesn’t it make you angry? David: Laurie, it was a long time ago. We can’t change what happened. Laurie: I know, but it still upsets me. Brian (sitting down): Hey, Davie, who’s going to win the big game on Friday? David: We’d better—the coach has been working our tails off. Amy (joining them): Would you forget about football? How about going to a dance tonight? Laurie: David and I have to study. Brian: You know, if you two don’t stop acting like hermits, you’re gonna end up like Robert over there. Narr 2: Sitting alone, Robert holds a comic book in front of his face. He is totally engrossed, lips moving, lost to the outside world. Narr 1: Later that day, Mr. Ross sits in the school library, flanked by a stack of books. His wife, Christy—also a teacher at school. finds him there. Christy: What are you reading that’s so fascinating here, huh? Ross: Some terrific stuff. (continues his reading) Christy: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Are you cramming for a degree in dictatorship? Ross: One of my students asked me a question that
Unit I: READING #22 I couldn’t answer today. Christy: Welcome to the club. Ross: Right. (keeps reading) Narr 2: That night, Mr. Ross reads the same book until past 2:00 a.m. Narr 1: The following morning, as students enter the classroom, Mr. Ross writes on the blackboard: STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE. Then he addresses the class. Ross: Today I’m going to talk to you about discipline. (several grumbles) Now wait—this can be exciting. Student 1: Oh, sure! Ross: Now, I’m talking to you about power. Power through discipline. Success? Success through discipline. Nobody here wants a taste of power and success? (Students’ interest builds.) OK—here we go. David, Eric—you play football. You know it takes discipline to win. (They nod and beam with pride.) And what about ballet dancers, Andrea? (She looks up.) You know it takes long, hard hours of work for them to develop their skill. Same goes with painters and scientists. It is all discipline, control; strength of will. Narr 2: As more students show interest Mr. Ross goes on. Ross: There’s something we can do to experience power through discipline right now. Shall we try? It begins with posture. Amy, come forward. Brian: Teacher’s pet. Ross: Proper seating posture will help the concentration, strengthen the will. Brian: This is stupid. Ross (ignoring the snickers): First, put your feet flat an the floor. David: Is this History or P.E.? Ross (as Amy and several others follow his instructions): Now, place your hands flat across the small of your back and force your spine straight up. Can’t you breathe more easily? Relax. Ross (ignoring the groans): Now, resume the proper position-then relax. Again. Narr 1: At this point, nearly all the students are playing the game. Mr. Ross walks down the aisle checking them. Ross: Everyone—look how Robert’s legs are parallel, his ankles locked, his knees bent at 90 degrees. See how straight his spine is, chin back, head forward. Very good, Robert. (Robert, the center of so much praise, beams with pride-others copy his posture.) Now, I want you all to get up and walk about the room. When I give the command, I want you to return to your seats as quickly as possible and
Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981.
assume the proper seating posture. Come on, up. Narr 2: Eager for a break, the students rise and wait for Mr. Ross’s command. Ross (stiff ly): Take your seats! Narr 1: Students make a dash for their seats amid great noise and confusion, chairs clatter and students trip. Ross: (displeased): No. Let’s try it again! Now, the quieter and more controlled you are, the quicker you will reach your seats properly. Narr 2: A bit later, Mr. Ross repeats the exercise, using a stopwatch. As he gives the signal, students enter the room in absolute silence and precision form. They take their seats and assume the attention position. Ross: Excellent! Half the time…Now, there are three more rules which you must obey. One—everybody must have pencils and notepaper for notetaking. Two—when asking or answering a question, you must stand at the side of your seats. Three—the first words when answering or asking a question are: Mr. Ross, All right? Narr 1: Without exception, all students sit in the proper position, attentively awaiting Mr. Ross’s next move. Ross: Brad, who was the British Prime Minister before Churchill? Brad: Ah—wasn’t it the— Ross: (quickly): You weren’t listening. Remember— discipline! Robert, show Brad the procedure for asking a question. Robert: (snaps to attention beside his desk and barks like a soldier): Mr. Ross. Ross: That is correct. Thank you, Robert. Again, Brad. Brad: Mr. Ross, wasn’t it the—um—Prime Minister— Ross: No, too slow. Much too slow! From now on your answers are to be as short as possible. Now sit down and try it again! Brad (standing swiftly): Mr. Ross, Chamberlain. Ross: Now, that’s the way to answer a question. Punctual, precise. What country did Hitler invade in September of 1939, Andrea? Andrea: Mr. Ross, I don’t know. Ross: Still a good response, Andrea. Amy’? Amy (standing): Mr. Ross, Poland. Ross: Excellent. What was the name of Hitler’s political party? Brian (stands to respond): Mr. Ross, the Nazis. Ross: Good, Brian. Very quick. (shouting now) Who died in the death camps? Eric: Mr. Ross, Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Ross: Who ran the death camps?
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Unit I: READING #22
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David: Mr. Ross, the S.S. Ross: Excellent! Narr 2: Suddenly the bell rings, but not a student moves. They’re all caught up in the game. Ross: Tomorrow’s assignment is on the board. Class dismissed. Narr 1: As the students dash into the hallway, everyone is talking at once. Brian: Man, what a rush, huh? Eric: Too bad all my classes aren’t like that! Amy: It sure beats taking notes. Andrea: Hey, anybody who can get this class together like that is a genius. David: Did you ever see anything like that? I was really getting into it. Narr 2: That evening, Mr. Ross discusses the class experiment with his wife. Ross: I can’t believe how quickly they accepted the new behavior code. I mean, everyone did it immediately—it was eerie. Christy: They reacted that way because they were playing a game. Ross: I don’t think so. Christy: How else do you explain it? Ross: I don’t know. It was as if they wanted to be disciplined. Christy: Are you going on with it? Ross: No, I don’t think so. I’ve got the whole Japanese involvement in World War II to look at tomorrow.
SCENE TWO Narr 1: When Mr. Ross enters the class the next day, he is stunned—to see the students sitting in the attention position, maintaining complete silence. Narr 2: Some have little smiles on their faces, as though they’re part of a joke. But several look extremely serious. Narr 1: After a moment’s hesitation Mr. Ross lays down the book on Japan and takes a new tack. Ross: Well, look at you. What are you feeling? Group of Students: (some sure, some unsure): Discipline? Ross: Well, discipline is one thing. But there’s something more. Narr 2: Yesterday’s line, STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE, is still on the blackboard. Underneath it, Mr. Ross writes: COMMUNITY. Ross: It’s community. Now community is that bond between people who work and struggle together. It’s building a barn with your neighbors. (Several students chuckle.) It’s feeling that you’re part of something that’s more important than yourself—a
Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
movement, a team, a cause. (pause) Now, repeat our two mottos. Class: Strength Through Discipline, Strength Through Community. Ross: Now we need a symbol for our new community—something for members of this class only. Narr 1: Mr. Ross walks to the blackboard and draws a circle with a wave inside. Ross: A wave is a pattern of change. It has movement, direction, and impact. From now on, we will be known as “The Wave.” And this will be our salute. Narr 2: Mr. Rose raises his right arm, palm pointing down, inches from his shoulder, with hand in curled position. The class imitates him. Ross: Robert, what is our motto? Robert (stands at attention, no longer distracted and slouching): Mr. Ross, Strength Through Discipline. Strength Through Community! Ross: Very good, Robert. Remain standing, please. Now, Brad, Amy, Eric. All Three: Strength Through Discipline. Strength Through Community. Ross: Now Brian, Laurie. Louder! Narr 1: Mr. Ross succeeds in getting the class on its feet, shouting the mottos and saluting enthusiastically. Narr 2: That night at dinner, Laurie tells her parents about the Wave. Laurie (excitedly): It was incredible. Everybody was saluting and repeating the motto. You couldn’t help but get caught up in it. You know, really wanting to make it work. Mrs. Saunders: I don’t like it. It sounds like brainwashing and mob psychology. Laurie: No, Mom, it’s nothing like that. Honest, you’d just have to be there to feel the positive energy in class. Mr. S: I’m for whatever will make kids pay attention these days. Laurie: And that’s really what it’s doing. Even Robert Billings—the class creep—he’s even a part of the group now. Mrs. S: But you’re supposed to be learning history— not how to be part of a group. Mr. S: This country was built by people who were part of a group—the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers! Mrs. S: Yes, but it owes its greatness to those people who weren’t afraid to be individuals. Laurie: Stop worrying, Mom. Mr. Ross has just found a great way to get everybody to learn something. Even the slow kids are keeping up.
Unit I: READING #22 Mrs. S: It just doesn’t sound like the right thing for you. We raised you to be an individual. Laurie: But, Mom, haven’t you always said I was a little too independent? Mrs. S: Just remember, the popular thing is not always the right thing. Mr. S: I’m sure Laurie’s teacher knows what he’s doing. Besides, as long as the other parents aren’t raising any objection, why should we make a fuss? Mrs. S: Because it’s dangerous to allow a teacher to manipulate students like that. We’ve always taught Laurie to think for herself. Mr. S (changing the subject): By the way, where’s David tonight? Laurie: He’s at home studying for tomorrow’s history assignment. Mr. S: David? Studying? Now there’s something to worry about! Narr 1: In a house nearby, the Rosses are unpacking groceries. Christy: How’s that class experiment going, Dr. Frankenstein? Have they turned on you yet? Ross: Quite the contrary. Most of them are actuallyturning into human beings! Christy: You don’t say! Ross: And their homework assignments—they do what I give them and more! Christy: These can’t be the same kids I have for music. Ross: It’s amazing how much more they like you when you make decisions for them. Christy: How far can you push this? Ross: I don’t know, but I intend to find out. The funny thing is, I feel myself getting caught up in it. It’s contagious.
SCENE THREE Narr 2: The next day Laurie tells David about her mother’s objections. David (annoyed): What do you care what your mom says? Laurie: I didn’t say I agreed with her. David: You didn’t say you disagree with her either. Laurie: I was just telling you what she said. David: How does she know? She can’t possibly understand what The Wave is about unless she’s seen it work. Narr 1: Just then a car screeches dangerously near David and Laurie, missing them by inches. As the driver comes close, he smiles and gives them the Wave salute. Laurie (confused): Who was that? David: I don’t know. But he’s not in our history class.
Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981.
Narr 2: In history class that day… Ross: Now, you all have membership cards. Turn them over. If yours has a Red X, you are a monitor and will report directly to me any members who don’t obey our rules. Narr 1: The students who have been appointed monitors are very pleased. But Laurie looks around the room, concerned about this new twist. Ross (dramatically): Discipline and Community are meaningless without Action. And a disciplined group with a goal can take action like a well-oiled machine. Through hard work you will learn faster and accomplish more. But only if you support one another, and only if you work together and obey the rules, can you ensure the success of the Wave. (pause) Now, you are all to actively recruit new members. Each new member must know our rules and pledge strict obedience to them. Robert (standing): Mr. Ross, for the first time I feel like I’m part of something great! Amy: Mr. Ross, this is like being made a whole new person. Andrea: Mr. Ross, I feel the same way. David: Mr. Ross, I’m proud of the Wave. Narr 2: Laurie continues to look on with worry in her face at the robot-like way in which her classmates are reacting. Narr 1: Mr. Ross begins repeating the two mottos in a whisper. Soon the whole class follows suit, joining him in giving the Wave salute. Laurie does not participate. Narr 2: Later that week, David and Laurie are arguing at their lockers. Laurie: I’m not going. David: Why not? Laurie: Because I don’t want to. David: Laurie, this is a very important meeting. All the new members are going to be there. Laurie: So what? David, I think you’re taking this thing too seriously. David: No, I’m not—you’re not taking it seriously enough. Look, Laurie, you’ve always been a leader. The other kids look up to you. You’ve got to be at the meeting. Laurie: That’s exactly why I’m not going. Let them make up their own minds about the Wave. They’re individuals. David: I don’t understand. Laurie: I can’t believe how crazy everybody’s gotten. The Wave is taking over everything. David: That’s because the Wave makes sense, Laurie. It works. Everybody’s on the same team. Everybody’s equal.
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Unit I: READING #22 Laurie: Oh, that’s terrific. Do we all score a touchdown? David: You know, you’re against this thing because you’re not special anymore. Because you’re not the best student in class now! Laurie: That’s not true and you know it! David: I think it is true! Now you know how the rest of us felt listening to you and Amy always giving the right answers! Laurie: David, you’re being stupid! David: All right, if I’m so stupid, why don’t you go find yourself a smart boyfriend? (He storms off.)
SCENE FOUR
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Narr 1: Several days later Mr. Ross walks down a crowded hallway, giving the Wave salute to passing students. Narr 2: Ross notices some students hanging a large Wave banner in the hall. Others are handing out fliers and shouting slogans. Brad: Here’s a pamphlet—learn all about—the Wave. Eric: Work together and achieve your goals. Narr 1: Suddenly Mr. Ross notices that Robert is following him. Ross: Robert, what are you doing? Robert: Mr. Ross, I’m your bodyguard. Ross: You’re my what? Robert: I want to be your bodyguard. You see, Mr. Ross, for the first time in my life—well, nobody makes jokes about me anymore. I’m part of something special. I just don’t want anything to ever happen to you. Mr. Ross, please let me be your bodyguard. Narr 2: Later that day, a fight takes place involving Brian and another student. A teacher rushes in to break it up. As Brian is hauled off, he shouts the Wave mottoes repeatedly. Narr 1: Meanwhile, in the library, Laurie shows Amy an article she’s written. Amy (astonished): What are you going to do with this? Laurie: I’m submitting it to the school paper. Amy: You can’t say these things about the Wave! Laurie: Why not? They’re true. Amy, the Wave has become an obsession with everyone. People aren’t thinking for themselves anymore. Amy: Come on, you’re just letting your argument with David get to you. Laurie: But the Wave is hurting people. And everyone’s going along with it like a flock of sheep! Amy: Please don’t submit this. Laurie: I already have. Narr 2: That night Christy finds her husband in the
Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
den surrounded by books on the Hitler Youth group. Christy: I need to talk to you. Ross (snapping): Can’t it wait? I’ve got to finish this before tomorrow. Christy: Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. This Wave thing—it’s just becoming too disruptive. Half of my class has been skipping just to go to yours. You’ve disrupted the entire school. And it isn’t just me—all the teachers are complaining. Ross: They just don’t know what I’m trying to do. Christy: Did you know that the school counselors have been questioning every student in your class? Even the principal’s concerned. Ross: Don’t you think I know that? I know they’re saying I’m crazy with power—on an ego trip. Christy: Have you thought they may be right? Think of your original goals. Are they the ones you have now? Ross: I thought you were on my side. Christy: I am. But you’ve become so involved in playing this role at school that you’re slipping into it at home. Just turn it off! Ross: Not yet! Look, if I stopped now, they’d all be left hanging. They’d be confused. Christy: Well let them be confused! Ross: No! I have to push them until they get the point. I’m teaching these kids the most important lesson of their lives! Narr 1: The following day, when the school paper is released, angry Wave members discuss Laurie’s article. Robert: These are all lies. She can’t be allowed to say these things. David: Ah, nobody cares what Laurie’s writing, anyway. Robert: But anybody who reads this’ll get the wrong idea about the Wave. Amy: And this isn’t the first article she’s written against the Wave. David: Relax—there are always going to be people who won’t believe in what we’re trying to do. Eric: But if we don’t watch out, those people will ruin it for the rest of us. Robert: Laurie Saunders is a threat. She must be stopped. Brian: Don’t worry. David and I will take care of it. Narr 2: It’s dark out that evening when Laurie exits from the school newspaper office. Narr 1: But it is a shocked Laurie who reads the word ENEMY splashed in bold letters across her locker door. Then, when she walks down the hall, the lights go out.
Unit I: READING #22 Narr 2: Becoming frightened, Laurie starts to run. She hears footsteps behind her and slams against the bar of the exit door. The first door doesn’t open, and Laurie nearly panics—then suddenly the second door gives way, and Laurie rushes outside. Narr 1: But she doesn’t see Brian and David in a parked van waiting for her. David jumps out. David: Let me take care of this. OK? Brian: OK, as long as she understands how important this is. We’re not playing games anymore, you know. David (running): Laurie, can you wait up? I’ve got to talk to you. Laurie (looking around): I’m not used to seeing you by yourself anymore. Where are your troops? David: Laurie, will you just listen to me for a minute, please? Laurie: We said everything we had to say the other day. Leave me alone. David: Laurie, you’ve got to stop writing that stuff against the Wave. You’re causing lots of problems. Laurie: The Wave is causing the problems, David! David: It is not! Look, Laurie, we want you with us—not against us. Laurie: Count me out. I told you I quit! This is not a game anymore. People are beginning to get hurt. David: So a few people are getting hurt along the way. But it’s for the good of the whole. Look, it’s a new system, we can make it work Laurie: Not with me, you can’t! Narr 2: As Laurie turns to walk away. David grabs her arm, roughly. Laurie: Let go of me! David: Look, Laurie, you’ve got to stop writing those articles—and keep your mouth shut about the Wave. Laurie: I will write and say anything that I want to, and you can’t stop me! David: (shaking her violently): We can and we will!! Laurie (sobbing): I hate you! I hate the Wave! I hate all of you! David: Shut up!
Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981.
Narr 1: Angry at the bitterness of Laurie’s word, David throws her to the lawn. She slumps to the ground sobbing and gasping for breath. Narr 2: Finally realizing has violent he has become, David bends down to comfort her. Narr 1: Just then Brian’s van inches slowly toward them. When Brian sees David holding Laurie, he speeds off.
SCENE FIVE Narr 2: A little while later, David and Laurie go to see Mr. Ross. Ross: What are you two doing here? David: Mr. Ross, we’ve got to talk to you. Ross: Come in. Sit down. David: Mr. Ross, you’ve got to help us. Ross: What’s wrong? David: It’s the Wave. Laurie: Mr. Ross, we know how important this is to you—to all of us, but it’s just gone too far. David: It’s taken over. There’s no room to be yourself or to say what you really believe. Laurie: And all the kids in school are really scared. Not only to say anything against the Wave—but what might happen to them if they don’t go along with it. David: Kids are actually spying on each other. Some even use the Wave as an excuse to beat up on other kids. Ross: Yes, the principal told me about that this afternoon. Laurie: You can’t even carry on a conversation without worrying about who’s listening. We’re scared, Mr. Ross. David: Laurie and I haven’t talked for days because of the Wave. And tonight I lost control and almost hurt her. Laurie: Please stop this nightmare. Ross: You’re right—and I will. David: What are you going to do? Ross: Well, I’ll take care of it tomorrow. But I have to do it my way…
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Unit I: READING #22 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Is That The End? No, that is not how “The Wave” ends. But that’s all the producers of the show will permit us to reveal. They want you to ask yourself a few questions about this important program before it appears on TV. So as you wait to see the complete show, here are some things to think about: • What made the Wave gain so much popularity in just two weeks? • Is the Wave a good movement? • Have Wave members lost their individuality, as Laurie says? • What good lesson might Laurie and David have learned? • Will Mr. Ross be able to stop the Wave? Now? Do you think he’s lost control?
2.
Inference. An inference is a suggestion that may be picked up from a story, but was not openly stated. For instance, if we read that a young girl slammed the door and stomped upstairs to her room, we infer that she is angry. Read the inferences below, checking only those that are true. ____ Mr. Ross felt that the story of the Nazi movement held an important lesson for his students. ____ The Wave illustrates that there is something wrong with the motto: “Strength Through Discipline.” ____ Laurie would probably have stayed in the Wave if she had been given more leadership power. ____ A disinterested student like Robert feels important in the Wave because the movement defines his life’s goals for him. ____ Only the poorer students at Gordon High joined the Wave.
3.
What does the Wave imply about human nature? About conformity, silence and obedience?
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Source: Playlet: The Wave. Scholastic Magazine. 7 Oct 1981. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #23
Odyssey of Regimentation carried cult over decades Frank Bruni
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or 39 men and women who believed they were bound for a starry utopia in outer space, the fare to the heavens was a life adhering to exacting prescriptions and regimens. At their sprawling house in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., they woke at a specified time in the middle of the night to pray. They apparently ate the same food at the same hours. They wore short haircuts and shapeless clothing, intended to distract them from such frivolous realities as sexuality or even sexual identity. Previously, when members of the cult traveled the country in 1994 in an effort to expand their ranks, they were spotted with identical wedding bands on their fingers, symbols of their marriage to one another and their subjugation of the self to the group. Common rituals and a common sense of purpose were the supposed passports to paradise, and these defined the community of believers who died in what may have been the largest mass suicide in American history, much as they define other cults whose existence depends on rendering members docile and rapt. Over the years, the precise details of life inside the cult led by Marshall Herff Applewhite changed. In the late 1970’s, for example, the group reportedly lived in a Wyoming encampment in the Rocky Mountains where members sometimes wore hoods over their heads and altered their chores every 12 minutes in accordance with beeps from a command tent. Just before the end, in contrast, they lived in an exclusive suburban enclave, having traded campground drudgery for high-tech prowess and the designing of Web pages for companies that wanted a presence on the Internet. But as a more complete portrait of the cult emerged yesterday from interviews with experts on cults, statements of former members and a review of current and past reports in newspapers, books and journals, it became clear that for most of the group’s history, which spanned more than two decades, its members followed careful scripts as they pursued a
shared destiny. “Anyone willing to play by the rules was welcome,” Robert W. Balch, a professor of sociology at the University of Montana who studied the group for years, wrote in a 1995 book. It is also clear that the Total Overcomers, or Heaven’s Gate—just two of the names adopted by the group over the years—often recruited new members in a manner that could be described as almost bashful. Keeping its address secret, the group would advertise meetings with posters, frequently discourage potential recruits from joining on the spot and insist that they come to a follow-up session, sometimes at a location that would be difficult to reach. In one case, aspiring members had to travel to a post office 800 miles from the initial meeting place so that they could look in a ZIP-code book for the scribbled directions to the next meeting place. Longtime members talked to new recruits about free will even as those recruits were effectively robbed of that capacity and were encouraged to cast away the detritus of their lives before joining. “They were very explicit—people had to make a free and conscious choice,” Professor Balch said in an interview yesterday. Experts on cults said this approach, whatever its intent, had been a deft one, because it weeded out recruits who were not serious while giving those who went forward a deceptive sense of control over their own lives. Professor Balch, posing as a recruit, actually traveled with members of the group for two months in 1975. He said Mr. Applewhite and the coleader, Bonnie Lu Nettles, who died of natural causes in 1985, had even bought a bus ticket home for anyone who wanted to leave the group and had once purchased an airplane ticket for a defector and driven her to the airport. But Mr. Applewhite and Ms. Nettles, calling themselves Bo and Peep, as in shepherds of a flock, also encouraged recruits to renounce their former lives. Robert Rubin, now a 48 year-old supermarket clerk, who attended a presentation they gave in Waldport, Ore., in the fall of 1975, said yesterday that he had quickly heeded their call to shed his material
Source: Bruni, Frank. “Odyssey of Regimentation Carried Cult Over Decades.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997, and “The Overview: Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997.
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Unit I: READING #23
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possessions and had given away his house and land to a friend, who later gave them back. Mr. Rubin, then 26, accompanied Mr. Applewhite and Ms. Nettles to an outdoor camp in Colorado, he said, where he and other recruits gave the couple their money and, apparently as a gesture of forsaking former identities, their driver’s licenses. “We changed our names and were told to break all contact with friends and family,” Mr. Rubin said. “We were told not to watch television or to read anything but the redletter edition of the Bible.” “They did it to keep you in that mindset,” Mr. Rubin said. “The partner was there, if you were falling out of what you had to do, so you wouldn’t fall out. It was part of the mind control.” Those susceptible to it were most often people in the 20’s who had already embarked on spiritual quests of one sort or another. Testimonials by longtime members of the group that were included in a book it published on the Internet in 1995 give a strong sense of this. “For a few years, I went through wanting to become a nun,” wrote one member, who identified herself by the name Lvvody. “Nothing seemed right.” But in 1975, after hitchhiking across America and other countries, she saw a poster in Oregon advertising a discussion about U.F.O.’s. She went to it. “Now that I was connected to my teachers,” she wrote, “I knew I was safe.” But life in the group apparently grew more severe and regimented at some point after that. A member named Paul Groll who was interviewed by Time magazine for an article published in August 1979 described the encampment in Wyoming as a place of ritual. Members had to communicate almost entirely through written messages, Mr. Groll said, their speech limited to “yes” “no” or “I don’t know. In “The Gods Have Landed,” a 1995 book including a chapter by Professor Balch, he quotes a former member as saying the group had “a procedure for every conscious moment of life.” That included cooking, eating, bathing, washing clothes and sleeping, Professor Balch wrote. By a number of accounts, one member inherited $300,000 at some point, and factions of the group moved into houses in the Denver and Dallas areas. The precise timing of this is unclear, and the cult’s activities in the 1980’s, when it kept a low profile, are difficult to pinpoint. But by 1993 the group had resurfaced, and over the next two years various
people came into contact with representatives who spoke at public lectures, again summoning interested people through posters. The posters were often misleading, making it appear that the discussion would be simply about U.F.O’s. They were frequently placed in college towns and in cities like Taos and Santa Fe, N.M., known to attract people with New Age Interests. It is unclear how many new members were recruited during this period, but Yanya Lalich, a counselor who has helped relatives of the cult’s members, characterized these new recruits as “bright, idealistic.” Michael Upledger, a freelance writer who interviewed members when they were in Tampa, Fla. in 1994, says that by that point they did allow themselves at least one outlet for pleasure: television. “They loved ‘X-Files’ and ‘Star Trek,’” Mr. Upledger told the Associated Press yesterday, saying the normally glazed, soft-spoken members had become animated in discussing science fiction. Professor Balch said he ran into representatives of the cult in Missoula, Mon., in 1993. “They were supersecretive,” he said yesterday. “They wouldn’t tell me where they were staying or the phone number. I had to call an answering machine in Seattle and leave a number, and they’d call me back.” Bob Waldrep, another cult expert, ran into them around the same time in Birmingham, Ala., when they held a meeting there. It lasted three hours, he said, during which representatives offered listeners glimpses of life in the group. According to Mr. Waldrep’s notes from that meeting, one representative, referring to the group’s Older Members, or leaders, said: “The O.M’s have experimented with many different diets for us to determine the most efficient. The only purpose for food is to fuel the vehicles,” the cult’s term for bodies. Obsession with food also characterized the members who ended up in Rancho Santa Fe. According to West Coast newspaper reports, at least some, and perhaps all, ate a large communal meal at 5 A.M. and nothing else except for snacks of fruit and a lemon drink. Members also woke at 3 A.M. for prayer and, according to an employee of Arrowhead General, a company for which the group did freelance computer work, recoiled whenever someone made physical contact with them. “To touch or hug them was almost offensive to them,” he said. “They did not like to be touched.”
Source: Bruni, Frank. “Odyssey of Regimentation Carried Cult Over Decades.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997, and “The Overview: Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #23
Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly The tone of that farewell tape, made with the cult members sitting in pairs on chairs placed outside in a setting of trees and bushes, was similar to the tone of another tape found after the 39 bodies were discovered, with men and women alike dressed all in black, their hair closely cropped and their faces covered by diamond-shaped purple cloths. On the second tape, Marshall Applewhite tried to explain why he and the others were about to take their lives. He said that human bodies were just temporary earthly parking places for the soul and that suicide would free the soul to make a rendezvous on a higher plane of existence with an unidentified flying object that is trailing The Hale-Bopp comet, now on a swing past Earth. “We have no hesitation to leave this place, to leave the bodies that we have,” Mr. Applewhite concluded. While the cult member may have taken many of the secrets to the grave, the authorities said today
that they were confident that the people who died here were the only active members of the group…Dr. Blackbourne described a document, found by detectives, that was titled “The Routine.” It outlined how the cult members were to go about killing themselves. First, it said 15 of the 39 cult members, called “classmates,” would kill themselves with help from 8 “assistants.” Then 15 more “classmates” would repeat the process. It was unclear how the final 9 cult members were to go about killing themselves. To bring on death, the cult members were to ingest a dose of Dramamine, followed by “tea toast,” followed an hour later by “alco.& med.” When the bodies of the cult members were searched, Dr. Blackbourne said, the pockets of the matching black tunics were found to contain a collection of odd items—bills, rolls of quarters, tubes of balm, pencils and ballpoint pens, and facial tissue. Beside each body was a travel bag. But, Dr. Blackbourne said he had not been told what the bag contained.
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Source: Bruni, Frank. “Odyssey of Regimentation Carried Cult Over Decades.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997, and “The Overview: Families Are Learning of 39 Cultists Who Died Willingly.” The New York Times. 29 March 1997.
Unit I: READING #24
The power and the glory Alfons Heck Alfons Heck was a bright, promising and enthusiastic German boy who lived on a Rhineland farm with his grandparents. He was six years old when Hitler and the National Socialists (Nazis) came to power in 1933. In school, he was taught that the Germans are a master race and every German child owed a duty to Germany and its leaders, a duty above family, friends and even God. This selection is excerpted from Parallel Journeys that traces the journey of Alfons Heck in the Hitler Youth. What do you believe seduced Alfons to join this militaristic organization at age 10?
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ar from being forced to enter, I couldn’t wait to join. It promised to be an exciting life, filled with “duties” that were more like pleasures. In a way, it was like the Boy Scouts — hiking, camping, sports competition — with more emphasis on discipline and politics. Until I was old enough to join, I had to content myself with watching the Hitler Youth march in parades through the streets of Wittlich. One spring evening, in the company of my Uncle Franz, I watched a torchlight parade of brownshirted Storm Troopers and Hitler Youth formations. The music of a military band filled the air, the first military music our people had heard since the end of World War 1. The streets were draped with red flags and buntings. What would later become a symbol of death — a black swastika within a white circle — was then still new to most of the people in Wittlich. It seemed like the whole town lined the streets that night. People hung from windows and balconies shouting a constant storm of “Heil Hitler!” and “Sieg Heil! “ At last we laid eyes on the man who had put us into this wild fever of excitement. He was standing in an open black Mercedes touring car. It was the first time I had ever seen Adolf Hitler, and I will never forget the magic of that night. Even people who were usually quiet and surly were shouting their lungs out,
“Heil Hitler!” Here was the man who was building for us a new Germany, a proud country that would once again find its place in the world. On that night, I was just as certain as Hitler that the Third Reich would last a thousand years. Shortly before noon, 80,000 Hitler Youth were lined up in rows as long as the entire stadium. The tension among us tingled into our fingertips. When Hitler finally appeared, we greeted him with a thundering, triple “Sieg Heil!” (Hail to Victory) and it took all of our discipline to end it there, as we had been instructed. Hitler, the superb actor that he was, always began his speeches quietly, almost man to man. Then his voice rose, took on power, and his right fist punctuated the air in a series of short, powerful jabs. “You, my youth,” he shouted, with his eyes seeming to stare right at me, “are our nation’s most precious guarantee for a great future. You are destined to be the leaders of a glorious new order under National Socialism! You, my youth,” he screamed hoarsely, “never forget that one day you will rule the world.” For minutes on end, we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!” From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.
Source: Ayer, Eleanor H., Alfons Heck and Helen Waterford. “The Power and the Glory.” Parallel Journeys. New York: Atheneum, 1995 New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #25
I was a violent skinhead. Frank Meeink as told to Laura D’Angelo
W
hen Frank Meeink was a child, he was a teacher’s pet. No one would have guessed then that he would become a vicious neo-Nazi skinhead. But that’s what he did. It took Frank a long time to realize how misguided and pathetic his life as a neo-Nazi was. Today, Frank deeply regrets his violent, hateful past and is trying to make up for it. He shared his shocking story with Scope writer Laura D’Angelo. My parents divorced when I was one. I lived in a tough part of Philadelphia with my mom. We were very close. That all changed when I was 11, and her boyfriend moved in. He was jealous of our relationship. I couldn’t even talk to my mom without him criticizing me. The two of them started drinking. He’d get furious at me for stupid things. Once he beat me up in front of my friends because I hadn’t cleaned the basement. When I was 13, I couldn’t control my rage at him anymore. I got into a huge fight with him, and my mom sent me packing to live with my dad. I felt even more alone when I moved in with my dad and his new wife. They were never around, and I just did what I wanted to do. It seemed like there was no place for me and nobody cared. That summer, I went to live with my cousins and my aunt in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Hooked on Hate In Lancaster, I shared a room with my 16-yearold cousin. He was a skinhead and hung out with skinheads. They all shaved their heads and wore black boots and flight jackets. The skinheads treated me like I was their little brother. They made me feel protected. I thought they were so cool. I read all the skinhead pamphlets. They said whites are superior, and that all blacks, Jews, gays, and foreigners are evil. By August, my head was shaved, my boots were black, and I was preaching white supremacy to anyone who would listen. In the fall, I moved back in with my mom. When my skinhead friends visited me, we’d get drunk and go on “beat downs.” We’d target blacks and gays, and unload on them with bricks, baseball bats, chains,
knives, and boxcutters. It wasn’t before long I was expelled from school for knocking out a black kid’s teeth.
More rage and violence I started roaming the country, hanging out with skinheads. I had a swastika tattooed on my neck. One night, I got really drunk and depressed. I thought,”What am I doing with my life?” I was 16 and had 15 warrants out for my arrest. I felt like nobody loved me. I went to stay with some skinheads I knew in Springfield, Illinois. A friend and I decided to create a skinhead talk show for public access television in Springfield. We were instant celebrities. We recruited 40 new skinheads in two months. I even fell in love with a skinhead girl named Carin. It was in Springfield on Christmas Eve in 1992 that three of us got drunk and kidnapped a guy from a rival gang. We hated him because his ideas were different from ours. We tortured him for 14 hours. We kicked in his teeth and put his head through the wall. Then we warned him to keep his mouth shut and let him go. He went straight to the cops. Two weeks later, I was arrested. I knew I was going to get locked up and I was terrified. I was 17, tried and convicted as an adult, and on my way to prison. On top of that, I found out I was going to be a father. “Congratulations! You got what you always wanted,” said Carin in a letter to me. It was true. I wanted a baby—someone in my life who would always love me.
Prison First I was in isolation and only allowed out one hour a week to use the phone and take a shower. I was allowed one book a week. I grabbed the fattest one first, the Bible. When I was moved into the general prison population, a black guy named Abel invited me to a prayer group. At one point, I was holding hands with another black guy, praying. I remember thinking, “This feels just like my dad’s hand.” This was really confusing, so I pushed it out of my mind.
Source: Meeink, Frank, as told to Laura D’Angelo. “I Was A Violent Skinhead.” Scholastic Scope. 4 Oct 1999.18-20.
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Unit I: READING #25 I signed up for the basketball, soccer, and football teams. When I’d score a touchdown, the black guys would say, “Good run, white boy,” and hug me. This went against everything I stood for, but I thought, “Prison is a different world. When I get out, I’ll be true to my race.” The only other guy my age was black. His name was Little G, and he worked with me in the chow hall. When I told Little G that I was afraid Carin was cheating on me, he’d say, “Man, don’t worry. She’s waiting for you.” The older white prisoners would say, “Oh, yeah. She’s cheating on you.” It struck me that Little G was a better friend to me than any of the white guys.
Back home
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I was released from prison seven months later. I was glad to see my old friends in Springfield, but they’d say things like, “Blacks are worthless.” I’d think, “What do they know?” They never met Abel or Little G or probably any black person. But I didn’t say anything. It was hard to admit that the people I admired were wrong — that my “success” as a skinhead was based on ignorance. Carin had left the movement and was devoting herself to our daughter, Bailey. It upset her that I still associated with my old friends. Our relationship cracked under the strain, so I headed back to Philadelphia. I was having a hard time finding a job. My swastika tattoo got in the way. I was shocked when this Jewish guy, Keith, hired me to haul furniture. I guess he figured I was a messed up kid, and he wanted to give me a second chance. Keith was the first Jewish person I had ever known. I grew to love him and it made me sick that he might think I secretly hated him. I got my swastika tattoo removed. Then came the Oklahoma City bombing in 1996. When I saw the photograph of a fireman carrying out a dead little girl, I cried for days. I knew how devastated I would be if I lost my daughter. The faces of my victims came rushing at me. For the first time, I thought about all the people I had hurt. I felt terrible. I knew I could never make it up to my victims. But I wanted to try to make it right.
A new beginning I stopped hanging out with my skinhead friends. I grew out my hair and tossed away my boots. I started talking with people at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that fights discrimination. I came up with an idea to use sports to bring together black and white kids. After all, sports were the key to my turnaround. The ADL, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, and the city department of recreation got together and started a program called Harmony Through Hockey. I started working with kids. I’m 24 now. I speak at high schools and colleges. I tell kids who are dabbling in hate groups that they are headed for a life of pain, loneliness, and remorse. I tell them they can’t beat back their misery by hurting others. I know I can never make up for the lives I’ve damaged, maybe even destroyed. My victims paid a price for my hatred and that makes me feel awful. I put so much negativity into the world. Now it’s time to make positive contributions.
Skill builders. Think about it! WRITE ABOUT OR DISCUSS YOUR ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS. 1. If Frank’s cousin had been a baseball star instead of a skinhead, do you think Frank would still have become a skinhead? Why? 2. Who do you think is responsible for Frank’s becoming a skinhead? Explain. 3. What else could Frank do to try to make up for his violent, hateful past?
Word match Match each vocabulary word with its definition. ____1. supremacy ____2. isolation ____3. struck ____4. associated ____5. defamation a. occurred to b. had contact c. hate speech d. being the best e. being kept alone
Source: Meeink, Frank, as told to Laura D’Angelo. “I Was A Violent Skinhead.” Scholastic Scope. 4 Oct 1999.18-20. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #26
the holocaust: heidi’s dilemma
A
dolf Hitler (1889-1945) was chief of the German Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi) from 1920 and Chancellor of the Reich from 1933. He held absolute power in Germany and pursued an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy, which led to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Under Hitler, Germany controlled much of Europe. However, a turning point in the war came in 1943, and by 1945 America and her allies were able to stop Hitler and defeat Germany. Using the concept of race struggle as the prime force behind human history, Hitler and his followers implemented the most systematic, widespread and destructive anti-Semitic policies ever known. While other “non-Aryans” were also subjected to persecution and abuse, Hitler saved his special hatred for the Jews. Jews were depicted as the source of all of Germany’s ills and problems. They were viewed as an evil race whose ultimate aim was to destroy the “Aryan” race and dominate the world. The elements of this myth were previously used by German and Austrian anti-Semites at the end of the 19th Century; and, in general, anti-Semitism had been common throughout Europe for centuries. Hitler’s plan, however, was the most devastating—the total extermination of the Jews. Hitler personally followed and controlled this “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” The Holocaust, the massive genocide of six million Jews, is one of the most tragic periods of Jewish history and modern mankind as well. Millions of Jews lived under Nazi rule. Tortured by anxiety, insecure in the present, unable to anticipate the future, Jews were helpless in the face of a machine ready to crush them. Many of the victims had made important contributions to their countries in such fields as science, law, medicine and the arts. Nonetheless, young or old, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, every Jew was condemned. The extermination of the Jews in Nazi-controlled territories was carried out in a number of ways. The Jewish victims became slave laborers to be worked to death or shot. There were mass executions of men,
women and children who were forced to dig their own graves. Gold crowns on teeth were knocked out to enrich the German treasury…and human skin was made into lampshades, etc. Millions were gassed or burned alive in ovens. Hitler attempted to keep the destruction of the Jews a secret. Sophisticated methods of deception, fraud and camouflage were employed to prevent the victims from learning of the massacres. The very monstrosity of the events made it seem unbelievable. Despite the secrecy, the truth about the destruction of the Jews was known to certain party and government officials quite early, and stories gradually spread throughout Germany. Helping a Jew or other minority member could mean death to the person who exhibited such courage. Still, there were countless individual acts of sacrifice and heroism by Jews and non-Jews during this period. Denmark and Holland were two nations that took active roles in helping their Jewish citizens.
The Situation Heidi is a young Dutch girl who lives in a small house in Amsterdam with her family. She has a best friend named Greta, but lately she has not seen much of her and when she does see her, Greta is quiet and withdrawn. Heidi wonders if it is because of Germany’s new leader, Hitler, and his policies. Greta is Jewish. Heidi has heard the bad things that are being said about the Jews. She does not believe them, because she knows Greta is a good person. One day they do manage to talk, and Greta becomes very upset and finally tells Heidi about the awful persecution and ugly abuse that is going on. In fact, one of Greta’s uncles has just been arrested for daring to speak out against Hitler. No one knows what has happened to him. Greta has heard stories of Jews being taken away in the night and never being heard of again. Greta and her family are living in fear. Upset and feeling sorry for her friend, Heidi invites Greta home for dinner. That night after Greta leaves, Heidi tells her family what Greta had said about the ugly things
Source: Jacobsen, Louise and Mary Furlong. The Bystander’s Dilemma. Culver City, CA: Zenger Production, Inc., 1980. (Note: Questions for Discussions are an adaptation)
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Unit I: READING #26 done to Jews, simply because they are Jews. Heidi’s parents are aware of Hitler’s particular hatred for the Jews, but they believe it is not wise to speak out against the new order. They do not want to put their own family in jeopardy and so they tell Heidi it would be best not to associate with Greta. A few hours later Heidi answers a knock on the door. It is Greta and she looks terrified with tears streaming down her face. “Heidi, I went home after dinner—my family was gone, but their dinner was still
on the table, and there were spots that look like blood by the door. They have been taken, I know it. What can I do now? I have no place to go. Will you help me?” Heidi must make a big decision. There is a secret room in the attic where Heidi often goes to be alone. She is afraid for Greta and wants to help her. But she knows her own family’s safety will be in danger if she helps her friend.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What alternatives are available to Heidi? What are the probable consequences of each? 2. What should Heidi do? Explain the implications involved. 3. What are the implications for society if everyone makes the choice you suggest?
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Source: Jacobsen, Louise and Mary Furlong. The Bystander’s Dilemma. Culver City, CA: Zenger Production, Inc., 1980. (Note: Questions for Discussions are an adaptation) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #26
Individual Report Form Name: _________________________________________________________________________________ Directions: After reading the case study, answer questions 1, 2 A. B. C, individually, before going on to group discussion. 1. CASE STUDY DATA SHEET #_______________________ __________________________ Title of Case Study
Name of bystander in this case
2. YOUR DECISION: A. What was your decision? B. How did you reach your decision? C. What is likely to happen as a result of your decision? Directions: Appoint one person to be the group leader. The group leader will lead the discussion. Begin your discussion only after all group members have completed questions 1 and 2. 3. GROUP DISCUSSION: A. What was the issue involved in the case? B. What decision did each individual in your group reach? C. What do you believe as a group is the best solution to the bystander’s dilemma in this case study? D. Turn to your Case Study Data Sheet, beginning with question 1, discuss each question as a group and write answers to each question on the back of this form. Directions: Stop! Your teacher will conduct a Group Leader Panel Discussion. Directions: After completion of the Group Leader Panel Discussion, answer questions 4 A, B. C. D, E . 4. ON REFLECTION: A. Did the discussion by the small group and panel change your opinion on this issue? If so, explain. B. When should a person take a stand? C. What are some conflicts that may arise and make it difficult for a person to take a stand? D. Can you recall any situations when you have been a bystander? What was the situation and what did you do? E. Do people in society have a responsibility toward their fellow citizens? If so, how much of one?
c Zenger Publications, 1980
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Unit I: READING #27
Conversion or emigration What Would You Do? The following is based on actual historical accounts.
E
manuel Rutsa’s family has lived in Spain for hundreds of years. He has become a successful financier in Seville and is raising a family of four young children. Spain, now a Catholic state, is in the midst of an Inquisition, an attempt by the Spanish Church to stamp out all heretics. Christians convicted of heresy have been burned at the stake (or, often, have become victims of mob rule). These victims include many Jews who had been forcibly converted but still secretly retained their identity as Jews. In 1492, the state issues its Edict of Expulsion: All Jews who do
not convert to Christianity are to be expelled. (There are about 150,000 Jews in Spain at this time.) Rutsa, as a Jew, must make a difficult choice. He may leave the country and attempt to settle in a part of the world where Jews are permitted. It would mean starting life again in strange surroundings, learning a new language, leaving old friends. And he would not be allowed to take most of his wealth with him. Or he and his family can convert to the Christian faith and become part of the mainstream of Spanish society, maintaining their economic success and position.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
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1. What should Rutsa do? Are there other options available?
2. Should Rutsa’s economic success or his Jewish faith mean more to him?
3. How important is your faith to you? How far would you go to uphold it?
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #28
his name was jackie robinson Today, as baseball fans look forward to spring training and the start of the new season, it’s hard to believe there was a time when African American players were not allowed in the major leagues. It is especially appropriate to learn about the player who changed that situation as we observe Black History Month. PERFORMING THE PLAY This play has 21 speaking roles and can easily be performed in a classroom. Students without speaking roles, or those who have completed their parts, could be background mimes and a chorus. They could hum “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and mime ball players in action. CAST Narrators 1, 2,3,4,5,6 Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball scout Jackie Robinson, second baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers Newskids I and 2 Sportswriters I and 2 Baseball player Citizen Pee Wee Reese, shortstop for the Dodgers Red Barber, radio announcer of Dodgers games Bernice Franklin, fan Clay Hopper, minor-league team manager Rachel Robinson, wife of Jackie Robinson Ford Frick, president of the National League
ACT ONE Narrator 1: Jack Roosevelt Robinson was an ordinary kid. He grew up in California, where his mother had moved her family to escape hard times in their native Georgia. Narrator2: But no matter where they went, the Robinsons could not escape people who hated them because they were black. Narrator 1: Still, Jackie became a fine athlete. Even hearing people call him names and being cursed at by players on other teams didn’t stop him. Narrator 2: He went to college. He was a high scorer in basketball. He set records in track and field. He led the football team to win after win. Narrator 1: While Jackie was starring in college sports, his mother had to work to -support the family. This bothered Jackie so much that, in 1941, he left school to work and help out. Narrator 2: Jackie didn’t work for long. On December 7, 1941, the United States entered World
War II. Jackie was drafted into the army. Narrator 1: The U.S. Army was segregated. Black soldiers and white soldiers did not serve together. Jackie never let the racism and lack of respect defeat him, though sometimes standing up for his rights got him into trouble. But right was always on his side. Narrator 3: In April, 1945, when Jackie got out of the army, he joined a baseball team, the Kansas City Monarchs. Narrator 4: Baseball was segregated, too. There were separate leagues, each with professional teams for black players and white players. The Monarchs were part of the Negro Leagues. Narrator 3: Many hotels wouldn’t let the black players stay, so the men of the Negro Leagues slept on buses. Narrator 4: Because many restaurants and diners wouldn’t serve the black players, they ate at the side of the road. Narrator 3: It was a hard way to earn a
Source “His Name Was Jackie Robinson.” Creative Classroom. Jan./Feb. 1993.
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Unit I: READING #28 living. It would get even harder for Jackie Robinson—but in a different way. Jackie’s life was about to change because of a man named Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey: That’s me. I was the general manager of the Dodgers, who were then playing baseball in Brooklyn, New York. The Dodgers were an all white team and a lot of people wanted them to stay that way. Not me. I hated discrimination. I wanted baseball to be integrated. I believed race shouldn’t be a criterion for letting a player on the field. So I came up with a plan. Baseball scout: Rickey told me he was looking for players who would be on a new black team Rickey: I lied! I was really looking for a black player who would integrate the Dodgers. But I knew I had to keep that secret or I’d be fought every step of the way. Scout: So, anyway, Mr. Rickey wants to know about the players’ lives, about their background, about their temperament. Rickey: I wanted a person of intelligence, character, courage, and outstanding athletic ability. And one day, a scout brought that person into my office. Scout: His name was Jackie Robinson.
ACT TWO: IN RICKEY’S OFFICE 100
Rickey: Robinson, I want you to sign a contract with the Dodgers’ organization. Jackie Robinson (to the audience): I was so surprised that I could barely speak, which was fine. Branch was so busy talking I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise! Rickey (pacing): You’ll have a rough time out on the field. Pitchers will throw at your head. Runners will spike you. You’ll be called “nigger” and other ugly names. In some places you won’t be able to stay in hotels with the rest of the team or eat with them. But the hardest thing you’ll face is that you won’t be able to talk back or speak out. Robinson: Mr. Rickey, do you want a Negro player who is afraid to fight back? Rickey: I want a player with guts enough not to fight back. All: His name was Jackie Robinson.
ACT THREE: SPRING TRAINING Narrator 5: Jackie Robinson signed to play with the Montreal Royals. They were the Dodgers’ top minor league team. Players graduated from the Royals to the major league Dodgers. Narrator 6: The manager of the Royals was
Clay Hopper. Clay Hopper (to Rickey): Please don’t do this to me. I’m white and I’ve lived in Mississippi all my life. If you do this, you’re going to force me to move my family and home out of Mississippi. Rickey (to the audience): I’d known Clay Hopper for many years. I trusted him to deal with Jackie Robinson in a dignified way—and he did. Clay really cared about baseball and knew Robinson would be good for it. Narrator 5: The Royals had spring training in Florida, where the pressure on Jackie was strong and terrible. He didn’t play as well. He got discouraged but he had the support of some men on his team, his fans, and his wife, Rachel. Some incidents stuck in her mind. Citizen (to Robinson): Get out of our town! Get out now! There’s no way we’ll allow white people and Negroes to play on the same field. Baseball player (to Rickey): I used to respect you, but no more. If you bring Jackie Robinson along to play my team, I won’t play him. Rachel Robinson (to audience): This opened our eyes to what things were going to be like, but it also mobilized a lot of fight in us. We were not willing to think about going back. It gave us the kind of anger and rage to move ahead with real determination. Only one man seemed able to endure. All: His name was Jackie Robinson.
ACT FOUR: NEW YORK, 1947 Newskid 1: Extra! Extra! Jackie Robinson becomes a major leaguer! Sportswriter 1: Welcome Jackie Robinson! The fans are rooting for you. Rachel Robinson: I was very, very excited and very, very nervous. I was trying to figure out which players were going to be friendly and how Jackie was going to make out. Narrator 6: During Jackie Robinson’s first game against the Philadelphia Phillies, some members of that team were especially nasty to him. The players taunted and threatened him and his family. Robinson: I have to admit that this day of all the unpleasant days of my life brought me nearer to cracking up than I have ever been. Ford Frick: As the president of the National League, I say that any player who won’t play with or against Jackie Robinson will be suspended from baseball. This is the United States of America. One citizen has as much right to play as another.
Source “His Name Was Jackie Robinson.” Creative Classroom. Jan./Feb. 1993. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #28 Robinson: I learned that as long as I appeared to ignore insult and injury, I was a martyred hero to many people who seemed to have sympathy for the underdog. But the minute I began to answer, to argue, to protest—the minute I began to sound off—I became a swellhead, a wise guy, “uppity.” When a white guy did it, he had spirit. When a black player did it, he was “ungrateful,” an “upstart,” a “sorehead.”
ACT FIVE: BOSTON Sportswriter 2 (typing his story): The dateline is Boston. The Dodgers came here today to play the Boston Braves. The Braves players shouted at Jackie Robinson. The fans screamed dirty words and names. Jackie remained silent. Suddenly Pee Wee Reese, the popular Dodgers shortstop, walked over to his teammate. In a show of support, Pee Wee put his arm around Jackie’s shoulder. The insults stopped. Pee Wee Reese: I was born in Kentucky. I don’t guess that I ever shook the hand of a black person. But as my respect for Jackie grew, he became my friend as well as my teammate. (turns to Jackie) You know I didn’t go out of my way to be nice to you.
Robinson: Maybe that’s what I appreciated most.
ACT SIX: NEW YORK, 1949 Newskid 2: Extra! Extra! Jackie Robinson leads Dodgers to second pennant in three years! Wins the National League’s Most Valuable Player award! Robinson: I got fan mail from tiny places where people who never even saw a baseball game shared one big radio. Bernice Franklin: I lived in Tyronza, Arkansas, an all-black town. I wrote this to Jackie Robinson, “I own and operate a rural general store, and right now the farmers are gathering for your game this afternoon…There is no greater thrill than a broadcast of a Dodgers ball game…We are so proud of you.” Red Barber: My name is Red Barber. I did the announcing of the Dodgers games on radio—you couldn’t watch baseball on TV in those days. Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson thanked me for the calm way I broadcast the games. I know that if I have achieved any understanding and tolerance in my life…it all stems from this…I thank Jackie Robinson. He did far more for me than I did for him. All: His name was Jackie Robinson.
NOTE: Actual dialogue was used whenever possible in this play. It is based mainly on Jackie Robinson, a book for children by Howard Reiser, which was published in 1992 by Franklin Watts. Sources also included other books for children. Jackie Robinson: He Was the First, by David A. Adler (Holiday House); Jackie Robinson. by Richard Scott (Chelsea House); and Teammates, by Peter Golenbock (HBJ Publishers). For adults, Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, by Jules Tygiel (Vintage Books. a division of Random House), makes fascinating reading.
QUESTIONS FOR KIDS TO THINK ABOUT 1. For which accomplishment is Jackie Robinson most remembered? 2. How did Jackie Robinson’s early life help prepare him for his later experiences? 3. A teammate said Robinson had the qualities of “leadership and charisma.” What does that mean? Why were they important? 4. In real life, Branch Rickey spent much time laying the groundwork for bringing a black player into the Dodgers. He even spoke to experts in human behavior. What does this tell you about Rickey and his plans? 5. What did Jackie Robinson do after he left the Dodgers? (Research the answer.) 6. Why is it often harder to remain calm in the face of insults than to fight back? What do you think about this? Bonus: Who is Frank Robinson? (He was the first African American to manage a major league baseball team.) Though major league baseball has taken big strides in the area of racial equality, it still lags in the hiring of black people as managers. Watch your local newspaper’s sports pages for further developments.
Source “His Name Was Jackie Robinson.” Creative Classroom. Jan./Feb. 1993.
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Unit I: READING #29
we are the world
T
here comes a time when we heed a certain call, when the world must come together as
one. There are people dying and it’s time to lend a hand to life, the greatest gift of all. We can’t go on pretending day by day that someone, somewhere will soon make a change. We are all a part of God’s great big family and the truth, you know, love is all we need. CHORUS: We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones to make a brighter day, so let’s start giving. There’s a choice we’re making, we’re saving our own lives, it’s true, we make better days, just you and me.
Send them your heart so they’ll know that someone cares and their lives will be stronger and free. As God has shown us by turning stone to bread, so we all must lend a helping hand. CHORUS: When you’re down and out, there seems no hope at all, but if you just believe, there’s no way we can fall. Let us realize that a change will only come when we stand together as one. CHORUS: Repeat twice
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Source: We Are the World (Lyrics). USA for Africa. Family of God. Audio CD. 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #30
IMAGINE Lyrics by John Lennon
I
magine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too. Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one. Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger and brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world. You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one
P E A C E Source: Imagine (Lyrics). John Lennon. Bag Productions Inc., 1971.
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Unit I: READING #30
IMAGINE Lyrics by John Lennon Read the poem “Imagine” and answer the following questions.
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1.
Why might people behave differently if there wasn’t any knowledge of a heaven or hell? What is meant by “all the people living for today?”
2.
What message is John Lennon delivering when imagining “no countries, nothing to kill or die for and no religion?”
3.
How might the lives of people be different if material possessions were no longer needed or available? In addition, what if there was no need for food? How would these conditions affect the “brotherhood of man. and “people sharing all the world?”
4.
Do you feel that John Lennon was a dreamer?
5.
In the line “I’m not the only one,” is Lennon claiming that there are others who feel as he does?
6.
What group does John Lennon want us to join?
7.
What type of world are the dreamers dreaming of when “the world will live as one?”
8.
What type of world do you want to live in? Do you consider yourself a dreamer? If so, what influence are you capable of making in this world? Do you believe one person can make a difference? Did John Lennon make a difference in any way?
Source: Imagine (Lyrics). John Lennon. Bag Productions Inc., 1971. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #31
marion pritchard
O
n May 10, 1940, the German Army invaded the Netherlands. The invasion was a surprise. During World War I the Netherlands had managed to maintain its neutrality, and we hoped to be able to do that again. I was living in Nymegen, close to the German border and awoke very early in the morning to the drone of numerous aircraft flying overhead, and Germans on motorcycles lining the street. It was clear that the planes were not engaged in one of their regular raids on England, but that we were being attacked. It was a miracle that the Dutch held out for even five days in view of the overwhelming military superiority of the enemy. The Germans knew that anti-Semitism would not be acceptable to the vast majority of the Dutch people. After the surrender, the occupation forces instituted a very unsubtle education/propaganda approach, aimed at converting the general population to the Nazi ideology. Obviously it would be much easier to isolate and then round up and deport the Jews if the majority of the citizens were in favor of this process. I remember a film called ‘The Eternal Jew.” I attended it with a group of friends, some fellow students at the school of social work, some Jewish, some gentile. It was so crude, so scurrilous, that we could not believe anybody would take it seriously, or find it convincing. But the next day one of the gentiles said that she was ashamed to admit that the movie had affected her. That although it strengthened her resolve to oppose the German regime, the film had succeeded in making her see the Jews as “them.” And that, of course, was true for all of us; the Germans had driven a wedge in what was one of the most integrated communities in Europe. Gradually the Germans instituted and carried out the necessary steps to isolate and deport every Jew in the country. They did it in so many seemingly small steps, that it was very difficult to decide when and where to take a stand. One of the early, highly significant measures was the Aryan Attestation: all civil servants had to sign a form stating whether they were Aryans or not. Hindsight is easy; at the time only a few enlightened people recognized the danger and refused to sign. Then followed the other measures: Jews had to live in certain designated areas of the towns they lived in, and the curfew was stricter for them than for the general population. Jews over the age of six had to wear yellow stars on their clothing; Jewish children could not go to school
Marion Pritchard. “It did not occur to me, she said, “to do anything other than I did…I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently. We all have memories of times we should have done something and didn’t. And it gets in the way the rest of your life.”
with gentile children; Jews could not practice their professions, use public transportation, hire a taxicab, shop in gentile stores, or go to the beach, the park, the movies, concerts, or museums. The Jewish Committee was instructed by the Germans to publish a daily newspaper in which all these measures were announced; the regular Dutch press was not allowed to print anything about Jewish affairs. And in 1942 the deportations started in earnest. One morning or my way to school I passed by a small Jewish children’s home. The Germans were loading the children, who ranged in age from babies to eight-year-olds, on trucks. They were upset, and crying. When they did not move fast enough the Nazis picked them up, by an arm, a leg, the hair, and threw them into the trucks. To watch grown men treat small children that way—I could not believe my eyes. I found myself literally crying with rage. Two women coming down the street tried to interfere physically. The Germans heaved them into the truck, too. I just sat there on my bicycle, and that was the moment I decided that if there was anything I could do to thwart such atrocities, I would do it. Some of my friends had similar experiences, and about ten of us, including two Jewish students who decided they did not want to go into hiding, organized very informally, for this purpose. We obtained Aryan identity cards for the Jewish students, who, of course, were taking more of a risk than we were. They knew many people who were looking to onderduiken, “disappear,” as Anne Frank and her family were to do. We located hiding places, helped people move
Source of this reading: Rittner, Carol, R. S.M. and Sandra Myers, Editors. “Marion Pritchard.” The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: New York University, 1995.
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Unit I: READING #31
A street in the Jewish ghetto of Amsterdam.
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there, provided food, clothing, and ration cards, and sometimes moral support and relief for the host families. We registered newborn Jewish babies as gentiles (of course there were very few during these years) and provided medical care when possible. Then I was asked by two men I knew well—one of whom had become a leader in the Dutch Resistance Movement—to find a place for a friend of theirs, a man with three small children, aged four, two, and two weeks. I could not find an appropriate place and moved out into part of a large house in the country, about twenty miles east of Amsterdam, that belonged to an elderly lady who was a very close friend of my parents. The father, the two boys, and the baby girl moved in and we managed to survive the next two years, until the end of the war. Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug, and build a hiding place in case of raids. These did occur with increasing frequency, and one night we had a very narrow escape. Four Germans, accompanied by a Dutch Nazi policeman came and searched the house. They did not find the hiding place, but they had learned from experience that sometimes it paid to go back to a house they had already searched, because by then the hidden Jews might have come out of the hiding place. The baby had started to cry, so I let the children out. Then the Dutch policeman came back alone. I had a small revolver that a friend had given me, but I had never planned to use it. I felt I had no choice except to kill him. I would do it again, under the same circumstances, but it still bothers me, and I still feel that there “should” have been another way. If anybody had really tried to find out how and where he disappeared, they could have, but the general attitude was that there was one traitor less to worry about. A local undertaker helped dispose of the body; he put it in a coffin with a legitimate body in it. I
hope that the dead man’s family would have approved. Was I scared? Of course the answer is “yes.” Especially after I had been imprisoned and released. There were times that the fear got the better of me, and I did not do something that I could have. I would rationalize the inaction, feeling it might endanger others, or that I should not run a risk, because what would happen to the three children I was now responsible for, if something happened to me, but I knew when I was rationalizing. People often ask, Why did I decide to do what I did? I was a sinner, that I had had this baby out of wedlock, and that my punishment was that they were going to keep the baby, and I would never see it again. The husband walked me back to the station, and apologized, but explained that if curious villagers were to ask the children questions about this new baby in the family, they would be able to tell a convincing story. Why did they respond? There were many Dutch who sheltered Jews out of their unshakable conviction that this was the Christian thing to do and what God would want. This was a family who responded for that reason. I have heard this view expressed by other Dutch people. Another example involves some German soldiers. During the winter of 1944–45, food was extremely scarce in the west, and thousands of women and children, and a few men trudged to the farms in Groningen and Friesland to buy or barter or beg some flour, potatoes, or even butter and bacon. I made the trip with my bicycle (by this time without tires), took my flute, and some of the family silver, and was able to obtain what seemed like a wonderful supply of food. The Germans were constantly patrolling the roads, but the main danger point was near Zwolle, where one had to cross a wide river, the Ijssel. There were always many rumors among the people on the road: when it might be safe to cross the bridge, where a rowboat might be located, and how much would be charged to be taken across, etc. That night the story was that it would probably be safe to cross an hour before curfew time. About 40 of us approached the bridge, but we were stopped, searched, and arrested by German soldiers who took us to a building they were using as a command post. We were told that the food was confiscated, but that we would be allowed to leave the next morning. I had reached the point where I did not care what happened, threw all caution to the winds, and vented the accumulated rage of the previous four
Source of this reading: Rittner, Carol, R. S.M. and Sandra Myers, Editors. “Marion Pritchard.” The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: New York University, 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #31 years. In spite of attempts of the other people to stop me (they were concerned for my safety), I told the soldiers what I thought of the war, the Germans in general, Hitler in particular, and the concentration camps. They did not respond at all. The next morning two of them marched me outside and I did not know what to expect. But they returned my bicycle and my supplies, put me on a truck, and drove me over the bridge. Why? I don’t know. We did not talk. But they took a risk, an enormous risk. They had some basic decency left. The point I want to make is that there were indeed some people who behaved criminally by betraying their Jewish neighbors and thereby sentencing them to death. There were some people who dedicated themselves to actively rescuing as many people as possible. Somewhere in between was the majority, whose actions varied from the minimum decency of at least keeping quiet if they knew where Jews were hidden to finding a way to help them when they were asked. It did not occur to me to do anything other than I did. After what I had seen outside that children’s home, I could not have done anything else. I think you have a responsibility to yourself to behave decently. We all have memories of times we should have done something and didn’t. And it gets in the way the rest of your life. Now, in retrospect, and after reading Alice Miller’s excellent book, For Your Own Good. Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), I believe that courage, integrity, and a capacity for love are neither virtues, nor moral categories, but a consequence of a benign fate, in my own case, parents who listened to me, let me talk, and encouraged in every way the development of my own authentic self. It may be redundant to add that they never used corporal punishment in any form. Being brought up in the Anglican Church was a positive experience for me and imbued me early on with a strong conviction that we are our brothers’ keepers. When you truly believe that, you have to behave that way in order to be able to live with yourself.
Mr. Pollak, with two of his children, the family that Marion Pritchard hid in the house outside Amsterdam
Marion P. van Binsbergen Pritchard was honored by Yad Vashem in 1983 for helping Jews during the occupation of Holland. After the war, she moved to the United States and now lives in Vermont. She is a psychoanalyst, and is in the film, “The Courage to Care.”
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QUESTIONS FOR “MARION PRITCHARD” from The Courage to Care 1. How did Marion overcome her fear and step from inaction to becoming a rescuer? 2. How does Marion explain the difference between her interpretation of what constitutes a bystander and a rescuer? 3. Do you think you could have overcome your fears and have done what Marion called, “the responsibility to yourself — to behave decently.”? Comment.
Source of this reading: Rittner, Carol, R. S.M. and Sandra Myers, Editors. “Marion Pritchard.” The Courage to Care: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: New York University, 1995.
Unit I: READING #32
The why in wyoming seeking answers in a grisly gay murder Karen Roebuck
L
ARAMIE, WYO.—One night last fall, Matthew Shepard, a 105-pound freshman at the University of Wyoming left a bar with two men, believing they were, like him, gay. He ended up dying a death so violent it’s hard to imagine another human being could be responsible. This week in what has become a depressingly familiar courtroom ritual, America will glimpse what makes his alleged murderers tick. Similar to last month’s trial in the dragging death of a Jasper, Texas, man, the question this time is what kind of people would beat a man senseless and leave him to die lashed to a fence in the cold of the night? If there are any answers, they could come during
the trial of Russell Henderson. If convicted, he and his friend Aaron McKinney, both 22, could get the death penalty. McKinney’s trial is to start in August. Defense lawyers have suggested they may use the defendants’ troubled lives as an explanation. Henderson, though once an honor student, never graduated from high school and spent much of his childhood under the violent sway of his alcoholic mother’s abusive boyfriends. McKinney, also a dropout, reportedly took a turn for the worse when his mother died in 1993 after routine surgery. But prosecutors say nothing can explain what happened to Shepard. And, they will argue, death is the only punishment that fits such a horrific crime.
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Source: Roebuck, Karen. “The Why in Wyoming. “ U.S. News and World Report. 29 March 1999. 40. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #33
death in the prairie a vicious murder spotlights rising violence against gays and shatters a close-knit wyoming community Betsy Streisand
A
hideous crime is committed, a community traumatized. A wrenching national debate ensues. And in what is becoming an almost perverse but predictable ritual, a town goes under the microscope. Paducah, Ky. Jonesboro, Ark. Jasper, Texas. And now, Laramine, Wyo. The sad litany grows longer. Judgement Day came fast last week for Laramine when Matthew Shepard died. Pistol-whipped, tortured, then lashed to a fence and left for dead, Shepard suddenly became a symbol of growing violence against gays. Police say robbery was a motive for his killing. But Shepard’s attackers apparently chose the 5-foot, 2-inch, 105-pound college freshman in part because he was gay. As details emerge, questions about whether Shepard’s murder was a crime of hate or just a hateful crime become harder to answer. What is clear, though, is how crimes of such surpassing brutality can convulse communities like Laramie. In big cities, violence is a constant, police sirens amplified by grisly reports of rape and murder on the nightly news. But for Americans in smaller cities and rural areas, violence is not a constant. This is why, at a level deeper than debates over gay rights and hate crime statutes, the murder of Matthew Sheppard is so wrenching. Just north of the Colorado border, Laramie is described in the Chamber of Commerce brochure as a city with a homicide rate of 0.00. Largely because of the presence of the University of Wyoming, Laramie prides itself on being one of the most tolerant towns in the state. But if the murder charges filed against Russell Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, 22, are true, the suspects are aberrant products of a live-and-letlive culture. “What these boys did is so horrible, and I hope they fry,” said Kelly Wilson, a University of Wyoming sophomore who moved to Laramie two
years ago from South Dakota. “But what they did isn’t Laramie.” Like many towns suddenly thrown into the spotlight, Laramie now must deal with its shock and sadness while defending itself against what it sees as character assassination by the media and gay activists. In what has become an almost textbook response of other towns convulsed by sudden violence, the community immediately pulled together. The university scheduled teach-ins on tolerance, where 10-year-olds who had never met Shepard wrote poems about his death. Yellow armbands with green circles for peace became a fashion statement. In shop after shop, residents reassured reporters, and each other, that Shepard’s murder could have happened almost anywhere. “Because we’re a small town, everyone thinks we’re a bunch of backward, ignorant rednecks who believe in this kind of thing,” said Richard Marron, a realestate broker. “There’s a large silent majority of good people in this town with good values.” Silence, apparently, is a hallmark of Laramie-and a necessary survival skill, if you happen to be gay. “Nobody bothers you if you’re gay in Laramie as long as you keep it to yourself,” says Doug Ferguson, a bouncer at the Fireside bar, where Shepard met Henderson and McKinney the night he was fatally bludgeoned. “But if you show it off, well, then that’s different.” That’s common knowledge in Laramie. Meesha Fenimore, 18, a freshman who befriended Shepard, says she has been harassed since she started school there. Describing herself as “butch,” with a shaved head and lots of “symbolic” gay jewelry, Fenimore says she has frequently been called names and that one of her male classmates even followed her home, hurling insults at her along the way “Black people can’t hide their blackness. I don’t want to hide my gayness.”
Source: Streisand, Betsy. “Death in the Prairie.” U.S. News and World Report. 26 October 1998. 23-25.
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Watch how you walk. But for those who want to come out, there aren’t many places to go. Although gay student organizations meet with the university’s blessing, there are no gay bars in Larmie. Two men wouldn’t dare walk down the street holding hands, nor would they dance together at any of the town’s more than 20 bars. In Wyoming you even watch the way you walk if you’re gay. Shepard, who has repeatedly been described as “openly gay,” was hardly an exhibitionist. A political science major who wanted to work to advance civil rights, Shepard affiliated himself with many gay causes but according to friends, didn’t flaunt his homosexuality Just the opposite. He would drive more than 80 miles to Fort Collins, Colo., to be able to dance openly with another man. The night of the beating, Shepard came into the Fireside bar alone at around 10 o’clock, after a meeting and dinner with friends from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Alliance. Shepard was alone when he sat down at the bar and ordered a Heineken. About an hour later, Henderson and McKinney came in and sat several stools away. They bought a pitcher of beer with nickels and dimes. McKinney’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, told the TV newsmagazine 20/20 that McKinney told her Shepard approached and “said that he was gay and wanted to get with Aaron and Russ.” Price also said that Henderson and McKinney did not intend to “hurt him this badly. They just wanted to beat him up bad enough to teach him a lesson.” Police are releasing very few details about the case but other witnesses say the two suspects approached Shepard and told him they were gay. Before long, the three left together. After luring him out of the bar, Henderson allegedly pistol-whipped Shepard with a .357-caliber Magnum. Then, police say, the two men drove him to a deserted area where they lashed him to a fence and beat him as he begged for his life. Before they were done, they had taken his wallet and shoes, and gotten his address so that they could rob his apartment.
Drugs and drink. Police will never know why Shepard left the Fireside with McKinney and Henderson. But those who know the alleged killers say they were always just a step away from trouble. Both men had reputations in Laramie, a small town with a big methamphetamine supply, as being involved in drugs, alcohol, and fighting. (After the pair strung up Shepard, the police say, they attacked two Latino men who fought back. McKinney’s arrest in Shepard’s killing came at a hospital where he was being treated for a head injury.) Police, who say they “knew” both suspects, refuse to comment on whether either of the pair was using drugs the night of the beating. Friends who know both suspects say they are heavy drinkers and drug users with bad tempers. “They were both unstable and they were both into crystal meth a lot,” said a close friend of Chastity Pasley, who lived with Henderson in a dilapidated mobile home at the edge of town. “It wasn’t meant to be a hate crime,” McKinney’s girlfriend and the mother of his 4-month-old son told the press with unintended irony. “They just wanted to rob him.” Yet with both men possibly facing the death penalty, even those in favor of hate crime legislation say in this case it is a distinction without a difference. “We’d support anything that would make it easier for us to do our jobs,” said Rob DeBree, the lead investigator in the Shepard case. “But in this case, you can’t enhance death and you can’t enhance life. They’re both powerful sentences.” Still, the furor followed Shepard even to his funeral. The 650 mourners who attended services in his hometown of Casper on a snowy afternoon Friday had to pass by a small band of anti-gay protesters fenced in near the church holding signs decrying “fags.” “This is his funeral,” said Rachel Anderson, 20, a teary and incredulous childhood friend. “It doesn’t matter if he is gay. It is so stupid that they’re here.” With Elise Ackerman and Karen Roebuck
Source: Streisand, Betsy. “Death in the Prairie.” U.S. News and World Report. 26 October 1998. 23-25. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #33
jasper’s lesson: a texas town heals its wounds Dan McGraw
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ASPER, TEXAS—Last June, this town was close to imploding. A 49-year-old disabled black man, James Byrd Jr., had been slain, allegedly murdered by racists who savagely beat him, then chained him to their truck by his ankles and dragged him along until his body lay in bloody pieces on the road. The sickening crime left this once quiet town of 8,000 reeling. Three men with ties to white supremacy groups were arrested within 24 hours, but the New Black Panthers rode in warning black residents to arm themselves. The news media horde descended and began prodding Jasper citizens for any evidence of racial hostility. And the Ku Klux Klan announced it would rally in the town square. A few days after the killing, with tensions rising, the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived to address a church service. Walter Diggles, a local black leader, asked what he planned to say. The silver-tongued Jackson said he wasn’t sure. “I told him that he needed to compliment the district attorney, the sheriff, and the police deparment for their swift action,” says Diggles, 26, head of the regional Council of Governments. “And I told him he needed to emphasize that the black and white communities had to work together to heal. He said those things, and that’s when we turned the corner.” United front. Four months later, Jasper is just beginning to regain some sense of normalcy. But the town’s handling of the slaying could be a case study of how leaders can mend traumatized communities. Within 24 hours of the killing, the local sheriff and
district attorney had suspects in custody and had asked the FBI for help. Local black leaders like Diggles and Mayor R.C. Horn refused to play the race blame game. And Jasper officals—black and white— kept a united front, condemning the hate messages from all sides. The national media expected Jasper, 40 percent black, to fit the Southern backwoods stereotype of whites in power and blacks in squalor. Instead, they found a town where blacks hold top posts and most of the neighborhoods are racially integrated. When the Klan rallied two weeks after the killing, Mayor Horn advised everyone to “go fishing” for the day. Jasper also held a series of town meetings to discuss ways to ease mounting racial pressures. Horn says some national black leaders pushed him to publicly denounce the whites in his town as racists. But he refused. “I can’t say that,” says Horn. “There is some racism in the whites, but there is also racism in the blacks, too. I am the mayor for both groups.” The next step in Jasper’s healing will come in January when the capital murder trials of the three alleged killers are set to begin. Some residents want the trials moved, to spare the town from the media glare. Others, however, believe the only way to put this painful episode to rest is to see it through to its conclusion. “It’s important for Jasper to take care of its own business,” says Jasper County District Attorney Guy James Gray. Jasper’s leaders have shown they can do just that.
Source: McGraw, Dan. “Death in the Prairie.” U.S. News and World Report. 26 October 1998. 23-25.
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the reichstag is burning Ina Friedman At sixteen, Arthur Kahn was eyewitness to the terror instituted by the Nazis in 1933. He lived in Berlin with his father, a prosperous lawyer; his mother; and two younger brothers.
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n the fall of 1933 a knock sounded at our door. I opened it. Two SS men in black leather coats stood them “Herr Richard Kahn?” “Just a minute,” I said, staring at their black boots. “I will call him.” Father came into the hall. His face turned white. “Yes?” “You are under arrest for crimes against the state,” one of the men said. They seized him under the arms and dragged him towards the door. “And what is my crime?” my father demanded. “Sedition. We have been informed by the janitor that you have foreign books on your shelves.” “But I am a good German,” Father said. “I served the Kaiser in World War I.” “You are making a mistake,” cried Mother, who came into the hall as they were dragging him away. When they shoved him into the elevator, Father called out, “Arthur, take care of your mother and brothers. Remember, you are the oldest.” And he was gone. Mother became hysterical. “Quick, Arthur, help me burn the French and English books.” In a frenzy, she began to throw books into the woodburning stove in the kitchen. “Mother,” I protested, trying to stop her, “you’re no better than the Nazis.” “What do you know, Arthur! You’re only sixteen.” The next morning, Mother went to the police station to ask about Father. “You are wasting your time. Don’t bother us,” they told her. I remembered February 27, the evening of the Reichstag fire, a few months earlier. The dark winter sky had turned red as our parliament building burned, and the flames illuminated the entire Tiergarten district. Wolf, Fritz and I stood at the window, watching in disbelief as the fire blazed unattended We listened for the sirens and the fire trucks, but they never came. Mother refused to look out the window. “Alyce,” Father cried, seizing her by the
shoulders and thrusting her in front of the curtain. “The Reichstag is burning. Can’t you see it’s time to leave.” Mother broke away. “It’s only a temporary madness. Things will get better. My grandfather fought for Bismarck. It’s only the foreign-born Jews who will have trouble.” “Alyce, a Jew is a Jew. We must leave — for the children’s sake.” “I will not leave my parents and my homeland.” My small, slim mother sat down in her damask chair and picked up her needlepoint. “You always said you were a German first and a Jew second.” We all stared at Mother. This was the first time she had ever defied Father. When he and his friends met on Saturdays to plan our emigration to South Africa earlier that year, she had not protested. Now our visas had arrived, but despite the fire below, she refused to leave. “Fool,” Father said to her, “Germany does not want me, I have accepted its decree.” The day after the Reichstag fire, all individual rights guaranteed by the Weimar Republic were suspended. Only Nazis could hold public meetings All liberal newspapers were taken over by the Nazis. Truckloads of storm troopers in their brown uniforms roared down the Kaiser Alee and stopped before the apartment house next door. We watched from behind the curtains as several prominent writers and liberal thinkers were dragged out of the building. Jewish businesses were boycotted, and my brothers and I were expelled from school. Signs were posted on park gates and theatres: “No Jews and Dogs Allowed.” Every week, Wolf, Fritz and I would stand at the apartment window and watch the Hitler Youth parade pass. How we wished the hated Hitler Youth, in their spotless uniforms, would tumble when they stopped to form a perfect pyramid! One mild evening in May 1933, Wolf and I were returning from a meeting. As we strolled towards the University of Berlin, we noticed a crowd gathering in
Source: Friedman, Ina R. “The Reichstag is Burning.” Escape or Die: True Stories of Teens Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Yellow Moon, 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #34 front of the Opernplatz. We stopped to see what was happening. In single file, students marched out of the library, a lighted torch in one hand and books in the other. The flames cut an eerie red rim around the darkness. The students paused before a huge pile of burning books that had been collected by SS troops from other libraries. As each student tossed his armload of books into the flames, an SS trooper called out over the loudspeaker the names of the “subversive authors” whose books were being destroyed: “Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein, Erich Maria Remarque…” Here and there, a protesting sheet, its edges singed, escaped the flames end floated across the Opernplatz. After reading the list of the German authors, the SS trooper began to stumble through the names of condemned foreign writers: “Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, appeared to pronounce the final epitaph. The small, gnomish man stood before the students and spectators to say, “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era, they also light up a new one.” A month after my father’s arrest, I was in the kitchen eating a sandwich of knockwurst and ersatz bread. I heard scratching at the window and looked up. Father stood on the fire escape dressed in a black and white prison uniform. He held his finger to his lips. I opened the window, and he crawled inside, smelling of disinfectant. “Are you all right?” I asked, as he embraced me. I looked at his gaunt face. His clothes hung on his slight frame. “Where were you?” “Spandau prison. I pretended to have a heart attack, and they put me in the hospital. When the orderly went off the floor, I hid in the laundry truck and escaped.” He wolfed down the remainder of my sandwich. Mother heard our voices and came into the kitchen. “Richard,” she said. “Thank God.” Wolf and Fritz appeared. “I’ve been watching the apartment house for hours,” Father said. “The janitor just left for his Nazi party meeting. He must not know I’ve been here.” Father took off the uniform. “Quickly, Arthur, pack some food while I change clothes. Fritz, burn this uniform.” While he changed, he rifled through the mail. There was a letter from Adolph Hitler. It read: “You
have been awarded the Iron Cross for your service to the Kaiser during World War I.” Father pocketed the letter and left. A few hours after the Nazis discovered Father’s escape, they came to our house. “Where is Richard Kahn?” Mother stood there, trembling. “But you took him away. What have you done with him?” She was so petrified of the Nazis, her lying appeared believable. “If he contacts you, you must inform us. Otherwise, there will be measures.” Mother fainted. When she came to, she said, “Arthur you must join the Youth Aliyah. You must learn to become a farmer. Then you can go anywhere in the world. It’s your only chance.” Youth Aliyah was a Zionist movement which trained young Jews to become farmers, so they could go to Palestine. The Nazis permitted this project because they wanted as many Jews as possible to leave the country. When I joined a nearby camp in Halbe, Fred Perlman, the director, taught me to milk cows and put me in charge of the barn. He also taught us Jewish songs and history, and pride in our Jewishness. After being subjected to Nazi propaganda telling us how inferior we were, we needed to develop self-esteem. Meanwhile, the night my father left our house he had been hidden by his German employers. The next morning, he took a train to a town on the Czechoslovakian border. When he stepped onto the station platform, he saw a sign over the door. “Jews, enter this place at your own risk.” Father registered at a hotel a few blocks from the bridge leading to Czechoslovakia. The police chief laughed at his request for a permit to visit an “insurance” client in Czechoslovakia. “No good German wants to leave Germany, sir. You are a traitor.” “A traitor? You are mistaken,” Father replied, pulling out the letter from Hitler. “Would the Fuehrer award an Iron Cross to a traitor?” “All right,” the officer said, handing him a pass, “but leave your luggage in your hotel room. Father walked over the bridge connecting the two countries. He had to figure out some way of retrieving his luggage. At a small cafe overlooking the stream, he asked a waiter, “Can you go back and forth without a pass?” “Of course. The guards know me.” “Here is the key to my room. Bring me my suitcase, and I shall share the contents with you.” Father slipped him a large tip. The waiter promised
Source: Friedman, Ina R. “The Reichstag is Burning.” Escape or Die: True Stories of Teens Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Yellow Moon, 1991.
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to go at sunset. At sunset, Father returned to the cafe and ordered a beer. As the accordion player struck up a polka, Father forced himself to sing and tap his feet in rhythm, just like the rest of the patrons. Suddenly, there was a shot. The owner of the cafe rushed onto the terrace. “Someone sent my waiter for a suitcase, and it fell open, revealing hundreds of marks. The Germans are holding the waiter.” All the patrons jumped up and ran towards the bridge. Father rose, but walked out the back door and thumbed a ride to Prague. In Prague, a Jewish relief agency provided him with lodging, but before he went to sleep, Father sent a postcard to cousins in Charleston, West Virginia. It read. “I need help. Please contact me through the Joint Distribution Committee in Prague.” These distant cousins, now living in Baltimore, Maryland, received the forwarded postcard. They immediately sent money and an affidavit, which promised the American government that they would be responsible for Father when he emigrated to the United States. Father booked passage and arrived safely. Once in Baltimore, Father grew more and more frantic. The German government refused to release us. He and his cousin approached the State Department in Washington, D.C. At first the State Department said there was nothing they could do. Father pleaded with the officials “What kind of government refuses to release a woman and three young boys because the father fled? They must get out of Germany. Each day the situation grows worse.” The State Department prodded the German Foreign Office. Because the 1936 Olympics were scheduled to take place in Berlin in only a few months, Germany wanted to appear reasonable to the rest of the world. Two years after Father’s escape from prison, the Nazis granted us “valid for twenty-
four hours only” passports. A slipsheet had been inserted with the passports: “Remember, you are a good German.” Father met us in New York. From the top of the Empire State Building, we gazed down on the skyscrapers and at Rockefeller Center, glowing with Christmas lights. In the morning, we took the train to Baltimore, filled with happiness for America and all things American. Here, life would be truly wonderful. Father led us up the steps to our apartment on Spaulding Street. We stared at the mattresses supported by vegetable crates and at the kitchen table with its flaking blue paint. Our Baltimore cousins had stocked the kitchen, but aside from Father’s books, which we had sent over the year before, the apartment was bare. “We have a place to sleep and a place to eat,” Mother said. She took out the only painting she had managed to save and hung it on the wall. “We are home. We will never talk about Germany again. As soon as we learn English, it will be the only language spoken in this house.” Arthur Kahn served with the United States Army during World War II. He is now an executive of a greeting card company. Once a year he returns to Germany to attend a convention. Each time his plane approaches the airport, he begins to perspire and to relive the deaths of his family and friends at the hand of the Nazis. “I tell myself over and over that it is time to forget…old prejudices should not be carried over to the new generation. But I still ask myself what I am doing on this plane.”
QUESTIONS 1. How would you describe the family of Arthur Kahn when they lived in Germany? 2. How did they feel about their German heritage? 3. How did the unfolding events in Nazi Germany affect the family’s beliefs and behaviors? 4. In what sense were they victims? 5. How do you feel about the choices they made? 6. What were the probable consequences for each of the alternative choices they had?
Source: Friedman, Ina R. “The Reichstag is Burning.” Escape or Die: True Stories of Teens Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Yellow Moon, 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #35
miami man dies at hands of a gunman - but hands of passerSby are bloody, as well Leonard Pitts, Jr.
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ou ought to be outraged at what happened to Jose Ramon Baldizon. Not just the fact that the 23-year old Miami gas station attendant was robbed in his workplace Sunday afternoon. Not even the fact that the robber killed him with a single gunshot to the side. No, the thing that really ought to make your mouth go dry is this: Three separate times, people walked in on the robbery in progress. Three separate times, they saw a man with his hand in a brown paper bag pressed against the side of an obviously terrified Baldizon. And three separate times, they did nothing. One of the three has since come forward to say she didn’t realize what was going on. The second has told police he heard Baldizon plead with the gunman to let him go; the third witness has yet to be identified. None tried to interfere or call police. They just spun around and left, salvation making a Uturn. You ought to be outraged. And you ought to remember, if you’re old enough, Kitty Genovese. Thirty-three years ago, she was hacked to death on a quiet street in Queens. The attack took half an hour and was witnessed by 37 of her neighbors. Who did nothing. We all know the mantra of such urban apathy by heart: “I don’t want to get involved. I just mind my own business.” But that’s a crock. We are involved. This is our business. Who is it that lives in fear of dark corners and late hours? Who is it whose freedoms have been eroded bit by tiny bit these last decades? Who is it who’s taking self-defense courses, buying home security systems and learning to quickstep toward the car, keys in hand? You, that’s who. And me. Don’t you know we owe each other better than this? Don’t you understand that it’s your duty to watch my back and mine to watch yours? Haven’t you figured out yet that we are all we’ve got? Of course, that’s the problem, isn’t it? There is no more we, just me- just shortsighted self-interest. We’ve lost sight of community, mislaid our sense of social covenant. And that’s the real tragedy.
Source: Pitts, Leonard Jr. The Philadelphia Inquirer. 17 April 1997.
Ultimately, after all, it’s not fear of police or courts that maintains the peace. It’s that covenant, the implied rules that allow us to exist as a society. It’s the understanding that there are some things you do simply because you are supposed to. That’s the real reason we stop at stop signs, pay our subway fare, wait our turn at the market, even when we could easily get away with breaking the rules. It’s why we help a man in trouble. “Because we are supposed to.” Otherwise, how can we call ourselves a society? There are already places where we cannot, neighborhoods as lawless and mean as a frontier town in the Old West. You look at such places and shudder, wondering if they are a foretaste of the future. Why not? Any time the covenant can be broken with impunity, the result is inevitable: Order breaks down like an old jalopy, peace of mind frays like a dry-rotted cloth. And all hell breaks loose. Crime didn’t do this to us. We did it to ourselves. Because the issue is not simply fear, but a deeper thing, a soul corrosion. Consider what happened Sunday. Granted it’s hard to blame the people who walked into that gas station for not physically challenging an armed robber; I can’t say I wouldn’t have fled the place just as they did. But I know with a certainty that if I had been able to get to a place of safety, I would have called police instantly. You can only wonder at the humanity of someone who had that chance and did not. You can only imagine what went through Baldizon’s mind when he saw those people coming. Did he rejoice, thinking himself saved? Did he wait for the sound of sirens that never came? Or did he know how cold this world can be? Did he realize he was on his own? The social covenant is not an abstract concept, but the only real barrier between civilization and savagery. Sunday afternoon, it was the only hope for Jose Ramon Baldizon. And it wasn’t nearly enough. Leonard Pitts, Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His email address is [email protected]
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the indiferent ones Many German citizens, when asked why they did not rise up against the Nazi government’s antiJewish policies, claimed that they did not know what was happening. Some explained that they were not interested in politics, or that they trusted their government to do the right thing. Others claimed that their first responsibility was to their families. This indifference to the political affairs of their country was a major reason for the lack of widespread resistance to the Nazi government. In the first reading, Ellen Switzer interviews people who lived in Nazi Germany. The interviews reveal some of the reasons people have given for their “inactive” roles in the political life of their country. A comparison is made with attitudes of Americans during the 1960s. The second reading is from Elie Wiesel’s The Town Beyond the Wall. The author fictionalizes an encounter between a Holocaust victim and a spectator who watches as Jews were taken from their homes. Wiesel challenges us to consider the responsibility of the onlooker for human events. He asks whether the most inhuman position of all might be that of the uninvolved spectator. For a society like our own, so used to watching television, watching sports, and watching people, the reading raises profound questions about the quality of our own lives.
in germany Ellen Switzer 116
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hy do people like you keep asking us what we thought and felt about the Nazis?” asked a handsome blonde woman in a Berlin suburb in 1973. “I was fourteen when Hitler came to power, and I couldn’t have cared less. I was never interested in politics…all politicians are crooks, yours as well as ours. What does politics have to do with me? I’m a zoologist, and frankly, animals have always interested me more than human beings. I felt that way when I was an adolescent, and I feel that way now.” She also insisted that she did not join the Hitler Youth “because that kind of thing just didn’t appeal to me,” and that she spent most of her youth in the country, reading, playing the violin and bird watching. “What did you do about the war in Vietnam? You may not have liked all those stories about children being burned by napalm or My Lai, or the bombing of hospitals, but you didn’t do much about that, right? And I bet you didn’t stay awake nights worrying about the war, did you? Of course, your press informed you a lot better than ours did, and you wouldn’t be shot for protesting. But how
many Americans really cared about Vietnam or Watergate, or whatever it was you did to blacks and American Indians, for that matter? Very few of you, I bet. You worry about the price of food and getting ahead in your profession, and you probably have some kind of hobby. My hobby is music, not politics. I don’t think very many people would list ‘honest government’ as, their prime interest…No, I don’t feel guilty about what happened in Germany under Hitler. Why should I? Do you feel guilty about Vietnam?” I told her that I did. She looked surprised. “You must be the guilty type. Have you thought of seeing a psychiatrist? But then, I don’t really believe in psychiatrists either. Most of them are crooks, too.” Hilda said all this in a completely detached, unemotional voice. She told of her childhood and youth, completely divorced from what was going on around her, living in the country and “minding my own business.” She had, of course, heard some bombs exploding in the distance; but because of her family’s wealth and connections, she lived on an estate so far removed from a major city that not one bomb or shell fell near it. “When the Americans ‘liberated’ us,
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #36 they took over our house,” she said resentfully. “I told them I didn’t believe in killing… I wouldn’t even step on an ant, so why bother me about something that a bunch of crazy men did, even if it was in my name. I’ve never voted in an election and I never will. All governments are alike, and I couldn’t care less who runs the country as long as I’m left alone.” Hilda’s story about not being a member of the Hitler Youth did not check out. She had indeed been a member, but a very inactive one. It would have been impossible for her not to join. If she wished to go to school, membership was almost surely mandatory in her town. But friends remember that she missed most meetings, because she was “sick” or because “she couldn’t get transportation into the town.” “Perhaps she really didn’t know or care,” one neighbor said. “Unless the whole miserable situation was forced on you, you really often tried to avoid coming to grips with it.” Hilda’s mother, an elderly, highly educated widow, presents a different picture. Her best friend had been a Jewish woman, whose first husband, a Socialist, was arrested early in 1936. He died in prison four days later. She remembers going into town to try to console her friend. “Obviously, I was taking a risk going to see her under the circumstances, but we had been close for so long…” she said. She also smuggled fresh vegetables, sausages and loaves of bread from their estate to her friend when rations for Jews had reached the starvation level. “Sometime, in 1940, my friend fell in love and married again. Of course, I couldn’t go to the wedding…that would have been too dangerous, but I prayed that she’d manage somehow to be happy. Her second husband was taken to a concentration camp six months later. She never heard from him again. She hanged herself in 1941…” The older woman’s eyes filled with tears. Had she never discussed any of this with her daughter?” “One doesn’t want to worry one’s children, does one?” she said. “Hilda was so absorbed in her bird watching and her music… there was no point in telling her all these sad things. Youth is supposed to be a happy time…” It seemed useless to point out that by 1941 Hilda really wasn’t that young anymore. In a small villa outside of Berlin, lives a German composer whose hit songs were popular not only in Germany, but all over the world. A dapper little man in a red smoking jacket with a white silk scarf, he said that, of course he “regrets” Germany’s past. “But I was an artist, so politics really wasn’t my field,” he
pointed out. “I knew that Hitler liked my music. I had written a children’s opera, and he even suggested to Dr. Goebbels the Minister of Propaganda, that he take his own children to see it. Not only that, when young men were drafted into the army, I got a draft exemption because Hitler considered me a fellow artist and felt that my musical compositions would inspire the German nation. Naturally, I was proud of this distinction. Everyone wants to be appreciated, don’t they?” He said that he had remained a civilian, writing songs for “practically every German army unit.” “What was expected of me was a lot of trash, of course, but then popular taste isn’t what one would like it to be,” he added. “The words of the songs were full of hate and referred frequently to enemy blood streaming in rivers down gutters, and enemy cities being bombed into rubble. I thought some of that was really in exceedingly bad taste… much overdone. But I didn’t write the words, only the music. They had all kinds of official poets in charge of words. That was not my responsibility. As a matter of fact, Dr. Goebbels, himself, wrote the words to one of my melodies.” That fact still seemed to fill him with a certain amount of pride. Had he ever been a Nazi? “Well, of course, everybody had to join the party and the party Musicians Association. But I never took any of that very seriously. After all, I’m an artist, not a politician…” he repeated. The same point was made by an outstanding German film producer who was in her late teens and early twenties during the last years of the Weimar Republic and the early Hitler years. “I just pointed my camera and filmed,” she said. “I did the best job possible. Many of my techniques are still being copied by people in my field today. Yes, I made propaganda films for the Nazis. That was the only work I could get .. and work was more important to me than anything else. “…she finds it difficult to understand and accept the fact that many theaters throughout the world won’t show her current work, that she has not been employed by either German or U.S. television… “Why do people have to mix art and politics?” she asks rather angrily. “I never did…” A common thread runs through all the interviews with Germans who insist that they didn’t know what was happening in their country during the early, or even the late, Hitler years. Most consider politics something that should concern politicians, and possibly government professors, but certainly
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit I: READING #36 not themselves. “What can a little man do anyhow?” “After all, I was an artist, a zoologist, a postman, a baker .. I didn’t have any influence. . .” “I never got involved in anything that didn’t concern me . . . politics didn’t. I took care of my family, isn’t that everybody’s first responsibility?” “I did what I was told, and didn’t ask questions, I thought that the people running the government knew more about their business than I did. Good citizens obey their
leaders. I still feel that way. Look at what all those rowdy, rude demonstrators accomplish today. Nothing, except give their country a bad name.” . . . Hilda was right, in a way. There are similar quotes on tapes made for other stories about the war in Vietnam, My Lai, police brutality and corruption, Watergate. Only those tapes were recorded in towns and cities in the United States.
in hungary Elie Wiesel
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stopped in front of the house. The window was bright. The doorway was in the courtyard. I meditated for an instant: was this really an act of free will? I breathed deeply and pushed at the door without bothering to knock… There he was. Seated at a table, leaning on his elbows, his face in profile, he was reading a book. I’d have known him among a thousand. A heavy round head, completely bald. He hadn’t changed. But now he was wearing glasses. A symbol of anonymity, the average man. I watched him in silence. A fly skipped along his skull: he didn’t take notice. I stared at him without hate, without scorn. All I felt toward him was curiosity. He sensed a presence suddenly. His eyes shifted toward the door; he saw me and started. “What do you want?” On his feet, leaning against the table, he faced me. The features I had seen at the window. Large cold eyes, opaque as the ice that covered the river. A startling absence of eyebrows. Receding chin. Innocence itself: what does not exist is by definition innocent. “I’m thirsty, “ my little sister said. “Who are you?” I did not answer… “What do you want?” he said firmly. “To humiliate you.” I said. “I’m thirsty,” my little sister said. She had the most beautiful hair in the world. The sun loved to carouse in it. But on that spring day—a Saturday-she wore a scarf on her head, as if she were old and a widow. She was eight years old.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said. I couldn’t bring her water. The police were guarding the gates of the courtyard. We were forbidden to go out. And this man stood at the window and watched. “I’ve come a long way,” I said. “I’ve come to humiliate you.” I wanted to see him on his knees, licking the dust on my shoes. To make him taste the loneliness of cowards. To reduce him to shreds. To deprive him of any picture of himself, to decompose his identity, to scourge pride and self-esteem and countenance from him as one drives children away from a rotting cadaver. “I’m thirsty,” I told him. “Give me some wine.” He lumbered around the table, opened a cabinet, and brought out a bottle of Tokay and two glasses like inverted cones. He set them calmly on the table. I told him to fill the glasses. He did so. The bottle did not tremble in his hand. I took my glass in my right hand. He made as if to do the same. I stopped him. He nodded “All right,” and waited. We stared at each other silently. Each gauged the other’s strength. He sustained my glare. My fingers curled around the glass with near shattering force. I wanted to shout, “Lower your eyes, You scum! Crawl!” My expression shouted it. He did not give way. His opaque eyes ref lected an inner winter, sheathed in ice, impenetrable, stiff. The silence grew heavier. The man betrayed not the slightest sign of weakness. He saw in me an enemy, in this confrontation a duel. Then, in a motion quite abrupt though carefully premeditated, I dashed the wine in his face, which remained impassive. I took the second glass and held
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #36 it up for him to see: he did not look at it. His eyes never left mine. “Lower them! To the dust!” He received the contents of the second glass with the same calm. “Fill them,” I ordered him. Without a word he did so again, but his face darkened. When they were full to the brim he pushed the glasses toward me, placing them within my reach. “Let’s talk,” I said. “About what?” “A Saturday in spring. Nineteen forty-four. On one side, the Jews; on the other, you. Only the window-that window-between.” “I remember.” “With shame?” “No.” “With remorse?” “No.” “With sadness?” “No. With nothing at all. There’s no emotion attached to the memory.” I leaned forward slightly: “What did you feel then?” “Nothing.” The muscles in my face tightened: “Outside, children were sick with thirst: what did you feel?” “Nothing.” “Outside, men were turning away so as not to see their children doubled up in pain: what did you feel?” “Nothing.” A silence; then: “Absolutely nothing. My wife was crying in the kitchen. Not me. She was sad and miserable. I wasn’t.” Another silence; then: “No, I tell you. I had a shocked feeling that I was a spectator at some sort of game—a game I didn’t understand—a game you had all begun playing, you on one side, the Germans and the police on the other. I had nothing to do with it…” “I felt no sadness,” the man went on. “I remember: the day after you left, I was walking around in the half-empty city. All your things were strewn in the streets as if the earth had spewed them up. Here and there people were singing and dancing, dead drunk. I didn’t touch a thing. It was like being onstage an hour after the end of the show.” The blood beat in my temples. Remorse, shame, anger ebbed and flowed in me. Now I hated him. After all, I was not the defendant here. Even if he was right—and my heart said he was—that didn’t justify his spectator’s detachment. He too could have interrupted the game. If he had simply gone down to
the courtyard of the synagogue and alerted the Jews: “Good people! Listen to me! Don’t be fooled! Be careful! It’s not a game!” He hadn’t done it. “Coward!” I shouted, and crashed my fist down on the table. “You’re a shameful coward! You haven’t got the courage to do either good or evil! The role of spectator suited you to perfection. They killed? You had nothing to do with it. They looted the houses like vultures? You had nothing to do with it. Children were thirsty? You had nothing to do with it. Your conscience is clear. ‘Not guilty, your honor!’ You’re a disgusting coward! You hedge: you want to be on the winning side no matter what! It’s easy to say ‘I am I and they are they and to hell with them’! “You hate me, don’t you?” I turned. His voice had suddenly taken on a human tone. A certain intensity showed in his face. “No,” I said. “I don’t hate you.” A pause; then: “I feel contempt for you. That’s worse. The man who inspires hatred is still human; but not the man who inspires contempt. You don’t feel contempt for the executioner; you hate him, and you want him dead. You feel contempt only for cowards. People like you retreat to an ivory tower and say to themselves, ‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. Ah, how pleasant when they make us shiver!’ Hatred implies humanity: it has its coordinates, its motifs, its themes, its harmonics. Under certain conditions it can elevate men. But contempt has only one implication: decadence.” He paled perceptibly. His eyes were little more than slits. He stood erect, a hand on his stomach, as though he were sick. “You won’t do it,” he said. “You won’t humiliate me. You’re playing a game, and I won’t go along. I refuse to play.” He peered at me, and the cold glance grew harder, sharp as a sword: “You accuse me of cowardice. And you? What were you? A few policemen — not more than ten — led you all to the slaughterhouse: why didn’t you seize their arms? Can you tell me why?” “We didn’t know,” I said tightly. “We didn’t know what was ahead of us.” “That’s not true! There were some among you who knew, some who tried to warn you; you didn’t listen. Why? Why? Can you tell me why you didn’t listen?” “What they were saying sounded too fantastic; nobody could really put much stock in it.” “You were afraid, you preferred the illusion to the bite of conscience, and the game to a show of
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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courage!” I contained my anger with difficulty. You were thirsty, little sister. And he dared to judge you, he, the spectator. This man is accusing you of cowardice. My impulse was to charge him, to blind him, to kill him. A man like that had no right to live and to judge the dead. “You’re right; or rather you may be right. We too could have behaved differently. But you forget that we were victims: they had taken from us not only the right to live-and to drink when we were thirsty-but also any right to clarity. That doesn’t apply to you: you weren’t a victim. Your duty was clear: you had to choose. To fight us or to help. In the first case I would have hated you; in the second, loved. You never left your window: I have only contempt for you…” He wanted to say something, but I silenced him with a glance. I told him to join me at the window. He did so. We turned our backs to the room and looked out at the courtyard of the synagogue. It must have been close to midnight. The dead would never again come to pray. “You won’t humiliate me,” he said. I ignored his remark and said, “Do you remember the synagogue? Do you think it’s destroyed forever? Wrong. It exists. A synagogue is like the Temple in Jerusalem. The wise men of Israel say that there is one on high and a second here below. The one here below can be reduced to ashes; it’s been done twice. But the temple on high remains intact; its enemies cannot touch it. And this synagogue, too, exists. Only it’s been transplanted. Every time you raise your eyes you’ll see it. And you’ll see it so often, so clearly, that you’ll pray God to blind you.” “You won’t humiliate me,” he said. I ignored him again; I went on, “You think you’re living in peace and security, but in reality you’re not living at all. People of your kind scuttle along the margins of existence. Far from men, from their struggles, which you no doubt consider stupid and senseless. You tell yourself that it’s the only way to survive, to keep your head above water. You’re afraid of drowning, so you never embark. You huddle on the beach, at the edge of the sea you fear so much, even to its spray. Let the ships sail without you! Whatever their flag—Communist, Nazi, Tartar, what difference does it make? You tell yourself, ‘To link my life to other men’s would be to diminish it, to set limits; so why do it?’ You cling to your life. It’s precious to you. You won’t offer it to history or to country or to God. If living in peace means evolving
in nothingness, you accept the nothingness. The Jews in the courtyard of the synagogue? Nothing. The shrieks of women gone mad in the cattle cars? Nothing. The silence of thirsty children? Nothing. All that’s a game, you tell yourself. A movie! Fiction: seen and forgotten. I tell you, you’re a machine for the fabrication of nothingness.” “I will not let myself be humiliated,” he said. And this time too I ignored him and said, “The dead Jews, the women gone mad, the mute children—I’m their messenger. And I tell you they haven’t forgotten you. Someday they’ll come marching, trampling you, spitting in your face. And at their shouts of contempt you’ll pray God to deafen you.” “I will not let myself be humiliated,” the man said. This time I answered: “Be quiet.” Suddenly I had no further desire to speak or listen. I was weary, as after a battle fought without conviction. I had come, I had seen, I had delivered the message: the wheel had come full circle. The act was consummated. Now I shall go. I shall return to the life they call normal. The past will have been exorcised. I’ll live, I’ll work, I’ll love. I’ll take a wife, I’ll father a son, I’ll fight to protect his future, his future happiness. The task is accomplished. No more concealed wrath, no more disguises. No more double life, lived on two levels. Now I am whole. “Do you really feel contempt for me?” I didn’t answer. I’d talked enough. Everything had been said. I’ll leave Szerencsevaros, the city of luck. I’ll never come back. “Come,” I said. We left the window. There was something bizarre about the two glasses of wine on the table. “Let’s drink,” I said. I took a glass and pushed the other across to him. He picked it up hesitantly, not knowing if I would insult him again. The lines around his mouth now revealed bitterness and bewilderment. “Let’s drink to the actors,” I said. “To the actors destroyed in their own play.” We clinked glasses, and drained them. “You don’t hate me,” he said. “I told you. I don’t hate you.” “But you must!” he cried hopelessly. “I don’t hate you,” I said. “I couldn’t bear that! Your contempt would burn at my eyes; they’d never close again! You’ve got to hate me!” “No,” I said.
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #36 He stared at me for a moment and I thought he was going to cry. If he had, I’d have thrown my arms around him. For the first time that night his face had quivered. The veins in his temples were swollen. He ran his tongue around his lips as if to absorb the last drops of wine. Then he smiled a curious, ironic smile, the meaning of which I understood only later. “I feel sure you’ll hate me,” he said. Now his suffering was obvious, as though an unseen hand had engraved it on his skin. He had become human again. Down deep, I thought, man is not only an executioner, not only a victim, not only a spectator: he is all three at once. It was time to go, I said “Adieu” and without
waiting for an answer turned and left, shrugging. The street was empty, asleep. I headed for Dr. Todor’s house to see my father’s friend. I intended to spend two days there, until the rendezvous. But no man shouts his scorn and disgust at another with impunity. At the corner of the street running into the main square a car braked sharply at the curb; in the wink of an eye the door opened and two arms flashed out like lightning to drag me inside. In the front seat sat the spectator. I had barely left his house when he was off to warn the policeman on the corner. Our eyes met in the mirror: his were full of defiance, an anticipation of victory, saying, “Now you’ll have to hate me!”
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1 . Comment on the statement by Elie Wiesel, “If someone suffers and he keeps silent, it can be a good silence. If someone suffers and I keep silent, then it’s a destructive silence.” 2. How do you react to Hilda’s statement, “I don’t feel guilty about what happened in Germany under Hitler”? Is she correct in assuming that Americans reacted in a similar way during the Vietnam War and “Watergate”? Explain. Do you feel she was guilty? 3. Can citizens be free from guilt when their government’s actions violate human rights? If so, under what circumstances? How does this apply to Hilda and to the people in the United States? 4. Why did Hilda’s mother decide not to tell Hilda about what happened to a Jewish friend and her family? Do you believe Hilda should have been told? Why? 5. To what degree do the music composer and film producer bear any responsibility for what happened in Nazi Germany? How did they attempt to justify their actions? What do you think you would do in a similar situation? Why? 6. Why, according to Wiesel, is the spectator worse than the murderer? Do you agree? 7. Do you feel that every person in this country has an obligation to be politically involved? What would you say to someone who charged that a person who is not involved in political issues is responsible for the decline of that society? 8. In “The Hangman,” a well-known film about indifference to a common threat, the hangman states, “First the alien, then the Jew, I did no more than you let me do.” What does this mean?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Indifferent Ones: In Germany (by Ellen Switzer) and In Hungary” (by Elie Wiesel). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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anna’s dilemma What Would You Do? Not all Germans supported the Nazi program. Some actively opposed it. Others were silent in their opposition. Some were put to the test.
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nna is a German citizen who lives with her husband, Wilhelm, and their three small children in a comfortable home in Munich, Germany. Munich in 1938 is a center of Nazi activity in Germany. Anna’s husband is a high-ranking civil service employee and a member of the Nazi party. Wilhelm’s high-paying job was a reward for his loyalty to the party. Although Anna leads a comfortable life and is happily married, she disagrees with the Nazi philosophy and her husband’s party activities. She especially deplores the anti-Jewish laws and decrees that Hitler’s government has imposed. During her childhood Anna’s family developed deep friendships with a number of Jewish families in their town, and Anna learned to respect their cultural and religious differences. By 1938, the Nuremberg Laws are in effect and Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) has recently occurred. Jews in Germany have systematically been stripped of their political, economic, and social rights. Some Jews are attempting to leave the country to avoid what they consider to be eventual catastrophe.
One night, a friend of Anna’s approaches her and explains that he is secretly hiding Jews in Munich until he can find transportation for them to leave Germany. This is risky business because it is considered a racial crime against the Volk, the German people. Anna’s friend asks her to help him by hiding two members of a Jewish family who are wanted by the Nazis. He explains that because of Wilhelm’s position, nobody would suspect Anna. Also, Anna’s property includes a rarely used guest house located in a wooded corner. Anna is offered about 500 dollars for her cooperation. Anna is aware that, if caught, she and her family could face serious consequences. Also, she could jeopardize her husband’s good job and her family’s security. On the other hand, she realizes that what the Nazis are doing to the Jews, with widespread public support, is morally wrong. She has long believed that those who remain silent when human rights are being violated are also guilty. Anna’s friend tells her that he will come back the next morning for her decision.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What values come into conflict in this story? 2. What is Anna’s responsibility to her husband? Children? The Jews? The government? The law? Which is greatest? Explain. 3. Should Anna agree to hide Jews? 4. How frequently do you think this kind of situation occurred? Why? 5. Who should be held more responsible, a person with high ideals who, on practical grounds, accepts the Nazi policies toward the Jews; or the person with no ideals who believes in being practical all the time and accepts Nazi policies toward the Jews? Explain. 6. Evaluate the following statement: “All that is necessary for evil to win out over good is for good men to do nothing.” How does this relate to Anna’s dilemma?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “Anna’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #38
rosa parks
Introduction
T
he actions of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and furthered the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. It also shows us that one person can make a difference and bring the attention of the world to an injustice. Reading 38, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott,” is written by Rosa Parks who tells what happened in her own words. Reading 39, “Brown, Buses and Bombs,” is written by Virginia Durr, a friend of Mrs. Parks. Both women were involved in human rights causes before this incident that led to a national movement to bring about change.
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES 1. Discuss the event and the outcome. 2. Why was the action of Rosa Parks a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement and not that of the young woman previously arrested for the same action? Discuss the implications of this. 3. Discuss the importance of primary source documentation. Why is the testimony of a person who helped make history valuable? Rosa Parks’ testimony relates the facts without commentary. Discuss the significance of this.
Lesson activity above written by Arlene Shenkus.
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the montgomery bus boycott On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in the downtown shopping district of Montgomery, Alabama, and sat down in an area open to blacks. In time, newcomers filled the empty seats until one white person was left standing. The bus driver, James Blake, requested that Parks and the other black passengers in the front give up their seats. All of them complied except for Parks. When the driver was unable to get Parks to obey the law, he notified the city police who placed her under arrest. Parks’ refusal to give up her seat sparked a mass bus boycott in Montgomery. For over a year blacks walked, car-pooled, and bicycled to work. Finally, following a Supreme Court decision which ruled that a local bus-segregation ordinance was unconstitutional, the buses were desegregated. In addition to displaying a new level of militancy, the boycott catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr. — prior to the protests an obscure minister into the limelight. His philosophy of nonviolence struck a responsive chord among blacks and whites, and his charisma and oratorical skills fed and reinforced the determination of blacks, nationwide, to demand full equality. 3.1 In the first piece of this chapter, Parks, with simple eloquence, describes her refusal to give up her seat. While her decision was spontaneous, she had long been active in the local civil rights struggle. She had been a member of the NAACP and had attended human relations workshops conducted by the Highlander Folk School. She was close friends with several local activists, including E. D. Nixon and Clifford and Virginia Durr. These connections, along with her reputation in the black community as a hard-working family woman, contributed to the success of the boycott. Earlier that same year, a young woman had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat, but a boycott was not tried, in part, because the arrestee was pregnant out-of-wedlock and black leaders feared her circumstances, not Jim Crow busing, would become the main issue.
124 3.1 Rosa L. Parks, “Recollections,” in Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested (New York: G. P. Putnam Sons, 1977), pp. 40-42. I had left my work at the men’s alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At the time it was a little hard to get a seat on the bus. But when I did get to the entrance on the bus, I got in line with a number of other people who were getting on the same bus. As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn’t
particularly notice who was getting on the bus, didn’t particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle and I don’t know why this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those front seats. At his first request, didn’t any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, “You’d better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” At this point, of course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn’t said anything. In fact, he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in the seat with me and the two
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Rosa L. Parks: Recollections,” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #38 women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained where I was. When the driver saw that I was still there, he asked if I was going to stand up. I told him, no, I wasn’t. He said, “Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have you arrested.” I told him to go on and have me arrested. He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn’t. I told them I didn’t think I should have to stand up. After I had paid my fare and occupied a seat, I didn’t think I should have to give it up. They placed me under arrest then and had me get in the police car, and I was taken to jail and booked on suspicion, I believe. The questions were asked, the usual questions they ask a prisoner or somebody under arrest. They had to determine whether the driver wanted to press charges or swear out a warrant, which he did. Then they took me to jail and I was placed in a cell. In a little while I was taken from the cell, and my picture was made and fingerprints taken. I went back to the cell then, and a few minutes later I was called back again, and when this happened I found out that Mr. E. D. Nixon and Mrs. Clifford Durr had come to make bond for me… I was given permission to make a telephone call after my picture was taken and fingerprints taken. I called my home and spoke to my mother on the telephone and told her what had happened, that I was in jail. She was quite upset and asked me had the police beaten me. I told her, no. I hadn’t been physically injured, but I was being held in jail, and I wanted my husband to come and get me out…He didn’t have a car at the time, so he had to get someone to bring him down. At the time he got down, Mr. Nixon and the Durrs had just made bond for me, so we all met at the jail and we went home…
3.2 E. D. Nixon, who here recalls his initial contact with Parks following her arrest, played a pivotal though transitional role in the Montgomery bus boycott. For years Nixon had been a prominent black leader in the region. As local head of the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he orchestrated voter registration campaigns, organized black workers, and spoke out against injustice. These actions prepared the ground for the seed that would sprout with Parks’ arrest. Nixon and Clifford Durr bailed Parks out of jail and asked if she would be willing to turn her arrest into a challenge to segregation. Nixon also contacted Martin Luther King, Jr., a freshly arrived twenty-six-year-old preacher with no prior political involvement in the community. Recognizing that the various religious factions had yet to “lay their hands” on King, Nixon asked him to head the ad hoc boycott organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). King agreed to do so. Ironically, Nixon ended up playing a marginal role in the boycott itself. Because of work commitments he missed the first days of the protest and soon found himself eclipsed by the very man he had tagged to take the helm.
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Rosa L. Parks: Recollections,” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
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Unit I: READING #39
brown, buses, and bombs Introduction
V
irginia Durr, a white southerner, mother and wife of a lawyer, was a member of the Council on Human Relations. She provided a safe house for the black students who integrated Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery to wait in when their parents were late to pick them up. She met Rosa Parks, and she and her husband went with black supporters of Parks to arrange bail when Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus for a white man. Duff also met and spent time with Coretta Scott King and heard many of Martin Luther King’s early speeches. As one of the few white people at these meetings, she and her husband were known and accepted as participants in the civil rights movement in Montgomery. The following selection by Durr tells of the people she knew and the things that she and her husband did so that blacks would be looked at and treated as equals by white people. It provides a look at the civil rights movement through the eyes of a white southern female who was a participant in the movement for equality before the Montgomery bus boycott.
OBJECTIVES 1. To understand how working together for a common goal brings people of different races, religions, and backgrounds together. 2. To see involvement in the civil rights movement from the perspective of a white person. 3. To understand major themes. 4. To identify with the author.
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QUESTIONS 1. How did African Americans react to the Brown decision of May 1954? 2. How did whites react to desegregation? 3. How did this reaction affect African Americans? 4. According to the author, what is the only reason white southerners accepted integration? 5. What helped the black children get through the first weeks of school integration? 6. What did Victor Kearns do and why did he do it? What happened because of his decision? 7. What made Rosa Parks refuse to move to the back of the bus? Describe Rosa Parks as a person when she took this position. 8. Why did the policemen harass the white women who took the black women home? 9. Explain what Mary meant when she said “…I learned one thing in my life and that is, when your hand’s in the lion’s mouth, it’s just better to pat it on the head…“ 10. How did what was happening in the world at the time help integration and the civil rights movement? 11. What did Martin Luther King, Jr., tell the crowd outside when his house was bombed? Why did he say this? Do you agree? Why? 12. The bombers were not convicted, but what was done to stop them? What does this tell you about the power of the people? 13. How does the author describe Ku Kluxers? What is she really saying to the reader? 14. What price did their children pay for the Durrs’ involvement in the movement?
Source: Ferguson, Cynthia, Melissa I Greenwald and Randall M. Miller, eds. “Brown, Buses and Bombs.” Is There A Dream for Today? A Civil Rights Curriculum Resource. Dubuque, Iowa-Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #39 15. Select one lesson to be learned from the writing and explain it. 16. The author of the writing is a white woman. Does this affect your reactions to what she says about the civil rights movement? Explain. 17. Do the two writings give you a better understanding of Rosa Parks and the impact her refusal to move to the back of the bus had on our country? Explain. EVALUATION 1. Have you done anything to right a wrong when someone was being treated unfairly? Explain what happened, why you stepped in and what you did, and how the incident ended. How were you perceived when you intervened? Are you glad now that you did step in? Would you do it again? Explain. 2. Explain Durr’s involvement in the movement for civil rights. Did it make a difference that she was white? Explain. 3. Select one message from the writing and explain what it means to you.
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Source: Ferguson, Cynthia, Melissa I Greenwald and Randall M. Miller, eds. “Brown, Buses and Bombs.” Is There A Dream for Today? A Civil Rights Curriculum Resource. Dubuque, Iowa-Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998.
Unit I: READING #39
brown, buses, and bombs Virginia Durr
W
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HEN THE BROWN decision came down in May of 1954, it was regarded by the black people I knew here in Montgomery as the second Emancipation Proclamation. There was rejoicing in all the churches. They had singings and meetings. It was thrilling to see the joy that came over them. For the first time since Reconstruction they felt the federal government was actually on their side. They had had a brief period of eleven years at the end of the Civil War when they had had equality. They could go to the theaters and they could ride the trains and the buses. They’d had Negro representation in the legislature. Then by 1876 the government had withdrawn the federal troops, and the Bourbon Democrats came in. Little by little all of the black people’s rights were taken away. The white reaction to desegregation was painful to the blacks. Many of them really believed that when the segregation laws changed, they would be received with joy. Of course, it was only a false hope. Every step toward desegregation was a hard battle. When the schools opened, the first black pupils were met with a great deal of hostility from the teachers and the white pupils. Before they ever got into the school, there were lawsuits and other obstacles. Here in Alabama George Wallace made school segregation his great crusade. He’d send the troopers in to close the schools. He did that over in Tuskegee, in Macon County. He stood in the door at the university. He was going to see that the law was not obeyed. It was only the force of the federal government that made him give in. Now this is something that I saw with my own eyes—the last-ditch struggle to keep segregation. And I do not believe, as some people do, that there has been a great change in the Southern people. I believe that the only reason white Southerners accepted integration was that it was backed up by the federal government. They knew if they did not follow the Supreme Court and the law as laid down by the Supreme Court, they would be punished. The federal judges of the South, the ones I knew, and the lawyers who brought the cases up before the federal courts have been the heroes of the segregation fight. I do
not mean by that to take away from the struggle and suffering of the Negroes and the young people who fought for them. Four young men were murdered in Mississippi, and many civil rights workers were jailed. All of that made the struggle for racial equality a nationwide struggle. When a couple in Wisconsin had a daughter living in Mississippi, all of a sudden what happened in Mississippi was very important to them. When the NAACP brought a case, the whole country was alerted to it. It became a national issue. It was no longer a Southern issue. It had the backing of the nation. But the important thing was that it had the authority of the federal courts and the federal judges. The very next fall after the Brown decision a few black children actually began going to white schools in Montgomery. Mrs. Johnny Carr’s son Arlam was one. Mrs. Carr and I had been friends from the prayer group and United Church Women and also from the Council on Human Relations. The black students were selected not by the parents but by the board of education. They were not the best and the brightest but a cross section of young Negroes. I think there were only eight or ten, and they went to Sidney Lanier High School, which was right across the street from where we were living at that time. Arlam Carr was a very bright boy, and his mother was a very bright woman. Her business is insurance, and she is now head of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the largely black group that formed to support the bus boycott in 1955. Mrs. Parks and Mrs. King were friends of hers. The Negro community made certain that the children who were going to the white school had nice clothes to wear and money for their books. Then they arranged a car pool. The children were taken to school and they were met afterward because there was fear of some disturbance after or before school. In Little Rock, where they’d had so much trouble, the disturbance had happened outside the school rather than in the school. Since I lived right across the street from the school, Mrs. Carr said, “Mrs. Durr, is it all right if I tell Arlam if I’m late or his pick-up is late that he can come over to your house?” She didn’t say if there was
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #39 any danger, or if he got frightened. She just said, if they were late. So one afternoon Arlam did come over. And he brought a young black girl with him. I said, “Arlam, is there anything wrong?” “No, no. Nothing at all except Mamma’s late picking us up,” he said. “Are you sure? Are you okay? Nobody is giving you any trouble?” “No,” he said, “Everything’s fine.” He never admitted there was any trouble. He was an extremely proud, bright boy. But I met by chance just the other day the young girl who had been with him. She said, “You don’t remember me, Mrs. Durr, but I came to your house with Arlam Carr when we were surrounded by a lot of white kids. We didn’t want to stay there waiting for the car pool.” They never told me that at the time. They denied it completely, which I always thought showed a very brave spirit. There were some things that happened that were nasty. Arlam was very bright, but some of the black kids could hardly read and write. They’d been very badly prepared. Some of the white teachers were very mean. They would take those children’s papers, particularly the ones that were badly written and badly spelled; and pass them around and have them mimeographed to show what they had to teach. It’s hard to believe that a teacher would be that mean. They were trying to prove that these black children were so stupid and so illiterate that it was ridiculous to try to reach them. Except for these few incidents, there was no violence that I can recall when the schools first integrated. The black children were very brave. They were heroes in their own community, whereas my children, like Tilla and Lulah, were anything but heroes. They were pariahs and outcasts for being the nieces of Hugo Black and the daughters of Virginia and Clifford Durr. It was very different, indeed, from the way the black children were treated. Of course, the support from their community got the black children through a very hard period. They’d be introduced at church services, and benefits would be given for them. They were treated as heroes, and they were heroes, because it was pretty tough. After 1954, there was increasing bitterness and defiance in Montgomery. I remember the case of a Jewish fellow here named Victor Kerns. He was a teacher at the high school. The board of education had a meeting at Lanier High School, and Victor was the only one who stood up and said he would teach
black children. The teachers then gave up their own tenure so the board of education could fire any teacher who didn’t go along with resistance to the Brown decision. Victor wasn’t fired, but he did leave and went to Auburn University to get his Ph.D. A scary episode happened before he left. He and his family lived in the southern part of Montgomery. His wife, Ann, was a high-strung young woman, very nervous and sensitive and fearful. She and her mother, Mrs. Rosenbaum, had taken in a great many of the Jewish refugees from Germany. Mrs. Rosenbaum was an extremely strict Orthodox Jew and she had taken in a lot of Jews who were Orthodox. Victor was from Brooklyn and he was a very brave fellow, but one day somebody knocked on the door and two big men with guns on their hip swaggered in. Ann took the children to the backyard. The men told Victor if he didn’t stop this nigger talk something would happen to him. It was a direct threat from the Klan. Jimmy’s Restaurant down on Commerce Street had white waitresses, and when the restaurants were about to be integrated, Jimmy fired them all and put in black waiters, because he didn’t think white waitresses should wait on black men. One of the waitresses he fired was the sweetheart or the mistress of a big Ku Kluxer who worked for the power company as a lineman. He and Jimmy got into a quarrel about the girl’s being fired, and it got terribly bitter. The Klan was going to picket the restaurant. The Klansman’s father arranged a meeting for them out at Normandale about ten o’clock one night to see if they couldn’t work it out. Instead, they had a shootout, and Jimmy killed the fellow. The tension in the whole town built up on so many stupid little incidents. This killing really stemmed from a fear that the restaurants were going to integrate. By the time of the bus boycott in December of 1955, I had gotten to know many of the black leaders in Montgomery. I had met Mrs. King before the boycott at a black funeral at which she sang. Dr. King had just taken over as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and they were new in Montgomery. Mrs. King was a very young girl then, slender with long, pretty hair. I thought she was a very pretty young girl and sang very well. We were introduced to each other, and afterward she sometimes came to the Council on Human Relations. Dr. King spoke at the council once or twice. One night that he spoke the White Citizens Council infiltrated the meeting. Dr. King gave that famous
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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speech he gave so often about how we don’t want to be loved but we want to be respected. He used the Greek word he used so often, agape, which means human love, not love in the sense of sexual love but love in the sense of human beings loving each other. That was the night Juliet Morgan, who was a librarian, turned to me and saw a White Citizens Council member there. She said, “You know, I feel like somebody is pointing a gun at me.” She was afraid she was going to lose her job, and she did later on. I knew the Kings, but I never had any personal contact with them until Tilla applied to go to Antioch College, where Mrs. King had been. We got a letter from Antioch saying that Tilla would have to have a personal interview with a graduate of Antioch. They said the only graduate they had in Montgomery was Mrs. Martin Luther King. Tilla didn’t want me to go with her. Tilla never wanted me to speak for her. She thought if I went, I’d do all the talking, so she took a taxi over there. When she came back she told me the taxi driver had said, “What you doing, white girl, going in that nigger neighborhood?” Not long after that one of the many visitors we had during that period said she was very eager to meet Mrs. King. I called her up and told her I was Tilla’s mother. She remembered me, so we went over in late afternoon. Mrs. King was dressed in a very pretty light summer dress and her hair was piled on top of her head. She served us delicious Southern tea, iced tea and cookies. She was a gracious hostess and her house was decorated very tastefully. They had one child then, a little girl named Yolanda. Mrs. King was a perfect Southern lady. After that Mrs. King and I became friendly. I stayed at her house in Atlanta once or twice later on. The Kings didn’t attend the Human Relations Council meetings regularly, because he traveled a great deal and she was home with their daughter. She had some speaking engagements of her own, but she didn’t become the great public speaker she is today until after he died. She led a very domestic life. By the time of the boycott I’d met the Kings, but that was about all. We had developed a very strong relationship with Mr. E. D. Nixon and with Mrs. Parks, however. We knew through them what was going on in the NAACP in Montgomery. As I recall, it was the summer of 1955 that Mrs. Parks went to the Highlander Folk School. Myles Horton had written to me to say they had a scholarship for somebody at the Highlander Folk School for two weeks. They wanted
me to find somebody in Montgomery, preferably somebody black, to come and take the scholarship. I immediately thought of Mrs. Parks. It was the summer before the boycott. During 1954 and 1955, Mrs. Parks had been one of the people who helped the black schoolchildren; she tutored them and saw that they were properly dressed and that they got their school books. She didn’t have an automobile, so she rode the bus. She made only twenty-three dollars a week as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair, as I recall. The Montgomery Fair was a big department store here. Mrs. Parks’s husband worked as a barber and he was sometimes sick and unemployed. They lived in a housing project with her mother, who kept house for them. When Myles called from Highlander, I immediately went over and asked Mrs. Parks if she would like to go. She said she would but she didn’t have any money. You can imagine under what straitened circumstances they lived, even doing extra sewing, which she never charged enough for. I used to be embarrassed at the amount she charged to make a dress. She’d charge, say, three dollars, which was absurd. I’d have to just beat her down to make her charge twice as much, which was still very little. But in any case, she said she didn’t have any money, so I said, “If I can get you some money, can you go?” She said yes. I went over and got the money from Aubrey Williams, who had more money than we did at that time. The round-trip bus fare to Highlander and back was no more than twelve or fifteen dollars. Mrs. Parks also didn’t have a bathing suit. I told her about all the swimming at Highlander. One of my girls had a bathing suit they gave her. She didn’t have a suitcase, so one of the girls lent her that. Rosa Parks is one of the proudest people I’ve ever known in my life. She hated to admit she didn’t have a suitcase or a bathing suit or money. It was painful for her. She was a very proud woman, so all of this had to be accomplished with a great deal of tact, which I am not noted for. But Mrs. Parks was very fond of Aubrey Williams. By that time she’d gotten fond of me, too, and she really wanted to go. She had heard about the Highlander Folk School. She had never lived in an integrated situation in her life except the time she went to Miss White’s School, a private school for blacks in Montgomery where they had white teachers. So she went to the Highlander Folk School and she had a wonderful time. Now Myles always has taken great pride in the
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #39 fact that he thought Mrs. Parks’ stay at Highlander encouraged her in the boycott. Having known Mrs. Parks, I think it gave her a great lift. She loved it. She liked Myles so much and she loved being in a completely natural integrated situation where there was no discussion of it. She didn’t like the Council on Human Relations because she always felt so black there. All they talked about was race. She said, “You know, every time I went to one of those meetings, I came away blacker than I was before, because everything was discussed in terms of race.” When Mrs. Parks came back from the Highlander, she still had her job at the Montgomery Fair as seamstress. It was during the Christmas rush and the room where she worked was little and hot. The heavy pressing irons added to the heat. She had bursitis in her shoulder, which pained her very much. One afternoon she stopped to buy a big bag of groceries after work. Her arm was very painful, and she was exhausted from her day spent in that hot little room. She had complained about the bus to me and discussed it many times. She had told me how she’d pay her money and then have to run around to the back door to get in, and the driver would slam the door and ride off leaving her standing on the curb after she’d paid her money. She had resented this for years. She resented having to get up and give her seat to white people. The buses had been a very hot issue in Montgomery. The local NAACP had had many cases they’d tried to take into the courts about it. Mr. Nixon was very angry about it, although he had his own car. He never rode the bus. Mrs. Parks had to ride the bus twice a day. This particular afternoon, Mrs. Parks later told me, she was exhausted. The bus she took went out to the housing project and was full of blacks, but some white men got on. The bus driver turned around and said, the way they always said, “Niggers, move back.” And she just sat. The driver stopped the bus and came up to her. He said, “Did you hear me say to move back?” She said yes. He said, “Are you going to move back?” She said no. He called the police, and they came and arrested her and took her to jail. She was booked and put behind bars. We got home about five o’clock from the office. Only Lulah was at home then, and she always had coffee ready for us. Lucy had graduated from high school and had gone to college, and we had sent Tilla north to school. Lulah was pretty lonesome because she didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood, so we always tried to get home on time. We had just
walked in and poured some coffee when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Nixon. He said, “Mr. Durr, will you call the jail and see why Mrs. Parks has been arrested?” The police recognized his voice as being that of a black man, and they wouldn’t tell him anything. They treated him with the utmost disdain. Cliff called the jail and said he was Clifford J. Durr and he was a lawyer. They knew who he was, I think. He asked why Mrs. Parks was in jail. They told him she’d been booked on the city segregation ordinance. So Cliff called Mr. Nixon back. Mr. Nixon asked if Cliff would go down with him to make bail. Cliff said, “Mr. Nixon, I don’t have anything to make bail with.” We didn’t own any property at that time, and we only had three or four hundred dollars a month to live on. Mr. Nixon said, “That’s all right. I can make bail, if you’ll just go with me.” He was afraid they wouldn’t let him make bail. I was determined to go too, so I put on my coat and came running out. I waited for them while they made bail. Everything went very smoothly. They brought Mrs. Parks out from behind the bars. That was a terrible sight to me to see this gentle, lovely, sweet woman, whom I knew and was so fond of, being brought down by a matron. She wasn’t in handcuffs, but they had to unlock two or three doors that grated loudly. She was very calm. I asked her how they had treated her and she said, “Very nicely.” Just at that moment her husband arrived. He was very excited and upset. She went home with him in the car some friend had brought. We told her we would follow her home in Mr. Nixon’s car and would discuss the case in her apartment. We all went to her apartment, and after she had freshened up and had a little supper, Cliff and Mr. Nixon and Mrs. Parks and her husband and her mother and I discussed the case. Of course, Mr. Nixon wanted her to make a test case of it. Mr. Nixon remembers her as being extremely reluctant to do so, but I remember that it was her husband who was so reluctant. He kept saying over and over again, “Rosa, the white folks will kill you. Rosa, the white folks will kill you.” It was like a background chorus, to hear the poor man, who was as white as he could be himself, for a black man, saying, “Rosa, the white folks will kill you.” I don’t remember her being reluctant. Part of the city bus ordinance said that the white people got on in the front and sat from the front back; the black people got on in the back and sat from the back toward the front. No signs were posted and the center was always a no-man’s land.
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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When more whites got on, the bus driver would make the blacks get up and go stand up in the back. But the city ordinance included a phrase that said the bus driver couldn’t order a black to give up a seat unless there was another seat available farther back in the black section. In other words, he couldn’t just say, “Nigger, get back.” Cliff asked Mrs. Parks if she wanted to test the constitutionality of the law itself or if she wanted him to try to get her off on the fact that the bus driver hadn’t been following the law. She said she wanted to test the constitutionality of the law. Cliff told Mrs. Parks he thought he could get the charges dropped, if that’s what she wanted, to prevent her going through a long court session. Cliff told her, “Now if you’re going to fight this on a constitutional basis, you will have to get the NAACP to finance it because it’s going to cost you a fortune. It’ll have to go all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States and it’s going to cost a lot of money. You don’t have it and of course we don’t have it.” Certainly the Montgomery NAACP or even the Alabama NAACP didn’t have it, but Fred Gray, a lawyer for the NAACP in Montgomery, had connections with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in New York. So that night it was decided that Mrs. Parks would challenge the bus ordinance on constitutional grounds, and Fred Gray would represent her. It would be an NAACP case and Cliff would do all he could to help Fred, but Cliff would not be the lawyer of record. Mrs. Parks was brought up to trial on the Monday after her arrest. In the meantime, Mr. Nixon had organized a boycott of the buses on the day of her trial. It was supposed to be just a one-day boycott. I can very well remember going to a meeting Mr. Nixon had that Sunday afternoon at a black church. It was an NAACP meeting and Mr. Nixon asked me to come. I remember that he was very emotional. He said to the people, “I’m a Pullman porter and every time I go on my job, I put on an apron or a jacket.” He said, “You know, we’ve been wearing aprons for three hundred years. It’s time we took off our aprons.” I always thought that was a vivid phrase. He asked them not to get on the bus the next day. He had spread the word to all the preachers and they all told their congregations to stay off the buses on that Monday, the day of Mrs. Parks’ trial. They announced they would have a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church on Monday night. Fred Gray represented Mrs. Parks in the
courtroom. She was found guilty and fined. Then he announced they were going to appeal the case. That night I left the house to go to the mass meeting. Mr. Nixon had had to go off on his run as a Pullman car porter, and Martin Luther King was selected to be the speaker. There must have been ten or fifteen thousand black people crowding in and around that church. At that time I felt on very friendly terms with all the black community. I hadn’t the slightest feeling of fear being the only white person, but I couldn’t get into the church because of the crowd. King made a magnificent speech that electrified the black people. He became their undoubted leader that night. The Parks case went on and on, and so did the boycott. The black people formed car pools, and the city tried cracking down on them by arresting the drivers for going two miles an hour over the speed limit. The police were harassing them. So Cliff got in touch with Fred Gray, and they decided to transfer the case to federal court. It came before a three-judge panel: Judge Rives and Judge Johnson declare the ordinance unconstitutional; Judge Lynne dissented, saying the panel shouldn’t declare the ordinance unconstitutional until a higher court had ruled in that area of the law. Then the case went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court. Finally the Supreme Court declared the ordinance unconstitutional, and the Negroes began to ride the buses again. The boycott lasted the entire year, December 1955 until December 1956. I would see the black women walking to work every morning and walking back at night. It was like the black tides would come up out of the black section of town and go to work and then sweep back again. We would offer the women rides when we saw them walking, particularly out in the country club area where the distances were rather great. I would say to a complete stranger, “Would you like a ride?” They’d say, “Yes, thank you very much.” They’d get in the car, and I’d ask them where they lived. They always lived on the west part of town. I’d say, “I’m glad to see that you’re supporting the boycott.” “No, ma’am. I hadn’t nothing to do with that boycott. The lady I work for, she wasn’t feelin’ so good this afternoon so that’s why I was walkin’ home.” “No, ma’am, I don’t have nothin’ to do with that boycott it’s just that her little girl’s sick.” One reason after another, but they wouldn’t admit they were supporting the boycott. Then the policemen began giving tickets to the
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #39 white women who were taking black women home. I had a washwoman who came once a week, an older lady who belonged to the Church of Christ. She admired Dr. King greatly. She said she had seen the angels come down and stand on his shoulders every Monday night. In everything he said he was speaking with the voice of God. Now, everything she did was also dictated by the voice of God. She got so she talked to God so much that she didn’t do much ironing. She was really a sweet old lady, but she was a religious fanatic. I was taking her home one afternoon and we were stopped. I knew positively I had stopped at the stop sign, but a policeman came roaring up to me. He said that I had stopped too late. I’d gone two or three feet over the line. I knew there was no use in arguing, so I told him I was sorry and got my ticket and took this old lady home. I had to pay five dollars. This incident was typical of what happened over and over again all over town. The mayor of the city, Tacky Gayle, issued a plea for the white women of Montgomery to stop taking their black maids home. He said they could break the boycott if the white women would stop taking their black maids home, or even stop hiring them. Well, you have never heard such a roar of indignation in your life as came from the white women of Montgomery. They were just furious at Tacky Gayle. They said, okay, if Tacky Gayle wants to come out here and do my washing and ironing and cleaning and cooking and look after my children, he can do it, but unless he does, I’m going to get Mary or Sally or Suzy. And they said, “Sally has never had a thing to do with that boycott in the first place. She told me she only stays off the buses because she’s scared of those hoodlums that might hurt her.” A vast deceit went on. Everybody knew everybody else was lying, but to save face, they had to lie. The black women had to say they weren’t taking any part in the boycott. The white women had to say that the maids didn’t take any part in the boycott. We had a good example of that in Mary, Mrs. Durr’s old cook who came from Hardaway, in Mason County. She’d been with the Durrs for years and now was Mrs. Durr’s nurse. Mrs. Durr by that time was quite old and feeble and had to stay in bed, but a lot of people would drop by in the afternoons. Mary would sit in the room. Mrs. Durr was a beautiful old woman, all propped up in bed, with a pink bed jacket and a pink ribbon in her hair and looking so pretty. Her mind was failing her, but she was still able to carry on a
conversation. One afternoon when I was in the room somebody said to Mary, “Mary, I hope you don’t have anything to do with that boycott.” Mary said, “No, ma’am, I hadn’t had nothing to do with that boycott. There’s my sister Olla. She don’t live very far from her job so she just walks to work. And my brother, he’s got a job at the cotton mill and he just goes to work with some other men who are driving a car. And my other sister she just walks to work cause it’s so close. No, ma’am, none of us has a thing to do with that boycott. We just stays off the buses.” The white people really believed that. They didn’t see through it at all. In truth, Mary was a passionate advocate of the boycott. She’d meet us as we came in the driveway to ask how the bus boycott was getting on, how Dr. King was. She couldn’t read and write, but she listened to the radio. That afternoon after the guests had left and Mary was fixing supper, Cliff and I said to her, “Mary, you are the biggest storyteller in the world. You know very well you’re supporting the boycott and all of your family are. Why in the world did you make up that tale about how none of you were, and you were all walking just because you wanted to?” She laughed and she said, “Well, I tell you, Mr. Cliff, I tell you, I learned one thing in my life and that is, when your hand’s in the lion’s mouth, it’s just better to pat it on the head.” That expressed the feeling in the black community. The black women needed those jobs. They weren’t paid very much, but that’s all the income many of them had. They couldn’t afford to say, “I’m supporting the boycott.” So the white women lied and the black women lied. And the maids kept coming and the white women kept driving them back and forth to work. There was phenomenal support for the boycott. Absolutely phenomenal. The unity of the black people was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life. Because of segregation the blacks had their own churches and clubs and neighborhoods. There were two black lawyers, Fred Gray and one other, and there were several black doctors and a black hospital. So the black community was complete in and of itself The Supreme Court of the United States held that segregation on the buses was unconstitutional, and the black people felt they had won that decision by all their walking. I spoke at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and I said that I felt the law had won black people the right to integrated buses. I didn’t get much of a hand on that. Not that anybody said anything against it, but they wanted to believe they
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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had won the victory themselves, that, they had done it through their own united strength. And they really had done so, for the first time. Now, I believe the Supreme Court is made up of men, not idols, and that they do sense what is going on in the country. The Brown decision came absolutely in the middle of the cold war and McCarthyism. Here we were blaming Russia for being a totalitarian dictatorship. We had fought nazism and fascism and the persecution of the Jews. Well, we put ourselves in the forked stick. The whole basis of the cold war was that communism meant dictatorship and capitalism meant democracy. How could anyone say that capitalism was the best system in the world when the whole Southern part of the United States was segregated and Negroes had no rights at all? It created a great dilemma for the United States. Dr. King came on the scene at a moment of history. That’s why we here in the South didn’t get that feeling of total terror and failure that so many people in the North got during the McCarthy days— the feeling that there was no use trying. The civil rights movement was working. I always thought King was a great politician. He started the movement in the churches, so when the people started trying to red-bait the Negro movement, they had to go into churches and red-bait Jesus Christ—pretty difficult to do. All this time, of course, the Alabama Legislature was passing crazy resolutions. They were going to dissolve the public school system and give money to private schools. But Judge Johnson and Judge Rives in the federal court showed that they were not going to give in to these threats. A cross was burned on Judge Johnson’s lawn. Somebody bombed his mother’s house later. Two federal marshals guarded him all the time. Even his son, Johnny, was guarded. Now Judge Rives was from an old Montgomery family and he never had any guards. He got threats, and that worried him because his wife was more or less an invalid, but he always felt that anybody who was cowardly enough to make a threat anonymously was too cowardly to act out the threat. Judge Rives had a great deal of confidence. He was a brave man. When people finally began to give up segregation, the favorite phrase was, “Well, I’m doing it because I don’t want to go to Atlanta,” which meant they didn’t want to be put in the federal penitentiary. The threat of the federal penitentiary in Atlanta and Judge Rives and Judge Johnson standing there so completely resolute, not giving one single inch,
changed the whole climate of opinion. Judge Rives and Judge Johnson were going to carry out the law. In February of 1956, during the bus boycott, Autherine Lucy went to the University of Alabama. Folsom was governor then. Robert Shelton was head of the Ku Klux Klan in Tuscaloosa and a lot of the rubber workers there were Ku Kluxers. The opposition to Autherine Lucy was organized and fomented by a crazy young student at the university named Leonard Wilson, the Ku Klux Klan, Bobby Shelton, and the rubber workers. They were the ones that filled up the campus the day Autherine Lucy was to start school. The president of the university at that time was O. C. Carmichael, whom I had known very well because he had been one of my teachers in Central High School in Birmingham. He’d been a Rhodes Scholar, one of the first in Alabama. He came from a big family up in northern Alabama. He began teaching Spanish at the high school just after he returned from being a Rhodes scholar. I was about fourteen or fifteen, and the class had about two boys and eighteen girls. The eighteen girls all fell simultaneously and madly in love with him. We would do anything to stay after school just to have a few minutes more with our god. There wasn’t a girl in his class who failed to fall for him. He was very handsome, with reddish blond hair and blue eyes. He had to be extremely proper and stiff and dignified or the girls would have mobbed him. We didn’t learn much Spanish, but we certainly did suffer the pangs of love. At the time of Autherine Lucy’s admission to the university, Dr. Carmichael said that he was going to obey the law. We didn’t think he was as encouraging or as brave as he should have been, but he was too encouraging and too brave to suit the trustees of the university and the legislature, so he had to leave. Cliff and I felt he could have been more forward and prevented some of the disruption, but all he would say was, “I will obey the law.” He did obey the law, and the university made him leave because it didn’t think he put up any fight. That’s why George Wallace got to be so popular— he always lost, but he put up a fight. That appealed to the Southern spirit: we’re going to resist the Yankees and we’re not going to let them tell us what to do. The fact that the law prevailed at that time is a remarkable thing. And I must say that I think the firm stand taken by such people as Hugo Black and Cliff and Judge Rives and Judge Johnson kept events
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #39 from breaking out in open violence. Cliff’s brother James was under terrific pressure at this time, but he still stood by Cliff, even though he didn’t agree with him, and kept him on as lawyer for the Durr Drug Company. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Jimmy, I doubt if we could have stayed here. Uncle Jimmy was one of the unsung saints. James Durr also stood behind the people who worked for him. A Negro employee, Eli Judkins, drove one of the car pool cars at night in the boycott. Some of the Ku Klux Klan or White Citizen’s Council over in Selma read in the paper that this man had been arrested for taking part in the boycott, and one night a druggist called James and said, “Mr. Jimmy, we see where this man got arrested for being a part of the boycott. We want you to know until you fire that man, you’ll never get another order from us.” And James said, “Well, now look, if you want to come over here and do my hiring and firing and run my business for me, come over and do it, but as long as I am head of the Durr Drug Company, I will do my own hiring and firing.” And he didn’t fire Eli even though he was against the boycott. In 1956 or 1957, James bought a big block of tickets for the Chamber of Commerce dinner and invited Cliff and me to go. The commissioner of police, L. B. Sullivan, was at the head table, and all of a sudden in the middle of the evening I saw a policeman come around and speak to him. He got up and went out and I said to Cliff, “I bet there’s trouble.” We went out into the hall and there was a Negro waiter whom Cliff knew, and he said Martin Luther King’s house had been bombed. Cliff and I got in our car and drove up to see what had happened. When we got there, there were just hundreds—it seemed to me thousands people around the house, all black. King’s house had been bombed, and his wife and child had been there but, purely by chance, had not been hurt. We parked the car and walked through a great crowd of Negroes. We knew some of them, and they all shook our hands and led us right up to the porch of the house that had been bombed. There was a feeling of friendship and rapport. And King came out. His wife and Rev. Ralph Abernathy and all his supporters were there. At that moment, if King had said “Burn the town down,” I really believe they would have done it, because this bombing was the first act of overt violence. But King stood on the steps and said, “Now you have got to realize that if you respond to this hatred with hatred, you’re putting
yourself exactly on the same plane with these people. This is as low an act as a person can do, to bomb a man’s house with his wife and child in it.” That was what he said. He talked some more and then every one went home. King at that point, I thought—like Judge Rives and Cliff and Judge Johnson—prevented terrible violence. The next bombing took place in 1957 while we were still living in town, before we moved out to Cliff’s grandfather’s old place at Pea Level. The planes from Maxwell Air Force Base would often break the sound barrier but seldom at night. You’d hear a terrific shattering noise above your head. One night about two or three o’clock in the morning, we heard the same sort of noise. It seemed to be all over town, all over. Of course, it woke us up, and my first thought was what in the name of God was Maxwell Air Force Base doing breaking the sound barrier at three o’clock in the morning. Then the telephone rang and it was Mr. E. D. Nixon. He said, “Mrs. Durr, they have bombed Reverend Abernathy’s house and his church. They’ve bombed two or three more black churches and they’ve bombed Reverend Graetz’s house.” Graetz was a white Lutheran minister who was active in the MIA, the Montgomery Improvement Association. “Did they bomb you?” I asked. “No,” he said, “they didn’t bomb me because I was sitting here with my shotgun. They came by here and threw their light on me and when they saw that shotgun, they went on. You know, I’m not a nonviolent nigger.” He meant he was going to protect his house. Later on I asked Mr. Nixon how he had happened to be up so early. They bombed his house once when he was out of town; the bomb had barely grazed the sidewalk, but it frightened his wife a great deal. He said when he heard the first noise, he realized immediately what it was, and he went out and got the shotgun and sat there with his shotgun ready to fire. He said that two or three cars came up and the lights fell on him and then went on. He would have shot at them, no doubt about it. The Graetz family had four or five children at the time of these bombings. They were a young couple in their late twenties. He’d come down as a missionary and had a Negro Lutheran church on Holt Street. We went over and invited them to come and stay with us. Their house was pretty well blasted. Windows were broken. There was a hole in the yard. It was cold. I borrowed extra blankets and put up
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
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cots. Jeannie Graetz called me the next day and said, “Virginia, I’m sorry, but I’d rather just take a chance on staying in this house than moving all these kids. I just can’t face it.” She was pretty shaken up. Later their house was totally wrecked by a bigger bomb, but they weren’t there. The First Baptist Church, which was Abernathy’s church, had been completely bombed out. That bombing was solved, but in a strange way. The man in a filling station across the street from Martin Luther King ‘s house remembered some men who had stopped there for gas. I don’t know how in the world he did, but he remembered the cars and had taken down the license numbers. Ever since King’s first bombing, he had been noticing cars that came out late at night. The police got the numbers of the cars, and caught these men cold. They were the men who had been working at Aubrey Williams’s house. The bombers were not convicted. The only thing John Blue Hill, who was their lawyer, asked Martin Luther King was whether he’d ever proposed to a white woman and dated white women. The judge kept ruling him out of order. You see, when you got down to the roots of the thing, you always got back to the white woman and the black man. This was the mystique. I call it the cesspool of the South. Cliff always said that John Blue Hill stopped the bombing, because he charged the bombers so much to defend them. He charged each one of them five thousand dollars. There were seven of them, so they had to raise thirty-five thousand dollars. It was very much the technique Cliff used on the policemen in the police brutality cases. He knew they weren’t going to get a conviction on any police brutality, but when they had to come into court and hire a lawyer and get bad publicity and pay out so much money, beating up blacks on Saturday night just became too expensive. But the thing that struck me again, as it had struck me so often in the old days of the Klan when as a child I had seen them marching, was how poor these Ku Kluxers were, how emaciated, how scrawny they looked. They looked as if they had never had
proper food. You couldn’t help but feel that they had been deprived all their lives. The Montgomery city officials closed the zoo and the park that surrounded it in the late fifties rather than integrate it. I wrote a letter to the editor about that and came home and found my whole yard littered with obscene pamphlets. Children would go into the park and play on the abandoned merry-gorounds, and one three-year-old child got her head crushed in one. The city even took the chairs out of the library so no one could sit down. The idea was that if libraries had to be integrated, everybody had to stand up. Vertical integration apparently was more tolerable. We never felt we were in any real danger during this time in spite of our identification with Mrs. Parks and Mr. Nixon and the Council on Human Relations. But it wasn’t an easy time, and it was especially hard on the children. Our second daughter, Lucy, had made a circle of friends before the civil rights movement started and she had a lot of boyfriends. She was extremely popular, and her friends didn’t care whether her father or mother committed murder. But the two younger girls, Tilla and Lulah, had a rough time of it. The teachers singled them out in class and embarrassed them, and the children said their father was a nigger-lover and a Communist. Finally, they just wouldn’t go to school, so we had to send them to boarding schools. Tilla went to the Cambridge School outside of Boston, and Lulah went to Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts. There were times still when I thought we should leave Alabama. Cliff kept getting offers from other places in the country, but he never really considered them. He felt that we were at home here.
Source: Virginia Durr, “Brown, Buses, and Bombs,” from Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, edited by Hollinger F. Barnard, 274-88. Copyright © 1985. The University of Alabama Press. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #40
letter from Birmingham jail Peter B. Levy 6.3 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” reprinted in the New Leader (June 24, 1963), pp. 3-11. My Dear Fellow Clergymen, While confined here in the Birmingham City Jail, I came across your recent statements calling our present activities “unwise and untimely.” …Since I feel that you are men of genuine good will…I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms. I think I should give the reason for my being in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the argument of “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference…We have some 85 affiliate organizations all across the South — one being the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights… Several months ago our local affiliate here in Birmingham invited us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented and when the hour came we lived up to our promises. So I am here… Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the 8th century prophets left their little villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home town, and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Taurus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my home town… Moreover…I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.
You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects, and does not grapple with underlying causes. I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community no other alternative… We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
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just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never .given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.” …We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that, if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are
suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws. I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes’ great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ “Councilor” or the Ku Klux Klaner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a more convenient season. “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will…” I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail to do this they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress… In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? …Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because His unique God consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion?… You spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of the extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of selfrespect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation, and of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security, and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit I: READING #40 expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation…This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable “devil.” I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized… But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love?… Was not Martin Luther an extremist?… Was not Abraham Lincoln… Thomas Jefferson… So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice — or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? Before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence. I don’t believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes… It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrations. In this sense they have been rather publicly “nonviolent.” But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation… I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inner and demonstrators for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose, facing jeering and hostile mobs… They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a 72-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity: “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested…” One day the South will know that…they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-
Christian heritage… 6.4 Rather than deterring the protesters, King’s imprisonment emboldened them. Shortly afterward, Birmingham experienced unparalleled protest, highlighted by the daring freedom marches of school children. Thousands of them were arrested, others were set upon by Sheriff Bull Connor’s police dogs and knocked down by torrents of water shot at them from fire hoses. The mass media captured this vicious side of segregation, broadcasting pictures of it across the airwaves. Americans from all regions of the nation proclaimed their horror and demanded that President Kennedy intervene. As a result, city authorities and the business community negotiated an accord, which King and others proclaimed a tremendous victory. However, a day after it was announced, the KKK held a massive rally and later, that same day, bomb blasts ripped through the homes of Reverend A. D. King and the Gaston Motel, owned by Birmingham’s wealthiest black citizen. A miniriot broke out and SCLC averted a major one only by pleading with the citizens to remain nonviolent. The campaign was successful. According to Shuttlesworth if one placed it in its historical context, then the black community had made considerable strides forward.
139 6.4 Fred L. Shuttlesworth, “Birmingham Shall Be Free Some Day,” Freedomways (Winter 1964), pp. 16-19. …Much has been written about Birmingham since the demonstrations, and what the Birmingham Direct Action has meant to the nation and the world. “But you ought to have seen and known how bad and terrible Birmingham was before the demonstrations,” says a typical Negro citizen, “and it ain’t much better now. If it hadn’t been for the Movement, we would now be back in complete slavery.” This reflects the sentiment of most of the Birmingham Negro community. Birmingham, for many years, has been so afflicted with bleakness, and like Tombstone Territory of old, it has been “not good enough to live and too sinful to die.” Years ago, only a few Negro citizens dared to speak out, and there could be no consistent challenge to segregation; the Ku Klux Klan saw to that, and back of them were the police. The unwritten rule was “if the mobs don’t stop Negroes, the police will.” Not only was there no vociferous clamor for civil rights;
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
Unit I: READING #40 the Negro’s existence depended upon his keeping quiet and upon the white man’s paternalism. Dialogue between the white and Negro community was non-existent, except that between servant and master… Indeed, men were arrested for holding interracial meetings… When a reporter interviewed “Bull” Connor about his attitude and obedience to law, the commissioner was quoted in the Afro-American newspaper as saying “Damn the law, down here I am the Law.” With such an official attitude prevailing in Birmingham, one can understand why there have been over 50 bombings in 30 years. The city has sanctioned “keeping Negroes in their place,” and so
the police were considered to be acting intelligently when they slapped, beat, or abused hundreds of colored people; or when they made it untenable for Negroes to be in the streets late at night-even when coming from jobs… Despite this and other things, “Bull” was again elected commissioner (1956-59) and he felt this a mandate to continue leading the city backwards. The other commissioners were not better, just more dignified… At the inception of the “Movement,” it was common practice for police to issue a hundred or more parking tickets on meeting nights…
Letter from Birmingham Jail QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 1. 2. 3.
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Why does Dr. King say he is not an “outsider” and that he has a right to be in Birmingham? (2 reasons) What is the Biblical reference? What does “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” mean? What are the implications of this line of reasoning? 4. Why are people now refusing to “wait”? (Give specific incidents.) 5. Discuss Dr. King’s definitions of “legal” and “illegal,” laws. 6. What are his two confessions? 7. How does Dr. King explain the violence that is now occurring? What examples does he give? 8. What are the two opposing forces in the African-American community? Where does Dr. King stand in relation to these? 9. Name some famous “extremists.” 10. How did the Birmingham police force keep “order” and prevent “violence”? 11. Who are the South’s real heroes? Why? 12. Why is this letter so important? What happened as a result? Questions developed by Arlene Shenkus
Source: Levy, Peter B., ed. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: views of prejudice and genocide
“THE SCROLL OF FIRE”
UNIT II
AN INTRODUCTION TO A
Unit II
UNIT II AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: views of prejudice and genocide
B
etween World War I and World War 11, many Germans came to regard Jews as the source of their serious economic and political misfortune. Stereotypes and scapegoating of Jews, which had existed for two thousand years, coupled with late 19th Century racial anti-Semitism, was also affected by the defeat of Germany in World War I and Treaty of Versailles. This created a climate that allowed cruelty, terror and extremist behaviors to manifest themselves. In Germany during the volatile 1920s and 1930s, many felt compelled to combat the alleged “Jewish conspiracy” before it was too late. This eventually led to murderous measures to assure what the Nazis called a “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” This unexpected development in a modern and highly civilized state demands explanation and understanding. In preparation for their formal study of the Holocaust, it is important for students to explore the phenomenon of prejudice and its potential for venomous and ultimately lethal expression. Essential questions must be raised regarding how and why fear can lead to abusive violent behaviors. In order to make the issues more relevant to the lives of students, they will be asked to explore the recurrence of vicious behavior in our own time. Examples include the advent of extremist groups such as white supremacists and terrorists seeking “ethnic cleansing.” In an effort to personalize the content of this unit, students will be asked to engage in activities that are designed to help them become more acutely aware of their own attitudes toward various groups in our society. Students should be encouraged to reflect upon these attitudes throughout their study of this curriculum. Teachers may wish to supplement activities in this unit with the following curriculum materials that are endorsed by the N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education: Understanding Hate: From Holocaust to Columbine to the Internet—Where Hate Comes From and How You Can Help Stop It. New York: Scholastic, 2001, and Richard F. Flaim and Harry Furman, Eds. The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World. Trenton, NJ: N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, 2002. (Scholastic developed the former in cooperation with the N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education and the latter constitutes an addendum to this curriculum guide available under separate cover.)
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Unit II is designed to help students understand that genocide is a possible consequence of prejudice and discrimination that are left unchecked. Students will be asked to (1) define and explain the nature of prejudice as a universal human phenomenon; (2) examine the contemporary examples of prejudice, scapegoating, bigotry, discrimination and genocide; (3) define and examine the history of anti-Semitism from ancient times to 1933; (4) investigate current extremist groups and examine whether advanced education and culture reduce the potential for genocide; and (5) reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of their study of prejudice and genocide.
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Unit II
UNIT II:
AN INTRODUCTION TO A STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: VIEWS OF PREJUDICE AND GENOCIDE
UNIT GOAL: Students will understand that genocide is a possible consequence of prejudice and discrimination. PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Note: The notation, (READING #___), in this column, indicates that a copy of the article is included in this curriculum guide.
1. Students will define and explain the nature of prejudice as a universal human phenomenon.
A. Explore your “self” through one or more of the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Read the poem, “Our Human Rights,” using the Essential Questions and Activities as a basis for self-reflection about the identified issues. Discuss in small groups.
1.
2.
Complete and discuss the results of the “Attitudes Toward Groups” survey. Complete the following sentence(s):
2.
•
“The most positive thing I learned about myself, was:…;”
•
“The most surprising thing I learned about myself was…”
•
Share your findings in small groups, then develop and share with the class, several general conclusions from the activity. (Students should not be required to reveal their own results.)
Cummings, Susan. “Our Human Rights,” Individual Differences: An Experience in Human Relations for Children. Madison, WI: Madison Public Schools, 1974. (READING #1) Furman, Harry, Ed. “Attitudes Toward Groups.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #2)
3. “The National Hate Test.” USA
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 3.
Complete “The National Hate Test;” view the video of the same title; and discuss the prejudices that lie within us. (Again, students should not be required to publicly reveal their own results. Self-awareness is an important outcome.)
4.
Read “Little Boxes” using the following questions as a guide to your reading and follow-up discussion:
•
How can labels obscure what a person is really like?
•
Why do you believe society uses labels for people?
•
What labels has society ascribed to you, and how do these labels affect others’ opinions of you?
•
What is the main lesson to be learned from this reading? (Refer to the “Connections” segment of the reading for additional questions and activities related to this reading.)
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Networks, China Train Productions, 1998. Also, consult website: http://www.usanet work.com/functions/nohate/e rasehate.html (READING #3)
4.
Strom, Margot Stern. Ed. “Little Boxes.” Facing History and Ourselves. The Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994. (READING # 4 )
B. How do we see the world in which we live?
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
1.
View the video Shadow of Hate and take notes on the events that are depicted. Discuss the events in small groups and share group responses with the class.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Shadow of Hate: A History of Intolerance in America. Dir. Charles Guggenheim. Videocassette. Southern Poverty Law Office, 1995. See Southern Poverty Law Center website: http://www.splcenter.org/
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2. Shiman, David A. “Prejudice and Dislike.” The Prejudice Book. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1994. (READING # 5 )
2.
Complete a variety of activities from The Prejudice Book to raise awareness of prejudice:
•
“Prejudice and Dislike”
•
“Personal Contact Inventory”
3.
View Prejudice: Answering Children’s Questions using the following questions as a guide.
3.
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How many races are there normally thought to be and, according to the video, how many are there? Explain what caused each of the major races to form.
4. Children In the Crossfire. Vestron Video, Schaefer-Karpf. Videocassette. 1984.
•
What is Jane Elliott’s purpose for giving people such a hard time? How do people react to her? Why? How do you react to her?
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What does the little girl say to the person with “Philly” tattooed across his head? What do you think about this confrontation?
•
Summarize what you learned from this video. Which segment taught you the most?
•
What can you now do with this knowledge? (NOTE: Students may be asked to share their responses in small groups and their group’s conclusions in full class discussion.)
4.
View Children In the Crossfire. This is about children in Northern Ireland, how some are raised in a culture of fear and violence, and one effort to
Prejudice: Answering Children’s Questions. ABC News. Videocassette. 1992
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
change the prejudicial attitudes that develop. (Note: Discussion of this video should include a review of recent official developments to reconcile longstanding problems between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Students may wish to predict the short and long-term impact of these efforts on reducing prejudicial feelings in that country.)
C.
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Define “prejudice” after reading the selection from the chapter, “What is the Problem?” from The Nature of Prejudice, by Gordon Allport. In small groups, identify some common prejudices that students possess and meet the definition offered by Allport. (Note: The teacher may use the article, written in the 1940’s, to help students note the difference in language usage. For example, Allport used the word “Negro” to refer to the group of people who are more commonly referred to today as African-Americans.)
C. Resources for Section C: 1. Allport,Gordon W. “What is the Problem?” The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Press, 1988. (READING #6)
D. Use one or more of the following readings or activities to define and discuss prejudice:
D. Resources for Section D:
1.
1.
“I Ain’t Sleepin’ Nexta No Nigger!,” a reading from the autobiography of Sammy Davis, Jr., in which he describes his encounter with prejudice in the U.S. Army during basic training.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Davis, Jr., Sammy. “I Ain’t Sleepin’ Nexta No Nigger.” Selection from Yes I Can, by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Burt Boyar. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1965. Reprinted with
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES permission in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students, by Harry Furman, Ed., New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING # 7)
2.
“Survey: Race Still Factor in Military”. Discuss the results of this survey and relate them to the experience of Sammy Davis, Jr. In small groups, discuss reasons why race is still a factor in the military after all these years.
2. “Survey: Race Still a Factor in Military.” The Press. Atlantic City, NJ. 24 Nov. 1999, A1. (READING # 8)
3.
Shadows Between Friends (video), a personal dilemma between Mexican-Americans and Anglo-Americans in Los Angeles.
3.
Shadows Between Friends. Videocassette. ADL, New York, 1991.
4.
Prejudice a Universal Problem
4.
Selee, James. Prejudice a Universal Problem. Chapter 8. Omaha, Neb.: University of Nebraska at Omaha College of Education.
5.
Ecidujerp, Prejudice
5.
Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. Reprinted with permission from Ecidujerp, Prejudice, by Irene Gersten and Betty Bliss. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1974. (READING # 9)
6.
Identify individuals who have experienced and have overcome prejudice, and complete one of the activities below in which you will express the nature of the
6.
Sources may include biographies, articles, interviews, reports, Internet references on the following, or other student-or teacher-identified, examples:
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES prejudice and how the individual(s) was (were) able to overcome it. You may include past or contemporary subjects who experienced a type of prejudice based upon religion, race, ethnic group, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or others. You may select from the following alternative activities: Alternative activities: •
Character sketches
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Skits
•
Mock interviews
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Portfolio of written and artistic expression
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Small-group role play of the individual
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Panel discussion: compare/contrast several individuals
•
Original poetry
•
Original music
•
Posters
•
Reflective essays
•
Invite a speaker who has experienced/overcome prejudice: prepare questions and format
•
Write to the personalities inviting them to respond in writing or on videotape to a series of prepared questions.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Arthur Ashe, Elie Wiesel, John F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Daniel Inouye, Greg Louganis, Ellen DeGeneres. Local people may also be identified.
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
E.
Recognize and define the profiles of people who display prejudice, stereotyping, scapegoating, and bigotry.
E.
Resources for Section E:
1.
How are prejudice and scapegoating responses to unmet needs? What are our needs? wants? How do they differ?
1-2. Seeds of Hate: An Examination of Prejudice. Filmstrip. Warren Schloat Productions, 1974. (READING #10)
2.
List and discuss universal human needs.
3.
What is stereotyping? Note: Being Fair, Being Free contains 20 individual lessons that help students to understand the nature of prejudice and how it conflicts with basic American values.
3.
Being Fair, Being Free. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1992.
4.
Read the article “Scapegoating,” that contains selections by Gordon Allport, and use the included handout “Is Blame Justified?” as a guide for analysis and discussion.
4.
“Scapegoats: Lesson 2.” Night. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. (READING # 11)
5.
Read “Helga’s Dilemma.” The complete lesson plan includes the dilemma story, questions, objectives and suggested strategies. (Note to the teacher: Additional activities to develop higher-order and critical thinking skills may be completed from Reducing Adolescent Prejudice.)
5.
Gabelko, Nina Hersch and John U. Michaelis. Reducing Adolescent Prejudice. “Helga’s Dilemma.” New York: Teachers College Press, 1981. (READING # 12)
6.
Examine the lyrics, and listen to the recording of Word Game by Stephen Stills. (Musically-talented students may perform this song for the class and lead a discussion
6.
Stills, Stephen. Word Game. Words and music by Stephen Stills. Gold Hill Music, Inc. 1971. Reprinted with permission in The Holocaust and Genocide:
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
of its meaning.) The lyrics raise questions about the relationship between fear and prejudice and whether there is a relationship between age and prejudice.
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A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #13)
7.
View The Eye of the Storm which analyzes the effects of prejudice as it developed in a typical classroom. This is the classic account of the “Blue-Eyed, BrownEyed Experiment.” Discuss in small groups the implications of this experiment for understanding prejudice.
7.
The Eye of the Storm. Videocassette. The Center for the Humanities Inc., Mt. Kisco, NY
8.
View and discuss A Class Divided which does a follow-up on Eye of the Storm many years later when the students are adults.
8.
A Class Divided. Videocassette. “Frontline.” PBS, 1987.
9.
View Names Can Really Hurt Us that depicts teenagers from ethnically and racially diverse neighborhoods talking about painful experiences. Share with the class names you have been called, how you felt and how it affected you. Write your feelings down before sharing with the class.
9.
Names Can Really Hurt Us. Videocassette. WCBC-TV. AntiDefamation League 1989.
10. Complete the activity “Ethnic Jokes,” and share your responses in small groups. A class discussion should follow, with conclusions developed regarding the impact of ethnic jokes. (While this activity deals with ethnic jokes, the teacher may ask students to relate it to other groups that are typical targets of prejudice: i.e., gays, women, religious groups, the disabled, senior citizens, etc.) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
10. A World of Difference. “Ethnic Jokes,” New York: AntiDefamation League. (READING #14)
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 11. Discuss the role that the media play in stereotyping racial or other groups. Express your views in any of the following ways:
2. Students will define and examine contemporary examples of prejudice, scapegoating, bigotry, discrimination and genocide.
•
Create a collage
•
Prepare a scrapbook
•
Write in a journal
•
Create a series of examples in a videotape or PowerPoint presentation
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 11. Select contemporary sources, including popular music, magazines, newspapers, television, and all types of commercials.
12. Read and discuss “Rock, He Called Me A Guinea,” from Biography of a First Son, the story of former heavyweight boxing champion, Rocky Marciano. Use questions in the reading to guide your analysis and discussion.
12. Marciano, Rocky. Biography of a First Son. “Rock, He Called Me A Guinea.” Everett M.J. Kehan, Houghton and Mifflin Co., 1977 (READING # 15)
13. Read excerpt from Black Boy, by Richard Wright, and complete the activity, “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses,” included in the reading. Use this as a basis for class discussion.
13. Night: Curriculum Unit. “Excerpt from Black Boy” (by Richard Wright), and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses” by Richard Wright. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. (READING # 16)
A. Conduct research using multiple sources on contemporary examples of prejudice, scapegoating, bigotry, discrimination and genocide. Draw conclusions about the relationship between prejudice and discrimination and the tragic results of any of the following examples:
A. Resources for Section A:
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1.
Teacher and student-identified multiple resources.
2.
The following videos may be helpful in this section:
•
Love Hate Prejudice Peace. Carole Martin, David Diaz. WNET, Channel 13 (New York), PBS Production
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
•
Cambodia, 1975-1979
•
Racism 101. “Frontline.” PBS
•
Rwanda: Hutu-Tutsi Conflict,1994
•
•
Bosnia
Beyond Hate Trilogy. Videocassette. Bill Moyers. Dir. Catherine Tatge and Dominique Lasseur, Mystic Fire Video, 1992
•
Kosovo •
Hate Crimes. Bergen County (NJ) Prosecutor’s Office
•
The Shadows Between Friends. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1991.
•
I’m Not Prejudiced. New York: Anti-Defamation League
•
Massacre at Columbine High School in 1999
•
South Africa
•
East Timor
•
Los Angeles Riots
•
Crown Heights (NY) Incident
•
Native Americans of Central and South America
•
Native Americans of North America
•
Worldwide Terrorist Activities
•
Eastern Europe (anti-Semitism)
•
Haiti
•
Cuba
•
Mexicans
•
Korean and African-American Communities Conflict
•
Goshen, Indiana Hate Crime: Random Murder, 1999
•
Jasper, Texas: Hate Crime- Murder
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Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Notes to the Teacher: Students can use the Internet, school and other local libraries to identify the multiple sources needed to complete this assignment. Part of the objective of this assignment is for students to address Workplace Readiness Standard 2 in the N.J. Core Curriculum Content Standards: “All students will use information, technology and other tools;” and (2) many of the contemporary examples listed above are treated in greater detail in Unit VI: Genocide.
3. Students will define and examine the history of AntiSemitism from ancient times to 1933.
A. Select from the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
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1.
Read and discuss “Religious and Racial Anti-Semitism,” by Milton Meltzer, which describes the historic relations between Christians and Jews from the time of Jesus.
1.
Meltzer, Milton. “Religious and Racial Anti-Semitism.” Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1976. Used with permission in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #17)
2.
Read “The Things They Say Behind Your Back” and analyze the following historic examples of stereotypes about Jews in terms of their causes and effects. Why have these stereotypes been difficult to eliminate? (See the
2.
Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.” Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984 (READING #18)
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
end of the reading for additional thought-provoking questions.)
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•
International plot to take over the world
•
Shrewd businessmen
•
Chosen People concept
•
Christ killers
•
Control Wall Street
•
Rich and ostentatious
•
Communists
•
Control Media and the U.S. Congress
3.
Identify common stereotypes of one or two additional groups in our society, and reflect upon the harm they do, and who perceives themselves to benefit from stereotyping.
3.
Student-identified resources.
4.
Read “What Is A Jew?” and complete the following:
4.
•
In small groups, determine those unique characteristics that all Jews share in common.
Rosen, Dr. Philip. “What Is A Jew?” Cherry Hill, NJ: unpublished, November 1999 (READING #19)
•
Are there differences among people of the Jewish faith?
•
What characteristics do they share with other people of the world?
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
5.
View Children of Jacob and discuss the question: “What are your perceptions of a person who belongs or converts to the Jewish faith?”
5.
6.
View Of Pure Blood. This is a chilling look at the Nazi plan to develop a “super race,” Hitler’s plan to breed multitudes of ideal Germans. Discuss: What values were reflected in this plan? What were its implications? How successful was it?
6a. Of Pure Blood. Dir. Joseph Sargent. Perf. Patrick McGoohan, Lee Remick, et. al. MPI Video, 15825 Rotary Drive, Oak Forest, Illinois, 60452 (1-800-323-0442)
Use the Internet to investigate views of Social Darwinism. One example is Modern History Sourcebook: Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857. How might these views have influenced Hitler and the Nazis?
7.
Investigate the theme of Pre-Nazi Anti-Semitism in art, and report your findings, using specific examples in your presentation.
8.
7.
8.
Children of Jacob. Producer/Director, Jeremy Newman, 1999.
6b. Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry Abrams. http://www.fordham.edu/ halsall/mod/spencerdarwin.ht ml
157 A Survey of Western Art. CDRom. Crystal Productions, Box 2159, Glenview, Illinois, 60025. or http://www.crystalproduc tions.com
B. Compare and contrast antiSemitic views reflected in classic literature and films/videos.
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Read “The Princess Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer and discuss the concept of blood libel.
1.
2.
View The Fixer, based on the Beilis Case of 1911-12. Yakov Bok, a “fixer,” or handyman, is unjustly accused of ritualistically
2. The Fixer. Dir. John Frankenheimer. Perf. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, et. al. Videocassette. MGM Home
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Nevill Coghill, Trans. The Canterbury Tales. “The Princess Tale.” New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Entertainment, 1994. and Malamud, Bernard. The Fixer. New York: Penguin, 1994.
murdering a young boy in the Christian sector of Kiev in prerevolutionary 20th Century Russia. While everyone knows he is innocent, Bok symbolizes the plight of being a Jew in a rabidly anti-Semitic country. As a follow-up activity, express your interpretation of Bok’s experience through a medium that is meaningful: a poem; a drawing, a sketch or a painting; a reflective essay; or an original piece of music. Share the product with the class with a follow-up discussion of the video and/or book. 3.
Read scenes from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, which deals with anti-Semitism. It should be noted that in the 12th Century, Jews were banished from England by decree. Shakespeare never met a Jew, but in his play, The Merchant of Venice, there is a key character who is Jewish. See Act III, Scene I; and Act IV—court scenes.
3.
Nelson, William Allen, and Charles Hill Jarvis. Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1942.
4.
Read The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe, and compare and contrast the views of anti-Semitism expressed in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Marlowe. (Note to the Teacher:: This is one of the bestknown works by the influential English Renaissance dramatist. In order to raise tribute demanded by the Turks, Ferneze, the Christian governor of Malta,
4.
Marlowe, Christopher. David Bevington, ed. The Jew of Malta. Revels Student Editions. Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1997
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
seizes half the property of all Jews on the island. Students may act out portions of the drama and discuss its meaning.) 5.
View The Longest Hatred, which examines Jewish-Christian relationships over the past 2,000 years. Part I uses images from art, vintage clips and covers the Middle Ages, the Reformation, up to the Third Reich, resurgence in Austria, Poland and Russia. Part II deals with the Islamic World. (Note to the Teacher: This video is recommended for advanced students at the high school level. As with all films, the teacher is advised to preview before using.)
5.
The Longest Hatred. The History of Anti-Semitism. Videocassette. Anti-Defamation League, 1997.
6.
Create a timeline depicting the major events of Anti-Semitism: blood libels, Crusades, Black Plague, Martin Luther, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Dreyfus Case, Doctors’ Plot (Russia).
6.
Jackdaws Kit. Anti-Semitism. Amawak, NY: Golden Owl Publications. (P.O. Box 503, Amawak, NY 10501; phone: 914962-6911)
7.
Read “Luther” from Poliakov’s book The History of AntiSemitism using the following questions as a guide to your analysis and follow-up discussion:
6-7. Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. out of print (READING # 20)
•
What were Martin Luther’s views of the Jews in his later years? Why do you believe these views were accepted by many people?
•
Examine Luther’s use of language. Compare his use of inflammatory and derogatory language with that of other historical or contemporary leaders.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
8.
Review and analyze “The Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” and “Pre-Nazi and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” by Raul Hilberg. Using questions at the end of the readings, discuss what you believe to be Hilberg’s point.
8.
Hilberg, Raul. “Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” and “PreNazi, Anti-Jewish Measures.” The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1985. (READING # 21 )
9.
Read and discuss “About the Jew,” by Adolf Hitler.
9.
Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. “About the Jew.” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. (READING # 22)
10. Research anti-Semitism in the United States:
10a. Pool, James and Suzanne. “Ford and Hitler.” Who Financed Hitler? New York: Dial Press, 1978. (READING # 23)
a.
What were Henry Ford’s antiSemitic theories in the 1920’s that were articulated in his book, The International Jew? According to the authors of Ford and Hitler, how do their views compare?
10a-e. Gorberg, David. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana ILL.: University of llinois Press, 1986.
b.
What was the focus of Father Charles E. Coughlin, a Detroit priest who spoke on a radio program weekly in 1938-1939? How is Coughlin portrayed in the cartoon in Dr. Seuss Goes to War?
10b. Minear, Richard H. Dr. Seuss Goes to War. New York: New Press, 1999. Warren, David and Donald. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio. New York: Free Press, 1996. Wechsler, James. “Coughlin Terror.” The Nation. 22 July 1939, pp. 92-97.
c.
Research the views of fundamentalist preacher, Gerald L.K. Smith.
10c. Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. New York: Meridian, 1987.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
10a,e,c. Herzstein Robert F. Roosevelt and Hitler: Prelude to War. New York: Paragon Press, 1989.
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
d.
Research the myths of Christian anti-Semitism.
10d. Hay, Malcolm. The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1981. H-Antisemitism Website: http://www.h-net.msu. edu/^antis/
e.
Review the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the America First Party, and the isolationist ideas of Charles Lindbergh.
10e. KKK: A Secret History. Rep. Roger Mudd. Videocassette. The History Channel, 1998. (1-800-708-1776) Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989
f.
Amazon.com sells a book, The Protocols of Zion. A good many chapters are reprints from Ford’s The International Jew. Some are calling for a ban on its distribution. On the Internet, Amazon says: “Should Amazon.com sell The Protocols and other controversial works? As a bookseller, Amazon.com strongly believes that providing open access to written speech, no matter how hateful or ugly, is one of the most important things we do. It is a service that the United States Constitution protects, and one that follows a long tradition of booksellers serving as guardians of free expression in our society.” Do you agree with Amazon’s view? Is a bookseller obliged to sell books that promote hate? Amazon admits, “You can also
Herzstein, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hitler: Prelude to War. New York: Paregon House, 1989.
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
find books in other sections of Amazon.com online bookstore that analyze The Protocols’ fraudulent origins and its tragic historical role in promoting antiSemitism and Jewish persecution…” Discuss the implications of your response for our society.
4. Students will investigate current extremist groups and examine whether advanced education and culture reduce the potential for genocide.
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A. Conduct and share the results of research on the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan.
A. Resources for Section A.
1.
1a. Hate Watch. Website: http://hatewatch.org/ (CAUTION: This website includes links to a large number of racist and militant groups, including those of the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, Skinheads, and Holocaust deniers. Teachers must preview this site and exercise discretion regarding careful preparation and guidance in advance of any assignment, and the monitoring of students during their use of the site. School policies regarding use of such sites should be reviewed.)
Conduct research on the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, using library and Internet sources, with a focus on beliefs of the Klan, and its current strength and influence in the United States.
1b. Klan Watch. Website of the Southern Poverty Law Center: http://splcenter.org/ intelligenceproject/ip-index. html New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1c. Digital Hate 2000. Vol. II. CDRom. Simon Wiesenthal Center Interactive Report on the Internet. 1999.
2.
Presentations of the results of your research may take the form of: discussion in cooperative learning groups, an oral presentation, a written report or a Power Point presentation.
2.
Teacher and student identified resources.
B. Conduct a study of extremist groups in the United States, their goals, methods of advertising and recruiting, activities, successes or failures, and public response to them.
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Note to Teachers: You may wish to consult The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World. This curriculum guide and student reader, available from the N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, focuses upon eight topics:
1.
Flaim, Richard F. and Harry Furman, Eds. The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World. Trenton, NJ: N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, 2002. (Contact N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, P.O Box 500, Trenton, NJ 08625.)
•
Hatred A Search for Understanding
2.
Goldman, Caren. “Profile: Recovery from Hate.” Common Boundary July/August 1996. (READING #24) Cochran, Floyd. Speaker. c/o Education & Vigilance, PO Box 407, Coudersport, PA 16915. (814) 274-1791 (References are available)
•
Hate Speech and the First Amendment
•
Hate and the Internet
•
Implications of Hate Crime Laws
•
The Denial of History (Holocaust Deniers)
• County Prosecutors’ offices in New Jersey
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES • Bias Crime and Community Relations Unit, NJ Attorney General’s Office, Trenton, NJ
•
The Hitler Fascination
•
The Massacres at Columbine
•
Drawing Conclusions
2.
Invite a speaker to address the class on extremist groups. (One well-received speaker is Floyd Cochran, once a member and recruiter of the Aryan Nations who left the group in 1992 and has dedicated his life to exposing hate groups through his presentations at college and high schools throughout the country.)
2.
Contact local office of the AntiDefamation League of B’nai B’rith for list of speakers.
C.
Evaluate the role of extremist groups in society today, and how the lives of young people are impacted by them. Why are some young people attracted to them? How do we reconcile the existence of extremist groups with our democratic principles, including the freedom of expression and assembly?
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Consult web site for the American Sociological Association: www.publiceye.org/hate/ hate99ASA-10.html
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D. Research and debate the role of rap music and rap videos in terms of their potential to promote hatred.
D. Resources for Section D:
1.
Examine and interpret lyrics
1.
2.
Consider issues related to the First Amendment
3.
Interview a sampling of students and adults
4.
Present findings to the class
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Razzamatazz. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1991.
Unit II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
5. Students will reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of their study of prejudice and genocide.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Reassess and, where warranted, revise your previous generalization about human behavior based upon your newly acquired knowledge of prejudice and genocide.
A. Resources for Section A: Students’ previous generalization about human nature completed at the conclusion of Unit I.
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READINGS INCLUDED IN UNIT I Reading#
Title/Reference
1. Cummings, Susan. “Our Human Rights,” Individual Differences: An Experience in Human Relations for Children. Madison, WI: Madison Public Schools, 1974. 2. Furman, Harry, Ed. “Attitudes Toward Groups.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 3. “The National Hate Test.” USA Networks, China Train Productions, 1998. 4. Strom, Margot Stern. Ed. “Little Boxes.” Facing History and Ourselves. The Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994. 5. Shiman, David A. “Prejudice and Dislike.” The Prejudice Book. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1994. 6. Allport,Gordon W. “What is the Problem?” The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Press, 1988.
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7. Davis, Jr., Sammy. “I Ain’t Sleepin’ Nexta No Nigger.” Selection from Yes I Can, by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Burt Boyar. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. 1965. Reprinted with permission in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students, by Harry Furman, Ed., New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 8. “Survey: Race Still a Factor in Military.” The Press. Atlantic City, NJ. 24 Nov. 1999, A1. 9. Gersten, Irene and Betty Bliss. “Ecidujerp, Prejudice.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, Ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 10. Seeds of Hate: An Examination of Prejudice. Filmstrip. Warren Schloat Productions, 1974. 11. “Scapegoats: Lesson 2.” Night Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. 12. Gabelko, Nina Hersch and John U. Michaelis. “Helga’s Dilemma.” Reducing Adolescent Prejudice. New York: Teachers College Press, 1981. 13. Stills, Stephen. Word Game. Words and music by Stephen Stills. Gold Hill Music, Inc. 1971. Reprinted with permission in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, Ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 14. A World of Difference. “Ethnic Jokes,” New York: Anti-Defamation League.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II
15. Marciano, Rocky. Biography of a First Son. “Rock, He Called Me A Guinea.” Everett M.J. Kehan, Houghton and Mifflin Co., 1977 16. “Excerpt from Black Boy” and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses.” (by Richard Wright), Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. 17. Meltzer, Milton. “Religious and Racial Anti-Semitism.” Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1976. Used with permission in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 18. Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.” Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. 19. Rosen, Dr. Philip. What Is A Jew? Cherry Hill, NJ: unpublished, November 1999. 20. Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. 21. Hilberg, Raul. “Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” and “Pre-Nazi, Anti-Jewish Measures.” The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1985. 22. Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. “About the Jew.” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. 23. Pool, James and Suzanne. “Ford and Hitler.” Who Financed Hitler? New York: Dial Press, 1978. 24. Goldman, Caren. “Profile: Recovery from Hate.” Common Boundary. July/August 1996.
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Unit II: READING #1
our human rights I have a right to be happy and to be treated with compassion in this room: This means that no one will laugh at me or hurt my feelings. I have a right to be myself in this room: This means that no one will treat me unfairly because of my skin color, fat or thin, tall or short, boy or girl, or by the way I lookI have a right to be safe in this room: This means that no one will hit me, kick me, push me, pinch me, or hurt me.
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I have a right to hear and be heard in this room: This means that no one will yell, scream, shout, or make loud noises. I have a right to learn about myself in this room: This means that I will be free to express my feelings and opinions without being interrupted or punished. I have a right to learn according to my own ability. This means no one will call me names because of the way I learn. ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES 1. After reading the poem, “Our Human Rights,” identify those rights that have been violated against you during your years in school. How did these experiences affect your feelings? Your behavior? What was done to those responsible? (These may be discussed in a small group with results shared with the class.) 2. Have you ever observed the rights of classmates being violated? How did this make you feel? What did you do? 3. How would your school be different if everyone respected “Our Human Rights?” 4. Draw or paint a picture, or write or perform a song, that expresses your feelings about the importance of human rights. Source: Cummings, M. (1974). Individual Differences, An Experience in Human Relations for Children, Madison, Wisconsin: Madison Public Schools.) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #2
attitudes toward groups
W
e begin this unit by exploring your views about certain groups. Examine each statement very carefully. In the space to the left of each statement, print (SA) if you strongly agree; (A) if you agree; (D) ifyou disagree; or (SD) if you strongly disagree. Apply each statement to the various groups whose initials are found at the top of the columns to the left: “I” stands for Italians; “W,” White Anglo-Saxon Protestants; “J,” Jews; “B,” Blacks; and “H,” Hispanics. Another way to do this activity within a classroom is to divide into groups of five. Each group should, after extensive discussion, come to a consensus about these ethnic and racial groups. This activity has been adapted from The Racist Reader by Gary McCuen.
I—W—J—B—H 1.
Have many irritating habits and manners.
2.
Are usually very well dressed.
3.
Have superior athletic ability.
4.
Will seek to exploit others.
5.
Must be dealt with forcefully since democratic procedures will never make them behave properly.
6.
Tend to keep to themselves and are suspicious of others.
7.
Usually meddle too much and interfere with other people’s business.
8.
Are generally tolerant of other people.
9.
Often lack initiative and dependability.
10. Are extremely ambitious, capable, and intelligent. 11. Are often lazy and ignorant. 12. Are morally superior to others. 13. Often discriminate against others. 14. Usually become wealthy by manipulating and cheating unsuspecting people. 15. Are satisfied with their lot and are fair in their dealings with others. 16. Are never satisfied and are always seeking more money and power. 17. Usually try to exert control and influence over others. 18. Are the ones behind the Communist menace in the United States. 19. Have money and power out of all proportion to their numbers. 20. Are mostly patriotic individuals who would stand up for the U.S. above all others. 21. Are largely responsible for the increase of crime and lawlessness in the U.S.
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A -Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983.
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Unit II: READING #2
22. Put more emphasis on material than spiritual values. 23. Are fair with each other but ruthless in their dealings with other people. 24. Will probably succeed in education. 25. Prove to be as trustworthy as other people. 26. Control most of our powerful economic and political institutions. 27. Should be allowed to intermarry with any group. 28. Are the most likely to be aggressive and start fights. 29. Are almost always courteous and friendly. 30. Practice strange customs. 31. Lack imagination. 32. Are cunning and proud. 33. Will often display compassion for people in trouble. 34. Are often too emotional.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
170
1.
Did you find any differences in your attitudes toward the various groups you examined? How do you explain these differences?
2.
Substitute other ethnic, religious and racial groups for those listed above—i.e:. Poles, Vietnamese, Mexicans, Germans, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses. What differences do you find in your attitudes? Why?
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A -Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #3
THE NATIONAL HATE TEST QUESTIONS
RESPONSE
How important is it to you that your children have friends of other races?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Extremely important Very important Somewhat important Not very important Not important at all Not sure
How much would allowing a child of yours to play with another child who is HIV positive bother you?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Wouldn’t bother you at all Bother you somewhat Bother you a lot Wouldn’t allow your child to play with another child who is HIV positive Not sure
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Very comfortable Fairly comfortable Somewhat comfortable Not very comfortable Not at all comfortable Not sure
If you found out that a teacher in your child’s school is openly gay, would you want your child taught by someone else?
■ ■ ■
Yes No Not sure
How comfortable would you feel having a woman as your immediate boss?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Comfortable Have reservations Not comfortable Never feel comfortable Not sure
How comfortable would you feel dating someone who is in a wheelchair?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Comfortable Have reservations Not comfortable Never feel comfortable Not sure
How comfortable would you feel if you were working with someone that is openly gay?
“The National Hate Test.” USA Networks, China Train Productions, 1998. Also, consult website: http://www.usanetwork.com/functions/nohate/erasehate.html
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Unit II: READING #3
How comfortable would you feel with having one of your immediate family members marry someone who is of another race?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Comfortable Have reservations Not comfortable Never feel comfortable Not sure
How comfortable would you feel with walking on the same side of the street as a group of teenagers?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Comfortable Have reservations Not comfortable Never feel comfortable Not sure
Who could do a better job caring for a toddler: a male baby-sitter or a female baby-sitter?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Male baby-sitter Female baby-sitter Both the same Depends Not sure
How comfortable would you feel if you were talking to someone who is obviously disabled?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Very comfortable Fairly comfortable Somewhat comfortable Not very comfortable Not comfortable at all Not sure
Is learning a new job something younger people do better, or is it something older people do better?
■ ■ ■ ■
Something younger people do better Something older people do better They do about the same Not sure
How comfortable would you feel being examined by a physician of another race?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Very comfortable Fairly comfortable Somewhat comfortable Not very comfortable Not comfortable at all Not sure
How comfortable would you feel having a next door neighbor of another race?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Very comfortable Fairly comfortable Somewhat comfortable Not very comfortable Not comfortable at all Not sure
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“The National Hate Test.” USA Networks, China Train Productions, 1998. Also, consult website: http://www.usanetwork.com/functions/nohate/erasehate.html New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #3
If your spouse or partner had been 30 pounds heavier when you first met them, would you have been as attracted to them as you actually were at that time?
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Just as attracted to them Slightly less attracted to them A good deal less attracted to them A great deal less attracted to them Not sure
How likely are you to confront a person who has made a slur against another religion?
■ ■ ■ ■
Somewhat likely to confront that person Not very likely to confront that person Not at all likely to confront that person Not sure
173
“The National Hate Test.” USA Networks, China Train Productions, 1998. Also, consult website: http://www.usanetwork.com/functions/nohate/erasehate.html
Unit II: READING #4
LITTLE BOXES Margaret Stern Strom
C
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ategories and labels can help us understand why we act the way we do. But sometimes those labels obscure what is really important about a person. Student Anthony Wright’s difficulties in filling in the “little boxes” on an application form explains why reducing individuals to a category can be misleading. Little Boxes. “How would you describe yourself? (please check one)” Some aren’t as cordial. “Ethnic Group”: These little boxes and circles bring up an issue for me that threatens my identity. Who am I? Unlike many others, I cannot answer that question easily when it comes to ethnicity. My mother is Hispanic (for those who consider South American as Hispanic) with an Asian father and my father is white with English and Irish roots. What does that make me? My identity already gets lost when my mother becomes a “Latino” instead of an “Ecuadorean.” The cultures of Puerto Rico and Argentina are distinct, even though they are both “Hispanic.” The same applies to White, Asian, native American or Black, all vague terms trying to classify cultures that have sometimes greater disparities inside the classification than with other cultures. Yet I can’t even be classified by these excessively broad terms. My classification problem doesn’t stop with my ethnicity. My father is a blue-collar worker, yet the technical work he does is much more than manual labor. My family, through our sweat, brains and savings, have managed to live comfortably. We no longer can really be classified as poor or lower class, but we really aren’t middle class. Also, in my childhood my parents became disillusioned with the Catholic religion and stopped going to church. They gave me the option of going or not, but I was lazy and opted to stay in bed late Sunday mornings. Right now I don’t even know if I am agnostic, atheist or something else, like transcendentalist. I just don’t fit into categories nicely. My biggest conflict of identity comes from another source: education. In the seventh grade, I was placed in a prep school from P.S. 61. The only
similarity between the two institutions is that they are both in the Bronx, yet one is a block away from Charlotte Street, a nationally known symbol of urban decay, while the other is in one of the wealthiest sections of New York City. Prep for Prep, a program for disadvantaged students that starts in the fifth grade, worked with me for fourteen months, bringing me up to the private-school level academically and preparing me socially, but still, the transition was rough. Even in my senior year, I felt like I really did not fit in with the prep school culture. Yet I am totally separated from my neighborhood. My home happens to be situated there, and I might go to the corner bodega for milk and bananas, or walk to the subway station, but that is the extent of my contact with my neighborhood. I regret this, but when more than half the teen-agers are high-school dropouts, and drugs are becoming a major industry there, there is no place for me. Prep for Prep was where I would “hang out” if not at my high school, and it took the place of my neighborhood and has been a valuable cushion. At high school, I was separate from the mainstream majority, but still an inextricable part of it, so I worked there and put my effort into making it a better place. For a while, I desperately wanted to fit into a category in order to be accepted. Everywhere I went I felt out of place. When I go into the neighborhood restaurant to ask for arroz y pollo, my awkward Spanish and gringo accent makes the lady at the counter go in the back for someone who knows English, even though I think I know enough Spanish to survive a conversation. When I was little,. and had short straight black hair, I appeared to be one of the few Asians in my school, and was tagged with the stereotype. I went to Ecuador to visit relatives, and they could not agree about whether I was Latino or gringo. When the little boxes appeared on the Achievements, I marked Hispanic even though I had doubts on the subject. At first sight, I can pass as white, and my last name will assure that I will not be persecuted as someone who is dark and has “Rodriguez” as his last name. I chose Hispanic
Source: Strom, Margot Stern. Ed. “Little Boxes.” Facing History and Ourselves. The Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #4 because I most identified with it, because of my Puerto Rican neighborhood that I grew up in, and my mother, who has a big influence on me. However, many people would not consider me a Latino. And by putting just “Hispanic,” “White,” or “Asian,” I felt as if I was neglecting a very essential side of me, and lying in the process. I now put “Other” in those little boxes, and when possible indicate exactly what I am. I realize now the problem is not with me but with the identification system. The words Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American, describe more than one would expect. They describe genealogy, appearance and culture, all very distinct things, which most people associate as one; but there exists many exceptions, like the person who grows up in the Black inner city and adopts that culture, but is white by birth; or the Puerto Rican immigrant with blue eyes and blond hair. Religion can also obscure definitions, as is the case in Israel recently with the label “Jewish,” which can be a race, culture or religion, and the definition of being Jewish by birth. The classifications especially get confused when appearance affects the culture, as with non-White cultures due to discrimination. Defining what is “culture,” and the specifics also confuses the issue. For example, it can be argued that almost every American, regardless of race (genealogy), is at least to some degree of the white culture, the “norm” in this country. With more culturally and racially mixed people like myself entering society, these classifications have to be addressed and defined. My mixture helps me look to issues and ideas from more than one viewpoint, and I like that. Racial, economic, social and religious topics can be looked upon with a special type of objectivity that I feel is unique. I am not objective. I am subjective with more than one bias, so I can see both sides of an argument between a black militant and white conservative, a tenant and a landlord or a Protestant and a Catholic. I will usually side with the underdog, but it is necessary to understand opposing viewpoints in order to take a position. This diversity of self that I
have, I enjoy, despite the confusion caused by a society so complex that sweeping generalizations are made. I cannot and don’t deserve to be generalized or classified, just like anybody else. My background and position have affected me, but I dislike trying to be treated from that information. I am Anthony E. Wright, and the rest of the information about me should come from what I write, what I say and how I act. Nothing else.
CONNECTIONS Construct an identity chart for Anthony Wright. How does it help explain why he called his essay “Little Boxes”? Why does he find it so difficult to classify himself? When does a special designation become a box that limits person? Psychologist Deborah Tannen writes, “We all know we are unique individuals but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. It’s a natural tendency since we must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn’t be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn’t predict a lot about them and feel that we know who and what they are. But this natural and useful ability to see patterns of similarity create unfortunate consequences. It is offensive to reduce an individual to a category, and it is also misleading.” Give examples of the ways that generalizing can be useful. Give examples of its “unfortunate consequences.” How does Wright’s essay support Tannen’s observation? What is Wright’s dilemma? Do you or people you know share that dilemma? If so, how do you or they resolve it? Does the reverse of Wright’s dilemma ever cause problems? That is, do people ever feel hurt because their membership in a group is not acknowledged? How do Tannen’s comments help explain why Wright concludes that “I cannot and don’t deserve to be generalized or classified, just like anybody else”? Do you share his feelings?
Source: Strom, Margot Stem. Ed. “Little Boxes.” Facing History and Ourselves. The Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994.
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Unit II: READING #5
THE PREJUDICE BOOK ACTIVITIES FOR THE CLASSROOM David A. Shiman PREJUDICE AND DISLIKE Activity: Goal: To help students distinguish between a prejudice against a group and a dislike of an individual. Materials: None Procedure: First discuss term “dislike” and “prejudice” with the class. Then ask two students to read the dialogues below. For each of the dialogues below, ask the students if the attitude displayed is a prejudice or a dislike. The students should be encouraged to explain the difference between the two terms in their own words.
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DIALOGUE #1 Mary: I don’t like that Bobby Lewis. Josh: Why? Mary: He’s always teasing people. Josh: How do you mean? Mary: Oh, you know. He calls Carol “dummy” and laughs when she makes mistakes in class. Josh: Well, she’s not very smart. Mary: That’s not the point. He’s just mean. And he calls me “skinny” every time he sees me. Josh: Oh, Bobby doesn’t mean any harm. He’s just trying to be friendly. Mary: I don’t care. I still can’t stand him. DIALOGUE #2 John: Did you know that those new boys David and Paul Rosen are Jewish? Ann: Yeah, what about it? John: Well, I hope they don’t try to run everything. Ann: What do you mean? John: Oh, you know what I mean. Jews always want to be class officers. They always want to be president of the school clubs. Ann: But Carol Brown is Jewish and she’s not bossy. John: There are always some exceptions. You watch, those Rosen boys will be just like all the others.
DIALOGUE #3 Bob: Did you hear that somebody broke into Tommy’s home last night and stole his family’s stereo and television? Alice: Yeah, wasn’t it terrible. I wonder who did it. Bob: I can guess. Alice: Really, who do you think? Bob: Those black guys in the high school. Alice: Why do you think they did it? Bob: Well, my father told me that wherever there are black people there’s always a lot of crime. DIALOGUE #4 Carol: Have you heard the good news about that Puerto Rican girl Anna Ruiz? Larry: No, what about her? Carol: I just learned that she’s moving away at the end of the school year. Larry: Don’t you like Puerto Ricans? Carol: It’s not that. She’s always picking fights with me. Larry: I didn’t know that. Carol: Yeah, she’s just like all the other Puerto Ricans. You know, always fighting and pushing. (This dialogue is a bit more complex, involving both a dislike and a prejudice. The students might need help in sorting these out.)
Source: Shiman, David A. “Prejudice and Dislike.” The Prejudice Book. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #6
WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? Gordon Allport Definition The word prejudice, derived from the Latin noun praejudicium, has, like most words, undergone a change of meaning since classical times. There are three stages in the transformation: 1 . To the ancients, praejudicium meant a precedent—a judgment based on previous decisions and experiences. 2. Later, the term, in English, acquired the meaning of a judgment formed before due examination and consideration of the facts—a premature or hasty judgment. 3. Finally the term acquired also its present emotional f lavor of favorableness or unfavorableness that accompanies such a prior and unsupported judgment. Perhaps the briefest of all definitions of prejudice is: thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant. This crisp phrasing contains the two essential ingredients of all definitions: reference to unfounded judgment and to a feeling-tone. It is, however, too brief for complete clarity. In the first place, it refers only to negative prejudice. People may be prejudiced in favor of others; they may think well of them without sufficient warrant. The wording offered by the New England Dictionary recognizes positive as well as negative prejudice: A feeling, favorable or unfavorable, toward a person or thing, prior to, or not based on, actual experience. While it is important to bear in mind that biases may be pro as well as con, it is nonetheless true that ethnic prejudice is mostly negative. A group of students was asked to describe their attitudes toward ethnic groups. No suggestion was made that might lead them toward negative reports. Even so, they reported eight times as many antagonistic attitudes as favorable attitudes… The phrase “thinking ill of others” is obviously an elliptical expression that must be understood to include feelings of scorn or dislike, of fear and aversion, as well as various forms of antipathetic conduct: such as talking against people, discriminating against them, or attacking them with violence.
It is not easy to say how much fact is required in order to justify a judgment. A prejudiced person will almost certainly claim that he has sufficient warrant for his [or her] views. He [or she] will tell of bitter experiences…with refugees, Catholics, or Orientals. But, in most cases, it is evident that his facts are scanty and strained. He [or she] resorts to a selective sorting of his [or her] own memories, mixes them up with hearsay, and overgeneralizes. No one can possibly know all refugees, Catholics, or Orientals. Hence any negative judgment of these groups as a whole is, strictly speaking, an instance of thinking ill without sufficient warrant. Sometimes, the ill-thinker has no first-hand experience on which to base…judgment. A few years ago most Americans thought exceedingly ill of Turksbut very few had ever seen a Turk nor did they know any person who had seen one. Their warrant lay exclusively in what they had heard of the Armenian massacres and of the legendary crusades. On such evidence they presumed to condemn all members of a nation. Ordinarily, prejudice manifests itself in dealing with individual members of rejected groups. But in avoiding a Negro neighbor, or in answering “Mr. Greenberg’s” application for a room, we frame our action to accord with our categorical generalization of the group as a whole. We pay little or no attention to individual differences, and overlook the important fact that Negro X, our neighbor, is not Negro Y, whom we dislike for good and sufficient reason; that Mr. Greenberg, who may be a fine gentleman, is not Mr. Bloom, whom we have good reason to dislike. So common is this process that we might define prejudice as: An avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he [or she] belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group This definition stresses the fact that while ethnic prejudice in daily life is ordinarily a matter of dealing with individual people it also entails an unwarranted idea concerning a group as a whole. Returning to the question of “sufficient
Source: Allport, Gordon W. “What is the Problem?” The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Press, 1988,6-9.
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Unit II: READING #6
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warrant,” we must grant that few if any human judgments are based on absolute certainty. We can be reasonably, but not absolutely, sure that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that death and taxes will finally overtake us. The sufficient warrant for any judgment is always a matter of probabilities. Ordinarily our judgments of natural happenings are based on firmer and higher probabilities than our judgments of people. Only rarely do our categorical judgments of nations or ethnic groups have a foundation in high probability. Take the hostile view of Nazi leaders held by most Americans during World War II. Was it prejudiced? The answer is no, because there was abundant available evidence regarding the evil policies and practices accepted as the official code of the [Nazi] Party. True, there may have been good individuals in the party who at heart rejected the abominable program; but the probability was so high that the Nazi group constituted an actual menace to world peace and to humane values that a realistic and justified conflict resulted. The high probability of danger removes an antagonism from the domain of prejudice into that of realistic social conflict. In the case of gangsters, our antagonism is not a matter of prejudice, for the evidence of their antisocial conduct is conclusive. But soon the line becomes hard to draw. How about an exconvict? It is notoriously difficult for an exconvict to obtain a steady job where he can be self-supporting and selfrespecting. Employers naturally are suspicious if they know the…[person’s] past record. But often they are more suspicious than the facts warrant. If they looked further they might find evidence that the man who stands before them is genuinely reformed, or even that he was unjustly accused in the first place. To shut the door merely because a .. [person] has a criminal record has some probability in its favor, for many prisoners are never reformed; but there is also an element of unwarranted prejudgment involved. We have here a true borderline instance. We can never hope to draw a hard and fast line between “sufficient” and “insufficient’ warrant. For this reason we cannot always be sure whether we are dealing with a case of prejudice or nonprejudice. Yet no one will deny that often we form judgments on the basis of scant, even nonexistent, probabilities. Overcategorization is perhaps the commonest trick of the human mind. Given a thimbleful of facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub. One young boy developed the idea that all
Norwegians were giants because he was impressed by the gigantic stature of Ymir in the sage, and for years was fearful lest he met a living Norwegian. A certain man happened to know three Englishmen personally and proceeded to declare that .. all people from England had the common attributes that he observed in these three. There is a natural basis for this tendency. Life is so short, and the demands upon us for practical adjustments so great, that we cannot let our ignorance detain us in our daily transactions. We have to decide whether objects are good or bad by classes. We cannot weigh each object in the world by itself. Rough and ready rubrics, however coarse and broad, have to suffice. Not every overblown generalization is a prejudice. Some are simply misconceptions, wherein we organize wrong information. One child had the idea that all people living in Minneapolis were “monopolists.” And from his father he had learned that monopolists were evil folk. When in later years he discovered the confusion, his dislike of dwellers in Minneapolis vanished. Here we have the test to help us distinguish between ordinary errors of prejudgment and prejudice. If a person is capable of rectifying his [or her] erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence he [or she] is not prejudiced. Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all evidence that would unseat it. We tend to grow emotional when a prejudice is threatened with contradiction. Thus the difference between ordinary prejudgments and prejudice is that one can discuss and rectify a prejudgment without emotional resistance. Taking these various considerations into account, we may now attempt a final definition of negative ethnic prejudice. Each phrase in the definition represents a considerable condensation of points we have been discussing: Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inf lexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he [or she] is a member of that group. The net effect of prejudice, thus defined, is to place the object of prejudice at some disadvantage not merited by his [or her] own conduct.
Source: Allport, Gordon W. “What is the Problem?” The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Press, 1988,6-9. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #6 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION I
After reading the article, discuss with a small group the difference between a misconception and prejudice. Identify any examples of such misconceptions based upon the experiences of those in your group.
2.
After reviewing Allport’s definition of prejudice, discuss various examples of prejudice that have had an impact upon your community or school as well as the nation and the world. Identify the probable basis for such prejudices.
3.
Can prejudice be prevented? If so, what suggestions do you and your peers have?
4.
You may have noted that the author, who wrote in the 1940’s, used some language that today could be considered offensive to members of several groups. Identify several examples and discuss possible explanations for this. Why might individuals in those groups today feel offended?
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Source: Allport, Gordon W. “What is the Problem?” The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Perseus Press, 1988,6-9.
Unit II: READING #7
I AIN’T SLEEPIN’ NEXTA NO NIGGER! Sammy Davis, Jr. In this selection taken from his autobiography, Sammy Davis, Jr. recalls his experience in army basic training. Blacks have historically been subject to a special kind of prejudice in this country. Of special interest in this story are not only the actions of Davis and his tormentors but also the attitude of the majority who were not directly involved.
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e was sitting on the steps of a barracks, sewing an emblem onto a shirt. I walked over to him. “Excuse me, buddy. I’m a little lost. Can you tell me where 202 is?” The soldier jerked his head, indicating around the corner. “Two buildings over, and I’m not your buddy, you black bastard!” He turned back to his sewing. The corporal standing outside 202 checked my name against a list on a clipboard. “Yeah-well, you better wait over there awhile ‘til we figure out what to do with you.” I was at the Infantry’s Basic Training Center at Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I sat on the steps where he’d pointed. Other guys were showing up and he checked them off his list and told them, “Go inside and take the first bunk you see.” I looked away for a moment and heard him saying, “Sit over there with Davis.” A tall, powerfully built guy dropped his gear alongside mine. “My name’s Edward Robbins.” We shook hands and he sat down next to me. One by one, men were arriving and being sent inside. They kept on coming but no one else was told to wait with us. Then, finally, there was no point in hoping against the obvious. It was clear that we were the only ones being held outside while all the white guys were going right in. The corporal went inside. We were sitting in front of a screen door so even though he lowered his voice I could hear every word he was saying. “…look, we got a problem. Those niggers out there are assigned to this company. I’m gonna stick ‘em down there. You two guys move your gear so I can give ‘em those last two bunks.” There was the sound of iron beds sliding across the wooden floor. The corporal beckoned from the doorway. “Okay, c’mon in and I’ll assign you your
bunks. Let’s go,” he snapped, “on the double.” We picked up our gear and followed him through the door. I felt like a disease he was bringing in. There were rows of cots on both sides with an aisle down the center. The guys were standing in groups. They’d stopped talking. I looked straight ahead. I could feel them staring as we followed the corporal down the aisle. He pointed to the last two cots on one side. “These are yours. Now’ we don’t want no trouble with you. Keep your noses clean, do as you’re told, and we’ll get along.” He walked away. I looked around the barracks. The bed nearest to ours was empty. All the cots were about two feet apart from each other except ours, which was separated from the rest by about six feet-like we were on an island. A few of the men sort of smiled and half waved hello. Some wouldn’t look over at us. The nearest, a tall husky guy who must have been a laborer or an athlete, kept his back turned. A sergeant came in and from the center of the barracks announced, “I’m Sergeant Williams. I’m in charge of this company and I…” His glance fell on the space between the two beds. He turned to the corporal. “What the hell is that?” The corporal quietly explained how he’d handled things. Sergeant Williams listened, then spoke sharply: “There is only one way we do things here and that’s the Army way! There will be exactly three feet of space, to the inch, between every bed in this barracks. You have sixty seconds to replace the beds as you found them. Move!” He came over to me. “What’s your name, soldier?” “Sammy Davis, Jr.” “Of all the men in this barracks did you arrive first or tenth or last or what?” “About in the middle.”
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #7 “Did you choose this bunk?” “Well, no I was told…” He looked around. By this time the barracks had been re-arranged. “All right, Davis. Move your gear one bunk over.” He turned to Edward. “You do the same.” He addressed us all. “No man here is better than the next man unless he’s got the rank to prove it.” I sat on the end of my bunk, the shock gone, immense anger growing within me until my legs were shaking and it was impossible for me to keep them still. I couldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing how they’d gotten to me. I saw one of the other guys polishing his boots. That was a good idea…I took off my watch and laid it carefully on the bed.. Jennings [the white soldier in the bunk next to Davis) flopped onto his bunk. He sat up, reached over, and took my watch off my bed. “Say, this ain’t a half-bad watch.” He looked at me suspiciously. “Put it back.” “Hold on, now. My, but you’re an uppity one.” He stood up. “Hey Philips…catch!” He tossed the watch across the barracks. I ran to get it back, but just as I reached Philips he lobbed it over my head to another
guy who threw it back to Jennings. I ran after it, knowing how ridiculous I looked getting there just as Jennings threw it over my head again, that I shouldn’t chase after it, that I was only encouraging them, but I was afraid they’d drop it and I couldn’t stop myself. “Attenshun!” Every head in the barracks snapped toward the door. Sergeant Williams walked straight to Jennings. “What’ve you got there?” Jennings opened his hand and showed him my watch. “Whose is it?” Jennings shrugged. “It’s mine.” Sergeant Williams brought it to me. Jennings grinned. “Heck, we were just kiddin’ around. I was only showing the watch to them.” “You’re a wise guy, Jennings. In the army we respect another guy’s property. You just drew K.P. for a week.” He left the barracks. Jennings looked at me with more hatred than I had ever seen in a man’s face. “You just wait. I’ll fix you for this, black boy.”
181 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
In what ways was prejudice expressed in the barracks?
2.
How would you explain the actions of a man like Jennings? How do you explain the sergeant’s actions?
3.
What do you think about the reaction of the men in the barracks? What would you have done? How should a person respond to an act of prejudice?
4
How do you feel about the reaction of Sammy Davis, Jr.? How would you respond to those who would call Davis and his friends cowards?
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
Unit II: READING #8
survey: race still factor in military Associated Press
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ASHINGTON — Defense Secretary William Cohen called for a militarywide review of conduct on Tuesday after a Pentagon study said as many as 75 percent of blacks and other ethnic minorities reported experiencing racially offensive behavior. At the same time, a companion study indicated the percentage of minority and women officers had more than doubled in 20 years. Cohen, in a letter to service chiefs, said the survey on race relations, the most extensive ever taken by a government agency, should be used as a guide “as we work to improve our processes and practices.” “There is no place for racism in our society,” Cohen told a Pentagon news conference. “There is certainly no place for it in the military.” The 296 page congressionally mandated survey was conducted in late 1996 and early 1997. It was mailed to 76,754 active duty enlisted Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard members and officers. More than 44,000 were returned. The report indicated that racial minorities in uniform remain more pessimistic than whites about their chances for advancement. Seventy-five percent of blacks and 67 percent of Hispanics said they had experienced racially offensive behavior in the last 12 months before the survey was taken, compared with 62 percent for whites. Even though the military prides itself on moving against discrimination, major differences remain between whites’ and minorities’ perceptions of progress, the survey said. For example, while half of white service members believed investigations into racially offensive conduct were thorough, only 38 percent of blacks and 39 percent of Hispanics felt that way, according to the “Armed Forces Equal Opportunity Survey.” About 18 percent of blacks and 13 percent of Hispanics said they believed they were given poor assignments or evaluations based on race, compared
with 4 percent of whites. At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, the report drew mixed reactions from Army officers outside the base’s retail store. Staff Sgt. Sedrick Banks, who is black, said he hadn’t noticed overt racism in military units, but he encountered it while in training—derogatory comments that he said included “the ‘n’ word” “I would tend to agree with what’s written,” banks said, referring to the report. But Capt. Katrina Birkelien, a white army nurse who participated in the survey, said she has never been in a unit where punishment varied according to race. And rewards also have seemed fair, she said. “I think opportunity is based on merit,” she said. “That’s what I’ve seen.” “we would all like to have had us perform better. This survey is a declaration of action,” said William E. Leftwich III, assistant defense secretary for equal opportunity. “More attention and effort are needed, he said, although the Pentagon has no specific proposals for addressing the problem. Margaret C. Simms, research director of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank that specializes in racial issues, said the survey undermines the notion of racial harmony that the military attempts to project… (There) remains some significant amount of at least perceived differences in terms of opportunity. This now presents the military with a chance to take steps that might make them better,” she said. The report found there was “a strong propensity not to report” racially offensive encounters. While 74 percent of white service member said they believed their immediate supervisors made honest efforts to stop racial harassment, only 58 percent of blacks and 63 percent of Hispanics felt that way. Still, members of all races expressed the view that race relations were less positive in local civilian communities than on military bases and ships. Only 28 percent of the blacks who responded to the survey reported that community race relations were good. That compares with 34 percent among whites and Hispanics.
Source: “Survey: Race Still a Factor in Military.” Associated Press. The Press. Atlantic City, NJ. 24 Nov 1999. A1 New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #8 On a more positive note, large majorities of all racial groups indicated that they had close personal friendships (84 percent) or socialized (85 percent) with people of other races. More than half (52 percent) indicated they had more friends of another race now than they did before entering the military. Almost all service members (95 percent) responding indicated they did not know anyone who belonged to an extremist organization. And 46 percent of respondents said they thought race relations in the military had improved over the last five years. Only 30 percent gave that answer for the nation as a whole. The study reinforced conclusions drawn by other of nonmilitary populations that “minorities have a very different perspective than whites” on many things in life, said Anita Lancaster of the Defense Manpower Data Center, which conducted the study.
Frank Newport, director of the Gallup Poll, said in an interview that other surveys have also shown “that black Americans have significantly different views on race relations than do white Americans.” The Gallup Poll did such a survey in 1997 with a national sample and came up with many of the same conclusions. “It seems to be a pretty persuasive difference that we see nationally,” Newport said. In a separate report issued at the same time, the Pentagon said that in the two decades from 1977 to 1997, the percentage of racial minorities and women among active duty commissioned officers more than doubled—from 5.9 percent of the total to 14.1 percent for women; and from 7 percent to 15.3 percent for racial minorities. The patterns of increasing minority and female representation “held for all four services,” the report said.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Why do you believe race is still a factor in the military?
2.
How do you account for the facts that minorities tend to have a different perspective than whites on issues related to race?
3.
Did you find anything surprising about the survey results? Explain.
Source: “Survey: Race Still a Factor in Military.” Associated Press. The Press. Atlantic City, NJ. 24 Nov 1999. A1
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Unit II: READING #9
ecidujerp, prejudice Irene Gersten and Betsy Bliss Prejudice is an attitude, a rigid emotional response toward all members of a particular group or social category. It is generally an unfavorable opinion formed before the facts are known, which results in hatred or intolerance. In this selection, authors Irene Gersten and Betsy Bliss explain the meaning of prejudice. Careful attention is given to distinguishing the differences that exist between various types of prejudice. As indicated by the authors, prejudice can be motivated by, among other reasons, economic interest, conforming to group expectations, and/or the difficulty people have in accepting their own weaknesses. Prejudice can be expressed in a variety of ways such as antilocution (bad-mouthing), avoidance, discrimination, physical attack, and genocide. As the worst expression of hate, genocide represents the systematic murder of an entire people because they belong to a specific nation, race, or religion.
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Suppose that you had never met an old person. Suppose that your friends told you that “all old people are crazy.” Would you believe them? You might-if you had never known an old person. That is what happens when we insist on knowing only people just like ourselves. This kind of prejudice is really ignorant prejudice due to not knowing better. It is expressed by many people who keep themselves separate and do not mix with other groups. Ignorant prejudice was what those white residents felt when the black families began to move into their neighborhood. But when they were actually living next door to one another, they started to look at their black neighbors as individuals and to see that they were not noisy or troublemakers, but were honest, warm, hardworking people, very much like themselves.
Real Prejudice It is important to remember that there is a difference between ignorance and prejudice. Ignorance means forming opinion without really knowing the facts. The prejudice that often results from ignorance does not necessarily mean hateful feelings. Real prejudice, on the other hand, occurs when we choose to keep bad opinions even when we have a chance to know better. Prejudice occurs when a
person refuses to change his mind—even when the facts show him that he is wrong. Mark is an example of a person with real prejudice. When Mark was young, all of his friends and classmates told him that all black people were “lazy” and “dirty.” Mark took their word for it. He believed them because he had never seen a person with dark skin. There were no black people in his school, his neighborhood, or his Boy Scout troop. When he went to the movies, he hardly ever saw black people in films. Those that he did see were shown as “lazy” and “dirty.” The same was true on television. Mark was a very protected person who had little touch with the world outside of his own group. As Mark grew older and left his neighborhood, he began to see some people with dark skin. But they seemed so different from him. They looked different. They dressed differently and they even talked differently. Mark stayed away from them because they were strange and he was afraid of them. Mark covered his fear by saying that “they” were “dirty” and “lazy.” When Mark entered high school, he met Jeff, who was black. Jeff was in most of his classes and Mark was forced to see that Jeff was neat, welldressed, and very hardworking. But Mark refused to change his bad opinions of all dark-skinned people. Even though he knew Jeff to be much like himself,
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #9 his prejudice would not allow him to see Jeff as a complete individual. Mark could not see beyond Jeff’s dark skin. He said to himself, “Jeff is different from other blacks. It is still true that all those people are ‘dirty and “lazy.’ “ Mark simply could not see that “all those people” are individuals just like Jeff.
Prejudice and Profit Why do Mark and people like him refuse to give up their prejudices even when the facts show them to be wrong? Why do people prejudge others in the first place? Why has man, for as long as we can remember, been cruel to his fellow man? Why is prejudice as much a problem today as it was four hundred years ago? To answer these questions isn’t easy. Mostly, we act in a prejudiced manner because we expect to gain something. Each individual is a complex being, with many different needs, desires, and goals. And though people are guilty of prejudice because they believe they will gain something, what it is that they want to gain is different in almost every case…
Conforming Prejudice A very common type of prejudice comes from our need to have the same values as the group to which we belong. We tend to feel safe within our own group. It makes us feel important. To know we will be accepted by that group, we adopt the group’s thinking. When the group thinking is prejudiced, we often accept this thinking because we are afraid to go against the group. A college student recently wrote about an example of this kind of prejudice. It occurred on his first day of high school. He had been talking with a boy of his own age when one of the older students came over to him and said, “Don’t you know that Harry is a Jew?” He had never before met a Jew and really didn’t care whether or not Harry, whom he had started to like, was a Jew. But he admitted that the tone of the older boy’s voice was enough to convince him that he had better not make Harry his friend. When we act in this way, we are clearly in the wrong. There is nothing wrong in wanting to belong to a certain group because we want to feel a part of something. We all need friends and want to feel safe and needed. But there is something terribly wrong when we become a part of the group and are no longer an individual. By giving up what is special in
each of us, we can no longer act or think on our own. We become a group body. We are afraid to make a step on our own two feet. We act in a prejudiced way not because we believe the others are not as good as we are, but because we are afraid of being “different” and of having opinions different from those of our friends, classmates, and family.
Scapegoating There is one kind of prejudice that occurs when we want to go along with the opinions of our friends. There is a more dangerous kind of prejudice that stems from feeling unsure about ourselves and from the questions we have about our own worth as individuals. It is called scapegoating. It is part of human nature for people to compare themselves with one another. It is part of our society for individuals to compete with one another for money and personal rewards. Often our feeling of being not as good, as attractive, as wealthy, as skilled, or as successful as others makes us need to blame someone else for our own shortcomings. It is difficult for people to accept their own weaknesses. It is much easier to blame our problems on others. When we look down on someone else, we seem so much taller. The word “scapegoating” comes from Biblical times. Then a scapegoat was let loose in the wilderness after the high priest had placed the sins of the people on its head. All of the failures, the shortcomings, and the shameful things that the people were guilty of were put onto the goat. Sending the goat out into the woods was the people’s way of separating themselves from their guilt. They were no longer responsible for their own actions. Today we use the word scapegoat to describe a person or a group of people who are blamed unfairly. Scapegoating is in many ways like labeling. Both are lazy ways of thinking. Both can prevent a person from seeing himself as he really is. When we put people into groups, we hide ourselves or other people behind name tags. We see only a part of what people really are, not the whole picture. Our world is full of people like Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones is very upset about what is happening in this country. Mr. Jones says, “The reason we have riots is that there are outsiders in this country.” He adds, “If we could only get rid of the outsiders, everything would be fine.” Riots, like most problems, have many causes. Solutions are hard to find and Mr. Jones doesn’t want
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit II: READING #9 to bother to find out what all of the causes are. It is much easier to find someone to blame, to find a scapegoat. For Mr. Jones, “outsiders” are handy scapegoats. It is usually easy to recognize the Mr. Joneses of the world. They are the people who can say, “If only we didn’t have so-and-so, everything would be okay.” These persons will find one enemy to explain everything that is wrong. “If only we didn’t have Jews — “ or “If only we didn’t have hippies — .” But nothing is that simple. Prejudiced people who scapegoat say the same thing about all groups that are different from their own. No matter who the prejudice person is blaming, that “enemy” is “lazy” and “dirty” and “dangerous.” The prejudice person warns everyone against “marrying those people” or “getting close to those people” or “believing anything those people say.” You can substitute almost any kind of human being for “those people,” but the prejudiced person’s remark and warnings will be the same. That is because the scapegoater does not hate any one person in particular. He hates a “group that is different,” and his hatred coverd all the members of that group.
Defending Prejudice When people say the kinds of things that Mark, for example, said about Jeff, they do not always know that they are guilty of prejudice. Most prejudiced people try to hide their true fears from themselves as well as from others. These people feel good only when they believe that there are others who are not quite as good as they are. Practically nobody will admit to being prejudiced. Practically everybody agrees that prejudice is cruel and ugly. That is why people have been forced to defend their prejudice. And that is why their defenses have been pretty strange! In the nineteenth century, for example, many people tried to use religious excuse to cover their prejudice. They said that slavery was a way of introducing the Christian religion to the Africans, who had their own , different religion. It was obvious to the majority of people that this was not a very good excuse, and so many people tried to find a better one. These people turned to the idea that some people were born better than others — smarter, nice-looking, with better manners, and more honest. Today we know that this is completely untrue. Today we know that, any way you look at it, there is no excuse good enough to defend prejudice.
186 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
How might a person go through life learning prejudice?
2.
Why is real prejudice harder to deal with than ignorant prejudice?
3.
Some people hold that prejudice is an essential element of maintaining self-esteem. Others, like Professor Gordon Allport, have argued that prejudice may be the result of deprivation and frustration which create hostile impulses that are then displaced upon a logically irrelevant victim. Based upon this article, how do you react to these ideas?
DEFINITIONS real prejudice: scapegoating:
keeping one’s prejudice even after the facts are known. placing undeserving blame on a person or group.
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #10
seeds of hate: an examination of prejudice Prejudice: Deep-seated feelings of ill-will that are inf lexible and over-generalized about a group of people.
A.
Sources of Prejudice 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
B.
Degrees of Prejudice 1. 2. 3. 4.
C.
Can’t see members of another group as individuals Doubts himself or herself Feels alienated Dislikes himself or herself
The Price a Person Pays for Being Prejudiced 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
E.
Stereotyping Group conformity Protection of status Insecurity
People That Are the Target of Prejudice 1. 2. 3. 4.
D.
Family Unmet basic needs Frustration-aggression reaction Scapegoating Fear
Rigid in their thinking Fearful of change Distrustful of others Insecure as a person Sees things in absolutes – black and white thinking; little or no gray area Projection
Forms of Prejudice 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Avoidance Verbal aggression – jokes, direct insults and epithets, stereotyped statements Discrimination Segregation Violence – physical violence; killing and genocide
Adapted from Seeds of Hate: An Examination of Prejudice. Filmstrip. Warren Schloat Productions, 1974. (Out of print).
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Unit II: READING #10
seeds of hate: an examination of prejudice Essential Questions and Activities
Section A: 1. 2.
3. 4. 5.
How do our prejudices begin with our families? How might not having enough to eat every day develop a sense of prejudice? If possible, try to draw conclusions between the unemployed skinhead of today and the unemployed down-on-hisluck German World War I veteran who would have joined the Nazi Party. Do the frustrations that evolve out of desperation lead to violence against those groups seen as preventing success? What is scapegoating? Research its historical meaning and provide several examples of scapegoating today. How can fear develop into prejudice?
Sections B-E: 188 1. 2. 3.
How does this section describe the “walking on the slippery slope” of prejudice? Are these items increasing in intensity as we read them? Attempt to draw connections to how minorities are treated here in the United States and how Jews were treated in Germany beginning in 1933.
Adapted from Seeds of Hate: An Examination of Prejudice. Filmstrip. Warren Schloat Productions, 1974. (Out of print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #11
scapegoats Directions: Read the following selections from Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice, and answer the questions on page 190. Allport has contributed enormously to our understanding of the mechanisms of prejudice. According to his theory, prejudice grows out of personal frustration, which in turn generates aggressive feelings. When this aggression cannot be directed against the real cause of the frustration, the aggression is displaced onto relatively defenseless “scapegoats.”This displaced hostility is then rationalized and justified by blaming, projecting, and stereotyping.
T
he term “scapegoat” originated in the famous ritual of the Hebrews, described in the Book of Leviticus (16:20-22). On the Day of Atonement a live goat was chosen by lot. The high priest, robed in linen garments, laid both his hands on the goat’s head, and confessed over it the inequities of the children of Israel. The sins of the people thus symbolically transferred to the beast, it was taken out into the wilderness and let go. The people felt purged, and for the time being, guiltless. The type of thinking here involved is not uncommon. From earliest times the notion has persisted that guilt and misfortune can be shifted from one man’s back to another. If a load of wood can be shifted, why not a load of sorrow or a load of guilt? Nowadays we are likely to label this mental process projection. In other people we see the fear, anger, lust that reside primarily in ourselves. It is not we ourselves who are responsible for our misfortunes, but other people. In our common speech we recognize this failing in such phrases as “whipping-boy,” taking it out on the dog,” or “scapegoat…” Yankees in a conservative Maine community may discriminate socially against the Italians or French-Canadians who live there—but the snobbery is relatively mild, and one can seldom see evidences of actual aggression (true scapegoating). On the other hand, a much more serious problem of antagonism exists In the case of other minorities (Jews, Negroes, Orientals, Mexicans) to whom the dominant majority has said, “We shall never accept you as one of us.” Just as It is impossible to tell clearly when a group is a scapegoat and when it is not, so too we
cannot find a clear formula that will cover the selection of scapegoats. The essence of the matter seems to be that different groups are singled out for different reasons… There seems to be no such thing as an “all-duty scapegoat” although some groups come nearer to this objective than others. Perhaps today Jews and Negroes are blamed for the widest variety of evils. We note that these are inclusive social groups consisting of both sexes (and their children), which transmit social values and cultural traits. They are more or less permanent, definite and stable. (Scapegoats need not be lily-white in their innocence, but they always attract more blame. more animosity, more stereotyped judgment than can be rationally justified.) One reason for the popularity of the scapegoat theory is that it is easy to understand. Probably this fact is also an argument for its validity, for the case of understanding must be related in some way to the commonness of the experience. A storybook for seven-year-olds contains a clear example of the scapegoating theme. The tale runs as follows: An enterprising pig with some ducks as companions is aloft in a rudderless balloon. A farmer with evil intentions is trying to capture the balloon, but the alert piglet pelts the farmer with cans of tomato soup. The farmer is spattered by the soup and thoroughly angry. A dirty-faced boy comes out of the barn to help him wipe off the soup. But the farmer cuffs the little boy good. He does this for three reasons: first, because the balloon had got away; and
© COPYRIGHT, The Center for Learning. Used with permission. Not for resale.
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Unit II: READING #11 second, because he would now have to take a bath to get the stocky soup off him: and, third, because it seemed like a pretty good thing to do anyway. The following case shows how a blend of home and school frustration may lead to prejudice. A college student writes: I had honors all the way through school and one double promotion, but I did not have a straight “A” record. I was not happy. My father boasted that he had had only an A
and A-plus record when he was in college, and at the same time held down a full-time job. He never let me forget it, and berated me for doing less well than he. I felt utterly frustrated. I wanted to please him but could not succeed. Finally I found comfort in telling myself and other people that it was only the Jewish grinds and cheats who did me out of the top position. (In thinking the matter over I realize that I do not know for a fact that the boys who excelled me in scholarship were Jews, or that they cheated.)2
Is the Blame Justified? Directions: Answer the following questions in the spaces provided. 1.
List one example of a scapegoat from the present time. Describe for what you think they are being blamed. Do you think the blame is justified?
2.
Have you ever taken out your frustrations or anger on an innocent person? Describe the situation and why you acted this way.
3.
Have you ever been blamed unjustly or used as a scapegoat by a friend, parent, teacher, or coach? Describe the experience and include a description of how you felt.
4.
On the back of this sheet, write a letter to a fictional young teenager in your community who is treated as a scapegoat. Attempt to explain to this person why he or she is unjustly persecuted and suggest what he or she could do about this. Tell this person what you could do to help him or her. (Though the teen you write to is hypothetical, the situation you address should be realistic.
190
2
Gordon Allport. The Nature of Prejudice. (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1958). © COPYRIGHT, The Center for Learning. Used with permission. Not for resale. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #12
helga’s dilemma
H
elga and Rachel had grown up together. They were best friends despite the fact that Helga’s family was Christian and Rachel’s was Jewish. For many years, this religious difference didn’t seem to matter much in Germany, but after Hitler seized power, the situation changed. Hitler required Jews to wear armbands with the Star of David on them. He began to encourage his followers to destroy the property of Jewish people and to beat them up on the street. Finally, he began to arrest Jews and deport them. Rumors went around the city that many Jews were being killed. Hiding Jews for whom the Gestapo (Hitler’s secret police) was looking for was a serious crime and violated the law of the German government. One night Helga heard a knock at the door. When she opened it, she found Rachel on the step huddled in a dark coat. Quickly, Rachel stepped inside. She had been at a meeting, she said, and when she returned home, she found Gestapo members all around her house. Her parents and brothers had already been taken away. Knowing her fate if the Gestapo caught her, Rachel ran to her old friend’s house. Now what should Helga do? If she turned Rachel away, the Gestapo would eventually find her. Helga knew that most of the Jews who were sent away had been killed, and she didn’t want her friend to share their fate. But hiding the Jews broke the law. Helga would risk her own security and that of her family if she tried to hide Rachel. But she had a tiny room behind the chimney on the third floor where Rachel might be safe.
Question: Should Helga hide Rachel? Yes______ No _______ Why or why not?
To be answered by all: What are Helga’s most important considerations?
To be answered by those who answered yes: What if Helga only knew Rachel slightly?
To be answered by those who answered no: What if Helga knew that Rachel could pay an enormous amount of money to the person who would hide her?
The following questions are to be answered by all: Does Helga have any alternatives to either hiding Rachel or not hiding Rachel? What are they? Does Rachel have the right to place her friend into jeopardy? Why or why not? Does Helga have the right to refuse to help a friend who is in danger? Why or why not?
Source: Gabelko, Nina Hersch and John U. Michaelis. Reducing Adolescent Prejudice. New York: Teachers College Press, 1981. “Helga’s Dilemma” is taken from Superka et. al. Values Education Sourcebook. Social Science Education Consortium, 1976. Used by permission of the publisher.
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Unit II: READING #12
to the teacher: lesson plan Major Understandings Moral decisions sometimes do not offer easy choices. Sometimes the individual does not even have a clear idea of what is right or wrong in the particular situation. It is then that moral reasoning becomes most important. The whys which underly choice, and each behavior, need to be examined.
Instructional Objectives To list the reasons why Helga should act in a given way To list the reasons which might affect a decision To state the consequences of any alternatives open to Helga To state feelings, if any, about the reciprocal nature of friendship To list the priorities to be established before making a moral decision
Teaching Strategy 192
PROCESS
QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
CONCEPTS
Introduction Before passing out the reading “Helga’s Dilemma,” introduce the dilemma by stating: At different times in our lives, each of us has to make difficult decisions. Sometimes it seems that we have to choose from two equally unpleasant choices. Sometimes we have to decide if there are some things that are more important to us than our personal safety. Before making choices such as these, we must examine very closely what we believe in, what we value. We are going to examine one such situation. Development
Source: Gabelko, Nina Hersch and John U. Michaelis. Reducing Adolescent Prejudice. New York: Teachers College Press, 1981. “Helga’s Dilemma” is taken from Superka et. al. Values Education Sourcebook. Social Science Education Consortium, 1976. Used by permission of the publisher. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #12 Read the dilemma aloud while the students follow along on their sheets. Interpreting
Ask the students to state the issue in their own words. Then ask the students: How many vote yes?
Moral reasoning
How many vote no? What are the reasons for decision? Divide the class into groups for discussion. The groups can either be comprised of those who voted yes, or no, but for different reasons; or they can be comprised of a balance of yes and no voters. State the following to the students: In your groups, please discuss the questions on your dilemma sheet. Please select one person in the group to take notes so that you will be able to share your thoughts and conclusions with the whole class.
Conclusion The class should meet again as a group to share the outcomes of their small group meetings. The emphasis in the class discussion should be on the reasoning employed in coming to the various conclusions.
Evaluation 1.
2. 3.
Review your answers to the questions following Helga’s dilemma. Some students state that self-protection is the most important value involved, others state that loyalty to friends comes first, and others feel that a belief in justice was the most important value. What was the value that was the basis of your answer? If you were Helga, would this still be the governing value? If you were Rachel. would this still be the governing value? What would happen if everyone behaved the way you suggest that Helga behave?
Additional Activities 1.
2.
Working with three or four other students, compile a list of real life situations that pose a moral dilemma. Select the four best ones. Have each member of the group write a short moral dilemma about the situation. Present the dilemma to your class. Working with four or five students. have each student present and discuss “Helga’s Dilemma” with two or three adults. Take notes on the discussion. Combine your data with that of the other team members. How were the responses of the adults like the responses of the students in your class? How were they different?
Source: Gabelko, Nina Hersch and John U. Michaelis. Reducing Adolescent Prejudice. New York: Teachers College Press, 1981. “Helga’s Dilemma” is taken from Superka et. al. Values Education Sourcebook. Social Science Education Consortium, 1976. Used by permission of the publisher.
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Unit II: READING #13
word game Stephen Stills In this song, Stephen Stills comments on the origins of prejudice and how it affects human behavior. The song expresses much anger and frustration at the hypocrisy and hate of people with prejudices. Yet, Stills ends with a defiant faith in the ability of young people to overcome the prejudices of their elders. But recent studies have concluded that young people today hold very deep prejudices about each other. Would you knock a man down If you don’t like the cut of his clothes Could you put a man away If you don’t want to hear what he knows Well it’s happening right here People dying of fear by the droves And I know most of you Either don’t believe it’s true Or else you don’t know what to do Or maybe I’m singing about you Who knows
194
It’s incredibly sick You can feel it As across the land it flows Prejudice is slick When it’s a word game It festers and grows Move along quick It furthers one to have somewhere to go You can feel it as its rumblin’ Let emotions keep a tumblin’ Then as cities start to crumblin’ Mostly empty bellies grumblin’ Here we go People see somebody different Fear is the first reaction shown Then they think they’ve got him licked The barbaric hunt begins It must be too tough to die American propaganda, South African lies Will not force me to take up arms That’s my enemy’s pride And I won’t fight by his rules That’s foolishness besides
And they move in slow A human spirit is devoured The remains left to carrion crow I was told that life is change And yet history remains Does it always stay the same Do we shrug it off and say Only God knows By and by somebody usually goes Down to the ghetto Try and help but they don’t know why Folks treat them cold And the rich keep getting richer And the rest of us just keep getting old You see one must have a mission In order to be a good Christian If you don’t you will be missing High Mass or the evening show And the well-fed masters reap The harvests of the polluted seeds they’ve sown Smug and self-righteous They bitch about people they owe And you can’t prove them wrong They’re so God damn sure they know I have seen these things With my very own eyes And defended my battered soul His ignorance is gonna do him in And nobody’s gonna cry Because his children they are growing up And plainly tired of putting up With bigots and their silver cups They’re fed up, they might throw up on you
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How does fear relate to prejudice? 2. Is it possible to be a good person and still have prejudices? 3. Do you agree that young people will be less prejudiced than their elders? Why? DEFINITIONS carrion: dead and decaying flesh, unfit for food. ghetto: a quarter of the city in which members of a minority live, originally restricted to Jews. Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #14
ETHNIC JOKES Please read the following statements. Circle SA if you strongly agree with the statement, A if you partially agree, U if undecided, D if you disagree, and SD if you strongly disagree. 1.
It is okay to tell ethnic jokes.
SA A
U
D
SD
2.
People who tell ethnic jokes are usually insensitive.
SA A
U
D
SD
3.
It is okay for people to tell ethnic jokes about their own group.
SA A
U
D
SD
4.
It is inappropriate to tell ethnic jokes in school or at work.
SA A
U
D
SD
5.
It is appropriate to tell ethnic jokes at home.
SA A
U
D
SD
6.
People who are offended by ethnic jokes have no sense of humor.
SA A
U
D
SD
7.
Ethnic jokes are not intended to hurt anyone’s feelings.
SA A
U
D
SD
You will be asked to share your reasons in a small group following the completion of this worksheet.
.“Ethnic Jokes.”A World of Difference. New York: Anti-Defamation League. å
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Unit II: READING #15
rock, he called me a guinea Rocky Marciano
R
196
ocky and Eugene had walked to Flagg Pond to go ice skating. It was a place where many of Brockton’s teenagers went for winter fun. “We were just kind of fooling around on the ice when we spotted this nice-looking Broad,” Sylvester said. “We were just beginning to get slightly interested in girls, but The Rock was still real shy. I was the only one in our gang who could throw the girls a line.” “Euey, see if you can get her to talk to us,” Rocky said. Eugene skated up to the girl and began talking. “So I was wondering if you’d like to meet my friend Rocky,” he was saying, so engrossed in the progress he was making with her that he didn’t notice her boyfriend skate up and tower over him. “Who’s this?” he said, glaring down at Sylvester. “Oh, this is Eugene,” the girl said. “He’s a baseball player.” “Screw you dumb little guinea,” the boy said. “You and who else is gonna make me?” They looked comical coming across the ice skinny little Eugene skating for his life with the girl’s enraged boyfriend racing after him. “Rock, this guy’s tryin’ to beat me up,” 1Sylvester shouted. “He called me a dumb guinea.” Sylvester saw a fight that “lasted only a couple of minutes.” As soon as Rocky heard of Eugene’s insult, he charged in and began punching. Rocky connected with a looping right that split the skin above the startled boy’s eye. The gash spurted blood onto Rocky’s shirt as the boy sprawled over backward. “It was a nasty cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and they had to take this kid up to Brockton Hospital for stitches,” Sylvester said. “I could tell Rocky was upset because the kid got hurt so bad and the blood got on his shirt. But The Rock didn’t say anything. He was still plenty mad because this guy had called us ‘dumb guineas.”’
“Rock, He Called He a Guinea” The Power of Words. At times, words can strike with the power of a fist. After reading passage, “Rock, he called me a guinea,” from the book; Rocky Marciano, Biography of a First Son, discuss; 1.
Why did the term ‘Guinea’ provoke such rage from the young future heavyweight boxing champion of the world? *Used in this context, at a time when Italians were newcomers to our country, ‘Guinea’ was a great insult. It implied that Italians were ignorant foreigners, that they did not belong here, etc..
2.
While it is never proper to use a term such as ‘Guinea,’ why has it lost much of the vicious strength it held in the early 1930’s, when Rocky Marciano was a young teenager? *When prejudice against Italians ceased to be a major problem, and acceptance of Italians became the norm, ‘Guinea’ became less of an insult, and more of a slang term.
3.
In groups, have students list the ethnic and racial terms used by our society today. Which terms are generally considered the most offensive and insulting? Why? *The teacher may want to perform group exercise first, as a prelude for the above questions.
Source: Marciano,Rocky. “Rock, He Called Me A Guinea.” Biography of a First Son. Everett M.J. Kehan, Houghton and Mifflin Co., 1977 New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #16
excerpts from black Boy Richard Wright Introduction People often ask how prejudice is allowed to happen. It is sometimes difficult for us to understand how the Holocaust happened and why people didn’t anticipate it and stop what was happening long before the period 1939-1945. Jane Eliott says people learn to go along to get along. Richard Wright, author of Black Boy, tells of a young man who is given a position in the South by a Northerner that puts him in direct conflict with the “system.” In the end, he is kept “in his place” and no one does anything to change the wrong that is allowed to continue. Read the passages that follow in this reading and complete the activity “Limitations, Feelings, and Defenses,” which asks you how Richard Wright would complete the chart.
Directions: Read the following passage and complete the chart and questions on page 200.
T
he next morning I was outside the office of the optical company long before it opened. I was reminding myself that I must be polite, must think before I spoke, must think before I acted, must say “yes sir, no sir,” that I must so conduct myself that white people would not think that I thought I was as good as they. Suddenly a white man came up to me. “What do you want?” he asked me. “I’m reporting for a job, sir,” I said. “O.K. Come on.” I followed him up a flight of steps and he unlocked the door of the office. I was a little tense, but the young white man’s manner put me at ease and I sat and held my hat in my hand. A white girl came and began punching a typewriter. Soon another white man, thin and gray, entered and went into the rear room. Finally a tall, red-faced white man arrived, shot me a quick glance and sat at his desk. His brisk manner branded him a Yankee. “You’re the new boy, eh?” ‘Yes, sir.” “Let me get my mail out of the way and I’ll talk with you,” he said pleasantly. I even pitched my voice to a low plane, trying to rob it of any suggestion or overtone of aggressiveness.
Half an hour later Mr. Crane called me to his desk and questioned me closely about my schooling, about how much mathematics I had had. He seemed pleased when I told him that I had had two years of algebra. “How would you like to learn this trade?” he asked. “I’d like it fine, sir. I’d like nothing better,” I said. He told me that he wanted to train a Negro boy in optical trade; be wanted to help him, guide him. I tried to answer in a way that would let him know that I would try to be worthy of what he was doing. He took me to the stenographer and said: “This is Richard. He’s going to be with us.” He then led me into the rear room of the office, which turned out to be a tiny factory filled with many strange machines smeared with red dust. “Reynolds.” he said to a young white man, “this is Richard.” “What you saying there, boy” Reynolds grinned and boomed at me. Mr. Crane took me to the older man. “Pease, this is Richard, who’ll work with us.” Pease looked at me and nodded. Mr. Crane then held forth to the two white men about my duties: he
Source: “Excerpt from Black Boy” and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses.” (by Richard Wright), Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993.
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Unit II: READING #16
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told them to break me in gradually to the workings of the shop, to instruct me in the mechanics of grinding and polishing lenses. They nodded their assent. “Now, boy, let’s see how clean you can get this place,” Mr. Crane said. “Yes, sir.” I swept, mopped, dusted, and soon had the office and the shop clean. In the afternoons, when I had caught up with my work, I ran errands. In an idle moment I would stand and watch the two white men grinding lenses on the machines. They said nothing to me and I said nothing to them. The first day passed, the second, the third, a week passed and I received my five dollars. A month passed. But I was not learning anything and nobody had volunteered to help me. One afternoon I walked up to Reynolds and asked him to tell me about the work. “What are you trying to do, get smart, nigger?” he asked me. “No sir,” I said. I was baffled. Perhaps he just did not want to help me. I went to Pease, reminding him that the boss had said that I was to be given a chance to learn the trade. “Nigger, you think you’re white, don’t you?” “No, sir.” “You’re acting mighty like it,” he said. “I was only doing what the boss told me to do,” I said. Pease shook his fist in my face. “This is a white man’s work around here,” he said. From then on they changed toward me: they said good morning no more. When I was just a bit slow in performing some duty, I was called a lazy black sonofabitch. I kept silent, striving to offer no excuse for worsening of relations. But one day Reynolds called me to his machine. “Nigger, you think you’ll ever amount to anything.?” he asked in a slow, sadistic voice. “I don’t know, sir,” I answered, turning my head away.. I ignored him. Mr. Pease was watching me closely; then I saw them exchange glances. My job was not leading to what Mr. Crane had said it would. I had been humble, and now I was reaping the wages of humility.. The climax came at noon one summer day. Pease called me to his workbench; to get to him I had to go between two narrow benches and stand with my
back against the wall. “Richard, I want to ask you something,” Pease began pleasantly, not looking up from his work. “Yes, sir.” Reynolds came over and stood blocking the narrow passage between the benches; he folded his arms and stared at me solemnly. I looked from one to the other, sensing trouble. Pease looked up and spoke slowly, so there would be no possibility of my not understanding. “Richard, Reynolds here tells me that you called me Pease,” he said. I stiffened. A void opened up in me. I knew that this was the showdown. He meant that I had failed to call him Mr. Pease. I looked at Reynolds; he was gripping a steel bar in his hand. I opened my mouth to speak, to protest, to assure Pease that I had never called him simply Pease and that I had never had any intention of doing so, when Reynolds grabbed me by the collar, ramming my head against a wall. “Now, be careful, nigger,” snarled Reynolds, baring his teeth. “I heard you call ‘im Pease. And if you say you didn’t, you’re calling me a liar, see?”He waved the steel bar threateningly. If I had said: No sir, Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease, I would by inference have been calling Reynolds a liar; and if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to the worst insult that a Negro can offer to a southern white man. I stood trying to think of a neutral course that would resolve this quickly risen nightmare, but my tongue would not move. “Richard, I asked you a question!” Pease said. Anger was creeping into his voice. “I don’t remembering called you Pease, Mr. Pease,” I said cautiously. “And if I did, I sure didn’t mean. . .” “You black sonofabitch! You called me Pease, then!” he spat, rising and slapping me till I bent sideways over a bench. Reynolds was up on top of me demanding: “Didn’t you call him Pease? lf you say you didn’t, I’ll rip your gut string loose with this f—k—g bar, you black granny dodger! You can’t call a white man a liar and get away with it!” I wilted. I begged them not to hit me. I knew what they wanted. They wanted me to leave the job. “I’ll leave,” I promised. “I’ll leave right now!” ‘They gave me a minute to get out of the factory, and warned me not to show up again or tell the boss.
Source: “Excerpt from Black Boy” and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses.” (by Richard Wright), Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #16 Reynolds loosened his hand on my collar and I ducked out of the room.. The next morning at ten I crept up the stairs and peered into the office of the optical shop to make sure that Mr. Crane was in. He was at his desk. Pease and Reynolds were at their machines in the rear. “Come in, Richard.” Mr. Crane said. I pulled off my hat and walked into the office: I stood before him. “Sit down,” he said. I sat. He stared at me and shook his head. “Tell me, what happened?” An impulse to speak rose in me and died with the realization that I was facing a wall that I would never breech. I tried to speak several times and could make no sounds. I grew tense and tears burnt my cheeks. “Now, just keep control of yourself.” Mr. Crane said. I clenched my fists and managed to talk. “I tried to do my best here,” I said. “I believe you, “ he said. “But I want to know what happened. Which one bothered you?” “Both of ‘em.” I said. Reynolds came running to the door and I rose. Mr. Crane jumped to his feet. “Get back in there.” he told Reynolds. “That nigger’s lying!” Reynolds said. “I’ll kill ‘im if he lies on me!” “Get back in there or get out,” Mr. Crane said. Reynolds backed away, keeping his eyes on me. “Go ahead,” Mr. Crane said. ‘Tell me what happened.” Then again I could not speak. What could I accomplish by telling him? I was black; I lived in the South. I would never learn to operate those machines as long as those two white men in there stood by them. Anger and fear welled in me as I felt what I had missed: I leaned forward and clapped my hands to my face.
“No, no, now,” Mr. Crane said. “Keep control of yourself. No matter what happens, keep control…” “I know.” I said in a voice not my own. “There’s no use of my saying anything.” “Do you want to work here?” he asked me. I looked at the white faces of Pease and Reynolds; I imagined their waylaying me, killing me. I was remembering what had happened to Ned’s brother. “No sir,” I breathed. “Why?” “I’m scared,” I said. “They would kill me.” Mr. Crane turned and called Pease and Reynolds into the office. “Now, tell me which one bothered you. Don’t be afraid. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Mr. Crane said. I stared ahead of me and did not answer. He waved the men inside. The white stenographer looked at me with wide eyes and I felt drenched in shame, naked to my soul. The whole of my being felt violated, and I knew that my own fear had helped to violate it. I was breathing hard and struggling to master my feelings. “Can I get my money, sir?” I asked at last. “Just sit a minute and take hold of yourself,” he said. I waited and my roused sense grew slowly calm. “I’m awfully sorry about this,” he said. “I had hoped for a lot from this job,” I said. “I’d wanted to go to school, to college…” ‘I know,” he said. “But what are you going to do now?” My eyes traveled over the office, but I was not seeing. “I’m going away,” I said. “What do you mean?” “I’m going to get out of the South,” I breathed. “Maybe that’s best,” he said. “I’m from Illinois. Even for me, it’s hard here. I can do just so much.”
Source: “Excerpt from Black Boy” and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses.” (by Richard Wright), Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993.
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Limitations, Feelings, and Defenses Directions: Based on this passage, how would Richard Wright complete this chart. Limitations placed on him by the prejudice of Pease and Reynolds
Feelings experienced during this ordeal
200 Tactics used to defend against or destroy prejudice
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS. 1. How did Mr. Crane’s attitude differ from the attitude of Pease and Reynolds?
2. Why do you think his attitude was different?
Source: “Excerpt from Black Boy” and “Limitations, Feelings and Defenses.” (by Richard Wright), Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #17
religious and racial anti-semitism Milton Meltzer The history of the Jewish people has been marked by both accomplishment and persecution. Jews have always grappled with the problem of how to maintain their identity while living in diverse larger cultures. There is much to learn in understanding why Jews have been the subject of so much historic prejudice. Christian anti-Semitism which is almost as old as Christianity, stems from the refusal of Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah and from the accusation that the Jews killed Christ. In recent times, many church bodies have stressed that guilt for the death of Jesus is to be borne by all humanity and that Jesus willingly gave his life. In addition, many Christian scholars such as Franklin Littell and Roy Eckardt have charged that the Gospels, especially the Book of John, helped to develop the idea that the Jews killed Christ. John wrote at a time of tension between Jewish and Christian communities, when the young Church wanted to improve its relations with the ruling Roman Empire. By the fourth century, Judaism became an unacceptable faith in the expanding Christian world. By the nineteenth century, antiSemitism became a tool of the growing nationalist movements. From there it was a short step to racist anti-Semitism which described Jews as being racially inferior, unable to be “cured” by simple conversion to Christianity. A knowledge of historic relations and tensions between the Jews and Christianity is important for an understanding of the Holocaust. The following selection by Milton Meltzer provides an overview of these relations since the time of Jesus.
J
ude verrecke…Jew perish… How did it come to that? And why in Germany? Germany is the country where modern antiSemitism of the racist kind began. The term itself, anti-Semitism, was first used only a few years before Hitler was born. But the roots of anti-Semitism go much farther back in history. The religious basis for it in the Christian world is the accusation (it appears in the Gospels) that the Jews were to blame for the crucifixion of Jesus. “Christkiller” became a synonym for Jew. The anti-Semites took that charge as sanction for the persecution of the Jews. In the early fourth century, Constantine the Great made Christianity the state religion of the Byzantine Empire. The Church insisted that Christianity was the true religion, the only religion, and demanded the conversion of the Jews. When the Jews would not easily give up their faith, the Church used the power of the State to make them outcasts. They were denied citizenship and its rights. By the end of the century, Jews were viewed as devils, cursed by God.
A popular and enduring hatred of the Jews built up. If Jews suffered misfortune, it was only divine punishment for Christ’s crucifixion. But the punishment was not left to God alone. Both Church and State took legislative steps — later imitated in Hitler’s edicts — to ensure Jewish misery. Among them were decrees that made it impossible for Jews to farm the land or to engage in the crafts. Trade was almost the only choice left, and many Jews became merchants, working with and through other Jews scattered throughout the world. As the economy of the medieval world developed, the Church lifted the restrictions it had placed on commercial activity, and Christians replaced Jews. The Church still forbade Christians to receive interest on loans, so the Jews provided the service of banking. But when banking profits became attractive, the Church eased its restrictions, and Christians then competed with Jews in finance, too. Yet, even as Christians took over the same financial functions, they libeled the Jews as avaricious and heartless — the image perpetuated by
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Shakespeare’s Shylock. The launching of the Crusades in 1096 marked the beginning of an oppression that for duration and intensity would be unmatched until Hitler’s time. The hordes of nobles, knights, monks, and peasants who set off to free the Holy Land from the Moslem infidels began their bloody work with “the infidels at home”— the Jews. Offering the choice of baptism or death, the Crusaders slaughtered Jews on a stunning scale. Those Jews who refused baptism and sacrificed themselves “to sanctify the Name of God” became martyrs who set an example of heroism for centuries to come. What had been done in the name of Christianity made very few in the Church feel regret when the fury ended. Nested in the popular mind was the conviction that such atrocities must have been deserved. Piety became a convenient excuse for plunder. To make the Jew an ever easier target for mobs hunting down the “Christ-killer,” the Church’s Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required Jews to wear a distinctive badge on their clothing. Now no Jews could escape humiliation. As public pariahs, they were blamed for everything that went wrong. “The guilty Jews”—the words were inseparable. Expulsion or extermination seemed to be the Jews’ fate. What delayed their elimination was their usefulness. While their money could be diverted into the treasuries of king and noble, they were tolerated. When that value was gone, they were expelled. In England. it happened in 1290, in France in 1306, in Spain in 1492. It was in these centuries that Europe began moving from the medieval into the modern world. Epochal changes were taking place in economic, political, cultural, and religious life. But the mass of Jews remained cut off from the mainstream and isolated. They were compelled to live behind ghetto walls. A new humanism induced more tolerance, but not for the Jews. Persecution continued, followed often by expulsion. The Jews of Spain and Portugal fled into Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine, northern Italy, and Holland. Some migrated to the New World, settling in Brazil and the West Indies, and soon in North America, too. The Jews of Germany made new homes in Eastern Europe. The Polish rulers welcomed them because they needed Jewish enterprise. Jews were allowed to become traders and financiers. The flow east was heightened by the founding of Martin Luther’s new faith in the sixteenth century. In his youth, Luther had been a champion of the Jews. When he failed to win them to Protestantism, he
raged at them in a language that exceeded even Hitler’s for violence. He renewed all the old charges— the Jews were poisoners, ritual murderers, usurers, parasites, devils. He called for the burning of their synagogues, the seizure of their books, and their expulsion from all of Germany. (Centuries later, Hitler would find it helpful to circulate Luther’s antiJewish writings in mass editions.) New ideas about the rights of the common man emerged later, as the Industrial Revolution developed in Western Europe. A struggle for civil emancipation began. By then there were numbers of middle-class Jews eager to break free of the ghetto and to share in the civil rights promised by the movement for Enlightenment. It was Germany’s Jews who were the first to be touched by the Enlightenment. Frederick the Great, a despotic ruler and no lover of the Jews, realized that his Prussia could prosper by encouraging enterprising Jews to found new industries and build up commerce. Many Jews seized the opportunity offered and rose to prominence as manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. Young Jews devoted themselves to modern education so that they could make a mark in Western culture. Cracks appeared in the ghetto walls even before the French Revolution of 1789, and Napoleon’s armies finished the job, bearing the banners of freedom wherever they marched. They defeated the Prussians in 1806; and in 1812 Prussia issued the Edict of Emancipation, which made Jews citizens. Jews were to have all the rights of the dominant majority. But not for long. Napoleon’s downfall brought powerful reaction in its wake. Emancipation was undone in many places. The ideals of the Enlightenment were drowned in a wave of German nationalism. To be a patriot now meant to be a product of German culture and a Christian. Again the Jew was defined as an outsider. He was viewed as a parasite feeding upon the German body, which could never absorb him. His political rights were cut down or taken away altogether. An endless stream of anti-Semitic books and pamphlets polluted the culture of Germany. Some of the most distinguished intellectuals contributed to it. Feeling against the Jews mounted to the point of violence. The old cry, “Hep, hep, death to the Jews!” echoed again in Germany’s streets. Popular writing dropped all distinctions between the “good” Jew and the “bad” Jew. Even the baptized and assimilated Jew was not spared, for the anti-Semite now condemned all Jews. No longer was it a question of religion. It was the Jew’s “race,” his
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #17 “blood,” that damned him. A Jewish stereotype took shape in widely read novels. The Jew was depicted as puny and cowardly. The ugly features given the Jewish villain were said to be the outward signs of an evil soul. The Germans built hatred of the Jews into what they considered to be an unchallengeable scientific system. A “theory” of anti-Semitism was created to lend scientific justification to their prejudice. Wilhelm Marr based his theory of anti-Semitism on racial identity. He said that Jews, or Semites, had an inborn character that made them a “slave race,” while the Germans, or Aryans, were the “master race.” The Jews couldn’t help being morally and physically inferior because Nature had predetermined that. The lucky Aryans (he meant the Teutonic or Nordic peoples, such as the Germans, Austrians, Scandinavians, Dutch, English, and French) were by the same token born to be superior. The Aryans were the jewel of the world. Everything great and good was said to be the creation of this “master race.” The smashing victory over the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 made many Germans feel they truly belonged to a “master race.” And when Otto von Bismarck’s policy of “blood and iron” succeeded in molding the petty states into the German Empire in 1871, it intensified that feeling of superiority. Chancellor Bismarck proclaimed the State’s highest duty was to increase its own power. Germany’s destiny was to conquer the world; “lesser” peoples had to be subdued. Militarism and the doctrine of “blood and iron” became the dominant forces in German life. Under Bismarck’s leadership, the educated classes turned away from rationalism and liberalism. A new kind of pseudo-scholarship, useful to politicians who prosper on myths, held sway. Two foreign writers, the Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau and the Englishman
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, contributed props for the myth of racial superiority. De Gobineau held that the Jews were a “mongrel race.” Chamberlain wrote that “The Jewish race is altogether bastardized, and its existence is a crime against the holy laws of life.” Both men won vast audiences in Germany by singing the praises of the “Aryan race.” Politicians began to draw upon the power of anti-Semitism for their propaganda arsenal. In 1878 speakers for a Christian Social Workers’ Party fired up mass meetings by blaming Jews for business failures and profiteering. The party leader, Dr. Adolf Stocker (court preacher to the Kaiser), coined the slogan “Deutschland erwache!”; Hitler would borrow it later. And as Hitler would, Stocker directed his appeal to the lower middle classes — artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, petty officials — who yearned for better incomes and higher social status. In 1879 Wilhelm Marr founded the League of Anti-Semitism “to save the German fatherland from complete Judaization.” A year later the anti-Semites were able to secure 300,000 signatures to a petition demanding that the government bar the Jews from all schools and universities and from holding public office. By 1893 candidates of anti-Semitic political parties were able to muster 400,000 votes and elect many deputies to the Reichstag. A new slogan “The Jews Are Our Misfortune” appeared in print and on banners. Another philosopher, the anarchist Eugene Duhring, stepped forth to sound the final note in anti-Semitism. The Jews, he wrote, are “inferior and depraved.” “The duty of the Nordic peoples is to exterminate such parasitic races as we exterminate snakes and beasts of prey.” His was a paranoid image of the Jew as the universal enemy. Entrenched as an article of German faith, it would have the destructive power of an atomic arsenal when Hitler triggered it.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Many people feel that a crucial part of growth is our response to uncomfortable new knowledge about things we cherish. How do you respond to the charge that organized Christianity might have played a major role in the historic mistreatment of Jews? 2. How did Constantine’s decision to make Christianity a “state religion” affect attitudes toward Jews? 3. How could Jews avoid being killed during the Crusades? 4. How much do you think contemporary Jews and Christians know about each other’s faith? How does this affect the relationship between Jews and Christians? 5. How was the Jew perceived in nineteenth-century Germany? 6. During the last few years, there has been a dramatic worldwide increase in acts of terror against Jews. Synagogues in Paris and in Vienna have been bombed and people murdered. And there are many examples of vandalism. Even in the United States, the number of anti-Jewish acts of desecrations of synagogues and cemeteries, has increased. Why? DEFINITION avaricious:
greedy
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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the things they say behind your back: stereotypes about jews William B. Helmreich Compiled and Edited by Ivan L. Tillem PACIFIC PRESS, NEW YORK
Internationalists Plotting to Take Over the World
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This myth developed because nineteenthcentury anti-Semites needed an image of the Jew frightening enough to make the Russian peasant see him as the enemy rather than the Czar. To give support to these accusations, Czar Nicholas II asked the monk Sergei Nilus to come up with “proof” of an international Jewish conspiracy. Nilus obligingly produced a set of forged documents in a book called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols were partially based on an admittedly fictional work called Biarritz, written by Hermann Goedsche and published in 1868. It contains a rather imaginative chapter called “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” A secret meeting takes place in this cemetery between thirteen old, white-bearded Jews, each of whom is supposed to represent one of the twelve tribes of Israel, plus a thirteenth who speaks for “the unfortunates of the exiles.” This is actually the latest in a series of meetings that have occurred once every century ever since the Jews were exiled from the land of Israel. The representatives report on how their activities, ranging from undermining the Church to fomenting revolution, have helped the Jews move toward their eventual goal of taking control of the world. The Protocols was widely published, reprinted, and distributed. Millions throughout the world, including many Americans, accepted it as true. Despite its exposure as a fraud, it is today still widely disseminated in Russia, the Arab lands, and in Latin America. Billy Carter’s Libyan guests quoted from the Protocols during interviews given to newsmen here several years ago and were apparently unaware that the documents have been widely discredited. It is easy to dismiss such attitudes as the views
of a small minority. Yet, as Cohn points out in his book, lies of this sort can have terrible consequences: There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. It is an incontestable fact that the forgotten eccentrics described in the first half of this book built up the myth which, years later, the masters of a great European nation were to use as a warrant for genocide.
Shrewd Businessmen A Jewish agent in a Catholic insurance firm did exceptionally well for a number of years and was recommended for a top executive post. His religion posed a serious problem, however, because the company felt it would harm their relations with top members of other firms. After a good deal of agonizing, they decided to call in a leading priest to convert the Jew. A meeting was held in the private office of the company’s president, during which the clergyman attempted to persuade the Jew to accept the Christian faith. Finally, after almost three hours, the two emerged. ‘“Well, Father,” asked the president. “How did you make out? Do we have a new
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #18 Catholic?” “No, we don’t,” replied the priest, “but he did sell me a $50,000 policy.” Whether or not Jews are actually shrewder businessmen than others is impossible to prove. Certainly this is widely believed to be so, as can be seen from such popular expressions as “Jew you down.” There are enough factors involved that would suggest that they might indeed have an edge in this area. For one thing, Jews have been in business for a long time. The feudal system of the Middle Ages, which lasted over a thousand years, excluded Jews. Forbidden to own land by the Church, denied entry into the various craft guilds that were so important in those times, Jews were forced to turn to money lending in order to survive. The Church forbade its members to enter this occupation, since it regarded the charging of interest, no matter how small the amount, as sinful. The Talmud, on the other hand, permitted the charging of interest on business loans, so long as the rates were not excessive, taking the position that moneylending was necessary in order to stimulate trade and commerce. Since the Jews were damned and money was damned, the Church concluded that a marriage of the two was entirely fitting and appropriate. As matters turned out, the Jews became indispensable to the feudal economy in this capacity. It was they who supplied the necessary funds when the farmer’s crops failed or when his livestock were killed off by disease. They also supplied the necessary capital when the nobles wanted to build castles, when they went off to war when the Church purchased jewels, and so forth. Eventually the Christian majority came to the conclusion that moneylending wasn’t such a bad idea, and when this happened Jews found themselves forced out of the industry which they had pioneered in so many countries. Nevertheless, their experience in money matters and continuing discrimination against them made it inevitable that they would remain involved in various forms of business. For example, it was moneylending that was responsible for the entry of Jews into the diamond trade. This occurred because diamonds were often used as collateral for loans. Thus, in the sixteenth century Jews controlled the diamond trade in Portugal, which traded extensively with India, then the chief source of uncut diamonds. Later, when the Jews were forced to leave Portugal,. Holland, which welcomed the Jews, became the new
center of the diamond market. The Jewish religion, with its emphasis on abstract thinking, may also account for the Jews interest and skill in business. It was not merely the worship of an abstract God that could not be seen and the rejection of idol worship, for Christianity and Islam also shared such beliefs. Rather, it was the study of the Talmud and the focus on abstract ideas which make up so much of that work that sharpened the mind of the Jew to the point where he was able to transfer his intellectual acumen to the economic sphere. From childhood on, when he was first exposed to the Bible, the Jew’s mind was geared toward explaining the seemingly incomprehensible. As an adolescent, he might spend hours discussing the conditions under which the ancient rabbinic sages would permit someone to purchase something that had not yet come into existence. Could one, for example, purchase a grove of palm trees even if there were no trees, simply because past experience indicated that they were certain to spring up in a particular location? And, if so, was it permissible to buy the wool from a sheep before the time had come to shear it, or the as—yet—unborn calves of a cow? Even those Jews who were not as educated developed a profound respect and appreciation for such thinking. Thus, when capitalism became important in the modern world, Jews were in a position to benefit from it. After all, interest, futures, options, stocks and, most importantly, money itself were abstractions. They were representations of concrete items, and the Jew, trained as he was to think in analogies that spanned both time and space, was equipped to function in a modern industrialized society that increasingly depended upon commerce, banking, and financial investment. In this sense it was not so much a question of superior skills as having the skills that modern society most needed. In The Pawnbroker there is a famous scene in which Rod Steiger, who plays the Jewish immigrant pawnbroker, sternly lectures a young Puerto Rican boy who works for him about the importance of having and holding onto money. It is easy to see in this film the caricature of the Jew as a greedy, moneyhungry man without taking into account the experiences sometimes responsible for such obsessions. Lacking a homeland for thousands of years, always dependent on the whims of others, never certain when persecution might strike, the Jew, perhaps more than any other nationality, has come to
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984.
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see money as a means of survival. In medieval times Jews often bartered their lives in exchange for money, which they gave to local overlords for protection from a hostile population. Unlike the Gentile, who could work the land and benefit from its use, the Jew owed his shelter, safety, food, and anything else of value he possessed to money. Small wonder that it became so important to many Jews. During the Nazi era, to take a case in point, many Jews survived because they were able to purchase protection from individual Gentiles in various occupied lands. Jews today are far more likely to enter the professions than business-related fields. This is a natural outgrowth of the desire on the part of many Jews of a generation ago to have their children become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so forth, because they wanted to raise both their own status (“my son, the doctor”) and that of their offspring. As a result, the image of the Jew as a shrewd or good business man may, like other stereotypes in this area, be headed for extinction. Still, such views often die a slow death, as this observer discovered during a visit to a non-Jewish resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains in 1980. An Italian comedian regaled his audience with story after story of Jews and their preoccupation with money. In one joke a Jewish watchdog was described as one who says to the burglar, “Take anything you want. It’s all insured.”
Have Horns This belief is not an exaggeration but rather a complete falsehood. It is clearly confined to those who have never seen a Jew. While few Americans fall into this category, the author was asked this question once while traveling through rural Iowa. Its roots can be traced to Aquila Ponticus, who translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek during the second century. According to the Bible, Moses is described as descending from Mount Sinai carrying the tablets, with rays of light shining from his head. Unfortunately for the Jews, the word koran (shone) was incorrectly pronounced keren, the Hebrew word for horn. This was quite easy to do, since Hebrew relies on vowels beneath the letters for its pronunciation, and the vowels in the version consulted by Ponticus were probably missing. This interpretation was given a powerful boost in popularity in the Renaissance. One of the greatest works during that time was Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, and perched on his head are two small
horns. The stereotype was also enhanced by the association, among Christians, of the Jew with the devil.
The “Chosen People” For you are a holy people unto the Lord your God: of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth the Lord your God has chosen you to be his treasured people. (Deut. 7:6) The story is told of how God offered the Torah to several other nations before turning to the Jews, all of whom rejected it as too restrictive. The Jews, according to the legend, accepted it unquestioningly, agreeing to be bound by its commandments even before they knew what they were. Such acceptance implied a special responsibility but did not mean superiority. Thus one can understand the response to the English writer Hilaire Belloc’s quip, “How odd of God to choose the Jews” that “It was not odd—the Jews chose God” Regardless of who chose whom, there is certainly a kernel of truth to this theory, for many Jews, especially those who are observant, believe that God has a special relationship with “His people.” Many view their meticulous observance of the hundreds of Biblical commandments as meriting special consideration from God. In addition Jews have used the idea of being chosen to explain the suffering and cruelties to which they were so often subjected by other peoples. It was often only by seeing himself as destined to play a special role in the world or in the hereafter that the Jew was able to justify his suffering. Support for the concept of chosenness comes also from Christian fundamentalists, who cite such evidence as the survival of the Jews through the ages despite the efforts of others to destroy them, their success in so many areas, and the rebirth of the State of Israel. In his book Israel’s Final Holocaust noted evangelist Dr. Jack Van Impe writes: Frederick the Great said: “No nation ever persecuted the Jew and prospered.” His correct observation is proof of God’s faithfulness in keeping His promise to Abraham. This tiny scattered people has had such a definite date with destiny that no power on earth could destroy them. If the Jews are “chosen,” they are not unique in
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #18 this sense. After all, Christianity and Islam, as well as most other religions, hold out the promise of divine grace and salvation only to believers. By contrast Judaism believes that “all the righteous of the world have a place in the world to come.” Nevertheless, it ought to be recognized that no faith or doctrine can demand the undivided loyalty of its adherents unless it believes its members occupy a special place in the scheme of life. In modem times, as Jews have increased their contact with people outside their community, many leaders have become increasingly sensitive to this stereotype. Some have responded by asking, tongue in cheek, whether being chosen is such a great privilege when one considers that the Jews have been persecuted for so many centuries and have only recently been able to reestablish their homeland. Others have taken concrete steps to deal with the term by specifically denying its validity. The Reconstructionists, one of the denominations within the Jewish faith, have eliminated all such references from their prayer book while Orthodox Jews have repeatedly emphasized that the concept means service and accountability, not an elite status.
Killed Jesus Christ Nearly every Jew in America has been exposed, at one time or another, to the charge that the Jews murdered Jesus. For some it has come up in innocent ways, a casual observation made by a neighbor or fellow worker; for others it was the taunt of “Christ killer!” often encountered in childhood days. Even the 1965 declaration by the Vatican that the Jews as a group could not be held responsible for what occurred did not lay the matter to rest. Here, then, in brief, is what happened. The trouble began when Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem three days before his death and drove out the vendors and money-changers, predicted the destruction of the Temple, and attacked the Sadducean high priests. Followers of Jesus described him as a messiah or as “king of the Jews” and thus alarmed the Temple authorities. Fearful that such claims would bring the wrath of the Roman legions upon them (this had happened in the past with other messianic claimants), they paid one of Jesus’ apostles, Judas Iscariot, to help them arrest Jesus. Why, as a loyal follower, Judas accepted the bribe is not known. In any case, Jesus was arrested at night and turned over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator of Judea, who ordered him executed.
One misconception about these events is that it was the Jewish high court, known as the Sanhedrin, that ordered his execution. This is highly unlikely for several reasons, First, it was illegal for the court to meet at night, nor could it do so on the eve of a holiday, which in this instance was Passover. In fact, the court had no power of arrest. Finally, according to the Gospels, Jesus was tried at the palace of Caiaphas, the high priest. Yet the Sanhedrin never met any place but in their own court, known as the Chamber of Hewn Stone. For all of these reasons it seems far more likely that his arrest was arranged only by the aristocratic Sadducees, who were angered by his attacks upon them. There is no evidence that the death sentence decreed by Pontius Pilate was instigated or supported by the Jews. In all likelihood the high priests merely wanted Jesus detained until after the Passover holiday. The Gospel according to John does say, however, that Pontius Pilate ordered Jesus’ death because of pressure from the Jews. This seems rather improbable since Pontius Pilate was one of the most ruthless rulers in history and was, in any event, extremely unlikely to be afraid of an unarmed civilian population. This Gospel is, incidentally, the most pro-Roman, perhaps because, as the last Gospel, it was written at a time when the Christians had begun aiming their teachings at the Romans themselves. This last factor may account for the fact that it is the only Gospel to specifically blame the Jews for the crucifixion. Part of the problem here is that the Gospels are our only written record of these events and were only transcribed forty to ninety years after they occurred. They also contradict each other at various points. Perhaps the greatest canard is the accusation that the Jews actually killed Jesus. To begin with, crucifixion was not permitted by Jewish law, even on the rare occasions when the Jewish courts sentenced someone to death. It was a Roman method of execution that was used on thousands of people, including many Jews. The flogging or scourging of Jesus prior to his crucifixion and forcing him to carry his own cross were also well-known Roman customs. In addition, executions were never carried out on Fridays by the Jews. Finally, according to Jewish law it was a requirement that as the accused was being led to his death a herald should walk before him and ask for any supporting witnesses to come forward and refute the charges. There is no record that this was done.
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984.
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No one knows for certain what the Jewish population of Jerusalem was thinking as they watched Jesus being marched through the streets. Some may have felt his death justified because of his seemingly blasphemous messianic claims; others simply because the Temple priests opposed him. The majority, however, probably sympathized with him as just another Jewish victim of the Romans. It must be remembered that Jesus was a Jew, and his sect was only one of many Jewish groups. Moreover, he had never renounced the validity of Mosaic Law. In fact, according to the Gospels it was the Jews, not the Romans, who wept at the crucifixion site. Will Durant sums up the event in The Story of Civilization: “Quite clearly the condemnation did not have the approval of the Jewish people.” In the face of all this, it is interesting that the charge should have survived for so long. In fact, even if it were true, why blame those not alive at the time? Apart from all the psychological and social reasons for stereotyping that have been mentioned in the first chapter, there is the seriousness of the charge of deicide. The Jews are accused of having killed the Son of God. The perception of the Jews as guilty is undoubtedly heightened by the fact that they continue to refuse to accept Jesus as the Savior, and have the nerve to regard him as a fake messiah. The Church’s declaration that the Jews, past or present, could not be held accountable for his death prompted a suggestion by the humorist Harry Golden that the Jews issue a statement of their own clearing today’s Christians from complicity in all the crusades and pogroms of the past two thousand years.
Control Wall Street and the Banks This stereotype was accurate around the turn of the century, when the major stock brokerage firms were both founded and run by Jews. As an example of their power, the financier Jacob Schiff was able to float a $200 million bond issue for the Japanese government on short notice. Jews are still well represented in Wall Street brokerage houses. A glance at the names listed in the New York Stock Exchange Directory indicates that perhaps a quarter of them are Jewish sounding. In addition, important companies such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, Bear Stearns, and Lazard Freres were started by Jews. On the other hand, some of the largest firms on Wall Street today, such as Merrill Lynch, The First Boston Corporation, and Blythe
Eastman Dillon are most definitely not “Jewish” firms. Furthermore, the so-called “Jewish houses” are often so in name ‘only. Many of the children of the early founders intermarried and quite a few are, in fact, no longer Jewish. Finally, there are probably no firms of any size in existence today on Wall Street that are exclusively Jewish in terms of those who exercise power within them. Jewish influence in banking today is virtually nonexistent. Several banks such as Bank Leumi and Republic National Bank of New York are under Jewish ownership, but the vast majority of banks are not only controlled by non-Jews but do not, in fact, employ Jews in high positions. For example, in New York City, where two million Jews live, there are almost no Jews among the top executives of the city’s seven largest banks. Elsewhere in the country the proportion is even smaller. A 1978 study by Professor Stephen Slavin of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York found that schools with low Jewish enrollment received far more visits from corporate recruiters than those with large numbers of Jewish students. IBM’s recruiting manual, for example, lists hundreds of U.S. colleges that the company visits annually, but the list doesn’t include Brandeis or Yeshiva. But the worst offenders, according to Slavin, were the large New York City banks, which send recruiters all over the country while ignoring the largely Jewish colleges in their own backyard. (Dan Rottenberg, “How to Succeed In Business Without Being Gentile.” Jewish Living December 1979:41) In recent years some banks have begun to make a more concerted effort to attract Jews. There are, however, two major obstacles. The first is that, notwithstanding the increased acceptance of Jews in general, there are still many people who are simply not comfortable among Jews. American business has always been tied in with social connections, and many of these are made in private clubs that still discriminate against Jews. As a result, banks are often reluctant to hire or promote Jews because they fear it will affect their business. Naturally, they may use this argument as an excuse to perpetuate their own prejudices. A second problem is that the word is
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #18 already out among Jewish graduates of business schools that advancement is very difficult for Jews who enter banking. This means that many graduates who are highly qualified do not even bother to try. Recognizing this, some banks have sponsored meetings and seminars focusing on recruiting more Jews, but thus far banking is still a very closed field to Jews. If there are so few Jews in banking, why and how did this stereotype emerge? It is here that we encounter the kernel of truth theory. Although the major role was probably played by the bankers of the Italian city-states, Jews became heavily involved in moneylending, which eventually became known as banking, in the late Middle Ages. During the nineteenth century their influence in banking increased with the rise of banking houses such as Rothschild, Marcus and Warburg, Salomons, Kuhn and Loeb, and others in America there was the wellknown case of Haym Salomon, who helped finance the American Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century numerous important banking houses were established in this country by German-Jewish immigrants. Moreover, families such as the Schiffs, Seligmans, Loebs, and others often acted together to offset the financial influence of the much larger Gentile concerns. This contributed to the feeling that Jews, as a group, “controlled things.” Fueled by Populist politics, anti-Semitism increased. This, combined with the rise of large impersonal corporations, served to virtually eliminate the influence of Jews in banking. A B’nai Brith study done in 1939 found that less than one percent Of 211 bankers in the United States were Jewish. Despite the fact that what was once true is no longer the case, the stereotype about Jewish control in these areas persists, all of which attests to the staying power of prejudice in general. Moreover, the perception of Jews as controlling Wall Street or the banks carries with it the belief that the Jew often acts to promote specific Jewish interests at the expense of those who do not belong to the faith. This is actually part of the anti-Semitic image of the Jew as a world conspirator. What better place to employ this stereotype than in money matters where Jews are, for various reasons, heavily involved? The fact that the world of finance and the reasons for the ups and downs of the economy are so poorly understood by the average person makes this a very convenient area in which to target Jews as scapegoats.
Rich and Ostentatious Teaching a course on minority relations at City College of the City University of New York, I once spent an hour discussing the general view that “all Jews are rich.” The class, predominantly AfroAmericans and Hispanic, had just seen a short film on the Holocaust when one Black student, a middle-aged man who had been an aide to former New York City Mayor John Lindsay, raised his hand and asked, “Why are we feeling so sorry for the Jews? Everyone knows that five years after the Holocaust they made all their money back.” Others chimed in with comments such as, “Everybody knows that Jews are rich.” “Money’s in their blood,” and so forth. To what extent are such assertions true? On the one hand, only one of the ten wealthiest families In America is Jewish. They are the Pritzkers of Chicago, worth an estimated $850 million. Compared to the Mellons, worth between $3 and $5 billion, and the Gettys, whose wealth is well over $2 billion, the Pritzker fortune, large as it maybe, does not put them into the category of the super-rich. On the other hand, a 1979 survey of American wealth by writer Dan Rottenberg found ten Jews among the seventyfour families in this country whose net worth was $200 million or more. Thus Jews, who constitute but three percent of the population, are indeed overrepresented among the nation’s richest families. The majority of Jews in this country are not millionaires, being both solidly middle-class and earning more, on the average, than the average American. Studies by the National Opinion Research Center and United States Census Bureau reveal that the median income of Jews is significantly higher than that of non-Jews. Demographers have pointed out, however, that this is directly related to education. When Jews and others in the population with similar educational levels are compared, the differences are less than ten percent. All but overlooked by many is the existence of large numbers of poor Jews, mostly elderly folk living on pensions and social security. In an article called “The Invisible Jewish Poor,” which appeared in the Journal of Jewish Communal Service the number of American Jews living at or below the poverty level was estimated at between 700,000 and 800,000 The author, Ann Wolfe, a consultant to the American Jewish Committee, cited the case of a thirty-squareblock area in “wealthy” Miami Beach’s South Shore, where the average annual income in 1968 was
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984.
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$2,460 and where thousands of Jews were subsisting on less than $28 a week for food and rent. One major reason for the common perception of Jews as rich is their concentration in retail businesses ranging from grocery stores to large department stores. As a result, they must often deal directly with the poor and the working class, many of whom are apt to focus general resentment at their economic status on an easily identifiable scapegoat. The same is true in the housing area. It is much simpler to focus on the Jewish landlord (or slumlord) than on the impersonal gas or electric company, whose wealth is far greater. It makes little difference to a poverty-stricken ghetto dweller that his Jewish landlord is middle-class. Compared to his own economic plight, the Jew is rich. As long as Jews are heavily involved in highly visible occupations of this sort, such stereotypes are likely to persist. As far as ostentatiousness goes, it is not clear that Jews are, in fact, more showy than other groups, but the stereotype, greatly popularized by the unforgettable wedding scene in Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, is well-known. Puerto Ricans and Afro-Americans have also been accused of ostentatiousness, mostly in terms of loud clothing, fancy cars, and so forth. Behavior of this sort, where it exists, can perhaps be explained as a response by a minority group to perceived or actual rejection by the larger society. It is a way of saying, “You may think I’m nobody but my material well-being proves that, at least in one way, I have made it.” For the upwardly mobile Jew, motivated as he is by a strong work ethic and a general desire to succeed, conspicuous consumption can sometimes become a way of justifying one’s efforts. Doing so is obviously easier if, as is true of many Jews one has the financial means. Acting in what has come to be called the style of the “nouveau riche” can also be attributed to the insecurities of those who are more recent arrivals to the United States. Writing in 1930 about Jews, who had immigrated to America and settled in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York, the writer Michael Gold gave the following description of one such family “We came into a large gaudy room glowing with red wallpaper, and stuffed like the show window of a furniture store with tables, chairs, sofas, dressers, bric-a-brac. Mrs. Cohen wore a purple silk waist, hung
with yards of tapestry and lace. Diamonds shone from her ears; diamond rings sparked from every ringer…typical wife of a Jewish nouveau riche.” (Jews Without Money; p. 217) It is interesting that today the Orthodox Jewish community…seems most concerned about this issue. In an address given at the 1974 convention of the strictly Orthodox organization Agudath Israel of America. Rabbi Chaim Dov Keller, a prominent leader in the community, chastised his audience for such tendencies, saying, Many of our people have suffered a warping of priorities, throwing themselves headlong into the pursuit of materialism. Unbelievable sums of money are spent for one night of a wedding celebration, while yeshivas (Hebrew schools) pay their teachers coolie wages for lack of funds. Plush carpets and ornate furnishings have become status symbols among a people whose aristocracy was always measured in terms of…learning and righteousness. (Jewish Observer, January 1975: 10) Generally speaking, as members of a group become more Americanized they will lose their cultural distinctiveness. Often this includes a conscious downplaying of certain traits associated with the group. One respondent whom I interviewed in a study of Jewish identity stated: I am super conscious of being Jewish. I will overtip in a restaurant because I know people think Jews are cheap. I’ll order in a soft voice, and my taste in cars, clothes, and the furniture I buy for our home is very conservative because I know what others think of Jews.
Control the Media Jews play an important role in media industries in the United States. Some examples are CBS, chaired by William Paley, and ABC, headed by Leonard Goldenson, both Jews. NBC was founded by another Jew, David Sarnoff, who also created RCA. Lester Bernstein, editor of Newsweek, and Henry Grunwald, who occupies the post of editor-in-chief at Time magazine, are both Jews. The Newhouse chain of
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #18 newspapers, which, with a combined daily circulation of close to 3.3 million in 1978, is the third largest in the United States, is owned by the Newhouse family. Then, of course, there is the New York Times, owned by the Sulzbergers. At the same time, it would be an exaggeration to say that Jews dominate this field. The Newhouse group includes only 31 out of a total of 291 chainoperated newspapers. A survey by political scientist Stephen Isaacs revealed that only 3.1 percent of the 1,007 newspapers in this country were owned by Jews. Moreover, the magazines with the second and third largest circulation, Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, have relatively few Jews in top posts, as do the two major news services, AP and UPI. Morton Yarmon, public relations director at the American Jewish Committee, found only about half a dozen Jewish-sounding names among 200 chief editorial writers of newspapers around the countryhardly a scientific approach but interesting nonetheless. One area where Jews have always had a major impact is Hollywood. In fact, it was Jews, for the most part, who founded the filmmaking industry. Men such as William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis Mayer, Adolph Zukor, the Selznicks, and many others got their start around the beginning of the century running nickelodeons where customers saw movies for a nickel while seated on wooden chairs. These men, known as “moguls,” gravitated to filmmaking and distribution because it offered opportunities to the new immigrants unavailable in more established fields. They remained typically Jewish, often had accents, and, as a result, became identified in the public mind with the media in general. For the anti-Semite looking for a scapegoat, the media and the Jews are a perfect match. Many people have a deep suspicion of both what they read in the papers and what TV and radio commentators tell them. “You can’t trust what you read in the paper” or “Don’t believe everything you see on the news” are common expressions even among those not prejudiced against Jews. (Jews also hold such views.) But for the anti-Semite suspicion of the media in terms of credibility adds fuel to his feeling vis-à-vis Jews. It matters little that most news commentators are not Jewish. He may even see persons such as Walter Cronkite, Howard K Smith, and John Chancellor as front people for the Jewish conspiracy
he imagines must be behind the news. Most studies have demonstrated that, notwithstanding the recent tilt to conservatism, Jews are generally liberal. The presence of substantial numbers of Jews in the media might be partially responsible for its seemingly liberal bias, but there is no evidence linking the two. In fact, the giant Newhouse chain is well known for its policy of not interfering with the positions taken by its newspapers, many of which are politically and ideologically conservative. If Jews are well represented in the media, this does not mean that they work actively to promote Jewish interests. A good case in point is the State of Israel. The overwhelming majority of Jews in this country are pro- Israel. Yet the New York Times has certainly not been pro-Israel in its editorials over the years. At best it could be regarded as “even-handed.” Columnists such as James Reston and Anthony Lewis, while occasionally sympathetic to Israel, have generally been highly critical of its policies. In a scathing article that appeared in The Village Voice, reporter Sol Stern charged: Our most important newspaper (the New York Times) has turned its only page of outside opinion into an exclusive sounding board for the opposition to the democratically elected government of an allied country. This is unprecedented and scandalous. (The Village Voice, October 1-7, 1980: 13) According to Stern, the Op-Ed page of the New York Times has carried about forty “guest” columns and articles on the Middle East since Menachem Begin’s election in May 1977. Not one has appeared that supports the Begin government. Stern cites three pieces that were submitted and rejected, including one by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. Interestingly, the New York Times published an article favorable to Begin on its Op-Ed page several days after Stern’s attack. The two major newsweeklies, Time magazine and Newsweek, have, over the years, published many stories favorable to the Arabs despite the involvement of Jews at the highest levels in both places. Surely it is possible for Jews to disagree with Israeli policies. The fact, however, that such disagreement or even neutrality is often expressed in the media indicates that there is a big difference
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984.
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Unit II: READING #18 between saying that many Jews work in the media and that they made a concerned effort to promote the interests of Jews as a whole. Why are so many Jews found in this field? The major reasons are probably: their generally high level of education; their interest in intellectual and literary affairs; the
fact that so many Jews live in New York and Los Angeles, the communications time centers of the country; and the fact that Jews were able to enter this profession from the ground floor many years ago as immigrants.
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
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1.
What were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? What was the purpose of the Protocols? Although exposed as a fraud, how do you account for the fact that the Protocols are still widely disseminated today in Russia, Arab lands and in Latin America?
2.
Are there historic reasons why Jews may have been stereotyped as shrewd businesspeople? How has this stereotype been used against Jews? Is the stereotype valid today?
3.
How has literature, interpretations of the Bible and art been used to promote stereotypes of Jewish people?
4.
The article exposes the harmful myth that the Jews killed Jesus. This myth, now condemned by the Catholic and other Christian churches, is refuted in the article. Discuss some of the logical arguments presented by the author. How was this myth harmful to Jews and helpful to those who believed it was true?
5.
Examine the remaining common stereotypes described in the article. (These include the myths that Jews control Wall Street, the banks and the media.) Write your conclusions about the origins, effects and current validity of these stereotypes.
6.
Identify common stereotypes of two additional groups in our society. How are these stereotypes harmful? Who perceives them to be beneficial? What can be done to counteract such stereotypes?
Source: Helmreich, William B. “The Things They Say Behind Your Back: Stereotypes About Jews.”Ivan L. Tillem., Ed. The Jewish Directory and Almanac. New York: Pacific Press, 1984. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #19
what is a jew? Philip Rosen, Ph.D.
T
he Jewish people have a distinctive consciousness—a sense of sharing a common origin and fate and a unique religious, historical, and cultural heritage. Jews lived with and under many peoplesEgyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arab-Muslims and Christian Europeans-yet preserved their own identity. The earliest tradition preserved in history relates to a self-image of a people chosen by God to obey Him alone and keep His commandments. Jews believe they are descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. God made a covenant (sacred agreement) with the forefathers that Jews are to live by a book— the Five Books of Moses, known as the Torah — hence Jews enjoy God’s special protection. Two central ideas prevail down through the ages: election by God and the role of Jews to bring ethical monotheism to the peoples of the world. Jews are to live by commandments found in the Torah. These include, for Orthodox Jews, all ritual observances, celebration of all holidays and social-ethical behavior. The latter include defense of the weak, sympathy for the stranger, aiding the poor, and kindness to humans and animals. Non-Orthodox Jews accept the latter but are selective about rituals and manner of celebration of holidays. While Orthodox Jews tend to define Jews and emphasize religious aspects, non-Orthodox stress cultural and historical aspects. Cultural aspects include attachment to organizations, Jewish charities, pro-Israel groups (Zionist), defense against antiSemitism, and observing marriage and death traditions. Jews have a special feeling toward the Hebrew language, the Yiddish language (JudeoGerman) and those from North Africa and Mediterranean areas, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). There
are eating customs. Pork products are avoided; many Jews eat only ritually accepted foods, kosher food, and enjoy special holiday foods such as matzoh on Passover. Most Jews define a Jew by the Jewish law, one born of a Jewish mother, although Reform Jews also accept the father as transmitting identity. Judaism was the mother religion of both Christianity and Islam. However, if a Jew converts to one of these he/she is no longer considered a Jew. Jews are not members of any race; they are not strictly a biological people. Jews come in all colors, sizes, shapes and appearances. They tend to resemble the peoples among whom they live. Anti-Semites, Jew haters, falsely say Jews are a race and regardless of how absorbed into the population, they retain negative characteristics. During the late eighteenth century Jews in Western Europe were emancipated, that is, they were allowed to mix freely, marry freely, live where they chose and enjoy equal citizenship and opportunities for education where they lived. Anti-Semites would like to turn the clock back and impose all sorts of economic, social and political restrictions on Jews. The Nazis wished to murder all of them, commit genocide. In summary, Jews are an ethnic community, a historical people who can trace their roots back to biblical times over 4000 years ago. Although there are Jews who do not practice Judaism, Jews have a religion with rituals and rules of behavior governing many aspects of life. Jews have a common history, common customs, common language, folkways and literature. They can live in two worlds, two culturesthe Jewish one and the one where they reside.
Source: Rosen, Dr. Philip. What Is A Jew? Cherry Hill, NJ: unpublished, November 1999.
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the history of anti-semitism Leon Poliakov Translated from the French by Richard Howard SCHOCKEN BOOKS, NEW YORK
Luther
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n 1542 Martin Luther published his celebrated pamphlet: Against the Jews and Their Lies (307). In it he advised never entering into an argument with a Jew. If it was impossible to avoid, one was to say: “Listen, Jew, don’t you know that Jerusalem and your kingdom, the Temple and your ministry, were destroyed over 1460 years ago?…Give this nut to the Jews and let them break their teeth on it and dispute as much as they like. For the cruelty of divine wrath shows all too clearly that they are surely in error and are on the wrong path: a child would understand this…” Then for nearly two hundred pages’ the reformer rails against the Jews in his powerful, lusty style, with a torrential outpouring of passion that makes the diatribes of his predecessors seem languid, and that no one else, perhaps, has matched to this day. Reproach and sarcasm addressed to the Jews alternate with transports of love and of faith in Christ; and between the lines we may glimpse a kind of anguished admiration. Sometimes Luther attacks the usurers and the parasites from foreign countries, and we see how, in forging the German language, he implanted at the same time a certain style of argument and thought. “In truth, the Jews, being foreigners, should possess nothing, and what they do possess should be ours. For they do not work, and we do not give them presents. Nonetheless, they keep our money and our goods and have become our masters in our own country and in their Dispersion. When a thief steals ten guldens, he is hanged; but when a Jew steals ten barrels of gold through his usury, he is prouder than the Lord himself. He boasts of it and strengthens his faith and his hatred of us, and thinks: ‘See how the Lord does not abandon His people in the Dispersion. We do not work, we are idle, and we pass the time pleasantly; the cursed goyim must work for us, and we have their money:
thus we are their lords and they our servants!’ “To this day we still do not know what devil brought them into our country; surely we did not go to seek them out In Jerusalem.” “No one wants them. The countryside and the roads are open to them; they may return to their country when they wish; we shall gladly give them presents to get rid of them, for they are a heavy burden on its, a scourge. a pestilence and misfortune for our country. This is proved by the fact that they have often been expelled by force: from France (which they call Tsarpath), where they had a downy nest; recently from Spain (which they call Sephard), their chosen roost; and even this year from Bohemia, where, in Prague, they had another cherished nest; finally, in my own lifetime, from Ratisbon (Regensburg), Magdeburg, and from many other places…” Sometimes Luther makes use of one of his unique and imaginative comparisons: “They did not live so well in their countries under David and Solomon as they live in our countries, where they steal and pillage every day. Yes, we hold them captive, just as I hold captive my stone [calculus], my ulcers, or any other disease I have caught and must endure: I would rather see [these miseries] in Jerusalem, with the Jews and their following! “Since assuredly we do not hold them captive, how have we provoked such enmity by such noble and saintly characters? We do not call their wives whores, as they do Mary, the mother of Jesus; we do not call their children sons of whores, as they do our Lord Jesus Christ. “We do not curse them; we wish them all the good in the world, in flesh and in spirit. We give them shelter, let them eat and drink with us, we do not carry off and kill their children, nor poison their wells, we do not slake our thirst on their blood. Have we then deserved the fierce anger, the envy and hatred of these great and holy children of God?”
Source: Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #20 He then shifts to the religious level: to the defense and glorification of Christ, the only matter that really counts for Luther: “Know, O adored Christ, and make no mistake, that aside from the Devil, you have no enemy more venomous, more desperate, more bitter, than a true Jew who truly seeks to be a Jew (als einen rechten Juden, der mit Ernst ein Jude sein will). “Now, whoever wishes to accept venomous serpents, desperate enemies of the Lord, and to honor them, to let himself be robbed, pillaged, corrupted, and cursed by them, need only turn to the Jews. If this is not enough for him, he can do more: crawl up into their—and worship the sanctuary, so as to glorify himself afterward for having been merciful, for having fortified the Devil and his children, in order to blaspheme our beloved Lord and the precious blood that has redeemed us. He will then be a perfect Christian, filled with works of mercy, for which Christ will reward him on the Day of Judgment with the eternal fire of hell (where he will roast together) with the Jews…” On a practical level, Luther proposes a series of measures against the Jews: that their synagogues be burned, their books confiscated, that they be forbidden to pray to God in their own way, and that they be made to work with their hands; or, better still, that the princes expel them from their lands and that the authorities-magistrates as well as clergy unite toward these ends. As for himself, having thus done his duty, Luther is “excused.” (Ich habe das meine gethan: ich bin entschuldigtl) A few months later another pamphlet, appeared: Schem Hamephoras, in which Luther’s curses became even more frenzied. Here lie is not concerned with the Jews’ usury and graft, but only with their captious reasoning and their witchcraft. This is, then, a theological polemic, but in what a tone. In the preface, Luther specifies that he is not writing to convert the Jews but merely to edify the Germans: “…so that we Germans may know what a Jew is…For it is as easy to convert a Jew as to convert the Devil. A Jew, a Jewish heart are hard as wood, as stone, as iron, as the Devil him self. In short, they are children of the Devil, condemned to the flames of hell…” Later he contrasts the apocryphal gospels of the Jews, which are specious and false, with the four canonical Gospels whose truth is evident. His exegesis is interspersed with remarks of this kind: “Perhaps some merciful and holy soul among us Christians will be of the opinion that I am too rough
with these poor and pitiable Jews, mocking and deriding them. 0 Lord, I am much too feeble to mock such devils. I would do so, but they are much stronger than I in raillery, and they have a God who is a past master in this art; he is called the Devil and the wicked spirit….” In other passages Luther indulges in obscene buffoonery: “…Cursed goy that I am, I cannot understand how they manage to be so skillful, unless I think that when Judas Iscariot hanged himself, his guts burst and emptied. Perhaps the Jews sent their servants with plates of silver and pots of gold to gather up Judas’ piss with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank his offal, and thereby acquired eyes so piercing that they discover in the Scriptures commentaries that neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself found there, not to mention the rest of its cursed goyim… Elsewhere we seem to hear a cry from some deeper level of his tormented soul: “I cannot understand it except by admitting that they have transformed God into the Devil, or rather into a servant of the Devil, accomplishing all the evil the Devil desires, corrupting unhappy souls, and raging against himself. In short, the Jews are worse than the devils. 0 God, my beloved father and creator, have pity on me who, in self-defense, must speak so scandalously of Thy divine and eternal Majesty, against Thy wicked enemies, the devils and the Jews. You know that I do so in the ardor of my faith, and in Thy Majesty’s honor; for in my case, the question is one that involves all my heart and all my life…” Such are the depths into which Luther allowed himself to fall, wherein scatology that outraged his most faithful colleagues followed closely upon authentic religious anguish. He concluded this work by proclaiming: “Here I break off, and I would have nothing further to do with the Jews, neither write upon them, nor against them. They have had enough of me. If there are some among them who would repent, may God take them into His mercy…” A drunkard’s promise: many letters attest to Luther’s efforts to have the Jews expelled or their privileges withdrawn. (He was successful in this respect in Saxony, Brandenburg, and Silesia. “Truly, he has made our position very perilous!” noted Yosel (Joseph) of Rosheim at this time in his Memoirs) (308). Luther’s last sermon at Eisleben, the city of his birth, four days before his death (February 18, 1546), was
Source: Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
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Unit II: READING #20
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entirely devoted to the obdurate Jews, whom it was a matter of great urgency to expel from all German territory. It would be easy to explain these excesses in the light of what is known of the aging Luther, of his bitterness and inner conflicts, his hallucinations that made him see the Devil everywhere, and his incessant obsession with the end of the world. Such comparisons, which we have already made several times with respect to other prophets, would nowhere be better justified than in Luther’s case. We might also, apropos of his verbal lack of restraint, cite some relevant psychopathological considerations. For instance, the reformer was a man who slipped into blasphemy, as in his stating that at certain moments and during certain temptations, he no longer knew who was God and who was the Devil and he actually wondered if the Devil was not God! At times he called God infinitely foolish (stultissimus) and described the Christian religion as the most absurd of any. On one occasion he proved that Christ must necessarily have been an adulterer, and on still another proclaimed the suppression of the Ten Commandments. One might describe him as an unbalanced genius and find in him astonishing anticipations of Freudian theory. We know, too, that he expressed himself about the pope, his archenemy, even more vehemently and obscenely than about the Jews. Such invectives, temptations, and outbursts of aggression certainly seem to combine quite naturally with the hatred of the chosen people. But Luther’s character is too rich and complex, and the imprint he left on the history of his country and of our whole civilization is too profound, for it to lie content with an over-simplified, unidimensional interpretation, limited to the level of individual psychology. As we have said, Luther was not always the enemy of the Jews. At the zenith of his activity, during the heroic period when this rebellious monk, sustained and justified by his faith, defied pope and emperor and for some time attained the dizzy peaks of total freedom, he had a very different attitude toward the Jews. Apparently he hoped for some time to convert and rally to his cause the people of the Bible. This hope moved him to publish in 1523 a pamphlet with a significant title: Jesus Christ Was
Born a Jew (Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei). This was a missionary text intended to show the Jews, with the help of the exegesis of various verses from Genesis and Daniel, that Christ was indeed the true Messiah. Commentaries on the meaning of the Dispersion and the servitude of the Jews were cited in support of this view. The author sympathizes with the Jews and mocks their enemies: “Our imbeciles, the papists and the bishops, the sophists and the monks, have treated the Jews in such a way that a good Christian would seek to become a Jew. If I had been a Jew, I should have preferred to turn pig before I became a Christian, seeing how these imbeciles and ignorant louts govern and teach the Christian faith. They have treated the Jews as if they were dogs and not men. They have done nothing but persecute them. The Jews are the blood relatives, the cousins and brothers of Our Lord; if His blood and flesh could be boasted of, the Jews belong to Jesus Christ much more than we do. Hence I beg my dear papists to call me a Jew, when they are tired of calling me a heretic… “That is why I advise being considerate of them. So long as we use violence and lies and accuse them of using Christian blood to eradicate their own stink, and I do not know what other absurdities; so long as we keep them from living and working among us, in our communities, and force them to practice usury— how can they come to us? If we seek to aid them, it is the law of Christian love that we must apply to them, and not the papist law. We must welcome them in friendship, let them live and work with us; and they will be of one heart with us…” To understand Luther’s complete reversal between 1523 and 1543, we may note primarily that his propaganda met with no success among the Jews. Although he had some discussions with them, there were very few who “came to him” and accepted conversion, and most of these seem to have recanted subsequently. “If I find a Jew to baptize, I shall lead him to the Elbe Bridge, hang a stone around his neck, and push him into the water, baptizing him with the name of Abraham!” he sneered one day in 1532. “These dogs mock us and our religion!” And when, five years later, the indefatigable Yosel of Rosheim tried to intercede with him apropos of the expulsion
Source: Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #20 of the Jews from Saxony, Luther refused to receive him and informed him in writing of his disappointment. His heart, he told the Jew, in substance, remained kindly disposed toward the Jews, but such kindness must serve to convert them, not to confirm them in their errors. Shortly thereafter, troubling news reached him from Bohemia. On the instigation of the Jews, some reformed Christians were Judaizing, celebrating the Sabbath, and even having themselves circumcised. This news seemed to upset Luther greatly; thereafter, in conversation, he referred more often to the Jews: “I hope I shall never be so stupid as to be circumcised!” he exclaimed one day. “I would rather cut off the left breast of my Catherine and of all women!” And he wrote a missive, “The Letter of Dr. Martin Luther against the Sabbatarians,” in which he polemicized against the Jewish law. On December 31, 1539, he announced to his friends: “I cannot convert the Jews. Our Lord Christ did not succeed in doing so; but I can close their mouths so that there will be nothing for them to do but lie upon the ground.” Three years later he put his plans into operation. Such were the successive stages of Luther’s reversal. To be sure, the Jews had profoundly disappointed him. But there was something else: during these years he himself had changed a great deal. Between 1521 and 1543 lay the gap that separates dream from reality. There had been the war of the knights, the bloody peasant revolts, the countless sects and heresies, put down by fire and sword, with Luther’s express approval. His very success had made him aware of the measure of human imperfection and of his own political responsibilities. Forced to choose, he had sided with the mighty of this world, the princes, since it was upon them that the future of the Reformation depended. Thus the splendid purity of his doctrine was tarnished. Blood was shed in his name, crimes were perpetrated to which he must accommodate himself, for better or worse. (“You do not acknowledge the peasants, but they acknowledge you!” Erasmus wrote him.) Certain aspects of his thought developed as a consequence: to inner freedom he opposed the immutable order of things
established in the world by God. The necessity of obedience was emphasized: the Christian must remain loyal and submissive. Hence, by an inescapable dialectical reversal, the doctrine of total freedom becomes one of total servitude. The archangel of rebellion is transformed into an embittered and despotic bourgeois, excommunicated and banished from the empire, confined in the small territory where his prince protects him. We can readily see that his failure among the Jews tormented Luther all the more since his rejection by the people of God was symbolic of the countless failures and disappointments that darkened his last years and which he attributed to the intervention of the Devil—and of the Jews. Did he not make them responsible (even if it was said jokingly) for the chill that, in 1546, was to carry him off in three weeks? The Devil tormented him only in dreams; the Jews were living scapegoats, within easy reach. The consequences of Luther’s position with regard to the “Jewish question” were incalculable, less from the direct effect of his savage texts—which during his lifetime enjoyed only a limited circulation and which subsequently, until Hitler’s advent, were practically hidden under the bushels—than as a result of a certain internal logic of German Lutheranism. In that species of polyphonic passion which is antiSemitism, the religious motif of justification by faith implies the rejection of justification by works, an essentially Jewish doctrine (judischer Glauben, wrote Luther; and we have seen that for him the “Jew who truly seeks to be a Jew” is the “enemy of Christ”). The social motif of unconditional obedience to the authorities, combined with identification with a national prophet—the reformer had specified many times that he was addressing himself to the Germans alone—paved the way for the Hitlerian heresy four centuries later. In all this, Luther’s ardent spirit had roused some secret yearning of his people, provoking a gradual crystallization of national awareness. In essence, “the Jewish problem was for Luther the reverse of the problem of Christ,” as one of his German commentators has recently pointed out (309). This is an appalling contrast; for minds not trained to the subtleties of dialectics, but that look
Source: Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.
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Unit II: READING #20 upon moral questions as black or white, it inevitably comes down to contrasting “good” and “evil,” “God” and “Devil,” with consequences we have discussed at length.” “If to be a good Christian is to detest the Jews, then we are all good Christians,” Erasmus had said. Perhaps a true Christian who worshiped his God in the manner of a Martin Luther inevitably ended by detesting the Jews with all his soul and opposing them with all his strength.
Moreover, we must take the customs and usages of the period into consideration. We must consider the actual role of the Jews and the stereotyped notions about them. We have seen what these were before Luther; now we shall see how the question was to develop after him.
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Source: Poliakov, Leon. The History of Anti-Semitism. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #21
Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures Raul Hilberg
Destruction of the European Jews J Canonical (Church) Law º Nazi Measure
J Prohibition of intermarriage and of sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews, Synod of Elvira, 306 º
Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, September 15, 1935
J Jews and Christians not permitted to eat together, Synod of Elvira, 306 º
Jews barred from dining cars (Transport Minister to Interior Minister, December 30, 1939)
J Jews not allowed to hold public office, Synod of Clermont, 535 º
Law for the Re-establishment of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933
J Jews not allowed to employ Christian servants or possess Christian slaves, 3d Synod of Orleans, 538 º
Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, September 15, 1935
J Jews not permitted to show themselves in the streets during Passion Week, 3d Synod of Orleans, 538 º
Decree authorizing local authorities to bar Jews from the streets on certain days (i.e. Nazi holidays), December 3, 1938
J Burning of the Talmud and other books, 12th Synod of Toledo, 681 º
Book burnings in Nazi Germany
J Christians not permitted to patronize Jewish doctors, Trulanic Synod, 692 º
Decree of July 25,1938
J Christians not permitted to live in Jewish homes, Synod of Narbonne, 1050 º
Directive by Goring providing for concentration of Jews in houses, Dec. 28, 1938
J Jews obliged to pay taxes for support of the Church to the same extent as Christians, Synod of Gerona, º
1073 The “Sozialausgleichsabgabe” which provided that Jews pay a special income tax in lieu of donations for Party purposes imposed by Nazis, Dec. 24, 1940
J Jews not permitted to be plaintiffs, or witnesses against Christians in the Courts, 3d Lateran Council, º
1179 Proposal by the Party Chancellery that Jews not be permitted to institute civil suits, September 9, 1942
Source: Hilberg, Raul. “Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” and “Pre-Nazi and Nazi, Anti-Jewish Measures.” The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1985.
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Unit II: READING #21
J Jews not permitted to withhold inheritance from descendants who had accepted Christianity, º
3d Lateran Council, 2179 Decree empowering the Justice Ministry to void wills offending the “sound judgment of the people,” July 31, 1938
J The marking of Jewish clothes with a badge, 4th Lateran Council. 1215, Cason 68 (Copied from the º
legislation by Caliph Omar 11 (634-44), who had decreed that Christians wear blue belts and Jews, yellow belts.) Decree of September 1, 1941
J Construction of new synagogues prohibited, Council of Oxford, 1722 º
Destruction of synagogues in entire Reich, November 10, 1938
J Christians not permitted to attend Jewish ceremonies, Synod of Vienna, 1267 º
Friendly relations with Jews prohibited, October 24, 1941
J Jews not permitted to dispute with simple Christian people about the tenets of the Catholic religion, Synod of Vienna, 1267
J Compulsory ghettos, Synod of Breslau, 1267 º
Order by Heydrich, September 21, 1939
J Christians not permitted to sell or rent real estate to Jews, Synod of Ofen, 1279 º
Decree providing for compulsory sale of Jewish real estate, December 3, 1938
J Adoption by a Christian of the Jewish religion or return by a baptized Jew to the Jewish religion defined º
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as heresy, Synod of Mainz, 1310 Adoption by a Christian of the Jewish religion places him in jeopardy of being treated as a Jew, June 26, 1942
J Sale or transfer of Church articles to Jews prohibited, Synod of Lavour, 1368 J Jews not permitted to act as agents in the conclusion of contracts between Christians, especially º
marriage contracts, Council of Basel, 1434 Decree of July 6, 1938, providing for liquidation of Jewish real estate agencies, brokerage agencies, and marriage agencies to non-Jews.
J Jews not permitted to obtain academic degrees, Council of Basel, 1434 º
Law against overcrowding of German schools and universities, April 25,1933
QUESTIONS: 1. What does the comparison between Church Law and Nazi Measures help us understand? 2. Which laws do you think were the most damaging to the Jews? Why? 3. At what point would you have realized that the Nazi Measures were getting to a serious level? What would you have done? What would you do today? 4. Which items in our Bill of Rights or in our Constitution protect us from these measures?
Source: Hilberg, Raul. “Canonical and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures,” and “Pre-Nazi and Nazi Anti-Jewish Measures.” The Destruction of the European Jews. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1985. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #21
pre-nazi and nazi anti-jewish measures
PRE-NAZI STATE DEVELOPMENT
NAZI MEASURE
Per capita protection tax (der goldne Opferpfennig) imposed upon Jews by King Ludwig the Bavarian, 1328-1337 The property of Jews slain in a German city considered as public property, “because the Jews with their possessions belong to the Reich chamber,” provision in the 14th-century code Regulae juris “Addecus”
13th Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law providing that the property of a Jew be confiscated after his death, July 1, 1943
Confiscation of Jewish claims against Christian debtors at the end of the 14th-century in Nuremberg
1lth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law, November 25, 1941
“Fines”: for example, the Regensburg fine for “killing Christian child,” 1421
Decree for the “Atonement Payment” by the Jews, November 12, 1938
Marking of documents and personal papers identifying possessor or bearer as a Jew
Decree providing for identification cards, July 23, 1938 (RGB I 1, 922.)
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Decree providing for marking of passports, October 5, 1938 Marking of houses, special shopping hours, and restrictions of movement, 17th century, Frankfurt
Marking of Jewish apartments, April 17, 1942. Decree providing for movement restrictions, September 1, 1941
Compulsory Jewish names in 19th-century bureaucratic practice
Decree of January 5, 1937 Decree of August 17. 1938
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983.
Unit II: READING #22
ABOUT THE JEW Adolf Hitler
T
he Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual qualities, is without any true culture, and especially without any culture of its own. For what sham culture the Jew today possesses is the property of other peoples, and for the most part it is ruined in his bands. Thus, the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed. The Jew never possessed a state with definite territorial limits and therefore never called a culture his own… He is, and remains, the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading
as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period. Thus, the Jew of all times has lived in the states of other peoples, and there formed his own state, which, to be sure, habitually sailed under the disguise of “religious community” as long as outward circumstances made a complete revelation of his nature seem inadvisable. But as soon as he felt strong enough to do without the protective cloak, he always dropped the veil and suddenly became what so many of the others previously did not want to believe and see: the Jew.
DISCUSSION/QUESTIONS
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Learn about Hitler and his theories. The last document writen by the Fuhrer just before his death was a plea to the German people to carry on the “struggle” against the Jews. The document that brought his philospophy to the attention of the world twenty years earlier. Mein Kampf (my Struggle), also uses that term in its title. Why did Hitler view the world in terms of struggle? What does that suggest about the individual? What were his racial theories? How did he become convinced that the Jews were the source of all evil? Relate these theories to the concept of scapegoating. What events in Hitler’s own life may have created the need for a scapegoat?
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer Eds. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #1
“FORD AND HITLER” James and Suzanne Pool
T
o understand their contempt for democracy it must be pointed out that neither Ford nor Hitler believed in human equality. Ford had no qualms about expressing his disdain; he said there could be “no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal.” If no two things in nature are alike and if each Ford automobile, which has completely identical parts, is unique in some way, then how can men be equal in any way?—this was Ford’s rationale. Since men were “certainly not equal,” any democratic effort to make them equal would only block progress. The crux of Ford’s theory of inequality was the fact that “men cannot be of equal service.” Because there are few men of great ability, it is possible for a mass of men with small ability to pull the greater ones down”but in so doing they pull themselves down.” “It is the greater men who give the leadership to the community and enable the smaller men to live with less effort,” asserted Ford. With equal frankness, Hitler said that “men are not of equal value or of equal importance.” He also spoke of the varying achievements of men and the obvious necessity to entrust the administration of economic and political affairs to the men who had proved themselves most capable. Democracy is nothing but a “leveling down of ability” which makes for waste, complained Ford. It was described by the Dearborn Independent as a “tool” that the Jews used to raise themselves to the ordinary level in places where they are oppressed below it, and then gain special privileges to make themselves superior. But the very Jews who sponsored democracy publicly did not privately believe in the equality of men. This was revealed in the Protocols, which The International Jew quoted: “We were the first to shout the words, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ among the people. These words have been repeated many times since by unconscious poll-parrots, rocking from all sides to this bait with which they have ruined…true personal freedom. The presumably clever…Gentiles did not understand the
symbolism of the uttered words .. did not notice that in nature there is no equality.” It was in the Protocols, claimed the Dearborn Independent, that the Jews admitted they had won their first victory over public opinion with the weapon of democracy Hitler’s explanation was almost identical: Democracy was “the mastery of the herd over the intelligentsia, the mastery over true energy through the dead weight of massed numbers. Therefore it was very simple for the Jewish rulers, small in number and completely invisible to the public eye, to propagandize and ultimately control the masses. Both The International Jew and Mein Kampf use the term “Gentile fronts” to describe the politicians in a democracy. These are men with a “past” who can be easily discredited and thus must bow to the demands of the Jews or lose their position. In fact, the Dearborn Independent claimed the Jewish manipulation of the American election campaigns have been so skillfully handled that even if a good man would be elected, the Jews would have a sufficient amount of evidence to force him under their control. If he still refused to obey, then “scandals,” “investigations,” and “impeachments” would remove him easily. As to the election campaigns, The International Jew said that they are “staged as an entertainment, a diversion for the people.” This charade allows the people to think and act as if they were really making their own government, but it is “always the Jews that win.” When The International Jew began to make its impact, a prominent American Jew, Isaac Landman, of the American Hebrew challenged Ford to prove that a Jewish plot existed. Landman said he would guarantee to provide sufficient money to hire the world’s leading detectives and would agree to print their findings, whatever they might be, in at least one hundred leading newspapers. Henry Ford had always had a liking for detectives. His plant was infested with them. They spied on the workmen, the executives, and upon each other. This was a chance too good to miss. But naturally they had to be his
Source: Pool, James and Suzanne. “Ford and Hitler.” Who Financed Hitler? New York: Dial Press, 1978, 105-107.
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Unit II: READING #23
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own detectives; he was afraid the Jews would find it very easy to corrupt any outside agency. Ford set up an elaborate headquarters in New York and hired a group of agents to unmask the operation of the “Secret World Government.” The agents themselves were an advanced lot: two were former senior members of the U.S. Secret Service, some were professional detectives, and some were just fanatical anti-Semites. They shadowed prominent Jews, investigated such improbable bodies as the War Finance Corporation, and carried on a melodramatic correspondence with headquarters in Detroit using code names as signatures. The detectives spent a great deal of time trying to trace a private telephone line from the home of justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court to the room in the White House here President Wilson lay gravely ill. Not surprisingly, they failed, since Justice Brandeis had no private phone. Not only did Hitler specifically praise Henry Ford in Mein Kampf, but many of Hitler’s ideas were also a direct reflection of Ford’s racist philosophy. There is a great similarity between The International Jew and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and some passages are so identical that it has been said Hitler copied directly from Ford’s publication. Hitler also read Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work, which was published in 1922 and was a best seller in Germany, as well as Ford’s book entitled Today and Tomorrow. There can be no doubt as to the influence of Henry Ford’s ideas on Hitler. Not only do Hitler’s writings and practices reflect The International Jew, but one of his closest associates, Dietrich Eckart, specifically mentioned the Protocols and The International Jew as sources of inspiration for the Nazi leader. Echoing Ford’s concept of the superiority of the
Anglo-Saxons, Hitler described the “Aryans” as the only race capable of creating great civilizations. Interbreeding with the lower races caused the decline of these civilizations. North America, “the population of which consists far the greatest part of Germanic elements,” was given as an example of Aryan conquest and civilization of a continent once inhabited only by an inferior race. “The Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan,” Hitler wrote. The Jewish people, despite their “apparent intellectual qualities,” are nevertheless without any “true culture” of their own. The “sham culture” which the Jew possesses, Hitler said, is taken from other people and is mostly spoiled in his hands. But the alleged lack of a true Jewish culture was not the main thrust of either Ford or Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Ford’s primary complaint is clearly stated in The International Jew: “We meet the Jew everywhere in the upper circles, literally everywhere where there is power. And that is where the Jewish question begins in very simple terms. How does the Jew so habitually…gravitate to the highest places? Who puts him there?…What does he do there?…In any country, where the Jewish question has come to the forefront as a vital issue, you will discover that the principal cause is the outworking of the Jewish genius to achieve the power of control. Here in the United States is the fact of this remarkable minority attaining in fifty years a degree of control that would be impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race.” Both Ford and Hitler believed in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy—that the Jews had a plan to destroy the Gen world and then take it over through the power of an international super-government…”
Source: Pool, James and Suzanne. “Ford and Hitler.” Who Financed Hitler? New York: Dial Press, 1978, 105-107. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #24
profile: recovery from hate Caren Goldman
The former chief propagandist for the racist group Aryan Nations, Floyd Cochran is now a passionate opponent of bigotry.
L
AST SEPTEMBER, AS HE CONDUCTED A BIBLESTUDY CLASS FOR THE FIRST time in three years, Floyd Cochran’s worst fear came true. Standing before a small group of people in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Toledo, Ohio, spouting verses from Genesis, John, and Revelations, Cochran felt intoxicated. Scrutinizing those before him, he knew that his delivery — lightening-fast, flawless, mesmerizing — was arresting every bit of their attention. Their very souls might be his for the asking, he thought. But this time he didn’t ask. Instead, the stentorian voice of the former chief propagandist for the Aryan Nations, the fastest-growing hate group in the country, abruptly stopped, then said, “I can’t go on—I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this ever again.” Sweaty and visibly shaken, Cochran looked like an alcoholic on the wagon who, in a moment of grace, catches himself In the midst of a plunge back into dependency. “Something inside me was getting turned on again,” confesses Cochran, who defected three years ago from the Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and is now called “traitor” by organized hate groups. “It’s that extraordinary power I had as a racist to control people with what I was teaching them about the Bible. I could taste it. I could feel it. And this time it frightened me.” For Cochran, once upon a time almost always means the two-year period beginning in 1990, when he left his home in upstate New York to live in the Nations’ heavily armed headquarters. A knowledgeable neo-Nazi whose unwavering belief in Adolf Hitler’s ideology had grown from years spent as an “armchair racist” — one of approximately 150,000 sympathizers nationwide who read racist literature, send contributions to related groups, and
occasionally attend separatist rallies—Cochran didn’t take long to move to the forefront of the virulent organization indeed, within months of settling in, peers dubbed him “the next Goebbels” — referring to Hitler’s notorious propagandist — and the media gave front-page coverage to events he staged to psych up those ready to move out of their La-Z-Boys and do something to stop the U.S. government, Jews, and “mud people” — people of color — from “destroying” the country. Cochran says he relished — no, loved — that power; he found is addictive and wanted more. And more power is just what he would have gotten were it not for an incident in 1992 that shook his sensibilities so mercilessly that his trajectory to the top took a 180-degree turn. The way Cochran tells it, the seeds of his conversion were planted one summer night after a successful Hitler Youth Day organizing rally. While celebrating with compatriots, he proudly passed around a photo of his two sons. Glancing at it, the Nations’ chief of security matter-of-factly reported that when they came to power, Cochran’s youngest son would be euthanized because he had a cleft palate. Cochran still looks pained as he recalls the story. “I said to myself, This is a beautiful and innocent four-year-old child who never hurt anyone, and he’s telling me my son will die because he’s a ‘genetic defect.’ I began to wonder where you draw the line: Black people are born black, Chinese, people are born Chinese, Indians are born Indians, — is it right to kill people just because of who they are?” “No!” Cochran soberly declared over and over. “I’d be a hypocrite if I advocated killing other innocent people but not my own son.” Although by now Cochran knew intuitively that he had to leave thecompound, it took another three months before he could step back over the border separating the home of the so-called master race from the human race. And, he acknowledges,
Source: Goldman, Caren. “Profile: Recovery from Hate.” Common Boundary. July/August 1996.
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“meeting that challenge may take the rest of my life.” The man some once believed would be the successor to Richard Butler, the Nations’ aging leader, says that, like almost every other person who joins a hate group, he didn’t wake up one day and decide to he a racist. Instead, his initiatory process began, innocently enough, when he read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He was 10 years old. Digging deeper in an attempt to explain the roots of his racism, Cochran reaches back 36 years to when he was two and his mother abandoned him. Later, when his uncaring father remarried, Cochran’s stepmother abused him physically and psychologically. Reading and daydreaming about Hitler — a “black sheep” who rose to world power — became Cochran’s survival tactic in his dysfunctional world, one in which his stepmother forced him to sit on a hard stool for hours after school every day while his four step-siblings were free to run and play together. “They treated me like an animal,” lie says. I wasn’t even allowed to eat with the rest of the family.” By I he time he was 11, Cochran — labeled by parents, teachers, and relatives as “unattractive,” “incorrigible,” and a “loser” — was shunned by his family and sent to live in a succession of foster homes. As he questioned whether or not he would ever fit in or be accepted anywhere, he looked ever more longingly to his hero for answers: “I would read about Hitler at night by flashlight, and by the time I got to high school, I knew not only more than my teachers but how to use that information in the classroom, cafeteria — anywhere to get attention from my peers. For a while, it empowered me because I could make them listen — even if they didn’t accept me or what I said. But eventually that stopped working.” Feeling isolated and inferior, Cochran left high school before graduating. In 1979, he earned a general equivalency diploma while doing a stint in jail for misdemeanors, but one of several incarcerations between 1976 and 1989, which included a conviction for threatening to burn a synagogue. For Cochran, it was just one more place to seeth and steal, lick wounds that never started to heal, and spend hours reading racist literature. Each time he little changed — until 1989, when after seven years…he was once again…sniffing around for a community that would accept him…later his search came to a halt at the Nation’s doorstep. “I was dressed in camoflage and when I walked past the
..sign on the gate, I knew I was home,” Cochran remembers. “When I was inside they treated me like I was one of their family. At last I was with people just like me and accepted for what I was.” Pausing, he adds, “You know that’s why they hug every one of the kids they recruit. Most kids are middle class and from the suburbs. They’re runaways…when a throwaway kid arrives at the compound, the first thing he gets are hugs, food a bed, and a family that cares and offers structure. I wasn’t a kid, but that’s what I…needed, and got — along with a uniform and the weapons I needed to become a racist in God’s name. The Nations, which considers itself a political arm of the Church Jesus Christ Christian, is one of hundreds of satellite churches around the nation, that are linked to a…form of Christianity called Christian Identity. Last year, the Identity compound in Allentown, Pennsylvania got national attention after two Michigan brothers, who attended events there, murdered and mutilated their parents and another brother in the name of Fürher. According to Cochran, Identity adminstrators and leaders stage..rallies, and rock concerts to unify and recruit…Like the Michigan brothers, marginalized and disenfranchised teens and young adults become easy prey. “You can always spot them,” claims Cochran. “They look vulnerable — their posture, their dress, their mannerisms. Lots of things mark them, and it doesn’t take much to get them involved — just food, shelter, love and structure.” According to the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, two years ago Aryan Nations was active in three states; today it is in 30 states and overseas. Typically, Identity theology preaches an antisemitic interpretation of the Book of Genesis that says white people are the true Israelites, that Jews are the “children of Satan,” and that people of color are subhuman. Also taught is the belief that ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, controls the United States and the world’s financial institutions. Christian Identity dresses its doctrine of faith in pageantry and rituals, Old Testament dietary laws, and the beliefs that women should be subservient and that Hitler was godly. Ultimately, Cochran asserts, it imbues followers with a sense of divine blessing and guidance for their faith. On the day Cochran left the Nations compound, he had $100 in his pocket and no blessings for his journey. For months he lived alone in a tent until deciding to accept an invitation to go to Kansas and meet with Leonard Ziskind, a Jew and at the time
Source: Goldman, Caren. “Profile: Recovery from Hate.” Common Boundary. July/August 1996. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit II: READING #24 research director of the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, a national clearing house for efforts to counter hate-group activity. For Cochran, the meeting was serendipitous: “I went there with the thought that he wanted to exploit me. But I was wrong.” Instead, Ziskind spent the next six months helping Cochran deal with issues concerning gays and lesbians, people of color, and Jews. “He’s a remarkable person who has completely overcome the outrageous bigotry which characterizes individual members of Klan and Neo-Nazi groups,” reflects Ziskind. “More importantly, he has made these efforts on his own volition, as part of a genuinely transformative process.” Says Cochran: “Leonard opened the door for me to talk about my experience at a time when I didn’t think I’d have something to say.” Today, as Cochran travels the country telling his story, he is still somewhat of a renegade searching for a place he can call home in the world and within himself. Although his newly formed information center, Education and Vigilance, is now firmly
planted in a modern double-wide trailer in Pennsylvania, he remains an itinerant preacher who proclaims the gospel of human rights to all who will listen along a road littered with personal threats from racists and reminders of a past he cannot discard. Indeed, since defecting, he has visited over 300 communities to talk with students, parents, teachers, clergy, civic leaders, and anyone else willing to hear a prophetic voice articulating the dangers of racism. When asked when he plans to stop, Cochran replies, “Never.” “Why?” most people ask. Cochran answers, “I think about this 24 hours a day. Many times I’ve wanted to stop, but I can’t. Change is challenging; it’s not something completed overnight. Everyday I wake up knowing that I have to challenge myself and others to question old stereotypes and fears and replace them with an open mind and a sense of the positive.” He pauses, then adds, “I apologize to all if my hatred and bigotry offended you directly or indirectly.”
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Source: Goldman, Caren. “Profile: Recovery from Hate.” Common Boundary. July/August 1996.
IN GERMANY: PRELUDE TO THE HOLOCAUST
“SIX MILLION MARTYRS”
UNIT III
THE RISE OF NAZISM
Unit III
UNIT III THE RISE OF NAZISM: PRELUDE TO THE HOLOCAUST
I
n Unit III students will explore the historical background of Nazi anti-Semitism, paying particular attention to social, economic and political turbulence in the 19th and 20th centuries. Germany resorted to desperate measures to resolve its post-World War I turmoil. Anti-Judaism fueled anti-Jewish behavior for centuries before Hitler came to power in 1933. Since the time of the Roman Empire, Europeans in dominance regarded Jews as second-class citizens. Believing that Jews killed Christ and rejected Jesus as the Messiah, Christian leaders prohibited Jews from the privilege of owning land and occasionally expelled them beyond national boundaries. Partly as a result, Jews lived in isolation and on the margins of mainstream society, often becoming traders or moneylenders. As the European economy evolved from an agrarian to an urban one, Jews in commerce became economically vital. In the late 18th and in the 19th centuries, discrimination and prohibitions against Jews abated and Jews integrated into European culture. Events in Europe in the late 1890s made Jews who had been assimilated into the heart of European intellectual and cultural life feeling increasingly less secure. Hostilities and suspicions toward Jews became fertile soil for the growth of extremist political movements. Adolf Hitler grew up in this turbulent climate. His troubled youth prepared him for a life full of resentment. The fourth child of Klara and Alois, Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria, on April 20, 1889 and later moved with his family to nearby Linz. His father was alcoholic and abusive and his mother was overindulgent. Hitler’s contemporaries remembered young Adolf as a lazy, ill tempered and poorly disciplined student. When he was 15, he quit school and moved to Vienna. His one ambition was to become a recognized artist, but he was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Anti-Semitic parties and ideas were prevalent in prewar Vienna. Karl Lueger’s successes at using antiSemitic calumny to mobilize a following and win mayoral election inspired Hitler as an adolescent. Hemet writers, like Jorg Lanze von Liebenfels, who wrote racist pamphlets extolling Aryan heroes and disparaging the Jews. Hitler’s experience in World War I, after moving to Munich in 1913 and enlisting in the German Army, galvanized his anti-Semitic views. He supported popular beliefs that Jews were responsible for Germany’s humiliating defeat in 1918. Upon his return to Munich, he remained in the German Army as a spy and reported on the German Workers Party. He then joined the German Workers Party in 1919 and soon became its leader. He eventually changed its name to the National Socialist German
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THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE: Views of Prejudice and Genocide
Workers Party, which became known as the Nazi Party. As the leader of the party, he began to speak publicly about what was needed to save Germany from political collapse. Hitler was a captivating orator, attracting large audiences to the Nazi Party. In 1923, Hitler and his Nazi Storm Troopers laid siege on Munich City Hall in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Bavaria. Arrested and incarcerated for nine months, he organized his political viewpoints and wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), with the assistance of his secretary, Rudolf Hess. The book expounded theories about the significance of racial policies, the (imaginary) conspiracy theory of a covert Jewish plot to take over and destroy the world, and the saving mission of the Aryan nation. This soon became the “bible” of the Nazi Party. The Great Depression catapulted Germany into economic turmoil and set the immediate stage for Hitler’s rise to power and the supremacy of racial politics. Like Lueger before him, he successfully deployed anti-Semitic propaganda to parlay social discontent and despair into a loyal political following. Seeking national victory for the Nazi Party in the Reichstag (German Parliament), Hitler promised to create new jobs by rebuilding the German economy and repudiating the Treaty of Versailles. In 1931, the last free election of the Weimar Republic resulted in 37 percent of the voters expressing support for the Nazi Party. A succession of failing Chancellors led to a political deal in which Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, appointed Adolf Hitler the new Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
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Hitler commenced a campaign of persecution against his political enemies: Communists, socialists and especially Jews. On February 27, the Reichstag was set on fire and Hitler used the occasion to blame the Communists. To gain complete control over the nation, he took advantage of the chaos of the fire and abrogated Weimar constitutional freedoms. Hitler deployed his Storm Troops to terrorize his enemies. Complete political power was achieved by Hitler upon the death of President Hindenburg in August 1934. This fused the two offices of President and Chancellor of Germany and Hitler called himself Der Fuhrer, the leader or dictator. With the population’s support or tacit consent, Hitler was, by 1935, in the uncompromising position to give his anti-Semitic vitriol full rein. The goal of Unit III is to help students understand the global and domestic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany. They will be asked to (1) analyze and form conclusions about the late 19th and early 20th century German politics that provided the seedbed for the rise of Nazism; (2) demonstrate a factual knowledge of the life of Adolf Hitler with an emphasis on his personality traits; (3) form a generalization about Jewish life in Europe prior to the Holocaust; (4) assess and form conclusions about events that affected the collapse of the Weimar Republic and contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany; (5) determine why Nazi philosophy, ideology and government policies appealed to certain aspects of human nature and behavior; (6) examine the role of the media and propaganda in promoting Nazi ideology; and (7) reassess their views of human nature in light of new knowledge they acquire about Hitler’s life and the Nazi Party in Germany.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III
UNIT III:
THE RISE OF NAZISM: PRELUDE TO THE HOLOCAUST
UNIT GOAL: Students will understand the global and domestic conditions that led to the rise of Nazi Germany. PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Note: the notation (READING #) in this column indicates that a copy of the article is included in this curriculum guide.
1. Students will analyze and form conclusions about the late 19th and early 20th century German politics that provided the seedbed for the rise of Nazism.
A. Analyze the impact of key individuals on the development of the world view of Hitler and the Nazis and study the internal political evolution of Germany, including the impact of extreme-nationalism and authoritarianism using selections from the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Read the selection on Johann Fichte in William Nicholls’ book, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate, using the following questions to guide analysis and discussion:
1.
Nicholls, William. Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate. Northdale, NJ: Joseph Aronson, Inc., 1993.
•
Why could Fichte be called an extreme nationalist?
•
Which of his ideas seemed to influence Hitler?
2.
Read the selection on Friederich Nietzsche in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, using the following questions as a guide to analysis and discussion:
2.
Shirer, William. “Friederich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. (READING # 1 )
•
How does this explain Hitler and his regime’s view of morality?
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THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
234
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
Does it explain Hitler’s Messiah complex? Explain. If so, how?
3.
Read the selection on Richard Wagner in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer using the following questions as a guide to analysis and discussion:
•
Explain why Israeli orchestras do not play Wagner’s music.
•
During the last days of the Third Reich, Hitler ordered Albert Speer to destroy all bridges, factories, ships and anything of value for a civilization. Do you believe Hitler’s love of Wagner influenced him? Explain.
4.
Listen to selections from Wagner’s Lohengrin while reading the text, and listen to sections of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (of Schiller’s poem).
•
Brainstorm the message and values in the texts.
•
Compare and contrast the messages in the two texts.
•
Draw conclusions about the messages in Wagner’s text in comparison to the message in the Beethoven work, and extend this/these conclusion(s) to the possible influences of Wagner on Hitler.
5.
Read the selection on Johann von Treitschke in Ideology of Death, by John Weiss using the following questions as a guide to analysis and discussion:
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
3.
Shirer. “Richard Wagner.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. (READING # 2)
4a. Wagner, Richard. Lohengrin. CD. 4b. Beethoven, Ludwig von. Ninth Symphony. http://www.cs.purdue.edu/ homes/coxgs/mus362/index. html
5.
Weiss, John. Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996. (READING #3)
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
How did the university professor use stereotypes?
•
How were the Jews used as scapegoats for trends of which he disapproved?
6.
Read the selection on Otto von Bismarck from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer using the following questions as a guide to analysis and discussion:
•
On what points did Bismarck and Treitschke agree?
•
Why does Shirer believe there is a straight line from Bismarck to Hitler?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
6.
Shirer, William. “Otto Von Bismarck.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. (READING #4)
235 7.
Read the selection on Houston Chamberlain from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by Shirer using the following question as a guide to analysis and discussion: Why did Hitler create a so-called Aryan church that did not admit Jews, preached racism and rejected the Old Testament? Base your answer on Chamberlain’s views.
7.
Shirer, William. “Houston Chamberlain.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. (READING #5)
8.
Either individually, or with a partner, use the suggested biographies listed in READINGS #1-5 as a basis for writing a brief summary of the thinkers mentioned in #1-6 above. You may add Frederick Jahn, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langehn, and Lanz von Liebenfels.
8.
Mosse, George. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. New York: Harper & Row, 1980)
THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 9.
The following movements influenced Hitler: Romantic Movement, Pan-Germanism, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, Lebensraum and Wandervogel. In small groups select one of the movements, describe it and indicate how the Nazis adopted it. Results should be shared with the class.
10. Additional resources may be consulted for descriptions of the people and movements mentioned above.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 9a. Mosse. Ibid. 9b. Carr, W. A History of Germany 1815-1945. New York: St. Martins Press, 1969. 9c. Haffner, S. The Ailing Empire: Germany from Bismarck to Hitler. New York: Fromm International, 1989. 10a. Poliakov, Leon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1996. 10b. Snyder, Louis. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon Press, 1985. 10c. Epstein, Eric, and Philip Rosen. Dictionary of the Holocaust. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1997.
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10d. Landau, Ronnie S. The Nazi Holocaust. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1994.
B. Compare and contrast the political, economic, social and geographic conditions in Germany before and after World War I.
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
1a. Strom, Margot Stern and William Parsons. Facing History and Ourselves. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. 89-93.
Read the selections by three writers who discuss why Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and why the Weimar Republic fell. Use the questions in the reading to guide analysis and discussion.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1b. Landau, Ronnie S. The Nazi Holocaust. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997. 1c. Shirer. Op.Cit. pp. 185-187.
2.
3.
Create a timeline for any or each of the following areas of German history. Include the major events that have significant meaning during the period from 18711933. (a) political; (b) economic; (c) social; (d) cultural.
2a. Website for The History Place: www.thehistoryplace.org
Develop a photo-essay of art that influenced the development of Nazi volkish, or racist, ideology which was prevalent in the 19th century.
3a. Degenerate Art. Videocassette. Dir. David Grubin. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. National Endowment for the Humanities, 1993. (1-800-343-4727)
2b. Website for The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: www.ushmm.org
3b. Consult the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: http://www.metmuseum.org 4.
(a) Examine Nazi-inspired/ approved art; (b) read “Fashionable Fascism”; (c) locate three fashion magazine advertisements that depict male fashion/beauty; (d) compare these ads to the Nazi art and the examples from the article; and (e) write and discuss your conclusions about what the ads say to you about ideal male beauty. How does this conception compare or contrast with perceptions of ideal male beauty in the United States today?
4a. Art of the Third Reich.
4b. Golsan, R. “Fashionable Fascism.” Utne Reader. Nov/Dec 1995, pp. 60-63.
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THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
238
2. Students will demonstrate a factual knowledge of the life of Adolf Hitler with an emphasis on his personality traits.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
C.
Small groups may select one or more of the following activities to conduct an analysis of the Weimar Republic, from its birth to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and develop a chart, or PowerPoint presentation to summarize relevant findings:
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Study the birth of the Weimar Republic in which you identify key factors that led to its creation.
2.
Study the causes and effects of hyperinflation, prosperity and economic depression during the Weimar Era.
1-5. Anderson, J. and V. Berghahn. Crisis, Conscience and Choices: Weimar Germany and the Rise of Hitler. Providence, RI: Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 1994.
3.
Summarize aspects of the dominant culture, values and politics of the Weimar era.
4.
Analyze the issues involved in, and the results of the 1932 Reichstag elections.
5.
Draw conclusions about how the Weimar experience led to the rise of the Nazis.
A. Demonstrate knowledge of the life of Adolf Hitler through completion of the following:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1.
Examine and discuss the history of Hitler’s genealogical chart.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Toland, John. Hitler: A Pictorial Documentary of His Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978. p. 6.
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris. New York: Norton, 1999. p. 4.
2.
a. b. c. d. e.
Develop a time line of events in the life of Adolf Hitler, April 20, 1889 to April 30, 1945. Periodization and psychological study is encouraged: 1889-1918—Early PeriodChildhood/Youth 1919-1924—Early Political Career 1924-1933—Rise to Power 1934-1939—Prelude to War 1939-1945—World War II
2a-d. Marrin, Albert. Hitler: A Portrait of a Tyrant. New York: Viking, 1987. Flood, Charles B. Hitler: The Path to Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992. Langer, Walter. The Mind of Adolf Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 1972. Fest, Joachim. Hitler. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1973 Furman, Harry, ed. “The Rise of Hitler.” by Sefton Delmar. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #6) Rosenbaum, Ron. Explaining Hitler. Nw York: Random House, New York, 1998. Hitler. Videocassette. Biography Series of A & E Television. Arts and Entertainment Inc., New York.
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THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2a-e. Consult the following websites: www.historyplace.com www.historyplace.com/worldwar2 /holocaust/timeline.html www.historyplace.com/worldwar2 /timeline/ww2time.html 2a-e. Knopp, Guido, et. al., The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler. 6-Part Series. The History Channel, 1995. (1-800-708-1776) 2d. Good Morning Mr. Hitler. Videocassette. Perf. Luke Holland and Paul Yule. Berwick Universal Pictures, 1993. [International Historic Films] (773-927-2900)
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3.
(a) Examine drawings by Hitler. Share with the class exactly what you see. List the characteristics/ traits on the board or overhead transparency for the class; (b) examine the drawings by Schiele. Describe exactly what you see. List the characteristics/traits in the same manner for the class; (c) read short biographies of Hitler’s youth and Schiele’s youth; (d) list similarities and differences on the board/ transparency for the class in a Venn Diagram; and (e) conclude by discussing with the class Hitler’s life in comparison with that of Schiele. In leading the discussion, use thoughtful questions about conjecture of the outcomes of their two lives based upon their interests/pursuits, and relative successes/failures as young people.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
3a. Whitford, Frank. Egon Schiele. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd. 1981.
3b. Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich. New York: Harry N. Adams, Inc., 1988.
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Each small group may select one of the following activities (#4-6): 4. Write an essay that describes how Hitler’s upbringing affected his personality development to age 17.
4.
Ragland, Rachel G. and Saxon Burt. Invitation to Psychology, 2nd ed., Glenview, Ill: Scott Foresman and Co., 1989 (Ch. 2: Middle Childhood and Adolescence, pp.46-70; Ch. 3: Adult Life, Sections 1 & 2, pp. 7182; Ch. 1l: Self and Personality, pp. 280-304; Ch. 12: Abnormal Behavior, pp. 308-339) Langer. Op.Cit.
5.
Research the question: “How did Hitler’s years in Vienna, 19071914, inf luence his views of Jews?: Which people and events inf luenced him? Present a summary of findings in the form of an oral presentation.
5.
Toland, John. Hitler: A Pictorial Documentary of His Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978, p.6. Fest. Op.Cit. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Interview with Putzi Hofstangel segment. William Shirer. Videocassette. “60 Minutes,” CBS
•
• •
• •
Internet Resources: U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/ Simon Wiesenthal Center: http://www.wisenthal.com/ Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority: http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/ Cybrary of the Holocaust: http://www.remember.org Facing History and Ourselves: http://www.facing.org/
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THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
242
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
6.
Read the Hitler In Vienna passage from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he sums up his developing views of Jews and other “lessons” from living in Vienna. Discuss in your group how Hitler attacks ethnic pluralism, democracy and social democracy? Discuss.
6.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. (READING #7)
7.
Hitler considered the surrender of the German armed forces “a stab in the back by the November criminals.” Read the article by Kennedy and discuss what the statistics on the forces opposing the Central Powers indicate about the defeat of Germany in World War I and the effects of World War I on Adolf Hitler.
7.
Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. (READING #8)
8.
In the first article in this reading, Hitler accuses the German Jews of cowardice and contributions to Germany’s defeat in World War I (from Mein Kampf). How does historian Martin Gilbert refute Hitler’s view in the second article?
8.
Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. (READING #9)
9.
Research the effects of World War I on Adolf Hitler and the fact that he survived 48 battles. Discuss findings with the class.
9.
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Videocassette. “Battle of the Somme” episode, ABC Network, 1992.
Internet Resources www.worldwarI.com/index.html www.killeenroos.com/link/war.html www.about.com www.rockingham.k12.va.us/EMS/ WWIWWI.html www.pbs.org/greatwar/ www.pitt.edu/~ww1.html
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
3. Students will form a generalization about Jewish life in Europe prior to the Holocaust.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Study Jewish life in Europe prior to the Holocaust by engaging in one or more of the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Examine the maps/charts, A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life; Some Early Records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600; Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge; and Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 16001920, and do the following:
1.
•
Identify aspects that constituted Jewish community and family life?
Gilbert, Martin. “A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life,” “Some Early Records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600,” “Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge, 1050A.D- 1650,” and “Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 1600-1920.” The Holocaust. New York: Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994. (READING #10) and
•
Discuss how these aspects helped Jews to “survive as a people” from 1000 A.D. to 1939.
•
How did the Nazis set out to destroy Jews “as a people?”
•
Develop a hypothesis on why you believe the Jews survived even after the Holocaust. (This hypothesis can be evaluated following your study of the Holocaust and its aftermath.)
2.
Read, Jewish Life in Europe Before the Holocaust. Develop a chart, poster or wall display, a series of slides, or a Power Point presentation in which you summarize some key aspects of Jewish life in Europe
•
Interwar European Jewish Communities. Resource Map. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem (no date).
2.
Bachrach, Susan D. “Jewish Life in Europe Before the Holocaust.” Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. (READING #13) and
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•
3.
• •
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• • • •
before Hitler assumed power; or Role play, live or in a video presentation, the lives of the teenagers who are described in the article.
Compare and contrast Eastern European Jews, South Eastern and Western European Jews by developing a chart that depicts the different cultural and subcultural traits among the various groups. The cultural map should include, but not be limited to, the following: Religious practices Assimilation into, and contributions to the mainstream culture. Economic life Cultural life Language Other Note: A chart may include the above categories, and be applied to various regions and nations of Europe: Germany, France, Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Greece, Italy, etc. Each will have a unique experience, with only a common religion that binds them together, and even that will have a variety of interpretation.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Hatefutsoth, Beth. Journey to Poland: In Search of a Vanished Jewish World. Tel Aviv, Israel: The Nathum Goldmann Museum of Jewish Diaspora, 1990. 3a. Contact local Jewish Community Councils, N.J. Holocaust Centers (see Appendix for listing), college, university or synagogue resource centers. 3b. Furman, Harry, ed. “Jewish Life in the Twentieth Century.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 Note: This reading includes “The Jews of Poland,” by Judah Pilch; and “The Jews of Germany,” by Otto Friedrich. (READING #11) 3c. Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper and Roe, 1987. 3d. Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer, eds. Holocaust Years: Society Trial. New York: Bartam Books, 1978. (Note: This reading includes “Christians and Jews in Germany,” by Urial Tal, and “Jewish Life Between Two World Wars,” by Judah Pilch. (READING #12 ) 3d. Zobrowski, Mark, and Elizabeth Herzog. Life Is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl. New York: Schocken Books, 1952.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3e. Eliach, Yaffa. There Once Was A World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok. Canada: Little, Brown and Co., 1998. 3f. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. In My Father’s Court. New York: Noonday Press, 1991. 3g. Singer, Issac Bashvis. A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw. Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1986. 3h. Vishniac, Roman. A Vanished World. New York: Noonday Press, 1991. 3i. Holocaust: A Study of Genocide. Albany, NY: New York Department of Education, Division of Curriculum and Instruction, 1985. Pp. 157-197. (Medieval Ghetto; Development of Anti-Semitism in Europe; Jewish Life in Europe; and Anti-Semitism in the 19th Century.) 3j. Paterson, Charles. Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond. New York: Walker and Co., 1981. 3k. Hay, Malcolm. The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism. New York: Freedom Press Library, 1981. 3l. Voles, Rachel. Teaching About Christian Anti-Semitism: Emory Studies on the Holocaust. Vol. II. Atlanta: Emory University, 1988.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3m. Prager, Dennis and Joseph Telushki. Why the Jews: The Reason for Anti-Semitism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. 3n. Zormberg, Ira. “Lesson 2: Can Any People Become the Victim of Genocide?” Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #13) 3o. Fiddler on the Roof. Videocassette. Dir. Norman Jewison, United Artists. (Musical depicts 19th century Jewish rural life in Eastern Europe. 3p. The Chosen. Videocassette. (Reveals insights into Hassidic life in New York.)
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3r. The Fixer. Videocassette. (Russian Jew unjustly accused of “ritual murder.”) 3s. Melamud, Bernard. The Fixer. New York: Pocket Books, 1966. 3t. Lee, George. Holocaust: Social Studies Activity Book. Mark Twain Media, Inc., 1998. (Distributed by Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company, Inc.) 4.
View the video and/or read the book, Image Before My Eyes, both of which are about Polish Jewry in the decades that preceded World War II. The video uses a skillful mixture of rare film footage, memorabilia, photographs, music and
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
4a. Image Before My Eyes. Videocassette. Ergo Media, Inc., P.O. Box 2037, Teaneck, NJ 07666 4b. Dobroszycki, Lucjan and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
interviews to portray a rich and varied way of life. Discuss with your class the image of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust that you derive from these sources.
History of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
5.
NOTE TO THE TEACHER: New Jersey teacher, Rebecca Aupperle, authored an article, Face to Face: The Study of Freidrich, A Novel About the Holocaust, an excerpt of which is included as a reading in this guide. In the excerpt, Aupperle provides teachers with practical suggestions in the teaching toward this objective. She offers a specific approach with accompanying resources and activities.
5.
Aupperle, Rebecca G. “Face to Face: The Study of Freidrich, A Novel About the Holocaust.” copyright Rebecca G. Aupperle, 2000, excerpted from Teaching Holocaust Literature. Samuel Totten, Ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, 2001. (READING #14)
6.
Select a book, fiction or nonfiction, about a Jew living in Europe before and during the Holocaust. (An appropriately prepared bibliography should be provided by the teacher). Use the following as a guide to your reading:
6.
Teacher and student-identified selections.
a.
Locate passages that describe the main character’s life before Hitler came to power. Share those passages with classmates and lead them in a discussion of general conclusions about Jewish life before the Holocaust.
b.
How are their stories similar, or different from, each other and from today’s teenagers? i.e., sports, music, holidays, after school activities, friendships, teenage turmoil, etc.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 7.
View the videocassette, Camera of My Family, using the following as a guide for viewing and followup:
a.
How can photographs tell us about the lives of the people depicted? What conclusions can you draw about the life of Jews in Europe before the Holocaust?
b.
If available, bring to class pictures from your own family’s photo albums that go back to the 1930’s. What similarities and/or differences do you notice?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 7.
Camera of My Family: Four Generations in Germany 18451945. Anti-Defamation League.
c. Trace one grandparent or greatgrandparent who may have emigrated from Europe and lived before and during the Holocaust. Write a short biography of that relative based on a picture and stories told by older family members. 8.
Invite to your class a Jewish guest who grew up in Europe and can discuss Jewish life before the Holocaust.
8.
Contact offices of the local Jewish Federation for suggested speakers. Students may be able to suggest members of their own families or their rabbis.
9.
Individually, or with another student,
9.
•
read journal entries from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, then look at images from Shtetl life;
“Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl.” Videocassette. Frontline Special Edition. Public Broadcasting System (PBS), April 17, 1996.
•
draw conclusions about life in the Shtetl, and share with the class; and
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Roskies, D. The Shtetl Book. Warsaw: Ktav Publishing, 1975. Marcus, I. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
discuss what Shtetl life meant in Europe during the Pre-Nazi era, and what it means today.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES University Press, 1996. Eliach, Yaffa. Once There Was A World. New York: Little, Brown, 1998. Fluek, Toby Knobel. Memories of My Life in a Polish Village 19301949. New York: Alfred Knkopf, Inc., 1990. American/Polish/Israeli Shalom Foundation. And I Still See Their Faces. Warsaw: Shalom Foundation, 1995.
4. Students will assess and form conclusions about events that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany.
A. Form conclusions about the events that affected the collapse of the Weimar Republic and contributed to the rise of Nazism in Germany by engaging in a combination of the following activities:
1.
Report on the influence of political party life in Germany, 1919-1933, and the effects of the Enabling Act, March 23, 1933. This should include: leaders, platform, membership, and performance results by election. Develop a generalization regarding how the Nazi and Communist parties contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
A. Resources for Section A:
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1a. Furman, Harry, ed. “Why Did the Nazis Come to Power?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING #15) 1b. Furman. “Rise of Hitler.” (SEE READING #6) 1c. Gutman, Israel. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1990.
THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1d. Delmar, Sefton. Weimar Germany: Democracy on Trial. New York: American Heritage Press, 1972. 1e Hogan, David J. “The Nazi State Begins.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill: Publications International, Ltd., 2000. 61. 1f. Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. (See the following readings in Unit III, 101-125: •
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• • • • 2.
3.
#29: Third Reich in Perspective (READING #16) #30: Seven Case Studies #31: Herr Damm #32: Why I Joined the Hitler Youth #33: A Town Goes Nazi
Graph the German economy from 1919-1933. Form a generalization describing the state of the economy during the rise of Nazism.
2a. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: Norton, 1999.
Using the broadsheet from “The Rise of the Nazis” and the Election Chart (Jackdaws), draw conclusions about the relationship between the state of the German economy and the rise of the Nazi Party.
3.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
2b. Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. “Hitler and the Rise of Nazism,” and “Chart of the Results of Elections to the German Reichstag 1919-1933.” Broadsheet II. Jackdaws. Amawalk, NY: Golden Owl Publications.
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
4.
Read the articles “The Twilight of the Weimar Republic 1929-1933” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator” in Readings 17 and 18 and complete a chart in which you list the political, social and economic reasons responsible for the decline of the Weimar Republic and of Hitler’s rise to power.
4.
Strom, Margot Stern and William Parsons. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. (READING #17)
5.
Read the excerpt from The Nazi Holocaust and discuss this question: Why does the author put a great deal of blame on Heinrich Bruning and Franz von Papen?
5.
Landau, Ronnie S. “Nazism and Modern Germany (excerpt).” The Nazi Holocaust. New York: Ivan R. Dee 1997. (READING #18)
6.
Read the excerpt from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Revise the chart you developed in activity # 4, above.
6.
Shirer, William L. “The Last Days of the Republic.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster, 1990. (READING #19)
•
The author, William Shirer, put much blame for the decline of the Weimar Republic on political parties and groups. Discuss which ones he accuses and why.
•
Discuss this question: If there had been no economic depression, would Adolf Hitler have risen to power?
7.
Part I: Complete the following:
•
Brainstorm as many examples of personal crises as the class can discover: i.e., family crises, school crises, etc.
7.
Students’ prior knowledge and experiences. In relating their ideas to the rise of Nazism in Germany, the sources listed above may be consulted.
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252
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
Identify visible behaviors that indicate how people respond to crises: i.e., crying, using profanity, rationalizing, blaming, denial, etc.
•
Identify irrational responses: i.e., substance abuse, suicide, scapegoating, cultism, or selfdestructive behavior
8.
Part II: Topic for class discussion: “What irrational behaviors might a nation exhibit in response to the following national crises?” Relate these to the rise of the Nazis in 1933.
•
Economic setbacks: depression and its problems
•
Political setbacks: war, civil war, revolution, chaos
•
Social setbacks: crime, religion, racism
•
Demonstrations, unrest, mistrust, voter apathy
•
Rise of political extremist groups, cults, demagogues
9. Part III: After dividing into four groups, discuss and develop a consensus on the following topics from the probable perspective of each group listed: •
As Nazis: Why we won in Germany in 1933.
•
As Communists: Why we lost in Germany in 1933.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
8.
Anderson, J and V. Berghahn. Crisis, Conscience and Choices: Weimar Germany and the Rise of Hitler. Providence, RI: Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.
9.
Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930-1935. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965. Haffner, Sebastian. The Meaning of Hitler. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
5. Students will determine why Nazi philosophy, ideology and government policies appealed to certain aspects of human nature and behavior.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
As Social Democrats: Why we lost in Germany in 1933.
•
As Conservatives: Why we were unable to control the Nazis as we thought we could, and why this resulted in losing Germany in 1933.
A. View the film Triumph of the Will as a basis for developing tentative conclusions regarding the impact of this motion picture on public support for the Nazis.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Ragland, Rachel and Burt Saxon. Invitation to Psychology. Second edition. Chapters 15 and 16. Glenview, Ill: Scott Foresman and Co., 1981. Johnson, Eric A. Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans. New York: Basic Books, 1999. III.
A. Resources for Section A:
253 1a. View the film Triumph of the Will using the following questions to guide analysis and follow-up discussion: • What strategies does the film use to appeal to people’s needs? Which needs? •
Why was this done? To whose benefit?
•
What primitive instincts does this film appeal to, and how does it benefit the rise of Nazism?
•
Do you believe the film is pure propaganda? If so, in what ways?
•
Why do you believe it is among the most studied films in any modern film class?
1a. Triumph of the Will. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. Videocassette. Social Studies School Service #SV678VJO. Teacher’s guide.
THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
How is religious imagery utilized in this film? Why?
1b. Over the years, people raised many questions about Leni Riefenstahl, such as, (a) Was she innocent of spreading Nazism, or did she actively and knowingly participate in its spread? (b) Was she more interested in art or politics? (c) Are her works unique works of art, or are they compromised by the circumstances of their production? After reading Feingold’s article, discuss your reactions to these questions.
1b. Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994. (READING #20)
B. Brainstorm: “What kind of person joins extremist groups such as the neo-Nazis, Aryan Nations or the Ku Klux Klan?” Then, compare the conclusions with those of John Moffatt Mecklin.
B. Resources for Section B:
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
1.
KKK: A Secret History. Videocassette. Rep. Roger Mudd. The History Channel. 1998. (1800-708-1776)
2.
Furman, Harry, Ed. “What the Nazis Believed.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- an Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. 60-63. (READING #21)
3.
Women/ Leadership Hate Groups Like Klan. Videocassette. “20-20” ABC Television News. 10 Feb 2000
4.
Crimes of Hate. Videocassette. Anti-Defamation League.
5.
Klanwatch Website: http://www.klanwatch.com/
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
C.
Develop a chart that demonstrates typical language used by the Nazis to distort reality and advance their policies and programs.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 6.
Southern Poverty Law Center Website: http://www.splcenter.com/
7.
Crimes of Hate. Videocassette. New York:Anti-Defamation League Includes Teacher’s Discussion Guide.
C. Resources for Section C: 1.
Furman. Harry, Ed. “Nazi Language.” (See Reading #5, Unit IV)
2.
Glossary of Nazism. Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Foundation. (Note: This is a complete glossary of the words that best describe the intended meanings of the Nazis as well as their belief structure.) Also, consult Simon Wiesenthal Center website: www.wiesenthal.com .
3.
NOTE TO THE TEACHER: For a look at modern day hate groups, consult the following teacher and student resource: Flaim, Richard F. and Harry Furman, Eds. The Hitler Legacy: A Dilemma of Hate Speech and Hate Crime in a Post-Holocaust World. Trenton, NJ: The N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, 2002. (P.O. Box 500, Trenton, NJ 08625)
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THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
6. Students will examine the role of the media and propaganda in promoting Nazi ideology.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES A. Students will examine the role of the media and propaganda in promoting Nazi ideology by engaging in a variety of the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Students will define and describe propaganda, and explain why it is used, using The Propaganda Kit. This game teaches and describes the techniques of propaganda: faulty analogy, rationalizing, and attacking the “straw man.”
1a. Stevens, Larry. The Propaganda Kit. (Available from Social Studies School Service.)
Using one or more of the resources listed, examine and discuss Hitler and the Nazi Party’s use of propaganda messages and the media. In your discussion, examine advertisements in today’s media and determine whether messages contain elements of propaganda. How do these compare or contrast with the techniques used by the Nazi Party?
2a. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Message of the Nazis: Slogans, Posters, Songs and Games.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience- An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #22)
2.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
1b. Analyzing Persuasion: 10 Teaching Aids. Available from the Social Studies School Service
2b. Art With a Message: Protest and Propaganda, Satire and Social Comment. Videocassette. Available from Social Studies School Service 2c. The Wave. Videocassette. Films Incorporated. Available from Social Studies School Service. 2d. Heil Hitler: Confessions of a Hitler Youth. Videocassette. Home Box Office, Inc., 1992. Distributed by Ambrose Video Publishing, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2245, New York, NY, 10104. Available from Social Studies School Service
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
3.
As an introduction to propaganda, read the handout, “The Techniques of Propaganda,” using the questions as a guide for analysis and discussion.
3. “The Techniques of Propaganda.” from How to Detect and Analyze Propaganda, by Clyde R. Miller. Night, Lesson 4, Handout 10. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. (READING #23)
4.
View The Eternal Jew and discuss the following questions:
4.
•
Could this be labeled a “hate film?”
•
How does this film promote Nazi ideology?
•
Does the film cite any scholarly sources or experts?
•
What does the film say about the filmmaker, Hipple?
•
What stereotypes does the film promote?
•
In what ways might this film have affected the attitudes of many German people toward Jews?
5.
Download from the Internet one or more of the resources listed in the column to the right. Each source provides examples of Nazi propaganda, including the use of art and other media to influence the viewer. What techniques are used, and what impact do you believe they had on popular opinion in Germany?
The Eternal Jew. Videocassette. International Historical Films, Box 29035, Chicago, Ill. (1-312-9272900)
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5
Internet Resources: ”The Eternal Jew (1937).” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/diebow.htm ”Der Giftpilz.” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/thumb/htm ”Weekly Quotations of the NSDP.” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/ws.htm
THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES ”Berliner Illustrierte: 28/1/1943.” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/berill01.htm ”Warning! Enemy Propaganda!” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/feindpro.htm ”Excerpts from a Nazi Biology Textbook (1942)” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/textbook01.htm “A Nazi Analysis of the American Population.” www.calvin.edu/academic/cas /gpa/hsa01.htm
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7. Students will reassess their views of human nature in light of new knowledge they acquired about Hitler’s life and the Nazi Party in Germany.
A. After engaging in this unit, reflect upon and reevaluate your previous view of human nature, using the following suggestions as possible means of expressing your tentative conclusions:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Write a reflective essay in which you restate your previous view of human nature, and indicate how your study of Unit III has affected that view. Share your revised reflection with a small group of your peers.
1.
Students’ previous tentative conclusions about human nature.
2.
The teacher may wish to have each group share their reevaluated views of human nature, and lead a class discussion in which some of the following questions may be used:
2.
Teacher-led discussion.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES a.
Have any of your views on human nature changed? If so, why do you think this happened?
b.
Are there any current human behaviors or events that tend to support your changing view of human nature?
c.
To what extent do you believe people have control over the major decisions in their lives?
d.
Do you believe it is natural for people to be guided by selfinterest, even when it could be damaging to others? If you believe it is not an inborn tendency, why do some people do this?
e. Do you believe people can change? What kinds of change do you believe are needed in order to satisfy your view of what human nature should reflect? How confident are you that this will occur within your lifetime?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
259
THE RISE OF NAZISM: Prelude to the Holocaust
READINGS INCLUDED IN UNIT I Reading#
Title/Reference
1. Shirer, William. “Friederich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. 2. Shirer, William. “Richard Wagner.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. 3. Weiss, John. Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996. 4. Shirer, William. “Otto Von Bismarck.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. 5. Shirer, William. “Houston Chamberlain.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. 6. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Rise of Hitler.” by Sefton Delmar. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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7. Hitler, Adolf. “Hitler in Vienna.” Mein Kampf. 8. Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. 9. Gilbert, Martin. “Excerpt from Mein Kampf,” and “Historian Refutes Hitler’s View.” The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. 10. Gilbert, Martin. “A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life,” “Some Early Records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600,” “Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge, 1050A.D–1650,” and “Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 1600-1920.” The Holocaust. New York: Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994. (Maps) 11. Furman, Harry, ed. “Jewish Life in the Twentieth Century.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. Note: This reading includes “The Jews of Poland,” by Judah Pilch, and “The Jews of Germany,” by Otto Friedrich. 12. Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer, eds. “The Jews of Europe.” Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. (Note: This reading includes “Christians and Jews in Germany,” by Uriel Tal.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III
13. Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 14. Aupperle, Rebecca G. “Face to Face: The Study of Freidrich, A Novel About the Holocaust.” Copyright Rebecca G. Aupperle, 2000, excerpted from Teaching Holocaust Literature. Samuel Totten, ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, 2001. 15. Furman, Harry, ed. “Why Did the Nazis Come to Power?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 16. Noar, Gertrude. “The Third Reich in Perspective,” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978 17. Strom, Margot Stern and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. 18. Landau, Ronnie S. “Nazism and Modern Germany (excerpt).” The Nazi Holocaust. New York: Ivan R. Dee 1997. 19. Shirer, William L. “The Last Days of the Republic 1931-33” (excerpt). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1990. 20. Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994. 21. Furman, Harry, Ed. “What the Nazis Believed.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 60-63. 22. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Message of the Nazis: Slogans, Posters, Songs and Games.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 23. “The Techniques of Propaganda.” from How to Detect and Analyze Propaganda, by Clyde R. Miller. Night, Lesson 4, Handout 10. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993.
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Unit III: READING #1
friederich neitzsche
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et I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to be impressed by Nietzsche’s influence on it. His books might be full, as Santayana said, of “genial imbecility” and “boyish blasphemies.” Yet Nazi scribblers never tired of extolling him. Hitler often visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration for the philospher by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the bust of the great man. There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and the superman — and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly quote him on almost every conceivable subject, and did. On Christianity: “the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion…I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind…This Christianity is no more than the typical teaching of the Socialists.” On the State, power and the jungle world of man: “Society has never regarded virtue as anything else than as a means to strength, power and order. The State (is) unmorality organized…the will to war, to conquest and revenge…Society is not entitled to exist for its own sake but only as a substructure and scaffolding, by means of which a select race of beings may elevate themselves to their higher duties…There is no such thing as the right to live, the right to work, or the right to be happy: in this respect man is no different from the meanest worm.”* And he exalted the superman as the beast of prey, “the magnificent blond brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory.” And war? Here Nietzsche took the view of most of the other nineteenth-century German thinkers. In the thundering Old Testament language in which Thus Spake Zarathustra is written, the philosopher cries out: “Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory…Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity,” Finally there was Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming elite who would rule the world and from whom the superman would spring. In The Will to
Power he exclaims: “A daring and ruler race is building itself up…The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect and will. This man and the elite around him will become the “lords of the earth.” Such rantings from one of Germany’s most original minds must have struck a responsive chord in Hitler’s littered mind. At any rate he appropriated them for his own — not only the thoughts but the philosopher’s penchant for grotesque exaggeration, and often his very words. “Lords of the Earth” is a familiar expression in Mein Kampf. That in the end Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy can not be doubted. In Hitler’s utterances there runs the theme that the supreme leader is above the morals of ordinary man. Hegel and Nietzsche thought so too. We have seen Hegel’s argument that “the private virtues” and “irrelevant moral claims” must not stand in the way of the great rulers, nor must one be squeamish if the heroes, in fulfilling their destiny, trample or “crush to pieces” many an innocent flower. Nietzsche, with his grotesque exaggeration, goes much further. The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag…When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a “Master,” when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?…To judge morality properly, it must be replaced by two concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a specific species. Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler. A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois” morals. Thus, when his time for action came, Hitler could justify the most ruthless and cold-blooded deeds, the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labor, the depravities of the concentration camp, the massacre of his own followers in June 1934, the killing of war prisoners and the mass slaughter of the Jews.
Source: Shirer, William. “Freiderich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #2
richard wagner
“W
hoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” Hitler used to say. This may have been based on a partial misconception of the great composer, for though Richard Wagner harbored a fanatical hatred, as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money, and though he scorned parliaments and democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie, he also fervently hoped that the Germans, “with their special gifts,” would “become not rulers, but ennoblers of the world.” It was not his political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over as their own. From his earliest days Hitler worshiped Wagner, and even as his life neared a close, in the damp and dreary bunker at Army headquarters on the Russian front, with his world and his dreams beginning to crack and crumble, he loved to reminisce about all the times he had heard the great Wagnerian works, of what they had meant to him and of the inspiration he had derived from the Bayreuth Festival and from his countless visits to Haus Wahnfried, the composer’s home, where Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, still lived with his English-born wife, Winifred, who for a while was one of his revered friends. “What joy each of Wagner’s works has given me!” Hitler exclaims on the evening of January 24-25, 1942, soon after the first disastrous German defeats in Russia, as he discourses to his generals and party cronies, Himmler among them, in the depths of the underground shelter of Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Outside there is snow and an arctic cold, the elements which he so hated and feared and which had contributed to the first German military setback of the war. But in the warmth of the bunker his thoughts on this night, at least, are on one of the great inspirations of his life. “I remember,” he says, “my emotion the first time I entered Wahnfried. To
say I was moved is an understatement! At my worst moments, they never ceased to sustain me, even Siegfried Wagner. I was on Christian-name terms with them. I loved them all, and I also love Wahnfried . . . the ten days of the Bayreuth season were always one of the blessed seasons of my existence. And I rejoice at the idea that one day I shall be able to resume the pilgrimage! . . . On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival . . . I’m gripped by a great sadness— as when one strips the Christmas tree of its ornaments.” Though Hitler reiterated in his monologue that winter evening that to him Tristan und Isolde was “Wagner’s masterpiece,” it is the stupendous Nibelungen Ring, a series of four operas which was inspired by the great German epic myth, Nibelungenlied, and on which the composer worked for the better part of twenty-five years, that gave Germany and especially the Third Reich so much of its primitive Germanic mythos. Often a people’s myths are the highest and truest expression of its spirit and culture, and nowhere is this more true than in Germany. Schelling even argued that “a nation comes into existence with its mythology…The unity of its thinking, which means a collective philosophy, (is) presented in its mythology; therefore its mythology contains the fate of the nation.” And Max Mell, a contemporary poet, who wrote a modern version of the Song of the Nibelungs, declared, “Today only little has remained of the Greek gods that humanism wanted to implant so deeply into our culture…But Siegfried and Kriemhild were always in the people’s soul!” Siegfried and Kriemhild, Brunhild and Hagen— these are the ancient heroes and heroines with whom so many modern Germans liked to identify themselves. With them, and with the world of the barbaric, pagan Nibelungs—an irrational, heroic, mystic world, beset by treachery, overwhelmed by violence, drowned in blood, and culminating in the Goetterdaemmerung, the twilight of the gods, as Valhalla, set on fire by Wotan after all his vicissitudes, goes up in flames in an orgy of selfwilled annihilation which has always fascinated the German mind and answered some terrible longing in the German soul. These heroes, this primitive, demonic world, were always, in Mell’s words, “in the people’s soul.” In that German soul could be felt the
Source: Shirer, William. “Richard Wagner.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990.
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Unit III: READING #2 struggle between the spirit of civilization and the spirit of the Nibelungs, and in the time with which this history is concerned the latter seemed to gain the upper hand. It is not at all surprising that Hitler tried to emulate Wotan when in 1945 he willed the destruction of Germany so that it might go down in flames with him. Wagner a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas
often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated with the “tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.
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Source: Shirer, William. “Richard Wagner.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #3
johann treitschke
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einrich von Treitschke’s career mirrors the increasing racism and reaction of the universities. The favorite of the Prussian establishment, he was appointed royal historiographer of Prussia by the kaiser, and no middle-class household was complete without his famous History. He was even able to reproach the kaiser with impunity. In 1892, when Pastor Stoecker was ordered by the kaiser to hold his tongue at a dinner honoring a liberal prince, Stoecker nevertheless attacked “Jewish liberalism,” and the kaiser fired him. Treitschke complained that William had “disarmed the only party…with a chance to break the pernicious rule of the Progressives and the Social Democrats.” He was not disciplined. Idol of the German Student Federation, Treitschke gave scholarly sanction to establishment prejudices. For two decades his public lectures at the University of Berlin were attended by the highestranking members of government and the military, his classes crammed with their sons and future schoolteachers, who, while their opposite numbers in France taught the virtues of republicanism, taught those of autocracy. His strident voice harshened by near deafness, Treitschke ranted like a demagogue, praised imperialism, denounced the Jews, and raged against democracy and socialism. Civilians, he insisted, should have no say over the sacred army budget; thank the God of Battles there had been no universal suffrage when Prussia unified Germany. Why give the vote to readers of a daily press that encouraged every ignoramus to utter opinions on matters best left to a few? Universal elementary education created discontent. If it must be, appoint retired noncommissioned officers as teachers to instill the right values. For Treitschke, socialism was the treason of the Jews, feminism the illegitimate offspring of Jewish socialism and Hebrew females. Violating nature, feminism also threatened the sources of Prussian greatness, the patriarchal family and the warrior ethic. As the Nazis would insist, woman’s role was one of childbearer for the race, nurse to the warrior, symbol of the gentler sentiments. Treitschke even criticized Bismarck for not completing the holy task of uniting all Germans in an imperial Weltmacht (world power). A people with the power to conquer and absorb weak states had a
divine mandate to do so. “Brave peoples expand, cowardly peoples perish.” Treitschke looked forward to the day when a German fleet would sail up the Thames and a German army occupy London. Bismarck saw no reason why Slavs should rule themselves, but he would not prop up the dying Austrian Empire. To Treitschke and the leagues he inspired, it was inconceivable to allow the thinly scattered Germanic stock in the east to be overwhelmed by the vast flood of inferior Slavic peasants, then in the grip of nationalistic antiGerman movements. If Austria and Russia fought, Germany must support Austria, for it was the racial destiny of Germans to rule over “inferior” Slavs. In politics, all was force. War united the race and fostered the heroic; peace mutilated the personality and brought the domination of vulgar commerce. Might did not make right; it was right. Treitschke said, as Hitler would, “History is nothing other than the eternal struggle of race against race.” The glittering, uniformed elites and arrogant youth of the dueling fraternities received academic sanction for their power and interests from Treitschke, the crude voice of the barracks writ large. Angered by the advance of democracy, socialism, and international pacification under Caprivi, Treitschke’s racist vituperation intensified. With simpleminded abandon he assigned racial characteristics: orientals were effeminate, the French (or Latin “race”) had a natural penchant for shallowminded superficiality, blacks were natural servants, gifted only with athletic talent — as Hitler maintained when he explained away the victories of Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. The enormous popularity of Treitschke’s harsh simplicities illustrates bow racism enabled so many upper-class Germans to reduce social and moral complexities to racial differences and take seriously those who later, in the midst of social trauma, preached racial revolution and war. Treitschke’s writings were revived by the radical right in the 1920s, and he was one of the very few nineteenthcentury writers to win a place in the official Nazi pantheon of required reading. Quotations from Treitschke were included in the small books of readings carried into battle by German soldiers during World War II.
Source: Weiss, John. Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996.
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Unit III: READING #4
otto von bismarck
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t was this political genius, this apostle of “blood and iron,” who between 1866 and 1871 brought an end to a divided Germany which had existed for nearly a thousand years and, by force, replaced it with Greater Prussia, or what might be called Prussian Germany. Bismarck’s unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time, a problem child of Europe and the world for nearly a century, a nation of gifted, vigorous people in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste and by many a strange intellectual, succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority, for authoritarianism. Under such a spell, this nation rose to great heights, fell and rose again, until it was seemingly destroyed with the end of Hitler in the spring of 1945—it is perhaps too early to speak of that with any certainty. “The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, “will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.” That was exactly the way he proceeded to settle them, though it must be said that he added a touch of diplomatic finesse, often of the most deceitful kind. Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism, bolster the power of conservatism—that is, of the Junkers, the Army and the crown—and make Prussia, as against Austria, the dominant power not only among the Germans but, if possible, in Europe as well. “Germany looks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies in the Prussian parliament, “but to her force.” Bismarck first built up the Prussian Army and when the parliament refused to vote the additional credits he merely raised them on his own and finally dissolved the chamber. With a strengthened Army he then struck in three successive wars. The first, against Denmark in 1864, brought the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein under German rule. The second, against Austria in 1866, had far-reaching consequences. Austria, which for centuries had been
first among the German states, was finally excluded. Bismarck’s crowning achievement, the creation of the Second Reich, came on January 18, 1871, when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Germany had been unified by Prussian armed force. It was now the greatest power on the Continent; its only rival in Europe was England. Yet there was a fatal flaw. The German Empire, as Treitschke said, was in reality but an extension of Prussia. “Prussia,” he emphasized, “is the dominant factor…The will of the Empire can be nothing but the will of the Prussian state.” This was true, and it was to have disastrous consequences for the Germans themselves. From 1871 to 1933 and indeed to Hitler’s end in 1945, the course of German history as a consequence was to run, with the exception of the interim of the Weimar Republic, in a straight line and with utter logic. Despite the democratic facade put up by the establishment of the Reichstag, whose members were elected by universal manhood suffrage, the German Empire was in reality a militarist autocracy ruled by the King of Prussia, who was also Emperor. The Reichstag possessed few powers; it was little more than a debating society where the representatives of the people let off steam or bargained for shoddy benefits for the classes they represented. The throne had the power — by divine right. As late as 1910 Wilhelm II could proclaim that the royal crown had been “granted by God’s Grace alone and not by parliaments, popular assemblies and popular decision…Considering myself an instrument of the Lord,” he added, “I go my way.” He was not impeded by Parliament. The Chancellor he appointed was responsible to him, not to the Reichstag. The assembly could not overthrow a Chancellor nor keep him in office. That was the prerogative of the monarch. Thus, in contrast to the development in other countries in the West, the idea of democracy, of the people sovereign, of the supremacy of parliament, never got a foothold in. Germany, even after the twentieth century began.
Source: Shirer, William. “Otto Von Bismarck.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #5
houston chamberlain
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mong the zealous members of the Gobineau Society in Germany was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose life and works constitute one of the most fascinating ironies in the inexorable course of history which led to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. This son of an English admiral, nephew of a British field marshal, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and of two British generals, and eventually son-in-law of Richard Wagner, was born at Portsmouth in 1855. He was destined for the British Army or Navy, but his delicate health made such a calling out of the question and he was educated in France and Geneva, where French became his first language. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen fate brought him into touch with two Germans and thereafter he was drawn irresistibly toward Germany, of which he ultimately became a citizen and one of the foremost thinkers and in whose language he wrote all of his many books, several of which had an almost blinding influence on Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler and countless lesser Germans… The book which most profoundly influenced that mind, which sent Wilhelm II into ecstasies and provided the Nazis with their racial aberrations, was Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Grundlagen des Neunehnten Jahrhunderts) a work of some twelve hundred pages which Chamberlain, again possessed of one of his “demons,” wrote in nineteen months between April 1, 1897, and October 31, 1898, in Vienna, and which was published in 1899. As with Gobineau, whom he admired, Chamberlain found the key to history, indeed the basis of civilization, to be race. To explain the nineteenth century, that is, the contemporary world, one had to consider first what it had been bequeathed from ancient times. Three things, said Chamberlain: Greek philosophy and art, Roman law and the personality of Christ. There were also three legatees: the Jews and the Germans, the “two pure races,” and the half-breed Latins of the Mediterranean—”a chaos of peoples,” he called them. The Germans alone deserved such a splendid heritage. They had, it is true, come, into history late, not until the thirteenth century. But even before that, in destroying the Roman Empire, they had proved their worth. It is not true,” he says, “that the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called ‘Night of the
Middle Ages’; this night followed rather upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the raceless chaos of humanity which the dying Roman Empire had nurtured; but for the Teuton, everlasting night would have settled upon the world.” At the time he was writing he saw in the Teuton the only hope of the world. Chamberlain included among the “Teutons” the Celts and the Slavs, though the Teutons were the most important element. However, he is quite woolly in his definitions and at one point declares that “whoever behaves as a Teuton is a Teuton whatever his racial origin.” Perhaps here he was thinking of his own non-German origin. Whatever he was, the Teuton, according to Chamberlain, was the soul of our culture. The importance of each nation as a living power today is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population…True history begins at the moment when the Teuton, with his masterful hand, lays his grip upon the legacy of antiquity.” And the Jews? The longest chapter in Foundations is devoted to them. As we have seen, Chamberlain claimed that the Jews and the Teutons were the only pure races left in the West. And in this chapter he condemns “stupid and revolting antiSemitism.” The Jews, he says, are not “inferior” to the Teuton, merely “different.” They have their own grandeur; they realize the “sacred duty” of man to guard the purity of race. And yet as he proceeds to analyze the Jews, Chamberlain slips into the very vulgar anti-Semitism which he condemns in others and which leads, in the end, to the obscenities of Julius Streicher’s caricatures of the Jews in Der Stuermer in Hitler’s time. Indeed a good deal of the “philosophical” basis of Nazi anti-Semitism stems from this chapter. There follows what purports to be a detailed history of the Jewish race from the time of the mixture of the Semite or Bedouin of the desert with the roundheaded Hittite, who had a “Jewish nose,” and finally with the Amorites, who were Aryans. Unfortunately the Aryan mixture—the Amorites, he says, were tall, blond, magnificent—came too late to really improve the “corrupt” Hebrew strain. From then on the Englishman, contradicting his whole theory of the purity of the Jewish race, finds the Jews becoming a “negative” race, “a bastardy,” so that the Aryans were justified in “denying” Israel. In fact, he
Source: Shirer, William. “Houston Chamberlain.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990.
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Unit III: READING #5 condemns the Aryans for giving the Jews “a halo of false glory.” He then finds the Jews “lamentably lacking in true religion.” Finally, for Chamberlain the way of salvation lies in the Teutons and their culture, and of the Teutons the Germans are the highest-endowed, for they have inherited the best qualities of the Greeks and the Indo-Aryans. This gives them the right to be masters of the world. “God builds today upon the Germans alone,” he wrote in another place. “This is the knowledge, the certain truth, that has filled my soul for years.” But it was on the Third Reich, which did not arrive until six years after his death but whose coming he foresaw, that this Englishman’s influence was the greatest. His racial theories and his burning sense of the destiny of the Germans and Germany were taken over by the Nazis, who acclaimed him as one of their prophets. During the Hitler regime books, pamphlets and articles poured from the presses extolling the “spiritual founder” of National Socialist Germany. Rosenberg, as one of Hitler’s mentors, often tried to impart his enthusiasm for the English philosopher to the Fuehrer. It is likely that Hitler first learned of Chamberlain’s writings before
he left Vienna, for they were popular among the PanGerman and anti-Semitic groups whose literature he devoured so avidly in the early days. Probably too he read some of Chamberlain’s chauvinistic articles during the war. In Mein Kampf he expresses the regret that Chamberlain’s observations were not more heeded during the Second Reich. Chamberlain was one of the first intellectuals in Germany to see a great future for Hitler — and new opportunities for the Germans if they followed him. Hitler had met him in Bayreuth in 1923, and though ill, half paralyzed, and disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Hohenzollern Empire—the collapse of all his hopes and prophecies!— Chamberlain was swept off his feet by the eloquent young Austrian. “You have mighty things to do,” he wrote Hitler on the following day. My faith in Germanism had not wavered an instant, though my hope—I confess—was at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That in the hour of her deepest need Germany gives birth to a Hitler proves her vitality; as do the influences that emanate from him; for these two things—personality and influence—belong together…May God protect you!”
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Source: Shirer, William. “Houston Chamberlain.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #6
THE RISE OF HITLER Sefton Delmar The Nazi Party grew out of increased dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic. In 1920, the party was a small group of disgruntled veterans taken over by a young Adolf Hitler. Ten years later, it would become one of the largest groups in the Reichstag. Its leader, Adolf Hitler, was born in Austria in 1889. He was the son of a minor civil servant and a softspoken young woman. His relationship with his brutal, drunken father was very strained until the father died in 1903. Hitler’s desire to be an artist was challenged by his father who wanted his son to become a civil servant. Hitler’s relationship with his mother was marked by closeness and affection. Hitler’s career in education was a series of failures. Thrown out of a monastery school, he would quit high school before he was 16. In 1907, Hitler left for Vienna to live what would be the life of a tramp. In the same year, his mother died of cancer. Despite these depressing aspects of his life, Hitler would learn much from the general environment of anti-Semitism in Vienna. Dr. Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, used anti-Semitism for his own political ends. George von Schonerer, Pan-German nationalist, was a bitter anti-Semite. Hitler would learn much from these men, which he combined with the romantic nationalism he had learned as a youth. Hitler devoured the “western” novels of the German writer Karl May, which depicted the great Indian fighters of the American West. He loved the music of Richard Wagner that emphasized the need for great German heroes to combat evil in the world. Wagner himself would see that evil in the Jews. It would be Hitler who would carry out these ideas. Throughout the 1920s, the Nazis slowly gained in strength. But it was not until the late 1920s, which saw the combination of a decaying economic order and financial support of the Nazis by some wealthy industrialists, that the Nazis gained significant popular support. Hitler joined forces with Alfred Hugenberg and the Nationalist Party. He also received support from Erhard Milch of Lufthansa, Fritz Tyssen of the German steel trust, Emil Kidorf of the German coal industry and others. In the Reichstag elections of 1928, the Nazis received about 800,000 votes and only 12 seats. By 1930, the Nazis gained over 6 million votes and 107 seats. In 1932, the Nazis received almost 14 million votes, 120 seats, and became the largest political party. In 1932, Adolf Hitler ran against General von Hindenburg for the Presidency of Germany. Chartering an aircraft from Lufthansa, Hitler became the first politician to make full use of the airplane for campaigning. Hitler received over 13 million votes although Hindenburg won the election with over 19 million. What followed were months of political scheming. A member of the Hindenburg clique, Franz von Papen, tried to make a deal with Hitler. Von Papen believed that Hitler could be controlled if he were brought into the Hindenburg government. This brief selection by Sefton Delmar describes the few years before the actual rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power.
B
y the beginning of 1931 Germany had the message ‘Wanted, a dictator’ written all over it. And it was the army, represented by Kurt von Schleicher, the astute office-desk general who ran the political department of the Defence Ministry, who was making the appointment. At the moment he was trying out Dr. Bruning. But…Bruning lacked appeal for the mass of the German public. Another candidate
was already after his job: Adolf Hitler. Two things Hitler needed to secure the position: the backing of Schleicher and the support of the German masses. Hitler had a key to both in his Storm Troops. The German masses were dazzled by the Storm Troops. That had been shown in the elections when Storm Troop parades through towns and villages before the meetings had been the Nazis’
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit III: READING #6 biggest drawing-card at their election rallies. The army for its part would welcome the Storm Troops as a reservoir of soldiers and a valuable contribution to Germany’s rearmament. There was one man who could both organize the Storm Troops for Hitler and put him in touch with Schleicher: Ernst Rohm, a one-time Reichswehr captain and Free Corps leader, who had been one of Hitler’s closest associates in the early days of the Nazi movement…Within eighteen months of his return, Rohm, aided by the bank crash of 13th July 1931 and the rapid escalation in unemployment which followed (the 3,000,000 unemployed of 1930 had become 6.500,000 by the end of 1932), had expanded the numbers of Storm Troops from 80,000 men to 600,000. On 4th January 1933, a closed, curtained car called for Hitler who was staying in Godesberg near Bonn. It took him to the Cologne house of the banker Baron Kurt von Schroder. There he met Papen and a new alliance between the two was secretly formed. At the same time the banker Schroder obligingly arranged to refill the Nazi party’s empty money bags. This, as the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher has written, was the hour in which the Third Reich was born.
Last Lap 270
Now Hitler concentrated all the power of his party machine on the forthcoming elections in the tiny state of Lippe. Hitler treated this election as though it was a major event. He toured the villages and addressed the public in tents put up in farm pastures. The elections, on 15th January 1933, were a great success for the Nazis. Hitler, in jubilant mood, was certain that he had turned the corner. The party had polled 39,000 votes, more than forty per cent of the total electorate. The anti-Schleicher clique, led by Oskar von Hindenburg, the Field Marshal’s son, were able to persuade the old man that Hitler was by no means a “burst bubble”…
Hugenberg too, who had been denied the Ministry of Economics by Schleicher, now joined in the Papen-Hitler cabal. On the morning of 23rd January Schleicher proposed to Hindenburg that he should declare a state of national emergency, dissolve the Reichstag, and send it on indefinite leave. Hindenburg refused. On 28th January Schleicher asked for a simple dissolution of the Reichstag. Again Hindenburg refused. “Then, your Excellency,” said Schleicher, “I may as well resign.” “You may.” said Hindenburg. Before he took his farewell Schleicher gave Hindenburg one last piece of advice “Don’t make Papen Chancellor. It will provoke a general strike and I am afraid we can’t rely on the army to put down the strike by force.” Even now it looked as though there might still be a last minute hitch to prevent the fruition of the Papen-Hitler pact. Certainly Hindenburg had agreed that Hitler should be Chancellor, but Hitler was refusing to accept the other side of the deal: that Papen in addition to becoming Vice-Chancellor should also be dictator of Prussia, thus having under his control two-thirds of Germany and the largest police force in the Reich… By eleven o’clock that evening they had hatched out the compromise under which Hitler became Reich Chancellor and Papen Vice-Chancellor, while Goering would be Minister of the Interior in Prussia with control of the police. In the morning Hindenburg formally appointed the new cabinet. After fourteen years of struggle Hitler had at last reached his goal. He was Chancellor—though not yet absolute dictator. As the Storm Troops marched past the presidential palace that night, the old Field Marshal stood at his window tapping his stick in time with the music of the bands. Hitler stood at a window of the Chancellery, smiling and saluting with outstretched arm the singing and cheering crowds below.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Why didn’t the Communists win the upper hand in Germany after the economic crash?
2.
Franz von Papen believed he could control Hitler by bringing him into his government as chancellor. Thus, Hitler came to power legally. Why do you think Von Papen thought he could control Hitler?
3.
How important was the S.A. in the rise of Hitler?
4.
What role did Kurt Schroder play in the rise of Adolf Hitler?
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #1
hitler in vienna Mein Kampf
O
nce, as I was strolling through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black hair locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. For, to be sure, they had not looked like that in Linz. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, scrutinizing feature for feature, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German? As always in such cases, I now began to try to relieve my doubts by books. For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Unfortunately, they all proceeded from the supposition that in principle the reader knew or even understood the Jewish question to a certain degree. Besides, the tone for the most part was such that doubts again arose in me, due in part to the dull and amazingly unscientific arguments favoring the thesis.
I relapsed for weeks at a time, once even for months. The whole thing seemed to me so monstrous, the accusations so boundless, that, tormented by the fear of doing injustice, I again became anxious and uncertain. Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves; for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.
271
Hitler in Vienna: From his autobiography: “Mein Kampf”
Unit III: READING #8
the rise and fall of the great powers Paul Kennedy
T
he significance of the American entry into the conflict was not at all a military one, at least for twelve to fifteen months after April 1917, since its army was even less prepared for modern campaigning than any of the European forces had been in 1914. But its productive strength, boosted by the billions of dollars of Allied war orders, was unequaled. Its total industrial potential and its share of world manufacturing output was two and a half times that of Germany’s now overstrained economy. It could launch merchant ships in the hundreds, a vital requirement in a year when the U-boats were
sinking over 500,000 tons a month of British and Allied vessels. It could build destroyers in the astonishing time of three months. It produced half of the world’s food exports, which could now be sent to France and Italy as well as to its traditional British market. In terms of economic power, therefore, the entry of the United States into the war quite transformed the balances, and more than compensated for the collapse of Russia at this same time. As Table 24 demonstrates, the productive resources now arranged against the Central Powers were enormous.
Table 24: Industrial/Technological Comparisons with the United States But Without Russia 272
U.K./U.S./France
Germany/Austria-Hungary
51.7
19.2
798.8
236.4
44.1
20.2
472.6
178.4
Percentages of world manufacturing production (1913) Energy consumption (1913), million metric tons of coal equivalent Steel production (1913) in million tons Total industrial potential (U.K. in 1900=100)
Source: Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #8
Table 25: War Expenditure and Total Mobilized Forces 1914-1919 War Expenditures at 1913 Prices (billions of dollars)
Total Mobilized Forces (millions)
British Empire France Russia Italy United States Other Allies*
23.0 9.3 5.4 3.2 17.1 –0.3
9.5 8.2 13.0 5.6 3.8 2.6
Total Allies
57.7
40.7
Germany Austria-Hungary Bulgaria, Turkey
19.9 4.7 0.1
13.25 9.00 2.85
Total Central Powers
24.7
25.10
273
*Belgium, Rumania, Portugal, Greece, Serbia
While it would be quite wrong, then, to claim that the outcome of the First World War was predetermined, the evidence presented here suggests that the overall course of that conflict—the early stalemate between the two sides, the ineffectiveness of the Italian entry, the slow exhaustion of Russia, the decisiveness of the American intervention in keeping up the allied pressures, and the eventual collapse of the Central Powers—correlates closely with the economic and industrial production and effectively mobilized forces available to each alliance during the different phases of the struggle. To be
Source: Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random House.
sure, generals still had to direct (or mis direct) their campaigns, troops still had to summon the individual moral courage to assault an enemy position, and sailors still had to endure the rigors of sea warfare; but the record indicates that such qualities and talents existed on both sides, and were not enjoyed in disproportionate measure by one of the coalitions. What was enjoyed by one side, particularly after 1917, was a marked superiority in productive forces. As in earlier, lengthy coalition wars, that factor eventually turned out to be decisive.
Unit III: READING #9
excerpt from “mein KAmpf” Adolf Hitler
B
ut in exact proportion as, in the course of the War, the German worker and the German soldier fell back into the hands of the Marxist leaders, in exactly that proportion he was lost to the fatherland. If at the beginning of the war and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future. But it just happened to be in the line of bourgeois ‘statesmanship’ to subject millions to a bloody end on the battlefield without batting an eyelash, but to regard ten or twelve thousand traitors, profiteers, usurers, and swindlers as a sacred national treasure and openly proclaim their inviolability. We never know which is greater in this bourgeois world, the imbecility, weakness, and cowardice, or their deep-dyed corruption. It is truly a class doomed by Fate, but unfortunately, however, it is dragging a whole nation with it into the abyss. I am going to fulfill the vow I made to myself five years ago when I was a blind cripple in the military hospital: to know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals have been overthrown, until on the ruins of the wretched Germany of today there should have arisen once more a Germany of power and greatness, of freedom and splendor.
historian refutes hitler’s view 274
Martin Gilbert
I
n the war which came to Europe in August 1914, Jews served in every army: and on opposite sides of the trenches and the wire. German Jews fought and died as German patriots, shooting at British Jews who served and fell as British patriots. Of the 615,000 German Jews in 1914, more than 100,000 served in the German army, although before 1914 Jews could enter the military academies only with difficulty, and certain regiments almost entirely excluded Jews. Man for man, the Jewish and non-Jewish war casualties were in an almost exact ratio of the respective populations. Jews and non-Jews alike fought as Germans: for duty and for the Fatherland. The first member of the German parliament to be killed in action was a Jew, Dr. Ludwig Haas, member for Mannheim: one of twelve thousand German Jews to fall on the battlefield in German uniform. Jews in the Austro-Hungarian army fought Jews in the Russian, Serbian and Italian armies. When the war ended in November 1918, Jewish soldiers, sailors and airmen had filled the Rolls of Honour, the field hospitals and the military cemeteries, side by side with their compatriots under a dozen national flags.
QUESTIONS: 1.
What are Adolf Hitler’s accusations about German Jews in the first article above?
2.
How does historian, Martin Gilbert respond to these accusations?
Source: Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #10
A THOUSAND YEARS OF JEWISH CULTURE AND COMMUNAL LIFE
275
Source: Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust. New York: Anti-Defamation League, Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994.
Unit III: READING #10
SOME EARLY RECORDS OF JEWISH TOWN LIFE IN EUROPE BEFORE 1600
276
Source: Gilbert, Martin. “A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life,” “Some Early records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600,” “Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge, 1050 A.D.–1650,” and “Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 1600-1920.” The Holocaust. New York: Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994. (Maps) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #10
PERSECUTION, EXPULSION AND REFUGE, 1050 AD – 1650
277
Source: Gilbert, Martin. “A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life,” “Some Early records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600,” “Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge, 1050 A.D.–1650,” and “Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 1600-1920.” The Holocaust. New York: Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994. (Maps)
Unit III: READING #10
MASSACRE, POGROM AND EMIGRATION, 1600 – 1920
278
Source: Gilbert, Martin. “A Thousand Years of Jewish Culture and Communal Life,” “Some Early records of Jewish Town Life in Europe Before 1600,” “Persecution, Expulsion and Refuge, 1050 A.D.–1650,” and “Massacre, Pogrom and Emigration, 1600-1920.” The Holocaust. New York: Braun Center for Holocaust Studies, 1994. (Maps) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #11
jewish life in twentieth century europe Jews have lived in Europe for more than 2,000 years. The Jews of Eastern and Western Europe developed their own culture while also contributing to the countries in which they lived. Two examples of the nature of their contributions can be found in Poland and Germany. Judah Pilch gives us an overview of the more than three million Jews who lived in Poland, more than in any other European country. A large number of them lived in the cities such as Warsaw, Vilna, and Cracow. There were over 500,000 Jews in Germany. One hundred thousand, writes Otto Friedrich, were loyal German soldiers in World War I. Yet in the wake of the war and the revolution in Russia, Jews all over Europe faced a fierce brand of anti-Jewish feeling. In Germany the Weimar government would increasingly be seen as a Jewish concoction. Well before 1933, attempts would already be made to reduce the gains made by Jews at the beginning of the century.
the jews of poland Judah Pilch
A
fter World War I, the newly established state of Poland had a Jewish community of 3,300,000, the largest and one of the oldest in Europe and the second largest in the world. It was organized as a Kehillah [structured community], with power of owning all communal property, such as synagogues, cemeteries, hospitals, and with authority to direct the communal educational, religious and social-cultural institutions. Each town, large and small, was represented on a Council which was elected by direct, secret ballot. The greatest achievement of Polish Jewry was its educational system maintained at its own cost. Here, too, the different Jewish ideological and religious groups maintained their respective types of schools, each with its own language of instruction in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, or bilingual. Of the total Jewish school population of 425,000 some 340,000 attended these schools. The Jewish community also maintained teacher training schools, rabbinical academics, trade schools and other cultural institutions, such as
museums, libraries, and adult study courses. In higher general education, Jewish students were greatly handicapped because of discrimination against them by the universities. As many as half of the Jewish trainees in various professions had to seek admission to foreign universities. When they returned home they had great difficulty in gaining permits to practice their professions. Jewish cultural life of a religious and secular character flourished throughout Poland. There was a large output of books, magazines, dailies and other publications. In higher institutions of Jewish learning, such as the famous Yeshivoth of Lublin and Mir, the Yiddish Scientific Institute (in Vilna), the Institute for the Science of Judaism (in Warsaw), scholars produced many volumes on Jewish subjects and trained students who later spread Jewish knowledge throughout the world. In the Jewish museums of Warsaw, Vilna, and Cracow one could find treasures of the past as well as creations of such contemporary artists as Marc Chagall, Henryk
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
279
Unit III: READING #11 Glicenstein, and Arthur Szyk. A vibrant religious life, centering around thousands of synagogues, courts of hasidic rabbis, and individual homes, endowed the Jews with the strength and courage to live a traditional Jewish life in a non-Jewish world, frequently hostile. The Sabbaths and the holidays, all rites and customs were observed in an atmosphere that glowed with joy and piety. Jewish communal life also abounded with a variety of political, social, philanthropic, and mutual aid organizations and institutions which helped the Jew to cope with the complexity of problems calling for action. There were organizations aiming to restore to the Jew individual human rights and freedom as well as collective autonomy, and to defend these rights along political lines. Numerous Zionist organizations helped in the rebuilding of Palestine.
Jews also contributed their full measure to the general culture of Poland in science, art, literature and music. Among others, Julian Tuwim was considered the foremost contemporary poet of the Polish language, Bruno Winawer was prominent in literature, Bronislaw Huberman in music, and Szymon Ashkenazi in historiography. The Jewish community of Poland functioned under tremendous hardships of financial limitations and governmental discrimination, which drove large Jewish masses into poverty and migration. The antiSemitic attitudes of the government and the masses produced economic boycotts and outbreaks of violence against Jews. Nevertheless the Jews fought their battle for survival with all possible means through internal efforts and with the aid of American Jewry, and they maintained their communal life on a high level to the very end of the interwar period…
280
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #11
PARTITION OF POLAND, THREE MAJOR GHETTOS
281
Source: Shirer, William. “Freiderich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990.
Unit III: READING #11
POLAND’S LARGEST JEWISH COMMUNITIES ON THE EVE OF WAR
282
Source: Shirer, William. “Freiderich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #11
the jews of germany Otto Friedrich
W
hen World War I began the Jews expressed their sense of German nationalism by swarming into the army with an ardor as lemminglike as that of the gentiles. Some 100,000 Jews (one out of every six, including the women and children) entered the German Army. Of these, 80,000 served in front-line trenches. 35,000 were decorated for bravery, and 12,000 were killed. “The Jews were pathologically patriotic,” says Rabbi Prinz. “My father served in the war, and my grandfather was wounded in 1866, in the war against the Austrians. He was enormously proud of that.” And only an American reporter thought it odd that a segregated cemetery should have been created for the Jews who had been killed. “It was a vast place,” Ben Hecht said, “acres and acres of earth covered with rows of little marble slabs. . . . [My guide said:] ‘They fought bravely for their Fatherland. More Jews were killed in battle than Germans. The Jewish population of Germany was only one half of one percent. The Jewish deaths in the war were three percent.’ “ Only after the war, finally, did the Jews attain the full equality that had been promised them in 1812 and 1871. Numerically, they remained a tiny minority, never more than about one percent of the population. Those few, however, tended to congregate in Berlin. The 50 families of 1671 grew to a population of 3,322 in 1800, to 92,000 in 1900, to a peak of 173,000 in 1925 (about six times the 29,000 in Frankfurt, Germany’s second-largest Jewish community). Even during this increase, Berlin’s Jews never numbered more than five percent of the city’s population, but they managed to acquire some very visible positions of power and prestige. They were enormously influential in commerce, dominating the giant Deutsche, Dresdener, and Darmstadter banks, and huge department stores like Wertheim, Tietz, and Kaufhaus Israel. The most important newspaper groups, Ullstein and Mosse, were owned by Jews, and, to a very considerable extent, the spectacular culture of Berlin in the 1920’s, the culture dominated by men like Max Reinhardt and Bruno Walter and Albert Einstein, was a Jewish culture.
To the Jews, this was naturally a matter of pride, and more than one Jewish chronicler has pointed out that one-quarter of all the Nobel Prizes won by Germans in the first third of this century were won by German Jews. To many gentiles, however, even those who vehemently deny the accusation of antiSemitism, this flowering of Jewish life represented the triumph of an alien and vaguely threatening force. Whatever the Jewish hopes for assimilation might be—and they were considerable (“Jews are political idiots,” says Rabbi Prim “They are too optimistic, too hopeful. They do not understand an enemy”)—the unusual structure of German religious life tended to keep them permanently separate. To a nation shattered by defeat and revolution, the emergence of Jews in public life seemed a somehow sinister development, quite apart from the old religious antagonism. Even in more ordinary situations, the quantity of Jewish publishers and doctors and lawyers seemed to many anxious gentiles something other than the triumph of the fittest. “The 1920’s were governed, in science, medicine, in culture, by the Jews,” says one embittered survivor of that period. “The professors at the university were Jews. If a student was a Jew, he would get the best job. If you had a Jewish lawyer, you could win a case, but if you didn’t, you would lose. And any job which promised to get money out of it was in the control of the Jews. For us, for the Germans, it was very bad.”
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How did Jews contribute to both Polish and German cultures? 2. How many of the Jewish students in Poland attended Jewish schools? What might this indicate about the degree of integration of Jews into Polish society? 3. How did some Germans see the role of Jews in the economic and cultural life of Germany? Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit III: READING #12
the jews of europe One of the striking and puzzling features of the Holocaust is the singling out of the Jews as the main target of hostility. What made them so vulnerable to attack? The next reading provides some answers to this question. In the selection, historian Uriel Tal explains that while Jews won equal rights in Germany at the end of the lost century, they could never fully Integrate into German society. One reason was that the German people believed “German” and “Christian” to be synonymous, a Jew, therefore, could never be considered a “true” German. The selection is from the book Christians and Jews of the Second Reich, 1870—1914, by Uriel Tal.
Christians and Jews in German 1870-1914 Uriel Tal
W
284
e began our study with a discussion of the double aspiration of the Jews in the Second Reich to integrate into the dominant society and at the same time retain their Jewish identity. This endeavor on the part of German Jews was part of a larger struggle of men to achieve freedom in modern society without forfeiting individuality. This struggle gave rise to a number of concomitant questions: how was this Jewish aspiration regarded by the German Christian society of that day; how did it affect the relations between Jews and Christians on the one hand and the Jew’s conception of his role in the modern world on the other; what can we learn from this historical attempt of German Jewry to become an integral part of German society and still retain its Jewish identity, that is, achieve equality without surrendering its freedom; and, finally, what conclusions can we draw from this study concerning the interrelationship between modern Jewish history and the history of mankind or between, Judaism and Christianity in the modern era and between the Second and the Third Reich. Friedrich Paulsen explained in his System of Ethics, if one is proud of the fact that he is a Jew and not a German, he has no right to complain that the German people do not accept him as a judge or as a teacher of German children: “To remain a complete Jew and a complete German is impossible.” When we recall that Paulsen was a prominent liberal and humanist and an outspoken opponent of antiSemitism, his words take on added significance as a ref lection of Germany’s determination not to acknowledge the claims of German Jewry to civil equality while retaining its Jewish identity. In the Second Reich, as well, religion, albeit in
its secular form, occupied an important place. Contrary to the expectations of the Jews and the liberals, religion had not become a private matter limited to the sphere of the individual, nor was it cleansed of its irrational elements in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, as a result of the process of religious secularization, Christian and especially Protestant patterns of thought and behavior were impressed on the cultural, social, and political life of the Second Reich. The national movement, the political parties, the social and economic organizations, and some of the principal scientific societies—all of which were an integral part of Germany’s rapid process of industrialization—defined themselves explicitly as Christian in essence. The Conservative Protestants and an increasing number of Catholics wished to establish the Second Reich on the principle of a Christian state as it had been formulated in conservative ideology throughout the greater part of the 19th century. German nationality, contrary to the expectations of the Jews, was not acquired by conscious selection or subjective feelings of the citizen but (according to the romantic school of thought) by belonging to a historic community whose roots went back to ancient tribal and pagan sources or in the more recent past to Lutheran Christian culture or (according to the anthropological school of thought) by belonging to a community whose roots went back to groups of different ethnic, cultural, and even religious origins which, through intermarriage and mutual biological assimilation, had come to constitute the present German nation. Neither of these two views was favorable to German Jewry in its determined effort to integrate into the dominant society while retaining its identity, the first view because of its exclusive conception of German nationality according to which it was not the conscious acknowledgment of belonging to the nation that determined German nationality, but the
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #12 objective fact of belonging to an organic ethnic group whose roots went back to the pagan Germanic tribes and to the Germans who became Christians and lived under a feudal system in principalities, duchies, and other traditional social forms in the historical German states; the second view because of its inclusive conception of German nationality according to which the determining factor in nationality was not membership in the nation, but the religious and biological fusion of the various ethnic components of the nation that left no room for particularistic internal groups. This second view was the one accepted by a considerable number of intellectual liberals, including many of the leading opponents of modern anti-Semitism, such as Rudolf von Gneist and Theodor Mommsen, who urged the complete assimilation of Jews into German society and argued that the addition of the Jewish heritage and the personal talents of the Jews would constitute an immense contribution, culturally and biologically, to the growing German nation and would at the same time strengthen the cause of the liberal intellectuals in their struggle against the irrational and pagan elements in German romanticism, potent ingredients in the anti-Semitic ideology of this movement. Against the background of these conflicting ideologies and political parties within the Second Reich the Jews endeavored to achieve their double goal of complete integration into the social environment without surrendering their identity. Political and racial anti-Semitism during this period failed to exert any appreciable public influence, and whatever effectiveness it had was limited to short intervals and restricted regions. The members of this movement were for the most part recruited from the unstable lower middle class, that is, from marginal groups within the liberal professions, workers who bad migrated from rural to urban areas where they led a precarious existence, and city dwellers of the proletarian working class. Only a small number among these social classes turned to the racialpolitical anti-Semitic movement, most of them being represented in Christian or socialist political and economic organizations. As a result of this policy of social reform, in which anti-Jewish propaganda had little part, the anti-Semites in 1893, the year when they first became politically significant, received 263,861 votes in the Reichstag election or 3.4 percent of the total vote of 7,673,973. In 1898 they reached the high point of their political success when they received 284,250 votes or 3.7 percent of the total vote of 7,752,693. It is therefore obvious that even in the heyday of their political activity the anti-Semites could not muster enough votes to endorse their policy among their
own rank-and-file supporters, who voted instead for the Conservative Protestant and Catholic parties on the one hand and the socialists on the other. This trend continued until the election of 1907 which was preceded by an intensive anti-Semitic campaign in which the anti-Semites sought to strengthen their image as the party of the “small man.” The resolutions adopted at the conventions held in Erfurt (1895), in Halle (1896), in Cassel (1898), and in Berlin (1903) reiterated this policy of social reform in favor of the lower middle class, the impoverished farmer, the underprivileged economically and socially, and the embittered and frustrated elements in the large urban centers. After World War I and during the Weimar Republic the mythological, non-Christian, and antiChristian character of anti-Semitism grew stronger, thus removing one of the main obstacles to the spread of racial anti-Semitism during the Second Reich and its acceptance by growing masses of the population. Christian anti-Semitism was not as virulent as racial anti-Semitism. It stigmatized Jewish perfidy, but it permitted the Jew to exist (though not flourish) as the living witness to the truth of Christianity. The Jew must remain to act out his preordained ignominious role as villain in the drama of salvation, at the end of which he would be crowned with glory. But he was always free to abrogate his covenant with Jehovah and accept the benevolent efforts of the church to redeem him. According to racial theory, however, baptism could not penetrate the tainted Jewish seed; the deep stain could only be removed by destroying the source of infection and its bearer, the physical Jew. The Jew must not only be excoriated but eliminated. Christianity, insofar as it had succumbed to Jewish inf luences, was also culpable since Christian agape, love and pity; like Jewish logos, law and reason, had alienated man from nature and weakened him in his struggle for existence. However, the Jewish stain could be removed from the Christian cloth, so to speak, by fumigation without destroying the cloth itself. In the days of the Second Reich these racial theories were not accepted by the great majority of the German people. After World War I and in the period of the Weimar Republic, however, they became increasingly popular, thus removing one of the chief obstacles in the path of the Nazi rise to power. The source of this ideology at the beginning of the Second Reich could be found in the teachings of Naudh-Nordmann, E. Duhring, C. Radenhausen, A. Wahrmund, F. Lange, and P. Forster, which were then transmitted by Theodor Fritsch, H. S. Chamberlain, and members of the anti-intellectualist Rembrandt
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
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Unit III: READING #12
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movement to the leading Nazi ideologists, to such figures as Alfred Rosenberg on the one hand and to the heads of the Deutsche-Christen movement on the other. Animated by this aggressive mood that sought to deprive the Enlightenment of all its gains, the racial anti-Semites put their faith in the efficacy of blood, the mysterious fountain from which all life flows and which determines the hierarchy of powers that shape history. Apriorism, whether in theology or in critical rational thought, was done away with and blood became the epistemological model whose uniqueness, contrary to the logical structure of rational thought, was that it comprehends both form and content, symbol and reality, the concept and that which is expressed by the concept. Blood became an absolute value because it erases the distinction between the symbol and that which is symbolized, between theory and practice; it attempts to create a total identity between the particular and the general, between the individual sphere and the public domain, between society and the state. It was felt that man’s life must be rescued from the anemic ideals of Christianity and restored to its root and anchor in blood. Truth is not within reach of the pretentious intellect nor the reward of holiness, for both remove man from the deep sources of life. When the world demands a courageous response and genuine sacrifice, religion covers its face, unable to sustain the bravest efforts, and the untrustworthy intellect betrays man with its spurious profundities. It is then that blood clamors to be heard, and truth, long repressed, emerges through its cleansing filter. Evangelical Christianity with its morality of humility, selflessness, and excessive self-contempt, reinforced in modern times by democratic social altruism, thus constituted for the racial anti-Semites one of the principal obstructions to man’s natural development. By placing spirit above matter, conscience above intuition, and speculative thought above the experience of blood, Christianity poisoned the noblest instincts in man and removed him from his natural roots. The cross is the Christian symbol for the crucifixion of the body and its vital instincts. It would seem then that radial anti-Semitism and traditional Christianity, although starting from opposite poles and with no discernible principle of reconciliation, were moved by a common impulse directed either to the conversion or to the extermination of Jews. Thus we find that the racial anti-Semites appropriated basic Christian ideas even while reprobating them and adapted them for their own purposes. The Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation, for example, whereby God became man, was interpreted by them not in the evangelical sense (John 1: 14) nor in the Pauline sense (Colossians 2:9), nor even in Nietzsche’s purely mythological sense, but in an empirically political and racial sense. According to the Christian Heilsgeschichte the Jews were the theological means to correct evil by acknowledging the principle (John 1:14): “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father”; and hence the Jews as the children of promise were eligible for salvation “in order that God’s purpose of election might continue” (Romans 9:11). According to the racial anti-Semites, however, the Jews could not be the means to correct evil for they themselves were the essence of evil, evil incarnate, and must therefore be exterminated not only in the spirit (as Christianity) but also in the flesh. When we recall the traditional Christian bias against the Jews—the collective guilt of deicide and the eternal curse of the world that rests upon them because of their unpardonable defection (Matthew 27:22, 25; 11 Thessalonians 2:15), the official policy of the church as formulated in such councils as the Synod of Elvira in 306, Clermont in 535, Toledo in 691, or the Third Lateran in 1179 and the Fourth Lateran in 1215, the preachments of Martin Luther against the Jews and his incitement to violence, especially after 1543 when he was disillusioned in his efforts to convert them, the blood libels and accusations in which the persecuted wandering Jew became the symbol of sin and abomination—when we recall all this, we see how Christianity created the patterns of prejudice, hatred, and calumny that could readily provide a rationale to justify organized violence. The anti-Christian elements of racial antiSemitism were interpreted in such a way that the traditional theological concepts of Christianity were not completely rejected; only their meanings were changed by using a pseudoscientific jargon and applied to the historical realities of that day, without the salutary correction of Christian discipline and belief. Racial anti-Semitism and the subsequent Nazi movement were not the result of mass hysteria or the work of single propagandists. The racial anti-Semites, despite their antagonism toward traditional Christianity, learned much from it, and succeeded in producing a well-prepared, systematic ideology with a logic of its own that reached its culmination in the Third Reich.
Source: Chartock, Roselle and Jack Spencer. The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #13
Lesson Focus
can any people become the victim of genocide? This lesson seeks to offer students an understanding of the tragic results of anti-Semitism and group hatred in the Jewish historical experience. It seeks to provide insight into the origins of one of the oldest and most deep-rooted forms of group hatred ever to pervade an otherwise progressive civilization. It enables the teacher to raise questions about the danger of attributing “collective guilt” to all members of an ethnic or religious group. It enables students to achieve the realization that human beings must be judged as individuals.
Student Performance Objectives: 1.
To define: ghetto, pogrom, blood libel, deicide, collective guilt, devil image and anti-Semitism.
2.
To demonstrate an understanding of the origins of anti-Semitism.
3.
To explain the danger in attributing “collective guilt” to all members of an ethnic, racial or religious group.
4.
To demonstrate an understanding that although the motivations may have been different, many different peoples have been the victims of those who have wished to see them suffer or disappear.
Learning Activies: 1.
“A sketch of the Jewish Historical Experience” — homework assignment.
2.
New York Daily News article, “Nab 4 Youths on Anti-Semitism Rap.”
3.
Graphics which can be made into overhead projections — Medieval Jewish Expulsions (1000-1500 A.D.)
4.
How can one explain anti-Semitism? — Three answers by non-Jews.
Development of the Lesson: 1.
The teacher should read excerpts for students from the article entitled “Nab 4 Youths on Anti-Semitism Rap.” (Learning Activity IIB.) Students should be asked: a.
How would you explain high school students in our country acting in this way?
b.
Could Jews only be targets of such behavior or could any group of people have been their target? Students should then be told that during World War II, Jews were victims of genocide (planned mass murder). Suppose we raise the question why. The focus or aim should then be placed on the blackboard: “Can any people become the victim of genocide?”
Source: Zomberg, lra. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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2.
Students should then be asked to consider their responses to questions raised in the homework (Learning Activity IIA), and whether they were in any way surprised by what they read.
3.
The following questions should be asked in developing the lesson: a.
It has been said that many words were created just to describe the historical experience of Jews. What is meant by the statement? (The words ghetto, anti-Semitism, pogrom, blood libel, genocide should be defined.)
b.
The teacher should show students the projection entitled “The Jews of Central Europe, 1000-1500.” (Learning Activity IIC). Students should be asked, “What does this tell us about the Jewish historical experience in Europe?”
c.
How would you explain the tragic aspects of this experience? (Minority status everywhere in the ‘diaspora,’ a people without a land, and a different religion should be considered.)
4.
The lesson should conclude by asking students to read and answer the question raised in the aim: “Can any people become the victim of genocide?” (The characteristics of potential victims should be listed: minority status, a socially weak group without many allies, a group with a “devil image” over a long period of time are all worthy of consideration.)
5.
As an application, students should be asked: “Can any people become the victim of genocide?” The extermination of Armenians, Indians (North and South America), Gypsies, Ainu (a tribe living in northern Japan) and others reveals that genocide was not something strictly applied to Jews alone, though never in such a systematic manner nor on such a scale. The fact that human systems of thought are constantly being conceived in which other groups of human beings have no right to exist is a never ending threat.
Source: Zomberg, lra. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #13
THE JEWS OF CENTRAL EUROPE 1000–1500
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Source: Zomberg, lra. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
Unit III: READING #13
Learning Activity IIA
classroom strategies for teaching the holocaust Ira Zormberg, A.D.C. A Sketch of the Jewish Historical Experience The Jews are an ancient people whose thoughts have been deeply imprinted upon western civilization. Judaism, the first monotheistic faith with its idea of a single God interested in the moral behavior of man, was outlined in the Bible and in the declarations of the prophets. From about 1000 B.C. until TO A.D. (with intervals), Jews lived in Israel under full or partial autonomy. The “Great Revolt” against the Romans (67-70 A.D.) ended with the destruction of the Temple. Another revolt in 132-135 A.D. resulted in the Roman expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem. The Romans changed the name of the land from Judea to Palestine. Christianity, originally a sect within Judaism, originated in the hills of Judea, and its message was spread by Matthew and Mark, both Jews, in the synagogues of the Roman Empire.
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Although by the 3rd Century the majority of Jews lived in the Diaspora (lands outside of Palestine) — it is estimated that 1/8th of the population in the far-flung Roman Empire was Jewish —many still lived in Palestine. It was there, and in Babylon, that Jewish scholars over a period of hundreds of years created the Talmud — a vast collection of laws and literature which guided Jewish life and served as a “portable homeland” for Jews wherever they lived. After the Arab conquest of Spain in the 8th century large numbers of Jews migrated there. During the Golden Age of Islam Jews were poets, scholars and generals under Moslem princes. The reconciling of faith and reason in the writings of the Jewish scholar, philosopher (and physician) Moses Maimonides was carefully studied by Christian scholars in the later Middle Ages. Many Jews acted as middlemen in trade between Moslems and Christians. Others were welcomed to settle by Frankish kings and translated works preserved by the Arabs (originally Greek and Roman works) into Latin. They were weavers and vintners, millers and minters. Wherever and whenever they were permitted, Jews not only worked for the betterment of their own lives but were also contributing members of the larger communities. Among those who have deeply affected the world in which we live are: a.
Jesus of Nazareth, whom Jews see as a teacher who preached important ethical concepts and whom Christians see as man and Son of God.
b.
Baruch Spinoza, 16th century Holland, who is the father of modern Biblical criticism and theology.
c.
Karl Marx, l9th century Germany (whose parents converted to Christianity and raised him as a Christian) believed in the ultimate perfection of society under Communism.
Source: Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #13
d.
Sigmund Freud, 20th century Austrian probed the causes of human behavior.
e.
Albert Einstein, 20th century Germany, who revolutionized the world of science with his theory of relativity.
f.
Jonas Salk, 20th century American, developer of the Salk vaccine against polio.
Some Historical Incidents of Anti-Semitism 1096
A majority of Jews in the Rhineland were either slaughtered or forcibly converted by the Crusaders. Hundreds of communities destroyed.
1205
Pope Innocent III threatened to excommunicate the King of Castile for employing Jews. He declared: “The Jews like the fratricide Cain are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds and their faces must be covered in shame.”
1215
The Fourth Lateran Council of the Catholic Church decreed that Jews wear special clothing to distinguish them from Christians. For many centuries Jews had to wear special hats, badges, or colors. (A special kind of identifying dress was once required of Christians and Jews by Moslems.)
1298-1348
Fifty years of horror for Jews in Germany. Jews were accused of desecrating sacramental wafers (it was said that blood flowed from them); of using the blood of Christian boys to make Passover Matzoth. Stereotypes in Christian church art were used to inflame the masses. In Germany and Austria it is estimated that 100,000 Jews were burned alive by people who called themselves “Yudenbrenner,” Jew burners.
1492
After Granada, the last Moslem stronghold in Spain, fell to the Christians, and Spain was united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, Jews were ordered to convert to Catholicism or be expelled from Spain. Jews who accepted Christianity, but were believed to be practicing Judaism in secret, were tried as heretics by the Holy Office of the Inquisition and were tortured and often burned at the stake.
1550
Daring the Protestant Reformation (the struggle between the Catholic Church and Christians who wished to separate themselves from it) Jews received poor treatment from both sides. Jews were ordered by Pope Paul IV to live in walled-up ghettos. Martin Luther, angry that Jews would not convert to his form of Christianity, declared: “..next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel…than a true Jew.” He also raised the question, “What shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews?”
1648-49
By the 13th century, seeking haven from the slaughters in Germanic lands, and invited to migrate to Poland by King Cassimir, Jews began to move eastward. Many, being literate, were employed by the Polish nobility. In 1648, Chmielniki, a Cossack chieftain, attacked the Polish nobility and slaughtered Jews wherever he conquered. More than 7OO Jewish communities were wiped out.
Source: Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Following the French Revolution in 1789 and the growth of democratic institutions in the late 18th, l9th and early 20th centuries there were dramatic improvements in the political, social and economic life of Jews in Western Europe. Anti-Semitism had not disappeared, but with some notable exceptions it was not of the virulent variety of previous centuries. Jews were out of the ghetto. They were granted citizenship in the countries where they had lived for centuries. They could (and did) enter the universities and other areas of life previously closed to them. They thrived in their new freedom and contributed to the societies in which they lived. Within this context let us examine modern anti-Semitism.
Modern Anti-Semitism As all were called upon to defend the state in France during the revolution in 1789, modern nationalism was born. Some nationalists reasoned that the genius of the nation was determined by the “race” or “tribe” it united. Some nationalists reasoned that Jews were different and should be denied equality in the nation. In 1873, Wilhelm Marr, published Victory of Judaism Over Germanism. His thesis was that Jews were conspiring to run the state and should be excluded from it. In Russia, czarist secret police published a forged collection of documents, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion; it told of secret meetings by rabbis in a cemetery, speaking ancient Chaldaic, planning to rule the world.
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In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who was a captain in the French Army, was falsely accused and convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans. When Colonel Georges Piquart found evidence that Dreyfus was innocent, he was dismissed. French sentiment was openly anti-Semitic. When author Emile Zola (Nana), a nonJew, tried to reopen the case, he was forced to flee to England. Officers on the Army General Staff wanted to blame the crime on a Jew. When the case was reopened, Colonel Marie Esterhazy confessed his guilt and took his own life. For a while, anti-Semitism in France seemed discredited. In 1896, Edouard Drumont wrote France Juive (Jewish France); he used the word “anti-Semite” for the first time in describing himself as one who believed that French Jews should be excluded from all aspects of French life. In 1791, after participating in the partition of Poland, Catherine the Great ordered Jews confined to one region - “the pale.” They could not own land and were confined to towns as artisans and small middlemen. Most Jews were extremely poor, yet when social unrest increased, resulting in the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, Jews were blamed for all the problems of the Russian peasantry. Pogroms (planned attacks on Jews) were instigated by the czarist secret police. In 1905, Russia’s loss in the Russo-Japanese War moved the government to incite the bloody Kishinev pogrom. In 1911, Mendel Beilis was accused of murdering a Christian child so he could use his blood in celebrating the Passover. Before his release — the child’s mother and her lover had murdered the child — Beilis was kept in prison and tortured for years. Between 1917 and 1921 after the Russian Revolution, more than 500 Jewish communities in the Ukraine were wiped out by pogroms. It is estimated that 60,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered.
Source: Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #13
Learning Activity IIB
Nab 4 youths on anti-semitism rap Thomas Raftery
A decoy cop dressed as a rabbi teamed up with his partner to arrest four Grady High School youths, it was reported yesterday, in in attempt to halt a series of anti-Semitic epithets and the stoning of yeshiva students by bus-riding youths near a Midwood yeshiva, the Transit Authority said. The two cops from the TA Bus Crime squad also tongue-lashed three busloads of unruly youths, the TA said. You see some of these 6-foot goons terrorizing these kids and it turns your stomach,” said decoy cop Fred Mack. “Some of these yeshiva kids came here from Russia. Then this happens. It’s uncalled for.” Mack dressed as a rabbi, ordered the streets cleared at 2:45 p.m. Wednesday of students and faculty members of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin at 1593 Coney Island Ave. Officer Joe Mastromarino, Mack’s backup, prepared to halt the special TA buses carrying any students throwing such objects as bricks, broken tools, eggs and other debris found in previous incidents, authorities said.
Eggs and Epithets One bus was ordered stopped as eggs and epithets flew out its windows at Mack. “Some of them rushed to the side door to meet me. Then they suddenly saw the badge,” Mack said. Arrested and charged with reckless endangerment were Sean Reilly, 16, of 164 Terrace Place and Paul Palasciano, 16 of 258 16th St. Two boys, one 13, the other 14, also were taken into custody and turned over the juvenile authorities, police said.
Source: Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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One of the Slurs “There were others, but we arrested only the ones we could positively identify,” Mack said. “One of the slurs included, ‘Yea. Hitler, burn a Jew!” Yeshiva officials said similar harassments have gone on for three years. Mack and Mastromarino checked out three buses loaded with the students, they said. “We hope we don’t have to return to the area and do it again,” Mack said. “If it starts up again, we’ll be there. It just saddens me that this stuff is done.” A Board of Education official said that high school authorities were unaware of the problem. They are investigating.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1.
How would you describe the treatment of Jews in Europe in the past 900 years÷
2.
How would you explain their treatment?
3.
Are you surprised by anything that you have read?
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Source: Zomberg, Ira. “Lesson 2. Can any People Become the Victim of Genocide? Classroom Strategies for Teaching About the Holocaust: 10 Lessons for Classroom Use. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #4
face to face: the study of
friedrich, a novel about the holocaust Rebecca C. Aupperle
A
s I approached the subject of the Holocaust by providing a chronology and a short historical overview (key vocabulary terms, timelines, a historical overview of anti-Semitism), three things became obvious: 1. My students had very little understanding about whom I was teaching: they vaguely knew, courtesy of some war movie they had seen on TV, that the Nazis were the perpetrators of this heinous event, but they had no knowledge of the victims, much less the rescuers or bystanders; 2. When asked to name one prominent Jew in history, the majority of students could name no one but Anne Frank: they had no idea that Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Marc Chagall, and Jonas Salk were Jews; 3. Each year, without fail, at least one of my students has felt compelled to ask, “Ms. Aupperle, are you Jewish? You’re not? Then why are you on such a crusade about the Holocaust?” It was clear that, with few exceptions, my students had absolutely no idea who the Jews of Europe were, what they were like before the war, and what kinds of lives they lived before they were victims. How could I possibly teach the results of hatred and racial anti-Semitism without teaching what preceded it? How could I possibly show a group of kids — kids who could not fathom why a gentile found it necessary to teach about this topic — that one does not have to be a member of a group targeted for state-sponsored annihilation to decry such inhumanity? I start with Susan D. Bachrach’s (1994) Tell Them We Remember which combines brief, thematic segments illustrated by artifacts and photographs with the personal stories of more than twenty young people of various social, religious, and national backgrounds who were affected by the Holocaust. The photographs, many of which are formal portraits, illustrate the importance and diversity of Jewish family life before the Holocaust This is imperative, because most extant photos and film footage of Jews during the Holocaust years were the product of the Germans, portraying their derogatory and unflattering perception of the Jews.
This archival information provides an intimate connection to the more than one million children and teenagers murdered by the Nazis. It reveals that before the Holocaust, these young people enjoyed a world that revolved, not unlike my students’ worlds, around family, friends, school and social activities until their worlds were turned upside down and annihilated under Nazi rule. Next we watch and discuss “The Camera of My Family: Four Generations in Germany 1845-1945” (Available from: Anti-Defamation League Materials Library, 22D Hollywood Ave., Dept. CA98, Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ 07423), an eighteen minute film made by American Catherine Hanf Noren about her German Jewish roots and heritage which had been totally unknown to her throughout her childhood. As Noren states, “One day while visiting my grandmother, she showed me a picture from her past and I discovered it was my past, for the face of this stranger was so like my own at the same age. It was my great Aunt Elsa.” This is an intriguing vehicle for introducing teenagers to the Holocaust: it combines clear visual and textual foundation for the experience of the Jews in Germany in the pre-war period as well as delves into the issue of protecting children from unpleasant “family secrets,” a practice which many Jewish immigrants and survivors have followed. Because of her relatives’ reluctance to talk about their lives in Germany before World War II, it was not until she was a grown woman that Catherine “met” her family through the “face” in the picture her grandmother showed her, the face so much like her own, the face so powerful that it compelled her to seek out the information about her family members’ lives that culminated in the film. By getting to know them, she could know herself better. Subsequent to this preparatory activity, I announce that we are “going to meet and get to know” some of my students’ Jewish counterparts from fifty years ago. After the kids gawk at me as if I am a crazy woman (a look I become accustomed to as the year progresses), I ceremoniously present each student with a copy of an actual photograph of a
Source: Aupperle, Rebecca G. “Face to Face: The Study of Friedrich A Novel About the Holocaust.in Samuel Totten, Ed. Teaching Holocaust Literature. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, 2001. CCopyright Rebecca G. Aupperle, 2000
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Holocaust victim which I have fashioned, in an attempt to provide them with a sense of familiarity and comfort through a common object, into a faux frame. These pictures have been culled from a variety of sources, including the aforementioned Bachrach book, Michael Berenbaum’s (1993) The World Must Know, Dobroszycki and Kirshenblatt-Gimbleft’s (1977) Image Before My Eyes, and the American/ Polish/Israeli Shalom Foundation’s magnificent And I Still See Their Faces (1995). The individual nature of each photograph is meant to elicit an aura of personal connectedness with their subjects. I place a short blurb on the back of each, offering a name, location, and year, if available. As these unique images make their way down the aisles, typical eighth-grade pandemonium erupts. Before even looking at her own, Ashley is leaning to the girl sitting across from her, demanding, “Who’dja get? Let me see!” Carlee exclaims, “Where in the world is Titiance?” Sarah is more reflective: “I have a bunch of kids having fun in a boat.” Mike yells, “Check it out! I have an entire family at a wedding in Belgium in 1939. Belgium?” “Look,” says Amy, “Here’s a little Gypsy girl from Hungary before the war. Are Gypsies Jewish?” “Mine’s some old lady,” grouses John, none too happily, “and she’s dressed all in black.” The potential motivation for personal investigation of this singular face by my students is now infinitely higher than had I decreed, “Look up what was happening to the Jews in Holland in 1938.” They are captivated by the reality that the likeness they are holding is the face of a person who once lived; the limited information on the back whets their curiosity; they want more. While perusal of the photos continues, I distribute a variety of maps from Martin Gilbert’s (1988) Atlas of the Holocaust and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (1996) Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. By starting with the maps and then accessing other sources as necessary, a treasure trove of information is unearthed about preHolocaust life in the different Jewish communities of Europe, including the names of countries, cities, and towns where their “faces” resided, contributions of Jewish culture and communal life made to society by fellow Jews in that geographical area, and 2,000 years of Jewish life in general prior to the onslaught. Sarah discovers that the teens frolicking in the boat in Holland are most likely adrift on a canal, one of the many waterways on which Dutch streets are built. She has also discerned that no one even dreamed that Holland, traditionally neutral, would eventually be invaded. She reports that Holland’s neutrality and its reputation as a haven for religious minorities were the prime factors in Anne Frank’s family emigrating
there from Germany in 1933. Mike determines that during the post World War I years things were bad economically, so it was not unusual for weddings to be simple, just as in any country experiencing the deprivations of a depression. “That’s probably why this bride is wearing a suit, not a gown,” he explains. Amy becomes our resident expert on the Gypsies, revealing that the two main non-Jewish nomadic clans were the Sinti and Roma, considered to be subhuman in the ideology of the National Socialist People’s Party. Dana is stunned by the knowledge that some prescient Jews, fearing the worst from an anti-Semitic government and possessing the necessary resources, made the heartwrenching choice to send their children out of the country to relatives or strangers elsewhere. According to the information on the back of her portrait, Dana discovers that Dora, a German girl near her own age, is preparing to leave for Palestine. “Isn’t Palestine in the Bible?” she intones. “She’s going there by herself?” John’s “old lady in black,” he discovers, is probably the much-respected grandmother of an Orthodox Jewish family in a Russian border town of Lithuania, sitting, as was the custom in early twentieth century Europe, for a formal, somber portrait. The minutiae of facts about their “faces” flows as if from a wellspring; the kids have uncovered the mere tip of the iceberg. I encourage them to continue their quest. The next day I introduce to the class a thinking/writing exercise utilizing their newfound information: each of my students will author an essay or short story delineating his/her concept of a day in the life of his personal “face” prior to the Holocaust. A torrent of questions assails me, and I reiterate in detail that I am looking for a written portrait based on their research, one that reflects what they have come to understand about the life of this individual prior to the upheaval caused by Hitler. Certain assumptions will be considered a given, such as that children between the ages of six and eighteen went to school, but character development will need to be augmented by imagination, based on historical accuracy. This is a vital component not to be confused with a creative writing assignment, even though I encourage the kids, many of whom are classified as “Gifted and Talented” and therefore enrolled in the school’s “Special Program for Individual Enrichment,” to employ their facility for language while at the same time maintaining high standards of composition and infusing previously studied vocabulary into their written pieces. The goal is for students to utilize all available resources (books, atlases, primary documents, CD’s) to glean the information necessary to achieve a working
Source: Aupperle, Rebecca G. “Face to Face: The Study of Friedrich A Novel About the Holocaust.in Samuel Totten, Ed. Teaching Holocaust Literature. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, 2001. CCopyright Rebecca G. Aupperle, 2000 New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #14 understanding of Jewish life in that time and place; only then can they begin to appreciate what was lost. The subsequent task — to “flesh out” the character in this specific setting, to give life to the “face” is couched within the primary objective of achieving historical accuracy. I move up and down the aisles, hanging over shoulders, giving encouragement, making suggestions; I have faith. A few seem stumped, but those who have availed themselves of the succinct and incisive material offered by the maps and other references are not “tuned out” or “bored,” those twin adolescent curses; they are researching and writing. They are leaning over the tops of their desks, frowning with concentration as they transfer their ideas into words on paper. The first to share their written reports the next day are shy: I call on Kim, who writes of Clara, her “face,” going to secondary school and working afterwards in her parents’ bakery shop in Poland. She will probably not go on to gymnasium, the European equivalent of college, because her family can’t afford it. Most likely she will look for a husband, marry early and start a family; that’s what girls do in her small town. According to Sarah, the kids’ “faces” she writes about belong to teenaged students in Holland, on vacation from school. They have just finished exams, she says, and have rented a boat to celebrate. At this moment they are carefree, with not a thought of impending doom. They know they are Jews, but they are also Dutchmen; what harm could possibly come to them? Dana raises her hand and continues telling her story of a day in the life of Dora, who lives in Mainz, Germany and is a high school student. “She belongs to an Orthodox Jewish family,” explains Dana, “which means they are very religious and follow strict rules.”
“Oh, you mean they go to mass every Sunday?” asks one of her classmates. I help her explain that the day of worship for Jews, the Sabbath, is Saturday, not Sunday, as it is for Christians, and that Jews attend a synagogue, or temple, not a church. This is a major news flash to most of my students who are members of an extremely homogeneous community of white Christians. Dana continues, The Jewish people begin their Sabbath at sundown on Friday by lighting candles and reciting a special prayer. If they are extremely observant, they do no work and observe explicit dietary laws, eating what is called kosher food. The celebration of the Sabbath is a family affair, beginning with the dinner on Friday evening and continuing on Saturday when Dora goes with her family to the local synagogue for services where she sits in the balcony with her mother and her sisters; the men sit downstairs. See the little skullcaps on the men’s heads? They are yarmulkes, or kipot, the traditional headcovering of Jewish men for religious occasions. And that cloak with the strings hanging from it that her father is wearing is a tallit, or prayer shawl. In the inquisitive and ingenuous hands of my students, the “faces” in their portraits have come to life. We now know something of the pre-war geography of many of the European countries that would fall into the Nazi grasp, and we have a glimpse of the encroaching anti-Semitic restrictions that would affect everyday lives. We also know something about where and how the Jews lived and something of their culture and religious beliefs. I tell my class that they have done a terrific job, but there is more work to be done. We must take this foundation, this personal relationship they have developed through historical research and primary documents, and expand and develop it as we continue the study of the Holocaust and its effects on every victim’s “face.”
Source: Aupperle, Rebecca G. “Face to Face: The Study of Friedrich A Novel About the Holocaust.in Samuel Totten, Ed. Teaching Holocaust Literature. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon Publishers, 2001. CCopyright Rebecca G. Aupperle, 2000
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Unit III: READING #15
why did the nazis come to power in germany? In this unit we have read about the rise of Nazism in Germany. Now it’s time to sort out the reasons. Below are ten factors that contributed to the rise of Nazism. Rank the following in the order of their importance. 1.
One man, Adolf Hitler, was most responsible. His own charisma and ability to lead the masses seduced the German people.
2.
European power politics was most responsible. Germany responded resentfully to the vicious attempt at Versailles to emasculate the German nation. The Nazis presented themselves as the best answer to this threat of castration by other European nations.
3.
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Nazism was the logical outgrowth of a history of authoritarianism and militarism in Germany. Weimar was a historical accident for which the German people were totally unprepared. The Fuhrer principle satisfied what was a historical anti-democratic need of the German people. The Nazis represented the traditional values in German history which were acceptable to a large percentage of Germans during the 1920s.
4.
Nazism rose in direct response to fear of a possible takeover by Bolshevism (Communism) stimulated by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The growth of the German Communist Party drove many moderate Germans to support the Nazis as the only alternative capable of stopping the Communists.
5.
Nazism was the result of the attempt by big business and nationalist forces to stem the possibility of a socialist takeover in Germany. They feared the growth of worker consciousness resulting in loss of their own power. Thus, they bankrolled Hitler, paying for an enormous advertising campaign that was very successful.
6.
Nazism was actually the consequence of the “sick psyche” of the German people. The Germans suffered from certain psychological conflicts that led to their positive response to the psychopathic call of the Nazis.
7.
Nazism rode to power on the heels of a two thousand-year-old tradition of anti-Semitism. The Nazis claimed that they would finally solve this “Jewish problem” in Germany once and for all. The German people, not unaccustomed to anti-Semitism, responded affirmatively to the claims of the Jew-hating Nazis.
8.
Nazism was the direct result of a political plot by aristocrat Franz von Papen and others to control Hitler’s growing power from inside the Weimar government.
9.
Nazism was the result of a declining economy, inflation and depression, that lead inevitably to its victory.
10. Nazism was a spiritual revolt against the Enlightenment idea that mankind could change its own nature. Nazism appealed to those who revolted against individualism, rationalism, and mass rule (democracy) of the nineteenth century which seemed to bring Germany to the edge of ruin. Nazism expressed a basic longing for the past, for a more ordered time unlike the liberal chaos of Weimar. Many Germans held these beliefs. 11. Nazism was the direct result of the evil nature of human beings, of the basic desire for authority and dominance that lies buried in every person. The Nazis gave people an opportunity to express their most basic instincts: to destroy and to kill.
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #16
the third reich This brief history examines the reasons for the failure of democracy in Germany, and describes the means by which Hitler came to power. As you read, note these key concepts which help to explain why Germany was fertile ground for a dictatorship: extreme nationalism, idealization of the military, little experience of democracy, humiliating defeat in World War I, economic depression, unemployment. The selection is from The Third Reich in Perspective by Gertrude Noar.
The Third Reich in Perspective Gertrude Noar
M
odern German history is the history of the failure of German democracy. The roots of Nazism lie in that history of failure. Until late into the 19th century, long after most western peoples were united, the word “Germany” did not refer to a single nation, but to a Central European patchwork of over 100 German states ranging in size from miniscule to middling. Each was more or less independent and under the autocratic rule of a petty prince or — in the case of larger ones like Prussia and Bavaria — a king. In the Middle Ages every attempt to impose a central authority upon the German lands had proved abortive, the Holy Roman Empire being more a fiction than a fact. In the 16th century, the Lutheran Reformation had tremendous effects which still affect our lives today, but it too failed to bring about the unification of Germany. The world-shaking French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity expressed politically in rule by Parliament, failed to inspire the German people to similar effort. The aristocracy and landed gentry fought all attempts to establish a parliament based on democratic suffrage. When a great wave of revolution swept Europe in 1848, democratic uprisings also took place in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, and in other German states. The German liberals, supported by most of the middle class and peasantry, came to power for the first time. But they lacked resolution and compromised with the Prussian military autocracy and the German princes. In the end many were forced to flee Germany for England or America. Until 1848 democracy and nationalism had more or less gone hand in hand in Germany, as they had in western Europe and America. But after the failure to institute liberal reforms in 1848, this situation changed. Prussia—the strongest of the German states, thanks to a powerful army commanded by a military elite—set about uniting Germany under its own rule. Prussia’s Prime Minister, Otto von Bismarck, used a policy of intimidation and
conquest to bring about the unification. The union was completed on January 18, 1871, when the Prussian King was proclaimed Kaiser of the German Reich (Emperor of the German Empire) after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. Thus Germany did not unite voluntarily on the basis of a democratic parliamentary system, which was the pattern in Western Europe and America; rather did Prussia unite the German people by conquering them. From the alliance between German nationalism and Prussian militarism there followed all those sinister events of modem German history which culminated in the catastrophe of Nazism. William L. Shirer writes: “Bismarck’s unique creation is the Germany we have known in our time …in which first this remarkable man and then Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, aided by a military caste, …succeeded in inculcating a lust for power and domination, a passion for unbridled militarism, a contempt for democracy and individual freedom and a longing for authority…” Bismarck announced the future course of Prussian Germany in 1862 by declaring: “The great questions of the day will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848—but by blood and iron.” The policy of blood and iron, of war and conquest and empire, led Imperial Germany into World War I, which, after years of enormous slaughter, ended with her ignominious surrender and the abdication and flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The revolution that broke out in November 1918 again presented Germany with an opportunity to reconstruct herself on democratic foundations, and again she failed, although the failure did not become apparent at once. The Weimar Republic proclaimed by the Social Democrats at the end of 1918 was established quite half-heartedly, as it were, by default. It was born out of defeat in war and not out of a triumph of democratic sentiment. And indeed the old Junker landowning and military class remained very much alive and powerful. Although the Weimar Constitution was a model liberal and democratic document, the Republic rested on shaky foundations so long as it failed to disarm and defeat all those
Source: Noar, Gertrude. “The Third Reich in Perspective,” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
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hostile classes and groups which were biding their time and merely tolerating a democratic regime: the feudal Junker landlords and upper castes, the General Staff and military caste, the industrial magnates, and the heads of the Prussian bureaucracy. The Social Democrats, or Labor party, who were the largest single political organization, vacillated. Instead of moving energetically to destroy these hostile elements, they compromised with them, just as German liberalism had compromised with the autocracy in the 19th century. Later these same reactionary elements, in spite of their dislike for Hitler as a vulgar demagogue, would finally install him in power. The Weimar period from 1918 to 1933 was just such a time of turmoil and disorder as was needed to spawn the Nazi movement. Almost immediately after the end of the war, reactionary groups began to clamor that the army had not been defeated by the Allies at the front, but had been “stabbed in the back” at home by democrats and socialists. They said this even though they knew the General Staff had compelled the Imperial government to sue for an armistice long before there was any revolutionary disturbance, by informing it that the army could not carry on the war any longer. Armed bands of terrorists and freebooters assassinated liberals, democrats and socialists, and supported attempts to overthrow the government. The humiliating Versailles Treaty was laid at the door of the Weimar democrats. The mark began to fall. By 1923 it was worth 4 billion to the American dollar. The savings of the middle class, the principal depositors, were wiped out and there was general impoverishment and desperation. When the crash of 1929 ushered in the worldwide depression, factory production declined drastically, businesses closed, and millions were thrown out of work. Conditions bred fear and despair, which in turn, bred violent hatreds. Adolf Hitler knew how to play on these feelings and enlist them in the service of nationalist delirium, hatred of democracy, and the drive for military domination and conquest-which, for all his talk of a Nazi “revolution,” were the more or less traditional features of Prussian Germanism. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in the Austrian town of Braunau-on-the-Inn across the border from Bavaria. Austria was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians spoke German and many, like Hitler, thought of themselves as German and looked with contempt on the other, mostly Slavic, nationalities that made up the Empire. The youthful Hitler wished passionately to become an artist, but was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts as lacking talent. He spent four crucial years, 1909-13, in Vienna, most of the time as a
down-and-out tramp shunning regular employment. During these years, Hitler crystallized his own brooding hatreds and resentments into a philosophy. Its cornerstones were: glorification of war and conquest; exaltation of the Germans as the Master Race; hatred of the Jews; contempt for democracy. In 1913 Hitler went to Munich and when World War I broke out enlisted in the German army. After the war he stayed in the army and was assigned to spy on political parties in Munich which the military considered dangerous. One such party was the tiny German Workers party, which turned out to be violently nationalist. Hitler, instead of reporting it to the authorities, was the seventh man to join it, in 1919. The name of this party was changed to the National Socialist German Workers party in 1920 (“Nazi” is an abbreviation of the first part of the German title). Under Hitler’s frenzied leadership it grew from a tiny group to a mass organization with millions of members. Eventually it became the only political party in Germany. Hitler built the Nazi party in frank emulation of the mass party of the Social Democrats; in Vienna be had been impressed by the great demonstrations of Viennese Social working men, their popular press, and their oratory. But the Social Democratic party was democratic—what did Hitler see in it to serve his dictatorial purpose? Hitler had appreciated very early that in the modern age, German militarism and nationalism could no longer rule by means of the traditional aristocratic minorities and elites, but required the support of the “masses.” To win the mass support of unemployed factory workers, small farmers lacking land, threadbare and underfed office clerks and civil servants, shopkeepers on the verge of ruin, and disinherited middle class people, to whom the Communist party was also appealing, the Nazis needed to promise more than anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, nationalism and militarism. They needed to pretend that they would carry out a social revolution. (Hence the word “Socialist” in the party name. The Nazi “social” aims were dropped soon after the party came to power.) At the very first public meeting of the Nazi party in 1920, Hitler’s talents as a demagogue and orator had marked effect. His pounding fists, burning eyes, hoarse cries and hysterics aroused his audience to a fever pitch, He outlined a 25-point program, which became the party’s official platform, that promised everything to everybody. Among other things he promised a, larger “living space” (i.e., more territory) for Germany; full citizenship only for people of “German blood”; confiscation of war profits; old age pensions; low rentals to small businessmen; antiCommunism and abolition of interest on land and mortgages. By 1923 the party membership had grown from
Source: Noar, Gertrude. “The Third Reich in Perspective,” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #16 the handful of 1920 to some 17,000, most of it concentrated in and around Munich. In November of that year, Hitler enlisted the support of General Erich von Ludendorf and attempted to carry out what has since come to be known as the “Beer Hall Putsch”: he proclaimed the outbreak of the “national revolution” in a Munich beer hall and announced that the Bavarian and Reich governments were dissolved. A few shots fired by the authorities sufficed to rout the Nazi “revolutionaries.” The Nazi party was banned. He was released after less than a year, at the end of 1924—Weimar judges, for the most part the old judiciary of Kaiser Wilhelm days, being always tolerant of treason when committed by nationalists. Hitler seemed defeated and discredited. After completing his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Battle), which openly revealed his sinister political intentions, Hitler set out to rebuild the National Socialist party. No more “putsches” from now on; he had learned his lesson. Now he would capture power legally. “We shall have to hold our noses and go into the Reichstag,” he said. In the years from 1925 to the end of 1928, the Nazi membership was scarcely more than 100,000, in spite of active campaigning. But in 1929 the depression struck Germany. In the hunger, despair and chaos that it brought, Hitler at last found his chance; millions of Germans began to listen to the promises and threats he vociferated daily. Where the Nazis had polled 810,000 votes in 1928, in the fall of 1930 they polled six-and-a-half million, increasing their seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107. They were now second only to the Social Democrats. Meanwhile the Nazi party had grown into a vast apparatus organized down to the street and block level, and complete with special sections for children, youth, women, professional groups and labor organizations. It published innumerable newspapers and magazines. The party itself was organized like the government and became a state within a state. The brown-shirted Storm Troopers (Sturm Abteilungen—SA), the Nazi armed force, were bands of thugs who conquered the streets for Hitler by beating and killing opponents and breaking up their meetings. Everywhere the Nazi emblem of the swastika, the crooked cross which so perfectly expressed the sinister spirit of Hitlerism, was in evidence. With a powerful mass organization and an electoral following of millions, Hitler now began to look to the top. In the spring of 1932, he ran for president (head of the state; the chancellor was head of the government) against the incumbent, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He failed, and Hindenburg was re-elected, but the Nazi party had increased its vote to thirteen-and-a-half million. In two Reichstag elections in 1932 Hitler tried to win a
majority of Germans to his party so as to become chancellor and form a government of his own. The Nazis won nearly 14 million votes in the first, and became the largest German party, but still they fell short of a majority. In the second election the Nazi vote fell off by 2 million. At this point a union of the anti-Nazi forces could have stopped Hitler. But the Communists were attacking the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and looking to the victory of Hitler as a stage along the way to their own capture of power. They denounced the Weimar Republic as violently as the Nazis. The conservative and reactionary groups, the ever-powerful Prussian Junkers, army and big business, who had only tolerated the Republic, were now prepared to bury it. Using Hitler as their tool, they hoped to eventually restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. Through Franz von Papen they made a deal with Hitler agreeing to back him for chancellor. In return for this they would retain the preponderance of power for themselves, including the vice-chancellorship and most of the cabinet posts. On January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi leader had no intention of serving as the Junkers’ tool. In only a few months he became dictator. He used the occasion of the Reichstag fire in February 1933, which the Nazis almost certainly started themselves but which they blamed on the Communists, to attack and drive out of existence not only the Communist party but the democratic antiNazi parties. In spite of the Nazi reign of terror which was now backed up by the power of the state, Hitler still failed to capture a majority of the vote in the last free elections in March 1933. At this point the Nazis simply refused to seat the Communist delegates who had been elected, threatened other delegates with the same fate, and thus secured the two-thirds majority by which the Constitution was amended, to place all legislative functions in Hitler’s hands. Now he and he alone made the laws, as well as executed them. By the summer of 1933 the Nazis were the only party in Germany. They proceeded to nazify German life completely (their word for this process was Gleichschaltung), bringing it under the total domination of the political religion (Ideology) of National Socialism. They nazified the Christian churches as well, and even made efforts to replace them with an outright pagan racist (“Nordic”) ritual. “Totalitarianism” is the term we have coined to describe the total control of a nation’s life by a mass political movement. Concentration camps, that dreadful invention of the 20th century, were set up in which to lock up opponents of the regime: liberals, radicals, Jews, religious leaders and intellectuals.
Source: Noar, Gertrude. “The Third Reich in Perspective,” The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial. Roselle Chartock and Jack Spencer, eds. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
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the twilight of the weimar republic 1929-1933
T
he Weimar Republic faced two major problems in the fall of 1929: Gustav Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. Despite the fact that all Germans detested the Versailles Treaty and its war guilt clause, Stresemann had emerged to symbolize confidence and success. His successors were to symbolize more negative traits. The United States’ stock market crash of October 1929 would take its greatest toll on Germany. Stresemann observed: I must ask you always to remember that during the past year we have been living on borrowed money. If a crisis were to arise and the Americans were to call in their short-term loans, we should be faced with bankruptcy.
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American financiers immediately demanded payment on their loans. The depression led to massive unemployment in Germany: 1,368,000 in 1929; 5,668,000 in 1931; 6,014,000 by 1933. Wages were cut and the jobless wandered the streets with cries of “give us bread.” These double setbacks revealed the weaknesses and mistakes of the Weimar Republic. The Republic had been like a candle burning at both ends, with the Communists on one end calling for a dictatorship of the working class and the Nazis on the other end calling for a dictatorship of the few. The Republic had been kind to most of its enemies. The German army had not been destroyed in World War I and the Republic used it to put down uprisings. Hitler had served only one year in prison for political treason. Only the Communists were punished ruthlessly. The Nazis would gain the most from the Republic’s troubles. While Hitler’s rise to power might now be possible, it was not clearly inevitable. Many complicated explanations are available, but no simple solution exists. The political scene from 1930 to 1933 resembled a corrupt political chess game with all participants invoking article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which stated that the chancellor could rule by decree in emergency situations. Herman Bruning, chancellor from March 1930 to March 1932, was the most humane of the group. Bruning was an intelligent economist (he later taught at Harvard), but he was a dull speaker and always sounded as if he were delivering a treasurer’s report. In September 1930 the Nazis were able to get more members elected to the Reichstag; an increase from 12 to 107. Chancellor Bruning found it increasingly difficult to deal with this growing Nazi party; coping with the Nazis was now a major problem. After becoming a German citizen In February 1932, Hitler challenged Hindenburg for the presidency. He conducted a whirlwind campaign, but Hindenburg still outpolled Hitler 18,000,000 (49.6%) to 11,000,000 (30.1%). Since no candidate received a majority of the votes, a run-off election was required. In April, Hindenburg received his majority with 19,000,000 (53%), while Hitler polled 13,000,000 (36.8%). Hitler was a loser, but 13,000,000 Germans had voted for him in a free, democratic election. Following the election, Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen as chancellor. Von Papen sought ways of bringing the Nazis into a coalition government so that they might be under control. In the July elections of 1932, the Nazis had emerged as the strongest single party; they increased their Reichstag representation from 107 to 230. The Nazi representatives showed up at the Reichstag in uniform. Herman Goering, the second most important Nazi, was now appointed president of the Reichstag. Chancellor von Papen was not allowed to speak in the Reichstag because Goering would not recognize him. The wily von Papen, who later served the Nazis, proved to be a disaster; he would be replaced in December 1932. Meanwhile, Hindenburg arranged to meet with Hitler in August 1932. Hitler was awed by the 87-year-old
Source: Strom, Margot Stem and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #17 president, and performed badly. Hindenburg offered him the job of vice-chancellor, but Hitler refused. The Nazis suffered defeats in the November elections; their membership in the Reichstag declined from 230 to 196. Some Nazis despaired that Hitler might not get another chance to become chancellor. On December 2, 1932, General Kurt von Schleicher became the last chancellor before Hitler. He convinced the senile Hindenburg that the Nazis could be controlled. One way to do this was to convince the Nazi leaders below Hitler to join the government. Von Schleicher hoped to convince these Nazis that if they remained with Hitler, they would never get a chance to gain power at all. Von Schleicher failed to bring them into the government and, as a result, he resigned on January 28, 1933. Hindenburg now had little choice. He still regarded Hitler as a “bohemian corporal.” He didn’t want to appoint him, but Hitler was in charge of the largest party. Hitler had held out for the “best deal” and now he got it when Hindenburg asked him to form a “nonpartisan” government. At 11 a.m. on January 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor. Some people argue that Hitler’s rise to power was a natural outcome of German history. Some see his rise to power as sheer luck. Others say it was nothing unusual, since dictatorships were established in over a dozen European countries by the 1930s. Still others point out that the German leaders underestimated Hitler and felt they could control him. The most important issue may lie in these words by the provocative British historian, A.J.P. Taylor: The real problem in German history is why so few of the educated, civilized classes recognized Hitler as the embodiment of evil. University professors; army officers; businessmen and bankers— these had a background of culture, and even of respect for law. Yet virtually none of them exclaimed: “This is anti-Christ. “ Later, they were to make out that Hitler had deceived them and that the bestial nature of National-Socialism could not have been foreseen. This is not true. The real character of National-Socialism was exposed by many foreigners, and even by some German observers long before Hitler came to power This reading documents the shattering of the relative peace and prosperity of the German nation, exposes the weaknesses of the Republic, and details how the German political leadership manipulated Hitler into power in order to control him. This allowed Hitler to come to power legally. The complexity of the events reiterates the course objective that there are no simple answers to the complex question of how Nazi dictatorship came to Germany. Before reading this, ask students to speculate on the meaning of twilight. Will this reading be about the end of the Weimar Republic? The beginning of the end? The “dark days” of the Republic? Have students add to their vocabulary list such words as decree, coalition, and nonpartisan. This reading seems ideal for the use of the political, economic, and social chart suggested earlier. It is an excellent source for gathering evidence. Who or what was responsible for Hitler’s rise to power—politicians, the German people, luck, the depression? What was the “twilight” of the Republic? Another approach is to discuss with students how the reading relates to the following quotation by John Snell. “Any system can stand in fair weather: it is tested when the wind blows.” Discuss with students how the quotation relates to the Weimar Republic: In what ways was it tested? What winds were blowing? Why did it stand? (Keep in mind that Hitler was now chancellor of the Weimar Republic.) Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator Adolf Hitler had come to power legally, but not as the result of an election victory or any wave of popular enthusiasm. The Nazis had suffered a loss of two million votes in the most recent elections of 1932, and they had never won over 37 percent of the popular vote. Conservative leaders in Germany convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler so that he and the Nazis could be controlled. Nazis were given only three of the eleven cabinet positions in the government, and all of those were minor posts. Outnumbered eight to three, Hitler was supposed to carry out the wishes of others. Hitler could not even report to President Hindenburg unless the vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, was present. Once in office, Hitler proved to be uncontrollable. He astounded and overwhelmed those who felt they had trapped him. Hitler made legal what others considered to be illegal. What did Hitler do? How did he do it? How did he get away with it? The following headlines describe the events through which Hitler became dictator of Germany. The list of definitions will explain key words.
Source: Strom, Margot Stem and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982.
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HE A DLINES February 27, 1933
• Nazis Burn Reichstag Building • Berlin SA Involved • Dutch Communists Blamed
February 28, 1933
• Nazis Suspend All Civil Liberties • Hindenburg Signs Hitler’s Decree • Hitler Warns of Communist Acts of Violence
March 5, 1933
• Nazis Receive 43.9% of Election Votes • Total Is 5,500,000 Greater Than Last Election • Nazis Form Coalition with Nationalist Party
March 9, 1933
• Nazis Overthrow Government in Bavaria • Nazis Take Over Key Government Posts
March 23, 1933
• Reichstag Passes Enabling Law, 441-94 • Huge Crowd Roars Approval Outside • Hitler Free to Make Laws for Four Years
May 2, 1933
• Trade Union Powers Transferred to Nazi Labor Front • Strikes and Collective Bargaining Outlawed • Trade Union Leaders Sent to Concentration Camps
January 30, 1934
• Hitler Decrees Law for Reconstruction of Reich • German State Governments Abolished • Powers of German States Surrendered to Nazi Party
May 20,1934
• Nazis Move Against Social Democratic Party • Occupy Party Buildings and Newspaper Offices • Nazis Confiscate Social Democratic Funds
May 26, 1934
• Nazis Take Over Property and Money of Communist Party • Communist Party Outlawed • Communists Barred from Holding Public Office
June 19, 1934
• Nazis Abolish Social Democratic Party • Brand Social Democrats as Enemies of the People • Social Democrats Barred from Holding Public Office
June 21, 1934
• Nazis Turn Against Nationalist Party • Invade Party Offices All Over Germany • Abolition of Party Inevitable
June 30, 1934
• Hitler Refuses to Incorporate SA into Army • Charges SA Planned to Overthrow Government • 400 of Hitler’s Former SA Colleagues Killed
July 14, 1934
• German Government Bans Formation of Parties • Nazi Party Declared Only Party in Germany • Severe Prison Terms for Any Violators
August 2, 1934
• President Hindenburg Dies • Hitler Takes Over as President and Chancellor • Army Takes Oath of Allegiance to Hitler
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Source: Strom, Margot Stem and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #17 August 19, 1934
• Germans Vote to Support Hitler’s Takeover of Presidency • Vote is 90% Favorable -38,395,479 to 4,300,429 • Voter Turnout is 95.7%
September 7, 1934
• Hitler Addresses Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg • Declares Nazi Revolution at an End • Vows No New Revolution in Germany for 1,000 Years
LIST OF DEFINITIONS Bavaria:
Second largest of the 17 states in Germany. Hitler had lived here in Munich, had joined the Nazi party here, and had tried to overthrow the Munich government in 1923.
Civil Liberties:
Freedom of speech, right to assembly, freedom from illegal search, right to protection of property, etc.
Coalition:
A group of parties that combine for common interest. In 1933 the Nazis (43% of the vote) joined with the Nationalists (8%) to form a majority.
Communist Party:
International party calling for dictatorship of the working class. Had taken over government in Russia in 1917. Always committed to overthrowing the Weimar Republic.
Decree:
A law dictated by the government leader without the vote of the law-making branch of the government. Article 48 of the Weimar Consitution permitted presidential decrees in emergency situations.
Hindenburg:
German general in World War I, elected President of Weimar Republic in 1925 and 1932. Detested Hitler, but appointed him because he was leader of the largest party.
Nationalist Party:
Party of upper-class who wanted a monarchy. Major opposition party to Weimar Republic. Joined with Nazis to form majority government in 1933.
Nazi Labor Front:
Organized to bring the independent trade unions under control. Hitler needed control of trade unions to organize Germany under Nazi rule.
Reich:
German government. Hitler called his government the Third Reich. The First Reich had been estabilshed in the 9th century, the Second Reich in 1871.
Reichstag:
The law-making body of Germany under the Weimar Republic. It was elected by the people.
SA:
Sturm Abteilungen, Hitler’s storm troopers. Acted as police and army for Nazis. Demanded a larger role in German government after Hitler became chancellor.
Social Democrats:
Played the largest role in establishing the Weimar Republic. Lost much support after the Great Depression of 1929.
Trade Unions:
Organization of workers, a very large and powerful group in Germany. No previous government had interferred with them. Unions tried not to provoke Nazis, in order to preserve their organization.
Source: Strom, Margot Stem and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982.
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Unit III: READING #17 This assignment will provide data of a different kind to sharpen students’ data skills. It asks students to read a series of headlines and to synthesize the data to make a series of generalizations. These headlines detail how Hitler moved from the role of chancellor where there were checks on him, to the role of absolute dictator where there were no checks on his power. It further demonstrates that the Nazi takeover of power was not inevitable; it had to be achieved. Hitler had said that democracy was rule by “crazy brains.” How does his rise to power in the German Republic give meaning to his statement? Because the other political parties of Germany did not unite against Hitler, he became chancellor with less than a majority vote. Later the Nazis manipulated the two-thirds vote necessary to make Hitler the legal dictator. In 1934, after Hindenburg died, Hitler proclaimed himself Supreme Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, after uniting the offices of president and chancellor. Finally he asked for a plebiscite where he received a 90% Yes-vote.
Anatomy of a Dictatorship This film is made up of film clips that document Hitler’s rise to power. Key figures in this history are identified. Ask students to evaluate the film. Raise such questions as: What does the film tell you that you already have learned? What does it tell you that you have not learned? What in the film disagrees with what you’ve learned.
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Source: Strom, Margot Stem and William Parsons, eds. “Twilight of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933,” and “Hitler: From Chancellor to Dictator.” Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Intentional Educations, Inc., 1982. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #18
NAZISM AND MODERN GERMANY (excerpt) Ronnie S. Landau
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n March 1930 Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning as Chancellor. Brüning was a Centre Party politician of the old conservative mould, whose avowed aim was to bury the Weimar Constitution. His solution to the economic crisis was to impose swinging cuts in government expenditure and a deflationary budget. When the budget was refused by the Reichstag he dissolved it, calling an election for September 1930. This is considered the first major departure from the spirit of the Weimar Constitution because, in effect, he punished the Reichstag for refusing his decree—as they were entitled to do. This election led to the permanent weakening of the parliamentary system, with the Nazi Party gaining an astonishing 107 seats, and the Communist Party enjoying similar success with 77 seats. The centre middle class parties collapsed and there was no chance of a viable coalition. Brüning survived, however, for two years, until May 1932, governing not with the support of a positive parliamentary majority, but because the SPD decided to ‘tolerate’ the government’s decrees: they refused to support motions of no confidence, but managed to avoid direct association with the painful economic medicine being administered by Brüning.
Brüning’s economic measures In its attempt to cope with the Depression, Brüning’s economic policy was so severe that it led to massive increases in the level of unemployment, the numbers rising between 1932 and 1933 to approximately 6 million. Brüning’s principal aim was to force the cancellation of further payment of reparations by demonstrating that Germany could no longer afford it; this he chose to do at the expense of huge unemployment for the foreseeable future. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that Brüning could, in mid-1931, have accepted foreign credits to help finance a reflation, but this would have hampered his policy of non-payment of reparations. In the longer term, it is believed, he intended to sweep away the Weimar Constitution and re-impose a Hohenzollern monarch. On the other hand, it has been argued in Brüning’s defence that he had no other option since, after the experience of 1922-3,
there was widespread terror at the prospect of another bout of hyper-inflation. In the event, a oneyear moratorium on reparations was later agreed in June 1931, and in July 1932 two months after Brüning’s fall from office—they were totally cancelled. The most important political consequence of Brüning’s economic policy, however, was that it severely polarized the electorate to the left and to the right. Brüning was removed in May 1932, largely at the behest of Prussian army circles which now surrounded the president. One officer who was to have a profound impact on the course of events, culminating in Hitler’s appointment in January 1933, was General von Schleicher. Schleicher was Minister of Defence from June 1932, and sought to impose a permanent authoritarian right-wing government, independent of the Reichstag and backed by the army - in effect a version of the pre-1918 constitution. He was the principal mover in Brüning’s downfall and was the guiding spirit behind the von Papen cabinet of May-December 1932 (von Papen was Brüning’s successor as Chancellor); he it was who was shortly to suggest that Hitler could be tamed and the Nazi Party used on his (i.e. Schleicher’s) terms, in particular by incorporating the Brownshirts (Hitler’s bully boys) into a new expanded state army.
1932: crisis year Schleicher secured the appointment of von Papen as Chancellor, a conservative Centre Party politician who, failing to get the support of the Reichstag, called an election for July 1932. His government, hoping to use the Nazis for their own purposes, lifted the ban on Hitler’s Brownshirts on 15 June. Not content with that, on 20 July von Papen did even more of the Nazis’ work for them by removing from power the Social Democratic government of Prussia by way of a coup d’etat. No resistance was offered by the Prussian socialists—a tame ending to the party once feared by Bismarck. The results of the July election were sensational: the Nazi Party reached its highest level of popular support securing 13.8 million votes and more than a third of the Reichstag seats (230 out of 603). The July
Source: Landau, Ronnie S. “Nazism and Modem Germany (excerpt).” The Nazi Holocaust. New York: Ivan R. Dee
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1932 election was a turning-point because, thereafter, both radical ends of the political spectrum, the Nazis and the communists (who gained 89 seats) together held more than half the seats in the Reichstag. Permanent democratic paralysis now set in. A remarkable feature of the unending crisis of 1932 was that, under the normal rules of democracy, Hitler as leader of the largest party should have been appointed Chancellor. But Hitler adamantly refused to join any government unless he was appointed Chancellor. This was acceptable neither to Hindenburg nor to his conservative aristocratic camarilla. Meanwhile, von Papen was working towards a policy of dismissing the Reichstag and refusing to stage new elections, as required. This would not only have laid the Weimar Constitution to rest, it would also have denied the Nazi Party its claim to substantial political power. Between July and November 1932 no action was taken because von Papen was immediately voted down in the Reichstag and new elections called. In November 1932, in the second election of the year, remarkable new trends revealed themselves. The SPD, Centre Party, Democrats and the Nazi Party all lost votes. The more respectable Nationalists, the People’s Party and the Communist Party all gained ground. As well as losing 2 million votes and 34 seats, Hitler also saw substantial losses for the Nazi Party in Thuringia in December 1932. What seemed to be emerging was that the Nazi bubble had burst: the coalition of pro-Nazi constituencies was beginning to wane now that Hitler had shown himself unwilling to enter the government. Von Papen proceeded with plans to dismiss the Reichstag without summoning elections; at this stage, he intended to use the army and police to put down any civil war or insurrection, and to disband political parties and all other quasi-political organizations. The possibility of civil war was repugnant both to the army and to Schleicher. Consequently, on 3 December, von Papen was dismissed, and Schleicher appointed in his place as Chancellor. Schleicher lasted less than a month, primarily because he tried to appease the left by courting both the trades unions and Gregor Strasser’s proletarian wing of the Nazi Party. This tactic greatly alarmed the right, prompting Schleicher to move in an entirely contrary direction.
Hitler appointed Chancellor Von Papen initiated retaliatory political manoeuvres to remove Schleicher and replace him with a von Papen-Hitler-Nationalist government. The appointment of this coalition was the only option President Hindenburg was able to accept, given that the alternative was dissolution of the Reichstag and rule by state of emergency. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Von Papen became Vice-Chancellor and there were eight other conservatives, including the Nationalist leader Alfred Hugenburg, and two other Nazis in the cabinet. But, it is important to note that Hitler’s cabinet was a presidential cabinet, not a Reichstag government - he could never have formed a government with a majority of the Reichstag, since together they commanded only 42 per cent of the vote.
Conclusion Three major themes emerge from the process that culminated in the events of 1933. Firstly, the Weimar system had failed prior to, and independently of, the success of the Nazi Party. Secondly, the Weimar system was consciously sabotaged by conservative pre-Weimar elites. Lastly and most astonishingly, even though he led the largest party in the Reichstag, Hitler could never have come to power by conventional means; he could never have formed a proper parliamentary government with the support of the majority of the Reichstag deputies. Hitler assumed the reins of government only with the assistance of the old conservative elites, who naively continued to believe that Hitler would pay them deference. Electorally, the constellation of pro-Nazi voters was already dissolving by late 1932. What gave Hitler his break was the colossal miscalculation that Hitler could, as a junior politician, be tamed and used by the Establishment. Meanwhile, the Jewish question—so central to Hitler’s own world view—was, both to his new political partners and to most other Germans, a largely peripheral concern. What followed, therefore, is all the more puzzling and alarming, a terrifying indictment of the power of human indifference and passivity.
Source: Landau, Ronnie S. “Nazism and Modem Germany (excerpt).” The Nazi Holocaust. New York: Ivan R. Dee New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #19
the last days of the republic: 1931-33 (excerpt) William Shirer
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n this way, by way of the back door, by means of a shabby political deal with the old-school reactionaries he privately detested, the former tramp from Vienna, the derelict of the First World War, the violent revolutionary, became Chancellor of the great nation. To be sure, the National Socialists were in a decided minority in the government; they had only three of the eleven posts in the cabinet and except for the chancellorship these were not key positions. Frick was Minister of the Interior but he did not control the police as this minister did in most European countries—the police in Germany were in the hands of the individual states. The third Nazi cabinet member was Goering, but no specific office could be found for him; he was named Minister without Portfolio, with the understanding that he would become Minister of Aviation as soon as Germany had an air force. Little noticed was the naming of Goering to be also Minister of the Interior of Prussia, an office that controlled the Prussian police; for the moment public attention was focused on the Reich cabinet. Goebbels’ name, to the surprise of many, did not appear in it; momentarily he was left out in the cold. The important ministries went to the conservatives, who were sure they had lassoed the Nazis for their own ends: Neurath continued as Minister of Foreign Affairs; Blomberg was Minister of Defense; Hugenberg took over the combined Ministries of Economy and Agriculture; Seldte, the Stahlhelm leader, was made Minister of Labor; the other ministries were left in the hands of nonparty “experts” whom Papen had appointed eight months before. Papen himself was Vice-Chancellor of the Reich and Premier of Prussia, and Hindenburg had promised him that he would not receive the Chancellor except in the company of the ViceChancellor. This unique position, he was sure, would enable him to put a brake on the radical Nazi leader. But even more: This government was Papen’s conception, his creation, and he was confident that with the help of the staunch old President, who was his friend, admirer and protector, and with the growing support of his conservative colleagues, who outnumbered the obstreperous Nazis eight to three, he would dominate it.
But this frivolous, conniving politician did not know Hitler—no one really knew Hitler—nor did he comprehend the strength of the forces which had spewed him up. Nor did Papen, or anyone else except Hitler, quite realize the inexplicable weakness, that now bordered on paralysis, of existing institutions— the Army, the churches, the trade unions, the political parties—or of the vast non-Nazi middle class and the highly organized proletariat all of which, as Papen mournfully observed much later, would “give up without a fight.” No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. At the crest of their popular strength, in July 1932, the National Socialists had attained but 37 percent of the vote. But the 63 percent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler were much too divided and shortsighted to combine against a common danger which they must have known would overwhelm them unless they united, however temporarily, to stamp it out. The Communists, at the behest of Moscow, were committed to the last to the silly idea of first destroying the Social Democrats, the Socialist trade unions and what middle-class democratic forces there were, on the dubious theory that although this would lead to a Nazi regime it would be only temporary and would bring inevitably the collapse of capitalism, after which the Communists would take over and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism, in the Bolshevik Marxist view, represented the last stage of a dying capitalism; after that, the Communist deluge! Fourteen years of sharing political power in the Republic, of making all the compromises that were necessary to maintain coalition governments, had sapped the strength and the zeal of the Social Democrats until their party had become little more than an opportunist pressure organization, determined to bargain for concessions for the trade unions on which their strength largely rested. It might be true, as some Socialists said, that fortune had not smiled on them: the Communists,
Source: Shirer, William L. “The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1990.184-187.
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unscrupulous and undemocratic, had split the working class; the depression had further hurt the Social Democrats, weakening the trade unions and losing the party the support of millions of unemployed, who in their desperation turned either to the Communists or the Nazis. But the tragedy of the Social Democrats could not be explained fully by bad luck. They had had their chance to take over Germany in November 1918 and to found a state based on what they had always preached: social democracy. But they lacked the decisiveness to do so. Now at the dawn of the third decade they were a tired, defeatist party, dominated by old, wellmeaning but mostly mediocre men. Loyal to the Republic they were to the last, but in the end too confused, too timid to take the great risks which alone could have preserved it, as they had shown by their failure to act when Papen turned out a squad of soldiers to destroy constitutional government in Prussia. Between the Left and the Right, Germany lacked a politically powerful middle class, which in other countries—in France, in England, in the United States—-had proved to be the backbone of democracy. In the first year of the Republic the middle-class parties, the Democrats, the People’s Party, the Center, had polled a total of twelve million votes, only two million less than the two Socialist groups. But thereafter their strength had waned as their supporters gravitated toward Hitler and the Nationalists. In 1919, the Democrats had elected 74 members to the Reichstag; by 1932 they held just 2 seats. The strength of the People’s Party fell from 62 seats in 1920 to 11 seats in 1932. Only the Catholic Center retained its voting strength to the end. In the first republican elections in 1919 the Center had 71 deputies in the Reichstag; in 1932 it had 70. But even more than the Social Democrats, the Center Party since Bismarck’s time had been largely opportunist, supporting whatever government made concessions to its special interests. And though it seemed to be loyal to the Republic and to subscribe to its democracy, its leaders, as we have seen, were negotiating with the Nazis to give Hitler the chancellorship before they were outbid by Papen and the Nationalists. If the German Republic was bereft of a middleof-the-road political class, it also lacked that stability provided in many other countries by a truly conservative party. The German Nationalists at their peak in 1924 had polled six million votes and sent 103 deputies to the Reichstag, in which they formed the second largest party. But then, as at almost all times during the Weimar regime, they refused to take a responsible position either in the government or in
opposition, the only exception being their participation in two sort-lived cabinets in the Twenties. What the German Right, whose vote went largely to the Nationalists, wanted was an end to the Republic and a return to an imperialist Germany in which all of their old privileges would be restored. Actually the Republic had treated the Right both as individuals and as classes with the utmost generosity and, considering their aim, with exceptional tolerance. It had, as we have seen, allowed the Army to maintain a state within a state, the businessmen and bankers to make large profits, the Junkers to keep their uneconomic estates by means of government loans that were never repaid and seldom used to improve their land. Yet this generosity had won neither their gratitude nor their loyalty to the Republic. With a narrowness, a prejudice, a blindness which in retrospect seem inconceivable to this chronicler, they hammered away at the foundations of the Republic until, in alliance with Hitler, they brought it down. In the former Austrian vagabond the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These were Hitler’s aims too. And though he brought what the conservatives had lacked, a mass following, the Right was sure that he would remain in its pocket—was he not outnumbered eight to three in the Reich cabinet? Such a commanding position also would allow the conservatives, or so they thought, to achieve their ends without the barbarism of unadulterated Nazism. Admittedly they were decent, God-fearing men… The Hohenzollern Empire had been built on the armed triumphs of Prussia, the German Republic on the defeat by the Allies after a great war. But the Third Reich owed nothing to the fortunes of war or to foreign influence. It was inaugurated in peacetime, and peacefully, by the Germans themselves, out of both their weaknesses and their strengths. The Germans imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves. Many of them, perhaps a majority, did not quite realize it at that noon hour of January 30, 1933, when President Hindenburg, acting in a perfectly constitutional manner, entrusted the chancellorship to Adolf Hitler. But they were soon to learn.
Source: Shirer, William L. “The Last Days of the Republic: 1931-33. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1990.184-187. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #20
leni riefenstahl: the survival of her will Stanley Feingold STANLEY FEINGOLD, Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Distinguished Professor at Westchester Community College, teaches political science and film.
L
ENI RIEFENSTAHL is alive. That will come as a surprise to many readers of her autobiography, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (St. Martin’s Press), and viewers of a documentary film, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. At 91, she is the only well-known survivor of the Nazi era and both book and film confirm that her will has survived as well. Nearly 60 years after completing her extraordinary documentary films, she is unrepentant for what she did and unhappy about what she regards as her unfair fate. At 85 she completed her autobiography, and at 90 she participated in many hours of interviews for the three-hour documentary about her life and films. The American edition of the book is called A Memoir, which suggests that it might be a less than comprehensive sketch. Leni Riefenstahl would not be guilty of such understatement; this is a full length 650-page autobiography. It tells all, at least as she remembers it. The British edition is called The Sieve of Time, from the epigraph by Albert Einstein she or the publishers have chosen. It is a curious choice because Einstein writes: “One must take comfort in the fact that time has a sieve, through which most trivia run off into the sea of oblivion.” Time may, but Leni does not. No incident, word, or facial expression is too trivial to be forgotten. Her (one suspects) morethan-total recall makes fascinating reading and viewing. Riefenstahl’s memoir and oral memory are offered as a corrective, not a mea culpa, to the harsh verdict that was rendered (by whom?) half a century ago, condemning her as a Nazi collaborator despite the clearances she received from denazification tribunals. If she has edited, rewritten, and reinterpreted past events, she hasn’t changed her feisty temperament and uncompromising conviction in the rightness of her beliefs and behavior. Her plea is that politics mattered little to her, she has paid too high a price for what others read into her films, and she has lived for 60 years the living death of an
obsessive moviemaker who has been denied the opportunity to make movies. For detail, A Memoir is unexcelled, but it provides more minutiae than any but her greatest admirers and detractors could want. The film is for everyone else interested in film history, political cinema, or the Nazi era. Its German title. Die Nacht der Bilder (The Night of the Pictures), has been jazzed up for its American release as The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Both adjectives are appropriate. The film’s merits are that it takes only three hours to see (as against the much longer reading time of the memoir) and director Ray Muller’s comments and questions provide balance for Riefenstahl’s biases. Best of all, it offers impressive brief extracts from the major films, and even scenes from the African and underwater movies that are unlikely ever to be completed. Riefenstahl reenacts her oft-told account of how her life changed when, standing on a train platform, she saw a poster advertising a mountain film by Arnold Fanck. On the basis of her photo and an expression of interest, Fanck wrote a script in three days which he dedicated to her and which made her into a movie star. Like much else in her life, it’s hard to believe but you try hard to believe it. It takes in act of faith to accept the facility with which she recalls the smallest details of incidents and the exact words and intonations of conversation. Riefenstahl anticipates this skepticism: “Hitler has so left his mark on my life that I can still remember every single word of my conversations with him and with the most important people in his entourage.” And nearly everyone else. On the evidence of her films, no moviemaker was ever more skillful at reshaping events. Riefenstahl could slow, stop, fast forward, and reorder reality, all the while insisting that what was seen on the screen was an objective chronological account, If she was capable of this, she surely is capable of as much invention in recalling events and
Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994.
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encounters that took place six and seven decades ago. loop or out of town. Leni Riefenstahl’s career raises two questions to Two claims, her independence and her which contradictory answers have been given. One is objectivity, are critical in Riefenstahl’s defense. political: Was she innocent or complicit in spreading Neither withstands scrutiny. Only the closest Nazi Nazism? The other is aesthetic: Are her masterworks, cooperation can explain the resources lavished on Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) and her films. Her own latest count is that in filming Olympia, unique works of art and is their artistry Triumph of the Will, she had a crew of 170, compromised by including 19 the circumstances cameramen, each of their production? with an assistant. A clue to She insists Riefenstahl’s that Olympia was ideology can be privately financed found in viewing and controlled by Das Blaue Licht her. The claim is (The Blue Light), disingenuous. A the first film she private company directed and which was set up because, brought her to as the Propaganda Hitler’s attention. Ministry put it, Like the earlier “the government mountain movies does not wish to in which she appear publicly as starred and the the producer of Nazi films that this film.” In fact, followed, it depicts existing records a strong and show that the Nazis handsome body founded, financed, silhouetted against made money from, the sky and and ordered the Leni Riefenstahl preparing Olympia, 1938 (1994 Kino International Corp.) conquering a liquidation of the dramatic landscape company. that would be daunting to lesser individuals. The At the 1934 Nuremberg party rally that Riefenheroine in The Blue Light (with whom Riefenstahl stahl memorialized in Triumph of the Will, Minister identified herself is an idealistic child of nature who of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels said that propaganda is destroyed by civilization. Like her later heroes, has “to win the heart of a people and keep it.” Hitler and the Olympic athletes, she strives upward as The relationship between the man charged with a symbol of the victory/ triumph of faith/will. These doing it and the woman who did it best remains a are, of course, the titles of her Nuremberg rally films, subject of dispute. She says he was a repulsed wouldVictory of Faith and Triumph of the Will. The same be lover and jealous of her talent. In contradiction, symbolism is physically explicit in Olympia, her two the Ministry’s records attest to his continued support films of the 1936 Olympics. for her activities. For Riefenstahl, this was not Fascism, but After the second time she rebuffed Goebbels’s ingrained German romanticism. She professed to be advances, “I knew that the Propaganda Minister was innocent and ignorant of any guilty knowledge. If now my enemy for sure.” (By her account, most men Triumph of the Will is a Nazi apology for the purge loved or at least lusted after her, and they didn’t take of Ernst Röhm and the leaders of the S.A., she didn’t no for an answer. The list is long, including her first know it because she was abroad on holiday when the director, her costar, and the Fuhrer.) purge took place. If she was ridiculed upon her Riefenstahl recalls that “in the last week of arrival in America for denying the reality of August 1933.” Hitler asked her “how far you’ve got Kristalinacht, she didn’t know it because she was with your preparations for the film on the Party aboard ship and without news when it took place. If rally, and whether you’re getting enough support she sent Hitler a telegram when the Nazis occupied form the Minister of Propaganda.” Far from getting Paris, gushing “How can we ever thank you?,” she support, Riefenstahl replied that Goebbels had not was inspired by the belief that the war was over and even informed her of the assignment. As the rally didn’t know that it continued. No matter how close began on August 30, she had by her account at most she was to the propaganda, she was always out of the only a few days to prepare. As a result, Sieg des
Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #20 Glaubens (Victory of Faith) was hastily put together, technically amateurish, and little-seen. That’s her story. Recovered fragments of Goebbels’s diary tell a different story, detailing a series of meetings about the film beginning in midMay. Which account is more truthful? Riefenstahl obtained the services of her favorite cinematographer, Sepp Allgeier, who later described the special equipment he secured and the arrangements he made with Hitler to photograph him during the rally. There were approximately 25 cameras and additional footage shot by four commercial newsreels. A photo shows where a wooden platform was built for a camera and a newspaper article described the exact locations of camera teams. It is farfetched to imagine that all this could have been accomplished in three days and remarkable if it was achieved in three weeks. The offical Volkischer Beobachter printed final arrangements for the film on August 26 and Riefenstahl arrived in Nuremberg on the next day. Riefenstahl’s charge of Goebbels’s hostility is contradicted by the evidence that he personally twice gave her Germany’s highest film awards, and was seen walking arm in arm with her at the 1938 film festival in Venice. Far from obstructing her filmmaking, when accountants enumerated minor extravagances in expenditures for her Olympic films, Goebbels wrote across the report: “Let’s not be petty.” When her budget was exceeded, he approved a large additional expenditure. When the government-created film company was liquidated in 1943. Goebbels transferred further administration of the films to her own film company. Denigrating the 1933 Nuremberg rally film not only serves Riefenstahl’s purpose in distancing herself from Goebbels; it also serves to deny the political character of the film. It his been recovered after many years during which it was believed that no prints had survived. Victory of Faith glorifies S.A. leader Ernst Röhm. He is seen sharing whispered conversations with Hitler, he is the only person Hitler addresses with the familiar du form, he is at Hitler’s side during a major parade, and he is seen in closeups with Hitler. The film received a gala Berlin premiere that began with an orchestral performance and ended with Hitler giving Riefenstahl a bouquet. Contemporary accounts indicate that millions saw it. As for its merit, the eminent German documentary filmmaker, Walter Ruttmann, said in a 1934 interview that the biggest problem that year would be to avoid making the same film over again. But a new film had to be made because Hitler had all prints of Victory of Faith destroyed after he ordered the murder of Ernst Röhm, his right-hand man in that film, along with hundreds of other S.A. officers, on
June 30, 1934, “the night of the long knives,” just two months before the next party rally. Hitler had learned a lesson from the failure of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which had been suppressed by the army. Having achieved power in 1933, he concluded that he bad to make peace with the German High Command. In return for the army’s support for his regime, Hitler agreed to sacrifice Röhm, who had made no secret of his desire to have the S.A. take over the military. Riefenstahl mentions none of this. To do so would be to acknowledge the explicit political content of the earlier, almostforgotten Nazi film and to expose the political reason for making the second and more famous film. If killing Röhm was a sacrifice, Hitler was more than eager to abandon what the brownshirted S.A. had stood for. They had engaged in the street fighting that had helped bring him to power and encouraged the commitment to social revolution that had made National Socialism so appealing in hard times. The violence was no longer necessary and the call for social reform was abandoned to appease the army and consolidate power. The need for a new menage was made more urgent by the death of Reichspresident Otto von Hindenberg. The military, having entered an alliance with Hitler, did not object when he added the title of President to that of Chancellor. Riefenstahl’s insistence that no one in the Nazi Party saw any part of her film before it was completed is astonishing in view of the political sophistication of Triumph of the Will. Hitler is most often seen in his brownshirt uniform, thus identifying himself with the two-and-a-half million S.A. troops whose loyalty he must gain. His declaration that “no revolution could last forever without leading to total anarchy” is a rebuke to those who shared Röhm’s ideology. Viktor Lutze, the new little-known leader of the S.A., is the only speaker addressing a gathering without Hitler, and the appearance of enthusiastic approval for him is contradicted by William Shirer’s eyewitness account. All this was included in the film by a director who claimed. “I have not one moment thought of Röhm.” She still doesn’t; Röhm gets one passing mention and Lutze none in her memoir. The evidence of Triumph of the Will demonstrates that if she was that innocent, she must have been subject to political control. If she were that independent, she could not have been politically naive. The only other possibility is that she was neither innocent nor independent: she knew what she was doing and it was what her beloved Fuhrer wanted her to do. Against all criticisms of the political import of her films, Riefenstahl maintains that Triumph of the Will is reportage. She insists that “not a single scene
Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994.
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is staged. Everything is genuine. It is history, pure history.” The claim is pure hokum. All of the sound effects were produced in the studio, and the music by Herbert Windt added greatly to the film’s impact. Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich recalled the studio restaging of a speech by Rudolf Hess. Riefenstahl admits shooting a studio close-up of Julius Streicher. There are 13 sequences in the film, presented in total disregard for chronological order. Riefenstahl admits. “It is not important to get everything on the screen in the right chronological order.” To discuss the accuracy and objectivity of the film is to miss the point or it. When an event is staged with full consciousness of how it will look on film, how “real” is its reality? Riefenstahl had invented the photo opportunity, the event which occurs in order to be visually recorded. In her 1935 ghostwritten account of the making of the second rally film, she wrote: “The preparations for the Party Convention were made in concert with the preparations for the camera work…To enable us to obtain novel visual effects, the city of Nuremberg gave its generous support in the building of bridges, towers and tracks.” The film was the rally; the rally was the film. She could hardly have directed the Berlin Olympic games to the extent to which she influenced the Nuremberg Party rally, but Riefenstahl could edit, reorder, and even get athletes to redo feats that her cameramen had missed. The famous diving sequence is like no feat any human being has ever performed. As in the overtly political films, Riefenstahl sought to alternate tension and relaxation, and she built up each contest “to do a different thing.” With permission from the various Olympic committees and contestants, 30 cameras were placed in towers, balloons, ditches, below and above water. Because filming might interfere with the actual events, some
sequences are of practice sessions. From the panting of the runners to the breathing of horses, all of the sound was created in the studio. Given her unparalleled success in making films that were both artistic and political, it may appear surprising that she made no more Nazi films after Olympia. The explanation in part may be that her glorification of the simplicity of nature and natural strength was more appropriate in the new Reich than in the war Reich. Besides, Riefenstahl was neither a Nazi Party member nor a Ministry of Propaganda bureaucrat, and she was both outside the powerful studios and a woman. A half-century has passed since the war’s end and Leni Riefenstahl dreams of, embarks upon, and puts aside new film projects. She spent four years in prisons and detention camps before being cleared. She was dogged by rumor without foundation that she was Hitler’s mistress. Notorious filmmakers, including Veit Harlan, director of the racist Jew Suss, were reinstated and resumed making movies. The only explanation for why Riefenstahl has suffered more and suffers still is because she was more successful. Overt propaganda tracts are forgotten, but Triumph of the Will and Olympia survive, appealing for their extraordinary and unprecedented artistry and appalling for their premonitions of unspeakable horrors to come. The publication in America last year of the autobiograpby and the release this year of the documentary film are bound to stir up interest in Leni Riefenstahl’s films, back to The Blue Light, the first film she directed in 1932, and forward to Tief land, the last film she completed in 1954. From the way in which she directs her director in The Wonderful, Horrible Life, it’s possible that we haven’t seen the last of her. Of what other 91-year-old can that be said?
Feingold, Stanley. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Survival of Her Will.” Congress Monthly. April/May 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #21
what the nazis believed What was so attractive about Nazism? Before answering that, we must first understand what the Nazis believed. As one author has stated, “Nazism is an attitude towards life.”
1. The Nazis valued the community rather than the individual. A. B. C.
The overall goal was unity; as Hitler stated: “the preservation and fostering of living beings who are physically and mentally alike.” As befits the term “totalitarian,” the state would largely control the life of the citizen. As Robert Ley put it, “our state never releases the human being from the cradle to the grave.” Individuals were to be measured by their usefulness to the state. These values were supported by the words of others in German history. The philosopher Hegel had said, “Everything that man is, he owes to the state .. all value which man has, all spiritual reality, he only has through the state.”
II. The Nazis valued authority and order. A. B. C. D.
E.
Democracy as a workable system was dead. The people needed a mystical savior to lead them. Hitler was their charismatic salvation. He was “Der Fuhrer.” When the Nazis went to the people, they gave “the whole people an opportunity to demonstrate and proclaim its support of an aim announced by the Fuhrer.” The Fuhrer was infallible. He gave the laws to Germany. As one Nazi stated, “The National Socialists believe in Hitler who embodies their will…Only what Adolf Hitler, our Fuhrer, allows or does not allow is our conscience.” “In thy service is perfect freedom.” The Nazis quoted the German writer Goethe, “I would rather commit an injustice than endure disorder.” Thus, the emphasis was placed on order, control, discipline, duty, and sacrifice. “Through the door of death we enter the door of true life.. He who does not risk his life to gain it ever anew is already dead, though he still breathes, eats, and drinks. Death is only a departure for the sake of a higher life. We are born to die for Germany.” To justify Hitler’s decision making, the Nazis quoted Gerhart Hauptmann. “If only life would demand no more solutions from us.” Since people did not want to make decisions. Hitler would do it for them.
III. The Nazis valued the concept of a select race. A. The Germans were a superior race, a group they called the Aryan race. B. Germany was destined to lead the world. Nature and fate would produce events to make this happen. The Aryan people would need more territory in which to grow. This desire to expand German boundaries was called Lebensraum. C. Only those of true German blood could be citizens. The Nazis called them the Volk. Concern for the Volk lead to a glorification of German “ancestry.” Great Germans of the past, from Beethoven to Wagner, were honored. The Nazis studied Teutonic mythology and took pride in the heroic exploits of their ancestors. Praising the past led to an admiration for the medieval peasant. The peasant virtues of simplicity, honesty, and physical labor were glorified. D. As a result, Nazi education emphasized German history, biology, and physical education. E. One of the favorite images of the Nazis was the German painter Albrecht Durer’s “The Knight,
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit III: READING #21
F.
Death, and The Devil.” The Nazis saw themselves as heroic, loyal. and racially pure knights of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail. The Aryans would produce a Golden Age, a millennium which they called the “Third Reich.” The First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire of Frederick Barbarossa, the Second Reich was under Otto von Bismarck. The Third Reich would last a thousand years.
IV. The Nazis saw politics as a religion. A. B. C. V.
Hitler was looked upon as someone greater than Jesus. Acts against the state would be immoral in almost a religious sense. Nazism became a mission: “The Reich must direct the life of nations, individuals, and states. The Reich signifies a mission.”
The Nazis valued emotion more than reason. A. B.
C.
D.
Thinking was criticized. A person should act spontaneously and directly. The Nazis referred to the educated middle class as “acrobats of the intellect,” “intelligent beasts with paralysis of the spine,” and “hothouse plants incapable of achievement.” Hitler called them “rejects of nature.” An SS paper stated that I.Q. was inversely proportional to male fertility. “Intellectuals validate their claim to existence within the community by a paucity of children.” The Nazis emphasized physical force and strength. Sports were important to develop the body to serve the state. As one Nazi stated, “A young man who works with a spade for six months on the western fortifications has done more for Germany than an intellectual has done during his whole life.” War was the ultimate expression of man’s capacity for sacrifice, courage, and greatness. “The measure of the strength of a people is always and exclusively its readiness for military conflict.”
VI. The Nazis believed in the use of the “big lie” to manipulate people. As Hitler wrote, “A definite factor in getting a lie believed is the size of the lie. The broad mass of the people, in the simplicity of their hearts, more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.”
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VII. The Nazis were strong nationalists. A. B. C.
The Nazis used incited appeals to German patriotism. Germany was a nation wronged by history. To return to its rightful place, Germany should disregard any sense of “morality” in international life. They opposed German participation in any peace organizations such as the League of Nations. The Nazis were critical of all people except those of the “Volk.” The Poles were -racial anti-types”; the British were worshippers of Mammon. Of the United States, Hitler stated, “One Beethoven symphony contains more culture than America has produced in her whole history.” To Hitler, America was a Philistine, mongrelized community descended from convicts and the unwanted dregs of society. The Russians were just above the Jews.
VIII. The Nazis had a strong belief in the traditional family. A. B. C.
D.
The family was “the germ cell of the state.” Women were not equal to men. Their purpose: Kindersagen, to be blessed with children. Women were encouraged not to wear make-up (which was considered a conspiracy of the Jews) or pants. Women were encouraged to have many children. The display of contraceptives and their advertisement would be banned, and birth control clinics would be closed. Abortions were called “acts of sabotage against Germany’s racial future,” and strict penalties would be given to doctors performing them. Men were encouraged to be adulterous if their wives were barren. The Nazis, like many in the early twentieth century, were interested in eugenics. To prevent the spread of “bad genes,” the Nazis would recommend the sterilization of those suffering from physical malformation, mental retardation, epilepsy, deafness, and blindness.
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #21 Advocated by Nazis community unity the fuhrer mysticism salvation charisma order discipline duty sacrifice conformity Aryan blood destiny Volk Lebensraum physical labor heroism sense of mission strength war patriotism/nationalism Social Darwinism male dominance force/violence eugenics control
Opposed by Nazis democracy equality individual freedom Jews thinking peace internationalism Marxism/Communism rationalism a passive Jesus modernity birth control integration of races conscience intellectual inquiry abstract art
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION: 1.
How do you feel about judging the value of someone by examining his or her usefulness to you?
2.
What did the Nazis believe about the average person’s desire to make political decisions? Are they right?
3.
Why were the Nazis so critical of intellectuals? Is the development of the mind or the body more important?
4.
Do you think the values expressed by the Nazis were very unusual in their day? Discuss.
5.
The following statement was made by Theodore Roosevelt in the early twentieth century: Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population…The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity…I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave off-spring behind them…The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed. What values are indicated by the statement? Do you agree with the statement?
6.
What kind of society is created that downplays the role of morality and conscience?
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit III: READING #22
the message of the nazis: slogans, posters, songs and games Slogans, games, songs and posters were important ways of emotionally carrying the message of Nazism to the German people. In a very simple manner, they spread the values of Nazism. They allowed people to participate in the Nazi movement and conveyed the feeling of a widely supported, passionate, and active break with the Weimar past.
Major Slogans
318
Deutschland Erwache! Judah Verrecke!—Germany Awake! Judah Perish! Ein Reich. Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!—One State, One People, One Leader! Deutschland Ist Hitler! Hitler Ist Deutschland—Germany is Hitler! Hitler is Germany! Wer Kennt den Jude, Kennt den Taufel!—Whoever knows the Jews, knows the Devil! Deutschland Uber Alles—Germany Above Everything Sieg Heil!—Hail to Victory! Heil Hitler!—Hail to Hitler! Volk Ohne Raum—People without Space Weltmacht Oder Niedergang!—World Power or Ruin! Heute Deutschland! Morgen Die Welt!—Today Germany! Tomorrow the World! Die Juden Sind Unser Ungluck!—The Jews are our misfortune!
Songs Hold high the banner! Close the hard ranks serried! S.A. marches on the sturdy stride Comrades, by Red Front and Reaction killed, are buried, But march with us in image at our side. Gangway. Gangway now for the Brown battalions! For the Storm Troopers clear roads o’er land. The Swastika gives hope to our entranced millions. The day for freedom and for bread’s at hand The trumpet blows its shrill and final blast. Prepared for war and battle here we stand, Soon Hitler’s banner will wave unchecked at last, The end of German slav’ry in our land…
Forward. Forward. With resounding fanfares. Forward. Forward. Youth knows no peril. Be the goal ever so high, Youth will gain it. Our banner precedes us, fluttering in the breeze, as we march into the future, man after man. We’ll march for Hitler through night and through danger with the flag of youth, for freedom and bread. Our banner precedes us, fluttering in the breeze. Our banner signals the new time. Our banner leads us to eternity. Yes, our banner is worth more than death.
Symbols The three most well—known symbols of the Nazis are the swastika, the runic slashes, and the Hitler salute. • The swastika was the central symbol of the Nazi movement. In Hitler’s youth, it was used by J. Lanz—Liebenfels in his secret society, the “New Temple,” in Austria in 1900. After World War 1, the Freecorps group known as the Ehrhardt Brigade painted the swastika on their helmets. Thus, the swastika had been used as a symbol of racial strength before the Nazis. • The runic slashes were used by Lanz’ colleague, Guido von list. They were considered another potent racial symbol and would become the symbol of the SS, the Nazi elite. • The “Heil” greeting was used by a German youth group, the Wandervogel, as early as 1901. Rudolf Hess, an early Nazi and totally devoted to Hitler, was the first to use the salutation, “Heil Hitler!”
Forward. Forward. With resounding fanfares Forward. Forward. Youth knows no peril. Germany, you will stand resplendent although we may die. Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anothology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #22
Children’s board game, “Jews Get Out,” sold in Germany in 1939 and 1940.
1932 Election poster, “Enough Now! Vote For Hitler!”
The Nazis sweep out alien elements, early 1930’s.
319 Exhibit poster for the Wandering Jew exhibit, Munich. 1937. Artist unknown.
“The Flag Bearer,” 1930’s, Germany.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What are the most important values expressed in the slogans and songs? 2. How is Hitler portrayed in “The Flag Bearer”? What do you think this symbol means? 3. Describe the Nazi interpretation of “The Wandering Jew.” 4. Who are the “alien elements” being swept out of Germany? How are they depicted? Why? 5. What impact do you think the board game “Jews Get Out” had on the players? 6. Describe the impact of the Nazi election campaign poster. What passions does it display? Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anothology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
Unit III: READING #23
the techniques of propaganda from “How to Detect and Analyze Propaganda” by Clyde R. Miller
I
n examination of propaganda the first logical thing to do is to define the term. A little over a year ago a groups of scholars organizing the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, after a good many hours of argument, arrived at this definition: “As generally understood, propaganda is an expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups, deliberately designed to inf luence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends.” That means if you and I have an opinion and express it with intent to influence some individual or group, we are, to that extent, propagandists. And are acts propaganda too? Yes. The Boston Tea Party was a propaganda act plotted and planned and beautifully timed by that master propagandist of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams, to crystallize the feeling of hatred by the Colonists against the British Tories. The burning of the Reichstag when Hitler came to power may have been a propaganda act. Certainly Hitler took advantage of it by placing blame for it on “Jews” and “Communists,” labeling those whom he did not like “Jews” and “Communists” whether they were or not, blaming them for the fire and putting them in prison. By such propaganda acts Hitler was able to dispose of many of his enemies at the very outset of his dictatorship.
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We are fooled by propaganda chiefly because we don’t recognize it when we see it. It may be fun to be fooled, but, as the cigarette ads used to say, it is more fun to know. We can more easily recognize propaganda when we see it if we are familiar with the seven common propaganda devices.* These are: 1 . The Name-Calling Device 2.
The Glittering Generalities Device
3.
The Transfer Device
4.
The Testimonial Device
5.
The Plain Folks Device
6.
The Card Stacking Device
7.
The
Band Wagon Device
Why are we fooled by these devices? Because they appeal to our emotions rather than to our reason. They make us believe and do something we might not believe or do if we thought about it calmly, dispassionately. In examining these devices, note that they work most effectively at those times when we are too lazy to think for ourselves; also, they tie into emotions which sway us to be “for” or “against” nations, races, religions, ideals, economic and political policies and practices.
*From The Fine Art of Propaganda, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Source: “The Techniques of Propaganda.” from How to Detect and Analyze Propaganda by Clyde R. Miller. Night, Lesson 4, Handout 10. USA: Center for Learning, New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit III: READING #1 1.
Name-Calling is a device to make us form a judgment without examining the evidence on which it should be based. Here the propagandist appeals to our hate and fear. He does this by giving “bad names” to those individuals, groups, nations, races, policies, practices, beliefs, and ideals which he would have us condemn and reject. For centuries the name “heretic” was bad. Thousands were oppressed, tortured, or put to death as heretics. Anybody who dissented from popular or group belief or practice was in danger of being called a heretic. Today’s bad names include Fascist, demagogue, dictator, Red, Financial oligarchy, Communist, alien, outside agitator, economic royalist, Utopian, rabble-rouser, troublemaker, Tory.
2.
Glittering Generalities is a device by which the propagandist identifies his program with virtue by use of “virtue words.” Here he appeals to our emotions of love, generosity, and brotherhood. He uses words like truth, freedom, honor, liberty, social justice, public service, the right to work, loyalty, progress, democracy, the American way. These words suggest shining ideals. All persons of good will believe in these ideals. Hence the propagandist, by identifying his individual group, nation, race, policy, practice, or belief with such ideals, seeks to win us to his cause. As Name Calling is a device to make us form a judgment to reject and condemn, without examining the evidence, Glittering Generalities is a device to make us accept and approve, without examining the evidence. In the Name Calling and Glittering Generalities devices, words are used to stir up our emotions and to befog our thinking. In one device “bad words” are used to make us mad; in the other “good words” are used to make us glad.
3.
Transfer is a device by which the propagandist carries over the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something he would have us accept. For example, most of us respect and revere our church and our nation. If the propagandist succeeds in getting church or nation to approve a campaign in behalf of some program, he thereby transfers its authority, sanction, and prestige to that program. Thus we may accept something which otherwise we might reject. In the Transfer device symbols are constantly used. The cross represents the Christian Church. The flag represents the nation. Cartoons like Uncle Sam represent a consensus of public opinion. Those symbols stir emotions. At their very sight, with the speed of light, is aroused the whole complex of feelings we have with respect to church or nation. A cartoonist by having Uncle Sam disapprove a budget for unemployment relief would have us feel that the whole United States disapproves relief costs. By drawing an Uncle Sam who approves the same budget, the cartoonist would have us feel that American people approve it. Thus, the Transfer device is used both for and against causes and ideas.
4.
The Testimonial device is employed to make us accept anything from a patent medicine to a program of national policy. The propagandist secures statements or letters from prominent people with the expectation that the crowd will follow the leader. Almost every newspaper and magazine contains a number of testimonials extolling the virtues of this and that. The point for the reader to remember, however, is that no person’s recommendation is particularly valuable except in that person’s chosen field of work. Henry Ford’s opinion about an automobile qualifies as expert testimony, but Henry Ford’s opinion of the virtues of a new tooth—paste is probably worth very little. On reading any testimonial, the reader should ask himself the question, “Can this testimonial be considered expert opinion?”
Source: Shirer, William. “Freiderich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990.
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Unit III: READING #1 5.
The Plain Folks device is used by politicians, labor leaders, business men, and even by ministers and educators to win our confidence by appearing to be common people like ourselves— ”just plain folks among the neighbors.” In election years especially do candidates show their devotion to our little children, flourish the cards which show that they are members in good standing in some important labor union, or have their pictures taken while they are pitching hay.
6.
The Card Stacking device is employed by the propagandist when he tells us only part of the truth, He uses under-emphasis and over-emphasis to dodge issues and evade facts. He draws a red herring across the trail to confuse and divert those in quest of the truth. The principal of a small private school met the criticism that his faculty had no teaching experience by issuing the statement that the average experience of each member of the faculty was five years. This statement was technically true: there were five teachers in the school including the principal, but the latter neglected to mention that he had had the twenty-five years of experience while the remaining four members had had none.
7.
The Band Wagon device is used to make us follow the crowd, to accept the propagandist’s program en masse. The theme of this type of propaganda may be summed up in the statement, “Everybody’s doing it, come along and follow the great majority, for it can’t be wrong.” In dealing with this type of propaganda, the reader should remember the words of Lincoln, “You can fool all the people some of the time.”
Observe that in a these devices our emotion is the stuff with which propagandists work. Without it they are helpless; with it, harnessing it to their purposes, they can make us glow with pride or burn with hatred, they can make us zealots in behalf of the program they espouse.
322
To say this is not to condemn emotion, an essential part of life, or to assert that all predetermined ends of propagandists are “bad.” It is simply to say that the intelligent citizen does not want propagandists to utilize his emotions, even to the attainment of “good” ends, without knowing what is going on. He does not want to be “used” in the attainment of ends he may later consider “bad.” He wants to know the facts and among these is included the fact of the utilization of his emotions. Remember that there are three ways to deal with propaganda-first, to suppress it; second, to answer it by counter-propaganda, third, to analyze it. Suppression of propaganda is contrary to democratic principles, specifically contrary to the provisions of the United States Constitution. Counter-propaganda is legitimate but often intensifies cleavages. Analysis of propaganda, on the other hand, cannot hurt propaganda for a cause that we consider “good.”
Source: Shirer, William. “Freiderich Neitzsche.” The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Touchstone/Simon Schuster, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
to mass murder: the holocaust
“WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING”
UNIT IV
from persecution
Unit IV
UNIT IV from persecution to mass murder: the holocaust
I
n this unit, students examine the sequence of events in Nazi-occupied Europe that culminated in the mass murder of European Jewry. With Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, on January 30, 1933, dictatorship soon replaced democratic, constitutional government in Germany. After five years in power, the Nazis achieved control over German politics, society and culture. Precluding dissent and political checks and balances, Hitler’s unlimited zeal for absolute authority— and his evil intention—developed without significant restraint. From the start, the Nazis terrorized Jews by using the Gestapo police as their main instrument of intimidation. Eventually, they restricted Jews’ civil liberties, confiscated their property, dismissed them from civil service and the universities, barred them from practicing their professions and “Aryanized” their businesses or reassigned ownership to non-Jewish Germans. The 1935 laws and the decision in September of 1941 to force Jews to wear an identifying Jewish star accelerated the crippling process of isolating Jews from the rest of German society. To make matters worse, the free world didn’t seem to care. Of the thirty-two countries represented at the July 1938 Evian Conference to deal with Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi terror, only the Dominican Republic offered significant help. The free world’s indecision amounted to a rejection of Jewish pleas for protection. Their gates were closed to Jewish refugees. On November 9th and 10th, 1938, a pogrom (riot) of anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout Germany and Austria. On that “Night of Broken Glass,” (in German, called Kristallnacht), Germans destroyed synagogues, Jewish businesses and homes, and burned Torah scrolls, Bibles and prayer books, and books by Jewish authors. About one hundred Jews were killed; thirty thousand Jewish men were sent to the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Again, although fully aware of the Nazi campaign against Jews from newspaper reports, the world exhibited no meaningful concern. Hitler invaded and annexed Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39. On September 1, 1939 the German army invaded Poland, provoking England and France to declare war. This marked the beginning of World War II. Subduing popular and military resistance in three short weeks in Poland, the Nazis extended their policy of isolating Jews with the creation of Jewish ghettos in Poland over a two-year span, from 1939-41. Ghettos were living quarters in cities where Jews were held captive, pressed into hard labor, robbed of their rights and possessions and exposed to miserable conditions. Ghetto inhabitants endured extreme despair, hunger and poverty. Frequently, large numbers of Jews were forced to live in spaces
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FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: The Holocaust
designed for a few people. Epidemic diseases, like typhus and tuberculosis, were a constant threat. Ragged orphaned children who lived on the streets were forced to beg. Responsibility for governing each ghetto belonged to a Nazi-appointed organization known as the Jewish Councils (in German, Judenrat). These councils had to make choiceless choices: simultaneously attempting to meet the needs of people in the ghetto while being forced to carry out Nazi commands. On June 22, 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, including those areas occupied by the Red Army in 1939-1940: Eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. This marked a major turning point in Nazi policy toward the Jews: mass killings followed physical isolation—the goals of Nazi antiJewish policy. Units of the SS and Special Action Squads (Einsatzgruppen) rounded up Jews and murdered them. They also rounded up and murdered others, including Communist Party officials, Roma (Gypsies) and members of the intelligentsia. It was common for victims to be marched out of town and summarily shot, falling into mass graves. Over one million Jews throughout Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union died in this manner. In 1942 the Nazis decided to speed up the killing process by implementing the program of mass killing in death camps. On January 20, 1942, Nazi officials met in a Berlin villa known as Wannsee. Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, those at the Wannsee Conference adopted a policy and a plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. This was known as The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. It included the use of poison gas (Zyklon B) to kill Jews, and crematoria to dispose of their bodies at six death camps—Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
326
As the war was coming to an end in the spring of 1945, the Allies liberated the survivors who remained in the camps. Reacting with abject grief and disbelief on his visit to a concentration camp on April 12, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, felt compelled to describe his feelings in a letter to his Chief of Staff, General George Marshall: “The things I saw beggar description….The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick…I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence to these things in the event, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.” The goal of this unit is to develop an understanding that the Holocaust was an evolutionary process of Nazi state policy that led from persecution to mass murder. Students will examine (1) Nazi policies, laws and teachings after their rise to power; (2) the changes that took place, including the impact of the Nuremberg Laws on the German Jews; (3) events and programs, including Kristallnacht, Eugenics, Euthanasia Program, the isolation and deportation processes, the Einsatzgruppen, the Wannsee Conference and The Final Solution. In addition, students will examine (4) the origins, establishment, conditions and operations of the Nazi concentration camps and death camps; (5) how this period is represented in the literature, art and music of the ghettos and camps; (6) the roles of the business, industrial, legal, scientific and medical professions, and the role of the churches in the Holocaust; (7) the response of Germans and collaborators from other nations; (8) the role of the mass media and propaganda; (9) the Nazi victimization of non-Jewish groups; (10) the response of the governments of United States and the Allies, the world media and the American Jewish community; (11) the importance of eye-witness testimony; (12) the creation of a chronology of events of the Holocaust; and will (13) reassess their previous generalizations about human nature based upon new knowledge acquired during their study of the Holocaust.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV
UNIT IV:
FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: THE HOLOCAUST
UNIT GOAL: Students will understand that the Holocaust was an evolutionary process of Nazi state policy from persecution to mass murder. PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Note: The notation (READING #) in this column indicates that a copy of the article is included in this curriculum guide.
1. Students will examine policies, laws and teachings in the years immediately following the Nazi assumption of power which led to the Holocaust.
A. After consulting a variety of sources, write about Nazi racial theory and discuss your findings. Specifically, describe the Nazi concept of three pure races: white (Aryan); yellow (Asian); and black (African).
A. Resources for Section A: 1a. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Racial Question.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #1) 1b. Koen, Ilse. Mischling Second Degree. New York: Bantam Books, 1977. (A young girl relates her story of not being a pure Aryan.) 1c. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. (Chapters 1-3). New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., 1997. 1d. Genocide. World At War Series. Videocassette. Available from Social Studies School Service. (Examines the rationale and methods employed by Nazis to realize their goal of the “Master Race.” First 20 minutes is recommended. Caution: there is graphic footage and teachers should use discretion in the use of this film.)
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1e. Bauer, Elvira. “Don’t Trust a Fox on the Greensward and Never a Jew on His Plighted Word.” Der Stuermer. Nuremberg, 1936. Translation, anonymous, from the University of South Florida Library, in “Propaganda in Education.” Shoah. Fall/Winter 1982-3. (Used as a primer reader in elementary schools in Germany. Slides, cassette available from Waldor Memorial Library (1-973-428-7400). Photographs and commentary by Cecile Seiden: Shoah, Fall/Winter 1982-83. (READING #2)
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Note to the teacher: The article by Natalie Angier, referenced in resource 1f to the right, may be useful to enable students to understand what the latest research indicates about racial differences in intelligence.
1f. Angier, Natalie. “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show,” New York Times. 22 Aug. 2000, F 1.
B. Examine the erosion of the civil rights of German Jews from 1933-1935, including the following: 1. Anti-Jewish riots 2. Boycotts against German Jews 3. Anti-Jewish laws
B. Resources for Section B: 1a. Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.” (READING #3) 1b. “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933.” Days of Remembrance: Planning Guide. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989. (READING #4) 1c. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Anti-Jewish Legislation: 1933-1935.” The War Against the Jews. Boston: Doubleday, 1991.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1d. “The Holocaust Timeline” The History Place Web Site: www.historyplace.com/ worldwar2/timeline/nuremlaws.htm (See “Holocaust Timeline” in Appendix C) 1e. Friedlander, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. New York: Harper Collins, 1997.
C.
Describe the Nazi use of mass media to promote AntiSemitism and to dehumanize the Jewish people.
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Examine the role of Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels.
1a. Hitler’s Henchmen. Videocassette. 5-Part Series. The History Channel. (1-800-7081776) 1b. Genocide. World at War Series, #20. First 20 minute segment. See reference in Section A, 1d, above.
2.
View Triumph of the Will by Leni Reifenstahl and discuss the use of mass media to promulgate Nazi propaganda. Compare and contrast this propaganda with the techniques used on American television in a current commercial.
2.
Triumph of the Will: A Nazi Propaganda Film. Dir. Leni Reifenstahl. Videocassette. Barr Entertainment, 1934. Available from Social Studies School Service. (German dialogue; major policy speeches by Goebbels, Goering, Streicher, Himmler, Hess.)
3.
Compare the philosophies of the Nazis of the 1930’s to those of white supremacists today.
3.
Refer to the following videocassettes available from Social Studies School Service: Eternal Jew; Triumph of the Will; The California Reich (about the rebirth of the U.S. Nazi
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Party). Contact Anti-Defamation League for additional materials.
4. Discuss the ways the Nazis used language to hide the real meaning of their actions. Is this corruption of language found elsewhere in history? Today? Give examples.
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2. Students will describe the changes that took place in Germany after the Nazis came to power and interpret the impact of the Nuremberg Laws on Jews living in Germany.
4.
Furman, Harry, ed. “Nazi Language.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #5)
A. Analyze the principal Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and their effects on the Jews of Germany.
A. Resources for Section A
1.
Review the ADL Poster Series, Nuremberg Laws, and list the laws. Then read The Preparation by Nora Levin, and summarize how the Nuremberg Laws changed the lives of Jews in Germany or review IB Holocaust Project: The Nuremberg Laws web site. Discuss in small groups, for example, how your life would change if such laws were implemented in the United States and everyone in your family were affected.
1a. Nuremberg Laws. Poster Series. New York: Anti-Defamation League.
2.
Read Honor the Yellow Badge and/or The Nuremberg Race Laws (The History Place web site) and discuss, for example, these questions:
•
Why would it be important for Jews to “honor” the yellow badge?
2a. Furman, Harry, ed. “Honor the Yellow Badge,” Anonymous; in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING # 7)
•
How would you feel if you were forced to wear a symbol that was meant to be degrading?
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
1b. Levin, Nora. “The Preparation.” The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968, pp. 6873 (READING # 6) 1c. “Enabling Act to the Nuremberg Laws” IB Holocaust Project: The Nuremberg Laws. Web Site: http://www.cghs.dade.k12.fl. us/holocaust/laws.htm
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2b. “The Nuremberg Race Laws.” World War Two in Europe. The History Place Web Site: http://www.historyplace.com/ worldwar2/timeline/nuremlaws.htm
3.
Read David Rosenstein’s Dilemma using these questions to guide your analysis and discussion:
•
What should David Rosenstein have done?
•
What are one’s obligations to oneself? family? community? Which takes precedence?
•
What can and should citizens, not only those directly involved, do when unjust laws are enacted? Is there a difference between law and justice? Discuss your reactions in small groups and report your group’s conclusions in a class discussion.
4.
Compare and contrast the Nuremberg Laws with the “Jim Crow Laws” in the United States, directed against AfricanAmericans.
Note: The author of Invisible Walls and And to Remember Is to Heal and her brother were stripped of their rights, prevented from earning a living, and forbidden to marry. Their father was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 where he died. Hecht describes in vivid detail her life under these appalling conditions: restrictions at school, in seeking work, at restaurants
3.
Furman, Harry, ed. “David Rosenstein’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING # 8))
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4a. Hecht, Ingeborg, John Brownjohn (translator), John A. Broadwin (narrator). Invisible Walls: A German Family Under the Nuremberg Laws; and And To Remember Is to Heal: Encounters Between Victims of the Nuremberg Laws. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999. 4b. “Martin Luther King, Jr., NHS Jim Crow Laws” Web Site: Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site, 5 Jan 2000. (Note: This piece provides a sampling of Jim Crow
FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: The Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES and other public places, and in riding public transportation. She could not own a radio, a pet, a telephone, or a business, and she was forced to wear a Jewish star. (Editorial review by George Cohen for Amazon.com., 4 June 2000.)
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES laws from various states in the United States.) http://www.nps.gov/malu/doc uments/jim_crow_laws.htm 4c. “The Impact of Jim Crow” Jim Crow Lesson Plan. Web Site: www.davison.k12.mi.us/acade mic/jimcrow.htm 4d. Newman, Amy, ed. The Nuremberg Laws: Institutionalized AntiSemitism. (Words that Changed History). San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1999. (Available from Social Studies School Service, catalog “Holocaust 2000.”) 4e. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “1935: Steps Toward Destruction.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000.
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4f. Kennedy, Stelson. Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was. Florida Atlantic University, 1990. 4g. Schneider, Mark L. and Mark Robert Schneider. Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920. Boston: Northeastern University 1997. 4h. Woodward, Comer Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Hofstra University Press, 1989. 5. View the film segments listed to the right and discuss the similarities and differences
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
5a. Separate But Equal. (Segment on psychologist with dolls) Videocassette. TNT Productions
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES between them. (Note to the teacher: It is suggested that sufficient time be devoted to the viewing of all four film segments to facilitate an in-depth discussion. The teacher should preview the films in their entirety.)
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 5b. The Tuskegee Airmen (Train boarding scene). Dir. Robert Markowitz. Perf. Laurence Fishburne, John Lithgow, et.al. Videocassette. HBO Home Video, 1996. 5c. Glory (The whipping scene). Dir. Edward Zwick. Perf. Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, et. al. Videocassette. Tri Star, 1989. 5d. Shadow of Hate: A History of Intolerance in America (Segment on Japanese Internment Camps). Dir. Charles Guggenheim. Videocassette. HBO Video, 1995.
3. Students will investigate the escalation of Nazi policies of persecution which include the following: Kristallnacht; Eugenics Program; Euthanasia Program; Isolation and Deportation of Jews; Einsatzgruppen; Wannsee Conference; and The Final Solution.
A.
After reading two or more of the resources listed, examine and discuss the events of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Use the following questions to guide your analysis of this important event:
1.
What motivated Herschel Grynszpan to murder vom Rath?
2.
Examine Heydrich’s instructions for November 1938.
3.
What was the economic impact of Kristallnacht on the Jews? How did it serve the Nazi cause?
4.
What did the world know about Kristallnacht? What happened? How did citizens of the Reich respond? How did the media treat this event?
A. Resources for Section A: 1-5. Green, Gerald. “The Night of Broken Glass.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #9) 1-5. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “1938: The End of Illusions.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 1-5. “Kristallnacht.” Dimensions. AntiDefamation League, 15 Sept 1988. 1-5. “Regulation for Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany, November 12, 1938.”
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What was the fate of the Jews of Germany after Kristallnacht?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Documents on the Holocaust. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1981 (READING # 10)
Note: On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year old PolishGerman Jew, walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot Third Secretary, Ernst vom Rath, who died shortly after. Vom Rath’s death was used as a pretext by the Nazis for the destruction and mayhem that became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, and the beginning of the Holocaust.
1-5. More than Broken Glass: Memories of Kristallnacht. Videocassette. Ergo Media. Teaneck, NJ.
B. Describe the Eugenics Movement’s origins in the United States and its use as a model for the Nazi Eugenics Movement.
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
1a. “Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement.” Web Site: A Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. http://vector .cshl.org/eugenics.html
On July 14, 1933, Germany enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which provided for the sterilization of “unfit” parents and potential parents. Through this and related legislation, the Nazis attempted to preserve what they believed was their racial “purity” and health. The law was endorsed by the American Eugenics Society.
•
What was the genesis of Eugenics?
•
What similarities and differences were there in the practice of eugenics in the United States and in Nazi Germany? Why was this promoted by some in the United States?
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
1b. Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 1c. Proctor, Robert N. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (Note: The Nazi’s euphemism for eugenics was racial hygiene.)
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
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What part did Eugenics play in the process that led to the Holocaust? Discuss your findings with the class.
2.
Read the three excerpts of the writings of highly educated Americans who expressed views on intelligence, heredity and eugenics in the United States between the years 1911 and 1923. Discuss the following questions:
•
How do the views compare with those reflected in German laws designed to preserve “racial purity?”
•
What “solutions” do the three writers suggest or imply? How do their views stand up against current research on heredity and intelligence?
•
Research American views during the 1920’s-1940’s of heredity, intelligence and eugenics. How common were the views of the three writers among Americans?
3.
The controversy regarding race, heredity and intelligence continues to this day. In their book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press), authors Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray claimed relationships between race and intelligence. One book that sought to refute all or part of the authors’ contentions is The Bell Curve: Race, Intelligence and the Future of America, by
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
2a. Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (Excerpt). Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, NY: Carnegie Institute of Washington; Department of Experimental Evolution; Secretary of Eugenics Section, American Breeders Association, 1911. (READING #11) 2b. Terman, Lewis M. The Measurement of Intelligence (Excerpt). Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1916. (READING #11) 2c. Brigham, Carl C. A Study of American Intelligence. (Excerpt). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1923. (READING #11)
3.
Fraser, Steven, ed. The Bell Curve: Race, Intelligence and the Future of America. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
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Steven Fraser, ed. Read one or more of the 19 essays and summarize in writing the views of the authors whose essays you read. Why do you believe the controversy continues? What are the implications of the MurrayHerrnstein thesis for the future of America?
C.
Describe the development of the Euthanasia program and its implementation as a part of the “Final Solution,” using the following questions as a guide:
C.
1.
Explain the Nazi definition of “Lebensunwertes Leben” (“Life Unworthy of Life”).
2.
What was the role of the medical and legal establishments in the development of the Euthanasia Program (T-4)?
3.
What techniques to murder people were used in this program that established a foundation for the refinement of the killing process in the death camps?
1-3. Lifton, Robert J. “ ‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. pp. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced, Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998. (READING # 12)
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Resources for Section C:
1-3. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “‘Euthanasia’ and Operation T-4.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. p. 169. 1-3. Web Site: http://www.euthanasia.com 1-3. Selling Murder. Videocassette. Discovery Channel. http://www.discovery.com (film produced by the Nazis in 1934)
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1-3. Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 1-3. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. 1-3. Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
D. Examine the development of the deportation program that relocated and/or isolated European Jews into ghettos using a combination of the following activities:
D. Resources for Section D:
1.
1-3. Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
After viewing the video, A New Germany, 1933-1939, summarize the major events and implications of the conquest of Poland by Germany.
1.
“A New Germany, 1933-1939.” World At War Series. Vol. I. Available from the Social Studies School Service.
1-3. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. (maps and photographs) 1-3. Gilbert, Martin. “Warsaw,” Chapter 8; and “Lodz,” Chapter 6. Final Journey: The Fate of the Jews of Europe. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
Make a list of the principal ghettos of Eastern Europe and place them and their respective populations on a map.
3.
Examine and describe life in the ghettos and the “choiceless choices” that people were forced to live with.
4.
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Who were the Judenrat leaders? How were they chosen? What was their role? How did they compare and contrast with one another?
(a) Adam Czerniakow of the Warsaw Ghetto (b) Mordechai Rumkowski of the Lodz Ghetto (c) Elkhanan Elkes, of the Kovno Ghetto (d) Jacob Gans, of the Vilna Ghetto
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2.
Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “ Major Ghettos in Occupied Poland: 1939-1941.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 169.
2-3. Children of the Night. Dir. Marion Wiesel. Videocassette. Arthur Cohn Productions, 1999. 2-3. Tatelbaum, Itzhak. “Ghetto Life: Through Our Lives” (Excerpt). Children Witness The Holocaust. (READING #13) 3.
Grossman, Mandel. With A Camera in the Ghetto. Jerusalem: Ghetto Fighters’ House and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Israel Publishing House, 1970.
1-4. Adelson, Alan and Robert Lapides, Editors. Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. 3-4. Czerniakow, Adam. “The Judenrat Chairman’s Last Diary Entries.” The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. (READING #14) 3-4. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222. (READING #15)
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit Unit IV II PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 4a. Elkes, Joel. Values, Belief and Survival: Dr. Elkhanan Elkes and the Kovno Ghetto. (A Memoir). London: Vale Publishing, 1997. 4b. Tushnot, Leonard. The Pavement of Hell. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972.
5.
Read the following moral dilemma story, Life in the Ghettos: A Moral Dilemma, written by New Jersey teacher, Frank Yusko. Then in a small group, share your responses to the following questions:
•
How did the Nazis benefit from having the Judenrat leaders make the selection of those to be “resettled”? What did “resettlement” mean?
•
Why did some Judenrat leaders submit to these Nazi orders? What choices did they have? What were the probable consequences of each of those choices for themselves and for their communities? Is it fair for anyone to judge who made the “right” choice? Life in the Ghettos: A Moral Dilemma Adam Czerniakow was the leader of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) in the Warsaw Ghetto. The leader of the Lodz Ghetto Judenrat was Mordechai Rumkowski. Both men were told by the Nazi leadership [in their ghettos] that they were to select a number of Jews to be
5.
Reproduce Life in the Ghettos: A Moral Dilemma, by Frank Yusko (unpublished), that appears to the left on this page.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
“resettled in work camps” in the East. Both men knew this meant that [those selected] would be taken to their deaths. Czerniakow refused to comply with this immoral order by swallowing a poison pill he had hidden in his desk. The next morning the Nazis selected a number of people at random. Rumkowski, on the other hand, complied with the order by selecting the number from among the old, young, and the ill—- those unlikely to survive in any case. 6.
Use The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma: What Would You Do? as a basis for small group and full class discussion of the difficulties inherent in the “choiceless choices” people were forced to make.
6.
7.
View the video Korczak. Discuss the following:
•
What does this show about the life of children in the ghetto, especially for the orphans in Dr. Korczak’s care?
7a. Korczak. by Andrew Wajda. 118 min. Polish with English subtitles. Available from Social Studies School Service.
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•
What is the symbolism reflected in the first scene of the video.
8.
Study daily life and the struggle to survive in various ghettos of Eastern Europe; then choose one of the following related activities to express your understanding:
•
Create a mural or display on a school bulletin board that depicts your understanding of daily life and struggles in the ghetto.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Furman, Harry, ed. “The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING #16)
7b. Lifton, Betty Jean. The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.
8a. Tatelbaum, Itzhak. “ Ghetto Life: Through Our Eyes.” Children Witness the Holocaust. (Also available as a videocassette with a teacher’s guide from Social Studies School Service.) (SEE READING #13 ABOVE.) 8b. Margolis, Peppy and Cecile Seiden. “Warsaw Ghetto.”
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
Create a power-point presentation and present it to the class.
•
Interview Holocaust survivors who lived in one of the ghettos. Use either videotape or audiotape to record the interviews with the permission of the survivors. Play segments of the tape for the class and discuss your conclusions with your classmates.
•
Write a poem or a series of poems that captures your feelings and insights on daily life in the ghetto.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES (Lessons). Whippany, NJ: United Jewish Federation of MetroWest Community Relations Committee, 910 Route 10 East, Whippany, NJ 07981. (1-973-884-4800, ext. 178). 8c. The Warsaw Ghetto. BBC. Videocasette. 51 min., B/W. Available from Social Studies School Service. 8d. Everyday Life in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Study Unit for Junior High and High School Students (With slides of photographs taken by German soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto). Teachers Guide and Student Workbook. Israel: Yad Vashem, Education Department Pedagogic Center, 1993. 8d. Keller, Ulrich, Ed. The Warsaw Ghetto in Photographs: 206 Views Made in 1941. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1984. 8e. The Island on Bird Street. 104 min/color. Dir. Soren KraghJacobson. Lantern Lane Entertainment and Third Row Center Films. Videocassette. 2000. (Based on the book by Uri Orlev) 8f. Orlev, Uri. The Island on Bird Street. Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. 8g. Adelson, Alan, Ed. The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES E.
Examine Nazi activities after the decision to invade Russia.
1.
Identify activities of the Einsatzgruppen and label their locations on a map.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES E. Resources for Section E:
1a. Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder, Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62. (READINGS #17 & #18) 1b. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. CD-ROM. Published by Macmillan Publishing USA in association with USHMM .
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1c. Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 2.
Study the killing techniques used by the Einsatzgruppen that caused it to be only a step on the way to the Final Solution.
• •
Who were its commanders? What were the limitations of their techniques? What were their problems with evidence? What psychological factors were involved?
• •
3.
Describe the reasons that led to the complicity of the commanders of other units in the Final Solution, such as the Wehrmacht and Police Battalians. Were they “ordinary men?”
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
2.
Berenbaum, Michael. “The Einsatzgruppen.” Witness to the Holocaust: An Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of Its Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997. 112-116. (READING #19)
3a. Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, eds. Foreward by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Translated by Deborah Burnstone. “Members of the Einsatzgruppen on the Stresses and Strains of Killing,”
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES pp. 59-68/Part One, and “The Murder of Jews as a Public Spectacle,” pp. 107-126/ Part One. The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: The Free Press, 1991. (translated). New York: The Free Press, 1991. 3b. Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men. New York: Harper, 1998. 3c. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Vitage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1997. 1-3. Harris, Whitney. Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995.
F.
Evaluate the significance and implications of the Wannsee Conference in the development of the “Final Solution.”
1.
Reexamine the chronology of events from the Nuremberg Laws leading to the Wannsee Conference.
2.
Identify the goals of the Wannsee Conference by examining primary source documents of that event and viewing relevant parts of the video The Wannsee Conference. (The video is a recreation of the
F. Resources for Section F: 1-2. “Nazi Paperwork of the ‘Final Solution’: Origins and Authentication of the Wannsee Protocol.” 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. (READING # 20) 1-2. The Wannsee Conference. Videocassette. (87 min.) Available from Social Studies School Service.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES events of January 20, 1942, when 15 members of Hitler’s cabinet, seven of whom are identified as “Doctor,” gather in lush surroundings to plot the logistics and technology of the “Final Solution.”)
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4. Students will examine the origins, establishment, conditions and operations of the Nazi concentration camps and death camps.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1-2. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “1942: The ‘Final Solution.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. p. 300.
Note: The English text of the original German language Wannsee protocol is based on the official U.S. government translation prepared for evidence in trials at Nuremberg, as reproduced in John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes. Vol. 11: The Wannsee Protocol and a 1944 Report on Auschwitz by the Office of Strategic Services. New York: Garland, 1982. This document is in the public domain and may be downloaded at the web site listed in the right-hand column.
1-2. “Wannsee Protocol, January 20, 1942; Translation.” Web Site: http://www.mtsu.edu/~bausti n/wannsee.html
A. Describe the establishment and conditions of the concentration camps and death camps and the conditions on the transport trains.
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1.
Read the excerpt Concentration Camps and write a brief summary of the evolution of the camps, the similarities and differences among them, and their ultimate role in the Holocaust.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
“Concentration Camps.” Excerpt from Henry Freidlander. “The Nazi Concentration Camps.” Human Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators and Victims, Bystanders and Rescuers. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981. in 50 Years Ago. Washington, D.C., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (READING # 21)
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
2a. Read an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Night in which he describes the train ride to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp. What advice is young Wiesel given?
2a. Wiesel, Elie. “Night” (excerpt 2226). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING # 22)
2b. Read an excerpt from Wiesel’s Night that describes arrival in Birkenau. How were the prisoners initially dehumanized? Which of Wiesel’s observations had the greatest impact on you?
2b. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960. 27-40. 2c. Night. 12 Lessons. USA: Center for Learning, 1993. 2d. Pausewang, Gudrun. The Final Journey. Translated by Patricia Crampton. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.
3.
4.
View the section of Schindler’s List in which Oskar Schindler is hosing down transport trains destined for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Why did he do this? Was it a humane gesture?
3.
Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Liam Neeson, et. al. Videocassette.
An alternative or additional activity is to invite a survivor or a panel of survivors of the Holocaust to speak to you or your class about their experiences, each of whom can describe their personal experiences. After the visit, think about and discuss with your class the following questions: What do all of these survivors’ experiences share in common? How did their experiences differ? What enabled the Nazis and their collaborators to treat people with such brutality?
4a. Contact a local Jewish Federation or synagogue for a list of Holocaust survivors in your community who would be willing to speak to you or your class. 4b. See p. 60 of this unit for resources and suggested procedures for planning and conducting interviews of survivors.
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5.
Examine how “selections” were made upon arrival at the camps. Write a reflective essay in which you express your feelings about and questions that you have regarding this aspect of the Holocaust. You may focus upon the specific facts in the selection process and/or how this process affects your view of human nature.
5.
Grobman, Alex and Daniel Landis. “Arrival At Camp.” Critical Issues of the Holocaust. Chappaqua, NY: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1983.
6.
View a video depicting teenagers’ stories of Auschwitz.
6.
Videocassettes:
a.
The Triumph of Memory. Videocassette. PBS . 30 min. (Deals with non-Jewish resistance fighters who were sent to concentration camps)
b.
A Portrait of Elie Wiesel. Videocassette. PBS. 60 min. (An intimate look into Elie Wiesel’s teenage years).
c.
War and Remembrance. (transport scene)
d.
Auschwitz: If You Cried You Died. 28 min. Videocassette. Moore Foundation, 1993.
e.
The Holocaust and Yad Vashem. Parade Video PPI Entertainment Group, B8 Saint Francis Street, Newark, NJ 08105, 1994.
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Note to the teacher: The videocassette Auschwitz: If you Cried, You Died chronicles the journey of two Holocaust survivors as they revisit the hell of Auschwitz. Through candid, heartfelt comments of the two men, combined with the moving and sometimes shocking visuals, students can become aware of the dangers inherent in the growth of prejudice.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES B. Describe the conditions of major Nazi concentration camps.
• • • • • •
C.
• • • • • •
Examples: Bergen-Belsen Buchenwald Dachau Mauthausen Ravensbrueck Theresienstadt
Produce a map as part of a Power Point or HyperStudio presentation showing the location of the Nazi death camps. Explain the reasons for the location of death camps in Poland. Death Camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau Belzec Chelmno Majdanek Sobibor Treblinka
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES B. Resources for Section B: 1.
Eisenberg, Aziel. “The Blue Pen” (Auschwitz), and “Human Life Never Ceases to Have Meaning.” Witness to the Holocaust. New York: Pilgrim Press., 1981.
2.
“Concentration Camps.” Remembering the Voices That Were Silent. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1990.
3.
Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. pp. 55-80.
4.
Frankl, Victor. The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. New York: Random House, 1986. pp. 94-103.
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. CD-ROM. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
2.
Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
3.
Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “1942: The Six Death Camps of Poland, 1942” (map). The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 311.
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D. Describe operations in a death camp and the killing methods used by the Nazis. 1.
Carbon monoxide gas: death vans; gas chambers
2.
Zyklon B gas
3.
Random shootings and hangings
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 4.
Furman, Harry, ed. “Concentration and Death Camps” (map). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING # 23)
5.
“Note to Map,” “Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (READING #24).
D. Resources for Section D: 1-2. Berenbaum, Michael and Yisrael Gutman. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, Ill.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with Indiana University Press, 1994. 1-2. Berenbaum, Michael. Witness to the Holocaust. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997. 1-2. Dawidowicz, Lucy. “Witness Mass Murder.” Holocaust Reader. New York: Behrman House, 1976. 1-2. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “1941: Mass Murder.” and “1942: The Final Solution.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1-2. “Soviet POW’s: The First Victims of Zyklon B Gas.” 50 Years Ago: In the Depth of Darkness. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 308-311. 3.
5. Students will examine the effects of the living conditions in the ghettos, concentration camps and the death camps on the victims as ref lected in literature, art and music
Schindler’s List. 3 hrs, 17 min. B/W with color segments. Videocassette. Dir. Stephen Spielberg. Perf. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes. Social Studies School Service.
A. Produce artistic representations of concentration camps and death camps, based upon eyewitness accounts or historical documentation.
A. Resources for Section A:
1a. Read Art of the Camp Inmates, using the questions in the reading as a basis for discussion or a reflective essay. Which of the art works presented do you believe are the most powerful? Why?
1a. Furman, Harry, ed. “Art of the Camp Inmates.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983. (READING #25)
1b. Analyze Itzchak Belfer’s (a Holocaust survivor) drawings from your own perspective and that of the artists and the victims. Write a response for each in which you describe the emotions revealed. As an alternative, you may choose to express your response through any art form.
1b. Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings. (excerpts of art) Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995. (READING #25)
1c. Examine the sketches by Ella Liebemann-Shiber and the accompanying captions for each. Discuss your reactions to the artist’s work. With a group of
1c. Liebermann-Shiber. On the Edge of the Abyss (exerpted sketches). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1997. (READING #25)
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students, paint a mural on canvas that depicts your reactions to the information and the sketches. Develop a liturgy to be placed near the mural. Place the canvas mural in a special area of the school. (Note: Liebermann-Shiber, a Holocaust survivor, drew the sketches during the Holocaust and reconstructed each after she was liberated.) 2.
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•
•
Consult Art of the Holocaust, and/or the other sources listed that contain art created in ghettos, concentration camps and in hiding. (These provide excellent examples of the art that emanated from this period.) Then complete one of the following activities:
2a. Blatter, Janet and Sybil Milton. Art of the Holocaust. New York: Rutledge Press, Division of W.H. Smith, Publisher, Inc., 1981.
Paint tiles that express your feelings about the Holocaust. Mount the tiles on wood as a permanent display in class or public area of the school.
2c. Volakova, Hana. “Drawings and Poems of Terezien, 1942-1944.” I Never Saw Another Butterf ly. New York: Schocken, 1993.
Create a Power Point or HyperStudio presentation in which you incorporate a representative sampling of the art of the Holocaust with a narrative and appropriate computer animation. Invite an artist of Holocaust art to make a presentation to the class.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
2b. Fluek, Toby Knobel. Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 19301949. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990.
2d. Langer, Lawrence L., ed. “Painters of Terezin.” Art from the Ashes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 2e. Kibbutz Lohamei Haghetaot. Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps 1940-1945. USA: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. 2f. United States Holocaust Memorial Council Catalogue. The Story of Karl Stojka: A Childhood in Birkenau. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1992. (See “Use As A Classroom Resource” section)
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2g. Kantor, Alfred. The Book of Alfred Kantor: An Artist’s Journal of the Holocaust. London: Judy Piatkus (Publishers) Ltd., 1987. 2h. Lieberman-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss. Israel: Ghetto Fighters’ House, Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, 1997. 2i. Holocaust Artist: Dottie Fresco, 1318 Sylvania Avenue, Cinnaminson, NJ 08077. 856-7860789. 2j. Lower Saxony Society for the Preservation of Theresienstadt /Terezin, Ed. Draw What You See; A Child’s Drawings from Theresienstadt. (In Dutch, Czech and English). Wallstein Verlag, 1998.
3.
View and discuss your reaction to the contrasting artwork of Israel Berenbaum.
3.
My Brother’s Keeper. CD-ROM. Available from Social Studies School Service.
B. Read teenage diaries and stories that relate to the experiences of young people in ghettos and camps. Select one of the following activities as a follow-up:
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
1-2. Hart, Kitty. Return to Auschwitz. New York: Atheneum Books, 1985. (Note: Remarkable story of Kitty, who survived Auschwitz as a teenager.)
Create a series of drawings that reflect the realities, fears, horrors, frustrations, hopes, and/or aspirations revealed in the readings. Discuss your interpretations with your class and display your drawings.
1-2. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. (Note: A 1516 year old’s experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau.)
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Discuss the following questions in small groups:
•
To what extent can diaries and stories of those who experienced the camps enable us to understand their experiences?
•
What are the limitations?
•
Why are these sources important?
Note to the Teacher: The excellent book by Bretholz is about a boy who avoids the death camps by jumping from a transport train. While not about the camps, per se, he was interned in Drancy, a transit camp in France.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 1-2. Adelson, Alan, ed. The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 1-2. Bitton-Jackson, Livia. I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 1-2. Holliday, Laurel, ed. Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries. New York: Pocket Books, A Division of Simon and Schuster, 1995. 1-2. Bretholz, Leo, with Michael Olesker. Leap Into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe. New York: Random House Anchor Books, 1999. 1-2. Boas, Jacob. We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1995. 1-2. Gordon, Harold. The Last Sunrise. Salinas, CA: H & J Publishing, Inc., 1993.
3.
Analyze the documents listed in #3 a-d in the right-hand column: one by a former SS physician at Auschwitz; two by a survivor of Auschwitz; and an official SS document that identifies the calculation by the SS of profit value in the utilization of prisoners in the camps. These documents may be used by three
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
or four small groups using the following questions, culminating with a large class discussion. a.
What conclusions can you draw about Dr. Hans Munch, the SS physician at Auschwitz? Does his “confession” have value? How does he explain or rationalize his involvement? Is his explanation credible?
3a. Munch, Dr. Hans. “Documenting the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz” Signed and witnessed statement. Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995. (READING # 26)
b.
Read Echoes From Auschwitz, and then read Eva Mozes Kor’s Declaration of Amnesty: Auschwitz 50 Years Later.
3b. Kor, Eva Mozes. Echoes From Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele’s TwinsThe Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes. Terre-Haute, IN: Candles, Inc., 1996.
•
How do you feel about the willingness of Kor to forgive? What reasons does she give for her statement of amnesty? Do you agree with her that “Enough is Enough. Fifty Years is More Than Enough”? Of what value do you believe her declaration is? Why might it be difficult for all survivors to agree with her?
• •
•
Kor, Eva Mozes. “Declaration of Amnesty: Auschwitz 50 Years Later.” Signed and witnessed statement. Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995. (READING #26)
c.
Do you agree with Eva Mozes Kor’s statement about the importance of Holocaust education? Do you believe that what you and your classmates are learning about the Holocaust can lead to the kind of change that she describes?
3c. Kor, Eva Mozes. Unpublished open letter on the importance of Holocaust Education. 17 Jan 2000. (READING # 26)
d.
What does the calculation by the SS of profit value in the utilization of prisoners of concentration camps reveal about the Nazis? This was one of thousands of Nazi documents
3d. “Calculation by the SS of Profit Value in the Utilization of Prisoners in the Concentration Camps.” Official SS Document. (READING #26)
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES recovered after the Holocaust and used at the Nuremberg Trials. Why do you believe the SS left such detailed documentation of their work?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3e. Kor, Eva Mozes. Echoes From Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele’s TwinsThe Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes. Terre-Haute, IN: Candles, Inc., 1996. 3f. Biography: Josef Mengele: Medical Madman of Auschwitz. Videocassette. A & E Biography. 1969. (1-888-423-1212) 3f. Investigative Reports: The Mystery of Josef Mengele. Videocassette. A & E, 1969. (1888-423-1212)
C.
Listen to music that reflected this period of history and examine the songs that were written in the ghettos and camps and/or examine the lyrics. Discuss the emotions and values that are reflected.
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Song of the Partisans, by Hirsh Glick
1.
Glick, Hirsh. “ Song of the Partisans”, in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 Also, see additional songs of the ghettos, camps and resistance. (READING #27)
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Note: See READING 27 for the following pieces of music that include a brief background on each and the actual music scores: • Unter Di Poylishe Grinin (Under the Green Polish Trees) • Es Brent (On Fire) • Undzer Shtetl Brent (Our Town is Burning) • Yugnt-Himn (Youth Hymn) • Zog Nit Keynmol (Never Say) • S’Dremlin Feygl (Birds Are Dozing) • Yeder Ruft Mich Ziamele (People Call Me Ziamele) • Ani Maamin (I Believe) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2.
Tikva Record. 1650 Broadway, New York
3. In the Ghetto
3.
The Joy of Jewish Memories: Most Memorable Songs of the 20th Century. Songs: Es BrenntIt’s Burning; Shloimele, MalkeleThere Are No More Children. (Order from 1-800-768-4262)
4.
Rise Up and Fight! Songs of Jewish Partisans.
4.
“Rise Up and Fight! Songs of Jewish Partisans.” Featuring Theodore Bikel. CD Rom. U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996. (Liner notes include history and translation.)
5.
Hidden History: Songs of the Kovno Ghetto
5. “Hidden History: Songs of the Kovno Ghetto.” CD Rom. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1997. (Liner notes include history and translation.)
Es Brent—It’s Burning
6.
Karan, Joza. Music in Terezin. New York: Beauford Books, 1988.
7.
Kalesch, Shoshana and Barbara Meister. Yes We Sang! Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
8.
Katzenelson, Yitzhak. The Song of the Murdered Jewish People. Translated by Noah H. Rosenbloom. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1980.
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6. Students will investigate the roles of the business, industrial, legal, scientific and medical professions, as well as the role of the Church in the Holocaust.
A. Explain the role of business and industry in the Holocaust.
A. Resources for Section A:
1a. After reading the article “I.G. Farben” by Richard L. Rubenstein, use the listed Questions for Discussion as a basis for a small or large group discussion. In preparation, think about the question: “Should corporations have any moral or ethical responsibilities in the conduct of their businesses?”
1a. Rubenstein Richard L. “I.G. Farben.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING #28)
1b. Read American Corporations and the Nazis using the following questions as a guide to your analysis and discussion:
1b. Snell, Bradford. “American Corporations and the Nazis. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING #28)
•
Why do you believe some American companies continued to operate in Germany even after World War II began? How do you feel about this?
•
How do you react to General Motors and Ford being paid $33 million by the United States for damages to their European factories during the war? Were their claims justified? Why do you think they were paid?
•
How do you feel about the argument that corporations acted appropriately when they helped both sides in the war?
•
Could these companies have participated in effective resistance during the war? Did they have a moral responsibility to do so?
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Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
During the Holocaust, some employees of corporations knew to varying degrees that they were involved in the killing process and understood the implications of their work. Read the moral dilemma story, The Chemist’s Decision: What Would You Do? Use the following questions as a guide:
•
Why was this a situation a moral dilemma for Steiner?
•
What choices did he have? What were the probable consequences of each for himself, his family, others?
•
What should he have done? Why?
•
What would be the implications if all German workers made the same choice?
3.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2.
Furman, Harry, ed. “The Chemist’s Decision: What Would You Do? The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING # 29)
1-2. Higham, C. Trading With The Enemy: the Nazi-American Money Plot. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983. 1-2. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “The Business of Killing.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 343. 1-2. Borkin, Joseph. The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Discuss these questions in small groups, reach consensus and draw conclusions. Report conclusions to the larger group.
1-2. Manchester, William. The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968. New York: William Morrow, 1991.
The use of Jewish forced labor during the Holocaust benefited numerous businesses and industries in Nazi Germany. Today, Holocaust survivors are attempting to seek compensation for the work they were forced to do. After reading appropriate segments of Ferenz’ book, and consulting current news articles, write a position paper in which you argue for or against such compensation.
3.
Ferenz, Benjamin. Less Than Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and the Quest for Compensation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979
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B. Examine the role of the medical and scientific communities during the Holocaust 1. Read and discuss related passages from The Nazi Doctors.
B. Resources for Section B:
2.
2a. Hippocrates. Works. Translated by Francis Adams. New York: Loeb, Vol. I, 299-301. May be accessed from the following web site: http://www.humanities.ccny.c uny.edu/history/reader/hippo ath.htm
After reading The Oath of Hippocrates, discuss what the role of the doctor is, or should be, in any society.
1a. Lifton, Robert Jay. “Nazi Medical Experiments.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
2b. “Doctors of the Death Camps.” Time. 25 June 1979. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING #30)
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2c. Adelsberger, Lucie. Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. 2d. Annas, George J. and Michael Grodin. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 2e. Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Sheila Cohn Dekel. Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins. New York: Wm. Morrow and Company, 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 3.
Read and discuss The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret about a German industrialist who, in 1942, risked his life by revealing Hitler’s order to murder the Jews of Europe. Use the following questions as a guide:
•
Who was Gerhart Reigner and what dilemma confronted him? What did he decide to do with the information he was given? What were the risks?
•
How did those with whom he shared it respond? How do you explain this response? What was Reigner’s view on the intentions of the Nazis? How were his views validated?
•
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3.
Fenyvesi, Charles. “The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember: Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. (READING #31)
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•
Why do you believe the industrialist wanted his identity to remain secret? How do you feel about Reigner’s decision not to reveal this man’s name?
C.
Explain the role of the legal professions in the Holocaust.
C.
References for Section C:
1.
Read and discuss the article Manipulating the Law using the questions at the end of the reading as a basis for your discussion.
1.
Altshuler, David A. “Manipulating the Law.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (READING #32)
2.
View and discuss the video Judgment at Nuremberg and/or Nuremberg.
2a. Judgment at Nuremberg. B/W, 187 min. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Perf. Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, et. al. Videocassette. United Artists. 1961.
FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: The Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2b. Nuremberg. Color/ 4 hrs. Perf. Alex Baldwin, Jill Hennessy, et. al. Videocassette. TNT Productions. July 2000. www.tnt.turner. com/movies/tntoriginals/
3.
Consult Hitler’s Justice by Ingo Mueller.
3.
Mueller, Ingo. Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991
D. Examine the responses of Christians to the Holocaust.
D. Resources for Section D:
1.
Read Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes. In a small group, discuss and evaluate Harry James Cargas’ views about what else could have been done by Christians in response to the Holocaust. Report your group’s conclusions to the class.
1.
Herbut, Paula. “Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. (READING #33)
2.
Read The Church and the Holocaust using the questions at the end of the article as a basis for analysis and discussion.
2.
Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING # 34)
3.
Read and discuss the article Pope John Paul at Auschwitz using the Questions for Discussion in the reading as a guide for analysis and discussion.
3.
Reid, Robert,”Pope John Paul at Auschwitz.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING # 35)
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4.
Examine the behavior of Pastor Martin Niemoller toward the Nazi regime. Summarize your findings and discuss with the class. Explain his change in attitude.
4.
Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “Martin Niemoller”, p 119, and numerous references on pp. 92, 367, 633, 691 and 696-97. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000.
5.
Read “The Ordeal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: What Would You Do?” and discuss your responses to the Questions for Discussion at the end of the reading. Note: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a noted German Protestant theologian and a leading member of the dissident Confessing Church. He was arrested by the Nazis on April 5, 1943, and charged with “subverting the armed forces.” He had been recruited for establishing secret contacts with foreign churches by Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr (counterintelligence) and a leading opponent of Hitler.
5a. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Ordeal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: What Would You Do? ,” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING # 36) 5b. Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace. Perf. Ulrich Tukur, et. al. Videocassette. Norflicks Production Let. 2000 www.pbs.org/opb/bonhoeffer/ Additional Readings: Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 419-421 Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust. New York: Pantheon, 1985. pp. 9-15
.
Hocchuth, Rolf. The Deputy. (A Play). Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964. Blet, Pierre. Pius XII and the Second World War. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Littell, Franklin. The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Grobman, Alex and Daniel Lander, eds. “Luther and the Jews.” Critical Issues of the Holocaust. New York: Rossell Books, 1983.
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7. Students will analyze the involvement with and responses to Nazi persecution policies by Germans and collaborators from other nations.
A. Analyze various responses to Nazi persecution policies by Germans and collaborators from other nations through one or more of the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
After reading excerpts from Life With the Enemy, make a wall chart or visual that explains the different forms of collaboration during the Holocaust using examples: Tactical Conditional Unconditional Neutral
1.
Using one or more of the sources listed under #2 in the right hand column, examine and explain what collaboration of European nations meant during the Holocaust.
2a. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Collaboration and Resistance.” Fifty Years Ago: Darkness Before Dawn. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1991. 10-11.
• • • • 2.
Rings, Weiner. Life With the Enemy: Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe, 1939-1945. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982. 86, 106, 128. (READING #37)
2b. Marrus, Michael R. “Allies, Vanquished States and Collaborators.” The Holocaust in History. Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 1987. 82-83. (READING #38) 2c. U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79. (READING #39) 2d. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of European Jews. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1961. 204-205; 407-411. 2e. Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1990. (READING #40—Selected articles about collaborators).
3.
Read Annals of War: Neighbors by Jan T. Gross, which describes the massacre of Jews in the northeastern Polish town of Jedwabne in 1941. Use the following questions as a basis for analysis and discussion:
•
What was the previous relationship between the Jews and non-Jews of Jedwabne?
•
What does the terrorizing and the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne reveal about the attitudes of the “group of ordinary men” who carried out the German order?
•
How do you react to the author’s statement, “Everybody who was in the town that day and in possession of a sense of sight, smell, or hearing either participated in or witnessed the deaths of the Jews.”?
3.
Gross, Jan T. “Annals of War: Neighbors.” The New Yorker. 12 March 2001, 64-74.
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8. Students will evaluate the continuing role of mass media and propaganda in Nazi Germany including the use of the “Big Lie” and the corruption of language.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Identify the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Discuss the stereotypes they used to mark the Jews, and how these symbols have been utilized throughout history, using one or more of the following activities:
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
Read Origins of the Myth and The Mythic Nazi Propaganda.
1.
2.
Examine the sources listed in Hogan’s book to the right in 2a-b. The pages in 2b examine Nazi propaganda representations in books, radio, photos and filmstrips, including the film, Der Ewige Jude. Resource 2c provides photos of schoolbooks, posters, postcards, decrees, pamphlets, songbooks, toys, photography and many other rare documents that typified the Nazi propaganda machine in meticulous detail.
2a. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” p. 46; and “Protocols,” (Spanish version, 1963), p. 677. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000.
Note to the teacher: Students should be made aware that a court in Bern,
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Cohn, Norman. “Origins of the Myth” (Chapter 1, pp. 21-40); and “The Mythic Nazi Propaganda” (Chapter 9, pp. 194-215). Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1998.
2b. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 100, 142, 260, 218-219, and 315-316. 2c. Bankier, David. “The Use of Antisemitism in Nazi Wartime
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES Propaganda.” in The Holocaust and History: the Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998.
Switzerland pronounced the German edition of the Protocols a forgery on May 14, 1935.
2d. Ungerer, Tomi. Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis. Boulder: Tomi Co, the Roberts Rinehart Publishing Group, 1998.
B. Research the following line attributed to Adolf Hitler: “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Examine how Henry Ford used the Dearborn Independent newspaper to further his antiSemitic rhetoric of the International Jew. Explore why you believe Henry Ford, a man who had gained the respect of his country and an apparent humanist, became an ardent anti-Semite.
1.
Lee, Albert. “The Truth According to Ford,” pp. 13-44; “Hitler’s Inspiration,” pp. 45-66, and “Why Henry?” pp. 159-162. Henry Ford and the Jews. New York: Skinner and Day, 1980.
2.
Compare and contrast sayings from Hitler’s Mein Kampf with those in the Dearborn Independent newspaper.
2.
Hitler, Adolf. “Consequences of Jewish Egotism,” Mein Kampf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981. 300-315.
3.
The brief citations in Hogan’s book may be consulted for additional information.
3.
Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International Ltd., 2000. 48, 125, 132-133, 289.
Note: In the Nazi Party Headquarters on a desk next to his, Hitler hung a life-size likeness of Henry Ford.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 4.
Pool, James and Suzanne. Who Financed Hitler?: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power: 1919-1933. New York: The Dial Press, 1978.
C.
Examine the technique used by the Nazis to perpetrate the “Big Lie” and sway public support of official laws and policies against the Jews.
C.
Resources for Section C:
1.
Read The Big Lie Technique of Dictators and discuss in a small group the following:
1.
•
Have you ever experienced any of these techniques? Explain
Bauer, Eileen. The Big Lie Technique of Dictators. Bethlehem, PA: Freedom High School (unpublished) (READING #41)
•
Why do you believe such techniques appeal to some people today and many Germans during the Nazi era?
•
How did “The Big Lie” contribute to the steady escalation of policies and procedures that we know as the Holocaust? How can citizens protect themselves from such government strategies?
2.
View and discuss World War IIThe Propaganda Battle: A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers
2.
World War II- The Propaganda Battle: A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers. 55 min., b/w and color. Videocassette. Available from Social Studies School Service.
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9. Students will research the reasons why specific groups were victimized by the Nazis.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES A. Research and examine the experiences of the following groups of victims and determine how the Nazi motives for their victimization and their experiences compared and contrasted with those of the Jews: 1.
The Sinti and Roma (The “Gypsy” tribes that were the most common in Germany and Austria. Please note that the term “Gypsy,” although commonly used to describe groups of people, is no longer considered acceptable. The various tribes should be referred to by their preferred names.)
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES A. Resources for Section A: 1a. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Sinti and Roma (“Gypsies”): Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. 1b. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “Sinti and Roma.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 2000. 77. 1c. Berenbaum, Michael. “Enemies of the State: Gypsies.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 51. 1d. Milton, Sybil. “The Holocaust: The Gypsies.” in William S. Parsons, Israel Charny and Samuel Totten, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Reviews. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. 1e. Web Site: http://www.rnw.nl/ rascism/roma/html/history.ht ml 1f. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Story of Karl Stojka: A Childhood in Birkenau. Washington D.C.: USHMM, 1992. 1g. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Road to Genocide,” excerpted from Donal Kenrick and Grattan Puxon The Destiny
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, in 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, D.C., 1991. (READING #42) 1h. Persecuted and Forgotten (The Gypsies of Auschwitz). 54 min./color Videocassette. EBS Productions, San Francisco, CA, 1989.
2.
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The Jehovah’s Witnesses
Note to the teacher: The N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education’s Curriculum and Education Committee has reviewed Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault: Study Guide for the Documentary Video, and has recommended its endorsement by the Commission. Thus, it is recommended that teachers consult this guide and video which may be obtained from Watch Tower, Public Affairs Office, 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, NY 11201-2483; 718-560-5600; Fax: 718-560-5619.
2a. Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Study Guide for the Documentary Video Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault. Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 1997. 2b. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998.
2c. Friedman, Ina. R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. 2d. King, Christine E. “Jehovah’s Witnesses Under Nazism,” in Michael Berenbaum, Ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2e. Purple Triangles: The Story of the Kusserow Family. A Starlock Pictures Production for TVS. Videocassette. Dist. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 1991.
3.
Homosexuals
3a. Hagar, Heinz “The Man With the Pink Triangle.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (READING #43) 3b. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Homosexuals.: Victims of the Nazi Era 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. 3c. Berenbaum, Michael. “Enemies of the State: Homosexuals.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 52. (READING #44) 3d. Hagar, Heinz. The Men with the Pink Triangle. New York: Alyson Publications, 1980. 3e. Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. 3f. Grau, G. The Hidden Holocaust. New York: Cassel, 1995.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 3g. Web Site: http://eghs.dade.k12. f l.us/holocaust/homosexuals. htm 3h. We Were Marked With A Big “A”. 44 min., b/w and color. Videocassette. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 1991.
4.
Physically and Mentally Handicapped
4a. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. 4b. Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Harper Collins, 1986.
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4c. Berenbaum, Michael. “Murder of the Handicapped.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 63-65. (READING #44) 4d. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “Nazi Medical Experiments.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 2000. 77. 4e. The Swing Kids. 114 min. Videocassette. Turner Home Video 4f. Friedman, Ina R. “Franziska: A Silent Protest Against Sterilization,” Chapter 5, p.63.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990. (DEAF)
5.
The Poles
5a. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Poles: Victims of the Nazi Era 1933-1945. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. 5b. Berenbaum, Michael. “Terror in Poland.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 62-63. (READING #44) 5c. Lukas, Richard C. Did the Children Cry?: Hitler’s War Against Jewish and Polish Children: 1939-1945. New York: Hippocrene, 1994.
6.
People of Color
Note to the teacher: A pamphlet, “An SS Booklet on Racial Policy,” that outlines Nazi racial theories and appears to have been intended primarily for members of the SS, is available online from the Calvin College web site. This pamphlet suggests a plan for covering the content of the booklet in eleven class periods indicating it was intended for use in the schools of Nazi Germany. It is recommended that the teacher examine this document carefully prior to determining how to use it in the context of a study of Nazi racial attitudes and policies. The pamphlet includes photographs of stereotypical
6a. Friedman, Ina R. “No Blacks Allowed,” Chapter 7, p. 91. The Other Victims: First Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990. 6b. “An SS Booklet on Racial Policy.” German Propaganda Archive. Calvin College Web Site, 1998. http://www.calvin.edu/acade mic/cas/gpa/rassenpo.htm
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
“Aryans” and people who are black above a caption that reads, “Does the same soul dwell in these differing bodies?” This source can be used as a way to help students understand how the Nazis used German schools to promote their values and beliefs. Also, while this source is listed under “People of Color” in this guide, Nazi “racial” policies encompassed numerous other groups, which is apparent in the pamphlet. 7.
Anti-Nazis
7.
Berenbaum, Michael, ed. A Mosaic of Victims. New York: New York University Press, 1990. (Note: This source devotes chapters to Sinti and Roma; Jehovah’s Witnesses; Homosexuals; Physically and Mentally Handicapped; the Poles; and Anti-Nazis.)
7.
Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Note: This source also has applications to the groups identified in this section.)
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10. Students will analyze the response to the Holocaust by the United States and the Allies, the world media and the American Jewish Community when knowledge of the Holocaust was revealed to the world.
A. Assess the response to the Holocaust by the United States and its Allies.
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1a. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge,” and “The Evian Conference,” by Arthur Morse. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (READING #45)
At the Evian Conference held in France in 1938, 32 nations met to determine what refuge they could offer to the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust. The only agreement reached was to uphold the existing immigration quota systems. Discuss the following questions:
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
•
To what extent do you believe this conference was a failure?
•
What were the broad implications of the decisions of the nations who participated? What messages did it send to Jews, Hitler and the Nazis, and the world?
1b. Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Evian: A None Too Trustful Poker Game.” Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986. 93-96. (READING #46)
2.
The British White Paper of May 1939 restricted Jewish immigrants to Palestine to only 75,000 over the next five years, and also prohibited purchase of land there by Jews. Discuss the implications of this policy for the Jews of Europe.
3.
• • •
Investigate the experiences of refugee-carrying ships in their attempts to find safe harbors or countries willing to accept the refugees. (a) What reasons were given for turning the ships away? (b) What does this reveal about attitudes at the time? Voyage of the St. Louis in May 1939 The Struma The Pentcho
2a. Meltzer, Milton. Never to Forget: The Jews of the Holocaust. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. 43-47. 2b. Wasserstein, Bernard. Britain and the Jews, 1939-1945. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1079. 3a. Berenbaum, Michael. “The Voyage of the St. Louis,” and “To Safety.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 58-60. (READING #44) 3b. The Doomed Crossing: The Voyage of the St. Louis. 50 min. color. Videocassette. A & E , 1997 3c. Manning, Olivia. “The Story of the Struma.” from Holocaust. Muki Bar and Nathan Yansi. Education Department, American Zionist Youth Foundation. 3d. Wasserstein, Bernard. Britain and the Jews of Europe, 19391945. Oxford/London: Clarendon Press, 1979.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 4.
View and discuss the video The Port of Last Resort: Refuge in Shanghai which presents a littleknown story of nearly 20,000 European Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai in the years 1938-1941 as revealed through four survivors, archival materials, personal and published writings, relief reports and secret documents, and rare home movies, photographs, newsreels and propaganda films. Use the following questions as a guide:
•
Why were these refugees able to find refuge in Shanghai?
•
How were decisions made by families to escape?
•
What impact did these decisions have on family members?
•
Was Shanghai the first choice of some refugees?
•
What must it have been like to leave their country to go to the unknown of Shanghai?
•
Describe the experiences of some of the refugees in Shanghai.
•
What made their adjustment challenging? What helped their adjustment?
5.
Describe the impact of the Bermuda Conference of April 19-30, 1943.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 4.
The Port of Last Resort: Refuge in Shanghai. 79min./English, color and b/w. Dir. Joan Grossman and Paul Rosdy. Music by John Zorn. Videocassette. National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University, Lown 102 MS 053, Waltham, MA., 1999.
5a. Levin, Nora. The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968. 354.
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 5b. Wyman, David. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 341-343.
6.
7.
View the video Auschwitz and the Allies. Discuss the attitude of the U.S. Department of State and the British Foreign Office toward the immigration of Jews in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
6a. Auschwitz and the Allies. 113 min. /color and b/w. Videocassette. PBS. Films Incorporated.
What was the mission of ransoming Jews?
7a. Bauer, Yehuda. The Holocaust in Historical Perspective. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Chapter 4—“The Mission of Joel Brand.” 109-199— “Trucks for Food”
6b. Neufeld, Michael and Michael Berenbaum. The Bombing of Auschwitz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
7b. Bauer, Yehuda. Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 19331945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 7c. Herbert Druks, “Why the Death Camps Were Not Bombed.” American Zionist 8.
Research and discuss the efforts of Jan Karski, the Polish underground courier, who in 1942 visited the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec death camp and later reported his findings to Allied, Polish and Jewish officials in London. On July 28, 1943, Karski gave a firsthand report about the “Final Solution” to President Roosevelt in Washington. How do
8a. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “Jan Karski.” And “What Was Known in the West.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 2000, p. 389 and p. 328. 8b. Jan Karski: Polish Courier. Videocassette. PBS
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES you explain the way his information was treated? (Note: Karski, who died in 2000, spoke frequently about his experiences including numerous times in New Jersey).
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 8c. Cargas, Harry James. Voice from the Holocaust: Story of Jan Karski. University of Kentucky Press, 1993. 8d. Wood, Thomas and Stanislaw Janowski. Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1994. 8e. “In Memoriam: Jan Karski (19142000). Update. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sept/Oct. 2000. 3.
9.
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(a) Discuss the role played by the War Refugee Board in 1944. (b) Why was only 10% of the immigration quota filled? (c) Describe the journey of the Jews from war-torn Europe to Oswego, New York. How were they welcomed? Were they permitted to stay?
10. Investigate Britain’s response to Jewish refugees; and react to the statement by Lord Moyne, British High Commissioner, Egypt, 1944: What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?
9.
Gruber, Ruth. Haven: The Unknown Story of a Thousand World War II Refugees. Bergenfield, NJ: New American Library/Signet, 1984.
10a. Gilbert, Martin. Auschwitz and the Allies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. 10b. Newfield, Michael and Michael Berenbaum, eds. The Bombing of Auschwitz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. 10c. Revolt Amid the Darkness. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993. 20-53.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
B. Assess the response of the world media to the destruction of the Jews from 1939-1945.
B. Resources for Section B:
1.
Visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for information about American responses to the Holocaust and consult Lipstadt’s book Beyond Belief. Write a summary of your findings.
1.
2.
Research Gerhart Riegner’s transmission documenting Hitler’s plan for “The Final Solution,” January 19, 1943.
2a. Loftus, John and Mark Aarons. The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. (Also, SEE READING #31, Unit IV above.)
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
2b. Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 2c. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. “The ‘Final Solution’ 1942.” The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 2000. 293. 3.
Read and discuss article What Was Happening to Jews in Europe?
3.
4.
Review the many paths by which information seeped out of Nazioccupied Europe, including the following, and complete the final activity:
4a. Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. New York: A Meridian Book, New American Library, 1989.
Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1990. 85-93.
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
Polish underground Refugees leaving Nazi-occupied countries German soldiers Newspaper correspondents from neutral countries stationed in Germany. Make a collage by constructing a series of newspaper headlines that illustrates Jewish efforts to find a new home in various parts of the world from 1937-1945.
4b. Jan Karski, Polish Courier. Videocassette. PBS (1-800-424-7963)
5.
By early 1942, reports regularly reached England about widespread massacres of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. Such accounts appeared first in the Jewish Press (The Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Review). They were also carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that sent them to publications in New York. Discuss why there was no action taken when documented evidence of the massacres was revealed by early 1943.
5.
American Experience 2 and 3, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. 90 min, Videocassette. PBS (1800-255-9424)
C.
Analyze the major American Jewish organizations and leadership during this period using a variety of the following activities:
C.
Resources for Section C:
• • • •
•
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1.
• • • • •
Identify the major American Jewish organizations and their proposed projects, and discuss whether they provided assistance: American Jewish Committee American Jewish Congress Jewish Labor Committee B’nai B’rith World Jewish Congress
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
4c. Cargas, Harry James. “ Voices from the Holocaust: Jan Karski.” Voices from the Holocaust. 4. Wood, Thomas and Stanislaw Janowski. Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1994
1a. Morse, Arthur D. While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York: Random House, 1967. 1b. Bauer, Yehuda. American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 19391945. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981.
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
How did Jewish leaders express themselves publicly in reaction to Holocaust events?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2a. Lipstadt, Deborah E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986. 112-122. 2b. Druks, Herbert. The Failure to Rescue. New York: Robert Speller & Son, 1977. 6. 2c. Wyman, David. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
3.
Investigate Jewish leaders, their roles and their meetings with President Roosevelt and other government officials:
•
Benjamin V. Cohen, a former advisor to Roosevelt
•
Stephen S. Wise
•
Bernard Baruch
•
Judge Samuel Rosenman
•
Lawrence Berenson—sent by Joint Distribution Committee to negotiate docking rights for the refugees of the S.S. St. Louis in Cuba.
•
Gerhart Riegner, a World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland and his infamous cable of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
3a. Druks, Herbert. The Failure to Rescue. New York: Robert Speller & Son, 1977. 6; 17-26. 3b. Feingold, Henry. “Madison Square Garden Rally, “ The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust. New York: The Holocaust Library, 1981. 176. 3c. See Video Allies and Auschwitz,. (previously listed).
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
4.
Brainstorm the reason why Jewish leadership was confronted with strong opposition in their efforts to rescue European Jews. Note the following:
4a. Wyman, David. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
•
Mass demonstrations, public rallies and protests.
•
World Jewish Congress and other organizations raised significant funds to rescue Jews and finance missions.
4b. Lookstein, Haskel. “ Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, November 22, 1938. “ Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers? New York: Hartmore House, 1985. 40.
•
The Jewish organizations called upon the Jewish community in Palestine (under British mandate then) to aid in the rescue of European Jews.
4c. Lipstadt, Deborah E. Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986. 112-122. 4d. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Daily News Bulletin, November 22, 1938.
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4e. Consult the web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.html 5.
Discuss the eleven-point proposal of the 1943 Madison Square Garden Rally in New York and its impact.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
5.
Feingold, Henry. “Madison Square Garden Rally, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust. New York: The Holocaust Library. 1981. 176.
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
11. Students will identify the importance of eyewitness testimony in the study of the Holocaust.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Through the examination of a variety of accounts of those who were eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, draw conclusions about the similarities and differences of the their experiences.
A. Resources for Section A:
1.
1a. Finkelstein, Genya. Genya. Trans. from the Hebrew by Shuli Sharvit. New York: GT Publishing, 1994.
Read articles and books written by survivors of the Holocaust.
1b. Salier, Eva. Survival of A Spirit. New York: Shengold Publishers, Inc., 1995. 1c. Zeidman, Ruth. Light In The Darkness: A Personal Account of the Holocaust. Trans. from the Hebrew by Yehudit Kirstein Keshet. Jerusalem, Israel: Ruth Zeidman, 1988. 1d. Hart, Kitty. Return to Auschwitz: The Remarkable Life of a Girl Who Survived the Holocaust. New York: Atheneum, 1982. 1e. Leitner, Isabella and Irving A. Leitner. Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1994. NOTE: There are literally thousands of excellent books written by survivors of the Holocaust available on the market. Those listed above are examples. Teachers are encouraged to have students explore the range of books on this subject in libraries and bookstores.
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 2.
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Interview a Holocaust survivor or liberator.
Note to the teacher: Included in the planning of interviews of survivors or liberators, students must be provided careful guidance in the following: • background in the history of the Holocaust • identification of interviewees • the development of a list of questions • the need for sensitivity during the interview • practicing/role-playing the interview in advance • method of contacting the interviewee • selection of a comfortable setting • arrangements for video or audio taping, with the permission of the interviewee • some knowledge of the interviewee in advance • a plan for a follow-up presentation of the results of the interview • a letter of appreciation to the interviewee following the interview • an invitation to appear in class as a follow-up to answer questions. 3.
Invite one or more survivors of the Holocaust and/or liberators to speak to the class about their experiences individually or as part of a panel discussion. A student should moderate the panel with student questions prepared in advance. Allow adequate time for the panel
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 2-3. Students may contact any of the N.J. Centers for Holocaust Education, the Speakers’ Bureaus of the N.J. Anti-Defamation League, the N.J. Commission on Holocaust Education, local veterans organizations and/or local Jewish Federations for assistance in identifying survivors and liberators who would be available for interviews. A list of some of these organizations appears in Appendix G at the end of this guide. 2-3. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Oral History Interview Guidelines. Department of Oral History. Washington, D.C.: USHMM, 1998. (Excerpt included in Appendix H)
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
presentations and follow-up questions. Use same resources as in #2. 4.
View appropriate segments of Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust which present four survivors who give their firsthand accounts of their experiences in the Holocaust.
4.
Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust. CD-ROM. Torrance, CA: Knowledge Adventure/Simon & Schuster, Inc., © 1998 Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Write a reflective essay using the following questions as a guide: •
How were the survivors’ experiences similar?
•
How did their experiences differ?
•
How did their experiences affect their lives then and since?
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•
From their testimony, what do you believe is the most important lesson for your generation?
5.
With the permission of survivors and/or liberators who are interviewed or speak to the class, video or tape record their presentations and create a school and community oral history library.
5.
6.
Read the eyewitness accounts of a variety of liberators. Discuss your findings.
6a. U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. (READING #47)
Teacher and student-developed resources.
FROM PERSECUTION TO MASS MURDER: The Holocaust PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 6b. Abzug, Robert. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 6c. Seltzer, Michael. Deliverance Day: The Last Hours at Dachau. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1978. 6d. Opening the Gates of Hell: American Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. 45 min., B/W, Videocassette. Ergo Media. 6e. The Long Way Home. 120 min., b/w and color. Videocassette. Moriah/Simon Wiesenthal Center
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7.
Visit a Holocaust resource library, a local or regional Holocaust museum, or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to view/read the testimonies of survivors and liberators.
7.
See Appendices G and H for a list of such resources.
8.
Taped or written testimonies can be used as a springboard to further study; for example, the story of a Ghetto Fighter can be linked to a study of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; a testimony of a Wallenberg or Schindler survivor can be linked to a report on the righteous among the nations, etc.
8a. Warsaw Ghetto: Holocaust and Resistance, A Documentary. The Jewish Labor Committee. Videocassette. New York (212477-0707). 8b. Meed, Vladka. On Both Sides of the Wall. Israel: Lohamei Haghetaot Ghetto Fighters’ House and Ha Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1972. 8c. Contact one of New Jersey’s Holocaust resource centers. See list in Appendix G
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES 9.
Read segments of Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust; The Complete Text of the Film by Claude Lanzmann or view segments of the video as a basis for drawing your conclusions about the experiences of survivors.
10. Read the excerpt from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl using the following questions as a basis for discussion: •
Explain how, according to the author, men made choices in the camp.
•
Was there evidence of heroism in the camp?
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What determined how a man acted in the camps?
•
Because all people suffer, what does Frankl say is the implication for us in Part A?
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Explain the power of love (Part B).
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What did a man have to hold onto in order to keep his existence from descending to the level of animal life?
•
Explain how the tattoo number affected the inmate and the guards.
•
Of what importance was the future to the camp inmates?
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES 9a. Lanzmann, Claude. Shoah: An Oral History of the HolocaustThe Complete Text of the Film by Claude Lanzmann. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. 9b. Shoah. Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Videocassette. Available from Social Studies School Service. 10. “Excerpts from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.” Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. (READING #48)
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TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
What implications and lessons does this article have for us today? These questions can be divided among several small groups with a full class discussion concluding the activity.
11. Read Animal and write your responses to the following questions: •
What was your reaction to the end of the reading? Is it what you expected? Explain
•
What effect does the end have on your perception of moral right and wrong?
•
Is the father justified in his reaction? Why or why not?
•
What effect did the father’s experiences in the camp have on him for the rest of his life? How do you think this affected his children?
•
How can a parent’s experiences affect children?
•
After writing your responses, share them with a partner. How do your views compare and contrast?
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INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
12. Read the poem Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures, by Charlotte Delbo, and discuss how the author uses words and images to explain the incomprehensible. (Students may take turns reading sections aloud in class and describing the
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
11. Friedman, Carl. “Animal.” nightfather. New York: Persea Books, 1992. (READING #49)
12. Delbo, Charlotte. “Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures.” Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. (READING #50)
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
meaning.) Comment on the impact of each section. Finally, conduct a class discussion on the inhumanity of people toward others, including how an educated, cultured society could treat other human beings the way they did. 13. Read The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick. •
Discuss what happens in the selections
•
How are words used to describe people and the situations they are experiencing?
•
How is Magda characterized in the selection?
•
How is Rosa described?
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What happens to Magda at the end?
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What effect does this event have on Rosa, then and in the future?
•
What is the significance of the title?
14. Read about the lives of seven Holocaust survivors who were on the Rutgers University faculty in 1997 in the article For Remembrance. Student groups may jigsaw the articles and share their reactions to the following questions: •
How did people survive the Holocaust?
13. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Shawl.” In Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, by Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, Eds. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1997. (READING #51)
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14. Glevin, Bill. “For Remembrance” Rutgers Magazine. Vol. 77 No. 3. Fall 1997. (READING #52)
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12. Students will develop a chronology of the Holocaust from 1933 to 1945.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES
•
How were survivors able to overcome the trauma of losing their families, friends and possessions?
•
How did the experience affect these survivors’ faith in humanity, in God and in themselves?
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How did these survivors find meaning in their lives after the Holocaust?
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What does their survival and their accomplishments add to our understanding of the world’s loss as a result of the Holocaust?
•
How were the seven survivors’ experiences similar? How did they differ?
A. As a culminating activity, analyze the key events that constitute a chronology of the Holocaust from 1933-1945. 1.
•
Examine the events from 19331945 that constitute the Holocaust. Identify those events that you believe are the most critical and develop a wall chart or PowerPoint presentation of a chronology based upon the following categories, or categories of your own creation: 1933-1939: Removal and isolation of Jews from German economic, political and social life: Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, expropriation of Jewish property.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
A. Resources for Section A:
1a. Hogan, David J., Ed.-in-Chief. The Holocaust Chronicle: A History in Words and Pictures. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 2000. (Note: This source presents a running annotated chronology in each chapter.) 1b. Rossel, Seymour. “Yad Vashem Chronology, 1977.” The Holocaust, the World and the Jews, 1933-1945, New Jersey: Behrman House, Inc., 1992. 1c. Davidowicz, Lucy S. The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Unit IV PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES •
1939-1941: Expulsion, deportation, ghettoization
•
1941-1945: Enslavement, mass murder, genocide
2.
Using the hints provided below, write a brief description of at least two events from each period and relate them to the chart above.
•
Crusades: 1000-1348 (find date for each); Godfrey of Bouillon, York, England, mullahs in Moslem lands.
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES
2a. Lindermann, Albert. Antisemitism Before the Holocaust. New York: Addison Wesley, 2000. 2b. Flannery, Edward. The Anguish of the Jews. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
•
Period 1300-1500: Black Death, Inquisition, Expulsion from Spain
2c. Gilbert, Martin. The Atlas of Jewish History. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1993.
•
Protestant Reformation 15001599: Martin Luther, pointed hat, Jewish badge, Venice ghetto
2d. Dimont, Max. Jews, God and History. New York: Mentor Books, 1994.
•
The 17th and 18th Centuries: Cossacks, Tartars, Chmielnicki, Pale of Settlement
2e. Katz, Jacob. From Prejudice to Destruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
•
19th Century: May Laws, pogroms, Czarist directives
•
20th Century: Reactions to blood libel, Kishinev, position of Jews during war between Reds and Whites in Russia, numerous clauses, League of Nations minorities treaties in Eastern Europe.
3.
Use the chronological chart developed above and compare these major Nazi policies toward Jews with major anti-Jewish persecutions and laws throughout history.
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13. Students will reassess their previous generalizations about human nature in light of the events of the Holocaust.
TEACHING/LEARNING STRATEGIES AND ACTIVITIES A. Given your study of this unit, reassess your previous generalizations about the nature of human behavior. Write a short, reflective essay in which you describe your conclusions. Did you find that your previous generalizations about human nature were affected by the new knowledge you acquired in this unit? If so, in what way(s)? If not, why do you believe this is so? If you feel comfortable doing so, please share your latest generalization with a partner, small group, or the class.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS/RESOURCES A. Resources for Section A:
Each student’s previous generalizations on the nature of human behavior.
Unit IV
READINGS INCLUDED IN UNIT Iv Reading#
Title/Reference
1. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Racial Question,” and “Hitler’s War Against the Jews,” by David A Altshuler in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 2. Bauer, Elvira. “Don’t Trust a Fox on the Greensward and Never a Jew on His Plighted Word.” Der Stuermer. Nuremberg, 1936. Translation, anonymous, from the University of South Florida Library, in “Propaganda in Education.” Shoah. Fall / Winter 1982-3. 3. Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.” 4. “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933.” Days of Remembrance: Planning Guide. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989. 5. Furman, Harry, ed. “Nazi Language.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 6. Levin, Nora. “The Preparation.” The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. 68-73. 7. Furman, Harry, ed. “Honor the Yellow Badge,” Anonymous; in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). 8. Furman, Harry, ed. “David Rosenstein’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). 9. Green, Gerald. “The Night of Broken Glass.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). 10. “Regulation for Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany, November 12, 1938.” Documents on the Holocaust. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1981. 11. • Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (excerpt). Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, NY: Carnegie Institute of Washington; Department of Experimental Evolution; Secretary of Eugenics Section, American Breeders Association, 1911. • Terman, Lewis M. The Measurement of Intelligence (excerpt). Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1916.
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• Brigham, Carl C. A Study of American Intelligence. (excerpt). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1923. 12. Lifton, Robert J. “ ‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced, Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998. 13. Tatelbaum, Itzhak. “Ghetto Life: Through Our Lives” (excerpt). Children Witness The Holocaust. 14. Czerniakow, Adam. “The Judenrat Chairman’s Last Diary Entries.” The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakov. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. 15. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222. 16. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
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17 & 18. Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder, Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62. 19. Berenbaum, Michael. “The Einsatzgruppen.” Witness to the Holocaust: An Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of Its Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997. 112-116. 20. “Nazi Paperwork of the ‘Final Solution’: Origins and Authentication of the Wannsee Protocol.” 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 21. “Concentration Camps.” Excerpt from Henry Freidlander. “The Nazi Concentration Camps.” Human Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators and Victims, Bystanders and Rescuers. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981 in 50 Years Ago. Washington, D.C., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 22. Wiesel, Elie. “Night” (excerpt 22-26). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). 23. Furman, Harry, ed. “Concentration and Death Camps” (map). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV
24. “Note to Map,” “Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 25. • Furman, Harry, ed. “Art of the Camp Inmates.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). • Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (excerpts of art). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghetto Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995. • Liebermann-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss (excerpts of art). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghetto Fighters’ House, 1997. 26. • Munch, Dr. Hans. “Documenting the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz.” Signed and witnessed statement. Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995. • Kor, Eva Mozes. “Declaration of Amnesty: Auschwitz 50 Years Later.” Signed and witnessed statement. Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995. • Kor, Eva Mozes. Unpublished open letter on the importance of Holocaust Education. 17 Jan 2000. • “Calculation by the SS of Profit Value in the Utilization of Prisoners in the Concentration Camps.” Official SS Document. 27. • Stainman, Cantor Deborah. Teaching the Holocaust Through Song. Miami, FL: Temple Israel of Greater Miami. • Glick, Hirsh. “ Song of the Partisans,” in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 28. • Rubenstein Richard L. “I.G. Farben.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). • Snell, Bradford. “American Corporations and the Nazis. “The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience — An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 29. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Chemist’s Decision: What Would You Do? The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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30. “Doctors of the Death Camps.” Time. 25 June 1979. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 31. Fenyvesi, Charles. “The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember: Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. 32. Altshuler, David A. “Manipulating the Law.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 33. Herbut, Paula. “Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. 34. Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 35. Reid, Robert. “Pope John Paul at Auschwitz.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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36. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Ordeal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: AntiDefamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 37. Rings, Weiner. Life With the Enemy: Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe, 19391945. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982. 86, 106, 128. 38. Marrus, Michael R. “Allies, Vanquished States and Collaborators.” The Holocaust in History. Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 1987. 82-83. 39. U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79. 40. Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. 41. Bauer, Eileen. The Big Lie Technique of Dictators. Bethlehem, PA: Freedom High School (unpublished). 42. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Road to Genocide,” excerpted from Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, in 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, D.C., 1991.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV
43. Hagar, Heinz “The Man With the Pink Triangle.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). 44. Berenbaum, Michael. “Enemies of the State: Homosexuals.” The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 52. 45. Furman, Harry, ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge,” and “The Evian Conference,” by Arthur Morse. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. 46. Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Evian: A None Too Trustful Poker Game.” Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: The Free Press, 1986. 93-96. 47. U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 48. “Excerpts from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.” Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. 49. Friedman, Carl. “Animal.” nightfather. New York: Persea Books, 1992. 50. Delbo, Charlotte. “Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures.” Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 51. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Shawl.” In Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, by Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, Eds. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1997. 52. Glevin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine. Vol. 77 No. 3. Fall 1997.
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Unit IV: READING #1
the racial question Racist attitudes in Germany developed from the idea that the Aryan-Nordic race descended from the ancient Teutonic Knights of Northwestern Europe. To the Nazi, the Teuton stood for goodness, strength, courage, and beauty. Although the Aryan myth had existed prior to the Nazis, they turned it into a reality which was readily applied to society. The Nazis referred to themselves as the “master race.” The following excerpt reviews Hitler’s view of the Jewish people. It was Adolf Hitler who further developed an anti-Semitism built upon biology and race rather than upon religion, economics, and politics. The lessons learned in Vienna under Karl Leuger and Carl Schonerer were now applied to the Reich. The reading is followed by an illustration from only one of the many editions of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” a forged document that claimed that Jews plotted to gain control of the world. Editions of the “Protocols” are still printed and distributed in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Ousted Uganda dictator, Idi Amin, used to give copies to vistors as did leaders of some Arab states.
Hitler’s War Against the Jews David A. Altshuler
H
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itler assembled his ideas about the Jews in Mein Kampf…he explained race as the most important principle of human life, and he tried to show that since the beginning, history was a story of the conflict between the Aryans and the Jews. “The racial question,” he wrote, “gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture.” Therefore, civilizations rise and fall depending on how they take care of the “racial preservation of the nation.” “In the blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man,” so the “resurrection of Germany” depends on “the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem.” The “Aryan” race was the champion of “human cultural development.” By their nature and their “blood,” the “Aryans” were chosen to rule the world. The whole existence of human civilization, then, depended on safeguarding the purity of the “Aryan” race… According to Hitler, the state had only one purpose—watching over the purity of the racial community. The German people “must set race in the center of all life.” They have “the task, not only of assembling and preserving the most valuable stocks of basic racial elements in this people, but slowly and surely of raising them to a dominant position.” The only obstacle for Hitler to overcome was the Jew. Hitler saw the Aryan as perfect, the Jew as totally evil. As the saying went, “Whoever knows the Jew knows the Devil.” Thus, Jews were regarded not only as strange and different from Germans, but also as the worst type of human beings.
Hitler claimed that the “vileness” of Jews was part of their blood, that their “race” was inferior physically, mentally, and culturally. Jews, he said, “polluted” modern life with filth and disease. They “poisoned” others with germs, but somehow managed to preserve themselves. This myth that Jews carry disease goes back to the superstitions of the Middle Ages, when Jews were accused of spreading plagues and poisoning wells. Even as late as the seventeenth century, an outbreak of disease in Vienna was explained as the kind “caused by evil spirits, by Jews, by gravediggers, and by witches.” Hitler believed that Jewish “poison” had defiled German family life, culture, and the press. How had the Jews succeeded in “defiling” Germany? Hitler believed they had done so by lying, by claiming that Judaism is a religion. “Actually,” according to Hitler, “they are a race—and what a race!” He believed that Jews had no language or culture of their own, that they lived off other cultures and races until they destroyed them. The Jew’s ultimate goal, Hitler wrote, was to conquer the world, to achieve “domination over the nations.” From the idea of the Jew as an evil parasite, a bloodsucker contaminating the Aryan race, it was an easy step to add the notion that Jews were destroying German economic life. Hitler described Jewish business life as follows: “The spider was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people’s pores.” That image of the Jews as a selfish, greedy businessman was the one anti-Semites had used for nearly a century. Hitler saw Jews as trying to master the world not only in business but also in labor unions, not only in the press but also in the government. As for democracy, he wrote that, “only the Jew can praise an institution which is as dirty and false as he himself.”
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #1 Hitler viewed Marxism, which in Russia became Communism, as a Jewish movement. Marxism, too, he said, “systematically plans to hand the world over to the Jews.” Hitler’s “evidence” for this theory of Jewish plans to master the world came from the history of Russia. The Bolsheviks, a party which brought violent revolution to Russia in 1918, included many Jews, most notably the leader Leon Trotsky. Hitler believed the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he wrote that the Jewish “conspiracy” went even further. “In Russian Bolshevism we must see the attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twentieth century to achieve world domination.” All Russia, he believed, had somehow become captive of the Jews. A similar fate, he warned, faced Germany, unless it showed enough national will to resist. Hitler concluded that the Russian Empire must necessarily collapse because of this supposed “Jewish
domination.” His ideas of race and space, therefore, led to a foreign policy for Germany which demanded an all-out fight against Soviet Russia. Mein Kampf, then, is a vision of a worldwide conflict between Aryans and Jews. It is Hitler’s own plan for the triumph of “good” over “evil.” He saw himself as the Messiah who would save all people from the Jews and the Devil. “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Hitler’s image of himself was linked to his unlimited and unending fear and hatred of the Jew. “Two worlds face one another—the men of God and man of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.” The title. Mein Kampf, means “my struggle.” After Hitler wrote of his battle against the Jews, he went out to fight that battle…
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Cover of Brazilian edition of Protocols. Sáo Paulo, 1932.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. German society prior to the Nazi takeover was one of the most educated, cultured, and advanced in the world. How can you explain the widespread acceptance of racist theories in Germany? 2. How are Jews described? With what animal is the Jew associated in the illustration? 3. Who today promotes the distribution of the “Protocols” (or uses its language) and why? 4. Is there an “Aryan” race?
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
Unit IV: READING #2
Throughout the World SHOAH, Fall/Winter, 1982-3
propaganda in education INTRODUCED BY ERIC GOLDHAGEN
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A revolutionary regime bent upon eradicating the “old ideology” and replacing it with a new creed concentrates its efforts on the young generation, for the young are far more malleable than those whose minds have been molded by the ancien regime. The new pedagogues of the Nazi regime sought to inculcate in the young the virtue of ruthlessness, the faith in racism and, above all, the belief in the existence of the latter-day Devil—the Jew—and the necessity to wage incessant war against him. Like the medieval Devil, the Jew was a protean figure assuming various guises. Now he is terrifying, now comical. He provokes various emotions: contempt, hatred, fear, loathing and derision. Though the poems and songs were intended for the young, they might as well have been printed in adult publications, for the contents were not much more sophisticated. For Nazi ideology—with its tales of demons and supermen, of darkest evil battling immaculate Good, of sinister conspiracies thwarted by alert Teutonic guardians—had an infantile quality. The proclaimed aim of the Nazis to homogenize society (gleichschalter) extended to the mental realm as well. The collective mind was to be emptied of all complexity and fed on simple fairytale-like myths. Before sinking into murderous barbarism, Nazism regressed into puerile primitivism. The Nazis gloried in their simplifications. Der Fuhrer, proclaimed Goebbels, is the “Great Simplifier” (Der Grosse Vereinfacher). The truth is simple, but alas, obfuscated by decadent intellectuals. Der Fuhrer with his cleansing sword, hacks away the obscuring thicket of verbal weeds to reveal the Truth in all its uncomplicated plainness. “What the National Socialism teaches” declared one writer, “can be understood by the simple man as well as by the professor, often times better by the former.” This propaganda bore the desired fruit, especially in the young. The inmates of the ghettos and concentration camps knew, as a rule born of ERIC GOLDHAGEN, of the Harvard Divinity School, teaches the Holocaust at Harvard.
their experience, that the young Nazis tended to be more cruel than the old. Few of those who had been imbued with Nazi ideology retain that creed today. The vast majority has repressed the memory of it. And when an idea of the past does rise up in their minds it fills them with dread, pain and shame. For they then become aware of the intolerable thought that, but for the defeat of Hitler, they would have lived their lives as primitive mental barbarians.
Don’t Trust a Fox on the Greensward, and Never a Jew on His Plighted Word. Editor’s Note: The following poems are excerpts from a picture book written by Elvira Bauer and published by “Der Stuermer” in Nuremberg. The translation is an anonymous work from the University of South Florida Library.
The Father of the Jews is the Devil At the creation of the world The Lord God conceived the races: Red Indians, Negroes and Chinese, and Jew-boys too, the rotten crew. And, we were also on the scene: We Germans midst this motley medley— He gave them all a piece of earth To fill in the sweat of their brow. But the Jew-boy went on strike at once! For the devil rode him from the first. Cheating, not working, was his aim; For lying, he got first prize In less than no time from the Father of Lies. Then he wrote it in the Talmud. By the banks of Pharaoh’s Nile Pharaoh saw this folk decided “I’ll torment the lazy blighters,
Source: Bauer, Elvira. “Don’t Trust a Fox on the Greensward and Never a Jew on His Plighted Word”. Der Stuermer. Nuremberg, 1936. Translation, anonymous, from the University of South Florida Library, in “Propaganda in Education.” Shoah. Fall/Winter 1982-3. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #2 These people shall make bricks for me!” The Jew did this all wailing and whining Never was there such cursing and swearing. With bent backs and over-big slippers. Even today we see them shambling With lip hanging down and great red noses And looking daggers, f lashing hate. They owe Pharaoh a thousand thanks, Who trounced them soundly for their pranks. The Jews soon had enough of that! The Devil brought them to our midst. Like thieves they stole into our land Hoping to get the upper hand.
The Eternal Jew From the start the Jew has been A murderer said Jesus Christ. And as Our Lord died on the cross God the Father knew no other race To torment His Son to death, He chose the Jews for this. That is why the Jews now claim To be His special proteges. When Christ the burden of the cross Too heavy found, He sought to rest One moment ‘gainst a door But from the house a Jew came out Cursed Him and upbraided Him, Telling Him to move on further. For ‘twas a Jew that owned that house. It was the Jew Ahasuerus.. Since then the Jew has borne a curse. Two thousand years he has sought rest, That wretched Jew Ahasuerus, The curse has passed to all his race, Restless he wanders far and wide, One land to another. He has no home to call his own. The alien Jew, that scurvy knave. His nomad soul finds nowhere rest, Everywhere he’s just a pest. Four centuries have come and gone, Ahasuerus crops up everywhere Now in Hamburg, next Berlin, In Denmark and in Danzig too. Dresden, Paris have seen that Jew. Believe me, children, it is quite clear. Ahasuerus haunts us still Under the skin of every Jew.
Now, children, keep a good look out Whenever you see a Jew about. The Jew creeps round, a regular fox, Keep your eyes skinned, or you’ll be on the rocks.
The Jewish Teacher It’s going to be fine in the schools at last. For all the Jews must leave. For big and small it’s all alike. Anger and hate do not avail Nor utmost Jewish whine or wail. Away with all the Jewish breed. ‘Tis the German teacher we desire. Now he leads the way to cleverness, Wanders and plays with us, but yet Keeps us children in good order. He makes jokes with us and laughs So going to school is quite a joy.
The Jewish Businessman Folks, look at this rare twister, too. It is old Aaron Kahn, the Jew. Owner of a store is he. And all his precious merchandise Is sold by means of rotten lies. Just rubbish worked off on dumb goys. Aaron Kahn has a purse quite full. He’s emptied that of many a fool. These suckers come most willingly To spend their money at his store. But when a hungry man appears And begs for bread with melting tears, Look at the picture over there And see a Jewish soul laid bare. So listen folks, wherever you are: “Don’t trust a fox on the greensward, And never a Jew on his plighted word!”
Jews, Disappear! In our far-f lung Fatherland Many a bit of earth is famous For its beauty and its strength The wealth of health bestows. That’s why it’s so frequented By people from far and near As on this picture may be seen A notice-board is erected here, Telling for all the world to know Here Jews are hardly popular The German is the owner here, So, friend Yid, best disappear!
Source: Bauer, Elvira. “Don’t Trust a Fox on the Greensward and Never a Jew on His Plighted Word. Der Stuermer. Nuremberg, 1936. Translation, anonymous, from the University of South Florida Library, in “Propaganda in Education.” Shoah. Fall/Winter 1982-3.
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Unit IV: READING #3
chronological table of events 1933-1945 Excerpt Prepared by
Shmuel Krakowski INTERNATIONAL EVENTS AND EVENTS IN THE THIRD REICH
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
JEWISH ACTIVITIES
1933
January 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler appointed Reichskanzler (German Chancellor)
January 30, 1933 Judische Jugendhilfe; Established in Berlin
February 27, 1933 The burning of the Reichstag; wave of arrests and Nazi terror in Germany March 1933 First concentration camp established in Germany: Dachau
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March 9-10, 1933 Beginning of a wave of riots against German Jews by the S.A. and Stahlhelm
March 27, 1933 Mass demonstration in New York organized by the American Jewish Congress to protest Nazi terror in Germany
April 1, 1933 Boycott against German Jewry
April 1, 1933 The German Jewish newspaper Judische Rundschau carries the article by Robert Weltsch, “Wear it with pride, the yellow badge,” the first in a series, “To say ‘Yes’ to our “Jewishness,” these headlines become the slogans of the resistance of German Jewry
April 7, 1933 Law prohibiting Jews from working in government offices
April 26, 1933 The Gestapo established
April 21, 1933 Law prohibiting Jewish ritual slaughter
May 10, 1933 Public burning of Jewish books and works by opponents of Nazism in German towns
April 26, 1933 Decision by the Vaad Leumi (National Committee of the Jews of Palestine) to establish a project for the absorption of immigrants from Germany Mid-May 1933 Representatives of the Comire des Deleganes Juives submit a protest to the League of Nations about anti-Jewish discrimination in Germany (the petition of Franz Berheim) Mass demonstrations by the Jews of Paris to protest against the anti-Jewish campaign in Germany
Source: Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.” New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #3
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS AND EVENTS IN THE THIRD REICH
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
JEWISH ACTIVITIES
1933 May 1933 Establishment of the Judischer Kulturband in Berlin June 11, 1933 Conference of Jewish organizations in Silesia discusses means of safeguarding the rights of German Jews June 27, 1933 Mass anti-Nazi protest rally by London Jews August 20, 1933 American Jewish Congress declares boycott against Nazi Germany
July 14, 1933 Law prohibiting political parties in Germany; Nazi Party now sole legal party in Germany
September 8, 1933 Second World Jewish Conference in Geneva resolves to organize an antiGerman boycott movement throughout the world September 17, 1933 Establishment of the Reichsvertraung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of Jews in Germany) October 14, 1933 Germany leaves disarmament talks at League of Nations
October 17, 1933 Law prohibiting Jews from working as journalists
October 1933 Establishment of “liaison offices” for aid to German Jews by Jewish organizations in the U.S. and France
October 19, 1933 Germany leaves the League of Nations November 27, 1933 “Transfer” company established in Tel Aviv to facilitate the immigration of Jews from Germany through special arrangements for the transfer of their property
Source: Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.”
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Unit IV: READING #3
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS AND EVENTS IN THE THIRD REICH
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
JEWISH ACTIVITIES
1934
January 26, 1934 Germany and Poland sign a nonbelligerency pact February 1934 First group of young Jewish refugees from Germany arrive at Kibbutz Ein Harod
April 1, 1934 Heinrich Himmler appointed head of the S.S.
April 1934 Establishment of the Radical Nationalist Organization (O.N.R.) Poland, an extreme anti-Semitic organization
June 30 - July 2, 1934 “Night of the Long Knives”: purge of the S.A. and those opposed to Hitler’s policies; Roehm and his colleagues murdered
402 July 25, 1934 Attempted coup by Nazis in Austria, murder of Dollfuss, Austrian prime minister
August 2, 1934 Death of von Hindenberg, president of Germany; Hitler assumes the responsibilities of head of state
Source: Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.” New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #3
INTERNATIONAL EVENTS AND EVENTS IN THE THIRD REICH
THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS
JEWISH ACTIVITIES
1935
January 7, 1935 French-Italian agreement signed by Mussolini and Laval in Rome January 13, 1935 Saar region annexed to Germany March 16, 1935 Renewal of conscription in Germany, in violation of the Versailles Treaty May 31, 1935 German Jews prohibited from serving in the armed forces. June 1935 Wave of anti-Jewish riots in Poland September 15, 1935 Nuremberg Laws—enactment of basic antiJewish racial laws
October 3, 1935 Italy attacks Ethiopia
December 1935 Anti-Jewish riots in Polish universities; Jewish students restricted to special seats
Source: Krakowski, Shmuel. “Chronology: Table of Events, 1933-1945.”
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Unit IV: READING #4
days of remembrance planning guide Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service April 7, 1933 The Reich Government has enacted the following Law, promulgated herewith:
Section I 1.
To restore a national professional civil service and to simplify administration, civil servants may be dismissed from office in accordance with the following regulations, even where there would be no grounds for such action under the prevailing Law.
2.
For the purposes of this Law the following are to be considered civil servants: direct and indirect officials of the Reich, direct and indirect officials of the Lander, officials of Local Councils, and of Federations of Local Councils, officials of Public Corporations as well as of Institutions and Enterprises of equivalent status…The provisions will apply also to officials of Social Insurance organizations having the status of civil servants…
Section 2 1.
Civil servants who have entered the service since November 9, 1918, without possessing the required or customary educational background or other qualifications are to be dismissed from the service. Their previous salaries will continue to be paid for a period of three months following their dismissal.
2.
They will have no claim to temporary pensions, full pensions or survivors’ benefits, nor to retain designation of rank or titles, or to wear uniforms or emblems..
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Secton 3 1.
Civil servants who are not of Aryan descent are to be retired (Sec. 8 ); if they are honorary officials, they are to be dismissed from their official status.
2.
Section I does not apply to civil servants in office from August 1, 1914, who fought at the Front for the German Reich or its Allies in the World War, or whose fathers or sons fell in the World War. Other exceptions may be permitted by the Reich Minister of the Interior in coordination with the Minister concerned or with the highest authorities with respect to civil servants working abroad.
Section 4 1.
Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national State, can be dismissed from the service… Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler Reich Minister of Interior Frick Reich Minister of Finance Graf Schwerin von Krosigk
Reichsgesetzblatt, I, 1933, p. 175 In: Arad, Y., Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot (eds.). Documents on the Holocaust. Selected Sources on The Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem in cooperation with the AD Land Ktav Publishing House, 1981, pp.39-41.
Source: “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933.” Days of Remembrance: Planning Guide. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #4
First Regulation for the Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 11, 1933
(Amendment) to Sec. 3 1.
A person is to be considered non-Aryan if he is descended from non-Aryan, and especially from Jewish parents or grandparents. It is sufficient if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan. This is to be assumed in particular where one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish religion.
2.
Any civil servant who was not already serving on August 1, 1914, must bring proof that he is of Aryan descent or fought at the Front, or is the son or father of a soldier who fell in the World War. Such proof is to be supplied by the presentation of documents (birth certificates and marriage license of the parents, military documents).
3.
In the event of Aryan descent being questionable, an opinion must be obtained from the expert on racial research attached to the Ministry of Interior ..
Reichsgesetzblatt, I, 1933, p. 195
In: Arad, Y., Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot (eds.). Documents on the Holocaust. Selected Sources on The Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem in cooperation with the ADL and Ktav Publishing House, 1981, pp. 41-42.
)Source: “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933.” Days of Remembrance: Planning Guide. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989.
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Unit IV: READING #4
Instructions by Minister of Economics on the Position of Jews in German Trade September 1933
..The legal regulations made by the Law for the protection of retail trade are completed for the time being. This means that the Reich Government will refrain from taking further measures such as have been demanded from various sides… In this connection I see myself obliged…to point out once more that the absolutely essential further restoration of calm to the entire economy and its unified, organic reconstruction can only be achieved if those who have been appointed by the Reich Government to carry out its orders avoid any measure which could endanger the feeling of confidence in the Law as the result of their failure to observe existing laws and thereby introduce renewed uncertainty into the economy.. I therefore request that the lower-echelon offices and city magistrates in particular be emphatically instructed that such measures are to be absolutely avoided, and cancelled when necessary..
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The groups directly interested in additional measures, and who have claimed up to now that their more farreaching demands are in accordance with the economic policy of the Reich Government, are to be emphatically notified that the decision of the Reich Government in this respect has now been made unmistakably clear, as I have stated before. The Reich Government cannot permit itself to be deprived of freedom of action by the creation of established facts, as the result of unauthorized intervention, directly or indirectly, in its decisions on the legal and economic position of the enterprises concerned. It will deal with such lack of discipline as offenses against the Fuhrer Principle and as sabotage of economic reconstruction… In the interest of maintaining the enterprises in question as places of work of very large numbers of German employees and (blue-collar] workers, and as providers of employment for much larger numbers still, boycotts and similar measures are to be avoided where they prevent business relations with suppliers or customers (i.e., the production of black or white lists, failure to include the enterprises in supply registers, refusal to accept advertisements, discouraging of customers by the posting of observers, distribution of leaflets, posters, threats, photographing of customers or interfering with them in other ways, etc.)… Actions of this type have already been emphatically forbidden to members, officers and organizations of the NSDAP and its related bodies, by order of the Fuhrer’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess, of July 8, 1933, as well as by a subsequent order of August 8, 1933. I therefore request that most decisive action be taken to prevent intervention of this type in future, and that organizations and associations rescind without delay any contrary directions and decisions, and that lowerechelon offices should receive instructions in accordance with this memorandum as soon as possible.
C.V. –Zeitung, No. 19, October 11, 1933 IN: Arad, Y., Y. Gutman, A. Margaliot (eds.). Documents on the Holocaust. Selected Sources on The Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem in cooperation with the ADL and Ktav Publishing House, 1981.
Source: “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, April 7, 1933.” Days of Remembrance: Planning Guide. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1989. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #5
NAZI LANGUAGE During the twentieth century, we have learned that words need not serve the purpose of honest communication. In fact, words are often used to hide truth and become a means of deceiving people. During the Holocaust, Nazi language not only shielded reality from their victims but also softened the truth of the Nazi involvement in mass murder. This manipulation of language is still practiced in the modern world.
German Word
Literal Meaning
Real Meaning
1. Ausgemerzt
exterminated (insects)
murdered
2. Liquidiert
liquidated
murdered
3. Erledigt
finished (off)
murdered
4. Aktionen
actions
mission to seek out Jews and kill them
5. Sonderaktionen
special actions
special missions to kill Jews
6. Sonderbehandlung
special treatment
Jews taken through death process in camp
7. Sonderbehandeit
specially treated
sent through the death process
8. Sauberung
cleansing
sent through the death process
9. Ausschaltung
elimination
murder of Jews
10. Aussiedlung
evacuation
murder of Jews
11. Umsiedlung
resettlement
murder of Jews
12. Exekutivemassnahme
executive measure
order for murder
13. Entsprechend behandeit
treated appropriately
murdered
14. Der Sondermassnahme zugefuhrt
conveyed to special measure
killed
15. Sicherhistspoilzeilich durchgearbeitet
worked over in security
murdered
16. Losung der Judenfrage
solution of the Jewish question
police measure murder of Jewish people
17. Bereinigung der Judenfrage cleaning up the Jewish question
murder
18. Judenfrei gemacht
made free of Jews
all Jews in an area killed
19. Spezialeinrichtunger
special installations
gas chambers and crematorium
20. Badeanstalten
bath houses
gas chambers
21. Leichenkeller
corpse cellars
crematorium
22. Hechenholt Foundation
diesel engine located in shack at Belzec used to gas Jews
23. Durekgeschleusst
dragged through
sent through killing process in camp
24. Endlosung
the Final Solution
the decision to murder all Jews
25. Hilfsmittel
auxiliary equipment
gas vans for murder
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Are you aware of any use of language in American culture that also serves to hide real meaning? 2. Do advertisers often use words deceptively? How do politicans sometimes use language to mask their real values? Give some examples from daily life. Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #6
the holocaust the destruction of european jewry 1933 - 1945 Nora Levin
The Jews of Germany 1933 – 1938 The Preparation
T
408
he first frontal attack on all individual Jews in Germany came in September 1935, with the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. Up to this time, some Jews were persecuted, hounded and beaten up. These excesses were officially deprecated, but they were also excused as the “irrepressible” reaction of Germans to years of alien—that is, Jewish-domination. In the new Germany, the Nazis said, there would be no excuse for illegality. The natural feelings of the people would be given “legal” expression. The boycott of April 1 and the book burnings were thus “legal.” For two years the Nazis cultivated this policy, with careful attention to outside reactions. By 1935, the Nazis became bolder and felt convinced that no international action threatened them. The Nuremberg Laws were the result. These measures reduced the entire Jewish population of Germany to twentieth-century helots. The Nazi bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry had brooded over these laws for some time. The stumbling block was the problem of how to define a Jew. This was exactly the problem that had blocked the anti-Semitic members of the Reichstag in the 1890’s from proposing an anti-Semitic law. Who is a Jew? In the Nuremberg Laws, the Jew was defined negatively as someone ineligible to German citizenship. The law provided that only persons of “German or related blood” could be citizens, and that citizenship was acquired by a grant of a certificate of citizenship. This was called the “Law Respecting Reich Citizenship of September 15, 1935.” Jews were thus robbed of their citizenship and became Staatsangehorige, subjects belonging to the state. The second law, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” of the same date forbade marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and imposed heavy penalties for transgressions. Jews were also forbidden to employ German female servants under forty-five years of age and were forbidden to display the German flag. Thirteen supplementary decrees which followed delineate the whole course of Hitler’s anti-Jewish war down to the last decree, which was published July 1, 1943, when the Reich was theoretically purged of Jews. The pretext for the Nuremberg Laws was Hitler’s
anger at an organized Jewish protest against a film being shown in Berlin. After the laws were passed, Hitler said that now the Jews could lead their own lives as they could in no other country. In a conversation on September 23, 1935, between Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, Acting Minister of Economics, and a representative of President Roosevelt, S. R. Fuller, at the American Embassy in Berlin, Schacht interpreted the Nuremberg Laws for the American representative. He first pointed out the “international character” of Jews and Roman Catholics which constituted a domestic problem in many countries insufficiently understood elsewhere. When Fuller questioned him closely about the poor treatment of the Jews under the Nuremberg Laws, Schacht said: “I never was in favor of our treatment of the Jews, but the new laws announced at Nuremberg give protection to the Jews. They are now guaranteed the same rights as any other minority within Germany, such as Poland, for instance.” He further explained that they could engage in their businesses with government protection. This was a typical Nazi rationalization. The Nuremberg Laws were a triumph for the extremists among the Nazis and marked a sharp progression toward an irreversible anti-Jewish policy. No Jew could thereafter escape the sweeping dragnet of intensified persecution. As the definition of Jew was elaborated, the victim became a helpless target for whatever seized the Nazi mind. The Jews of Germany withered under these new blows but did not dream that they were a mere prelude to destruction. The administrative regulations which followed the Nuremberg Laws were based on the definition of “nonAryan descent” first described in the decree of April 7, 1933. A person of “non-Aryan descent” was someone who had a Jewish parent or grandparent. But the Nazis were not satisfied. Were half or quarter-Jews as dangerous an influence as three-quarter or full Jews? Serious, caustic discussions took place. Dr. Kurt Blome, secretary of the Medical Association, and later Deputy Director of the Reich Health Office, proposed that halfJews be considered Jews because “among half-Jews the Jewish genes are notoriously dominant.” This view later became party policy, but the decrees and regulations were written in the Interior Ministry, where the civil service attitude was somewhat different. The Party wanted to combat the part-Jew who was considered a carrier of “Jewish influence,” whereas the civil service wanted to protect that part which was German in the
Source: Levin, Nora. “The Preparation.” The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. 68-73. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #6 part-Jew. The authors of the final definition were Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart and Dr. Bernhard Losener. They had to work quickly, inasmuch as the terms “Jew” and “German” had been used in the laws of September 15 and carried criminal sanctions but had not been defined. Losener rejected the Party’s proposal to equate half-Jews with full-Jews. “In principle,” he wrote, “the half-Jew should be regarded as a less serious enemy than the full Jew, because in addition to Jewish characteristics, he possesses so many Germanic ones which the full Jew lacks.” Losener also believed that a boycott against half-Jews would be opposed by the German people. There was the further problem of the armed forces, which would be deprived of a potential 45,000 men, and the problem of marriages between Germans and half-Jews. In view of these difficulties, Losener proposed that half-Jews be sorted into two groups: one, those who had a Jewish religious affiliation or those married to Jews; and two, those who were not affiliated or were married to non-Jews. These proposals were incorporated into the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law, issued on November 14, 1935. In this regulation, the Jew is defined as someone descended from at least three Jewish grandparents or from two if: (a) he belonged to the Jewish religious community on September 15, 1935, or later; (b) he was married to a Jew as of that date or later; (c) he was the offspring of a marriage contracted with a three-quarter or full-Jew after September 15, 1935. Despite their racist slogans, in the last analysis the Nazis had to resort to religious criteria in defining a Jew. But they now had their definition, a solution to a problem that had defied an earlier generation of antiSemites. This definition appears to be a relatively harmless measure in the light of what was to come. No Jew was physically harmed by it. But it had a much greater built-in danger than any act of Nazi violence, or even the riots of 1938. For the definition was the first of a chain of measures, one leading to another, escalating in severity and leading ultimately to the annihilation of western European Jewry. The Nazi bureaucrats in 1935 did not blueprint the destruction, but the beginning definition was crucial. Once a Jew was defined and described, he could be expropriated, isolated, ghettoized and exterminated. The Nazis built on the old foundations of European anti-Semitism, but did much more than carry on terrible pogroms on a vaster scale. They set in motion an inexorable process of ever-acclerating destructiveness and did nothing to stop it. Earlier pogroms had been stopped short of total destruction. Under the compulsion of their own inner destructiveness and the temptation to carry their racist ideology to the literal limit, the Nazis moved from one measure to another, daring each time to plumb new depths of their will to enact their dogma. The Nuremberg Laws were the beginning. Hundreds of edicts followed, each leading to
more drastic exclusion of Jews from the general community, economic misery and helplessness. Each successive blow was believed by the Jews to be the last, particularly since lulls almost always followed drastic measures. The victims did not remain in one position for long, and the changes were always for the worse, but no Jew in 1935 could foresee the end of this disintegrating process, as indeed no Nazi could. The visible effects of the Nuremberg Laws were in themselves devastating. Jews became pariahs in German life by government decree. The ban on intermarriage and sexual relations between Aryans and Jews led to poisoned social relations. “Race defilement is worse than murder” became the new commandment for many Germans. The depraved Streicher’s Der Stürmer suffused the minds of millions of readers with horror and fear of Jews and gave rise to easy blackmail schemes. Many Jews were brazenly accused—with no evidence—of having sexual relations with Aryan women. A casual public encounter between a Jew and Aryan could lead to the arrest of the Jew and confiscation of his business. The rantings about blood and honor were often only a front for brutal robbery of Jewish property. Furthermore, as the orders and actions of the Gestapo were no longer subject to judicial review, Jews were now at the mercy of the police, their racial lusts and their greed. The rubric of race defilement did not end with the physical being of the Jew; his animals were also a source of evil. Village councils forbade Jews the use of the community bull for their cows; veterinarians refused to clip dogs owned by Jews. German children were also pulled into the Nazi subworld. Years of indoctrination and exposure to brutality had desensitized them. As the Jew was now offically the State Enemy, they plunged eagerly into barbarous cruelties against Jewish children. If their better instincts shrank at these excesses, they blamed themselves and were ashamed of their weakness. The Nuremberg Laws also deprived Jews of political rights and economic normalcy. They could not vote or hold public office. Jewish editors, musicians, artists and writers had already been excluded from the guilds. Dismissals of Jewish workers from business and industry soon followed. Most of the five thousand Jewish civil servants in Germany had been dismissed under the law of April 7, 1933. The rest, with the exception of teachers in Jewish schools, were chiefly Jews who had served in the government since August 1, 1914, or Jews who had fought in World War I. Under a decree issued on May 21, 1935, only those of Aryan descent could serve in the armed forces. The subsequent definition of Jew enabled the War Ministry to conscript Mischlinge Jews (half-Jews who were not affiliated with the Jewish religion or who were not married to Jews). Jews, as defined in the November 14 regulation, however, could not serve. Any remaining Jewish civil servants still employed in 1935 were removed by the end of the year. The Jews of Germany had only spiritual armament
Source: Levin, Nora. “The Preparation.” The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. 68-73.
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Unit IV: READING #6
410
with which to fight the Nuremberg Laws. Dr. Baeck composed a special prayer for the somber Yom Kippur service in 1935 which followed their passage. “We stand before our God,” the prayer read. “With the same courage with which we confess our sins, individual and collective, we shall declare with deep aversion that the lies against us, and the defamation of our religion and its teaching, are far beneath our dignity. We stand by our faith and our fate.. We stand before our God…Before Him we bow, but we stand upright before men..” Dr. Otto Hirsch, director of the Reichsvertretung, distributed copies of the prayer to all synagogues in Germany to be read. As a result, both he and Dr. Baeck were arrested and confined in the S.S. prison in Columbia House. Both men suffered frequent arrest and Dr. Hirsch, intermittent tortures. In 1941, he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp and murdered. There was no offical decree at this time directing firms to dismiss their Jewish personnel, but Party pressure and propaganda were strongly persuasive. Each company made its own decision about its Jews. Longterm contracts at first created legal difficulties , but the courts generally upheld dismissals through the ususal route of rationalization. Characteristic is a case decided by the highest court in Germany, the Reichsgericht, in 1936. A German movie company claimed that it had the right to fire a Jewish stage manager with whom it had a long-term contract because of a clause terminating employment in case of “sickness, death, or similar causes rendering the stagemanager’s work impossible.” The court held that the clause was applicable without qualification on the ground that the “racial characteristics” of the plantiff amounted to sickness and death. In the thinking of Germany’s highest judges, the Jews had already ceased to be living organisms. Some firms transferred their Jewish personnel abroad, but invariably transfers were gradually reduced. As dismissals gained momentum, the conditions under which Jews were fired became harsher. Severance pay settlements and pensions were progressively reduced. Later, a decree of June 14, 1938, precipitated the firing of Jewish directors and managers. Under this decree the Interior Ministry defined “Jewish enterprise” as any business owned by a Jew or having a Jewish legal representative or board member. By the end of the year, these dismissals were compulsory. However, none of these measures touched what the Nazis considered the citadels of “Jewish domination,” the independent Jewish stores and businesses. (In fact, the percentage of Jews in commerce in Germany was 3.3 percent of the total population.) The taking over of Jewish business establishments by German owners was called “Aryanization” (Arisierung). It was this process more than any other which destroyed the capacity of
Jews in Germany to survive economically, for over 60 percent of the Jewish population earned a living as independent owners of stores and businesses. The first phase of Aryanization, from January 1933 to November 1938, was a period of so-called voluntary Aryanization; transfers of ownership were supposedly based on voluntary agreements. The second phase following the November pogroms, was a period of compulsory Aryanization. However, no sale of Jewish property under the Nazi regime was based on a freely negotiated contract. Jews were under pressure to sell. The longer they chose to wait, the greater the pressure and the smaller the compensation. The Nazis also aimed at cutting off Jewish-owned companies from their customers by anti-Jewish boycotts, and from their suppliers through allocation measures.” The boycott of April 1, 1933, planned to fan “popular” hostility against the Jews, was later widened to include boycott action by civil servants, government agencies suppliers and “loyal” Germans. Under such pressures, many Jewish-owned businesses sold out. Early in 1938 there was some difficulty in finding enough German buyers for the remaining Jewish-owned businesses. The German Economy Ministry stepped in to force price levels down by requiring official approval of all contracts for the transfer of a business from a Jew to a German. In this process, the value of trademarks, goodwill, pending contracts, and any other factors enhancing the value of the enterprise were eliminated. On April 26, 1938, the Interior Ministry ordered all Jews to register all property in excess of 5,000 reichmarks (about $2,000). There followed a decree defining “Jewish enterprise.” With these preliminary measures, compulsory Aryanization began. By the end of 1937, the Jew in Germany had no civil rights. He was not a citizen. He could not vote or attend a political meeting. He had no liberty of speech and could not defend himself in print. He could not be employed as a civil servant or work as a writer, artist, musician or actor before the Aryan public. He could not teach or work in a public hospital or belong to any professional organization. If he were starving, he could receive no aid from the Winterhilfe organization. If he owned a business, his livelihood had either vanished or was in danger of evaporating. He was denied food and drugs in certain stores. He had to face the day-by-day ostracism of his neighbors and friends. Emigration was his only answer. During 1937, 23,000 Jews left Germany, bringing the total number who had left since 1933 to 129,000. This represented a little over one fourth of the Jewish population of Germany in 1933. In the following year, 1938, conditions worsened and the urgency to leave Germany became sharper. But the opportunities diminished.
Source: Levin, Nora. “The Preparation.” The Holocaust. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. 68-73. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #7
honor the yellow badge Author Unknown
I held in trembling hand A shred of yellow cloth; It was besmirched and creased, a ragged wedge. Bitter revulsion and nausea roared into my mouth: There it is, there: The Jewish, yellow badge. A blue flash caught my eye, A point peeped from each fold. Six points, all bent—the Star of David, blue. A sudden pounding took me by my throat. My blood streamed stronger, and hot words leaped out: There it is — there: the badge of honor of the Jew.
Which like a whirlwind tossed me, left me maimed. And afterwards, throughout the night till morn, A pall took hold of me, imprisoning hand. My body, all my limbs. And it proclaimed: Give honor that the points are bent and twisted, Give honor that the folds are wrapped and shifted About the arms and shoulders of the Jew, God’s pledge. Given honor to the rag filled like a sponge With desolation, sacred martyr’s death, pogrom — Proclaim and swear your love now to the yellow badge!
And I repressed my sudden spurt of fear; It seemed then that an outcry burst forth overhead.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Why would it be important for Jews to “honor” the yellow badge?
2.
How would you feel if you were forced to wear a symbol that was meant to be degrading?
3.
When were the yellow badge and the concept of the ghetto first employed?
DEFINITIONS martyr: a person who sacrifices his or her life for a cause pogrom: a violent, organized attack upon Jewish communities in Eastern Europe
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “Honor the Yellow Badge,” Anonymous; in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
411
Unit IV: READING #8
david rosenstein’s dilemma What Would You Do? What are one’s obligations to oneself? family? community? Which takes precedence?
D
avid Rosenstein is a doctor living in the city of Berlin. He has a young wife and two small children. David is well-known in the community as a good doctor who serves his patients well. As a result, he has become prosperous and well-regarded. He lives in a beautiful home and experiences many of the cultural advantages of success. Germany has undergone dramatic change. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, there has been violence and tension in the streets. David has hoped that Hitler and the Nazis were only trying to segregate Jews; all else that Hitler said was taken as little more than campaign talk. But the Nuremburg Laws of 1935 increased the actions taken against Jews. Rosenstein can no longer vote and he is heavily taxed by the Reich. He also can no longer serve non-Jewish patients. Yet he remains a dedicated doctor to those that need him.
It is now 1938 in Germany. Dramatic changes are called for in the life of the Rosenstein family. David thinks he could leave his beloved Germany even though emigration quotas are severely restricted. As a doctor, his position could help him to leave the country if he were willing to leave his wealth in Germany. But David has been approached by a group of people who want him to participate in an organization designed to help protect and give comfort to Jews in need in the city. As an influential doctor in the community, Rosenstein’s friends feel he has a responsibility to stay in Germany. Rosenstein understands that the decision to be made is a difficult one. He is torn by his responsibility to his family, his people, his community, and himself.
412 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
What should David Rosenstein do?
2.
It is important to remember that by 1938, it was very difficult for many Jews, especially those of lower economic levels, to leave Germany. The Nazis demanded high fees from those Jews who wanted to leave. As of the summer of 1938, nothing happened in Germany that had not already occurred to Jews in the past. In 1938, how would Jews have known what was ahead?
3.
Can one really say which is wiser—to stay or to go? Have there been historical examples of persecuted people who stayed and survived?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “David Rosenstein’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #9
the night of broken glass Gerald Green On November 7, 1938, Ernst Vom Rath, a member of the German Embassy in Paris, was assassinated by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Polish Jew. Grynszpan had received a letter from his sister in which she stated that the Grynszpan family, together with all Polish Jews living in Germany, had been arrested and deported to Poland. Seeking revenge for the suffering of his family, Grynszpan, who was 17 years old, bought a hand gun, went to the German Embassy, and shot Vom Rath, who later died. Supposedly in retaliation, the Nazis determined that all places of Jewish worship in Germany and Austria were to be destroyed. In reality, plans for such a riot had been made long before, and only awaited the appropriate moment for execution. Thus, on November 9. 1938, a “spontaneous” demonstration of anger was carried out. In fifteen hours, 101 synagogues were destroyed by fire, and seventy-six others were demolished. Seventy-five hundred Jewish-owned stores were destroyed. The streets were filled with broken glass; thus the name given to this event was Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass.” Then the government decided that the Jews would have to pay an “atonement payment” for having caused the damage. Millions of dollars had to be paid by the Jews and their insurance companies to the Nazi government. A new stage In the process of death had begun. The following selection is taken from the docunovel Holocaust by Gerald Green. Although the characters may be fictional, the story is true.
T
he world now knows it as Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass. It marked the true beginning of the destruction of our people. I saw it; I was in the midst of it… The cowardly bastards came down the street on which Grandpa had his bookstore. Smashed windows. Burned merchandise. Beat up any Jew they could lay their hands on. Two men who tried to fight back were beaten to death on the spot —Mr. Cohen, the furrier, and Mr. Seligman, who ran a dry-goods shop. They broke the window with the gold lettering: H. PALITZ BOOKSTORE. Grandpa was a tough old bird. Like my mother, he was convinced—even at this late date!—that he was a better German than they were, that his Iron Cross would protect him, that some miracle from Heaven would make them go away So he came out of the store waving his cane, after the first brick had shattered the glass, and shouted at them to go away. The mob answered by throwing his books into the street—rare editions, old maps, everything—and setting them afire. They called him an old kike, knocked him down, beat his back with canes. He kept protesting that he was Captain Heinrich Palitz, formerly of the Second Berlin Machine Gun Regiment. It made them angrier. My grandmother
looked from the window, screaming for the police. Three Berlin policemen stood on the far corner and watched as the gang, seven or eight, knocked Grandpa down again and again, turned his head into a bloody pulp, ripped his jacket off. One of them made him get on all fours and rode him, as if he were a horse. Then he saw Heinz Muller…Factory worker, union man, he was some kind of minor official in the local Nazi Party now. He was in civilian clothing, leading a singing gang. As usual, the Horst Wessel song. They wanted Jewish blood. They dragged Grandpa to his feet—the police were still watching, smiling those flat, cold smiles— and Muller handed my grandfather a toy drum. “You’re such a f— war hero, Palitz,” Muller said. “Lead the parade. Beat the drum, you old Jew liar.” Behind grandfather were a half-dozen other Jewish store owners. Their shops had been smashed, looted, burned. The street was ablaze. That bastard Muller! My grandmother watched, weeping, terrified, as Grandpa began to beat the drum, and the Jewish merchants, with signs reading JUDE hanging on their necks, were paraded down the street. And no one lifted a finger. My grandmother called our house and told us
Source: Green, Gerald. “The Night of Broken Glass.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
413
Unit IV: READING #9
414
Map 2. The destruction of synagogues throughout Austria and Germany was widespread. Reprinted from Atlas of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.
what was happening. We knew. We could hear glass shattering all over our neighborhood. My parents stood frozen in the living room. “I shall call the police,” my father said. “This is intolerable. Yes, there are laws against us, but this kind of violence…” My father’s pathetic belief that there still was some kind of justice in Germany almost made me cry. Being a just man, he could not believe otherwise. “We must wait…wait and pray,” my mother said. “It can’t last forever. What good can it do them?” “You can wait.” I said. “I’m going out to get Grandpa.” My mother grabbed my sleeve and tried to hold me back. She was used to having her way, forcing her children to bend to her will. “I forbid it. Rudi! You can’t fight them all!” “Yes,” my father said. “They are looking for excuses to kill us! We mustn’t fight back!” “They’ve got all the excuses they need.” I pulled away from my mother and ran down the stairs. As I was putting on my sweater. Anna came running after me. The street was a wreck. Every store had been smashed. Most were on fire. Mr. Goldbaum, a jeweler, was playing a fire hose against the remains of his
shop. Everything he owned had been stolen. A truck came rumbling by. I grabbed Anna and we hid in an alley. It was an open truck…There were men parading up and down with signs denouncing the Jews. Mr. Seligman, from whom my mother used to buy draperies and bed linen, was lying face down in a pool of blood and broken glass. The truck stopped and the hoodlums jumped off… Then we saw the parade. Grandpa, his head bloodied, one eye closed, was being forced to lead it, beating on the toy drum. Every few steps, he and the other storekeepers would be beaten with clubs and chains… I stepped out of the alley. Beyond the street the sky was turning orange with fires. I could hear women wailing. And more glass breaking, as if they meant to break every Jewish-owned window in Berlin. The mob seemed to be getting weary of its game. Muller’s gang began wandering off. Grandpa was still standing erect, refusing to cry, or beg, or plead. I walked up to him and took his hands. “Grandpa. It’s me. Rudi.” Anna came running out and took his arm.
Source: Green, Gerald. “The Night of Broken Glass.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #9 At the rear of the column of Jews, a drunken young man was rifling pockets — stealing wallets, pens, watches. Muller shouted at him. “Hey. The party says none of that. This is a patriotic demonstration, not a robbery.” “That’s what you think. Muller,” the man said. “You obey orders.” Muller shouted. Then he looked at me in the dim light and walked toward me. There was a moment of recognition, almost human, in his eyes, and I wonder now, could there have been something decent in this man, something that was crushed? After all, he was not, like some of the SS, a gangster or a tramp, a rootless troublemaker; he had a trade, he knew respectable people. What had impelled him to become a brute? I’m not sure I know yet; nor am I sure that it matters any more. An honorable man who turns criminal, especially if he moralizes about it, is perhaps more to be hated than a habitual burglar or murderer… Muller asked if he knew me, and Grandpa replied that I was his grandson, Rudi Weiss. In response, Muller slapped my grandfather’s face and said. “Shut up, you old kike.” “He’s an old man,” I said. “You want to fight someone, fight me. Not a mob, just you and me. Muller.”
Five or six of them gathered around us. Anna hugged Grandpa. Muller rubbed his chin, glared at me through the haze of smoke. People were coughing, doubled over. “Okay, Weiss. Beat it. Take the old s— with you. Get off the street.” I suppose I should have been grateful to him, and to Hans. But something was building up in me. I knew what. Revenge. Some day I wanted the sheer joy of smashing their faces, shaming them, letting them know they could not do this to us. We helped Grandpa to his house. He and my grandmother lived in an apartment over the bookstore. Once he stopped and picked up a burned first edition of Johnson’s dictionary, then an early edition of Faust. He turned the charred pages sadly. “Heinrich, Heinrich,” my grandmother wept. “How could they do this to an old man?” He wiped blood from his forehead, stiffened his back. “I’ll survive.” He looked at the burned books again. “But my books…” “Anna and I will clean up,” I said. But I saw it was useless. He would never sell a book or a print or a map again.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
How do you react to Grynszpan and to his assassination of Vom Rath? Explain.
2.
What do the police do while the Grandfather is being attacked?
3.
How do you think you would have reacted to this situation? Why?
Source: Green, Gerald. “The Night of Broken Glass.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
415
Unit IV: READING #10
regulation for the elimination of the jews from the economic life of germany November 12, 1938 On the basis of the regulation for the implementation of the Four Year Plan of October 18, 1936 (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1, p. 887), the following, is decreed:
§1 1.
From January 1, 1939. Jews (§ 5 of the First Regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, Reichsgesetzblatt. 1. p. 1333) are forbidden to operate retail stores, mail-order houses, or sales agencies, or to carry on a trade (craft) independently.
2.
They are further forbidden, from the same day on, to offer for sale goods or services, to advertise these, or to accept orders at markets of all sorts, fairs or exhibitions.
3.
Jewish trade enterprises (Third Regulation to the Reich Citizenship. Law of June 14. 1938— Reichsgesetzblatt, 1, p. 627) which violate this decree will be closed by police.
§2 416
1.
From January 1. 1939, a Jew can no longer be the head of an enterprise within the meaning of the Law of January 20, 1934, for the Regulation of National Work (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1. p. 45).
2.
Where a Jew is employed in an executive position in a commercial enterprise he may be given notice to leave in six weeks. At the expiration of the term of the notice all claims of the employee based on his contract, especially those concerning pension and compensation rights, become invalid.
§3 1.
A Jew cannot be a member of a cooperative.
2.
The membership of Jews in cooperatives expires on December 31, 1938. No special notice is required.
§4 The Reich Minister of Economy, in coordination with the Ministers concerned, is empowered to publish regulations for the implementation of this decree. He may permit exceptions under the Law if these are required as the result of the transfer of a Jewish enterprise to non-Jewish ownership, for the liquidation of a Jewish enterprise or, in special cases, to ensure essential supplies. Berlin, November 12, 1938 Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan Göring Field Marshal General
Source: “Regulation for Elimination of the Jews from the Economic Life of Germany, November 12, 1938.” Documents on the Holocaust. Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1981. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #11
Excerpts from
heredity in relation to eugenics by
Charles Benedict Davenport Carnegie Institute of Washington, Director, Department of Experimental Evolution, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, NY, Secretary of Eugenics Section American Breeders’Association 1911
E
ugenics is the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding or, as the late Sir Francis Galton expressed it: “The science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race.” The eugenical standpoint is that of the agriculturist who, while recognizing the value of culture, believes that permanent advance is to be made only by securing the best “blood.” Man is an organism — an animal; and the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold true for him also. Unless people accept this simple truth and let it influence marriage selection human progress will cease. (p.1) There is no question that, taken as a whole, the hordes of Jews that are now coming to us from Russia and the extreme southeast of Europe, with their intense individualism and ideals of gain at the cost of any interest, represent the opposite extreme from the early English and the more recent Scandinavian immigration with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and the love of country. (p.216) Summarizing this review of recent conditions of immigration it appears certain that, unless conditions change of themselves or are radically changed, the population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from Southeastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality and less given to burglary, drunkenness and vagrancy than were the original English settlers. Since of the insane in hospitals there were relatively more foreign-born than native it seems probable that, under present conditions, the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase. (p.219) If increasing attention is paid to the selective elimination at our ports of entry of the actually undesirable (those with a germ plasm that has imbecile, epilectic, insane, criminalistic, alcoholic, and sexually immoral tendencies); if agents in Europe learn the family history of all applicants for naturalization; if the luring of the credulous and suggestible by steamship agents abroad and especially in the southeast of Europe be reduced to its lowest limits, then we may expect to see our population not harmed by this mixture with a more mercurial people. (p.224)
Source: Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (exerpt). Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, NY: Carnegie Institute of Washington; Department of Experimental Evolution; Secretary of Eugenics Section, American Breeders Association, 1911.
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Unit IV: READING #11
Excerpts from
the measurement of intelligence by
Lewis M. Terman Professor of Education, Stanford University 1916
W
hat shall we say of cases like the last two which test at high-grade moronity or at border-line, but are well enough endowed in moral and personal traits to pass as normal in an uncomplicated social environment? According to the classical definition of feeble-mindedness such individuals cannot be considered defectives. Hardly any one would think of them as institutional cases. Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them. They are the world’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. These boys are uneducable beyond the merest rudiments of training. No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable citizens in the true sense of the word. Judged psychologically they cannot be considered normal.
418
It is interesting to note that M.P. and C.P. represent the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial difference in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered enormously significant racial difference in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture. Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often make efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding. (pp. 91-92.)
Source: Terman, Lewis M. The Measurement of Intelligence (excerpt). Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1916. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #11
Excerpt from
a study of american intelligence by
Carl C. Brigham, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology in Princeton University 1923
A
ccording to all evidence available, then, American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive. The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it. There is no reason why legal steps should not be taken which would insure a continuously progressive upward evolution. The steps that should be taken to preserve or increase our present intellectual capacity must of course be dictated by science and not by political expediency. Immigration should not only be restrictive but highly selective. And the revision of the immigration and naturalization laws will only afford a slight relief from our present difficulty. The really important steps are those looking toward the prevention of the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population. If all immigration were stopped now, the decline of the American intelligence would still be inevitable. This is the problem which must be met, and our manner of meeting it will determine the future course of our national life. (p. 210)
QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION During the 1920’s, the United States enacted a series of laws sharply reducing immigration. Are these laws consistent with the inscription engraved in the Statue of Liberty? What impact did these laws have on the inability of European Jews to escape the Holocaust by coming to America?
Source: Brigham, Carl C. A Study of American Intelligence. (excerpt). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1923.
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Unit IV: READING #12
euthanasia: direct medical killing Excerpt from: Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Inc., ©1986. pp. 71-79.
B
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y the spring of 1940 there were six main killing centers—Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Brandenburg, and Hadamar. Typically they were converted mental hospitals or nursing homes; at least one had been a prison. They were in isolated areas and had high walls—some had originally been old castles—so that what happened within could not be readily observed from without. “The unloading of the buses could be done in a way (so that) neither the screams of the patients nor any other occurrences could penetrate to the outside world.” Hitler himself is said to have decided upon the use of carbon monoxide gas as the killing method, on the so-called medical advice of Dr. (Werner) Heyde. The decision followed upon an experiment conducted in early 1940 at Brandenburg, then being converted from a prison into a killing center. Killing by injection (using various combinations of morphine, scopolomine, curare, and prussic acid (cyanide) was directly compared with killing by means of carbon monoxide gas. Karl Brandt, “a very conscientious man (who) took his responsibility very seriously,” requested the experiment; and he and Leonardo Conti administered the injections themselves “as a symbolic action in which the most responsible physicians in the Reich subjected themselves to the practical carrying through of the Führer’s order.” The four or six injected patients (“six at the most”) “died only slowly,” and some had to be injected again. In contrast, the gas worked perfectly. The first Nazi gas chamber had been constructed under the supervision of Christian Wirth, of the SS Criminal Police, lent to the T4* staff. The arrangement included a fake shower room with benches, the gas being inserted from the outside into water pipes with small holes through which the carbon monoxide could escape. Present were two SS chemists with doctoral degrees, one of whom operated the gas. The other, August Becker, told how eighteen to twenty people were led naked into the “shower room”: through a peephole he observed that very quickly “people toppled over, or lay on the benches”—all without “scenes or commotion.” The
room was ventilated within five minutes; SS men then used special stretchers which mechanically shoved the corpses into crematory ovens without contact. The technical demonstration was performed before a select audience of the inner circle of physicians and administrators of the medical killing project. Having been shown the technique, Dr. lrmfried Eberl, newly appointed head of the Brandenburg institution, took over “by himself and on his own responsibility.” Both (Viktor) Brack and (Karl) Brandt expressed their satisfaction with the experiment, the latter stressing that “only doctors should carry out the gassings.” Many of these patients were apparently deceived. A man who worked at the Hadamar killing center told how a patient he had known for many years said to him on the way to the gas chamber, “We will have a real bath now and get other clothes.”63 When patients were not deceived and did resist, they were quickly subdued by physical force, though even this could resemble ordinary treatment of psychiatric patients. What happened next makes clear the doctor’s responsibility for the entire killing sequence: After doors were closed, the air was sucked out of the gas chamber through a ventilator by the same doctor who carried out the earlier “examination.” Then for about ten minutes, carbon monoxide was let in [by that doctor] and its effect observed through a small window. As soon as he thought that those shut in had died, he had the gas chamber emptied. First fresh air was introduced through the ventilator, and the gas was forced out. From the beginning of the gassing until the reopening of the gas chamber took about one hour. The corpses that were to be dissected were removed to a special room. However the great majority of corpses were immediately taken to the ovens and burned there.” Concerning the “humanity” of this form of killing claimed by Brandt, another man who worked
Source: Lifton, Robert J. “‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psyschology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #12 at Hadamar and looked into the gas chamber through a side window spoke of “a horrible sight when the patients gradually collapsed and fell over one another.” and added, “I shall never get this picture out of my mind.” We shall find this sequence, including the doctor’s central role in it, to be strikingly similar to the killing sequence in Auschwitz. Given the medical cover-up of killing, every death certificate had to be falsified. The key principle employed in choosing the false cause of death was medical credibility: assigning a disease consistent with a patient’s prior physical and mental state, a disease that he or she could have contracted. Designated causes of death could include almost anything—infectious diseases, pneumonia, diseases of the heart, lung, brain, or other major organs. Skill at this falsification process was an important part of the “medical experience” of the killing doctors, and younger ones learned it during their “training” with their medical superiors and predecessors. To help them, they were given written guides specifying important details necessary for consistency. One such guide, for instance, focused upon septicemia (bacteria in the bloodstream) as a cause of death, referred to bacterial infection of the skin as a possible source, and listed the sequence of symptoms and therapy to be mentioned. The document included additional useful tips: unclean mental patients often have boils which they scratch; and, “It is most expedient to figure four days for the basic illness [bacterial infection of skin] and five days for the resultant sepsis”; and, this diagnosis “should not be used with patients who are meticulously clean” but “is preferable for young strong patients who smear readily,” but in that case “seven to eight days have to be allowed for the illness to take effect, since their circulation is relatively more resistant.” It is no exaggeration to say that the primary— perhaps the only—medical function of the killing doctors was to determine the most believable falsification of each patient victim’s death certificate. Maintaining these medical illusions required an extensive bureaucracy of deception. Every falsification in this “bloated apparatus” had to be “covered by two more.” For instance, at each killing center, there was a “Special Registry Office,” which had a subdivision whose specific task it was to determine a suitable death date for each patient. On the death certificate prepared by the doctor, the date of death was always omitted, to be provided by this department. On the basis of its “timecards” and “death filed,” it could prevent the recording of large numbers of deaths at a particular place during a particular time sequence. The bureaucracy of deception extended—
logically, one might say—to the ashes of cremated patients, which were haphazardly mixed together so that the urn received by the family of a dead patient contained ashes that were not their relative’s. (Families were told that quick cremation was necessary, especially during wartime for public health reasons.) One of the program’s leaders later said that he objected vehemently “for reasons of piety” when the policy had to be implemented because of a directive that corpses no longer be cremated individually. He claimed to have said to the administrator responsible for the order. “Even if the German people forgive you everything, they will never forgive you this.”69 While one must be skeptical about any such remembered conversation, it could suggest the existence, even then, of a glimmer of awareness of the desecration in this final medical falsification. I have referred to those initial gassings as both experiments and demonstrations; since later testimony—for instance, Brandt’s remarkable statements at the Nuremberg Medical Trial—make clear that they were both. Brandt said that the original plan was to kill people by injecting narcotics, until it was realized that these would cause loss of consciousness but that death would not occur for some time. An alternative suggestion was made by a psychiatrist (presumably Heyde) to use carbon monoxide gas (which, in turn, led to the demonstration just described). Brandt recalled not liking the idea because he felt that “this whole question can only be looked at from a medical point of view,” and that “in my medical imagination carbon monoxide had never played a part.” Killing by gas, that is, made it much more difficult to maintain a medical aura. Brandt was able to change his mind when he recalled a personal experience of carbon monoxide poisoning in which he lost consciousness “without feeling anything.” and realized that carbon monoxide “would be the most humane form of death.” Yet he remained troubled because that method required “a whole change in medical conception” and gave the matter extensive thought “in order to put my own conscience right.” He brought up to Hitler the difference of opinion about the two methods, and later remembered the Fuhrer asking, “Which is the more humane way?” “My answer was clear.” Brandt testified—and other leading physicians in the program agreed. Brandt concluded this segment of testimony with a meditation on medical breakthrough: This is just one example of (what happens) when major advances in medical history are being made. There are cases of an operation being looked on at first with contempt, but then later on one learned it
Source: Lifton, Robert J. “‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psyschology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998.
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Unit IV: READING #12 and carried it out. Here the task required by state authority was added to the medical conception of this problem, and it was necessary to find with good conscience a basic method that could do justice to both of these elements. Allowing for self-serving elements and for retrospective father-son mythology in his early relationship to Hitler, Brandt’s description takes us to the heart of the doctors’ embrace of medicalized killing.
The Bureaucracy of Medical Deception
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Throughout the “euthanasia” project, the pattern was for senior doctors to make policy and render decisions, to serve as high consultants and experts, while younger doctors did the actual killing. That was the message from Dr. Hans F. in connection with the killing of children, even if somewhat older chief doctors provided either orders or deadly innuendos. The pattern was still more true in regard to adult patients. Where senior doctors were involved in killing, they soon gave way to younger men, and some of the young doctors were quickly elevated to senior status. Killing doctors came to be chosen apparently for their combination of inexperience and political enthusiasm. At Brandenburg, for instance, Dr. (Irmfried) Eberl was twenty-nine years old when he learned to operate the gassing mechanism. The man later assigned to assist him, Dr. Aquilin Ullrich, was only twenty-six. Ullrich testified that his duties hardly required medical knowledge. He and Eberl did no more than make a “superficial inspection” of the naked patients in the anteroom of the gas chamber, which at the time he found “inexplicable”; subsequently he came to realize that “the presence of the physician at that moment was used to calm the mentally ill and camouflage the killing process.”60 Another doctor, who first worked as an assistant at a killing center, was informed by his immediate superior that “ a physician, according to the law, had the last say, and he therefore had to re-examine the arrivals.” Later he was informed by Dr. [Paul] Nitsche, one of the “senior experts,” that these pro forma “examinations before the death chamber served mainly to calm the conscience of the doctor who has to carry out the killing.” The Nazis were clearly aware of the psychological importance of the medical “as if” situation to the doctors involved. For the most part, the “examination” consisted of the doctor simply checking on the fact that patient and chart coincided—the right person was being killed—and using the occasion to help decide which false diagnosis would be appropriate (consistent with
the patient’s record and appearance) for the death certificates soon to be issued. Reversing a decision about a patient’s death at that point was extremely rare, probably limited only to a few discovered to have been war casualties of some kind.62 The fundamental significance of that pseudo examination was medical legitimation of murder. Inevitably, there were slip-ups in the bureaucracy of deception: a family receiving two urns; or being told that a patient, whose appendix had been removed earlier, had died of appendicitis, or being notified of the death of a patient who had not actually been killed and was alive and physically well. Or people learned (especially as church groups with national contacts began to look into the matter) of the suspicious deaths of a group of patients sent out together from the same mental hospital; or of letters received by families, at the same time in various parts of Germany, announcing the deaths of patients who were known to be physically healthy shortly after their arrival at a particular institution. In addition, people working at killing centers would drink heavily at nearby bars and sometimes reveal aspects of what they were doing. Local people employed in “euthanasia” station kitchens and laundries also spread the word. Sometimes transfer procedures were conducted where they could be seen—even on occasion in a town marketplace—so that many people witnessed the force used on some recalcitrant victims. And there was direct sensory evidence of the killing that no bureaucratic deception could eliminate: “The heavy smoke from the crematory building is said to be visible over Hadamar every day.” And: “At full capacity…(the chimneys at Hartheim) smoked day and night. Locks of hair went up through the chimneys and landed in the street.“ These bureaucratic oversights were mentioned in Nazi documents critical of the way the program was run and urging that “more sensitivity be exercised in carrying out these activities.” But the “mistakes” were partly a product of the regime’s own conflicts and contradictions about its principle of secrecy. In spite of the elaborate cover-up at every level and the pledge to eternal secrecy taken by all involved in the killing, at several of the killing centers outsiders—for example, the local Gauleiter (district leader) and other prominent Nazi personages at Hartheim—were received and, on some occasions, permitted to witness the killing of patients. There were inconsistencies concerning who was permitted to know everything and who was not. While the nature of the medical killing project was not openly discussed, it was not completely withheld either. Courses consistent with the “euthanasia”
Source: Lifton, Robert J. “‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psyschology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #12 program were given at large mental hospitals such as Eglfing-Haar, not an official killing center but a place where mental patients were nonetheless killed. An estimated twenty thousand Nazi military and civilian leaders and SS men were thus exposed to films and “case demonstrations” of highly regressed patients, especially Jewish patients, as “life unworthy of life”: recall Dr. (Hermann) Pfannmüller’s demonstration of the “most simple method” of starving a child to death. These and other bureaucratic contradictions had to do with uncertainty concerning the official view of the program as necessary but difficult for the population to accept—that view accompanied by the sense that the program was on the one hand dirty, ugly, and unacceptable (to be hidden at all costs) and on the other a liberating therapy for the race (and therefore openly demonstrable). It is quite possible that the Nazi doctors and their companions in the bureaucracy of deception held all three images at once… From the beginning…Jewish patients were viewed as a group apart. They were, before long, caught up in broader Nazi extermination policies. That was the time (late 1939 to early 1940) when the doctrine of “elimination [in the sense of removal] of Judaism as a whole” was being developed. Soon after Poland was overrun by German armies (September 1939). [Reinhardt] Heydrich formulated a plan to build a “Jewish reservation” in Lublin. Although this plan never materialized, deportation trains left for Poland during the winter of 1939-40, carrying Jews (who were not mental patients) from Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia. Though the Madagascar Plan (for the use of that island as a “reservation” for Jews) was still being given some consideration, there was in Party circles increasing talk of a “radical solution” (Radikalerlösung) for the “Jewish problem” which developed into the so-called Final Solution (Endlösung). Under T4, Jewish inmates of institutions in Germany did not have to meet the ordinary criteria for medical killing (mental deficiency or schizophrenia, length of hospitalization, capacity to work, etc.). For them, “no special consultations or discussions…were necessary”: “The total extermination of this group of asylum inmates was the logical consequence of the ‘radical solution’ of the Jewish problem being embarked upon.” Only at this point does direct medical killing provide an exact prefiguring of the Final Solution: Jews were to be killed—to the last man, woman, and child — simply because they were Jews. For the Nazis, Jewish mental patients were unique among all Nazi victims in that they could embody both “dangerous
genes” in an individual medical sense, and “racial poison” in a collective ethnic sense. Systematic T4 treatment of German Jews began in April 1940, with a proclamation from the Reich Interior Ministry that, within three weeks, all Jewish patients were to be inventoried. In June, the first gassings of Jews took place, as two hundred men, women, and children died in the Brandenburg facility, having been transported there in six Gekrat buses from the Berlin-Buch mental institution. There were more killings in July. On 30 August, another directive from the Interior Ministry ordered that Jews were to be transferred to various centers, depending on their geographic location. It was explained that employees and relatives of Aryan patients had complained about being treated and housed with Jews.76 The Bavarian collection center was Eglfing-Haar, where Dr. (Hermann) Pfannmüller had once declared proudly: “No Jews are allowed in my institution!” Now the Jews transferred in were placed in two special houses (where they were separated by sex rather than degree of illness) and thrust into propaganda—film roles depicting them as “typical Jews” and “the scum of humanity.” This segregation reflected the general policy that, in Schmidt’s ironic words,“‘Aryan’ mental patients could not be expected to die together with Jewish patients, much less live together.” In the fall of 1940, Jewish patients began to be transported to Nazi-occupied Poland as part of the policy of removing all Jews from Germany. In December, it was announced that henceforth Jewish patients would be transferred to a facility for mentally impaired children in Bendorf near Neuwied in the Rhineland. This was a privately owned Jewish institution going back to 1869… From September 1939, when the war began, with German troops pushing eastward, the SS began to shoot inmates (of whatever race or nationality) of mental hospitals to empty them for the use of soldiers. For example, a hospital in Stralsund, an eastern German city on the Baltic Sea, was emptied by December 1939, and its patients were taken to Danzig to be shot. Their bodies were buried by Polish prisoners, who themselves were then shot. In ChelmLubielski, in the General Government of Poland, patients were shot en masse by SS troops, sometimes after having been chased through the asylum, and then buried in mass graves… More closely related to T4, the Germans set up two psychiatric extermination facilities at MeseritzObrawalde and Tiegenhof, both in the old Prussian territory of Pomerania. The policy was first to
Source: Lifton, Robert J. “‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psyschology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998.
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Unit IV: READING #12 massacre Polish patients, then bring German patients into the emptied facility, and finally to kill them as well by such methods as shooting, gassing, injection, starvation, or drugs given with food. Standard T4 letters of condolence were sent to families. There is some evidence that physically or mentally impaired German soldiers were also given “euthanasia” in both institutions… Carbon monoxide gas was increasingly resorted to…During two weeks in May and June of 1940, 1,558 mental patients from East Prussia were gassed in vans at a transit camp in Soldau. The killings were carried out by “the itinerant euthanasia squad known as Sonderkommando Lange (its commander),” and represented an early blending of three elements of the Final Solution: the “euthanasia” program, laboratory science and SS technology (contributing to innovations in gassing), and Einsatzgruppen units (here working with the new gassing technology).
69. 70.
72. 73. 74.
References
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55. Heyde Trial, p. 380. 56. Heyde testimony. 12 October-22 December 1961, Heyde Trial, pp. 292-93. 57. Becker testimony. 21 April 1960. Heyde Trial. pp. 293-95. 58. Brandt testimony (English translation). Nuremberg. I October 1945 (NationalArchives). 59. Heyde Trial. pp. 388-89. 255-56, 268-69. 306 (respectively). Helmut Ehrhardt. Euthanasie und die Vernichtung “lebensunwerien” Lebens (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag. 1965). p. 35. Klee, “Euthanasie” (3). pp. 226-32. For a discussion of the age of members and leaders of the Nazi party, see Michael Kater. The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders. 1919-1945 (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1983), pp. 139-48. 60. Ullrich testimony. 4-27 September 1961. Heyde Trial. p. 388. 61. Testimony of Hans Bodo Gorgass, 15 August 1960, Heyde Trial, pp. 383-44. 62. Heyde Trial, pp. 447-48. 63. Testimony of Paul Reuter, 14-15 March 1946. Heyde Trial. p. 391. 64. Trial commentary. Heyde Trial. p. 391. 65. Ernst Klee. “Tot und seziert: Bilder cities Albums und die Schrecken der Euthanasie.” Die Zeit. 5 October 1984. 66. Testimony of Benedikt Hartls, 9 March 1946. Heyde Trial. p. 394. 67. Heyde Trial. pp. 396—99: see also pp. 399-406. 68. Ernst Klee, “Tot und seziert: Bilder tines Albums und die Schrecken der Euthanasic. “
75. 76. 77. 78. 83.
Die Zeit. 5 October 1984. pp. 409-16; Klee, “Euthanasie” (31, p. 344). Gerhard Bohne testimony. 10 September 1959. Heyde Trial. p. 417. Mitscherlich and Mielke. Doctors (43). p. 105; Florian Zehethofer, “Das Euthanasie-problem im Dritten Reicham Beispiel Schloss Hartheim (1938-1945).” Oberreuchusche Heimatsblatter 32 (1978):55; Heyde Trial, 360-68. On the “euthanasia” project’s public relations efforts. see Klee, “Euthanasie” (3). pp. 76-77. 163-65. 342-44 Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich 1933-1945 (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag. 1960). p. 35. On the formulation of the Final Solution, see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975). pp. 70-128; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1984 [19821); Raul Hilberg. The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle. 1967 [19611), pp. 257-66. Heyde Trial commentary. p. 45 1. Klee. “Euthanasie” [31. pp. 258-60. Hermann Pfannmuller, quoted in Schmidt, Selektion 371, p. 68. Ibid., p. 67. Klee, “Euthanasie” (3), pp. 401-16.
Source: Lifton, Robert J. “‘Euthanasia’: Direct Medical Killing.” The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psyschology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986. 71-79, in 50 Years Ago: Remembering Voices That Were Silenced. Section 4. Washington, DC: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #13
GHETTO LIFE: THROUGH OUR EYES “People started to talk about the ghetto. I had no idea what it meant…” Liliana (age 13)
I
n the fall of 1939, the Nazis began to establish ghettos in Poland and throughout Eastern Europe. These were streets, usually in a poor and run-down area of a city to which all the Jews in the city were shipped and which they could not leave. The purpose of the ghetto was to isolate the Jews from the general population and to make it easier to control their lives. The ghettos were terribly over-crowded. At times, within an area where only 7,000 people had previously lived, some 30,000 were now crowded. The first ghettos were established within the area of occupied central Poland conquered by the Germans, called “General Government.” The Lodz ghetto held about 165,000 Jews. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest one and held as many as 450,000. The Judenrat (Jewish councils) were appointed by the Nazi authorities to run the ghettos. They were responsible to the Nazis and had to execute their orders. Refusal to obey meant severe punishment and often death. They were forced to collect large sums of money from the Jews. They had to supply Jewish men for forced labor. They had to organize the transfer of the Jews from the ghettos to places of their so-called “resettlement”.
“I’ve learned here to appreciate ordinary things. Things that, if we had them when we were still free, we didn’t notice at all. Like riding a bus or train, or walking freely along the road to the water, say or go buy ice cream. Such an ordinary thing and it’s out of our reach.” Charlotte (age 14)
“I feel as if I were in a box. There is no air to breathe. Wherever you go you encounter a gate that hems you in … I feel that I have been robbed, my freedom is being robbed from me, my home, and the familiar Vilna streets I love so much. I have been cut off from all that is dear and precious to me.”
Source: Tatelbaum, Itzhak. “Ghetto Life: Through Our Lives” (excerpt). Children Witness The Holocaust.
Yitskhok (age 15)
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Unit IV: READING #13
“More and more people were robbed on the streets, especially for food. It happened to me once. I was coming home with a loaf of bread under my arm, when a young man ran up to me, grabbed the bread, bit off a big piece, and threw the rest back to me. Everything happened so fast that I did not have time to pick up the rest of the loaf; a group of small children grabbed it and ate it. I ran home, crying and shaking.” Liliana
Ghetto Theft
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“I grab. I’m beaten for the bread, But whips and sticks can’t hurt me. What’s life to me, what’s death to me? There’s nothing left to scare me. Here come a couple down the street. It’s night—no one can see me. I jump, I grab, and then they scream. Too late; my teeth have bitten. I thank you, God, for every night That you have given man. For while they sleep, my day begins. A life of ghetto thieving.”
From Tomorrow On by Motele (age 12)
“From tomorrow on, I shall be sad— From tomorrow on. Today I will be gay. What’s the use of sadness—tell me that. Because the evil winds begin to blow? Why should I grieve for tomorrow— today? Tomorrow may be good, so sunny. Tomorrow the sun may shine for us again; We shall no longer need to be sad. From tomorrow on, I shall be sad— From tomorrow on. Not today. No, today I will be glad. And every day, no matter how bitter it be, I will say: From tomorrow on, I shall be sad Not today.”
“She ate only a tiny piece, wrapping the rest in a bit of newspaper: “This will be for my little brother.”
Irene, Warsaw ghetto
“I think what peculiarly ugly things occur in the ghetto! On the one hand, the ugliness of stealing a pot of food, and on the other to strike a woman crudely in the face because she is probably hungry.” Yitskhok (age 15)
Source: Tatelbaum, Itzhak. “Ghetto Life: Through Our Lives” (excerpt). Children Witness The Holocaust. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #14
THE JUDENRAT CHAIRMAN’S LAST DIARY ENTRIES Adam Czerniakow, an engineer who was selected by the Nazis to serve as the chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat, constantly negotiated with his Nazi overlords to lighten the burden on the ghetto population. When he learned in July 1942 that all his efforts had been in vain and that the deportations were about to begin, Czerniakow wrote the last entry in his diary and a few hours later committed suicide. The following is extracted from The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow: Prelude to Doom, published by Stein and Day, New York, in 1979, and reprinted by permission of Scarborough House, Chelsea, Michigan.
J
ULY 18, 1942—In the morning with Lejkin to Brandt and Mende. A day full of foreboding. Rumors that the deportations will start on Monday evening (All?!). I asked the Kommissar whether he knew anything about it. He replied that he did not and that he did not believe the rumors. In the meantime panic in the Quarter; some speak of deportations, others of a pogrom. Today and tomorrow we are to empty the Synagogue for the foreign Jews to move in… JULY 19, 1942—In the morning at the Community. Incredible panic in the city. Kohn, Heller, and Ehrlich are spreading terrifying rumors, creating the impression that it is all false propaganda. I wish it were so. On the other hand, there is talk of about 40 railroad cars ready and waiting. It transpired that 20 of them have been prepared on SS orders for 720 workers leaving tomorrow for a camp. Kohn claims that the deportation is to commence tomorrow at 8 p.m. with 3,000 Jews from the Little Ghetto (Sliska Street). He himself and his family slipped away to Otwock. Others did the same… Because of the panic I drove through the streets of the entire Quarter. I visited 3 playgrounds. I do not know whether I managed to calm the population, but I did my best. I try to hearten the delegations which come to see me. What it costs me they do not see. Today I took 2 headache powders, another pain reliever, and a sedative, but my head is still splitting. I am trying not to let the smile leave my face. JULY 20, 1942—In the morning at 7:30 at the Gestapo. I asked Mende how much truth there was in the rumors. He replied that he had heard nothing. I turned to Brandt; he also knew nothing. When asked whether it could happen, he replied that he knew of no such scheme. Uncertain, I left his office. I proceeded to his chief, Kommissar Bohm. He told me that this was not his department but Hoeheman
(Hoffman) might say something about the rumors. I mentioned that according to rumor, the deportation is to start tonight at 7:30. He replied that he would be bound to know something if it were about to happen. Not seeing any other way out, I went to the deputy chief of Section III, Scherer. He expressed his surprise hearing the rumor and informed me that he too knew nothing about it. Finally, I asked whether I could tell the population that their fears were groundless. He replied that I could and that all the talk was Quatsch and Unsinn [utter nonsense). I ordered Lejkin to make the public announcement through the precinct police stations. I drove to Auerswald. He informed me that he reported everything to the SS Polizeifuhrer. Meanwhile, First went to see Jesuiter and Schlederer, who expressed their indignation that the rumors were being spread and promised an investigation… JULY 22,1940 (sic)—In the morning at 7:30 at the Community. The borders of the Small Ghetto surrounded by a special unit in addition to the regular one. Sturmbannfuhrer Hofle SS and associates came at 10 o’clock. We disconnected the telephone. Children were moved from the playground opposite the Community building. We were told that all the Jews irrespective of sex and age, with certain exceptions, will be deported to the East. By 4 p.m. today a contingent of 6,000 people must be provided. And this (at the minimum) will be the daily quota. We were ordered to vacate a building at 103 Zelazna Street for the German personnel who will be carrying out the deportation. The furniture was kept where it was. As the Council staff with their wives and children are exempted from deportation, I asked that the JSS personnel, craftsmen, and garbage collectors, etc. also be excluded. This was granted. I requested the release of Gepner, Rozen,
Source: Czerniakow, Adam “The Judenrat Chairman’s Last Diary Entries.” The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow. New York: Stein and Day, 1979.
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Unit IV: READING #14 Sztoleman, Drybinski, Winter, Kobryner, which was approved. By 3:45 p.m. everyone but Rozen is already back in the ghetto. In the afternoon Lejkin sent a message that a piece of glass has allegedly been thrown at a police car. They warned us that if this were to happen again our hostages would be shot. The most tragic dilemma is the problem of children in orphanages, etc. I raised this issue— perhaps something can be done… Sturmbannführer Hofle (Beauftragter (plenipotentiary) in charge of deportation) asked me into his office and informed me that for the time being my wife was free, but if the deportation were impeded in any way, she would be the first one to be shot as a hostage.
JULY 23, 1942—In the morning at the Community. Worthoff from the deportation staff came and we discussed several problems. He exempted the vocational school students from deportation. The husbands of working women as well. He told me to take up the matter of orphans with Hofle. The same with reference to craftsmen. When I asked for the number of days per week in which the operation would be carried on, the answer was 7 days a week. Throughout the town a great rush to start new workshops. A sewing machine can save a life. It is 3 o’clock. So far 4,000 are ready to go. The orders are that there must be 9,000 by 4 o’clock. Some officials came to the post office and issued instructions that all incoming letters and parcels be diverted to the Pawiak (prison).
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Source: Czerniakow, Adam “The Judenrat Chairman’s Last Diary Entries.” The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow. New York: Stein and Day, 1979. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #15
DEATH AND LIFE IN THE EAST EUROPEAN GHETTOS Excerpt from
Lucy S. Dawidowicz The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., pp. 197-222.
A
s soon as the Germans occupied Poland, their Einsatzgruppen began to direct a flow of human traffic that soon radically altered the age-old patterns of Jewish settlement in Poland. The Jews were driven from hundreds of localities in the Wartheland. They were expelled from thousands of small towns and villages throughout Poland and sent to nearby big cities. In Cracow, the ancient residence of the kings of Poland, the prewar Jewish population of 56,000 swelled to 68,000 as Jews in the neighboring small towns and villages fled to the big city. When Cracow was designated as the capital of the Generalgouvernement. Governor Frank ordered the “voluntary departure” of all Jews, except for those…”economically indispensable,” but only a few thousand—refugees from elsewhere—complied. After three months, the Germans took matters into their own hands: in one day they expelled 32,000 Jews. In hundreds of small towns ancient Jewish communities were uprooted. The fate of the Jews of Aleksandrow, seven miles west of Lodz, was typical. Aleksandrow, one-fourth of whose twelve thousand residents were Jews, was the hosiery center of Poland. It was also the seat of the Aleksanderer rebbe, one of the most distinguished hasidic dynasties in all Poland, and the hasidim gave a special Jewish character to the town. The Germans entered Aleksandrow on September 7 and the next day burned down its synagogues. After three months of terror, arrests, shootings, expropriations, impressments into forced labor, the Jews were expelled on December 17, 1939. In the depths of the Polish winter, they were marched out on the highway, men, women, children, and infants, the hale and the halt, with the few belongings they were permitted to take in sacks and baby carriages, wheelbarrows and pushcarts, bicycles, and sleds. The nearest town was Glowno, on the border of the incorporated area and the Generalgouvernement, which most managed to reach. Wayworn, some eventually arrived in Lodz, others in Warsaw. Within a few months of the German occupation, thousands of Jewish settlements were erased from the map of Poland, their inhabitants ejected without notice, forbidden to take bare necessities, condemned to exposure, hunger, and homelessness. By the end of
1940, Warsaw had taken in 78,000 refugees from Lodz, Kalisz, and some 700 other places in the Wartheland. Piotrkow’s Jewish population swelled from 8,000 to nearly 12,000 with the accretion of refugees. Some 330,000 Jews—one-tenth of the Jews in Poland — became homeless refugees, beggars of bread and shelter, candidates for disease and death. The very moment the Germans entered a town or city, they turned the Jews into outcasts of society. On entering Warsaw, the Germans agreed to distribute soup to the hungry population, having extracted one million zlotys from the municipal administration for that purpose. The agreement stipulated that all the hungry in the city, without exception, were to benefit. Yet immediately the Germans began to eject the Jews from the soup lines, calling upon the Poles on the line to do the same, “because the Jews deprive the Poles of their spoonful of soup.” It was interesting to observe, wrote an eyewitness, how quickly the brotherhood born under the continuous danger of death disappeared and how quickly the difference between rich and poor. Christian and Jew once again became apparent. Right away the Germans started to confiscate Jewish businesses and industry and to seal off Jewish retail stores for the disposal of either the military occupation or the SS. Sometimes Jewish shops were ordered to be opened only so that they could be plundered and robbed. In large manufacturing centers military trucks carried off the goods of Jewish factories and stores. In small communities Jews were ordered to bring in all their gold and jewelry under threat of death. Hostages were taken to enforce the extortion of large sums of money from the Jewish community, but were seldom released even after the contribution had been delivered. Terror enveloped the Jews. The Germans reenacted the Kristallnacht in every town and city they invaded and occupied. All over Poland synagogues went up in flames. (Those spared the fire were desecrated, turned into stables, garages, and public latrines.) Everywhere the Germans organized programs, rounding up the nonJewish population to witness and learn how to mock, abuse, injure, and murder Jews. Unbridled killing and senseless violence became daily commonplaces for the
Source: Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222.
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Unit IV: READING #15
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Jews; the fear of sudden death became normal and habitual. German terror in the Generalgouvernement in 1939 was wild and wanton… Everywhere the terror was aggravated by the sadism of the SS. In Czestochowa, on a frosty night in January 1940, the police surrounded a densely populated Jewish area, shouting “Juden raus!” Thousands of half-naked men and women were assembled in a large square and beaten to bleeding. Then they were kept standing for hours in the biting frost. Others — especially young girls — were taken into the synagogue now transformed into police headquarters, forced to undress, sexually shamed, and tortured. In Kowel, which the Germans occupied a few days after the attack on Russia, they arrested a beloved hasidic rebbe, tortured him, and, in an act of mythic Chinese savagery, displayed his head for several days in the window of a main-street store. The refinements of cruelty were reserved especially for pious Jews and rabbis, whose traditional Jewish garb — hat and long coat — and whose beard and sidelocks identified them as quintessentially Jewish. (In Germany the National Socialists had often failed to distinguish Jews from “Aryans” by “racial” features. During the High Holy DAys of 1932, a Nazi gang, bent on anti-Jewish violence, mistakenly beat up “Aryans.”) The Germans delibertly chose observant Jews to force them to desecrate and destroy the sacred articles of Judaism, even to set fire to synagogues… German terror was not exercised just in play, it was used also to extract work. Random seizures of Jews of the streets and even from their homes for forced labor began spontaneously, as it were, long before October 26, 1939, when {Hans} Frank issued a decree making forced labor compulsory for all Jews aged fourteen through sixty. Jews were seized to clean the streets of rubble, to scrub the floors of German residences, to haul and move, load and unload, to labor beyond fatigue. Sometimes they were released at the day’s end and allowed to return home, but more likely they were kept for a week or two, incommunicado, unable to inform their families of their whereabouts or even of their very existence. As the Germans consolidated their position in Poland, they set up labor camps outside the big cities, some of which — Treblinka and Majdanek — eventually became annihilation camps. Teams of forced laborers were assigned for periods of weeks and even months to construct these camps. After a stint of forest clearing, marsh draining, ditch digging, quarrying at these forced-labor installations, a normally robust man returned home sick, aged, and wasted. “Cursed Nazism now brings us physical slavery as well,” observed Chaim Kaplan in his diary on September 14, 1940… On November 23, 1939, {Hans} Frank issued an ordinance prescribing arm bands for all Jewish men and women in the Generalgouvernement over ten years of
age — a white band, at least ten centimeters wide, with the Star of David, to be worn on the right sleeve of both inner and outer clothing. Jews were being concentrated and identified, so that none would escape the evertightening meshes of German control. On November 28, 1939, Frank issued a decree ordering the formation in each city of Judenrat, whose membership roster was to be submitted to German officals for approval. In many places the decree came after the fact, for (Reinhardt) Heydrich’s instructions to the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen on September 21, 1939, had already been put in force. Frank’s order specified that the Judenrat was obliged to accept German orders and was answerable for their conscientious execution. Furthermore, it stipulated that all Jews had to obey the directives that the Judenrat issued to implement German orders. The next step was de facto ghettoization, soon to become de jure. One of the first ventures to establish a twentieth-century ghetto occurred in Warsaw, where a Judenrat had already been set up on Gestapo instructions since early October. A month later, on Saturday noon of November 4, 1939, the SS ordered Adam Czerniakow, chairmnan of the Warsaw Judenrat, to summon all twenty-four members to an emergency meeting at 4:00 p.m. At the appointed time, sixteen or seventeen had arrived and were waiting apprehensively. At 4:15, eight armed Gestapo officers burst in. After a roll call, the commanding officer gave those present half an hour to assemble all twenty-four members and all twenty-four alternates. People randomly available in the building and passerby were impressed to join the meeting. When the Gestapo officer returned, this time with some fifty men, he did not check credentials, but simply lined up the Judenrat members in one row and the putative “alternates” in another. He then read a decree supposedly issued by the army Command that ordered all Jews of Warsaw to move within three days into an area that was to be designed as a Jewish ghetto. The twenty-four alternates were then removed as hostages, with the warning that they would be shot if the Judenrat failed to comply with the order as specified. The Germans having left shortly before 7:00 p.m. the hour of the curfew, the Judenrat decided to reconvene early next morning. Few slept that night and they return the next morning tense and fatigued. Shmuel (Artur) Zygelboym, the representative of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund, held that the Judenrat had to refuse to carry out the order. How could they otherwise acquit themselves before them community and their children? But he received little support, for the majority feared that if they refused, the Germans would themselves forcibly carry out the ghettoization. What then of their women and children? A sense of their tragic destiny possessed them. Men wept. Still, agreeing that they must try to halt the establishment of a ghetto, they sent a delegation to
Source: Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #15 General Neumann, the top military officer in Warsaw. Neumann, astonished at this information, denied that he had issued any such order asked the Judenrat to withhold action until he had investigated the matter. A few hours later, the Gestapo summoned Czerniakow. Dr. Henryk Shoshkes, a member of the Judenrat, went along to give him moral support. The Gestapo officer was enraged because, by appealing to General Neumann, the Judenrat had circumvented his authority and disobeyed his warnings to deal only with the Gestapo. He savagely beat both men, while armed Gestapo men looked on. After Czerniakow apologized, the Gestapo officer, thus appeased, calmed down, even relenting sufficiently to negotiate minor expansions of the ghetto and concede a few streets to the Jews. Meanwhile, though Warsaw had no newspapers and no radio, news about the impending disaster swept through the Jewish community. Panic and terror seized the population. People with money and means started to look for apartments within the designated area. Thousands upon thousands of Jews besieged the offices of the kehilla, now Judenrat, pleading, weeping, clamoring for protection, for guidance, for instructions. Inside, the debate over the Judenrat’s course of action continued. The Germans had not yet officially promulgated the order. On Monday, the day before the ghetto deadline, the crowds beleaguering the kehilla swelled to some ten thousand. Zygelboym decided to address them. First, Shoshkes described the situation as it then stood. Zygelboym (thereupon exhorted his listeners to courage and dignity, calling on them to remain in their homes, to resist until they were forcibly moved. No one, he said, should go voluntarily into a ghetto. Some in the crowd, probably a following of Bundists, responded warmly, but the record is silent about the reaction of the whole populace. Immediately thereafter, the Judenrat reconvened its session, while some four hundred young men, assembled as couriers to inform and instruct the Jewish population about the move into the ghetto, awaited orders. Zygelboym once again advocated resistance, but the majority held that failure to comply would bring about ghettoization and reprisals. Zygelboym then submitted his resignation. (Zygelboym’s appeal for passive resistance spelled the end of his career in Warsaw. The Gestapo began to hunt for him. Two months later, he fled Poland.) Suddenly the ghetto order was withdrawn. No one knows why—perhaps as the result of a confrontation between the German army and the SS. But the SS retreat was only de jure, because they had started actually to circumscribe a ghetto. As early as October barbed wire had enclosed the main streets of dense Jewish population. In December 1939 the Judenrat was compelled to set up large wooden signs, reading “Danger Epidemic Zone,” at thirty-four street corners leading into the heart of the Jewish quarter. In the spring of 1940 these entries were walled up, restricting
and hindering movement between the Jewish quarter and the rest of Warsaw. The world of the Warsaw Jews was becoming a prison. Throughout Poland the Germans began to experiment with ghettos. The first try was in Piotrkow in October 1939, but the plan was abandoned then and a ghetto was not established until as late as March 1942. Detailed plans for a ghetto in Lodz were ready in December 1939, approved in February 1940, confirmed by Berlin in April; on May 1. 1940. the Lodz ghetto, with over 160,000 Jews, was sealed off. In Warsaw the ghetto walls began to be constructed in the summer of 1940, and by November 1940 nearly half a million Jews were enclosed and locked within its walls and guarded gates. Warsaw and Lodz, with the largest Jewish populations, were the most tightly, almost hermetically, sealed ghettos. Some ghettos had stone or brick walls, others had wooden fences with barbed wire entanglements. The Cracow ghetto was enclosed within walls in the form of Jewish tombstones, symbols of a terrifying literal character. Some ghettos, like Radom, Chelm, Kielce, with populations ranging from 15,000 to 25,000 were “open” ghettos, with access to other parts of town. In the Eastern areas, ghettos were established soon after the first sweep of the Einsatzgruppen and were subject to the same regulations that obtained in die General gouvernement. In most communities there were actually two ghettos—the main ghetto and a so-called small or second ghetto, which served the Germans as a transit area. The ghetto was an evil decree. Like sinners and criminals, Chaim Kaplan noted on November 13, 1940, “we are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race.” Moving into the ghetto was everywhere a day of lamentation, a nightmare experience. Endless processions of weary men and women, babies in their arms, children at their sides, with bags, sacks, bedrolls on their backs and around their necks, the miserable remnants of their belongings loaded on carts, wheelbarrows, or makeshift conveyances, leftovers of their past life, artifacts of a vanishing civilization, pushing, shoving, screaming, groaning, shuffled into the ghettos. Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum observed in his diary on November 8, 1940: “We are returning to the Middle Ages…” The only institution comparable to the Nazi ghettos was the Nazi concentration camp, that “concentrationary universe,” where, in David Rousset’s words, “death lived among the concentrationees at every hour of their existence.” Death bestrode the Nazi ghetto and was its true master, exercising its dominion through hunger, forced labor, and disease… The isolation was compounded by the removal of telephones from private homes. (Radios had long since been confiscated.) Mail within the General gouvernement and outside was erratic, undepend-able,
Source: Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222.
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Unit IV: READING #15 and censored (letters had to be written in either Polish or German). Once the Jews were inside the ghetto, the Judenrat had to assume postal functions. Telegrams and cables could be sent only through the Judenrat and required Gestapo approval. Parcels of food and clothing were more often than not confiscated by the Germans before they ever reached the ghetto post office. The Germans confiscated all presses and radios; their possession was punishable by death. The ghetto’s landscape sharpened the sense of isolation and imprisonment. The buildings huddled in a somber gray mass. In Warsaw the park in the former Jewish area had been excised from the ghetto, and just a few trees remained. The only other greenery were flowerpots and boxes on windowsills and balconies. Only one tree grew in the Vilna ghetto. A popular song sentimentalized: For them the square and boulevards, For me a place of misery.
432
The ghettos were located in the oldest, most rundown parts of town, sometimes in outlying areas that lacked the basic facilities of the city proper—paved streets, lighting, adequate sewage, sanitation facilities. Ghetto dwellings were the most dilapidated, often in ruined and devastated condition because of bombings and shellings, looting, and wanton vandalism. The ghetto was congested. The air was fetid: the streets were filthy… Overcrowding precipitated the breakdown of sanitation. Three and four families lived in space adequate for one. Toilets, running water, all plumbing and sewage facilities were taxed beyond capacity and beyond repair. The mephitic exhalations of latrines and broken toilets poisoned the air. In the long winters of bitter Polish cold, the water in the pipes froze. Staying warm took priority over cleanliness. Fuel was as scarce as disinfectants, and dearer. In Warsaw coal was called “black pearls…” Hunger subjugated the ghetto. German policy was to starve the Jews, and starvation stalked the great ghettos of the General gouvemement… Bread and potatoes were basic subsistence. The bread was at best, rough and coarse, often stale, sometimes moldy or compounded of foreign bodies, like sand… Its price rose and fell according to supply and demand. In prewar days it cost just groszy. In 1940 the price of a kilogram of bread hovered around 4 zlotys. Potatoes, Chaim Kaplan noted, are “our whole life. When I am alone in my room for a few moments of quiet, the echo of that word continues in my ears. Even in my dreams it visits me.” Before the war, 100 kilograms of potatoes had cost 30 zlotys. On November 27, 1940, it had risen to 100 zlotys; in bad times, potato peelings substituted… Hunger obsessed everyone. “A dybbuk has entered
my belly. My belly talks, shouts, even has complaints and drives me mad,” wrote Yehuda Elberg in his Warsaw ghetto diary… The apportionment of one’s bread ration required skill and art, for it had to last a week or ten days. How one managed depended not only on the tormenting pangs of hunger, but on strength of character, ability to postpone immediate gratification, and family responsibility.. Hunger killed, but first it wrought disabling change — mental, psychological, and physical. Hunger destroyed the normal rhythm of existence, affected the physical capacity to work and the mental ability to think. Nutrition deficiencies caused anemia, suppressed the menses. Fatigue and dizziness, apathy and depression were part of the general sense of malaise. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea were the daily complaints of the hungry. Hunger weakened and debilitated its victims so as to make them fall prey to countless other diseases… Breeding on human misery, typhus is associated with times of war, famine, and disaster, when people are crowded together in abnormal conditions of filth, cold, and hunger… The solidarity of the family provided the biological basis for the preservation of life and for Jewish continuity. Parental respect, filial obedience, obligations of kinship, sanctity of the home—these were the elements in family life that gave security and stability to the individual. In times of stress, the family became the Jewish stronghold, the source of comfort and moral strength. In the ghettos family realtionships deepened and broadened… The Jewish community was, of course, the extended Jewish family. In the ghettos most Jews felt a strong sense of Jewish identity, of belonging, of readiness to share Jewish fate. The proverb “What will befall all Jews, will befall each Jew” assumed new relevance. In the Lodz ghetto, German Jewish children presented a Hanukkah program in their school auditorium: “Hunger, cold, and conf licts were forgotten. Shoemakers and tailors, physicians, lawyers, and pharmacists, all at once, we were one big family. That could not have happend in Berlin…but here, behind the barbed wire, something existed that united us all—our Jewishness. When they sang together, they forgot their suffering and misery; they were still alive and in song they praised God, who many times before had performed miracles. When they sang about the little lamp whose oil for one day lasted eight, the singers regained their courage and hope. At bottom, Jews shared a deep faith in their ultimate survival and in the preservation of the Jewish people. Early in the war Chaim Kaplan observed: “Our existence as a people will not be destroyed. Individuals will be destroyed, but the Jewish community will live on…”
Source: Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Death and Life in the East European Ghettos.” The War Against the Jews 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1986. 197-222. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #16
the shopkeeper’s dilemma What Would You Do? We have already read about the role of the Judenrat in Nazi-created ghettos. Below is one of the situations faced by Judenrat members.
G
eorgi Pytrosenko is a member of the Vilna Judenrat. He was a well-respected shopkeeper in the Jewish community and reluctantly accepted participation on the Judenrat. Georgi has been on the committee for fourteen months, and in that time he has aided in the distribution of food and provision for employment in the ghetto. Although conditions are terrible and typhus has broken out, most Jews have been able to survive. But now the situation has changed dramatically. The Germans have just demanded that on Friday morning at 10:00 A.M., 6,000 men, women and children should be standing at the Umschlagplatz
(courtyard at the train station) for “resettlement.” The Judenrat has been held responsible for the selection of those people to be deported. Several months later, Georgi learned some devastating news: those Jews sent on trains for “resettlement” were actually sent to death camps to be gassed. He was shocked by this news and realized that he was expected to help make the next selection of Jews in two days. Georgi has to decide what he is going to recommend to the Judenrat. He also has to consider whether he should tell the Jewish population what he has learned. What should Georgi do?
433 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
What alternatives were available to Georgi? What were the probable consequences of each alternative? Does he have a meaningful choice?
2.
Should the Jewish population be told?
3.
Do you feel that the Judenrat should be held as responsible as the Germans for murdering those who were selected?
4.
On what basis should Georgi make his decision?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
Unit IV: READING #17
THE EINSATZGRUPPEN REPORTS The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen
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t the beginning of May 1941, potential recruits for the Einsatzgruppen gathered in the Border-Police School in Pretsch on the River Elbe, northeast of Leipzig. Due to lack of space, some were accommodated in Duben and Bad-Schmiedberg. There, similar units were organized and prepared for the occupation of the Balkans, the Soviet Union and even for Operation Sea-Lion, the invasion of Britain. There were no specific instructions as to who should be sent to Pretsch, and the RSHA manpower section turned to various departments of the Sipo and SD in its search for candidates. A large contingent from the Berlin-Charlotenburg Sipo Senior Commanders School as well as 100 Kripo (Kriminalpolizei, or Criminal Police) cadets, were also assigned there. The commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos were chosen by Himmler and Heydrich from a list compiled by the RSHA Department One. Of the 75 selected, 42 were members of the SD. In addition to Sipo and SD officers, a support staff of drivers, translators, radio operators and clerks was also assembled. These latter came from all over Germany, though most were members of the SS. Some were conscripted in accordance with the emergency law of 1938. Three of the Einsatzgruppen were reinforced by companies from the 9th Police Reserve Battalion. In Pretsch, companies from the Waffen SS Battalion for Special Duties sent up from the First SS Infantry Battalion were attached to Einsatzkommando 9 and Sonderkommando 4a. (Waffen-SS were drawn from the Wehrmacht.) Later pursuant to Himmler’s directive of July 27, 1941, other units received similar reinforcements. The division into sub-units and areas of activity was as follows:
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UNIT EG-A
EG-B
EG-C EG-D
SUB-UNIT SK 1a, 1b; EK 2, 3, 1C (Leningrad) SK 7a, 7b; EK 8, 9, VK SK 4a, 4b; EK 5, 6 SK 10a, 10b; EK 1la, 11b, 12
AREA
EST. STRENGTH
Baltic countries
1,000
Belorussia, Moscow Smolensk district North and Central Ukraine South Ukraine Crimea, Caucasus
655 750 600
(EG = Einsatzgruppen; EK = Einsatzkommando; SK Sonderkommando; VK = Vorkkommando.) The Einsatzgruppen were attached to the commanders of the rear area army groups by June 25, 1941, and had to send forward sub-units to join the staff of the Higher SS stationed at the groups’ headquarters. Thus, Einsatzgruppe A, headed by SS-Standartenfuhrer (Colonel) Dr. Walter Stahlecker, joined Army Group North in Danzig. Einsatzgruppe B, headed by SS Brigadefuhrer (General) Arthur Nebe joined Army Group Center in Maio Yaroslavets. Einsatzgruppe C, headed at the time by SS Brigadefuhrer Dr. Orto Rasch, attached to Army Group South at Kiev. Einsatzgruppe D, headed by SS-Standartenfuhrer Professor Otto Ohlendorf, joined the headquarters of the Eleventh Army in Piatra-Nearnt (Romania) on July 4, 1941. Notably, the Einsatzgrupppen included many highranking officers, intellectuals and lawyers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded Einsatzgruppe D, had earned degrees from three universities and achieved a doctorate in jurisprudence. One of the commanders of Einsatzgruppe C, Ernst Biberstein, was a Protestant pastor, theologian and church official.
Source: Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #18
THE EINSATZGRUPPEN REPORTS The Reports
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s did all other units in the German military bureaucracy, the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos reported on their extermination activities to their respective Einsatzgruppe headquarters which sent the information to Berlin. There the RSHA compiled concise reports in the name of the Chief of Sipo and the SID. Copies were distributed to high-ranking army, police and SS officers, diplomats, members of the foreign office and even to industrialists as they related to economic factors in the Soviet territories. The Einsatzgruppen Reports were discovered by the U.S. Army in Gestapo headquarters in Berlin after the war. They were initially impounded by a research analyst attached to the Berlin branch of the Office of the Chief of Councel for War Crimes (OCCWC, established under Council Law Number 10 of the Allied occupation authorities). The head of the office, Benjamin Ferenecz, who became Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen War Crimes Trials, turned them over to U.S. Army custody. They were sealed and transported to Nuremberg to the office of General Telford Taylor, Chief of Councel for War Crimes, for use in preparing for the Einsatzgruppen War Crimes Trial. During the first days of the Einsatzgruppen Trial the authenticity of the reports was established beyond doubt, after which the German defendants did not challenge their validity. The original reports were sent to the National Archives in Washington D.C. after the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. In 1960 they were given to the Bundesarchiv (the West German national archives) in Koblenz. Photocopies of all the reports remain in the National Archives in Washington and at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Jerusalem. (Only two of the reports are reproduced below.) Chief of the Security Police and Security Service
Berlin, October 2, 1941 48 copies (36th copy)
Operational Situation Report USSR No. 101 Einsatzgruppe C Location: Kiev Sonderkommando 4a in collaboration with Einsatzgruppe HQ and two Kommandos of police regiment South, executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev on September 29 and 30, 1941. Einsatzgruppe D Location: Nikolayev The Kommandos continued the liberation of the area from Jews and Communist elements. In the period covered by the report, the towns of Nikolayev and Kherson in particular were freed of Jews. Remaining officials there were appropriately treated. From September 16 to 30, 22,467 Jews and Communists were executed. Total number, 35,782. Investigations again show that the high Communist officials everywhere have fled to safety. On the whole, leading partisans or leaders of sabotage detachments have been seized.
Source: Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62.
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Unit IV: READING #18
Chief of the Security Police and Security Service
Berlin, October 7, 1941 48 copies (36th copy)
Operational Situation Report USSR No. 106 Einsatzgruppe B Location: Smolensk
Mood and general conduct of the population It can be observed that, just as before, the population in the area of our activities abstains from any selfdefense action against the Jews. True, the population reports uniformly about the Jewish terror against them during Soviet rule. They also complain to the German offices about new attacks from the side of the Jews (like unauthorized return from the ghetto to their previous homes, or hostile remarks against the Germans made by the Jews). However, in spite of our energetic attempts, they are not ready for any action against the Jews. The decisive reason here seems to be the fear of Jewish revenge in case of a return of the Reds. Even very active elements who help us find Jewish Communists and members of the intelligentsia and show themselves very efficient in their cooperation prefer to remain invisible and anonymous in the decisive moments. Reports on a stable, good mood in the population can be found only in those areas where economic life is somewhat normal, as, for instance, in the town Klintsy that has not been destroyed at all; also in Vitebsk. Einsatzgruppe C Location: Kiev
436 I. Kiev As a result of (war) destruction, especially of houses, and the forced order to evacuate endangered streets. about 23,000 persons became homeless and were forced to spend the first days of the occupation in the open. They accepted this inconvenience quietly and did not cause panic. Meanwhile, locked and empty apartments, insofar as they had not been burned and damaged, were put at the disposal of the population. A corresponding number of apartments have also become available through the liquidation, thus far around 36,000 Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941. The housing of the homeless is assured and has also been taken care of in the meantime. The population of Kiev before the start of the war numbered around 850,000. For the time being, no exact indication concerning its national composition can be given. The number of Jews is said to have been about 300,000. The total number of ethnic Germans living in Kiev is presently being counted by a Kommando. The final results will be available in ten days. The temporary appointed city administration has begun immediately to register all the inhabitants of Kiev. As a first measure, all males aged 15-60 must report. Except for a small part, the non-Jewish population, as far as can now be established, seems to welcome the German Army, or at least to display loyal behavior. During the first days of the occupation, serious unrest could be detected within the population because of rumors that the Germany Army was leaving the city. These rumors were successfully squelched with proper official announcements. The population cooperates very readily by furnishing information on explosives or secret membership in the NKVD, the Party and the Red Army. Unlike the first days, one could note that this information was 90% correct. The reason for this is that the city inhabitants are less frightened than is the rural population, since they do not fear the possibility of a return of the Bolsheviks. The supply situation in Kiev is extremely poor. There are no food stocks and these must be provided.
Source: Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #18
EXTRACT FROM THE COMMISSAR’S ORDER FOR “OPERATION BARBAROSSA” JUNE 6, 1941 Staff Command Secret Document Chief Only Only Through Officer High Command of the Wehrmacht WFST [Armed Forces Operational Staff] Div. L (VI/QU) No. 44822/41 g.K Chiefs June 6,1941 Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars In the fight against Bolshevism it is not to be expected that the enemy will act in accordance with the principles of humanity or international law. In particular, the political commissars of all kinds, who are the real bearers of resistance, can be expected to mete out treatment to our prisoners that is full of hate, cruel and inhuman. The army must be aware of the following: 1.
In this battle it would be mistaken to show mercy or respect for international law towards such elements. They constitute a danger to our own security and to the rapid pacification of the occupied territories.
2.
The barbaric, Asiatic fighting methods are originated by the political commissars. Action must therefore be taken against them immediately, without further consideration, and with all severity. Therefore, when they are picked up in battle or resistance, they are, as a matter of principle, to be finished immediately with a weapon.
In addition, the following regulations are to be observed: OPERATIONAL AREAS 1.
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Political commissars operating against our armies are to be dealt with in accordance with the decree on judicial provisions in the rank, even if they are only suspected of sabotage or incitement to sabotage…
OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR NO. 107 The Chief of the Security Berlin, Police and Security Service October 8,1941 50 copies (36th copy) Operational Situation Report USSR No. 107 Einsatzgruppe B Location: Smolensk Oral Bolshevik-oriented propaganda continues as before. It is obviously systematically carried out by enemy agents and partisans as well as by the Jewish population. Together with the continually growing rumors and, due to the lack of effective counterpropaganda, this oral propaganda has the effects desired by the Bolsheviks. Einsatzgruppe D Location: Nikolayev A small Vorkommando had entered Kherson on August 20, 1941, together with the army, and reported that the town was free of enemies. Consequently, a kommando consisting of two officers and thirteen men was sent to Kherson on August 22, 1941, in order to accomplish the task of Sonderkommando Source: Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62.
Unit IV: READING #18 11a. After the first two days, initial steps were taken towards the solution of the Jewish question, the protection of the ethnic Germans, and the fight against Bolshevism. Then, a change occurred in the situation in this town of some 100,000 inhabitants. Artillery fire began on August 24, 1941, at about 15 o’clock, and lasted, with some interruptions, until September 6, 1941, reaching on some days extraordinary force. Because of that situation, a number of German officers left Kherson again…
OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR No. 108 Chief of the Security Police Berlin, and Security Service October 9,1941 50 copies (36th copy) Operational Situation Report USSR No. 108 Einsatzgruppe B Location: Smolensk Police activity GENERAL SITUATION
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In general, the situation at the front is unchanged, except for the southern part of the area of Einsatzgruppe B. This permitted, at the time of this report, the conduct once more of intensive searches in many areas and localities. General organizational measures were also continued, like the introduction of the Order Service, marking of the Jews, registration, putting up ghettos, planting of informants, and calling upon the population to cooperate with the police. We are also concerned with the fight against partisans and agitators who were hostile toward the Germans. The actions that were required were difficult because of the streets and roads that had turned into mire due to the bad and wet weather… In any case, the endeavors and the attempts that were made to convert the partisan movement into a real popular movement to be used against German operations and plans have failed. This is without a doubt due to the enthusiasm of the German Security Police and the SD, the alertness of the army, and the systematic approach to these problems on the part of the army and the Security Force. This is by no means to belittle the danger of the partisan movement. First of all, attention will have to be paid to the effect of partisan activity on the feelings of the population. Partisans, Jews, and other Communists constantly try to intimidate the friendly population through Bolshevik pamphlets or whispering campaigns. They threaten that, as soon as the Reds return, they will take revenge on everyone who has rendered the smallest service to the Germans. Troop movements away from the front line cause the population to worry and to ask the German officers if they must really count on a return of the Red regime. FIGHT AGAINST THE PARTISANS The Vorkommando was urgently called to Khoslavichi by the local commander, since partisans were said to have invaded the place. After having shot a German soldier, the partisans retreated when the kommando arrived. Confidential information showed that several hundred partisans had committed their evil deeds in the localities and forests around Khoslavichi. Because of extremely bad road conditions, only two smaller places could be searched. In each of them two partisans were caught and liquidated.
Source: Arad, Yitzhak, Shmuel Krakowski and Shmuel Spector, eds. “The Organization of the Einsatzgruppen.” The Einsatzgruppen Reports. New York: Holocaust Library, 1989. Excerpts: 168, 171-174, from 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. 59-62. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #19
THE EINSATZGRUPPEN
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n June 22, 1941, the German army invaded Soviet territory. They did not enter alone— small units of SS and police, some three thousand men in all, were also dispatched on special assignment. Their task to kill the Jews on the spot— Jews, but not only Jews; communists, Gypsies, political leaders, and the intelligentsia were also killed. Order Police battalions, Waffen SS units, the Higher SS, and Police Leaders also carried out these mass executions. Their primary targets, Jews, were concentrated in the areas within easy reach of the German army. Almost nine in ten Jews were urbanized, living in large cities where the rapid advance of the army and the swift action of the mobile killing units left them unaware of their fate, paralyzed, unable to act. There were five stages to the killing. The invasion was followed immediately by the roundup of Jews and other intended victims. Those rounded up were marched to the outskirts of the city where they were shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves— large ditches were filled with bodies of people who had been shot one by one and buried layer upon layer The residents of these cities could see what was Two Jewish women. 1941. Bilderdienst Suddeutscher Verlag. happening. They could hear the shots and the victims’ cries. Most often, they remained neutral, neither helping the killer nor offering solace to the victim. Yet neutrality helped the killer never his victim. Frequently, local pogroms were encouraged by the Wehrmacht and the SS, especially in Lithuania and Latvia. Every Jew killed brought the Nazis closer to their goal. Auxiliary police comprised of local natives became indispensable to the understaffed killing units. Local collaborators volunteered. Before this phase of the killing ended, more than 1.2 million Jews were killed. Their bodies were piled high in mass graves throughout occupied Soviet territories. Later still, in 1942 and 1943, when the war had turned against the Germans, SS kommando soldiers returned to these sites of infamy to unearth the graves and burn the bodies, thus leaving no trace of the crime. The men who ran the mobile killing units that rounded up and murdered Jews were not German criminals but ordinary citizens. In scholarly literature, there is a current debate whether they were ordinary “men” or ordinary “Germans” imbued with a racist ideology that sanctified these killings. According to Raul Hilberg, the great majority of the officers of the Einsatzgruppen were professional men, who were in no sense hoodlums, delinquents, or sex maniacs; most were intellectuals most were educated at universities. They brought to their new task all the skills and training which, as men of thought, they were capable of contributing. These men became efficient killers. A handful of men had requested to be relieved of their unconscionable assignment; nothing happened to them. The rest went along performing a difficult and disciplined task. The killers drank heavily. Alcohol somehow made it easier They spoke in euphemisms, never quite saying what they were doing. Their language never spoke of murder and killing but of special actions, special treatment, executive measures, cleansing, resettlements, liquidation, finishing off, appropriate treatment.
Berenbaum, Michael. “The Einsatzgrapper.” Witness to the Holocaust: An Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of its Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 1997. 112-116.
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Unit IV: READING #19 The work of the Einsatzgruppen frightened the local inhabitants, “Today it’s the Jews, tomorrow perhaps us.” In the documents, we will read the memo of Reinhard Heydrich authorizing the killing. We will read the Nuremberg Trial testimony of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of the Einsatzgruppe D, explaining the actions and motivations of the killer. He offered a simple explanation: he was just following orders. Asked his instructions, Ohlendorf replied directly: “The instructions were that in the Russian operational areas of the Einsatzgruppen the Jews as well as the Soviet political commissars were to be liquidated.” He later clarified the meaning. “Yes I mean ‘killed.’” He detailed the confiscation process. Valuables were sent to Berlin, gold to the Ministry of Finance. When asked how it was that the orders were carried out regardless of his personal scruples Ohlendorf replied: “Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out an order given by the leaders of state.” Himmler personally witnessed executions at Minsk. As they proceeded, Himmler became more uncomfortable. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski then stepped in to press for mercy, not for the victims, but for their executioners. He pleaded for the killers. Himmler was told by one of his commanders, “look at the eyes of the men in this kommando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or savages.” In part, it was to spare the perpetrators that a new and better form of killing—the concentration camp and its killing centers—was implemented.
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Berenbaum, Michael. “The Einsatzgrapper.” Witness to the Holocaust: An Illustrated Documentary History of the Holocaust in the Words of its Victims, Perpetrators and Bystanders. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 1997. 112-116. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #20
nazi paperwork of the “final solution”: origins and authentication of the wannsee protocol Commentary and documents courtesy of Robert Wolfe, Director, Captured Germans Records Staff, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Reproduced microfilm frames follow this article. Original documents are located in the National Archives, Washington. DC
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n January 20, 1942, fifteen German officials, most of them ranking roughly at the level of an American Cabinet Undersecretary, participated for some two hours in an interagency meeting held in a villa at Am Grosse Wannsee 56-58 on the western outskirts of Berlin. The meeting was convened by Reinhardt Heydrich, Chief of Security Police, to coordinate the “final solution of the Jewish question,” an attempted genocide already well underway. A 15 page summary of the discussion—the socalled Wannsee Protokoll—received from Heydrich by the German Foreign Office on March 2, 1942, is numbered “16,” the only surviving copy of thirty numbered copies. Found in 1945 among the voluminous records of the German Foreign Office captured by American troops at an evacuation site in the Harz Mountains, this Wannsee summary is part of a two-folder file labeled Endlösung der Judenfrage (Final Solution of the Jewish Question). These folders contain 330 pages of documentation on that malign subject, filed in approximate reverse chronological sequence from January 25, 1939 through November 20, 1943. Extensive excerpts were entered into evidence at some of the American-conducted war crimes trials at Nuremberg under the document designation NO 2685. The original records are now deposited in the German Foreign Office Archives in Bonn. In the immediate aftermath of the so-called Kristallnacht pogrom, Hermann Göring was instructed by Adolf Hitler to coordinate a program for “Aryanization of the German economy.” A meeting to that purpose involving a number of cabinet heads, for whom Heydrich of the Security Police served as
expert adviser, was held at Goring’s Reich Air Ministry on November 12, 1938. The minutes of parts of that meeting were reconstructed in August 1945 from the 1938 stenograph notes by Dr. Fritz Dorr, a Reichstag stenographer (Nuremberg Document PS-1816, Prosecution Exhibit USA 261). On January 24, 1939, Göring took the next step, just a week before Hitler threatened (in a wildlyapplauded Reichstag speech recorded on newsreels immediately available to audiences around the world): “If international finance Jewry…should again succeed in plunging the peoples of Europe into another world war, the result will be…the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Göring, in his capacity as head of the Four Year plan, wrote to the Minister of Interior, the nominal head of Himmler’s police: (microfilm frame 3721131) “Emigration of Jews from Germany is to be promoted with all means. (A) Reich Central for Jewish Emigration is to be established… Direction of the Reich Central is to be assumed by the Chief of Security Police (Heydrich).” …As Rademacher’s notation of 8/12 indicates, the meeting scheduled for December 9, 1941 was postponed indefinitely. (Govemor-General Hans Frank already knew on December 16 that the meeting would be convened sometime in January 1942, as a speech to his staff in Cracow on that day attests: Frank Diary, vol. 17, Nuremberg Document
Source: “Nazi Paperwork of the ‘Final Solution’: Origins and Authentication of the Wannsee Protocol.” 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991.
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Unit IV: READING #20 2233). On January 5. 1942, Heydrich re-invited the same officials for January 20. Signed copies, identical except for annotations, of that invitation (and acceptances) are in both Luther’s Foreign Office and Hofmann’s Race and Resettlement Main Office files. Heydrich’s renewed invitation reads: (mircofilm frame 372039) “The conference which had been scheduled for December 9, 1941, concerning questions related to the final solution of the Jewish question. I had to cancel at the last minute because of suddenly announced events and the related preoccupation of some of the invited gentlemen. Since the questions to be considered permit no further delay. I therefore invite you anew to a discussion followed by brunch on 20 January 1942 at 12 o’clock. Berlin, Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58.
the Jewish question have been gratifyingly confirmed and full agreement reign therein on the part of the participating agencies, may I request you delegate your subject adviser (Sachreferent) to the necessary detailed discussions for the purpose of readying the draft wished by the Reich Marshal in which are to be listed the organizational, technical, and material prerequisites for taking in hand the tasks of the (final) solution. The first discussion of this kind I intend to have held on March 6, 1942, 10:30 o’clock, in Berlin. Kurfurstenstrasse 116. May I ask you to cause your agent to get in touch with my assigned specialist, SS Lt. Col. (Sturmbannführer Adolf) Eichmann. Heil Hitler Your [signed] Heydrich” I Annex ! “
The circle of invited gentlemen listed in my last letter of invitation remains unchanged. Heil Hitler Your [signed] Heydrich”
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This copy bears a Foreign Office incoming correspondence stamp dated January 12, and an annotation in ink by Luther indicating it was to go to Rademacher and be placed before Luther on the morning of January 13 (“January 18” crossed out). On the bottom is a notation dated January 21, the day after the Wannsee meeting, in what appears to be Rademacher’s hand: “Protocol of the meeting is still to be received. To the files.” On the evidence of the foregoing contemporary Nazi paperwork surviving in the files of two fully separate Third Reich agencies, there can be no doubt that the January 20, 1942, meeting at Am Grosse Wannsee 56-58 did take place. Copy 16 of the 15 page summary of the discussion, received by the German Foreign Office on March 2. 1942, was transmated under a covering letter, dated February 26, 1942: (microfilm frame 372023) “Dear Party Comrade Luther! Annexed, I send you the protocol of the discussion which took place on January 20. 1942. Now that the base lines in respect to the practical execution of the final solution to
This covering letter bears a handwritten annotation; “Party Comrade Rademacher Please reply in writing that you are the designee and will attend. (initialed in purple pencil) Lu[ther]” Shown are reproductions of two of the fifteen pages of the Wannsee Protocol listing the attendees [pages 1 and 2; microfilm frames 372024-51. Among those attending were Heydrich, who presided: Adolf Eichmann, who purportedly took the notes from which the summary protocol was derived; the head of the Gestapo. Heinrich Müller; Luther Hofmann; and Roland Freisler, the fanatic presiding judge of the Peoples’ Court (the latter’s rantings, at the trial of military and civilian participants in the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler, are frequently shown in television documentaries). Not shown here are pages 5, 9, and 10, from which the following translations are excerpted: (page 5, microfilm frame 372028) “In view of the dangers of wartime emigration and…the potentialities of the east, the Reich Leader SS and Chief of German Police (Himmler) has prohibited the emigration of Jews…This is henceforth replaced, as a further potential solution, after
Source: “Nazi Paperwork of the ‘Final Solution’: Origins and Authentication of the Wannsee Protocol.” 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #20 appropriate prior sanction from the Fuhrer, by the evacuation of the Jews to the east. These actions are, however, only to be addressed as alternative possibilities, but here already will be accumulated those practical experiences, which in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish question are of weighty significance…Around 11 million Jews come under consideration divided among individual countries as follows.” (statistical chart, page 6, frame 372029) (page 7, frame 3720301 “Jews shall be assigned to work in a suitable way in the ceast. In large work gangs, separated by sex. Jews capable of work will be put into road construction, whereby undoubtedly a major part will fall out through natural attrition.”
(page 8, frame 372031) “The eventually surviving remainder, because they undoubtedly will be the part with the most resistance, will have to be handled accordingly, since they represent a natural selection which, if turned loose, would provide the nucleus of a new Jewish buildup…Europe will be combed out from west to east…the evacuated Jews will first be brought group by group into transit ghettos, from there to be transported to the east.” Robert Wolfe National Archives
October 11, 1990
Fifty Years Ago: FROM TERROR TO SYSTEMATIC MURDER
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Source: “Nazi Paperwork of the ‘Final Solution’: Origins and Authentication of the Wannsee Protocol.” 50 Years Ago: From Terror to Systematic Murder. Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1991.
Unit IV: READING #21
CONCENTRATION CAMPS Excerpt from
Henry Friedlander “The Nazi Concentration Camps.” Human Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators and Victims, Bystanders and Resisters. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981. pp.33-67.
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uring the first years of the Second World War the KL* system underwent a new expansion as additional groups of prisoners were introduced into the KLs. First, there were large numbers of Poles, including those intellectuals and professionals rounded up as part of the AB Aktion (Allgemeine Befriedungsaktion). Second, there were the growing number of resistance members from countries in Western Europe, including those rounded up under the Night and Fog Decree (Nacht und Nebel, or NN). Third, there were thousands of Russian POWs selected as specially dangerous from the Stalag cages. For all these prisoners the KL Inspectorate needed new camps. KL Neuengamme became an independent camp, and a number of new ones were established: KL Auschwitz in Upper Silesia in May 1940; KL Gross Rosen in Lower Silesia in August 1940: [and] KL Stutthof in West Prussia in January 1941 (but it had already been operational as a Civilian Prison Camp since late 1939). The war also brought other changes. Until 1939 the KLs had been the only camps for the administrative, non-judicial incarceration of political enemies. In the early years of the war the KLs lost their exclusive status to a variety of new camps: transit camps, police camps, SD camps, and different types of labor camps. The most important of these, destined to have a great impact on the KL system, were the Forced Labor Camps for Jews in Eastern Europe. Hundreds of Zwangsarbeitslager (ZAL), ranging from the very small to the very large, were established in the East. They were established in the annexed Polish territories (Warthegau, West Prussia, Upper Silesia); the Government General (including the districts of Warsaw, Cracow, Radom, Lublin, and Galicia); the occupied Russian territories (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, Ukraine).The German authorities imposed compulsory labor on all Jews in the Eastern territories. Most of the Jews not immediately killed were confined to large ghettos and forced to work in ghetto industries. But
alongside these ghettos, the Germans established the ZALs; into these they conscripted able-bodied Jewish men and women. Thus Belzec, later a killing center, served as ZAL until September 1941: (and) Treblinka I, sister camp to the killing center, served as ZAL from 1940 to 1944. During 1940 these ZALs for Jews—often simply called Judenlager, or Julag— multiplied in the Government General. In October 16 145 Jews worked on 410 construction sites most of which were not even designated as ZAL. In December ca. 10,000 Jews served in 34 ZALs in the Lublin district. The line separating small ghettos from forced labor camps was never very distinct. At first the Jews were often marched from the ghettos to their work sites every day: also in many ZALs there was room for entire families. Later, when the ghettos were dissolved and the Jews killed, only able-bodied men and women remained in the ZALs. There they were confined behind barbed wire, and men and women had to occupy separate quarters. Eventually the small ghettos were themselves transformed into ZALs. Thus the ghetto of Radom became the ZAL Radom, and the ghetto of Czestochowa became the ZAL Czestochowa. The ZALs were not a part of the KL system, and they were not supervised by the Inspectorate of the KLs. Instead they were operated by the SS and Police Leaders (SS und Polizer Führer, or SSPF), Himmler’s representatives in the occupied territories. But they only had overall jurisdiction of the ZALs; the actual administration was left to a large variety of agencies. While the executive authority over the ZAL remained with the Sipo, the camps could be run by any German national appointed by the SSPF. Some camps were run by the Sipo, others by the uniformed Orpo; many camps were headed by German civilians, usually foremen of the German concern using the camp’s Jewish labor or officials of the German labor corps known as the Organisation Todt (OT). A few ZALs were run by the German armed forces. While the officers in the ZALs were always German nationals—
*KL = concentration camp
Source: “Concentration Camps.” Excerpt from Henry Freidlander. “The Nazi Concentration Camps.” Human Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators and Victims, Bystanders and Rescuers. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981 in 50 Years Ago. Washington, D.C., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #21 SS, police, army, or civilian—the guards were usually non-German troops. Some of these were Ukrainians. Latvians, and other Eastern nationals recruited into the SS. Trained in other camps, they were called Hiwis (from Hilfsfreiwillige or volunteer auxiliaries) or Askaris (a term used by the Germans in the First World War for native colonial troops). The nature of the ZAL and the composition of its administration was of little importance to the Jews incarcerated there. Although the treatment of the inmates differed a great deal depending on local conditions, the civilians running the ZALs were often as brutal as the SS. Unlike the KLs, the ZALs operated under no enforced regulations. The inmates were not registered, they were treated like interchangeable pieces of equipment. The KLs had draconic rules; the ZALs had none. They resembled the “wild” camps of the early 1930s. Treatment was completely arbitrary; torture and murder were everyday occurrences. The lawless conditions even increased after the start of the deportations to the killing centers, when for the Jews in ZALs death had only been postponed… The Germans who served in the ZALs were not usually SS men of long standing; many of them had never belonged to the SS or SA. Only a few had ever served in a KL. Without (Theodor) Eicke’s indoctrination, these ZAL functionaries engaged in murder and torture and were as brutal as any SS man from the KL system… Of course, not all ZAL officers lacked experience in the pre-war KLs. There were a few veterans of the KLs who also served in the ZALs… The Second World War changed the functions of the KL system. On one hand it became a large empire for slave labor, on the other it became the arena for mass murder. Already during the first days of the war persons sentenced to death without the benefit of a judicial proceeding were taken to the nearest KL and shot…But the most ambitious and far-reaching program of ideological murder was the destruction of the European Jews. However, it did not begin in the concentration camp. Murder by gas chambers was first introduced in the so called euthanasia program in 1940. Late in 1939 Hitler ordered the killing of the supposedly
incurably ill. The program was administered by Reich Leader Philipp Bouhler in the Führer Chancellery. He established special agencies with the euphemistic titles of “Utilitarian Foundation for Institutional Care” (Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Anstaltspf lege) and “Utilitarian Ambulance Service” (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH). The headquarters was located in Berlin at Tiergartenstrasse 4, the entire program was known as T4. Special commissions of physicians reviewed questionnaires filled out by all state institutions, and decided on the basis of the information supplied whether the institutionalized person should be killed. Those chosen were transferred to six institutions—Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bemburg, Brandenburg, and Hadamar—where specially constructed gas chambers were used to kill the patients. This radical ideological experiment in murder involved mostly German nonJewish nationals. Public protests eventually forced the Nazi leadership to abort the program in 1941; but in secret the program continued throughout the war on a smaller scale… As we have seen, during the war years the KLs grew into a vast empire with many different, and often contradictory, functions. One of these was the extermination of ideological enemies; another was the use of slave labor. While the SS murdered millions of potential workers, the SS-WVHA demanded that the SS physicians improve camp conditions to reverse the alarming death rate and thus preserve the slave labor force. Of course, conditions did not improve, and almost a million prisoners died of torture, starvation, exposure, and overwork. The mass exterminations created an atmosphere of total disregard for human life in the KLs. The only value attached to any prisoner was his ability to perform essential work. But the seemingly unlimited supply of inmates reduced even that limited value. The KLs became places where any form of human degradation and exploitation was permitted. The gruesome medical and biological experiments carried out in the KLs during the war were only the most glaring example.
Source: “Concentration Camps.” Excerpt from Henry Freidlander. “The Nazi Concentration Camps.” Human Responses to the Holocaust: Perpetrators and Victims, Bystanders and Rescuers. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981. in 50 Years Ago. Washington, D.C., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 1991
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Unit IV: READING #22
night Elie Wiesel In 1940, Auschwitz, originally a Polish military barracks, was turned into one of the largest concentration and death camps. Built in southwestern Poland on a major railway line between Cracow and Vienna, the camp grew to 40 square miles and contained more than 100,000 prisoners. Gas chambers were built in 1942 in the section of the camp called Birkenau. Elie Wiesel is probably the best known survivor of Auschwitz. In the following selection from his autobiographical work Night, Wiesel describes his family’s arrival at Auschwitz in 1944, and the process of “selection” which was to determine which of them lived or died. The Nazi system extended to the identification of different people by the color of the patches on their clothes. Black was worn by Gypsies, green by professional criminals (many of whom were as antiJewish as the SS guards), pink by homosexuals, purple by Jehovah’s Witnesses, red by Communists and other “politicals,” and yellow by Jews. Such identification was also intended to separate inmates from each other.
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he cherished objects we had brought with us thus far were left behind in the train, and with them, at last, our illusions. Every two yards or so an SS man held his tommy gun trained on us. Hand in hand we followed the crowd. An SS noncommissioned officer came to meet us, a truncheon in his hand. He gave the order. “Men to the left! Women to the right!” Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand: we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sisters moving away to the right. Tzipora held Mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking. My father held onto my hand. Behind me, an old man fell to the ground. Near him was an SS man, putting his revolver back in its holster. My hand shifted on my father’s arm. I had one thought—not to lose him. Not to be left alone. The SS officers gave the order: “Form fives!” Commotion. At all costs we must keep together.
“Here, kid, how old are you?” It was one of the prisoners who asked me this. I could not see his face, but his voice was tense and weary. “I’m am not quite fifteen yet.” “No, Eighteen.” “But I’m not,” I said. “Fifteen.” “Fool. Listen to what I say.” Then he questioned my father, who replied: “Fifty.” The other grew more furious than ever. “No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and forty.” He disappeared into the night shadows. A second man came up, spitting oaths at us. “What have you come here for, you sons of bitches? What are you doing here, eh?” Someone dared to answer him. “What do you think? Do you suppose we’ve come here for our own pleasure? Do you think we asked to come?” A little more, and the man would have killed him. “You shut your trap, you filthy swine, or I’ll squash you right now! You’d have done better to have hanged yourselves where you were than to come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you at Auschwitz? Haven’t you heard about it? In 1944?” No, we had not heard. No one had told us. He could not believe his ears. His tone of voice became increasingly brutal.
Source: Wiesel, Elie. “Night” (excerpt 22-26). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #22 “Do you see that chimney over there? See it? Do you see those flames? (Yes, we did see the flames.) Over there—that’s where you’re going to be taken. That’s your grave, over there. Haven’t you realized it yet? You dumb bastards, don’t you understand anything? You’re going to be burned. Frizzled away. Turned into ashes.” He was growing hysterical in his fury. We stayed motionless, petrified. Surely it was all a nightmare? An unimaginable nightmare? I heard murmurs around me. “We’ve got to do something. We can’t let ourselves be killed. We can’t go like beasts to the slaughter. We’ve got to revolt.” There were a few sturdy young fellows among us. They had knives on them, and they tried to incite the others to throw themselves on the armed guards. One of the young men cried: “Let the world learn of the existence of Auschwitz. Let everybody hear about it, while they can still escape. . . .” But the older ones begged their children not to do anything foolish: “You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your head. That’s the teaching of our sages…” The wind of revolt died down. We continued our march toward the square. In the middle stood the notorious Dr. Mengele (a typical SS officer: a cruel face, but not devoid of intelligence, and wearing a monocle); a conductor’s baton in his hand, he was standing among the other officers. The baton moved unremittingly, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left. I was already in front of him: “How old are you?” he asked, in an attempt at a paternal tone of voice. “Eighteen.” My voice was shaking. “Are you in good health?” “Yes.” “What’s your occupation?” Should I say that I was a student? “Farmer,” I heard myself say. This conversation cannot have lasted more than a few seconds. It had seemed like an eternity to me. The baton moved to the left. I took half a step forward. I wanted to see first where they were sending my father. If he went to the right, I would go after him. The baton once again pointed to the left for him too. A weight was lifted from my heart. We did not yet know which was the better side, right or left; which road led to prison and which to the crematory. But for the moment I was happy; I was near my father. Our procession continued to move
slowly forward. Another prisoner came up to us: “Satisfied?” “Yes,” someone replied. “Poor devils, you’re going to the crematory.” He seemed to be telling the truth. Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes… those children in the flames. (Is it surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.) So this was where we were going. A little farther on was another and larger ditch for adults. I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare…Soon I should awake with a start, my heart pounding, and find myself back in the bedroom of my childhood, among my books… My father’s voice drew me from my thoughts: “It’s a shame… a shame that you couldn’t have gone with your mother…I saw several boys of your age going with their mothers…” His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see the burning of his only son. My forehead was bathed in cold sweat. But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it… “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories…” His voice was choking. “Father,” I said, “if that is so, I don’t want to wait here. I’m going to run to the electric wire. That would be better than slow agony in the flames.” He did not answer. He was weeping. His body was shaking convulsively. Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I did not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves. “ Yitgadal veyitkadash shmé raba…May His Name be blessed and magnified…” whispered my father. For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless his name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for? We continued our march. We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch, from which an infernal
Source: Wiesel, Elie. “Night” (excerpt 22-26). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print).
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Unit IV: READING #22
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heat was rising. Still twenty steps to go. If I wanted to bring about my own death, this was the moment. Our line had now only fifteen paces to cover. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten steps still. Eight. Seven. We marched slowly on, as though following a hearse at our own funeral. Four steps more. Three steps. There it was now, right in front of us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that was left of my strength, so that I could break from the ranks and throw myself upon the barbed wire. In the depths of my heart, I bade farewell to my father, to the whole universe; and in spite of myself, the words formed themselves and issued in a whisper from my lips: “Yitgadal veyitkadash shmé raba…May His Name be blessed and magnified…”My heart was bursting. The moment had come. I was face to face with the Angel of Death… No. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks. I pressed my father’s hand. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those f lames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemend to live as long as God Himself. Never. The barracks we had been made to go into was very long. In the roof were some blue-tinged skylights. The ante-chamber of Hell must look like this. So many crazed men, so many cries, so much bestial brutality! There were dozens of prisoners to receive us, truncheons in their hands, striking out anywhere, at anyone, without reason. Orders: “Strip! Fast! Los! Keep only your belts and shoes in your hands. . .” We had to throw our clothes at one end of the barracks. There was already a great heap there. New suits and old, torn coats, rags. For us, this was the true equality: nakedness. Shivering with the cold. Some SS officers moved about in the room, looking for strong men. If they were so keen on strength, perhaps ore should try and pass oneself off as sturdy? My father thought the reverse. It was better not to draw attention to oneself. Our fate would then be the same as the others. (Later, we were to learn
that he was right. Those who were selected that day were enlisted in the SonderKommando, the unit which worked in the crematories. Bela Katz—son of a big tradesman from our town—had arrived at Birkenau with the first transport, a week before us. When he heard of our arrival, he managed to get word to us that, having been chosen for his strength, he had himself put his father’s body into the crematory oven.) Blows continued to rain down. “To the barber!” Belt and shoes in hand, I let myself be dragged off to the barbers. They took our hair off with clippers, and shaved off all the hair on our bodies. The same thought buzzed all the time in my head— not to be separated from my father. Freed from the hands of the barbers, we began to wander in the crowd, meeting friends and acquaintances. These meetings filled us with joy—yes, joy—”Thank God! You’re still alive!” But others were crying. They used all their remaining strength in weeping. Why had they let themselves be brought here? Why couldn’t they have died in their beds? Sobs choked their voices. Suddenly, someone threw his arms around my neck in an embrace: Yechiel, brother of the rabbi of Sighet. He was sobbing bitterly. I thought he was weeping with joy at still being alive. “Don’t cry. Yechiel,” I said. “Don’t waste your tears…” “Not cry? We’re on the threshold of death…Soon we shall have crossed over…Don’t you understand? How could I not cry?” Through the blue-tinged skylights I could see the darkness gradually fading. I had ceased to feel fear. And then I was overcome by an inhuman weariness. Those absent no longer touched even the surface of our memories. We still spoke of them—“Who knows what may have become of them?”—but we had little concern for their fate. We were incapable of thinking of anything at all. Our senses were blunted; everything was blunted as in a fog. It was no longer possible to grasp anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one ultimate moment of lucidity it seemed to me that we were damned souls wandering in the half-world, souls condemned to wander through space till the generations of man came to an end, seeking their redemption, seeking oblivion-without hope of finding it. Toward five o’clock in the morning, we were driven out of the barracks. The Kapos beat us once more, but I had ceased to feel any pain from their blows. An icy wind enveloped us. We were naked, our shoes and belts in our hands. The command: “Run!”
Source: Wiesel, Elie. “Night” (excerpt 22-26). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out of print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #22 And we ran. After a few minutes of racing, a new barracks. A barrel of petrol at the entrance. Disinfection. Everyone was soaked in it. Then a hot shower. At high speed. As we came out from the water, we were driven outside. More running. Another barracks, the store. Very long tables. Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt, and socks were thrown to us. Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men. If the situation had not been tragic, we should have roared with laughter. Such outfits! Meir Katz, a giant, had a child’s trousers, and Stern, a thin little chap, a tunic which completely swamped him. We immediately began the necessary exchanges. I glanced at my father. How he had changed! His eyes had grown dim. I would have liked to speak to
him, but I did not know what to say. The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it. So much had happened within such a few hours that I had lost all sense of time. When had we left our houses? And the ghetto? And the train? Was it only a week? One night—one single night? How long had we been standing like this in the icy wind? An hour? Simply an hour? Sixty minutes? Surely it was a dream.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
What advice is the young Wiesel given?
2.
How were the prisoners initially dehumanized?
3.
Why would the Nazis put a sign like “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes You Free) over the Auschwitz gate? Note that it was originally a slogan created by a founder of the International Labor Organization.
4.
At one point in Rolf Hochhuth’s play, The Deputy, Doctor Mengele states: “The truth is, Auschwitz refutes creator, creation, and the creature. Life as an idea is dead.” What is meant by this?
Source: Furman, Harry ed. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #23
concentration and death camps
I
n an effort to deal with groups of people whom the Nazis considered to be “subhuman,” a variety of concentration camps were established throughout Europe from 1933 until the end of World War II. The early camps began as detention centers in the mid-1930s for Communists, homosexuals, and political dissidents. With the onset of the war in 1939, the need for laborers resulted in the creation of forced labor camps in which prisoners became virtual slaves. Here, Jews and others were subjected to the most inhuman treatment, often resulting in death through illness, starvation, beatings, or execution. In 1942, with the adoption of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi plan to murder all European Jews, the emphasis shifted from concentration camps to death camps. The sole purpose of those camps was to murder millions of Jews by gassing them and burning their remains. In December 1941, Chelmno, the first death camp, was established. The camp consisted of little more than a garage and several trucks in which carbon monoxide was the killing tool for about one thousand Jews a day. By July 1942, the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were created. By the fall of 1943, these camps in northern Poland had already accomplished their tasks and ceased to function. The locations of the hundreds of concentration camps and death camps reveal much about the Nazi mentality and raise some significant questions for discussion.
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Map of major concentration and death camps.
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “Concentration and Death Camps” (map). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #23 Austria Belgium Bulgaria Czechoslovakia Estonia France
Galicia Germany
Greece Hungary Italy Latvia Libya Lichtenburg Lithuania Netherlands
Ebensee, Guesen, Mauthausen Breendonck, Malines Somovit Novaky, Patronka, Petrzalka, Terezin, Zilina Aigali, Ereda, Goldfield, Kalevi, Klooga, Lagedi, Liiva, Vaivara Agde, Argeles-sur-mer, Barcares, Beaune la Rodande, Camp du Richard, Compiegne, Drancy, FortBarraux, Gurs, Les Milles, Natzweiler-Struthof, Nexon, Pithiviers, Saint Cyprien Borislav, Buchach, Lvov, Plaszow Arbeitsdorf, Bergen-Belsen, Bochum, Brunswick, Buchenwald, Cottbus, Dachau, Dora, Esterwegen, Flossenburg, Grossrosen, Lichtenburg, Nevengamme, Niederhagen, Oranienburg, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Wells Haidon Kistaresa Bolzano, Fossoli, Mantua, Raab Kaiserwald, Salaspils Giado, Homs Lichtenburg Kaunas, Ponary Amersfoort, Vught, Westerbork
Poland
Rumania Russia
Yugoslavia
Auschwitz, Belzec,* Belzyce, Birkenau,* Bogusze, Bronna Gora, Budzyn, Burggrabben, Chelmno,* Chodosy, Chryzanow, Ciezanow, Elbing, Gerdaven, Heiligenbeil, Jaktorow, Jesau, Karczew, Kelbasin, Kielce, Kosaki, Lackie, Wielkie, Majdanek,* Miedzyrzec Podalski, Mielec, Mlyniewo, Nisko, Peikinia, Plew, Pomiechowek, Praust, Radomsko, Sasov, Schippenbeil, Seerapen, Skarzysko-Kamienna, Sobibor,* Stolp, Stutthof, Thorn, Treblinka,* Tyszowce, Zaglebia, Zaprudy, Zaslaw, Zawarnice, Zbaszyn Caracal, Markulesci Akmechetka, Bogdanovka, Bratslav, Domanevka, Golta, Kamenka-Bugskaya, Koldychevo, Maly Trostinek, Odessa, Paczara, Sekiryani, Targu-Jiu, Tiraspol, Vapnyarka, Volkoysk, Yedintsy, Zborov Ada, Djakovo, Jadovna, Jasenovac, Loborgrad, Saymishte
*Death Camps
451 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Where were most of the concentration and death camps located? How can their location be explained? Were there any economic or other advantages for the Nazis in the placement of these camps?
2.
Do you believe it was possible for millions of people to have been tortured and murdered in the death camps without the local population being aware of what was happening? Explain.
3.
Historian Raul Hilberg has written on the role of Europe’s railways in transporting victims to the camps. Thousands of written orders were sent from office to office, from railway depot to railway depot listing the number of “passengers” and the cost of shipping them. How do you think the railroad workers involved in forwarding these orders rationalized their actions?
4.
What is the term “extermination” most associated with? Are we adopting the language of the Nazis when we refer to “extermination camps”?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “Concentration and Death Camps” (map). The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
Unit IV: READING #24
note to map
A
452
fter the successful German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich suggested the creation of ghettos for the Jews both in the western areas of Poland annexed to Germany and in the General Government, the remaining parts of the conquered territories. The suggestion was quickly taken up. And soon millions of Polish Jews were confined in tightly sealed Jewish districts in Warsaw, Lodz, and smaller cities such as Cracow, Lublin, and Radom. By the time the Wannsee Conference convened on 20 January 1942 to plan the full implementation of the “Final Solution,” hundreds of ghettos as well as transit, concentration, and labor camps existed in Greater Germany. The situation was starkly different in eastern Poland and in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. These areas bad been occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939, per agreement with Nazi Germany. When Germany violated the nonaggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, these lands, as well as great stretches of the Russian Republic, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine, were conquered by the Wehrmacht. In the Polish areas that Germany occupied in 1939, the Nazis first created ghettos and then, after a pause of two years, began to deport and murder the ghetto inhabitants. During the interim many ghetto residents were used as slave laborers, and conditions of life deteriorated as a result of overcrowding, disease, and malnutrition. In the Soviet and Baltic areas taken in 1941, the Germans killed many thousands of Jews, as well as Gypsies, before—not after—the establishment of ghettos. The Einsatzgruppen, special mobile killing squads following in the wake of the German army, together with the Order Police, Waffen SS, and native anxiliary units of Latvians and Lithuanians, largely carried out the killings. Usually, only those Jews able to do heavy
labor were placed in ghettos in the conquered Soviet lands — after the other Jews had been killed. The Germans established ghettos in Lvov and Bialystok, located in what had been eastern Poland; in Kovno and Vilna, the largest cities in conquered Lithuania; in Riga, the Latvian capital; and in Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia. Ghettos were also established in many small towns in these newly seized territories. These ghettos resembled those in western and central Poland during and after the mass deportations in 1942. And, like the ghettos in western Poland and the General Government, they were doomed. During 1943 the ghettos in territory conquered from the Soviets were dissolved, and their inhabitants murdered. Only the ghettos in Kovno continued to exist—until June 1944. Meanwhile, the Germans built concentration camps across Poland and sent streams of Jews to them. Gypsies, Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, and others deemed “enemies” of the Reich were also dispatched to the camps. During 1942 killing centers were activated at Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as at Birkenau in the Auschwitz complex of camps. Concentration camps were also established in the territories taken from the Soviet Union in the 1941 invasion. The camp built at Maly Trostineks in eastern Byelorussia was the scene of mass shootings in 1942. By the end of 1942, the year when the Nazis proceeded with the systematic implementation of the “Final Solution,” millions had been killed in the east. The heavy lines on the adjacent map indicate Poland’s borders on 31 August 1939. The Germans divided these territories into the administrative districts shown on the map. All locations are approximations.
Source: “Note to Map,” Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in NaziOccupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #24
MAJOR NAZI CAMPS IN OPERATION 1939-1940 ● Concentration Camps ▲ Gypsy Internment Camps ■ “Euthanasia” Centers ✛ Labor Camp
MAJOR NAZI CAMPS IN OPERATION 1939-1940 Please note that all locations are approximate. *”Euthanasia” centers were frequently converted mental hospitals, nursing homes or prisons. Camp information provided by Dr. Sybil Milton, Resident Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Source: “Note to Map,” Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in NaziOccupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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Unit IV: READING #24
Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland and Russia, 1942 ▲ Concentration Camps ● Ghettos ■ Borders of Poland, 8/31/39
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Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland and Russia, 1942
Source: “Note to Map,” Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in NaziOccupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #24
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The Railways and Deportation Routes
Source: “Note to Map,” Major Nazi Camps in Operation 1939-1940,” “Main Nazi Concentration Camps and Ghettos in NaziOccupied Poland and Russia, 1942,” and “The Railways and Deportation Routes.” Fifty Years Ago. Washington, D.C.: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Unit IV: READING #25
art of the camp inmates
I
456
t should not be surprising that the highest expression of human beings, their ability to create, is not deterred even by the most harsh of circumstances. Despite the worst of materials, some concentration camp artists produced creative work which served as both consciously-drawn history of what was happening but also as an expression of the spirit that remained unblunted by even these conditions. Thus, this art is often considered an example of spiritual resistance. The following are but a few examples of the art of camp inmates—both during and after their Holocaust experiences. Born in what is now Czechoslovakia in 1893, David Friedman became a sign painter and then a professional artist. He survived Auschwitz because the Nazis had him paint their portraits. After the war, he lived in Israel and then the United States where he painted billboards and created hundreds of drawings, paintings, and etchings on his Holocaust experiences. Felix Nussbaum was born into a comfortable middle-class family in 1904, studied painting in Germany, and migrated in 1933. During the Nazi invasion of Belgium, he was arrested in Brussels and deported. He was sent to Gurs, a transit camp in the foothills of the Pyrenees (in France) in which 15,000 internees were held in 1940. He escaped, but was recaptured and sent to Auschwitz where he is believed to have died. David Ludwig Bloch was born in Germany in 1910, studied art, was expelled from the Academic Art Institute in 1938, and was sent to Dachau. Released in 1940, he fled to Shanghai. The two works shown here. “The March,” and “The Righteous,” were made after the war.
David Friedman, “Two Prisoners in K2,” original etching.
Karl Schwesig was an out spoken non-Jewish anti-Nazi who drew posters during the Spanish civil war, moved to the Pyrenees in 1938, and was later arrested and interned in Gurs. The drawing presented here, “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite,” was drawn in the margins of stamps sent from Gurs. It is a wry comment on the contradiction between the famous French motto and the real policy of the French government in collaborating with the Nazis in rounding up Jews.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What feelings does Nussbaum try to convey in his drawing? What common objects can you see portrayed? 2. Look closely at Bloch’s “The Righteous.” What is the artist saying? How do you think camp inmates dealt with these feelings in the camps? 3. What is the irony expressed in Schwesig’s mock postage stamps? Consider the difference between what we sometimes say and what we do. Why would anyone in a camp try to convey a message in the form of a postage stamp? 4. There has been a good deal of recent debate about whether recently published Holocaust art books really express the meaning of that experience to the contemporary viewer. How do you react to this criticism? What is it about a work of art that makes it “powerful”? Which of these do you think is the most powerful? The most poignant? The angriest? The most moving? How do you respond to them as works of art? 5. How do you react to Fritta’s birthday card to his son, Tommy? Source:Furman, Harry, ed. “Art of the Camp Inmates.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
Bedrich Fritta, “To Tommy on his third birthday in Theresienstadt—January 22, 1941.” One of ten drawings the artist made for his son’s birthday while they were both in Theresienstadt. Three years later Fritta was transferred to Auschwitz where he died. Tommy was later adopted by artist-survivor Leo Haas.
Bedrich Fritta was a Czech painter and graphic artist born in 1907. He went to Theresienstadt in December. 1941 Three years later he was arrested with other artists and eventually deported to Auschwitz where he died. Finally, Max Lingner was born in Leipzig in 1889. A soldier in World War 1, he was severely
wounded. He later participated in the German Revolution of November 1918. As a dedicated socialist, Lingner was arrested in 1939 and spent five years in various internment camps and eventually Gurs. Many of his Gurs paintings carry optimistic messages at the bottom.
Max Lingner, “Three Women Behind Barbed Wire Fence,” Gurs, 1941.
David Ludwig Bloch, “The March.”
Source:Furman, Harry, ed. “Art of the Camp Inmates.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #25
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Karl Schwesig,”Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Mock postage stamps from Gurs, March, 1941. Indian and colored inks on perforated stamp margins. 1 1/2” x 1”.
David Ludwig Bloch, “The Righteous.”
Felix Nussbaum, “Camp Gurs,” 1940.
Source:Furman, Harry, ed. “Art of the Camp Inmates.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
Holocaust paintings and drawings Itzchak Belfer
A birthday present for the camp commander’s 10 year old son. Jewish babies are thrown into the air, and he shoots them.
To save gas the villains invented new ways to commit mass murder.
Source: Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (Excerpts). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz
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Unit IV: READING #25
The most horrible acts of cruelty were performed by men whose beltbuckle caption read: “God is with us.”
460
“Here’s where you live, eat, and sleep. Here you will die.” With these words we are shown to our bunk. There’s a dirty blanket for six of us sharing a space. The block is engulfed in near-darkness. Narrow aisles separate the bunks. We are in the women’s camp at Birkenau, near Auschwitz. Source: Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (Excerpts). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
461
They were taken to the political section, to SergeantMajor Bogger. An interrogation by him meant torture—their breasts were singed, their fingernails extracted. They know what to expect; they would soon be free.
A dirty, rusty bowl of indefinable watery liquid, called “soup,” must suffice for 4 prisoners. Whoever swallows quickly will get more than her companions. The tin pot and the wooden ladles rattle and pound, the precious liquid spills in the pandemonium. Later, in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, we got soup at 3 a.m. They put a keg of soup on the middle of the room, everybody pounced on it at once, the keg often overturned and the soup spilled. Everyone started lapping it up off the f loor. The guard stood aside laughing heartily.
Source: Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (Excerpts). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995.
Unit IV: READING #25
Helpless and terrified, old Jews are dragged out into the streets and their beards cruelly plucked. I remember my brother’s school principal, Rabbi Dr. Munk, having his beard plucked on a Berlin street in the middle of the day. He went to the synagogue with a bandaged face, and prayed. The beard was a symbol of a Jew’s piety. If the intention was to humiliate him and hurt him to the depths of his soul, they succeeded.
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One of the most “popular” methods for executing Jews throughout Europe was by having them dig a mass grave and then shooting them as they walked across a plank laid over the grave. Many were only wounded, and there was movement in the grave for many hours.
Source: Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (Excerpts). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
Another kind of entertainment— loosing fierce dogs on people.
463 Sosnowitz, 1942. The maternity ward. The infants are wrapped in pillow cases and thrown out of the window. Their mothers are led downstairs to a black death-car. The doctors and nurses wash the blood off tables and f loors.
Source: Belfer, Itzchak. The Holocaust: Paintings and Drawings (Excerpts). Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1995.
Unit IV: READING #25
Drawings from “on the edge of the abyss” Ella Lieberman-Shiber
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Ella Lieberman-Shiber, On the Edge of the Abyss
Source: Lieberman-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, 1997. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
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Ella Lieberman-Shiber, On the Edge of the Abyss
Source: Lieberman-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, 1997.
Unit IV: READING #25
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Ella Lieberman-Shiber, On the Edge of the Abyss
Source: Lieberman-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, 1997. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #25
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Ella Lieberman-Shiber, On the Edge of the Abyss
Source: Lieberman-Shiber, Ella. On the Edge of the Abyss. Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot, Ghettos Fighters’ House, 1997.
Unit IV: READING #26
468
Source: Munch, Dr. Hans. “Documenting the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz” Signed and witnessed statement. Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #26
469
Source: Kor, Eva Mozes. “Declaration of Amnesty: Auschwitz 50 Years Later.” Signed and witnessed statement Auschwitz, Poland, 27 Jan 1995.
Unit IV: READING #26
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Source: Kor, Eva Mozes. Unpublished open letter on the importance of Holocaust Education. 17 Jan 2000. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #26
appendix Calculation by the SS of Profit Value in the Utilization of Prisoners in the Concentration Camps
Official SS Document. Calculation by the SS of profit value in the utilization of prisoners in the Concentration Camps. Daily “farming-out” wage, average, Reichs Marks 6.00 minus: Food RM 0.60 Clothing Depreciation RM 0.10 Approximate life span — 9 months = 270 X RM 5.30 = RM 1,431.00 Efficient utilization of the prisoners body: 1. Dental gold 2. Personally owned clothing 3. Valuables left by deceased 4. Money left by deceased minus: Cremation cost RM 2.00 Average net profit RM 200.00 Total profit after 9 months RM 1.631.00 plus additional revenue from utilization of bones and ashes.
(II.) Secret State Police State Police Headquarters Munich 3. 11. 41 B Nr. g 9074/41 II A/Sche. II A I. Schreiben: gef. Au. Secret! To the Commandant of the Concentration Camp Dachau Concerns: Russian Prisioners-of-war. Action: Order of the Chief of the Sipo and of the SD, from 11. 10. 41 No. 639 B-41 g IV A I c. Enclosures: None On the orders of the Chef of the Sipo and the SD the undermentioned 3 Russians, who have been declared “fully suspect and not to be kept any longer,” by the Einsatzkommando,* are to be executed in the concentration camp Dachau immediately. 1) F 304-10118 Ignatziuk Iwan, 12. 10 1913 2) IV B-1 17772 Dawanow Michayl, 15. 5. 1919 3) IV B-119827 Schtscherbakow Andrey, 1.7. 9. 1914 II, To file: Russian prisoners-of-war. W. V. II A sogl. J.A. signed: Schermer
Source: “Calculation by the SS of Profit Value in the Utilization of Prisoners in the Concentration Camps.” Official SS Document.
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Unit IV: READING #27
Teaching the holocaust through song Cantor Deborah Staiman Temple Israel of Greater Miami 137 N.E. 19th Street, Miami, Florida 33132 (305) 573-5900 Fax (305) 573-5904 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SONGS OF THE HOLOCAUST We are Here. ed. Eleanor Mlotek and Malke Gottlieb, published by the Educational Department of the Workmen’s Circle, and Hipponcrene Books, Inc. New York, N.Y. 10016, 1983. (45 East 33rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10016) Melody lines and chords, Yiddish and English versions provided for 40 songs. Yes, We Sang! Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps, ed. Shoshana Kalishch with Barbara Meister. Harper and Row, Publishers, New York. 1985 (10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022) Extensive background, piano accompaniment, Yiddish and English versions provided for 25 songs.
the heroic life of hannah senesh 472
A drama with music based on the writings of the young Hungarian poet and partisan Created and performed by
Cantor Deborah Staiman as Hanna Senesh with Slyvia Kahan, piano
Hannah Senesh and her brother Gyuri before her departure from Palestine for her last mission. Palestine, 1944. Beit Hannah Senesh, Kibbutz Sdot Yam, Israel.
H
ANNAH SENESH was born on July 17th, 1921 in Budapest, Hungary. As Hitler was rising to power in nearby Germany, she became a Zionist, immigrating to Palestine in 1939 to help work the land. As the war worsened, Hannah volunteered to help the Resistance Forces in Europe. On December 27th, 1943 she was flown out of Palestine on a mission to rescue Jews in Nazi occupied Hungary. After many dangerous encounters, she was captured and executed by the Nazis on November 7, 1944. At the time of her death—a victim of the Holocaust—she was twenty-three years old.
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #27 A song written after the war which is often heard at commemorative gatherings. Words are by Joesph Papiernikov (1899-), who was born in Warsaw and who settled in Palestine in 1924. He was one of the pioneers of Yiddish poetry in Israel. Music is by Israel Alter (1900-1979), cantor, composer and professor of cantorial music at Hebrew Union College in New York.
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #27
es brent on fire Mordechai Gerbertig
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orn in Krakow, Poland in 1877, Mordechai Gebirtig wrote poems and songs mirroring the life of the Jewish people around him. With the German invasion of Poland in 1939, that life turned into a horrible nightmare. Gebirtig himself fell victim to the Gestapo during a round-up of Jews in Krakow in 1942.
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Unit IV: READING #27
our town is burning! UNDZER SHTETL BRENT S’brent! briderlekh, s’brent! Oy, undzer orem shtetl nebekh brent! Beyze vintn mit yirgozn Raysn, brekhn un tseblozn Shtarker nokh di vilde flamen, Alts arum shoyn brent.
It burns, brothers, it burns. Our little poor, beloved town’s aflame. Brutal winds in fury growing Keep on tearing, breaking, blowing While the furious winds are wailing, Everything’s aflame. CHORUS And, with folded arms you watch it As if you were lame. And, with folded arms you watch it While our town’s aflame.
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It burns, brothers, it burns Our little poor, beloved town’s aflame Tongues of flames with force and power Have our villages devoured And the wild wind howls and churns Our poor town burns. CHORUS It burns brothers, it burns God forbid the moment may affirm When our city which now holds us Will, as ash and flames, enfold us Signs of slaughter leaving all With black and empty walls. CHORUS It burns, brothers, it burns. Help can only come if you return Love which shtetl once inspired Take up arms, put out the fire. Douse it with your blood, be true Show what you can do. Don’t just stand there looking on as if you were lame. Don’t just stand, put out the fire Our poor town’s aflame!
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #27
YUNGT–HIMN YOUTH HYMN Shmerke Kaczerginski was highly involved in the ghetto’s secret resistance organization. He wrote the text for this song for the Yugnt-Club (Youth Club) - the ghetto organization designed to give teenagers an opportunity to learn, to practice sports and help each other endure. It was a song to help keep their hopes.
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he very expression of apathy indicates submission to the enemy, which can cause our collapse morally and root out of our hearts our hatred for the invader. It can destroy within us the will to right; it can undermine our resolution…Our young people must walk with heads erect. —From the Voice of Youth, an underground publication of the Vilna ghetto Words by SH. KACHERGINSKY Music by BASYA RUBIN
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Unit IV: READING #27
Zog nit keynmol never say
W
hen the April 1943 round up of Jews began, the Vilna-born poet Hirsh Glick escaped and joined the Partisans. It was the time of the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and Glick was inspired to write this song. It soon became the official hymn of the Jewish Partisans. With the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, Glick was captured by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp in Estonia. When the Red Army swept through the area the following year, he escaped from the camp, only to be killed fighting the Germans in the nearby woods. He was twenty-four. By HIRSH GLICK
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #27
S’DREMLIN FEYGL BIRDS ARE DOZING
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REMLIN FEYGL (Drowsing Birds), Ghetto Lullaby. This is a song written in the Vilna ghetto by Lea Rudnitska, a young teacher and poet of the Vilna ghetto. She set it to an existing tune by the Russian-Jewish composer Leyb Vampolsky. It is a lullaby sung by a stranger to a baby who’s parents have died in the Holocaust By LEAH RUDNITSKY
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Unit IV: READING #27
YEDER RUFT MICH ZIAMELE PEOPLE CALL ME ZIAMELE
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he children in the ghetto would play and laugh, and in their games the entire tragedy was reflected. They would play at gravedigging: they would dig a pit and would put a child inside and call him Hitler…And they used to play funerals. —Dr. Aaron Peretz, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto
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New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #27
ani maamin i believe This song was sung by the Jews as they entered the gas chambers. The Hebrew words are based on the thirteen articles of faith by Moses Maimonides, a 12th century Jewish scholar. The tune is a folk melody. I believe with perfect faith in the Messiah’s coming. And even if he be delayed. I will await him.
B
ased on the Thirteen Articles of Faith by the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, this song — sung in Hebrew — became the hymn of the multitudes swallowed up by the extermination camps.
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Unit IV: READING #27
song of the partisans Hirsh Glick Hirsh Glick, a Polish Jew in the Vilna Ghetto, wrote the “Song of the Partisans” in Yiddish in 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It spread to all concentration camps. By the war’s end, it was sung by Jews the world over.
O
never say that you have come to your journey’s end, When days turn black, and clouds upon our world descend. Believe the dark will lift, and freedom yet appear. Our marching feet will tell the world that we are here. The dawn will break, our world will yet emerge in light, Our agony will pass and vanish as the night. But if our hoped for rescue should arrive too late These lines will tell the world the drama that was played.
No poet’s playful muse has turned my pen to write, I wrote this song amidst the anguish of our plight. We sang it as we watched the flames destroy our world, Our song is a banner of defiance we unfurled. O never say that you have come to your journey’s end, When days turn black, and clouds upon our world descend. Believe the dark will lift, and freedom yet appear. Our marching feet will tell the world that we are here. (Translated by Ben Zion Bokser)
482 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. How do you respond to revenge as a motive for survival? 2. Inspirational songs written by oppressed people have been common in history. What does this tell us about the will of the oppressed? Can you think of other songs that have encouraged the oppressed to overcome their plight?
Source: Glick, Hirsh. “ Song of the Partisans”, in The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An. Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #28
I. G. Farben Richard L. Rubenstein I.G. Farben was a major German corporation. The company not only continued to prosper during the Nazi period but also directly profited from Nazi policy. I.G. Farben made a business decision to use slave labor by building plants near the death camp of Auschwitz. I.G. Buna and I.G. Monowitz were built in 1940 as Farben investments. Both installations paid off handsomely in profits. In this selection from The Cunning of History, Richard L. Rubenstein discusses I.G. Farben’s wartime history. He also raises painful issues concerning the responsibility of a corporation that makes money from murder and the lenience with which we treated such policy after the Holocaust was over.
S
ome of Germany’s largest and most advanced corporations, such as I.G. Farben, seized the opportunity to utilize the camp prisoners as a labor force. In 1933 I.G. Farben was not an anti-Semitic corporation. It employed many Jews. Jews had helped to build the huge corporate empire…However, as the process of eliminating Jews from German life intensified in the thirties, I.G. Farben naturally got rid of its Jewish officials… By 1939 I.G. Farben was fully integrated into the new German order. During the war, it was faced with a severe labor-shortage at a time when Germany’s military and civilian needs for Buna, synthetic rubber, were expanding rapidly. It was decided to build a new plant for the manufacture of synthetic rubber. I.G. Farben officials met with officials of the Economy Ministry to decide on the location of the new factory. After several meetings, the corporation executives were convinced…of the advantages of constructing several plants at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz site had good supplies of water, coal, and
other needed ingredients. The problem of an assured labor supply was solved by Himmler who promised that all available skilled workers at Auschwitz would be placed at the giant corporation’s disposal…In February 1941, Auschwitz appeared to be an excellent corporate investment to some of Germany’s most respectable business leaders. Their mentality was not very different from that of corporate executives who close down plants in such high labor cost areas as Stuttgart and Philadelphia and relocate them in Manila and Singapore. This should occasion neither surprise nor shock. I.G. Farben was one of the first great corporate conglomerates. Its executives merely carried the logic of corporate rationality to its ultimate conclusion…the perfect labor force for a corporation that seeks fully to minimize costs and maximize profits is slave labor in a death camp…I.G. Farben’s investment in I.G. Auschwitz ultimately reached $1,000,000,000 in today’s money. The construction work required 170 contractors…When the factories commenced operations, the SS provided
Source: Rubenstein Richard L. “I.G. Farben.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #28
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guards to supervise the workers… The diet of the inmates was the same starvation diet of watery turnip soup given to all Auschwitz inmates, save that the corporation added a ration of extra “Buna soup,” not out of consideration for the workers’ well-being but to maintain a precisely calculated level of productivity… Given the almost inexhaustible supply of labor, the company adopted a deliberate policy of working the slaves to death. Nor was the policy hidden from the top echelons of I.G. Farben’s managerial elite. They were very much involved in the operation and made frequent trips to Auschwitz to see how things were going…(On) one occasion, five of I.G. Farben’s top directors made an inspection tour of I.G. Auschwitz. As one of the directors passed a slave scientist, Dr. Fritz Lohner-Beda, the Director remarked, “The Jewish swine could work a little faster.” Another I.G. Farben director responded, “If they don’t work, let them perish in the gas chamber.” Dr. Lohner-Beda was then pulled out of his group and kicked to death. One of the five directors present on that occasion was Dr. Fritz Ter Meer, I.G. Farben’s executive in charge of synthetic rubber and petrochemical operations including I.G. Auschwitz …Dr. Ter Meer visited the United States on a number of occasions before America’s entry into World War II. He had excellent relations with his American corporate counterparts, especially Mr. Frank Howard, chief executive officer of Standard Oil of New Jersey, as well as other top Standard Oil executives. (Jersey Standard has been incorporated into the Exxon Corporation)… Dr. Ter Meer was equally at home as the executive officer responsible for I.G. Auschwitz. …Nor did Dr. Ter Meer express any regret about I.G. Auschwitz after the war. When queried by a British officer…whether he regretted the experiments conducted upon concentration camp victims by I.G. Farben’s pharmaceutical subsidiaries, such as Bayer, Dr. Ter Meer is reported to have replied that “no harm had been done to these KZ (concentration camp) inmates as they would have been killed anyway.” My point in stressing Dr. Ter Meer’s American corporate connections is not to suggest that corporate executives are possessed of some distinctive quality of villainy. It is to emphasize the extent to which the same attitude of impersonal rationality is required to run successfully a large corporation, a death camp slave labor factory and an extermination center…At least in Germany, the top executives of all three enterprises often felt at home with each other…
About 35,000 slaves were used at I.G. Auschwitz. Over 25,000 died. The life expectancy of the average slave in the factory was estimated at between three and four months. Coal was a necessary ingredient in the manufacture of Buna In the nearby coal mines of I.G. Auschwitz, the life expectancy of the average slave was about one month. Only one incentive was necessary to keep the slaves working at maximum capacity, terror. …If the slaves did not keep up with the schedule, they were gassed; if they did keep up with it, the work itself killed them within a few months. One wonders what refinements might have been added, had the SS possessed computers. I.G. Farben also derived handsome profits from the manufacture by its subsidiaries of Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz’s chambers. Zyklon B was the commercial name for a gas used to exterminate rodents and vermin. It had been developed by…DEGESH (German Vermin Combating Corporation). In March 1944 the Dessau plant was damaged in an air raid. At the time Auschwitz was the only remaining murder center in operation, and the SS was trying to finish off 750,000 Hungarian Jews before it was too late. Because of the bombing, it was impossible to produce Zyklon B with its characteristic odor. The SS was less concerned with the odor than with the effect of the gas. One of its officials requested that five tons of Zyklon B be delivered without the odor-producing element. This troubled a DEGESH official who expressed concern that, without the telltale odor, the company might somehow be in danger of losing its monopoly! There was no concern that the gas was being used to kill millions of men and women; there was concern that the company’s monopoly in the production of the lethal substance might be compromised… To repeat, the business of mass murder was both a highly complex and successful corporate venture. The men who carried out the business part of the venture were not uniformed thugs or hoodlums. They were highly competent, respectable corporate executives who were only doing what they had been trained to do—run large corporations successfully. As long as their institutions functioned efficiently, they had no qualms whatsoever concerning the uses to which they were put… Thousands participated in the society of total domination and the murder process. The vast majority of those directly involved were never punished. Most of those still alive hold positions of responsibility and influence in both Germanies… These men did “solve” Germany’s Jewish problem. This fact was clearly understood by German society which rewarded them and found places of responsibility for them after the war.
Source: Rubenstein Richard L. “I.G. Farben.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #28 Every so often some SS guard who was a participant in one of the mobile killing units that cold-bloodedly shot to death tens of thousands of Jews or who performed some particularly vile task in one of the camps is identified in West Germany and brought to trial.. A few may receive token sentences, such as three or four years for killing ten thousand people, with time off for the period already spent in jail before sentencing. However, as we have seen, almost all of those involved in the corporate enterprises at Auschwitz were speedily restored to places of leadership in the West German business elite. The tendency towards greater leniency for the business executives reflects an almost universal bias in advanced technological societies. “White-collar
crimes,” such as large scale embezzlement and corporate fraud, may result in the actual loss of far greater sums of money than the average bank robber or petty thief, yet the “white-collar criminal” is almost always the recipient of greater leniency in the courts. If there were in reality any credible moral standard binding on all human beings…it would be possible to inquire whether the SS guards who received heavier sentences, as they sometimes did, were not unfairly treated in comparison with the business executives. Is there not the suspicion that it is easier to sentence an SS guard than a corporate manager, although the “clean” violence of the latter did the greater damage?
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What is your reaction to I.G. Farben’s early policy toward Jewish employees during the Third Reich? What should they have done? 2. Why was Auschwitz selected as a site for investment? 3. What was Fritz Ter Meer’s excuse for using slave labor in the I.G. Farben plants? What is your view of this argument? 4. Who do you think would be more responsible for what happened during the Holocaust: an SS camp guard or an I.G. Farben executive? 5. Do corporations have any ethical responsibilities? How harshly should “white collar” participants like I.G. Farben bejudged? 6. Should ethical responsibilities ever take precedence over business responsibilities? 7. Why does Rubenstein mention Ter Meer’s “American corporate connections?” Discuss. 8. Who was responsible for the production of Zyklon B? DEFINITIONS Buna: synthetic rubber factory at Auschwitz KZ: concentration camps IG: Interessen Gemeinschaft—Community of Interests. Used in relation to cartels and monopolies.
Source: Rubenstein Richard L. “I.G. Farben.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience-—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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american corporations and the nazis Bradford Snell Today, many large American companies are known as “multinational” corporations because they conduct their business in many countries. They not only sell their products in many countries but they also build their factories and employ people there. In their quest for profits, some corporations have acted in ways that have contributed to injustice and inhumane treatment of people. Some American oil companies, for example, have been accused of conspiring with oil-producing countries to control the supplies of crude oil to the United States. This control of supply caused shortages of oil products and higher prices for consumers. Multinational corporations are not new. During World War II, a number of American corporations operated their businesses in Germany out of a desire for increased profit. The following reading is based upon a 1974 report by Bradford Snell to the Senate Subcommittee on Monopoly and Antitrust where he was assistant counsel. Snell used declassified (once top secret) military and other government sources to demonstrate the involvement of America’s giant automobile companies in Nazi Germany. The article raises some important moral questions relating to the conflict between profit and human life.
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A
s owners of facilities in more than 45 different countries, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler can no longer properly be perceived as American corporations. Rather, they comprise supranational and sovereign economic states, which acknowledge loyalty to no particular country. The auto-makers readily concede this change in corporate outlook. Henry Ford, 11, chairman of the Ford Motor Co., for example, has stated: “We don’t think of ourselves as a national company anymore. We are definitely a multinational organization…” Likewise, GM’s Chairman Sloan reportedly told a group of stockholders on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 that his corporation was “too big” to be affected by “petty international squabbles.” Upon first examination, this posture would appear to be in the best of interests of international peace. The movement abroad by powerful firms, which already dominate vital industrial sectors at home, however, can produce the opposite result. At a minimum, it presents the dilemma of conflicting loyalties, which can become particularly acute during periods of international conflict. The activities of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler prior to and during World War II, for
example, are instructive. At that time, these three firms dominated motor vehicle production in both the United States and Germany. Due to its mass production capabilities, automobile manufacturing is one of the most crucial industries with respect to national defense. As a result, these firms retained the economic and political power to affect the shape of government relations both within and between these nations in a manner, which maximized corporate global profits. In short, they were private governments unaccountable to the citizens of any country yet possessing tremendous influence over the course of war and peace in the world. The substantial contribution of these firms to the American war effort in terms of tanks, aircraft components, and other military equipment is widely acknowledged. Less well known are the simultaneous contributions of their foreign subsidiaries to the Axis Powers. In sum, they maximized profits by supplying both sides with material needed to conduct the war. In Germany, for example, General Motors and Ford became an integral part of the Nazi war efforts. GM’s plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced
Source: Snell, Bradford. “American Corporations and the Nazis.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for-Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #28 aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps. As owner of Germany’s largest automobile factory, General Motors was quite naturally a more important factor in the Axis war effort than either Ford or Chrysler, whose investments were substantially less. GM’s participation in Germany’s preparation for war began as early as 1935. That year its Opel subsidiary cooperated with the Reich in locating a new heavy truck facility at Brandenburg, which military officials advised would be less vulnerable to enemy air attack. During the succeeding years, GM supplied the Wehrmacht with Opel “Blitz” trucks from the Brandenburg complex. For these and other contributions to wartime preparations, GM’s chief executive for overseas operations in 1938 was awarded the Order of the German Eagle (first class) by Adolf Hitler. Ford was also active in Nazi Germany’s prewar preparations. In 1938, for instance, it opened a truck assembly plant in Berlin whose “real purpose,” according to U.S. Army Intelligence, was producing “troop transport-type” vehicles for the Wehrmacht. That year Ford’s chief executive received the Nazi German Eagle (first class)… The outbreak of war in September 1939 resulted inevitably in the full conversion of GM and Ford of their Axis plants to the production of military aircraft and trucks. During the last quarter of 1939, for instance, GM converted its 432-acre Opel complex in Russelsheim to warplane production. From 1939 through 1945, the GM-owned Russelsheim facility alone assembled 50 percent of all the propulsion systems produced for the JU-88 medium range bomber. According to the authoritative work of Wagner and Nowarra, the JU-88 by 1940 “had become the Luftwaffe’s most important bomber, and remained so for the rest of the war.” The Russelsheim facility also assembled ten percent of the jet engines for the ME-262, the world’s first operational jet fighter…With a top speed of 540 miles per hour, it was more than 100 miles per hour faster than the American P-510 Mustang, the fastest piston-driven Allied fighter. Not until after World War II were the Allies able to develop pure jet aircraft. By producing ME-262 jet engines for the Luftwaffe, therefore GM’s Russelsheim plant made a significant contribution to the Axis’ technological superiority in the air. On the ground, GM and Ford subsidiaries built nearly 90 percent of the armored “mule” 3-ton halftracks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks. These vehicles, according to American intelligence reports, served as “the backbone of the German Army transportation system.” In addition, the factories of Ethyl G.m.b.H., a joint venture of I.G. Farben, General Motors and
Exxon subsidiaries, provided the mechanized German armies with synthetic tetraethyl fuel. During 193536, at the urgent request of Nazi officials who realized that Germany’s scarce petroleum reserves would not satisfy war demands, GM and Exxon joined with German chemical interests in the erection of the ethyl tetraethyl plants. According to captured German records, these facilities contributed substantially to the German war effort… It was, of course, in the best interests of GM and Ford to cooperate in the Axis war effort. Although GM, for example, was in complete management control of its Russelsheim warplane factory for nearly a full year after Germany’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941, its refusal to build warplanes at a time of negligible demand for automobiles would have brought about the economic collapse of its Opel plant. Moreover, it might have resulted in confiscation of the facility by the German Government. In fact, on November 25, 1942, the Reich did appoint an administrator for the Russelsheim plant who, although not permitted to interfere with the authority of the GM-appointed board of directors, was instructed to oversee operations. Nevertheless, communications as well as materiel reportedly continued to flow for the duration of the war between GM and Ford plants in Allied countries and those located in Axis territories. General Motors had owned 100 percent of Adam Opel A.G. continuously since 1929…Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Board Chairman of GM-USA and GM vice presidents James D. Mooney, John T. Smith, and Graeme K. Howard served on the GM-Opel Board of Directors throughout the war. GM continued to operate its Opel plants after the United States had formally declared war on Germany without any apparent interference by the German government up until Nov. 25. 1942. In fact, the only noticeable wartime change in plant operations was the departure of American personnel. The GMappointed directors and management remained… Communications as well as materiel continually flowed between GM plants in Allied countries and GM plants in Axis-controlled areas, presumably in direct violation of trading with the enemy legislation… After the cessation of hostilities, GM and Ford demanded reparations from the U.S. Government for wartime damages sustained by the Axis facilities as a result of Allied bombing. Before 1967 GM had collected more than $33 million reparations and Federal tax benefits for damage to its warplane and motor vehicle properties in formerly Axis territories, including German Austria, Poland. Latvia, and China. Likewise Ford received a little less than $1 million,
Source: Snell, Bradford. “American Corporations and the Nazis.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for-Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #28 primarily as a result of damages sustained by its military truck complex at Cologne. Due to their multinational dominance of motor vehicle production, GM and Ford became principal suppliers for the forces of fascism as well for the forces of democracy. It may, of course be argued that participating in both sides of an international national conflict, like the common corporate practice of investing in both political parties before election, is an appropriate corporate activity. Had Hitler and the Nazis won, General Motors and Ford would have appeared impeccably Nazi; as Hitler lost these
companies were able to reemerge impeccably American. In either case, the viability these corporations and the interests of their respective stockholders would have been preserved. On the other hand, the inevitable conflict of loyalties and potential for abuse inherent in such corporate posture would seem to suggest that the case of powerful concentrated industries engaged in warconvertible production and multinational expansion may adversely affect America’s legitimate interest in national security.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Why do you suppose some American Companies continued to operate in Germany even after World War II began? How do you feel about this?
2.
How do you react to General Motors and Ford being paid 33 million dollars by the United States for damages to their European factories during the war? Were their claims justified? Explain. Why do you suppose they were paid?
3.
How do you feel about the argument that corporations acted appropriately when they helped both sides in the war?
4.
Could these companies have participated in effective resistance during the war? Did they have moral responsibility to do so? Explain.
488 DEFINITIONS Axis Powers: reparations:
Germany and Italy during World War II payments for damaged or lost property or resources due to war
Source: Snell, Bradford. “American Corporations and the Nazis.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for-Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #29
the chemist’s decision What Would You Do?
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very decision has consequences. Some consequences are inevitable. Often we must choose between two less than desirable options. Ludwig Steiner is a chemist for a company that manufacturers various chemical compounds for domestic and industrial use in Germany during World War II. Word has leaked out in the plant that one of the company’s products, Zyklon B, an insecticide, is being shipped to the “death camps” to kill people. Steiner is 50 years old, married, and the
father of three children, all of whom are under 20 years old. He is family’s sole source of support. Steiner has been an employee of this company for twenty years, is a respected chemist, and is well liked by his fellow employees. Steiner is opposed to the use of Zyklon B to kill people. Yet he realizes the consequences to himself and his family if he protests or refuses to work on this chemical.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What should Steiner do? Are there options other than refusing or protesting? 2. What is the extent of Steiner’s responsibility for what was happening in the “death camps”? What was the responsibility of others who worked in German factories that manufactured materials used in the “death camps”? 3. What was Steiner’s responsibility to his family? Government? Camp victims? His own conscience? Which responsibility was greatest? Why? 4. Would it make a difference if he was the only one in the factory who refused to work on the chemical?
Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “A Chemist’s Decision: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #30
doctors of the death camps Time Magazine
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f all the troubling questions that linger from the Holocaust, one is as baffling today as it was when the first Allied soldiers stumbled upon the Nazi death camps: How could German physicians, heirs to Europe’s proudest medical tradition, participate in mass slaughter, and grisly human experiments. For Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton [who] has spent much of his professional life examining disaster, understanding the doctors of the Holocaust has now become a particularly grim challenge… Says Lifton: “Doctors were key agents in the Holocaust. They are enormously implicated in the killing.”… Even a generation later, Lifton found, many of the German doctors resorted to complicated mental gymnastics in discussing their Hitler days…Some saw themselves as idealistic Nazis who worked to restrain primitive elements within the movement. Others continued to feel the magnetism of Nazism. As Lifton explains, in an almost defensively clinical tone: “Often the former Nazi doctors seem to have two separate and functional selves—a conventional conservative postwar German attitude toward Nazism and its ‘excesses’ and a nostalgia for the excitement, power and sense of purpose of the Nazi days. For many, that intensity is so great that the Nazi belief system has not been given up.”… What made the corruption of physicians so crucial to Hitler was that their support provided moral and scientific legitimacy for his crazed racial and biological notions… After all, it was doctors who supervised the selections” at the concentration camps—deciding who would live to work, who would die in the gas chambers, who would become guinea pigs in barbarous experiments justified as science. Says Lifton: “Doctors were the embodiment of Nazi political and racial ideology in its ultimate
murderous form. The killing came to be projected as a medical operation.” Incredibly, some came to see genocide as a health measure. Said one: “If you have a gangrenous growth, you have to remove it.” Another commented coldly that life at Auschwitz was as routine as “building a sewage project.” Against the background of a eugenics movement that gained unfortunate respectability in some scientific circles in Europe and America during the ‘30s,…“many doctors came to see themselves as vast revolutionary biological therapists.” The third ranking doctor in the Nazi hierarchy admitted to him that he joined the party when someone fired his imagination by arguing that “Nazism is applied biology.” How did so many doctors manage to preside over killings while viewing themselves as idealists? And how could they possibly continue to regard themselves in so favorable a light even today? Lifton concludes that they invoked two standard psychological forms of self-delusion: the first is “psychic numbing”: at Auschwitz, for example, doctors talked compulsively about technical matters to avoid confronting the reality of all the horrors around them. The second is “middle knowledge,” a form of knowing and not knowing at the very same time. One doctor who had shipped large allocations of cyanide to the SS storm troopers who ran the camps seemed genuinely shocked to learn that it had been used to exterminate Jews and other people. Comments Lifton dryly, “He had worked very hard not to know.”… In Lifton’s eyes, those who look upon the Nazis or their medical henchmen simply as maddened sadists are on the wrong track. “Most killing is not done out of sadism, not even most Nazi killing,” says Lifton. The reality of medical participation in the Holocaust,…is even more chilling: “The murders are done around a perverted vision of life enhancement.”
Source: “Doctors of the Death Camps.” Time. 25 June 1979. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #30 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
What kinds of “medical experiments” were done? What reasons were given for the various “scientific experiments”? How do you react to these reasons?
2.
Government-sponsored medical experiments on human beings are not limited to the Nazi era. In the United States, prisoners have been used to conduct medical experiments on new drugs. Army personnel also have been involved in such experiments. In the latter case, some people were not told of the nature of the experiments or the hazards involved. Are government-sponsored medical experiments justified? How do you react to drug companies using convicts as guinea pigs?
3.
Robert J. Lifton writes that “Doctors were key agents in the Holocaust.” What does Lifton mean by “middle knowledge”? After the war, how did these doctors justify what they had done? Does it surprise you that members of the medical community could become part of the death process?
4.
As to capital punishment in the United States, suggestions have been offered on how to improve the execution process. One recent suggestion involved using doctors to administer fatal injections to the condemned. What do you think of this idea?
5.
Do you think it was possible for doctors to refuse to perform certain kinds of actions in the camps? Adelaide Hautual, a doctor and a survivor of Auschwitz, has testified that she had refused, and has said that it was possible for others to also refuse, especially among the SS doctors. Comment.
6.
Have you ever tried, as Lifton said, not to know something? Why?
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Source: “Doctors of the Death Camps.” Time. 25 June 1979. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
Unit IV: READING #31
the man who knew the nazi secret Charles Fenyvesi
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n 1942 a German industrialist risked his life by revealing the secret of Hitler’s order to exterminate European Jewry. Only one person is still alive who knows this man’s identity. He is Gerhart Riegner. He is now a portly, pink-cheeked gentleman of 71. Dressed in a three-piece suit, of a heavy woolen cloth of midnight blue, he looks like the mayor of a Swiss town: stolid, somber and exceedingly respectable. During the war, Riegner was — and is still — the representative in neutral Geneva of the World Jewish Congress. Then he was a brilliant young legal counsel; now his title is secretary general. Then he was a refugee from Germany, one of the few the Swiss agreed to admit. He still travels with the laissez-passer of a stateless refugee; after close to 50 years of residence, he hasn’t been able to bring himself to apply for Swiss citizenship and passport. “It took two days to persuade myself that the industrialist was telling the truth,” Riegner now says, “and finally I came to the conclusion that it was possible and probable.” Riegner then went to the American and British diplomatic representatives and asked them to transmit the information to their governments and to key Jewish leaders. That now-famous telegram — sent Aug. 8, 1942 — and others that followed were curtly dismissed in the State Department and Whitehall as “the opinion of one Jew in Geneva.” The State Department advised the U.S. legation in Switzerland that Riegner’s charges were “unsubstantiated” and waited for 20 days to send a copy to Rabbi Stephen Wise, the key American Jewish leader of the time, to whom Riegner had originally addressed his cable. “(Undersecretary of State) Sumner Welles told Wise not to publish it,” Riegner says. “In wartime it was an order.” For several months, no Allied or neutral official believed the industrialist, who heard about the plan during his many visits to Hitler’s headquarters. He had free access to top Nazis because his factories, with their 30,000 skilled workers, were pressed into the service of the German war machine. The industrialist’s fervent hope was that once the world learned of the death camps, it would do something to stop them.
“Nobody really believed it,” Riegner says. “Not even Jews who knew it. For instance, at the height of the extermination policy, I counted four million Jews as dead. My own office in Now York — where I sent all my reports and which was directed by a great Jewish leader — published the figure of only 1.5 million.” The recent controversy over the Holocaust Inquiry Commission led by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg deals in large part with what American Jewish organizations did or did not do in response to Riegner’s cable. Riegner says he Gerhart Riegnar, 1983 photo. welcomes an impartial inquiry by independent scholars. But, he charges, the commission as it is now constituted is “ideologically fueled by people determined to rewrite history.” The people Riegner criticizes are associates of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, “who want to indict the Zionist establishment” of neglecting rescue work. Riegner tells how another American Jewish leader sent him a list of 30,000 addresses of Jews in Poland and asked the Geneva office to send food packages to those addresses. “That was in 1943 or ‘44,” Riegner says. “What madness! They saw all my reports and knew that none of those addresses were valid. Those people were..” Riegner doesn’t complete the sentence. He stares into space, purses his lips and declares slowly, flatly, impassively: “They knew it but they didn’t believe it.” Riegner, however, was convinced. At 30, he was “an unexcitable, serious young man,” he recalls, “always a well-balanced type.” Having studied law in Germany and then in France, he intended to become a professor of jurisprudence. He saw himself as following in the footsteps of his father, once Germany’s minister of justice, and a person drawn to the philosophy of law. “I come from a typically German-Jewish bourgeois family very deeply
Source: Fenyvesi, Charles. “‘The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #1
(left to right) After Riegner sent his telegram to Samuel Silverman, a member of Parliament, Silverman sent a message to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. Wise then wrote to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. The European Affairs division of the State Department immediately drafted a proposed reply for Welles.
embedded in German culture, a humanistic tradition, interested in philosophy, history, art,” Riegner says. “But also roots in Jewishness.” From the time Riegner saw Nazis beating up Jews and other political enemies on the streets and in the universities, he was a stiff pessimist in the face of what he calls “the Jewish optimism of the centuries — a kind of wishful thinking, really.” Unlike many other Jews, who dismissed Nazism as an episode and predicted that Hitler would soon run out of steam, Riegner argued that Jews should leave Germany while they still could — he left in May 1933, four months after Hitler became chancellor. He read Mein Kampf and listened to Nazi slogans and songs. “From my first encounter with Nazi terror, I took the Nazis seriously,” he says. “Hitler made many speeches in which he threatened to destroy the totality of Jews.” “Why people didn’t believe is a question I have always struggled with. It was so terrible that the human mind refused to accept it. An encounter with absolute evil is something very few people are prepared to accept. It is a paradox: The most positive experience is that people can’t accept evil. That means that man is basically good.” At the time Riegner had no doubt: The industrialist was telling the truth, and all other evidence supported the report. Headquartered in Geneva, only a few miles from Germany and France, Riegner collected information, all of which confirmed the industrialist’s report. The list of witnesses grew every week. A Jew who survived two massacres (36,000 dead) in the ghettos
of Riga and reached Switzerland; a Swiss employee in the consulate in Prague briefed by Czech Jews on deportations; a Polish Jew who was smuggled out of Russia by a disaffected German officer warning him about the extermination camps he had seen; messages, smuggled out by the French railway workers, of mass roundups of West European Jews for transportation to concentration camps in the east. There was even testimony from a Danish Jew close to Field Marshal Hermann Goering—“Goering had such strange associations,” Riegner explains, “and we asked ourselves how reliable he was”—who somehow smuggled to Geneva a sheaf of the railroad schedules for Jewish transports. In a supreme example of bureaucratic punctiliousness, the German railways billed the Berlin Jewish community for the cost of the deportations. Riegner kept filing the reports, kept asking for action. “We never did enough,” he says. “Sure, we could have done more. All of us. In 1944 Wise finally got the American government to agree to a free port admitting 1,000 Yugoslav Jews. It was a procedure to postpone immigration problems. It could have been done with thousands of others. Also, we could have put stronger pressures on the neutrals—Sweden, Turkey—to accept more refugees. We could have brought more people to England, to North Africa. “Hitler could have been stopped several times, but once he started rolling, only thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Jews could have been saved. Not millions.” The industrialist, ostensibly in Geneva on business, met Riegner three times, each time warning
Source: Fenyvesi, Charles. “‘The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983.
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Unit IV: READING #31 of the rising number of Jews being killed. He passed on details such as the kind of chemicals used in the gas chambers. The industrialist was frustrated that nothing was happening, Riegner says. “In December 1942, finally, there was a condemnation of the massacres of Jews (from) London, Washington and Moscow. The British Parliament rose in two minutes of silence. But they wouldn’t act.” Riegner says he does not know why the industrialist wanted to remain unknown. Fear of revenge against his family might have been a reason, Riegner says. He adds that it is possible that the industrialist never told his family about his role. “I wrote to his wife after his death,” Riegner says, “and I alluded to his service. I think his wife might have known. Perhaps. But not his children. I don’t know. For me, what mattered was that he was a democrat, deeply anti-Nazi—a man of great moral standards who wanted to relieve his conscience.” On one occasion, Riegner concedes, he was forced to reveal the industrialist’s name. When he
made “a desperate attempt” in the fall of 1942 to convince the Americans of the truth of the death camps, Riegner wrote down the industrialist’s name, put it in a sealed envelope and handed it over to the head of the American legation in Bern. This was a few days after the industrialist had warned Riegner that he now had definite information on Hitler’s direct order to exterminate all Jews. Riegner put all the evidence together in a document of 25 pages, to be transmitted to Washington. But the envelope has disappeared, Riegner says, and an inkling of a sly grin spreads across his impassive face. The sealed envelope is not in the American archives, Riegner says, the U.S. dipplomat is dead and no researcher has come up with the industrialist’s name. “I gave my word not to give out his name,” Riegner now says, “I am bound to my word. He never asked for anything else. Many people have approached me to give out his name, but I did not break my word. I never will.”
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Source: Fenyvesi, Charles. “‘The Man Who Knew the Nazi Secret.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #32
manipulating the law David A. Altshuler Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933. This new German government set in motion a series of events that resulted in the gradual denial of all basic civil and economic rights of German Jews. The victorious Nazis made Jews the target of violent attacks as part of their victory celebration. These initial attacks soon led to more formal and legal methods, which included boycotts and intimidation of Jewish businesses as well as laws that restricted the social, political, and economic life of the Jews. Over 400 anti-Jewish laws and decrees were passed by the Nazi government. The Nazis used the mysterious burning of the Reichstag building as an excuse to pass the Enabling Law, which made Adolf Hitler dictator of Germany. He outlawed all political parties except the Nazis. Many of those opposed to the Nazis, especially Communists and Socialists, were placed in the first concentration camps created in Germany. In this reading, David Altshuler describes how Hitler and the Nazi government used political power to enact laws denying Jews human freedom and dignity.
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ndeed, Hitler was able to use the law even more effectively than violence as a weapon to eliminate Jews from government service and public life. Eventually, the Third Reich enacted some four hundred laws and decrees, the first of these laws barred “non-Aryans” and political opponents of the Nazis from civil service…Other laws during this same month, April 1933, pushed Jews out of legal practice, university careers, and positions in the arts and the press. To simplify this procedure, a law passed on April 11 defined exactly what was meant by “nonAryan.” A “non-Aryan” was anyone “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents,” even if only one parent or grandparent was a “non-Aryan.” From then on, government workers had to prove their lineage (descent) with documents like birth and marriage certificates, and a special “expert on racial research” was employed by the Minister of the Interior to judge “doubtful” genealogies (“Family Trees”). The Nazi definition was simple: a Jew is a Jew is a Jew—that is, down to the third generation. It did not matter if one of your grandparents converted to Protestantism and your mother married a non-Jewish military hero. The grandchild of a Jew would always be a Jew… Having singled the Jews out, Hitler used the remaining months of 1933 to institute new antiSemitic laws. Kosher slaughtering of animals was forbidden. The citizenship of Jews whose families had immigrated to Germany from Eastern Europe was revoked. Farmers with any trace of Jewish blood were denied all rights of family property inheritance.
These and other measures had in just a few months turned the dreams of popular anti-Semitism into reality. And Hitler had won many friends by ousting Jews from important jobs and giving those positions to loyal Nazi party supporters. Now Hitler turned to solidifying his own power. The law, the courts and judges, the police and the press all bent to his will. All sources of opposition had been crushed or had collapsed. Protestant and Catholic clergy traded their blessings for the right to keep their religious ceremonies and institutions. Most professors and intellectuals like most lawyers and judges, sacrificed sense and honor, submitted to the Nazi state and enhanced it with their prestige. The army, believing it would be restored to grandeur, climbed on the bandwagon. President Hindenburg died in August 1934, and Hitler “legally” became both president and chancellor. By 1935, Hitler had succeeded in making Germany a unified and militarized vehicle of personal power. In May 1935, he assured Germany’s European neighbors and the world that he wanted power only for peace. The government even issued official statements condemning mob violence against Jews, probably because Hitler considered terror in the streets ungovernable. But on September 15, 1935, the most vicious anti-Jewish laws, the so-called “Nuremberg Laws” were adopted unanimously by the Reichstag. “Purity of German blood” became a legal category, and marriage between Germans and Jews was outlawed. Hitler explained in Mein Kampf that such marriages would be as evil as those “between man and ape.”
Source: Altshuler, David A. “Manipulating the Law.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #32 More serious still was the Reich Citizenship Law, which made race the determining factor in excluding Jews from any citizenship rights. Within a few short years, questions of race would make the difference between life and death.
During the next few years, up until 1938, no substantial anti-Jewish legislation was enacted. Instead, the SS, the most prestigious and dreaded branch of the Nazi movement, increasingly began to take full power over the Jews.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
How did the Nazi government deny civil and economic rights to Jews in Germany?
2.
Why do you believe that there was no major resistance to these Nazi policies by the non-Jewish Germans?
3.
The German government under Adolf Hitler is an example of how the law can be used as a weapon against innocent people. Has this occurred in our own society? Explain.
DEFINITIONS Kosher: food that is ritually fit to eat according to Jewish dietary laws Nuremberg Laws: a series of German laws that systematically denied civil, economic, and social fights to Jews
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Source: Altshuler, David A. “Manipulating the Law.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #33
theologians ponder holocaust’s causes Paula Herbut
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was picked out by Dr. Josef Mengele, along with about 200
other children. We were sent to Birkeneu Camp D, where the experiments were. I was experimented twice through injections and twice with chemicals. We were children. We didn’t know what the drugs were. It made you very sick, made you vomit. I was passed out eight hours, I think.
”
Some of the children died.
Alex Dehel, 51 of New York, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society worker. Born in Cluj, Romania. Sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was twelve.
ea Spiro, a Holocaust survivor now living in Los Angeles, still remembers the taunts of Christian children when she was growing up in the 1930s in Radom, Poland. “You could play with the kids in the courtyard, and all of a sudden they would say, ‘Hey, your’re a Jew, you killed Jesus’” she said. From the taunts of children to the forced wearing of a Star of David to five concentration camps, she told of the tightening net of isolation with the onslaught of Nazi Germany. The taunts of children came from erroneous theology. But, according to theologians examining the Holocaust, such theology was taught for centuries in churches around the world, leading to pogroms, to persecution, and finally to the climate permitting Hitler’s plan to kill the worldwide Jewish population. Spiro was one of more than 10,000 survivors who came to the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Washington. Six million Jews—one-third of the world’s Jewish population— perished in the Holocaust. For Jews the establishment and support of the State of Israel is one outcome of the Holocaust. Another is reexamination of Jewish theology and Jewish identity. Christians, meanwhile, are sorting through centuries of church-promoted anti-Semitism, trying to eliminate anti-Semitic teachings, and revising concepts of Christianity in relation to Judaism. The Rev. Dr. Franklin Littell, founder of the Philadelphia-based National Institute on the Holocaust and a professor of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia, said the Holocaust leads to a “credibility crisis” for both the modern univeristy, which produced “technically competent barbarians,” and Christianity. “This monstrous crime was committed by baptized Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians, none of them rebuked, let alone excommunicated.” “One cannot escape the implications of the Christian’s responsibility, because Christians have taught for centuries, and preached, contempt for the Jewish people,” said Littell, a United Methodist minister.
Source: Herbut, Paula. “Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983.
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Unit IV: READING #33
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“The question also arises, why didn’t Christians help the Jews more than they did? How did a terrorist movement like the German Nazi power come to power with the kind of ideology it was proclaiming without church leaders digging in and preaching against it ever coming to power? “It was all there in perfectly clear writing in the party platform and in Hitler’s Mein Kempf. Some were afraid that the communists were going to take over Europe. Some were such fanatical patriots they would have supported the devil himself if he were German, and he was. And a good many of them were just naturally compromisers and accommodators, bureaucrats.” The Rev. Dr. John T. Pawlikowski, a Roman Catholic priest and professor of social ethics at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, said that “traditional, primarily Christian anti-Semitism served as an indispensable seed bed for the popular acceptance of the Nazi-genocidal plan.” Faulty theology included the charge that Jews killed Jesus and the perpetual wandering concept, which said Jews were to roam the world without a state of their own as a sign of punishment for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah, he said. There also were the fables in the Catholic Chuch, there was the “blood during a Seder. There are probably some who “still believe it,” Pawlikowski said. Lay Catholic Holocaust scholar Harry Cargas, professor of literature and language at Webster University at St. Louis and author of A Christian Response to the Holocaust, called the Holocaust, “the greatest Christian tragedy since the crucifixion…” “In history,” he said, “we had ghettoization of Jews, expulsion from nations, the Inquisition…Then it turned from theological anti-Semitism to racial antiSemitism. That started in the 19th century. “Hitler didn’t just happen on the scene. He did what he did only because it was possible to do. In the middle 1930s. Hitler embarked on a ‘euthansia’ campaign, killing the feeble, mentally unproductive, the aged. He killed about 50,000 people. The Christian churches spoke out, and Hitler abandoned the eithanasia program. What would have happened if there had been a (papal) encyclical. For the Jews? There’s reason to believe it would have saved millions of lives.” Pope Pius XII was “silent,” he charged. “The annihilations went on, with impunity,” Cargas said. Heinrich Himmler, “who insisted that members of the SS must believe in God, could thus, unchallenged by serious moral attacks, speak of the honor and decency of the work of slaughter. “We can say that we have performed this task in love of our
people. And we have suffered no damage from it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character,” he said. Among Cargas’ suggestions are that the Catholic Church excommunicate Hitler, that the Christian liturgical calendars include an annual memorial service for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, that the Christian churches insist on the essential Jewishness of Christianity, and that the Christian emphasis on missionizing be “redirected toward perfecting individual Christian lives” instead. Jews who tried to escape the Holocaust when it was still possible were turned away by many safe countries, including the United States. The support of Israel as refuge is one result. The Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel “mirror each other,” said Rabbi Daniel Landes in the book of essays Genocide: Critical issues of the Holocaust. “As the Holocaust can be understood as Jewish powerlessness and victimization, Israel is the expression of Jewish power and self-determination,” said Landes, director of research projects at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “We lost 80 percent of all the rabbis, scholars, artists, poets, historians,” said Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington. “The Jewish people learned the perils of powerlessness and homelessness, and that’s the reason for our deep commitment to Israel.” The Holocaust raises “questions about God, with the simple question, where was God during the Holocaust: about the nature of man, and about the nature of the people of Israel,” said Rabbi Seymour Siegel, executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. One answer is that “evil in the world like the Holocaust is not created by God but is created by man,” he said. “The evil of the Holocaust destroys all simple, optimistic views about human nature, and shows the depth of evil that persons can commit against other persons…” The Holocaust differed from other genocidal examples because of its use of assembly-line technology in the slaughter. “It’s a warning,” said Holocaust survivor Rabbi Arthur Schneier, rabbi of Park East Synagogue in New York and chairman of the American division of the World Jewish Congress. For “haven’t we perfected our technology?” he asked. “Above all,” he said, “the greatest danger is silence and indifference, whenever there is any kind of injustice. The one important lesson of the Holocaust is the slumber of indifference on the part of many good people who played it safe.”
Source: Herbut, Paula. “Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #33
499 When the Allies entered the camps, they found thousands of corpses. Even after liberation, starved and sick prisoners continued to die. (Top) Members of a British Parlimentary delegation visit Buchenwald. Bodies of men who died during the preceding 24 hours are stacked awaiting burial. (Above) The U.S. First Army found these skeletonlike bodies when they entered the camp at Nordhausen, Germany, where slave laborers of various nationalities, some dead and some dying, lay side by side. (Right) Bodies of gassed prisoners were disposed of in adjoining crematoria, where other prisoners were forced to burn the dead.
Source: Herbut, Paula. “Theologians Ponder Holocaust’s Causes.” Holocaust: The Obligation to Remember Anthology. Washington, D.C.: The Washington Post, 1983.
Unit IV: READING #34
the church and the holocaust Guenter Lewy Perhaps no religious issue has stirred more controversy than the position of the Vatican, and particularly that of Pope Pius XII, during the Holocaust. Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial play “The Deputy” portrayed the Pope as indifferent to Jewish suffering. According to Hochhuth, the Pope feared that open opposition to Nazi genocide would imperil the Church. Most important, Hitler’s war against Bolshevik Russia could not be jeopardized by a verbal attack against the Nazis. For the Catholic Church, said Hochhuth, the defeat of the Communists was more important than the fate of the Jews. The debate about the actions of Pope Pius XII continues today. And what about “the people,” asks Harry Cargas in A Christian Response to the Holocaust, who devised the policies that Christians and others carried out? Adolf Hitler was a baptized Catholic who claimed to be doing God’s work in killing Jews. Paul Joseph Goebbels, propaganda expert, came from a strict Catholic family and had his education, in part, funded by the Albertus Magnus Society. Auschwitz’s Commandant Rudolf Hoess said he took his Catholic religion “very seriously.” Heinrich Himmler, the ruthless head of the SS, was from a devout Catholic family. Reinhard Heydrich, who led the Reich Security Service, was Catholic. It has not gone unremarked that Hitler’s heir apparent, Hermann Goering, was given the full funeral rites of the Lutheran Church.
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Of course, that discussion should not blind us to the reality of outspoken men such as Father Bernhard Lichtenberg and Women such as Edith Stein (the nun sent to the death camps because she was of Jewish origin) who did stand up against Nazi brutality. Andreas Szeptyck, the Archbishop of Lwow, and the titular head of the Ukranian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia, refused to offer religious services to those who participated in the Nazi murder machine. He wrote a letter of protest to Himmler, hid Jewish children and adults in his Church, and warned all individuals of divine punishment for those who shed innocent blood and “make of themselves outcasts of human society by disregarding the sanctity of man.” Father Daubrauskas concealed Jewish Tomb scrolls and denied the confessional to collaborators. Protecting the 200 Jews of Vidulka, the head priest, Father Jonas, cried “If you kill the children, you’ll have to kill me first.” Thus, there were members of the church who acted as heroic Christians. Tragically, too many members of the church hierarchy collaborated or remained silent. In the following selection, Guenter Lewy briefly describes the response of the Catholic Church to Nazism.
The Weimar Period From the time the National Socialist movement appeared in the 20’s, organized German Catholicism came into repeated conflict with it, but anti-Semitism was not one of the primary bones of contention. On the contrary, many Catholic publicists—like the Franciscan Father. Erhard Schlund—agreed with the Nazis on the importance of fighting “the destructive influence of the Jews in religion, morality, literature and art, and political and social life,” and objected only to the extremist tone of the movement. Thus, for example, the Jesuit Gustav Gundlach, writing in a reference work edited by Bishop Buchberger of Regensburg, argued that a political anti-Semitism, directed against the “exaggerated and harmful
influence” of the Jews, was permitted so long as it utilized morally admissible means. And Bishop Buchberger himself, while deploring racialism, concluded that it was “justified self-defense” to ward off the rule of “an overly powerful Jewish capital.” Concentrating her fire upon liberals and free thinkers, many of whom were of Jewish descent, the Church did practically nothing to stem the inroads anti-Semitism was making on German life throughout the period of the Weimar Republic. Though the German bishops during these years spoke up against Hitler’s glorification of race and blood, they rarely found anything specific to say about the virulent anti-Semitic propaganda the Nazis were spreading or about the acts of violence against
Source: Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #34 the Jews that were becoming more and more common.
The Pre-War Hitler Years On April 26, 1933, shortly after coming to power. Hitler had a talk with two dignitaries of the German church, Bishop Berning and Prelate Steinmann. In the course of this talk he reminded his visitors that the Church for 1500 years had regarded the Jews as parasites, had banished them into ghettos, and had forbidden Christians to work for them; he, Hitler said, merely intended to do more effectively what the Church had attempted to accomplish for so long. The reaction of the two Church dignitaries to Hitler’s attempt to identify his brand of anti-Semitism with the age-old anti-Judaism of the Church is not known. What we do know, however, is that from the time Hitler came to power all the German bishops began declaring their appreciation of the important natural values of race and racial purity, and they limited their dissent to insisting that this goal be achieved without resort to immoral means. The article on “Race” in an authoritative handbook on topical religious problems, edited by Archbishop Grober, expressed this position in the following words: Every people bears itself the responsibility for its successful existence, and the intake of entirely foreign blood will always represent a risk for a nationality that has proven its historical worth. Hence, no people may be denied the right to maintain undisturbed their previous racial stock and to enact safeguards for this purpose. The Christian religion merely demands that the means used do not offend against the moral law and natural justice… Close to half the population of the Greater German Reich (43.1 per cent in 1939) was Catholic, and even among the SS., despite all pressures to leave the Church, almost a fourth (22.7 per cent on December 31, 1938) belonged to the Catholic faith. Yet while the episcopate had, in the past issued orders to deny the sacraments to Catholics who engaged in dueling or agreed to have their bodies cremated, the word that would have forbidden the faithful, on pain of excommunication, to go on participating in the massacre of the Jews was never spoken. And so Catholics went on participating conscientiously, along with other Germans. There was, however, at least one Catholic churchman in Germany for whom the Christian duty to love one’s neighbor amounted to more than a pious formula-the sixty-six-year old Provost
Lichtenberg of Berlin, who, right through the stepped-up anti-Semitic agitation, continued to say a daily prayer for the Jews. He was finally arrested on October 23, 1941, a week after the first of the mass deportations of Jews had begun. During questioning by Himmler’s henchmen, the Provost asserted that the deportation of the Jews was irreconcilable with the Christian moral law, and asked to be allowed to accompany the deportees as their spiritual adviser. Sentenced to two years imprisonment for abuse of the pulpit, Lichtenberg was seized by the Gestapo upon his release in October 1943, and shipped off to the concentration camp at Dachau. He died during the transport on November 5, 1943. The passivity of the German episcopate in the face of the Jewish tragedy stands in marked contrast to the conduct of the French, Belgian, and Dutch bishops. In Holland, where the Church as early as 1934 had prohibited the participation of Catholics in the Dutch Nazi movement, the bishops in 1942 immediately and publicly protested the first deportations of Dutch Jews, and in May 1943, they forbade the collaboration of Catholic policemen in the hunting down of Jews even at the cost of losing their jobs. In Belgium members of the episcopate actively supported the rescue efforts of their clergy, who hid many hundreds of Jewish children. And in France, the highest dignitaries of the Church repeatedly used their pulpits to denounce the deportations and to condemn the barbarous treatment of the Jews. Throughout Western Europe untold numbers of priests and members of the monastic clergy organized the rescue of Jews, hid them in monasteries, parish houses, and private homes. Many lay Catholics in France, Holland, and Belgium acted in a similar fashion, thus saving thousands of Jewish lives…[In] Germany only a handful of Jews was hidden by the clergy or otherwise helped by them in their hour of distress… There were, then, exceptions, but the overall picture was one of indifference and apathy. “Among the Christians,” a group of German Protestant and Catholic theologians concluded in 1950, “a few courageously helped the persecuted; but the large majority failed disgracefully in the face of this unheard-of provocation of the merciful God.”
The Role of the Papacy In April 1933 a communication reached Pope Pius XI from Germany expressing grave concern over the Nazis’ anti-Semitic aims and requesting the Supreme Pontiff to issue an encylical on the Jewish question. The letter was written by the philosopher Dr. Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and later known as Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce of the Order of the Carmelites. Edith Stein’s request was not
Source: Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #34
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granted and nine years later, in August 1942, she was seized by the Gestapo from a Dutch monastery in which she had sought refuge, and sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. The debate over whether the Papacy could have prevented or should at least have vigorously protested the massacre of the Jews of Europe, of which Edith Stein was one of the victims, has been going on ever since and has acquired new vigor as a result of the Hochhuth play. In response to Hitler’s anti-Semitic drive. Pius XII’s predecessor, Pius XI, like the German episcopate, seems to have limited his concern to Catholic non-Aryans. At the request of Cardinal Bertram, the Papal Secretary of State in September 1933 put in “a word on behalf of those German Catholics” who were of Jewish descent and for this reason suffering “social and economic difficulties.” In the years that followed the Holy See often took issue with the Nazis’ glorification of race, but the Jewish question specifically was never discussed… Pius XI’s encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge” of March 1937 rejected the myths of race and blood as contrary to revealed Christian truth but it neither mentioned nor criticized anti-Semitism per se…The elevation of Cardinal Pacelli to the Papacy in the spring of 1939 brought to the chair of St. Peter a man who, in contrast to his predecessor, was unemotional and dispassionate, as well as a master of the language of diplomatic ambiguity. That the Holy See had no intrinsic objection to a policy of subjecting the Jews to discriminatory legislation again became clear when in June 1941 Marshal Petain’s Vichy government introduced a series of “Jewish statutes.” The Cardinals and Archbishops of France made known their strong disapproval of these measures, but Leon Bérard, the Vichy ambassador at the Holy See, was able to report to Petain after lengthy consultations with high Church officials that the Vatican did not consider such laws in conflict with Catholic teaching. Meanwhile, there was growing criticism of the Pope’s failure to protest publicly against Nazi atrocities, and especially against the murder of the Jews in the Polish death factories. In July 1942, Harold H. Tittmann, the assistant to Roosevelt’s personal representative at the Holy See, Myron C. Taylor, pointed out to the Vatican that its silence was “endangering its moral prestige and is undermining faith both in the Church and in the Holy Father himself.” In September 1942, Tittmann formally requested that the Pope condemn the “incredible horrors” perpetrated by the Nazis. After the Western Allies in December 1942 had vigorously denounced the cold-blooded extermination of the Jews, Tittmann again asked the Papal
Secretary of State whether the Holy See could not issue a similar pronouncement. Maglione answered that the Holy See, in line with its policy of neutrality, could not protest particular atrocities and had to limit itself to condemning immoral actions in general. He assured Tittmann that everything possible was being done behind the scenes to help the Jews. Two days later, in the course of a lengthy Christmas message broadcast by the Vatican radio, Pope Pius made another of his many calls for a more humane conduct of hostilities. Humanity, the Pope declared, owed the resolution to build a better world to “the hundreds of thousands who without personal guilt, sometimes for no other reason but on account of their nationality or descent, were doomed to death or exposed to a progressive deterioration of their condition… Every public statement had had to be carefully weighed “in the interest of those suffering so that their situation would not inadvertently be made still more difficult and unbearable.” Unfortunately, Pius XII added, the Church’s pleas for compassion and for the observance of the elementary norms of humanity had encountered doors “which no key was able to open.” The precise nature of these interventions has not been revealed to this day… The Pope’s policy of neutrality encountered its most crucial test when the Nazis began rounding up the 8,000 Jews of Rome in the fall of 1943. Prior to the start of the arrests, the Jewish community was told by the Nazis that unless it raised 50 kilograms of gold (the equivalent of $56,000) within 36 hours, 300 hostages would be taken. When it turned out that the Jews themselves could only raise 35 kgs., the Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, asked for and received a loan from the Vatican treasury to cover the balance. The Pope approved this transaction. But the big question in everyone’s mind was how the Supreme Pontiff would react when the deportation of the Jews from the Eternal City began… On October 18, over one thousand Roman Jewsmore than two-thirds of them women and childrenwere shipped off to the killing center of Auschwitz. Fourteen men and one woman returned alive. About 7,000 Roman Jews—that is, seven out of eight-were able to elude their hunters by going into hiding. More than 4,000, with the knowledge and approval of the Pope, found refuge in the numerous monasteries and houses of religious orders in Rome, and a few dozen were sheltered in the Vatican itself. The rest were hidden by their Italian neighbors, among whom the anti-Jewish policy of the Fascists had never been popular. But for the Germans, overwhelmingly
Source: Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #34 relieved at having averted a public protest by the Pope, the fact that a few thousand Jews had escaped the net was of minor significance… Since the end of World War 11, Pius XII has often been criticized for his silence. It has been argued that the Pope could have saved numerous lives, if indeed he could not have halted the machinery of destruction altogether, had he chosen to take a public stand, and had he confronted the Germans with the threat of an interdict or with the excommunication of Hitler, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis belonging to the Catholic faith. As examples of the effectiveness of public protests, it is possible to cite the resolute reaction of the German episcopate to the euthanasia program. Also, in Slovakia, Hungary, and Rumania, the forceful intervention of Papal nuncios, who threatened the Quisling governments with public condemnation by the Pope, was able, albeit temporarily, to stop the deportations. At the very least, it has been suggested, a public denunciation of the mass murders by Pius XII, broadcast widely over the Vatican radio, would have revealed to Jews and Christians alike what deportation to the East actually meant. The Pope would have been believed whereas the broadcasts of the Allies were often shrugged off as war propaganda. Many of the deportees who accepted the assurances of the Germans that they were merely being resettled, might thus have been warned and given an impetus to escape; many more Christians might have helped and sheltered Jews, and many more lives might have been saved. There exists, of course, no way of definitely proving or disproving these arguments. Whether a papal decree of excommunication against Hitler would have dissuaded the Fuhrer from carrying out his plan to destroy the Jews is very doubtful, and revocation of the Concordat by the Holy See would have bothered Hitler still less. However, a flaming protest against the massacre of the Jews coupled with an imposition of the interdict upon all of Germany or the excommunication of all Catholics in any way involved with the apparatus of the “Final Solution” would have been a more formidable and effective weapon. Yet this was precisely the kind of action which the Pope could take without risking the allegiance of the German Catholics. Given the indifference of the German population toward the fate of the Jews and the highly ambivalent attitude of the German hierarchy toward Nazi anti-Semitism, a forceful stand by the Supreme Pontiff on the Jewish question might well have led to a large-scale desertion from the Church. When…asked whether he would not protest the extermination of the Jews, the Pope is reported to
have answered, “Dear friend, do not forget that millions of Catholics serve in the German armies. Shall I bring them into conflicts of conscience?” The Pope knew that the German Catholics were not prepared to suffer martyrdom for their Church; still less were they willing to incur the wrath of their Nazi rulers for the sake of the Jews, whom their own bishops for years had castigated as a harmful influence in German life. In the final analysis, then, “the Vatican’s silence only reflected the deep feeling of the Catholic masses of Europe.” Some Catholic writers have suggested that a public protest by the Pope would not only have been unsuccessful in helping the Jews but might have caused additional damage-to the Jews, to the Mischlinge, to the Church, to the territorial integrity of the Vatican, and to Catholics in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. So far as the Jews are concerned, it is tempting to dismiss this argument by asking what worse fate could possibly have befallen them than the one that actually did. But in any case, the Catholic bishops of Holland tried the gamble and failed. In July 1942, together with the Protestant Churches, they sent a telegram of protest against the deportation of the Dutch Jews to the German Reichskommissar (commissioner) and threatened to make their protest public unless the deportations were halted. The Germans responded by offering to exempt from deportation non-Aryans converted to Christianity before 1941 if the churches agreed to remain silent. The Dutch Reformed Church accepted the bargain, but the Catholic Archbishop of Utrecht refused and issued a pastoral letter in which he denounced the wrong done to the Jews. The Germans retaliated by seizing and deporting all the Catholic non-Aryans they could find, among them Edith Stein. There was thus some basis for the fear that a public protest, along with any good that could come of it, might make some things worse, if not for the Jews, at least for the Mischlinge and the Catholics themselves. The Pope had other perhaps still weightier, reasons for remaining silent…The Holy See did not want to jeopardize its neutrality by condemning German atrocities, and the Pope was unwilling to risk later charges of having been partial and contributing to a German defeat. Moreover, the Vatican did not wish to undermine and weaken Germany’s struggle against Russia. In the late summer of 1943, the Papal Secretary of State declared that the fate of Europe depended upon a German victory on the Eastern front; and Father Robert Leiber, one of Pius XII’s secretaries, recalls that the late Pope had always looked upon Russian Bolshevism as more dangerous than German National Socialism.
Source: Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #34 Finally, one is inclined to conclude that the Pope and his advisors—influenced by the long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles—did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid. Pius XII broke his policy of strict neutrality during World War II to express concern over the German violation of the neutrality
of Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg in May 1940. When some German Catholics criticized him for this action, the Pope wrote the German bishops that neutrality was not synonymous “with indifference and apathy where moral and humane considerations demanded a candid word.” All things told, did not the murder of several million Jews demand a similarly “candid word”?
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
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1.
“The sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity.” What does this remark by Elie Wiesel mean?
2.
Respond to this statement: “If Jesus had been alive in Europe in the 1940s, he would have died in a gas chamber”
3.
What percentage of the German population was Catholic?
4.
Why is Pope Pius XII criticized by some historians? What options were available to him? How have some defended him?
5.
What should be the role of the Vatican when faced with experiences such as the Holocaust?
6.
What did Protestant church groups and theologians do? Did they protest and fight Nazi policies regarding the Jews? Did they accept Nazi policies? Did they remain silent?
7.
What examples does the author provide of Catholics who resisted the Nazis?
DEFINITION Mischlinge:
child of mixed (Jewish-Christian) parentage
Source: Lewy, Guenter. “The Church and the Holocaust.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #35
pope john paul at auschwitz Robert Reid Pope John Paul II grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. The marks of his own experience led him to visit Auschwitz in June 1979, In Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust Yaffa Eliach tells of a young priest who refused to baptize a two-year old Jewish boy hidden by a Christian family—because he knew the child’s parents wanted the boy to remain Jewish. That young priest was Father Karol Wojtyla—Pope John Paul 11. His journey, reported by Robert Reid of The Associated Press, was symbolic, not only as a recognition of the importance of the Holocaust for Christians but as a commitment of the Church to ease suffering everywhere.
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USCHWITZ, Poland—Pope John Paul II said Mass yesterday from a simple wooden platform above railway tracks that once carried millions to their deaths in Adolf Hitler’s most infamous concentration camp. Earlier, he prayed in the cell of a Polish priest killed at Auschwitz, calling the extermination complex “a place built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology.” For the Mass, a crowd of several hundred thousand stood among the remains of brick barracks that once housed inmates of the Birkenau camp, largest in the complex known as Auschwitz. [Almost two] million people, most of them Jews, died in the Auschwitz camps between 1940 and January 1945, when the Germans abandoned the complex to the advancing Soviet army. Joining the Pope for the Mass were about 200 priests, all former inmates of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Other survivors stood before the platform, clad in blue-and-white-striped camp uniforms… As the Pope arrived by helicopter, thousands strained at barbed wire, left standing as a grim
reminder of the killings… After praying in the cell, the Pope changed vestments for the Mass. The small building where 35 years ago the camp staff decided which new inmates would be put to work and which would go to the gas chambers. He then walked to a white platform near the ruins of the crematoria used to burn the bodies of victims killed in the gas chambers. Red and white carnations covered the old tracks over which trains brought Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others. John Paul, who studied for the priesthood in secret while working in a German forced-labor project, singled out the sufferings of Jews, Russians and Poles, who made up most of the victims at Auschwitz. “The very people that received from God the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ itself experienced in a special measure what is meant by killing,” he said of the Jews… “Auschwitz is a place everyone should visit,” he said. “And during the visit one should ask. ‘What are the limits of hatred, what are the limits of destruction of man by man?”
QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION 1.
Should a Pope raise issues like the Holocaust even if it might stir painful memories of the past?
Source: Reid, Robert. “Pope John Paul at Auschwitz.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Conscience—An Anthology for Students. Harry Furman, ed. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1993 (out-of-print).
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Unit IV: READING #36
the ordeal of dietrich bonhoeffer What Would You Do? The rise of the Nazis created major disagreement among Protestant churchmen in Germany. Led by Army Chaplain Ludwig Muller, the German Christian Church supported the Nazi government and its racial policy. Claiming some 70 percent of Protestants in Germany, this Church supported the 1933 Aryan Clauses that forbade anyone of Jewish origin or married to a Jew from holding state office. All pastors were required by the German Christian Church to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The other major Protestant group in Germany was known as the Confessing Church. They believed religion should not support political parties. Among its leaders were the theologians Karl Barth and Martin Niemoller and a young man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
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onhoeffer was the son of a famous German psychiatrist who grew up within a circle of wellknown German intellectuals. As a child, Bonhoeffer became interested in religion. After World War I, he studied theology and received his doctorate at the age of 21. He was particularly interested in Christian ethics and the question of what it means to be a good Christian. Influenced by the philosophy of Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer believed that the Church should not act against the state, no matter what the state’s offenses. But Bonhoeffer believed that Hitler and the Nazis were violating God’s laws. In 1934, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other members of the Confessing Church met at Barmen and produced an attack on the Nazi dictatorship. The Barmen Declaration also attacked Hitler’s loyalty oaths. But little was said about what was happening to Germany’s Jews under Hitler. In coming years, Bonhoeffer’s philosophy of
non-involvement changed. Bonhoeffer became involved in plotting the overthrow of Hitler. He participated in secret negotiations with the Allies to establish an anti-Nazi government in Germany. But when these efforts failed. Bonhoeffer came to believe that Hitler was the Anti-Christ and that it was his Christian duty to help eliminate him. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned. His writings indicated how far he had come from his early reliance on Luther and the pacifism of Mahatma Gandhi. In prison, he wrote: “[We] must take our share of responsibility for the molding of history in every situation and at every moment; whether we are the victors or the vanquished…We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds…What we shall need are not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain honest, straight forward men.”
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. Would the assassination of Hitler have been ethically justified? Should a Protestant theologian involve himself in a potential act or violence? 2. Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church have been viewed as examples of the weak nature of church response to the persecution or Jews. For example, Bonhoeffer, when addressing the issue of the Aryan Clauses, stated, “Without doubt the Jewish question is one or the historical problems which our state must deal with, and without doubt the state is justified in adopting new methods.… The Church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the ‘chosen people’ who nailed the redeemer of the world to a cross must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering.” How do you explain these words in the light of Bonhoeffer’s response to Hitler and Nazism? 3. Comment on the following Declaration of Guilt signed by Pastor Niemoller at the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, October, 1945. “In Germany the Nazis first came for the Communists and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant so I did not speak up. Then they came for me. By that time there was no one to speak up for anyone.” Source: Furman, Harry, ed. “The Ordeal of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: What Would You Do?” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1993 (out-of-print). New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #37
life with the enemy Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe 1939–1945 WERNER RINGS
Tactical Collaboration or
I Do but I Don’t The tactical collaborator says: I agree to collaborate despite my hostility to National Socialism and the Third Reich. I may do so for a variety of reason: to throw off the foreign yoke and regain my freedom; to prevent the mass murder of innocent people whenever possible; or to consummate a political idea whose fulfillment is obstructed by National Socialism. In every case, collaboration disguises resistance and is part of the fight.
Conditional Collaboration or
I Collaborate Up to a Point The conditional collaborator says: I cooperate with the occupying power although I endorse only some, not all, of the National Socialist doctrines. Subject to that proviso, I am ready and eager to collaborate faithfully because I wish to change the circumstances that dictate my attitude.
Unconditional Collaboration or
Our Enemy Is My Friend The unconditional collaborator says: I join forces with the occupying power because I endorse its principles and ideals. My attitude is dictated, not by circumstances, but by allegiance to National Socialism. I am prepared to do anything and make any sacrifice for the occupying power as long as I can thereby serve our common cause.
Neutral Collaboration or
I Conform The neutral collaborator says: I accept that life must go on. Knowingly and from self-interest, I directly or indirectly work for the occupying power without professing the political and ideological principles of National Socialism. My attitude is dictated by circumstances beyond my control. The sole alternative appears to be bankruptcy, unemployment, starvation chaos, and destruction. I am determined to survive the war and my country’s defeat as best I can.
Source: Rings, Weiner. Life With the Enemy; Collaboration and Resistance in Hitler’s Europe, 1939-1945. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982. 86, 106, 128.
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Unit IV: READING #38
the holocaust in history Michael R. Marrus
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an we draw a balance sheet on collaboration with the Holocaust in Europe? Given the traditions at work in the region, it is not surprising that anti-Jewish forces came to the fore under the impact of the Third Reich. It is striking, nevertheless, to see so many governments, not all of them subservient, joining the bandwagon of persecution in the wake of German victories, with countries as different as France in the west and Rumania in the east imposing comprehensive anti-Jewish laws. Even more shocking is the involvement of governments, for their own purposes, in the deportation and murder of Jews. The identification of Jews with former hegemonies, thrown off by the Germans, was a particularly powerful force in Slovakia, Croatia, Poland, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine, and generated an ugly reaction. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Germany’s allies as well as collaborationist states made some effort on behalf of native Jews and resisted demands to participate fully in the Final Solution. National pride, apprehension about public opinion at home, distaste for the Germans’ killing program, and fear of Allied retribution all played a part in their recalcitrance. While generally ruthless against foreign-born or unassimiliated Jews, governments in Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria used their bargaining power to hold the Germans at bay. As a result, the Jews of Bulgaria survived, as did most of the Jews of the Regat, the core of the Rumanian state. More Hungarian Jews might have also been spared, had the Hungarian leadership not acceded to German demands after the Nazis occupied the country in 1944. The French apparently believed they lacked such bargaining power, them is little evidence,
moreover, that they were prepared to use the leverage they did have before it was too late. To be sure, every one of these governments could have done far more for the Jews. But a real question is how much was possible. In eastern Europe, a region of critical importance for the German Lebensraum, it is unlikely that the Nazis would have suffered a disobedient ally or subject state for long. In western Europe, with fewer Jews and fewer Germans in occupation, the prospects were probably better. Except in Denmark and with the Italians, however, the question was never put to the test. In most cases it never even occurred to leaders to try. So much for speculation. More certain is the other side to this coin, and the theme of this chapter across Europe, the Germans needed help to achieve their objective, the murder of the Jews. As Hilberg pointed out long ago, the apparatus of destruction was thinly spread across the European continent. The Germans enlisted legions of helpers: in governments, ministries, police, private industry, the railwaysvirtually everywhere, in short. And all of it was important—whether the “green police” in Holland or the local gendarmerie in Hungary. To achieve the task of comprehensive mass murder the machine called not only upon the cold-blooded killers in the SS, but also upon remote officials of postal ministries, tax and insurance adjustors, bankers and clergymen, mechanics and accountants, municipal officials and stenographers. The clear implication is that murder on such a colossal scale involved the entire organized society to one degree or another and depended on a measure of support everywhere.
Source: Marrus, Michael R. “Allies, Vanquished States and Collaborators.” The Holocaust History. Hanover, MA; University Press of New England, 1987. 82-83. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #39
bystanders and collaborators
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ost Germans and other Europeans under Nazi rule were neither victims nor executioners in the Holocaust. A small number of brave people actually aided and assisted Jews and other victims But the vast majority of Germans and others in occupied Europe were somehow associated with the destruction of the Jews. Some watched the transports leave their cities but did not intervene. Others benefited economically. Some drove the trains filled with terror-stricken Jews. Some heard reports of mass extermination in “the east” but dismissed them as rumors or propaganda. A few, perhaps, knew nothing, though that is unlikely. All were affected. As historian Walter Lacquer has noted: “When all allowances have been made, when all mitigating circumstances have been accorded, it is still true that few come out of the story unblemished.” We mentioned one thing to a German family in a town we had taken, that there was a concentration camp about four and a half miles from where they lived and they acted very surprised. They didn’t know about it. But they did know, they did know about it. They had to be blind or deaf not to know about it. They saw cars and trucks going there and cars and trucks coming back. Cars and trucks going with people on them and the trucks returned with no people on them. — American liberator, Alex Schoenberg, Private First Class
We could never understand the townspeople not knowing about the camps. They swore they never knew. They told us there were camps in the United States.
But there was no way you couldn’t know. No matter which way the wind blew, you could smell it. — American Liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
The principle that governs the biblical vision of society is, “Thou shall not stand idly by when your fellow man is hurting, suffering, or being victimized.” It is because that injunction was ignored or violated that the catastrophe involving such multitudes occurred. The victims perished not only because of the killers, but also because of the apathy of the bystanders. Those who perished were victims of Nazism and of society — though to different degrees. What astonished us after the torment, after the tempest, was not that so many killers killed so many victims, but that so few cared about us at all. — Elie Wiesel, survivor
Several years ago, Claude Lanzmann produced a remarkable documentary, Shoah, An Oral History of the Holocaust. The film presents interviews Lanzmann conducted with bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators and victims throughout Europe. Lanzmann said of his work: “Incredulous. I read and reread this naked and bloodless text. A strange force seems to have filled it through and through, it resists, it lives its own life. It is the writing of disaster, and that for me is another mystery.” Translator:
Lanzmann: Translator:
He had a field under a hundred yards from the camp. He also worked during the German occupation. He worked his field? Yes. He saw how they were
Days of Remembrance of The Victims of the Holocaust Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79.
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asphyxiated; he heard them scream; he saw that. There’s a small hill; he could see quite a bit. What did this one say! They couldn’t stop and watch. It was forbidden. The Ukrainians shot at them. But they could work a field a hundred yards from the camp? They could. So occasionally he could steal a glance if the Ukrainians weren’t looking. He worked with his eyes lowered? Yes. He worked by the barbed wire and heard awful screams. His field was there? Yes, right up close. It wasn’t forbidden to work there. So he worked, he farmed there? Yes. Where the camp is now was partly his field. It was off limits, but they heard everything. It didn’t bother him to work so near those screams? At first it was unbearable. Then you got used to it. You get used to anything? Yes. Now he thinks it was impossible. Yet it was true.
— Interview with Polish peasant living near Treblinka, from Shoah, An Oral History of the Holocaust, by Claude Lanzmann
It’s hard to recognize, but it was here. They burned people here. A lot of people were burned here. Yes, this is the place. No one ever left here again. The gas vans came in here…There were two huge ovens, and afterward the bodies were thrown into these ovens, and the flames reached to the sky. It was terrible. No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible. And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now…I can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it. It was always this peaceful here. Always. When they burned two thousand people—Jews—everyday, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone went about his work. It was silent.
Peaceful. Just as it is now. —Simon Srebnik, survivor of Chelmo
Lanzmann: Piwonski: Lanzmann: Piwonski:
Is there still hunting here in the Sobibor forest? Yes, there are lots of animals of all kinds. Was there hunting then? Only manhunts. Some victims tried to escape. But they didn’t know the area. At times people heard explosions in the minefield, sometimes they’d find a deer, and sometimes a poor Jew who tried to escape. That’s the charm of our forests: silence and beauty. But it wasn’t always so silent here. There was a time when it was full of screams and gunshots, of dogs’ barking, and that period especially engraved on the minds of the people who lived here then. After the revolt the Germans decided to liquidate the camp, and early in the winter of 1943 they planted pines that were three or four years old, to camouflage all the traces.
—Jan Piwonski, present-day Sobibor
Near the end of March 1942, sizable groups of Jews were herded here, groups of fifty to one hundred people. Several trains arrived with sections of barracks with posts, barbed wire, bricks, and construction of the camp as such began. The Jews unloaded these cars and carted the sections of barracks to the camp. The Germans made them work extremely fast. Seeing the pace they worked at—it was extremely brutal— and seeing the complex being built, and the fence, which, after all, enclosed a vast space, we realized that what the Germans were building wasn’t meant to aid mankind. Early in June the first convoy arrived. I’d say there were over forty cars. With the convoy were SS men in black uniforms. It happened one afternoon. I had just finished work but I got on my bicycle and went home. — Jan Piownski, present-day Sobibor
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #39 Translator: Lanzmann: Translator: Lanzmann: Translator:
Lanzmann: Translator:
Lanzmann:
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He was born here in 1923, and has been here ever since. He lived at this very spot? Right here. Then he had a front-row seat for what happened? Naturally. You could go up close or watch from a distance. They had land on the far side of the station. To work it, he had to cross the track, so he could see everything. Does he remember the first convoy of Jews from Warsaw on July 22, 1942? He recalls the first convoy very well, and when all those Jews were brought here, people wondered, “What’s to be done with them?” Clearly, they’d be killed, but no one yet knew how. When people began to understand what was happening, they were appalled, and they commented privately that since the world began, no one had ever murdered so many people that way. While all this was happening before their eyes, normal life went on? They worked their fields? Certainly they worked, but not as willingly as usual. They had to work, but when they saw all this, they thought: “Our house may be surrounded. We may be arrested too!” Were they afraid for the Jews too? Well, he says, it’s this way: if I cut my finger, it doesn’t hurt him. They knew about the Jews: the convoys came in here, and then went to the camp, and the people vanished.
—Czeslaw Borowi, Present day Treblinka, Shoah
Lanzmann: Translator:
Is it very cold here in winter? It depends. It can get to minus fifteen, minus twenty.
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Which was harder on the Jews, summer or winter? Waiting here, I mean. He thinks winter because they were very cold. They were so packed in the cars, maybe they weren’t cold. In summer they suffocated; it was very hot. The Jews were very thirsty. They tried to get out. Were there corpses in the cars on arrival? Obviously. They were so packed in that even those still alive sat on corpses for lack of space. Didn’t people here who went by the trains look through the cracks in the cars? Yes they could look in sometimes as they went by. Sometimes when it was allowed, we gave them water too. How did the Jews try to get out? The doors weren’t opened. How’d they get out? Through the windows. They removed the barbed wire and came out of the windows. They jumped, of course. Sometimes they just deliberately got out, sat down on the ground, and the guards came and shot them in the head.
—Villager, present-day Treblinka
Lanzmann: Translator:
Lanzmann: Translator:
Did he hear screams behind his locomotive? Obviously, since the locomotive was next to the car. They screamed, asked for water. The screams from the cars closest to the locomotive could be heard very well. Can one get used to that? No. It was extremely distressing to him. He knew the people behind him were human, like him. The Germans gave him and the other workers vodka to drink. Without drinking, they couldn’t have done it. There
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79.
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Unit IV: READING #39 was a bonus—that they were paid not in money, but in liquor. Those who worked on other trains didn’t get this bonus. He drank every drop he got because without liquor he couldn’t stand the stench when he got here. They even bought more liquor on their own, to get drunk on. —Henrik Gawkowski, present-day Malkinia
We stayed there at that station waiting to go into Treblinka. Some of the German SS came around and were asking us what we have. So we said some of the people have gold, they have diamonds, but we want water. So they said: “Good, give us the diamonds, we bring you water.” They took the diamonds away, they didn’t bring any water at all. —Abraham Bomba, Treblinka survivor
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Then, on the second day I saw a sign for Malkinia. We went a little farther. Then, very slowly, the train turned off of the main track and rolled at a walking pace through a wood…we’d been able to open a window and an old man in our compartment looked out and saw a boy…cows were grazing…and he asked the boy in signs, “Where are we?” And the kid made a funny gesture. This: (draws finger across throat). —Richard Glazar, Treblinka survivor
Many bystanders and collaborators were one step removed from the actual concentration camps. Their experiences varied. Now the inmates told me they used to be awakened at three or four in the morning every day, and marched to the factories near Munich where they were being worked. The people of Munich claim that they never knew. But that
isn’t true. They saw them being marched back and forth everyday. — American Liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
And then there was the largest group of all, those who witnessed the Holocaust in silence and indifference, not participating in its cruelty but doing nothing to alleviate it. They went about their ordinary business, trying to survive, living from day to day, ignoring the horror around them. Where the local bureaucracy refused to cooperate in the Holocaust, on the other hand, the outcome was as a rule dramatically different. Italy was the first fascist country in Europe and Hitler’s oldest ally. Yet the authorities stubbornly resisted all attempts to enlist their aid in the war against Jews. There was procrastination, dissimulation, equivocation, and sometimes open defiance, not only in their own country but in the parts of France, Yugoslavia and Greece occupied by their armies. Thanks to their noncooperation, about 80 percent of the Italian Jews survived the extermination campaign. Even more illuminating is the case of Bulgaria. There the authorities decided that Jews living within the prewar boundaries of the state should be protected, but those in the newly acquired parts of Macedonia and Thrace were to be handed over to the Germans. The results underscore the crucial role of the non-German bureaucracy in the Holocaust. Of the 14,000 Jews in the regions annexed by Bulgaria during the war almost all were departed and never returned. Of the 50,000 living in Bulgaria proper, on the other hand, almost all survived. Thus the evidence that the collaboration of the local administration system was essential for the success of the extermination campaign appears irrefutable. —Theodore S. Hamerow, historian
This is no longer home, you see. And especially it’s no longer home when they start telling me that they didn’t know, they didn’t know. They say they didn’t see. “Yes, there were Jews living in our house, and one day they were no longer there. We
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #39 didn’t know what happened.” They couldn’t help seeing it. It wasn’t a matter of one action. These were actions that were taking place over almost two years. Every fortnight people were thrown out of the houses. How could they escape it? How could they not see it? I remember the day they made Berlin Judenrein. The people hastened in the streets; no one wanted to be in the streets; you could see the streets were absolutely empty. They didn’t want to look, you know. They hastened to buy what they had to buy—they had to buy something for Sunday, you see. So they went shopping and hastened back into their houses. And I remember this day very vividly because we saw police cars rushing through the streets of Berlin taking people out of the houses. They had herded the Jews together, from factories, from houses, wherever they could find them, and had put them into something that was called “Klu.” Klu was a dance restaurant, a very big one. From there they were deported in various transports. They were going off not very far from here on one of the tracks at the Grunewald station, and this was the day when I suddenly felt so utterly alone, left alone, because now I knew we would be one of the very few people left. I didn’t know how many more would be underground. This also was the day when I felt very guilty that I didn’t go myself and I tried to escape fate that the others could not escape. There was no more warmth around, no more soul akin to us, you understand. And we talked about this. What happened to Elsa? To Hans? And where is he and where is she? My God, what happened to the child? These were our thoughts on that horrible day. And this feeling of being terribly alone and terribly guilty that we did not go with them. Why did we try? What made us do this? To escape fate—that was really our destiny or the destiny of our people. — Inge Duetschkron, a German Jew who survived the war hiding in Berlin
Milton Mayer, an American newspaperman of German Jewish descent, spent a year in Germany in the early 1950s trying to understand how ordinary citizens remembered their experiences in Nazi Germany. The characters in his book have fictionalized names but are real people Mayer got to
know. These Germans were the furthest removed from direct witness to the killing process. Seven of them ducked my question. My question, which I framed very carefully and put to them in a variety of ways in the last weeks of our conversations, was, “What did you do that was wrong, as you understand right and wrong, and what didn’t you do that was right?” The instinct that throws instant ramparts around the self-love of all of us came into immediate operation; my friends, in response, spoke of what was legal or illegal, or what was popular or unpopular, or what others did or didn’t do, or what was provoked or unprovoked. But I was interested at this point in none of these things. “Who knows the secret heart?” I was trying to know the secret heart; I knew all about Versailles and the Polish Corridor and the inflation, the unemployment, the Communists, the Jews and the Talmud. The eighth of my friends, young Rupprecht, the Hitler Youth leader, having taken upon himself (or having affected to take) sovereign responsibility for every first and last injustice of the whole Hitler regime, was no better able to enlighten me than Herr Schwenke, the old Fanatiker, who, when I was at last able to divert him, with my insistent last question, from Versailles, the Polish Corndor etc., said “I have never done anything wrong to any man.” “Never?” said I, just to hear myself say it. “Never,” said he, just to hear himself say it. — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
One of the most important interpreters of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, explains how the killing process became rountinized in German bureaucracy. In all of my work I have never begun by asking the big questions, because I was always afraid that I would come up with small answers; and I have preferred to address these things which are minutiae or details in order that I might then be able to put together in a gestalt a picture which, if not an explanation, is at least a description, a more full description of what transpired. And in that sense I look also at the bureaucratic destruction process—for this is what it was—as a series of minute steps taken in logical order and relying above all as much as possible on experience. And this
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79.
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The execution wall at Auschwitz. On close examination the imprint of agonized fingers are evident in the brick. (Photo credit: YIVO)
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goes not only, incidentally, for the administrative steps that were taken, but also the psychological arguments, even the propaganda. Amazingly little was newly invented till of course the moment came when one had to go beyond that which had already been established by precedent, that one had to gas these people or in some sense annihilate them on a large scale. Then these bureaucrats became inventors. But like all inventors of institutions they did not copyright or patent their achievements, and they prefer obscurity. From the past, the Nazis got the actual content of measures which they took. For example, the barring of Jews from office, the prohibition of intermarriages and of the employment in Jewish homes of female persons under the age of forty-five, the various marking decrees—especially the Jewish star—the compulsory ghetto, the voidance of any will executed by a Jew that might work in such a way as to prevent inheritance of his property by someone who was a Christian. Many such measures had been worked out over the course of more than a thousand years by authorities of the church and by secular governments that followed in those footsteps. And the experience gathered over that time became a reservoir that could be used, and which
indeed was used to an amazing extent. One can compare a rather large number of German laws with their counterparts in the past and find complete parallels, even in detail, as if there were a memory which automatically extended to the period of 1933, 1935, 1939 and beyond. They invented very little and they did not invent the portrait of the Jew, which also was taken over lock, stock and barrel from writings going back to the sixteenth century. So even the propaganda, the realm of imagination and invention—even there they were remarkably in the footsteps of those who preceeded them, from Martin Luther to the nineteenth century. And here again they were not inventive. They had to become inventive with the “final solution.” That was their great invention and that is what made this entire process different from all others that had preceded that event. In this respect, what transpired when the “final solution” was adopted—or to be more precise, bureaucracy moved into it—was a turning point in history. Even here I would suggest a logical progression, one that came to fruition in what might be called closure, because from the earliest days, from the fourth century, the sixth century, the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect to the Jews: “You may not live among us as Jews.” The secular rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages then decided: “You may not live among us,” and the Nazis finally decreed: “You may not live.” Conversion was followed by expulsion, and the third was the territorial solution, which was of course the solution carried out in the territories under German Command, excluding emigration: death. The “final solution.” And the “final solution,” you see, is really final, because people who are converted can yet be Jews in secret, people who are expelled can yet return. But people who are dead will not reappear — Raul Hilberg, historian, in an interview with Claude Lanzmann for Shoah
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Bystanders and Collaborators.” Section 4. Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust: A Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. 73-79. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40
quisling, vidkun
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UISLING, VIDKUN (1887-1945), head of the Nazi-controlled puppet government of Norway from 1942 to 1945. Quisling, who in December 1939 had invited German troops to take over his country, openly met the invading Nazis in April 1940. His actions inspired the London Times to use his name as the symbol for all collaborators and traitors; thus a new word was introduced into the English language. Quisling was born in rural Fyresdal in southern Norway, the son of an erudite village pastor. He enrolled as a cadet in the Norwegian military academy, and in 1911 joined the Norwegian General Staff. In 1918 he was appointed military attache in Petrograd, and served there until relations with the Soviet Union were severed in early 1919. From 1922 until 1930, Quisling was an assistant to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen. He worked on relief for starving Russian peasants in the Ukraine and on similar projects in Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Armenia. By the time he left the Soviet Union in 1929, he had come to view the Bolshevik regime as a danger and a threat to Norwegian security. Quisling was a co-founder, in 1931, of the Nordisk Folkereisning (Nordic Folk Awakening) movement which reflected Nazi ideology. In 1931 Quisling, who was also a supporter of the Agrarian party, was appointed minister of defense in the Agrarian government, which was in control until February 1933. That May, he founded a fascistinspired political party called Nasjonal Samling (National Unity; NS). The following year he organized the young party activists into a group called the Hird, to act as bodyguards. As early as 1930, Quisling had sought contact with the German Nazis. His political ideas were similar to those of Alfred Rosenberg. Quisling believed that a strong leadership elite was essential to protect individual rights; the Hird was to be the spearhead of this new elite. The Jews, in his view, were impure, and their existence was a threat to the fulfillment of the ideal society. However, Quisling’s movement failed to gain popularity.
Determined to save Norway in spite of itself. Quisling began negotiating with the Germans. In December 1939 he met with Rosenberg, Erich Raeder, and Hitler. During his meeting with Hitler, Quisling asked for and was assured of German financial and moral support. The plan devised during his talks in Berlin called for the occupation of Norway “by peaceful means,” that is, via German forces called in by Norway. The German assault on Norway began on the night of April 8-9, 1940, and once the German troops were in Oslo, Quisling broadcast a speech proclaiming a new government with himself as prime-minister. The German army very soon became disillusioned with him, and he was removed from office on April 15. The new government was staffed by Quisling supporters but without Quisling. He remained leader of the NS, however, and for two years worked behind the scenes. On February 1, 1942, a national government was formed in which Quisling was Ministerpresident, but with limited power. Quisling hoped for a treaty with Germany that would give his regime formal status making it independent of the German occupation power. After the war, Quisling was arrested and tried. On September 10, 1945, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed on October 24 of that year. BIBLIOGRAPHY Andenaes, J., 0. Riste, and M. Skodvin. Norway and the Second World War. Lillehammer, Norway. 1983. Hayes, P. M. Quisling: The Career and Political Ideas of Vidkun Quisling, 1887-1945. Devon. England. 1971. Hoidal. 0. K. Quisling: A Study in Treason. New York.1989. Petrow, R. The Bitter Years. New York. 1974. JACQUELINE ROKHSAR
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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france: the jews and the holocaust
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n the summer of 1940, about 350,000 Jews lived in France, more than half of whom were not French citizens. Among these were tens of thousands of Jewish REFUGEES from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, some of whom had fled the Reich several years earlier. Persecution of these Jews began almost immediately, both in the German occupied zone and in the zone left under French control. The unusual context of the Holocaust in France is the considerable degree of autonomy accorded the French during the Nazi occupation. In this respect France differed substantially from fully occupied countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, or puppet states like Norway. Notably, throughout the entire period of the deportations of Jews, France had a French government, based in Vichy; a head of state (Marshal Petain); an administration at least nominally responsible for the whole of the country; and a powerful police force. Even after the Nazis moved across the demarcation line, in November 1942, the French government remained formally in charge of the nation and retained a substantial degree of authority. The Germans needed and received a great deal of assistance from the French to carry out their plans. After the war, defenders of Vichy claimed that the work of this government limited the damage, preventing even higher numbers of deportees from France. German documents lend a superficial plausibility to this notion, for it is plain that the Nazis in charge of the “FINAL SOLUTION” had hoped to do better in France, envisioning a completed task by the end of 1943. The SS in charge of the deportations failed to meet their own quotas, and Vichy claimed the credit for this failure. However, close examination of the German record, as well as research on the role of Vichy and its agencies, tells a different story. The deportations of 1942 to 1944 did not begin in a political vacuum. The dispatch of the Jews “to the east” was rather, the culmination of two years of aggressive legislation and persecution, including the passage of laws defining who was to be considered Jewish, isolating Jews in French society, taking away their livelihood, interning many, and registering them with the police. In the German-controlled zone
the SS in France, under Obersturmfuhrer Helmut KNOCHEN, set the apparatus of persecution in place. Matters concerning Jews were assigned to SSHauptsturmfuhrer Theodor DANNECKER, who reported directly to the office of Adolf EICHMANN in Berlin. Remarkably, however, the Vichy government too moved against the Jews, taking the initiative to issue the comprehensive STATUT DES JUIFS (Jewish Law) in October 1940, and to establish a central agency for coordinating anti-Jewish legislation and activity in March 1941, the COMMISSARIAT GENERAL AUX QUESTIONS JUIVES (General Office for Jewish Affairs, CGQJ). In November 1941, moreover, Vichy established the UNION GENERALE DES ISRAELITES DE FRANCE (General Union of Jews of France; UGIF), a Jewish agency operating under Vichy authority that was intended to control Jewish activities and communal affairs. During the two years following France’s defeat, the French government deliberately incorporated antisemitic activity into its revolution nationale—the officially declared policy of turning France in an authoritarian, nationalist, and corporatist direction. The French government considered it extremely important that its laws should apply throughout the entire country, in the occupied as well as the unoccupied zone; through the enforcement of such measures, Vichy assumed it was strengthening French sovereignty and hastening the day when full French sovereignty would be restored. Vichy’s leadership believed that the Germans would be grateful to the French for pursuing their own anti-Jewish policy, and would respond by yielding greater control over this and other spheres of national policy. In addition, the French were anxious to see that the property confiscated from the Jews did not fall into the hands of the Germans. Vichy inaugurated an extensive program of “Aryanization” in July 1941, with the important objective of maintaining formerly Jewish property in France. In practice, “Aryanization simply meant the confiscation of Jewish possessions by the state. It developed into a vast property transfer, involving some forty-two thousand Jewish businesses, buildings, and other properties. For their part, the Nazi occupation authorities engaged in a
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40 subtle form, of entrapment. Nudging Vichy ever deeper into measures against the Jews, and withholding serious pressure on the French for about a year, the occupation relieved itself of much of the trouble of antisemitic persecution while drawing the French into areas where even some Vichyites showed signs of discomfort. All Jews suffered grievously from the first two years of persecution, except for a tiny handful of well-established French Jews who received exemptions from the Vichy government. In legal terms, the way was cleared for persecution without limits, using the powerful judicial and administrative apparatus of the French state. The confiscation of Jewish property and the elimination of Jews from professions and the government service transformed thousands into penniless refugees in France. Foreign Jews were particularly vulnerable, and were especially victimized by both the Germans and Vichy. Thousands were forced into labor camps or interned, often in conditions that approached the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s. The first victims of the Holocaust in France died in these camps, their number eventually totaling about three thousand. Following the WANNSEE CONFERENCE of January 1942, the Nazis began to prepare for the deportation of Jews from France and other western European countries. They proceeded slowly and methodically, for the task was enormous and the German personnel that could be spared for the operation were relatively few. In particular, the Nazis did their best to ensure the cooperation of the French government and administration. The spring and summer of 1942 were turning points. At the end of April, Pierre Laval, who was committed to intensifying collaboration with Germany, became head of the French government under Marshal Petain. In May the legalistic and antiGerman Xavier VALLAT was replaced at the head of the CGQJ by the racist collaborator Louis DARQUIER DE PELLEPOIX. Darquier had no scruples about extending full support to the Nazis in their murderous enterprise. Simultaneously, the Wehrmacht yielded authority over repressive activity in France to the SS, now headed there by Hoherer SS und Polizeifuhrer (Higher SS and Police Leader) Carl Albrecht OBERG. The French police under Rene Bousquet worked out an arrangement with the SS whereby the former were given an important degree of autonomy, in exchange for agreeing to work against the enemies of the Reich. In their own zone the Germans cleared the way for deportations by imposing the wearing of a yellow star by all Jews (June 7), rounding up large numbers, and controlling the movements of the rest.
On June 11, a decisive meeting took place in Berlin at which arrangements were made for regular deportations of Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Demands for cooperation now rained down on Vichy. After deliberations, Laval and the French cabinet agreed to help. Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, roundups of Jews took place in both the occupied and unoccupied zones. Most of the work was done by the French police. On July 16 and 17, in one of the most cruel and spectacular operations, they rounded up 12,884 Jews in Paris, some 7,000 of whom—families with small children—were crowded for days in the Velodrome d’Hiver sports arena with no food, water, or sanitary facilities. Elsewhere, parents were torn from their children, with the victims unceremoniously packed into cattle cars and shipped to the transit camp at DRANCY, just outside Paris. In all, 42,300 Jews were sent eastward in 1942, perhaps one-third of them from the unoccupied zone. The cover-up of the Germans, which Laval agreed to repeat, was that the Jews were being sent to work camps “in the east.” Officially, Vichy would only report that the victims had gone “to an unknown destination.” In fact, the end of the line was AUSCHWITZ, where most of the deportees were immediately killed. The deportations of the summer and fall of 1942 stirred the first serious opposition to Vichy among certain segments of French opinion. The roundups of Jews could scarcely be concealed, and the cruelty of the separation of families was heavily criticized. A split developed in the Catholic Church, hither-to solidly behind Petain and the revolution nationale. Highly placed clergymen now made their first open protest against the anti-Jewish activity of the regime. For Vichy, the deportations signaled the failure of its strategy on the Jewish issue. Far from winning greater independence, the French were now being heavily importuned by the Germans. After November 1942, with Nazi troops in the formerly unoccupied zone, this worsening situation was obvious to all. Difficulties arose as the deportations gradually included French Jews as well as outsiders. Having agreed to the deportation of foreign Jews from both zones, the Vichy authorities found themselves drawn into satisfying the Nazis’ deportation quotas, which were fixed by the available railway transport from Drancy to Auschwitz and not by technicalities such as nationality. As early as January 1943, when massive deportations from both zones resumed, the Germans reported that the French police were no longer as reliable as they once had been in assembling and dispatching the Jews. Even Laval dragged his feetrefusing, in August 1943, to agree to strip French
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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Jews of their citizenship so as to facilitate their deportation. Yet despite occasional protests and difficulties, the deportations continued, the last convoys leaving France in the summer of 1944. Laval, Petain, and the government would not change course. To the end, Vichy enforced the extensive apparatus of anti-Jewish laws that legitimized the deportations in the eyes of some, and it certainly facilitated the process of deportation. Some Jews managed to escape for a time, by fleeing to the Italian-occupied zone of France. There the Italian Fascist troops provided a remarkable sanctuary—not only against German demands for deportations, but against the application of Vichy antisemitic laws as well. This protective screen was shattered in September 1943 when the Italians surrendered to the British and Americans. Other Jews escaped to SPAIN or to SWITZERLAND although passage across either frontier was not normally permitted by the host countries and was fraught with danger from the German and Vichy police. Thousands of Jews were assisted by a small but sympathetic element in the French population, often at great risk to those providing rescue or aid. Such Frenchmen were to be found among all groups but particularly among Protestants, many of whom by tradition also felt themselves to be a beleaguered minority in France. Help and sanctuary came from a variety of other sources: the Quakers, the American Jewish JOINT DISTRIBUTION COMMITTEE (known as the Joint), the YMCA, the Catholic Temoignage Chretien, and Jewish resistance networks. An
outstanding example was the Protestant village of LE CHAMBON-SUR-LIGNON, which became a kind of underground railway, smuggling several thousand Jews to safety. In all, over 77,000 Jews from France were either killed in concentration camps in Poland or died while in detention. Approximately 70,000 went to Auschwitz, and the rest to other camps—MAJDANEK and SOBIBOR, and a few dozen to BUCHENWALD in August 1944. Of all these Jews, about one-third were citizens of long standing: 8,700 were sixty years of age or over, 6,000 were under thirteen, 2,000 were under the age of six. The “Final Solution” in France was a Nazi project from beginning to end. Few Frenchmen advocated massacre, and only a small number of extreme collaborationists in Paris ever carried antisemitism to the murderous conclusions of Hitler and his associates. However, it seems highly unlikely that the Germans would have been capable of deporting large numbers of Jews from France without the help provided by the French authorities. Two years of persecution by the French government and administration helped snap the bonds that bound Jews to French society, leaving many helpless once the Nazis’ machinery of destruction turned to France. It is true that the final toll—about one-fifth of the country’s Jews were killed—seems less, proportionately, than in many other countries, but the circumstances the Nazis faced in France must be taken into account and the considerable difficulties they had to overcome noted.
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40
Vlasov, andrei
V
LASOV, ANDREI (1900-1946), Soviet army officer who collaborated with the Germans. Vlasov was born in a village in the Nizhni Novgorod district. In the Russian civil war he joined the ranks of the Red Army and eventually became a regular army man. He joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s. In 1938 and 1939 he was in China, serving as military adviser to Chiang Kaishek. In 1940 he commanded an elite division in the Kiev military district and rose to the rank of major general. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Vlasov was in command of the ThirtyFourth Army, charged with the defense of Kiev, and he later commanded the Twentieth Army, which defended Moscow: he was promoted to lieutenant general and awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner. In the spring of 1942 he was appointed commander of the Second (“Assault”) Army on the Volkhov front: there he and his troops were encircled by the Germans. His attempts to break out of the trap failed, and on July 13 of that year he was taken prisoner. Vlasov was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp for senior Soviet officers located near the advance headquarters of the German Army High Command. Following talks with senior German intelligence officers, Vlasov agreed to collaborate with the Germans against the Soviet regime. He was transferred to the propaganda branch of the Armed Forces High Command in Berlin. In September 1942 Vlasov issued three manifestos: in two of them he denounced Stalin, blaming him and his regime for the military defeats: attacked “Jewish capitalists,” the “Jewish press,” and the “Stalinist Bolshevik-Jewish dictatorship”; and called on Red Army soldiers to desert. In the other manifesto, Vlasov listed thirteen points on which to base a new regime that he would seek to establish in Russia. The plan was that this would be endorsed by the “Smolensk Committee” (a Russian public group that the headquarters of the German Central Army Group was in the process of organizing, to be headed by Vlasov). This plan was abandoned, however, on Hitler’s orders, which also directed that Vlasov’s activities be confined to propaganda. In the period from November 1942 to the winter of 1944, Vlasov trained anti-Soviet propaganda agents at the Dabendorf camp, near Berlin, and drafted memorandums concerning his anti-Soviet
movement. The agents were assigned to encourage Soviet prisoners of war to volunteer for the OSVOBODITELNAYA and, at the front, to encourage Red Army personnel to desert. Several of the Ostbataillone were given badges to wear by the Wehrmacht, bearing the inscription ROA (the initials of RUSSKAYA OSVOBODITELNAYA ARMIYA, or Russian Liberation Army). The men serving in these units—and later on, also other categories, of Soviet prisoners of war—were called “Vlasovtsy,” but in fact no Vlasov army existed, since there was no unified command headed by Vlasov of the units made up of Soviet prisoners of war. It was not until September 16, 1944, after a meeting with Heinrich HIMMLER, that Vlasov was permitted to set up the Komitet Osvobozhdeniva Narodov Rossii (Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia; KONR), to be recognized as an official representative body, and to form the “Russian Liberation Army,” with Vlasov heading both the “army” and the “committee.” Some of the minority groups in the Soviet Union, such as the Ukrainians, refused to join either Vlasov’s army or his committee, and the Germans permitted them to establish similar organizations of their own. On November 14, 1944, Vlasov’s KONR met in Prague and in an official ceremony issued the Prague Declaration, spelling out the political principles on which the Vlasov movement was based and the structure of the regime that it would set up—a combination of centralist socialism and capitalism. On May 15, 1945, Vlasov and his staff were handed over to the Soviets. Radio Moscow announced on August 1, 1946, that he and his associates had been tried, sentenced to death, and executed by hanging. BIBLIOGRAPHY Andreyev, C. Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement. Soviet Reality and Emigre Theories New York. 1988. Dallin, A. German Rule in Russia. 1941-1945. London. 1981. Fischer. G. Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A case Study in World War II. Cambridge, Mass., 1952. Strik-Strikfeldt, W. Against Stain and Hitler: Memoir Of the Russian Liberation Movement, 1941-1945. London, 1970.
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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Unit IV: READING #40
nacht unD nebel
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ACHTIGALL BATTALION, Ukrainian military unit in the service of the Germans. At the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941, the Germans, with the full support of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders, increased the numbers of Ukrainian youngsters mobilized into separate military units and paramilitary organizations. In this way the Ukrainian leaders hoped to promote their own political interests, pinning their hopes on the Germans in the anticipated war against the USSR. The Germans for their part wanted to exploit the Ukrainian nationalists to serve their own military aims in the east. Against this background, the Germans established, at the beginning of 1941, the 700-man Ukrainian Legion. In May 1941 the legion was divided into two battalions named Nachtigall and Roland. The German military commander of Nachtigall was Albrecht Herzner, and the battalion’s political control was in the hands of Professor Theodor Oberlander of the German military intelligence. The Ukrainian commander of this unit was Roman Shukhevych. After its establishment, Nachtigall was transferred to a training camp in Neuhammer, in Silesia. When the Germans invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941, Nachtigall was sent to serve at the front in the area of Prezemysl. By June 30, Nachtigall had entered Lvov, together with some German units. The soldiers of the battalion participated, with the Germans and the Ukrainian mob in the city, in the riots and the killing of Jews that took place between June 30 and July 3. During those days, Jews were kidnapped in the streets of the city, brought to concentration centers in several prisons, and brutally killed. Four thousand of them were murdered during the four days of rioting. The pretext for carrying out
this pogrom against the Jews of Lvov was the libel, maliciously spread by the Germans and the Ukrainians, that the Jews had taken part in the murder of political prisoners held by the Soviets prior to the retreat. Many of the Ukrainian officers and soldiers of Nachtigall supported Stefan BANDERA’S faction in the Ukrainian national movement (the ORHANIZATSYIA UKRAINSKYKH NATSIONALISTIV), and they were involved in the abortive attempt of the Ukrainian nationals, on July 1, 1941, to declare in Lvov the establishment of a Ukrainian state. The Germans crushed this attempt, and some believe that the involvement of members of the battalion in these events led to the unit’s expulsion from Lvov on July 7 of that year and its dispatch to the eastern front. Nachtigall passed through ZOLOCHEV and TERNOPOL and reached the area of VINNITSA. On the way, members of the battalion took part in pogroms against Jews. Because soldiers of the battalion continued to be involved in activities promoting Ukrainian political objectives, in opposition to the German stand, the unit was removed from the UKRAINE. In October 1941, many of its members were attached to German military units engaged in suppressing partisans in Belorussia. On December 1 of that year, the battalion was finally disbanded. Some of its members joined Ukrainian auxiliary police units in the service of the Germans. BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong, J. A. Ukrainian Nationalism. 1939— 1945. New York. 1955. Szeczesniak, A. B., and W. Z. Szota. Droga do nikad. Warsaw, 1973. AHARON WEISS
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40
general gouvernement
G
ENERAL GOUVERNEMENT (General Government), administrative unit established by the Germans on October 26, 1939, comprised of those parts of POLAND that had not been incorporated into the Reich, an area with a total population of twelve million. The full official designation was General governement für die Besetzten Polnischen Gebiete (General Government for the Occupied Areas of Poland), and it was only in July 1940 that the shortened name came into use. The Germans had used this name previously, when they occupied Poland in World War I and set up an administration there, also called the Generalgouvernement. The Generalgouvernement area was divided into four districts, KRAKOW, WARSAW, RADOM, and LUBLIN, which in turn were split into sub-districts. The administrative center was Krakow. In the summer of 1941, following the German attack on the Soviet Union, Galicia became the fifth district, adding between three million and four million to the population. Only a few Polish institutions were permitted by the Nazis to function, among them the bank that issued the country’s currency, the POLNISCHE POLIZEI, or Polish Police, known as Granatowa (Blue), from their dark blue uniforms: and the Central Relief Committee, all of them operating under the strict supervision of the occupation authorities. Heading the General gouvernement was the governor-general, Hans FRANK. As of May 1940, Frank operated through the Generalgouvernement administration, headed by Josef Buhler. The SS and police were headed first by SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Kruger, and then by Wilhelm KOPPE. The occupation authorities believed that the task of the Polish population of the Generalgouvernement was to obey the Germans and work for them. At first the Poles were regarded as a reservoir of manpower, to be exploited for the needs of the Reich. Later, the Germans considered a number of projects, such as the establishment of colonies, “Germanization,” expulsion of the population of ZAMOSE, and identification of those Poles who were deutschstammig (of German origin). The obedience of the Polish population was attained by extreme terrorization. For every gendarmerie with the German SD (Sicherheitsdienst: Security Service) and with Adolf EICHMANN’S
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GENERALGOUVERNEMENT, January 1940
Sonderkommando. The gendarmerie operated on a territorial basis. There were ten district commands, each headed by a colonel, who played a crucial role in planning and implementing the anti-Jewish policy in the territory under his jurisdiction. The district commanders we’re actively involved in the conferences organized by the leaders in charge of the “de-Judaizing” process, including Ferenczy, Laszlo ENDRE, the representatives of the county and local administration, and the
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
Unit IV: READING #40
The Hungarian Gendaarmerie round up the Jews of Bezdan and move them into the ghetto (1944). Bezdan is located 60 miles (96.5 km) northwest of Novi Sad in Yugoslavia, near the present Hungarian-Yugoslav border. During the war Bezdan was in the territory annexed by Hungary.
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special advisers of the Eichmann Sonderkommando. For purposes of the anti-Jewish drive, Hungary was divided into six operational zones, each zone encompassing one or two Gendarmerie districts. The ghettoization process began on April 16, 1944, in Zone I, which encompassed Gendarmerie District VII, covering the areas of the TRANSCARPATHIAN UKRAINE and northeastern Hungary. This was followed by Zone II encompassing Gendarmerie districts IX and Xarea of northern TRANSYLVANIA. These territories, closest to the eastern front, were inhabited largely by unassimilated Orthodox Jews. The gendarmes played a determining role in all aspects of the ghettoization, concentration, entrainment, and deportation of the Jews. During each of these phases, special investigative units of the gendarmerie were involved in expropriating the property of the Jews. These units were particularly active in the larger ghettos, usually established in the county seats, which also served as entrainment centers. In each of these entrainment centers, the investigative units set up a penzverde (“mint”), a place where Jews were tortured into confessing where they had hidden their alleged valuables. The gendarmes’ barbarous behavior during the interrogations as well as during the ghettoization and entrainment of the Jews has been highlighted in
countless accounts by survivors. It shocked many decent Hungarians and even some of the Germans involved in the anti-Jewish drive. To ensure the effectiveness of the gendarmes, the “de-Judaizing” command saw to it that the anti-Jewish operations in a particular county were carried out by a gendarmerie unit from another part of the country, in order to prevent possible corruption or leniency based on personal contacts with the local Jews. The Hungarian Gendarmerie round up the laws of Bezdan and move them into the ghetto (1944). Bezdan is located 60 miles (96.5 km) northwest of Novi Sad in Yugoslavia, near the present HungarianYugoslav border. During the war Bezdan was in the territory annexed by Hungary. In the fall of 1941 a special police section was set up to deal with Jewish affairs on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior, but it came under the supervision of the COMMISSARIAT GENERAL AUX QUESTIONS JUIVES (General Office for Jewish Affairs) in France, and its functions were officially restricted to intelligence and investigation. In contrast to this large French police force, the German force numbered at most some three thousand police, whose performance was hampered by inability to speak French and unfamiliarity with the terrain in which they were stationed. Consequently, the Germans assigned to the French
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40 police the tasks of maintaining public order, preventing subversive activities, suppressing crime, and implementing the German anti-Jewish policy. On July 16 and 17, 1942, thirteen thousand Jews were arrested in Paris, among whom were four thousand children, as well as old people and the handicapped and ill. They were concentrated mainly in the Velodrome d’Hiver, a closed structure in which even minimal amenities had not been prepared, and lacking in toilet facilities. For this operation nine thousand French policemen were brought in, and they carried out the arrests. More than ten thousand Jews whose names appeared on the lists of those to be arrested succeeded in leaving their homes in time, some because of warnings passed on by police officials out of humanitarian considerations. From the end of July 1942 agreements were signed between Carl Albrecht OBERG, Höherer SS und Polizeiführer (Higher SS and Police Leader) in France, and Rene Bousquet, chief of the Vichy police, defining the authority the French police and the amount of weapons and equipment they were allowed. The leaders of the Vichy government considered these agreements proof that despite the German occupation they had succeeded in maintaining the sovereignty of France and freedom of action regarding its citizens. Until the summer of 1943, a policy of cooperation was maintained throughout France in keeping with the Oberg-Bousquet agreement with no particular difficulty. The police force carried out the registration of the Jews and the expropriation of their property and businesses, conducted mass arrests and Aktionen, and made sure that the Jews wore the yellow Jewish BADGE and that their identity cards were stamped with the word Juif (“ Jew”). The police force was also responsible for the construction, operation, and guarding of concentration camps. In addition, they provided armed guards to escort the trains transporting Jews to the German border. Negligence, corruption, and neglect of sanitary and medical services were common in the concentration and transit camps under the responsibility of the French police. The special police section in Paris was active in the liquidation of the underground Communist partisan units, which included a large number of Jews. In the summer of 1943, after recruitment notices were sent out to thousands of young Frenchmen for forced labor in Germany, groups of partisans became organized throughout the country and inflicted losses not only on the occupation forces but also on the French police. The French police services gradually stopped arresting Jews, and the French administration in the DRANCY concentration camp
war replaced by the Gestapo under Alois BRUNNER. In 1944, Joseph Darnand, head of the French fascist militia established during the previous year, was appointed chief of police in place of Bousquet, who had been dismissed. From then on the operations against the Jews were carried out by the brutal militia forces, which executed their tasks industriously and pitilessly against the Jews of France. BIBLIOGRAPHY Klarsfeld. S. Vichy-Auschiwitz: Le role de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive erl France. 194Z 2 vols. . Paris. 1983,1985. Marrus, M. R. and R. 0. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. New York. 198 1. Paxton. R. 0. Vichy France. Old Guard and New Order. 1940-1944. New York. 1982. LUCIEN LAZARE
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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Unit IV: READING #40
ukrainische hilfspolizei
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KRAINISCHE HILFSPOLIZEI (Ukrainian Auxiliary Police). Ukrainian militia units were set up in the earliest days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the occupation of Ukrainianinhabited areas. The initiative for this step came from the Ukrainian nationalists who accompanied the German forces on their entry into the Ukraine. These units were recruited either as mobile groups (pokhidni grupy) or at the initiative of local nationalist activists-in all cases with the full encouragement of the military governors. As soon as the SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) had established its offices in the occupied area, it instituted a check on the political reliability of the Ukrainian militia personnel, especially the officers. On July 27, 1941, on Heinrich HIMMLER’S orders, the formation of the mobile Ukrainian Auxiliary Police was launched, under the jurisdiction of the SS and German police commanders in the various Kommissariate (subdivisions of the German civil administration). The battalions were housed in police barracks in key places, and were deployed in major police operations such as the drive against the partisans. After the civil administration had been installed in August 1941 in the Galicia district and, throughout September, in the other parts of the German-occupied Ukraine, the militia units were renamed the Ukrainische Hilfspolizei Schutzmanschaft (Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Constabulary), and the individual policeman was generally referred to as a Schutzmann (constable). The units were subordinate to the German police and gendarmerie.
The Ukrainian Auxiliarv Police were equipped with captured Soviet light weapons and wore black uniforms. On some occasions a collective fine was imposed upon the Jews in order to defray the costs of providing the police with uniforms and boots. The senior commanders of these units were Germans. In the first few days of the occupation, Ukrainian police, as an organized group or on an individual basis, participated in pogroms against the Jews, in Lvov, in the cities of Eastern Galicia, and in Volhynia. Later, when Ukrainian police escorted groups of Jews to places of work or were on guard duty in the ghettos, they extorted money from the Jews, harassed them, and frequently shot Jews merely for the sake of killing. When the ghettos were being liquidated, units of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police took part in Aktionen: blockading the ghettos, searching for Jews who had gone into hiding, and hunting those who had escaped. They escorted Jews to their execution in pits, and served as the guards surrounding the murder sites, barring access to them. They were known for their brutality and killed many thousands of Jews who could not keep up on the way to the execution sites, or who tried to escape. In the spring of 1943, Ukrainian police in large numbers deserted with their arms and joined the UKRAINSKA POVSTANSKA ARMYIA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Others, especially those who served in the mobile battalions, retreated westward with the German forces, and in the final stage of the war were incorporated into the OSTBATAILLONE or into divisions of the Ukrainian National Army. SHMUEL SPECTOR
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #40
policiniai Batalionai
P
OLCINIAI BATALIONAI (Lithuanian Police Battalions), paramilitary formation composed of Lithuanians who collaborated with the Germans. Shortly after the German occupation of LITHUANIA in the summer of 1941, a reorganization was launched of local Lithuanian units, made up of police, ex-soldiers and ex-officers, and nationalist elements of all sectors (among whom high school and university students predominated), who had been attacking the retreating Soviet forces from behind and had been brutally harassing and murdering Lithuanian Jews. That July, many of the units in Kovno and elsewhere were incorporated into a paramilitary organization, the Tauto Darbo Apsauga (National Labor Guard). In Vilna and other places the corresponding military organization was named the Lietuvia Savisaugos Dalys (Lithuanian Self-Defense). At the end of 1941 these formations were absorbed into a new framework based on battalions, and were renamed Policiniai Batalionai. By August 1942, twenty such battalions were in existence, with a complement of 8,388 men, of whom 341 were officers, 1,772 noncommissioned officers, and the rest privates. The command of these battalions was,
for the most part, in the hands of former officers and men of other ranks who had served in the army of independent Lithuania. On the higher level these officers had German liaison officers assigned to them, and on the top level the Lithuanian commanders were directly subordinated to the district SS and police leader (SS und Polizeiführer) in Lithuania. The battalions’ police operations, especially those of Battalion 1 (later 13) and Battalion 2 (later 12), also included the mass murder of Jews in Lithuania, as well as in the adjacent territories of Poland and Belorussia. Several of the battalions’ veterans were identified in postwar investigations and trials held in Lithuania, the United States, and elsewhere. Some of them were tried and found guilty of killing civilians and prisoners of war. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baranauskas. B., et al., eds. Mastines Zudynes Lietuvoje. Vilna, 1965. Hilberg. R. The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 vols. New York, 1985. Zeimantas, V. Teisingumas Reikalauja. Vilna, 1986.
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990.
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ostbataillione
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STBATAILLONE (Eastern Battalions: also called Osttruppen or Ostverbande), armed units in the German army, made up of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians serving in the German-occupied Soviet territories. The Germans’ need to recruit Soviet personnel arose out of the heavy losses incurred by the German army in the early months of the war against the USSR and in the early stage of the partisan fighting, especially on the northern and central fronts. In a letter dated October 6, 1941, Gen. Eduard Wagner. Generalquartiermeister (Quartermaster General) of the army, proposed to the army group commanders that they recruit Cossack, Ukrainian, and Belorussian prisoners and form them into cavalry troops (Hundatschaft Sornia) for fighting Soviet partisans. At a later stage, prisoners hailing from the Caucasus and Central Asia were added to these categories. In the course of 1942 the troops grew in numbers and formed battalions, which were attached to German divisions serving the command of the rearguard military administration of the army groups. On October 1, 1942, the formation of a large number of such Ostbataillone was launched, including also Ostlegionen (Eastern Legions), a designation applied to units composed of Tatars and nationalities from the Caucasus and Central Asia. The establishment and training of the units took place for the most part on GENERALGOUVERNEMENT territory. By May 1943, nine bridgades, sixty independent battalions, and eight Cossack battalions were in existence (the last eventually forming a corps), as well as six antiaircraft batteries, seventy-eight independent companies, and dozens of battalions serving with the engineering and supply corps. Battalion strength was often over one thousand. The commanding officers were mostly German, but in some units—such as those of Kaminski and Gil-Rodionov- the officers were all Soviet Citizens (See RUSSKAYA OSVOBODITELNAYA ARMIYA).
In early 1943 a special headquarters was set up for these units, headed by a Gerunder Ostruppen (Commander of the Eastern Troops), but its task was confined to the troops’ pay, welfare, and related matters. In fact, the conditions of service in the ostbataillone—such as clothing, pay, and food were comparable to that of German soliders. In June 1943, on Hitler’s orders, most of the Ostbataillone were transferred to the western front, from Norway to Italy. The largest contingent went to France, to protect the “Atlantic Wall” the Cossack corps was sent to Yugoslavia to fight the Yugoslav partisans under Josip Tito. Several German commanders, on their own initiative, began referring to those Ostbataillone whose ethnic composition was uniform as though they were part of a national army, such as the Russkaya Osvoboditelnaya Armiya (Russian Liberation Army) or Ukrainske Vyzolne Viisko (Ukrainian Liberation Army). This practice was soon stopped, because of opposition from the commanders of the rearguard divisions to which the Ostbataillone belonged, as well as from the Nazi leadership itself. Instructions issued by the Army High Command on May 29, 1944, to identify the Ostbataillone by their national origin did not take hold either. It was not until February or March of 1945 that these national armies were officially established. The accepted estimate is that about one million Soviet nationals served in the German army. Most of them were handed over to the Soviet authorities after the war, as provided for at the February 1945 Yalta Conference. BIBLIOGRAPHY Hoffmann. J. Die Ostlegionen, 1941-1943: Terkota Kaukisier und Wolgafinnen im deutschen Hoff. Freiburg im Breisau, 1991. Tessin, G. Verbande und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im 11 Weltkrieg. 1939-45. Vol. 1. Osnabruck. 1975. SHMUEL SPECTOR
Source: Gutman, Israel, ed. Holocaust Encyclopedia (excerpts on collaborators). New York: Macmillan, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #41
the big lie technique of dictators Created by Eileen Bauer, Freedom High School Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Start with a little lie that people accept and build! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
You are the best people. You deserve the best you can have in life. Germany is the best nation. She should have the best of life. To be the best country you have to sacrifice and give up some personal rights. Examples: • temporarily give up the right to freedom of the press — ideas are dangerous • diverse ideas can cause confusion • it can cause people to question the direction the State is leading • people can lose the focus of the direction of the good of the State • it can cause rebellion and ruin the chance for the State to succeed Some people are dangerous to the State. If they are dangerous the State should get rid of them to protect itself. Aryans are the best race. If you are not an Aryan you are a second class (inferior) citizen who has no right to the best. • therefore you should get less of the resources of the State • poorer land, jobs, food, etc. The State can be contaminated by mixing with inferior races. • therefore, don’t allow inferior people to live or interact with the best! • don’t contaminate society. Make laws to limit or restrict the rights of inferior people. ex. Nuremberg Laws, 1935 a. can’t marry a Jew b. can’t do business with a Jew c. Jew can’t teach, doctor, or employ his profession with an Aryan d. Jews forced to turn in all valuables, bicycles, and radios e. Jews forced to live in ghettos Prejudice is not bad if it preserves the State. Jews forced to wear a Star of David: Identify—Isolate—Eliminate!
Source: Bauer, Eileen. The Big Lie Technique of Dictators. Bethlehem, PA: Freedom High School (unpublished).
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Unit IV: READING #42
the road to genocide Excerpt from
Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972. pp. 76-80
T
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he mere imposition of restrictions on Gypsies did not satisfy the Nazis. To make Germany free of Gypsies followed logically from the policy applied to Jews. Heydrich organized a meeting on September 21 1939, at which it was decided that Gypsies should be sent to Poland. The plan covered all the Gypsies in Greater Germany (including recently annexed Danzig, West Prussia and the Warthe region) altogether 30,000 in number. A few categories were in theory to be exempted, those five years in regular employment and families in which the mother or father was a non-Gypsy. It was Heydrich who, on Himmler’s orders, issued the Settlement Edict, dated October 17th, under which Gypsies were prohibited from leaving their houses or camping places. A count was made in the period October 25th-27th and the Gypsies were then collected in special camps until they could be sent to Poland. The first moves in the deportation were initiated by express letter on April 27th, 1940. In the middle of May, 2,500 Gypsies faced transfer to Poland from the following towns: “Hamburg and Bremen Cologne, Dusseldorf and Hanover Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main
1,000 1,000 500.”
The Gypsies from Hamburg were deported to Belzec, a primitive camp consisting of some huts and tents put up by the Gypsies themselves. They had to work on digging trenches and other tasks. Three months later they went on to Krychow. This camp had stone buildings including an old factory. Here the Gypsies laboured on drains. Apart from the first fortnight the camp was guarded. Then, twelve weeks later, they were given back their documents and allowed to travel, some being placed in near-by villages. Some Gypsies from Cologne went first to Lochitzen and then to the ghetto at Kielce. The transport from Stuttgart also included Gypsies from Mainz, Worms and Ingelheim. About
100 went from Mainz leaving only sixteen behind in the town. These sixteen arrived at the Dieselstrasse camp in Frankfurt on June 24th. Gypsies from Stuttgart were sent to the Jewish town of Czenzidjow and then to the ghetto at Radom. Apparently a fourth transport, from south Germany, was unloaded in open country in Poland and the Gypsies left to fend for themselves. Gypsies deported to Poland were told that if they came back they would be sterilized and sent to concentration camps. They had to sign a document to show they understood this. Apart from the problem of Gypsies returning, others wanted to join deported relatives in the East. As a general rule it was decided that this would not be permitted. Christian Winterstein of Worms was however given permission to go if he paid his own transport. The General Government authorities wrote to Berlin in November 1940 saying they did not want relatives to come at least for the present as the situation was already chaotic. They thought after April of the following year it might be possible to admit them. Late in 1941 however an order signed by Otto forbade Gypsies to travel to the General Government: “A further settlement of relatives of the Gypsies resettled in the General Government in May 1940 cannot take place for the moment because of the war in the East. Further information will be given about this in due course. I may mention now that such reunion of relatives will be at their own expense. For the moment I am keeping all requests to join deportees in this office. This was reaffirmed in December 1942: “In May 1940 and November 1941 a number of Gypsies were sent to the General Government and the Warthe region. Since then their relatives have followed them and made inquiries about them, causing difficulties. Any such persons should be arrested and no permits to travel to the General Government and the Warthe should be given. The last edict was designed to prevent Gypsies moving out of Germany in the period just before
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Road to Genocide,” excerpted from Donal Kenrick and Grattan Puxon The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, in 50 Years Ago: From Terror or to Systematic Murder. Washingon, D.C., 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #42 their removal to Auschwitz. Some 3,000 persons had been deported leaving 27,000 Gypsies remaining in Germany when it was decided in October 1940 to stop further deportations to Poland. Various reasons have been put forward to explain the halt. Transport was needed for war purposes: Governor Frank of Poland objected as he was trying to organize the country efficiently; the classification of Gypsies as not yet complete. Also priority was being given to the expulsion of the Jews as their flats were needed for Germans returning from the Russian-occupied Baltic states. A combination of these reasons probably led to the decision. Deportation was however still the solution envisaged. A small transport left in November 1941. At a meeting in Prague the same month it was agreed to deport the German Gypsies to Riga. But this plan too was abandoned as the Nazis fell upon a simpler ‘solution’ to the Gypsy problem. A mass murder of Jews had taken place at Treblinka in December 1940. An experimental gassing station was established at Auschwitz in September 1941 and the first permanent gassing camp was set up at Chelmno in December. Some sources suggest that the decision to annihilate the Jews had already been made in June 1941. Certainly a Conference at Wannsee on January 20th, 1942, marked its definite acceptance. Later the same year the policy was extended to Gypsies. Meanwhile those still in Germany had been progressively restricted. Gypsies were deported from border zones in 1941. In other areas they continued to be forced into holding camps. From 1941 they were not allowed to travel and sell, being allocated instead to regular jobs. In 1942 the Gypsy camp was moved to Kruppstrasse and surrounded by a high wire fence with two policemen on guard. The Gypsies had to be inside by dusk and the gate shut until 5 a.m. Others were put into a camp behind barbed wire at Dusseldorf–Lierenfeld, were badly treated by the police and compelled to work in columns under SS guards. Although Gypsies had officially been excluded from the army by law is early as November 1937, many classified as pure and part-Gypsy were still serving. Some had even received medals. Early in 1941 the army authorities reaffirmed that on the grounds of racial policy no more Gypsies and partGypsies should be called up. Those in the army were to be placed in reserve units and no further decorations were to be awarded to Gypsies. The police sent lists of the persons concerned to the army. In the same month a secret order went out that Gypsies should not be employed in army factories and other top security workshops.
Discrimination in the field of education had already started in the pre-war years. In 1936 an edict of the Ministry of the Interior said that research should be carried out into whether Gypsies were fit for education and whether Gypsy orphans should be fostered. In Cologne after February 1939 only one class existed for all the Gypsy children in the town, and the Frankfurt Gypsies were dismissed from school in 1941 ‘because of the shortage of teachers’. Those who did attend had to put up with persecution by other children. The Ministry of Education announced in March 1941 that persons without citizenship could not attend school. Gypsies lacking German nationality were excluded and the police instructed to expel from the country any of them who became a ‘social nuisance’ as a result of having no occupation. Gypsy children holding German nationality had the theoretical right to attend classes. However, ‘if they were a moral or other danger to the German children’ they should be dismissed and the police informed. In view of its importance in some laws a brief account of the different groups of Gypsies in Germany at the outbreak of the war [follows]: Sinti who had come as early as the fifteenth century and could be called native to Germany. There were 13,000 in 1939, many of them musicians. The name probably comes from the province of Sinti in India. Lalleri or Lalleri Sinti (i.e. ‘dumb’ Gypsies, speaking a different dialect) were a smaller group, some 1,017 in 1942. They were chosen for preferential treatment because it was thought they were a branch of the ‘German’ Sinti but linguistically they are a sub-group of the Rom. Rom had come to Germany from Hungary in 186070 and were mainly horse dealers. In 1940 there were 1,860 and in 1942, 1,585. Balkan Gypsies who numbered some 8,000 in Burgenland. Litautikker who were sedentary in East Prussia. Numbering some 2,000 in 1940, they were probably a subgroup of the Sinti but were not classed as such. Others: Kelderari, Lovari, Drisari, Medvashi. Yugoslav Gypsies and basket-makers who together probably numbered less than 1,000.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Road to Genocide,” excerpted from Donal Kenrick and Grattan Puxon The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, in 50 Years Ago: From Terror or to Systematic Murder. Washingon, D.C., 1991.
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Unit IV: READING #42 The first hint of any distinction in law between different Gypsy tribes came in August 1941 when following classification, a refinement of the earlier division into pure and part-Gypsies was set up: Z ZM +. ZM(+) ZM ZM 1st grade ZM 2nd grade ZM –, ZM(–) NZ
pure Gypsy (Zigeuner) more than half-Gypsy part-Gypsy (Zigeunermischling) half-Gypsy, half-German half-ZM 1, half-German more than half-German non-Gypsy(Nicht-Zigeuner).
In addition Gypsies of the Sinti tribe were to be noted as native Gypsies’: A non-Gypsy married to a Gypsy or a part-Gypsy was to be additionally classified as “member of a Gypsy mixed family and a ZM– or ZM(–) was to be classed additionally, where relevant, as “member of a non-Gypsy family.”
The Central Police H.Q. was to decide the treatment to be applied to classes ZM– and ZM(–) under the various laws. Döring has pointed out that ZM 2nd grade should logically have been classed as ZM–. We doubt whether such a detailed classification as the above was ever carried out for the majority of German Gypsies. Such documents as we have seen indicate ‘predominantly Gypsy blood’ or similar phrases. The classification was not based entirely on genealogy. We find however that when the time came for the Gypsies to be taken to Auschwitz genealogy was of prime importance. Many integrated Gypsies, sought out by the police using information from family trees, were added to the transports. It has not been established with certainty when and by whom the decision was made to annihilate the Gypsies. The date was probably in Summer 1942, some time after the Wannsee conference..
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Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Road to Genocide,” excerpted from Donal Kenrick and Grattan Puxon The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, in 50 Years Ago: From Terror or to Systematic Murder. Washingon, D.C., 1991. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #43
the man with the pink triangle Heinz Hagar The increased drive of homosexuals for equal rights has made us more conscious of their place in historical events. The role of the homosexual during the Third Reich has been subject to much confusion. Although the Nazis had much regard for male comradeship (what some historians call homoeroticism), they were not sympathetic to homosexuality. The Nazis supported Paragraph 195 of the German penal code, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. In 1934, some homosexuals, including Ernst Roehm, head of the S.A., were murdered in what became known as “The Night of the Long Knives.” Many homosexuals were designated as dangerous to the state and ended up in concentration camps. Recently, the Broadway play “Bent” dealt with the issue of the homosexual and the Nazis. This controversial play is about a man who preferred to wear a yellow star in the concentration camp rather than the pink triangle that signified homosexual. The following selection by Heinz Hagar, is the testimony of one homosexual who had been in Flossenburg and Sachsenhausen, both concentration camps.
I
t was only during the journey that we learned from the SS guards that we were being taken to Flossenbürg. I had already heard tell of that camp from other prisoners in Sachsenhausen… Flossenbürg lay in the mountainous region of Bavaria, near to the Czech border…The concentration camp was built on a gentle slope, not far from Flossenbürg village. But no matter how scenically beautiful, with a ruined 14th century castle rising picturesquely in the landscape, Flossenbürg; is still a place of dreaded memory for tens of thousands of human beings… Out of over a hundred Sachsenhausen prisoners transferred to Flossenbürg, only five bore the pink triangle: A Czech singer from Prague, age 35; a civil servant from Graz in Austria, age 42; a 24-year-old man from Salzburg, said to have been a senior official in the Hitler Youth; myself, and another Viennese, both aged 22. Just as in Sachsenhausen, we were quartered in a ‘queers’ block,’ but this time only wing A of the block, i.e. one dormitory, was for homosexuals. This wing alone was occupied by more than 200 men, and here too, as in Sachsenhausen, the light was kept on the whole night, though only in the ‘queers’ wing’ of the block. Once again, we had to keep our hands outside the blanket while we slept. This was presumably a regulation in force for all concentration camps with blocks for homosexuals. Only a year later, when this wing was disbanded and
we were scattered in smaller groups throughout the other blocks, was this regulation no longer applied. We were led to our block by an SS guard, and transferred there to the sergeant in charge… Flossenbürg was a camp run by the ‘greens,’ just like Sachsenhausen. The great majority of elders and Capos, in other words, came from the ranks of the criminal prisoners, as naturally enough did the camp senior and head Capo. We gays were assembled into work detachments of 12 to 15 men, led by an SS work leader, a Capo and a foreman, to work in the granite quarry. This is where the stones were dug and prepared for Hitler’s great building projects, for motorway bridges and the like… The work of quarrying, dynamiting, hewing and dressing was extremely arduous, and only Jews and homosexuals were assigned to it. The quarry claimed very many victims, with the SS and Capos often deliberately contributing to the large number of accidents… Just like the prison camp itself, the granite quarry was completely surrounded by barbed wire, and guarded outside and inside by SS sentries. No prisoner was permitted to get closer than five metres to the wire. Anyone who did so was shot by the SS guards without warning, since this transgression was already considered as attempted escape. For shooting a prisoner who ‘attempted escape,’ an SS man received three days’ special leave.
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Man With the Pink Triangle,” by Heinz Hagar. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983.
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Unit IV: READING #43 It is not hard to imagine, therefore, how keen the SS were to organise ‘escapes’ of this kind, for the sake of their extra leave. In the relatively short time that I worked in the quarry, I myself witnessed at least ten occasions when SS men seized a prisoner’s cap and threw it against the wire. They would then demand that the prisoner fetch his cap back. Naturally enough, the prisoner tried to refuse, as everyone knew this meant certain death. The SS men then started beating the poor devil with sticks, so that he could only choose the way in which he was to die. Either beaten to death by the SS beasts, or be shot by the guards for “attempted escape.” It happened several times, too, that a prisoner would himself run against the wire in despair, to get shot and be freed from pain, hunger and the unbearable toil. When a prisoner was shot in the quarry, all other prisoners had immediately to lie on the ground and keep their heads down, until the victim, who was not always immediately dead, was taken away on a stretcher. This might take anything up to an hour and a half. Anyone who moved, moreover,
got a kick in the head or the kidneys from the patrolling SS guards, so that he nearly lost his senses. Only in summer was this procedure relatively bearable; in rain or on cold days it was more than painful, which was precisely the SS’s idea. One way of tormenting Jews and homosexuals that the SS in the quarry were very fond of was to drive crazy prisoners who were already physically at the end of their tether. A man who had not done anything in particular would have a metal bucket placed over his head. Two men held him down, while the SS men and Capos banged on the bucket with their sticks. The terrible noise amplified through the bucket soon brought the victim to such a pitch of terror that he completely lost his mind and his sense of balance was destroyed. Then the bucket was suddenly removed from his head and he was pushed towards the wire fence. He could seldom right himself in time. And if he staggered inside the 5metre zone, he was fired on in the usual way. ‘Games’ such as these were a favorite pastime for some of the SS guards.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
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1.
What special rules were applied to homosexuals in the camps?
2.
Hypothetically, if you lived in a society in which homosexuals were rounded up into concentration camps, how do you think you would react?
3.
In the play “Bent,” the major character, Rudi, must make the following decisions: (a) Whether to leave Nazi Germany without his weak male lover (b) Whether to physically hit his friend when ordered to do so by the Nazis (c) Whether to obtain medicine for a sick friend in the concentration camp by sleeping with an SS officer What decisions should Rudi have made?
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Man With the Pink Triangle,” by Heinz Hagar. The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience— An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44
THE WORLD MUST KNOW “ENEMIES OF THE STATE” Michael Berenbaum
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lthough Jews were the primary targets of Nazi persecution, they were not the only ones. Other groups were victimized — some for what they did, others for what they refused to do, still others for who they were. According to Nazi ideology, the world was divided into Aryans destined as the master race followed by the lesser races identified by color ethnicity, culture, and nationality. After Jews, Gypsies inspired the most animosity. Gypsies were also treated as social outcasts. In the first years of the Nazi regime, terror was directed at political opponents — Communists, Socialists, liberals, and trade-unionists — as well as members of the clergy who spoke out against the regime. Once these voices were silenced, terror actually increased as the Nazi state turned against whole categories of people including Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, homosexuals, and the mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or insane. Gypsies: Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) had been subject to official discrimination in Germany long before 1933, but even the Nazi regime never promulgated a comprehensive law against them. Pure Gypsies were not targeted for extermination until 1942: the real threat to the “purity of the race” was from the potential “mixture” of Gypsy and German blood. In the case of the persecution of Gypsies, local initiatives came before policy decisions were made in Berlin. In 1935, the city of Frankfurt herded Gypsies into a fenced camp. A year later, the city banned new immigration and authorized “biological hereditary examinations.” In 1936, the Reich Interior Ministry issued guidelines “For Fighting the Gypsy Plague,” requiring that all Gypsies be photographed and fingerprinted. This documentation of the Gypsy population was later used by the Nazis when persecution and incarceration no longer seemed sufficient and the Gypsies were targeted for systematic murder. In 1937, Himmler ordered the Reich Center for Fighting the Gypsy Menace to draft racial definitions for Gypsies, a preliminary step to authorizing “preventive custody” — the euphemism for imprisonment in a concentration camp — for those who fit the new definitions of Gypsy. According to Heinrich W. Kranz, who headed the
Institute for the Preservation of Race, Heredity and Health at the University of Giessen, “In the long run, the German people will only be freed from this public nuisance when [the Gypsies] fertility is completely eliminated.” The logical way to accomplish this was through wholesale extermination. Jehovah’s Witnesses: The proselytizing sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses was a small minority in Germany — only twenty thousand in population of sixty-five million, but the Witnesses were a thorn in the side of the regime. They would not enlist in the army, participate in air-raid drills, or give up their meetings and proselytizing. The Witnesses viewed themselves as soldiers of Jehovah in the spiritual battle between good and evil. They taught that the forces of Jehovah would defeat Satan, personified in Germany by Nazi authority. Worst of all the phrase “Heil Hitler” would never pass their lips. For the Witnesses, each instance of social conversation was an act of spiritual resistance. Persecution of the Witnesses lasted from 1933 until 1945, and beginning in 1937, they were sent to concentration camps. Those who remained at large lost children, jobs, pensions, and all civil rights. Nevertheless, the Witnesses continued to meet, to preach, and to distribute literature. Posters and tracts were even delivered to Nazi Party headquarters. Five thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to concentration camps. They were unique in that they were “voluntary prisoners.” If they recanted, they could be freed. Some lost their lives in the camps, but few renounced their faith. Homosexuals: As was the case throughout Europe, homosexual behavior had been against the law in Germany for hundreds of years. In the liberal climate of the Weimar Republic, however, homosexuality was tolerated and open. Works advocating homosexuality were published, and gay bars were found in all the major cities. Within weeks of his assumption of office, Hitler banned homosexual groups. On May 6, 1933, only four days before the book burning, Professor Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research, which defended homosexuality, was vandalized, its library and photo collection destroyed. During the summer of 1933, storm troopers began raiding gay bars. Homosexuals sent to concentration camps were
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
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Unit IV: READING #44
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forced to wear yellow bands inscribed with the letter A for Arscificker. Pink triangles would come later. Nazi homophobia was based on several strains in Nazi ideology. Homosexuals were seen as a threat to Aryan breeding policy. Homosexuality was also identified with the lack of manliness that the Nazis associated with the humiliation of Versailles and with the permissive cultural ambiance of the Weimar years. Above all, the upholders of the macho-centered culture of Nazism felt threatened by the very existence of homosexuality. On July 1, 1934, the head of the SA, the storm troopers, Ernst Roehm was shot to death on Hitler’s orders as part of a power struggle between the army and the SA. Roehm, an open homosexual, had been a close associate of Hitler since the early days of street fighting. His murder, which was lauded and officially sanctioned, was a signal to intensify the antihomosexual campaign. Murder became the norm for dealing with political enemies of the regime. Soon, Himmler created a special criminal police office to fight homosexuality. By December 1934, homosexual “Intent” was sufficient for criminal prosecution. Freemasons: Freemasons were a secret fraternal order whose Masonic lodges were regarded by antisemites as a cover for a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Started in 1717, from 1732 onward (almost sixty years before the French Revolution) Freemason lodges were open to Jews, and hence of added fascination to the antisemites. Under nazism, Freemasons were regarded as an ideological foe of the Third Reich as well as part of the Jewish problem. The Nazis believed that Jews exploited the Freemasons’ international connections to achieve world domination. The Nazi conception of “freemasonry” was quire elastic, and eventually grew to include potentially any secret brotherhood, including “old-Prussian” lodges. Scottish Rite Masons, the Rotary Club, the Order of the Grail, Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and Anthroposophists. Nazi
persecution of Freemasons was uneven and inconsistent. Initially, the pattern of persecution was virtually identical to that of the Jews, but it changed over time according to the needs of the state and the economy. Throughout Germany in 1933 and 1934, Masonic lodges dissolved themselves “ voluntarily” or were closed by force. In 1935 all remaining Masonic lodges were abolished. Like Jews. Freemasons were purged from the civil service, forced into early retirement. During the “Night of Broken Glass,” SA men were encouraged to paint anti-Masonic slogans on destroyed shops and synagogues. But as the campaign against Jews intensified after 1938, the persecution of Freemasons slackened. The massive rearmament program of the lace 1930s forced the Nazi regime to exploit every available resource and many Freemasons were civil servants, merchants, or professionals whose skills were required. In April 1938, Hitler declared a partial “amnesty” for Freemasons, and in September some lower-ranking Freemasons were readmitted to the civil service. After this partial rehabilitation, persecution of Freemasons inside Germany was limited to “obdurate” practitioners and mainly took the form of ideological warfare against Freemasonry’s humanitarian, and supposedly Jewish influence. This cultural warfare took the form of a museum located in Nuremberg denigrating the Freemasons. The amnesty did not, however, affect the treatment of Freemasons in the occupied territories of Western Europe. In every German-occupied land lodges dissolved themselves or were forced to close. Michael Berenbaum United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Washington. D.C. June 16, 1992
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44
“night of the broken glass” 1938
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n the night of November 9, 1938, anti-Jewish violence erupted throughout the Reich, which now included Austria and the Sudetenland. What appeared to be a spontaneous outburst of national anger sparked by the assassination of a minor German embassy official in Paris at the hands of Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen year-old Jewish youth, was carefully orchestrated by the Nazi regime. Grynszpan’s parents were Polish Jews living in Germany. They had been deported from Germany to Poland, but because Poland refused to accept its Jewish citizens, they were stranded in limbo. From the border town of Zbaszyn they wrote to their son in desperation. His immediate response was to seek revenge. Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller sent a telegram to all police units letting them know that “in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all Germany. These are not to be interfered with.” Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent Aryan properties. Within forty-eight hours, over one thousand synagogues were burned, along with their Torah scrolls, Bibles, and prayer books. Seven thousand Jewish businesses were crashed and looted, ninety-six Jews were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools, and homes were destroyed. The attackers were often neighbors. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested. To accommodate so many new prisoners, the concentration camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were expanded. When the fury subsided, the pogrom was given a fancy name: Kristallnacht — crystal night, or night of broken glass. It came to stand for the final shattering of Jewish existence in Germany. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the regime made sure that Jews could no longer survive in their country. The cost of the broken window glass alone came to five million marks, the equivalent of well over two million dollars. Jews of German nationality, unlike
Jewish-owned corporations from abroad, could not file for damages. Any compensation claim paid to Jews by insurance companies were confiscated by the Reich. The rubble of ruined synagogues had to be cleared by the Jewish community. A fine of one billion Reichmarks ($400 million) was imposed collectively on the Jewish community. After assessing the fine, Göring remarked: “The swine won’t commit another murder, Incidentally…I would not like to be a Jew in Germany.” On November 15, Jews were barred from schools. Two weeks later, local authorities were given the right to impose a curfew, and by December Jews were denied access to most public places. All remaining Jewish businesses were Aryanized. The Kristallnacht pogrom was the last occasion of street violence against Jews in Germany. It appeared that Jews could leave and enter their homes in safety. But they no longer had any illusions. Life in the Reich was no longer possible. There was another wave of suicides. Most tried desperately to leave. Fifty years after Kristallnacht, a survivor, Sigmund Tobias, recalled what it meant to a Jewish child then; Our family stayed at home and ventured outside only on the day after Kristallnacht. As we passed the entrance to the Ryke Strasse Synagogue, we saw a mound of simmering, smoking ashes in the center courtyard. To our horror, we realized that the smoldering mound consisted of the synagogue’s prayer books. From the center of the mound the blackened, charred handles of sacred Torah scrolls protruded. I had been taught great reverence for the Torah. If the Torah was dropped during services— even accidentally—the whole congregation would have to fast for 40 days. Yet the Nazis had brazenly destroyed the most holy, the most awesome objects of our faith. I will never forget how terror struck this sixyear-old at the realization that there was no safety for us anywhere.
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
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Unit IV: READING #44
search for refugE
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here was no place to go. Jewish emigration to Palestine was severely limited by the British. Neutral Switzerland was afraid of being overrun by Jews. The United States raised a formidable series of paper walls to keep refugees out. A strict quota system limited the entry of immigrants to the United States according to their country of origin. To obtain a visa, a would-be immigrant had to fill out myriad forms and submit them to American consular officials in Europe, whose job was to issue visas sparingly. There were financial tests to weed out refugees who were likely to become a public charge. One of the requirements was a certificate of good conduct arresting to the exemplary character of the immigrant. This was supposed to be obtained from one’s local police authority, in this case the Gestapo. Because American law at the time did not include any special provisions for admitting refugees fleeing persecution and since American law permits no distinctions on the basis of religion, after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, German Jews were barred as potential spies. The United States, a nation of immigrants, was reluctant to become a haven for Jewish refugees. Reflexive nationalism went hand in hand with widespread antisemitism. The depression lingered on, and high unemployment made many Americans fearful of opening the doors to new immigrants, who represented competition in the job market. That these were victims of Nazi persecution fleeing for their lives did not seem a sufficient reason to let in more than a trickle of refugees. Only in 1938 and 1939 in the years between 1933 and 1945 was the quota for Germany and Austria filled, even though from 1932 to 1938 more people emigrated from the United States than came in as immigrants—the first time in all of American history that this had happened. Public opinion polls taken at the time revealed widespread opposition to loosening the quotas, even among people who were critical of the Nazis. According to Roper polls taken in 1938 and 1939, while 95 percent of Americans disapproved of the
German regime, fewer than 9 percent supported changing the system to allow more refugees into the country. After Kristallnacht, even more Americans opposed any change. American Jews, most of whom were themselves first-and second-generation immigrants, were hesitant about bringing pressure for a more generous refugee policy. As a community, they were splintered and powerless. They were afraid of stirring up antisemitism in the United States, and with good reason. Antisemitism in the United States reached a peak in the period between 1938 and 1945. Sixty percent of Americans polled by Roper in the late 1930s thought Jews had “objectionable qualities”; nearly half believed Jews had “too much power” in the United States; and as many as 20 percent said they would sympathize with an antisemitic campaign. In virtually every poll, Jews were cited as posing a major threat to the country. Even efforts to rescue children were not successful. In February 1939, Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Congresswoman Edith Rogers of Massachusetts introduced a bill that would grant special permission for twenty thousand German children under the age of fourteen to come to the United States. The bill specified that the children would be supported privately, nor by the government. At first, it seemed that the bill would pass easily. How could anyone be opposed to taking in children? But opposition came from the isolationists in Congress, who argued that American children should come first, and from groups who argued that it was “a Jewish bill” designed to help only Jewish children. President Roosevelt never said a word in support. The Wagner-Rodgers Bill died in committee and never came to the floor of either the House of Representatives or the Senate. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote: It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44
the voyage of the st. louis
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n May 13, 1939, the SS St. Louis, a luxury liner on the Hamburg-America Line, left Germany for Cuba carrying 936 passengers, all but six of them Jews. Each had a landing permit to Cuba. They seemed to be the lucky ones among the hundreds of thousand of Jews seeking to leave the Reich after Kristallnacht. In a few days they would reach freedom. One day out of Havana, many of the passengers used the last of their “ship money” to send telegrams to relatives in Germany telling them, “Arrived safely.” But when the St. Louis reached port on May 27, the Cuban government refused to honor the visas. The day before the ship had set sail, the president of Cuba had invalidated the landing certificates, a fact known to the shipping line, although not to the ship’s captain. Bribes were solicited, with the asking price of five hundred dollars a person. As the ship sat in Havana harbor within yards of the shore, the ante was raised to one million dollars. The American Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish organization responsible for relief and rehabilitation work overseas, was in a dilemma. To pay such a huge ransom for nine hundred Jews would be an invitation for other governments to extort similar and even larger sums. At the same time, there was increasing pressure from the public—Jews and non-Jews alike—to meet the demand. The JDC continued to negotiate, while newspapers and radio gave daily reports on the fate of the passengers. Urgent appeals were made to the State Department, which decided not to intervene. The passengers sent a telegram to President Roosevelt. It went unanswered; the White House maintained its silence on refugee issues. A hand-wringing editorial in the New York Times said:
We can only hope that some hearts will soften and some refuge will be found. The cruise of the St. Louis cries to high heaven of man’s inhumanity to man. In New York, the JDC received discouraging replies from Colombia, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. On June 5, an agreement was reached that would allow the refugees to land in Cuba if $453,000 was deposited within twenty-four hours, a deadline the JDC could not meet. When the St. Louis left Havana, the German captain, Gustav Schroeder, appealed in vain to the United States for a haven. As the ship, sailed along the Florida coast, the passengers could see the lights of Miami. U.S. Coast Guard ships patrolled the waters to make sure that no one jumped to freedom. The St. Louis turned back to Europe. Antisuicide patrols were organized. Children played a game in which two boys guarded a barrier constructed of chairs. Other children lined up and asked permission to pass through. “Are you a Jew?” asked one of the guards. “Yes,” answered the child at the barrier. “Jews not admitted,” snapped the guard. “Oh. please let me in. I’m only a very little Jew.” For a while, the sad voyage of the St. Louis seemed to have a happy ending. Belgium, the Netherlands, England, and France admitted the passengers. But within months, the Nazis overran Western Europe. Only the 288 passengers who disembarked in England were safe. Of the rest, only a few survived the Holocaust.
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
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Unit IV: READING #44
to safetY
A
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few—too few—Jews found places of refuge. The United States received the largest number of refugees between 1933 and 1945, a total of 132,000. Until 1939, most refugees had gone to Palestine, but in 1939 a British White Paper limited the number of Jews who could settle there to fifteen thousand a year for five years. England did, however, take in ten thousand Jewish refugee children that year, something the United States was not willing to do. Latin American countries received approximately eighty thousand refugees. Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia were lands of refuge for those lucky Jews who escaped in time. Many German Communists who sought asylum in the Soviet Union were eventually sentenced to death under Scalia’s terror campaigns. Canada received only a handful of refugees. Canadian university faculties were not open to Jews. Of the thousands of European scholars who were forced to flee, only six found full-time jobs in Canadian universities. One of them, Gerhard Herzberg, a molecular physicist, became Canada’s first Nobel laureate in science. Until November 1, 1939, China required neither a visa nor a police certificate for entrance. Jews arrested after Kristallnacht could be freed from concentration camps on the condition that they left Germany within two weeks. Many went to Shanghai, a city of odd juxtapositions. Opium dens flourished in the vicinity of a distinguished university: thousands of Chinese died on the streets in a city that supported a symphony orchestra; caftan-clad Yiddish-speaking yeshiva students and Germanspeaking families who had been part of the Berlin cultural establishment lived alongside the Chinese. The German Jewish refugees included ordinary people—shopkeepers, artisans, middle-class professionals as well as distinguished writers, artists, scholars, and scientists who epitomized the flowering of high German and European culture. Many had international reputations in their fields. Leaving their homeland to make a new life in a strange country was difficult. An Einstein was received royally, but other, less-renowned intellectuals were often treated shabbily, unable to find work suited to their abilities. Not all the refugees were Jewish. Thomas Mann left Germany immediately after the Nazi takeover, and Paul Tillich, the brilliant young Protestant theologian, came to the United States in 1933.
Some of Europe’s finest artists fled, including Jean Arp, Andre Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, and Henri Matisse. Eminent musicians included Georg Szell and Bruno Walter. Many established writers came to the United States, among them Franz Werfel, the novelist whose Forty Days of Musa Dagh conveyed the tragedy of the Armenians and was invoked by Jewish resistance fighters in Bialystok and Warsaw. Lion Feuchtwanger and Max Brod, the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka, were forced to flee. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud dispatched his disciples around the globe. Psychoanalysis was no longer safe in the Reich. Analysts trained by Freud fled to New York and Los Angeles, Jerusalem and Johannesburg, Buenos Aires and Sydney. Freud himself left Vienna for London soon after the Nazis entered Austria. At a final gathering of his disciples in Vienna, Freud called on the memory of Yochanan Ben Zakkai, the first-century rabbi who had made Judaism portable and synagogue centered after the destruction of Jerusalem. Psychoanalysis would survive even if Freud was exiled from Vienna. An Emergency Visitors Visa Program was established in the United States to rescue “persons of exceptional merit, those of superior intellectual attainment.” Varian Fry, an emissary in France of the Emergency Rescue Committee, was dispatched, lists in hand, to save a cultural elite and relocate them in the United States. One hundred and fifty mathematicians came to the United States under the program. Hundreds of chemists came, eight of them Nobel Prize winners in the years before their arrival or in subsequent years. In the humanities, the social sciences, and medicine and law—fields in which Jews had achieved prominence—many of the best and the brightest were forced to flee. Whole institutions of scholarship were relocated for example, the Warburg Institute of Art, which moved from Berlin to London. Many of those who escaped found a haven and often home, in the United States. They taught at American universities, where their presence enriched American cultural life and left a permanent legacy. In fields as diverse as quantum physics and medieval history they reshaped American scholarship. Many of them could not easily find academic jobs, and a new institution, fittingly called the New School for Social Research, was established in New York City. Its faculty consisted
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44 almost entirely of refugees. The Manhattan Project, where atomic fusion first took place, would not have been possible without the contributions of the refugees. Many of the German Jewish refugees who managed to enter the United States formed a community in New York City. More than twenty thousand of them lived in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan. Because they strenuously preserved echt (authentic) German culture and attitudes in the face of freewheeling American customs, the blocks between 160th and 180th streets west of Broadway were facetiously called “The Fourth Reich.” The Émigrés published their own Germanlanguage newspapers, tried to live as they always had in Germany, and anguished for the brethren they had left behind. Among the children to grow up in this
area was a young Jewish refugee, Henry Kissinger, who was later to become the first secretary of state of Jewish origin, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the architect of American foreign policy between 1969 and 1977. Forced to begin anew in a strange world, the refugees had been wrenched from their language, their work, and their old lives. They could never forget those who did not survive. The playwright Bertolt Brecht described how it felt: I know of course; it’s simply luck That I’ve survived so many friends. But last night in a dream I heard those friends say of me: “Survival of the fittest” And I hated myself.
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Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
Unit IV: READING #44
the war begins “War is life.” Hitler wrote. “War is the origin of all things.”
O
n September 1, 1939, the German armies invaded Poland. World War II had begun. The aim of German foreign policy, Hitler said, was to “secure for the German people the land and the spoils to which they are entitled on this earth.” Austria and the Sudentenland had been taken into the Reich without a shot being fired, but the conquest of Poland required war. “Only thus shall we gain the Lebensraum (living space) which we need,” Hitler told his troops. Lebensraum was only one motive for going to war. Hitler’s determination to carry out Nazi racial policy was of equal importance. In a speech on January 30, 1939, celebrating the beginning of his sixth year in power, Hitler issued an unequivocal warning:
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If international-finance Jewry [Hitler’s term for the supposed conspiracy of Jewish bankers] inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. War made possible, Goebbels wrote, “the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in peacetime.” War freed the regime from all restraints and at the same time united the German people against their enemies— both real and imagined. Hitler’s war, which overnight reversed the humiliating defeat of 1918, restored the confidence of the nation that until recently had been still reeling from its defeat in World War I. Within a year of the attack on Poland, Germany achieved hegemony over an empire in the East. The Polish army was destroyed within days of the Nazi invasion. Warsaw surrendered in less than a month. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany to fulfill their treaty obligations, but provided no military assistance to the beleaguered Polish government. Germany and its new Soviet ally proceeded to carve up Poland. (In a stunning reversal of policy, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a
nonaggression pact less than two weeks before the attack on Poland.) Eastern territories were annexed to the Soviet Union; those in the west, including the city of Danzig, became part of the Reich or came under German rule. More than twenty-two million people were added to the Nazi empire. On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Both were conquered swiftly. On May 10, German armies swept through Belgium and the Netherlands on their approach to France in an attack called the Blitzkrieg, or lightning war. The Netherlands fell in five days. Belgium capitulated in less than three weeks, forcing a British army of a quarter of a million to flee across the English Channel from the beaches at Dunkerque. The French army, afraid of being totally destroyed, retreated. On June 13, Paris fell to the Germans. Under an armistice agreement, France was divided. The northern part of the country was occupied by Germany, while Hitler’s ally, Italy, occupied part of the south. Part remained under nominal French control, ruled by the Vichy government, which was in fact a puppet of Germany. During the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, the German air force, launched massive bombing raids on Britain as the prelude to a planned invasion, but met unexpectedly strong opposition from the Royal Air Force. Between July and October, the skies above England were ablaze with aerial combat. Germany lost 1,722 aircraft to the RAF’s 915. During the winter, the German army completed plans to invade the Soviet Union in May 1941. On April 6, 1941, Germany invaded the Balkan countries of Greece and Yugoslavia (Bulgaria and Romania had already come under German domination). The Greeks and Yugoslavs put up strong resistance, causing Germany to delay the invasion of the Soviet Union until late June, a postponement that was to have fateful consequences when the German armies were forced to campaign in the deadly Russian winter. Still, on the eye of the attack, the Soviet army was the only major land force on the European continent left standing against the Nazis. The triumphant German army looked invincible.
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44
terror in poland
T
he German High Command in occupied Poland received its orders directly from Hitler. In the Nazi hierarchy, Poles were considered Untermenschen (subhumans) standing in the way of German expansion. Prior to the attack, Hitler addressed his high command in Obersalzberg. Louis Lochner. a famous American correspondent in Berlin, recieved a copy of the notes of the meeting from Hermann Maass, a key contact of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, director of the Abwehr, the counterintelligence department of the German High Command. (In 1944, Maass was a leader in the conspiracy against Hitler.) Hitler is reported to have said: I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my deathhead formations in readiness—for present only in the East—with orders to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men. German policy in Poland represented a departure from traditional warfare. Terror was intensified after a state was subdued and its people had surrendered. In the territories extending from East Prussia to Silesia, which were annexed outright by the Reich, the Nazis instituted a program of colonization. German settlers moved in and the native Polish population—including Jews—was forcibly resettled. Cities and towns were given German names. Whole regions were evacuated. In what was known as the General-Government, the German-run but nonannexed territories of central Poland, members of the Polish intelligentsia and political leadership were systematically and brutally killed by the Nazis. The aim was to harness a leaderless, subservient population of laborers, who would be used to serve their German masters as migrant workers. Terror was central to this policy. The Nazi General-Governor Hans Frank said: “Poles will become slaves to the German Empire.” Executions took place daily in Warsaw’s Pawiak prison and the Palmiry forest on the outskirts of the city. In Poznan, Fort VII became a place for the torture of university professors, politicians, and clergy. The Roman Catholic Church had for centuries
been inextricably linked with the Polish nationalist movement; therefore, it seemed logical to the Nazis that getting rid of Catholic priests was an effective way to weaken Polish nationalism. During the course of the war, 18 percent of all Polish diocesan priests were killed. In some regions, the death toll was even more devastating. Polish reports indicate that in Chelmno 47.8 percent of the priests were murdered; in Lód´z, 36.8 percent were killed; and in Poznan, 31.1 percent died. Within four months of the German invasion, 80 percent of the priests of the Wartaland region were expelled. Even if these figures are inflated, the reality of massive slaughter cannot be denied. In prewar Poznan, thirty churches and fortyseven chapels had served a population of two hundred thousand. After the German occupation, only two churches remained open. In Lodz, a city of seven hundred thousand, only four churches remained. Within a few weeks of the invasion, two hundred professors from Poland’s ancient and venerated Jagiellonian University were murdered. Archives were plundered, art was stolen, and national treasures were taken to Germany. Even monuments to Poland’s heroic figures — Chopin, Kosciuszko, and Pilsudski were removed. Those Polish children who were considered to be sufficiently Germanic were kidnapped and sent to Germany as part of a forced Aryanization program. “If a child is recognized to be of our blood,” Himmler wrote, “the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to school and will remain permanently in Germany.” As for ordinary Polish children, there was also a plan. In a top-secret memorandum, “The Treatment of Racial Aliens in the East,” dated May 25, 1940, Himmler laid out the strategy: For the non-German population of the East, there must be no higher school than the fourth grade of elementary school. The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500, writing one’s name and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans…I do not think that reading is desirable. Himmler was equally blunt about his attitude toward Polish adults. “The conditions in which these people live…are a matter of complete indifference to us,” he said. “They interest me only to the extent that we need them as slaves for our culture.”
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
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Unit IV: READING #44
murder of the handicapped
M
ass murder began with the death of a few individuals. In September 1939, Hitler signed an order empowering his personal physician and the chief of the Fuhrer Chancellery to put to death those considered unsuited to live. He backdated it to September 1, 1939, the day World War II began, to give it the appearance of a wartime measure. In the directive: Reich leader Philip Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.
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What followed was the so-called euthanasia program, in which men, women, and children who were physically disabled, mentally retarded, or emotionally disturbed were systematically killed. Within a few months, the T-4 program (named for Berlin Chancellery Tiergarten 4, which directed it) involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to “take executive measures against those defined as ‘life unworthy of living.” A statistical survey of all psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for chronically ill patients was ordered. At Tiergarten, 4, three medical experts reviewed the forms returned by institutions throughout Germany, but did not examine any patients or read their medical records. Nevertheless, they had the power to decide life or death. Patients whom it was decided to kill were transported to six killing centers: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafenack, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. The members of the SS in charge of the transports donned white coats to keep up the charade of a medical procedure. The first killings were by starvation: starvation is passive, simple, and natural. Then injections of lethal doses of sedatives were used. Children were easily “put to sleep.” But gassing soon became the preferred method of killing. Fifteen to twenty people were killed in a chamber disguised as a shower. The lethal gas was provided by chemists, and the process
was supervised by physicians. Afterward, black smoke billowed from the chimneys as the bodies were burned in adjacent crematoria. Families of those killed were informed of the transfer. They were assured that their loved ones were being moved in order to receive the best and most modern treatment available. Visits, however, were not possible. The relatives then received condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by physicians, and urns containing ashes. There were occasional lapses in bureaucratic efficiency, and some families received more than one urn. They soon realized something was amiss. A few doctors protested. Heinrich Bonhoeffer, a leading psychiatrist, worked with his son Dietrich, a pastor who actively opposed the regime, to contact church groups, urging them not to turn patients in church-run institutions over to the SS. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the SS just before the end of the war.) A few physicians refused to fill out the requisite forms. Only one psychiatrist, Professor Gottfried Ewald of the University of Gottingen, openly opposed the killing. Doctors did not become killers overnight. The transformation took time and required a veneer of scientific justification. As early as 1895, a widely used German medical textbook made a claim for “the right to death.” In 1920, a physician and a prominent jurist argued that destroying “life unworthy of life” is a therapeutic treatment and a compassionate act completely consistent with medical ethics. Soon after the Nazis came to power, the Bavarian Minister of Health proposed that psychopaths, the mentally retarded, and other “inferior people” be isolated and killed. “This policy has already been initiated at our concentration camps,” he noted. A year later, mental institutions throughout the Reich were instructed to “neglect” their patients by withholding food and medical treatment. Pseudo-scientific rationalizations for the killing of the “unworthy” were bolstered by economic considerations. According to bureaucratic calculations, state funds that went to the care of criminals and the insane could be put to better use, for example by loans to newly married couples. Incurably sick children were seen as a burden for the healthy body of the Volk, the German people. In a time of war, it was not difficult to lose sight of the absolute value of human life. Hitler understood this. Wartime,
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #44 he said. “was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill.” The murder of the handicapped was a prefiguration of the Holocaust. The killing centers to which the handicapped were transported were the antecedents of the death camps. The organized transportation of the handicapped foreshadowed mass deportation, some of the physicians who became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps. All their moral, professional, and ethical inhibitions had long been lost. During the German euthanasia program, psychiatrists were able to save some patients, at least temporarily, but only if the psychiatrists cooperated in sending others to their death. In the Jewish communities of the territories later conquered by the Nazis, Judenrat leaders Jews appointed by the Germans to take charge of the ghettos, had to make similar choices. Gas chambers were first developed at the handicapped killing centers. So was the use of burning to dispose of dead bodies. In the death camps the technology was taken to a new level: thousands could be killed at one time and their bodies burned within hours. The Roman Catholic Church, which had not taken a stand on the Jewish question, protested the “mercy killing.” Count von Galen, the Bishop of Munster, openly challenged the regime, arguing that it was the duty of Christians to oppose the taking of human life even if this were to cost them their own lives. It seemed to have an effect. On August 24, 1941, almost two years after the euthanasia program was initiated, it appeared to cease. In fact, it had gone underground. The killing did not end, mass murder was just beginning. Physicians trained in the medical killing centers went on to grander tasks. Irmfried Eberl, a doctor whose— career began in the T-4 program, became the commandant of Treblinka, where killing of a magnitude as yet unimagined would take place.
A mentally disabled girl photographed shortly before her murder. Germany, Archiv Ernst Klee, Frankfurt, Germany.
Source: Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust As Told in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.
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Unit IV: READING #45
the search for countries of refuge In the first selection from Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died, the author discusses the important 1938 meeting of the thirty-two nations to deal with the “Jewish Question.” Some historians feel that the Evian Conference taught the Nazis that the world was willing to do very little about the persecution of Jews in Germany. Most nations were unwilling to increase their immigration quotas. In 1924, in a period of extreme hostility towards immigrants from Eastern Europe, the United States Congress passed the National Origins Act which drastically reduced the rate of immigration, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe. This law was reaffirmed at Evian. The anti-immigrant sentiment was maintained in the Depression atmosphere of the Thirties. Organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign War and the American Medical Association expressed their fears about immigration. Yet, it would be a mistake to think that the Depression was the sole cause of these feelings. The combination of isolationism and anti-Semitism, as well as economic self-interest, helped produce the reaction of the 1930s.
The Evian Conference Arthur Morse 544
O
n May 12 France approved of Evian-les-Bains as the site of the refugee conference. The luxurious resort on the French shore of Lake Geneva would provide excellent accommodations for representatives of the thirty-two nations which would attend. The United States announced that Myron C. Taylor, former chairman of the U.S. Steel Corporation would be its principal representative at the conference…The precarious situation of the Jews was held in abeyance between May and July. Nothing was done to ease the rigidity of the immigration procedures, which proved particularly tragic for a thirty-six-year-old German Jewish woman named Luise Wolf. Luise Wolf had arrived in New York on a six-week visitor’s permit. During her stay she hoped to obtain an affidavit attesting to her means of support so she could assure the United States of America that she would not become one of its public charges. Then she would become a bonafide immigrant. In Munich she had worked as a saleswoman to support her sick mother and herself, but was
discharged as a non-Aryan. At the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls where she lived in New York, she was regarded as a well-educated, quiet person, but somehow she had not been able to obtain her affidavit. She was scheduled to return to Germany on May 27. On May 25 Luise Wolf leaped to her death from a fifth-floor window of the Home. A return ticket to Germany and $15 were found in her purse. Such tragedies seemed needless to many Americans, especially since U.S. immigration quotas were unfilled. On June 7, 1938, a delegation of the Jewish People’s Committee for United Action Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism visited the White House and presented 120,000 signatures on petitions proposing that the unused quotas from any country be made available for the admission of refugees from other countries. Presidential secretary Marvin McIntyre met the group, accepted the petitions and then sent a note to Sumner Welles: “Personally I do not see much necessity for any reply except that a more or less courteous but stereotyped answer signed by me may head off insistence in the future for a specific reply. What do
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (Out-of-Print) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #45 you think.” Welles thought so too. A few months later the Jewish People’s Committee presented 245,325 additional signatures obtained from people of all faiths. These were filed with the first batch. Although there were many nonJewish signatories to these and other petitions and although leading Protestant and Catholic clergymen spoke out frequently against the Nazi actions, there was no national outbursts of Christian indignation. Shortly before the Evion Conference, James McDonald renewed a familiar campaign as he accepted the Albert Einstein medal for Humanitarian Services. Pointing out that Protestants and Catholics were also being per muted, he said that it was time that non-Jews became aware of the problem. “The only really discouraging element,” he said, “is that the Christian world. in this country and in other countries, should to such a very small extent take in the meaning of this current attack upon the principles of civilized society. Until Protestants and Catholics as well as Jews come to see that the things they hold dear, even as the things Jews hold dear, are threatened—not until then will there be an adequate response to enable refuge from central Europe to be cared for.” Much more typical than McDonald’s eloquence in behalf of the refugees was the action of the New York State encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. With the imminent Evian Conference in mind the VFW passed a resolution disapproving the admission of any refugees to the United States and calling for the suspension of all immigration for ten years.. Even as the VFW and other “patriotic” groups were fighting the admission of refugees, the American and British press reported the large scale movement of Austrian Jews to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. On June 19, two weeks before Evian, the London Time’s Vienna correspondent wrote: “Demoralization is pursued by constant arrest of the Jewish population. No specific charge is made, but men and women, young and old, are taken each day and each night from their houses or in the streets and carried off, the more fortunate to Austrian prisons, and the rest to Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany…The authorities demand rapid and impossible emigration. The Jews would welcome evacuation, but for most it is impossible…” Perhaps no one described the challenge of Evian more eloquently than Anne O’Hare McCormick, columnist of the New York Times. Two days before the conference opened, she wrote: “It is heartbreaking to think of the queues of desperate human beings around our consulates in Vienna and other cities waiting in suspense for what happens at
Evian…It is not a question of how many unemployed this country can safely add to its own unemployed millions. It is a test of civilization…Can America live with itself if it lets Germany get away with this policy of extermination, allows the fanaticism of one man to triumph over reason, refuses to take up this gage of battle against barbarism?” Unknown to Miss McCormick and to the reporters gathering to cover the conference. Myron Taylor had met earlier with Sir Michael Palairet, the deputy head of the British delegation. Taylor told him that American Jewish leaders were anxious that Dr. Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, be given an opportunity to present the case for immigration to Palestine either during the conference or at a private session. Sir Michael replied that his government “would naturally prefer that this meeting should not take place.” Taylor promised him that he would not even talk to Weizmann prior to the conference. Palestine had received more Jewish refugees than any other country, but the British had excluded its most eloquent spokesman, Dr. Weizman, even before the conference began… On July 6, 1938, after much introductory skirmishing, the highly publicized Evian Conference was called to order. The first major controversy tackled by the delegates had nothing to do with refugees. It concerned the selection of the conference president. This dispute went on for two days… When the delegates finally turned to substantive issues it became clear that it would take more than the dedication of a Myron Taylor to rescue the conference: one after another the nations made clear their unwillingness to accept refugees… Australia, with vast, unpopulated areas, announced. “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” New Zealand was unwilling to lift its restrictions. The British colonial empire,… contained no territory suitable to the largescale settlement of Jewish refugees. Canada wanted agricultural migrants and none others. The same was true of Colombia, Uruguay and Venezuela. Peru was particularly opposed to the immigration of doctors and lawyers lest such an intellectual proletariat upset the unbridled power of its upper class. The Peruvian delegate pointedly remarked that the United States had given his country an example of “caution and wisdom” by its own immigration restrictions. France, whose population already included two hundred thousand refugees and three million aliens, stressed that it had reached its saturation point. Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama issued a joint statement saying that they could accept
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (Out-of-Print)
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Unit IV: READING #45 no “traders or intellectuals.”Argentina, with a population one-tenth that of the United States, reported that it had welcomed almost as many refugees as the United States and hence could not be counted an for large-scale immigration. The Netherlands and Denmark reflected their traditional humanitarianism. Though Holland had already accepted twenty-five thousand Jewish refugees, it offered itself as a country of temporary
sojourn. Denmark, so densely populated that its own citizens were forced to emigrate, had already taken in a disproportionately large number of German exiles. Within its narrow limits, it would continue to do so. And the United States, the nation at whose initiative the conference had convened, what would it offer? The answer was soon in coming. The United States, with its tradition of asylum, its vast land mass and its unlimited resources, agreed, for the first time, to accept its full, legal quota of 27,370 immigrants
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1.
What agreements were made at Evian?
2.
What was the reaction of the American newspapers to the results at Evian?
3.
How do you react to the arguments made by the American Medical Association and the Veterans of Foreign War?
4.
In 1940, Anne Lindbergh, wife of the famous flyer, wrote “We, as Americans, do not have the moral right to judge what is happening. After all, we are not perfect ourselves.” How do you react to this statement?
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Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (Out-of-Print) New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
THE DESPERATE SEARCH FOR A COUNTRY OF REFUGE 1933-1945
Unit IV: READING #45
Source: Furman, Harry, Ed. “The Search for Countries of Refuge.” The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience—An Anthology for Students. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1983. (Out-of-Print)
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Unit IV: READING #46
evian: a none too trustful poker game Deborah E. Lipstadt
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or eight days in July the delegates of thirty-two nations, the representatives of thirty-nine private organizations, two hundred newspaper reporters, and a myriad of unofficial observers and supplicants gathered at the luxurious Hotel Royal at the French resort of Evian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva near the Swiss border. Evian’s mineral baths had long been a favorite of Europeans in search of cures for various ailments. On this occasion Evian’s healing powers would fail to cure any of the ills plaguing those who were the subject of the conference—the refugees. By this time much of the enthusiasm for the conference had evaporated and a keener recognition of the problems faced was to be found in news stories and editorials. Since the Anschluss Germany had increased the economic pressure on Jews, forcing them into what Newsweek described on the eve of the conference as “an isolation unequaled since the Middle Ages.” It was now clear that few nations wanted immigrants at all and fewer still were willing to provide places for those who were both penniless and Jews. Clarence Streit, writing in the New York Times, described the atmosphere which prevailed at this tranquil resort as “so much like a poker game . . . a none too trustful poker game particularly as between the three great democracies, the United States, the United Kingdom and France”—a poker game in which each of the players refused to even contemplate raising the stakes. This gathering, supposedly dedicated to helping refugees, was permeated by an “air of inhospitality” to them. During the conference various editorials energetically explained why the United States, despite its deepest sympathies, could offer little additional aid. Some papers vigorously protested, possibly a bit too much, that this was due to economic and not racial or religious considerations. They contrasted the contemporary situation with earlier times when “farmers needed more consumers for their products; railroads wanted new settlers along their rights of way,…[and] mills had room for common labor at low wages.” The press argued that while this was America’s mythic identity, reality was quite different. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, even skilled refugees were not wanted in
this country, where there was not only a surfeit of common laborers but “already as many doctors as can make a living, perhaps more.” Some papers ignored the issue of whether refugees should be allowed to enter the United States and simply echoed the demand of the “Big Three” powers—the United States, Great Britain, and France— that Germany permit the refugees to take a substantial portion of their income and belongings with them to facilitate their resettlement. Editorials repeatedly argued that Germany could hardly “expect other countries to admit the Jews” who had been cast “abroad penniless.” A New Orleans paper bluntly informed Berlin that if it was more “interested in getting rid of these people than in confiscating their property,” then the rule that Jews could only take 5 percent of their income should be eased. These demands seemed strangely unrealistic. Germany had previously done nothing to ease Jewish emigration, and there was no reason to expect it to begin to cooperate with other nations now. A few press observers recognized the ludicrousness of expecting German cooperation and dismissed it as a “naive suggestion.” One commentator cynically mused that life would certainly be easier if the Nazis would “give each refugee a cow and a horse, seed and farm implements, as well as some cash!” The Baltimore Sun wryly and accurately pointed out that the fact that Jews’ reception in other lands was made “doubly difficult” by their penniless state would be no “shock” to Nazis because expelling them in this condition was “part of their plan.” There was nothing to indicate that Germany would change its tactics without a strong incentive such as a decision at Evian to impose economic pressure on Germany. The few editorial suggestions for explicit action—e.g., countries which owed Germany money should withhold payments as a form of protest and leverage until Germany “acquiesces”— were the exception. As the conference progressed, press appraisal of it grew progressively harsher. The great expectations of March dissolved in the realities of July. The Detroit Free Press decried the behavior of the various delegations, dismissed their excuses why they could do nothing as “immaterial,” and branded the
Source: Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Evian: A None Too Trustful Poker Game.” Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1986. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #46 gathering a “sad commentary” on the willingness of the world’s democracies to resolve one of the “most serious problems” the world faced. Another paper aptly categorized the meeting as a polite game of “passing the buck.” According to yet another paper the delegates had all but nullified their “profound sympathy for the tortured victims of Europe’s totalitarian tyranny” with their various excuses why they were unable to provide asylum. The New York Herald Tribune declared the gathering “not exactly a pretty spectacle” as it got “nowhere with great dignity but at a high rate of speed.” Demonstrating both pessimism and insight, the Tribune observed that Evian was enough to justify the “scorn” which the fascist governments of the world “delight in pouring out” on the other nations. Time described Evian as a place which had heard “many warm words of idealism and few practical suggestions.” The “air of inhospitality” and undercurrent of antisemitism prevalent at Evian were most dramatically exemplified by Australia’s representative, who declared that “we have no real racial problem [and] we are not desirous of importing one.” Once again Jews were explicitly and implicitly held responsible for their suffering. The New Republic, one of the most ardent critics of the failure to rescue, observed that the delegates’ annoyance at the Nazis seemed to proceed fully as much from the fact that they had presented the rest of the world with an awkward problem of absorption as from the cruelty practised toward the exiles, past and future. An even sharper condemnation was contained in a query by the Richmond (Virginia) News Leader: When the conference adjourns and a permanent commission is established in London to aid in mass migration, what will the United States do? Will this country set an example and modify immigration laws carefully and wisely to permit the entry of a considerable number of these intelligent refugees? Or will we simply play politics, hide behind nationalism, and insist that South America is the proper home for these people? As between the two questions, the answer is nearly obvious. The United States will be content with friendly gestures and kind words. That is why some of us not only are cold to the report of the conference but also are a bit ashamed of our country. The Richmond News Leader’s response was unique in explicitly taking the United States to task for refusing to act. Generally press condemnations of the world’s intransigence excluded the United States. Victor Wilson of the Philadelphia Record assailed the “indifference if not downright hostility” of the conference in a lengthy article under a telling headline:
Humanitarianism Suffers a New Blow as Evian Parley Fails to Provide System for Aiding Europe’s Unhappy Exiles-France and Britain Maneuver to Shunt Burden on U.S. As the headline indicates, Wilson’s ire was directed at other nations, France and Britain in particular. Similarly Newsweek noted that when other nation’s, governments heard American calls for prompt action, they responded by “promptly… slamming their doors against Jewish refugees.” The Washington Star also castigated Evian’s participants, with the exception of the United States, for their “yesbut” behavior. The delegations “vied with one another in deploring the plight…faced by [the] oppressed”; the problem was that when it came to the “brass tacks…for facilitating emigration…Evian emulated a famous region paved with good intentions.” Then, during the meeting’s final days, when the participants managed to agree on the establishment of a permanent intergovernmental commission charged with the task of finding a solution to the refugee problem, some of the press’s sharp critique was tempered. The vast majority of the critics in the American press refused to consider that America’s refusal to change its quota laws might have been responsible in some measure for the limited results of Evian. When the United States promised that the status quo would be maintained, Evian’s eventual outcome could well have been predicted. In truth, had America expanded its quota allotments or assumed responsibility for a greater number of refugees, the press would have condemned its actions just as relentlessly as it now condemned the inaction of the rest of the world. The press had supported the idea of a conference because it guaranteed no increase in immigration. In fact its stance was entirely consistent with—if not slightly more liberal than—public sentiments. A Fortune survey taken earlier in the year revealed that less than 5 percent of Americans favored expanding the quotas while 67 percent favored trying to keep refugees out. Only 18 percent of the public—but most of the press—favored the status quo. In the opinion of the press America had done enough, and some even wondered if it had not done too much. Though this was a European matter, America had convened the conference, had promised full quota allocations, and and had already taken in more refugees than many other countries. An American, Myron C. Taylor, had served as the conference’s president. America had come to France and England’s aid just two decades earlier and now was being asked to do so again. A number of papers cautioned that it was not America’s responsibility to “remake Europe.” The burden was on others to respond.
Source: Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Evian: A None Too Trustful Poker Game.” Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1986.
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Unit IV: READING #46 For the American press, the failure of Evian was the failure of the rest of the world to shoulder its share of the burden. Press reaction to the Anschluss, Evian, and, as shall be demonstrated in the pages that follow, Kristallnacht exemplified the way in which American contempt for German behavior coexisted with an unwavering commitment to isolationism and anti-immigrationism ill. Though the
press was increasingly hostile to Nazi Germany, this did not preclude its strengthened commitment to the maintenance of American neutrality. Its sympathy for the victims and its contempt for the perpetrators did not negate its conviction that the gates of this land must remain firmly shut.
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Source: Lipstadt, Deborah E. “Evian: A None Too Trustful Poker Game.” Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1945. New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1986. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47
The Liberators
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he United States and the Soviet Union fought together as Allies in World War II. In 1944-45, the armies of the two countries moved toward Germany from opposite directions. The American Army moved East across Germany toward Berlin in early 1945. As the troops progressed they liberated scores of concentration camps. Soliders of all ranks were amazed and horrified at what they saw. The things I saw beggar description… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ — General Eisenhower’s letter to Chief of Staff George Marshall, April 12,1945
The same day I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.” Some members of my visiting party were unable to go through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt. — General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, 1945
General Eisenhower with American soldiers viewing corpses of the victims at Ohrdruf, 1945. (Photo credit YIOW)
I saw Eisenhower go to the opposite end of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. And I soon became ill. I suggested to General Eisenhower that cables be sent immediately to President Roosevelt, Churchill, DeGaulle, urging people to come and see for themselves. The general nodded, then stuck out his hand and said, “You and
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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Unit IV: READING #47 Hoge did a good job in pushing me to come. Weinstein, you’re persistent as all hell, and I was pissed off but you were right. I never would have believed that this was possible.” — Lewis H. Weinstein, Lieutenant Colonel and chief of the Liaison Section of General Eisenhower’s staff, April, 1945
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We had gone through the Bulge, we had seen the horrors of war: death, people who were wounded. Many of us came very close to losing our lives during that period. But we had no knowledge, and our first encounter came one day when we were asked to go to a place outside of Weimar; Germany. It wasn’t a mission of battle, it was just to go. And we came to this place, which was somewhat like a security place, a place you might see in any urban center that was a prison. But we were totally unprepared — at least I was, for what I encountered when I went into Buchenwald. The outside was very beautiful. It was in a suburban-type community, the grass was well manicured and cared for. And then you go inside, and then all of a sudden the stark horror of it all strikes you. And that’s the way I encountered it at the age of 19. When I walked in I saw what should be considered human beings, that had been reduced to the point where they were just merely surviving. I called them the walking dead, because I felt they had reached the point of no return. We all expressed horror. We were aghast at what we saw. How deep that feeling was is hard to say. I cannot even speak for myself, in terms of how deep that hit me because I felt that I pushed it aside. I sort of covered it up; I didn’t want to deal with that. It was too traumatic. And like most people, you have to find some kind of security blanket, some way to insulate yourself from the horror. And I sort of pushed it away, and I never talked about it at all. There were those survivors who hadn’t been there very long, who were much more healthy. But then I got to those who had probably been there for some time or who had gone through the tortures and the dehumanizing kind of things. There was a variety there, you might call it a smorgasbord. I talked to a young fellow who was there who spoke very good English. He
said that at first the camp had held something like 300,000. But when we came on the scene it was less than 20,000. And we talked to him and he said that the Germans got rid of political prisoners first. They were really frightened of them, and then they began to systematically work on Jews. Jews had high priority, for extermination. And of course Gypsies, and others. I had been told by this young man that most of the Jews had been exterminated. We saw the whole works. The crematorium…There was a fellow there who spoke English — a young fellow — and he must have been a student before being incarcerated. He walked around with us. And as we walked I looked at different things — people defecating in the holes in the ground, there were no tissues, no sense of dignity — just go ahead. Someone retching out of a window, where they had been encapsulated in such large numbers in a small space in the barracks. I saw clothing, it must have been baby clothing that they had piled up for their own use, later I guess. Then we saw the crematorium, where the dead bodies were outside, stacked up like cordwood, and we went into the crematorium and you could see the residue in the ovens — the rib cages, the skulls. And it was so hard to believe — to try to understand why. What did these people do that merited this kind of treatment! And it boggles the mind when you think that it had gone on for almost ten years before we got into the war! Why wasn’t it dealt with? Why did nobody scream and shout, “Stop!” They never did. And we saw the laboratory where they were experimenting on different people, and the parts of the body. And then there was the torture chamber, and you could see the stains of the blood on the stone, and on the wall. They even had the instruments. Some of them were still there. — Leon Bass, Sergeant, 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion
In the children’s cell block, the bedding; the clothing, the floors besmeared with months of dysentery, I could put my fingers around their upper arms, their ankles,
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47 so little flesh. Two hundred and fifty children. Children of prisoners. Polish children. Czechoslovakian children. I can’t remember what I did after I saw the children. — American liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Our men cried. We were a combat unit. We’d been to Anzio, to southern France, Sicily, Salerno, the Battle of the Bulge, and we’d never, ever seen anything like this. — American Liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
David Malachowsky, a sergeant with the 329th Medical Battalion and liberator of Nordhausen, realized like many other medics, that their candy, chocolate and canned food were killing the inmates, whose shrunken stomachs, unaccustomed to nourishment, simply could not tolerate food. David Malachowsky’s commander, General Terry Allen, quickly assessed the horrendous situation at Nordhausen. Instead of pursuing the Germans, he ordered his men to stay on in Nordhausen and save human lives. “So…everybody dropped their guns and became medics for four, or five, maybe six days.” Only after the living were helped, the dead were buried and the camp was bulldozed, did the liberating units continue their drive towards the Elbe. — Yaffa Eliach, Holocaust scholar
As we kept moving in closer, about three miles from the town, we came across oh, maybe eight to ten huge warehouses set on a field. We could see these from a great distance away and as we got closer we went to these warehouses and were amazed to find what was in there. We more or less broke in. They were unattended. There were no guards or anything. The Germans were pulling out before us as we kept moving along. We got into these warehouses and it was an astounding sight. They were each approximately eight to ten stories high, and
each floor had a different food commodity on it, as far as the eye could see. Thousands of boxes, say, tins of salmon, would be in one, sardines in another. Another floor had chocolate…chocolate from all the countries the Germans had been in. It seems that every time they went into a country and occupied it they would literally strip the country of all the commodities and ship it back and this evidently was one of the depots where all these supplies were stored, commodities, foods, primarily wines of all sorts in the baskets and all. I remember I was impressed by the fact that there was enough food there to feed the entire countryside. Of course, we “liberated” lots of cases. The liquor we took out with us and the wines and I remember taking cans of sardines and having trouble opening them. But at any rate, in contrast to what we found when we went into Nordhausen… That’s what really bugged me. Here was all this food stocked in warehouses and yet three miles away there were people eating horses’ heads, because that’s all they had. People, who literally had not eaten or been given water for weeks at a time. We had no knowledge at all of what we were going to find. When we came to the source of this big, heavy odor, we had gone through the factory, through the town and now on the other side of the town here was Nordhausen, the camp. It had barbed wire fences and all. We had no concept of what we’d find there. We heard machine guns fire as we came into the one end of the camp. We discovered later that that machine gun fire was the last German troops pulling out, indiscriminately machine-gunning anyone who was still able to stand on their feet, any one of the prisoners in the camp. But there weren’t too many of these, because when we actually got into the camp through the barbed wire, we saw row upon row of bodies just stacked like cordwood maybe five feet high as far as the eye could see. We later were told there were approximately five or six thousand inmates of whom just a handful were able to ambulate. All the others had either been shot down or were in an advanced state of emaciation. Even though they were working in the factory they’d be herded through the gate, through the town into the underground factory and herded back again
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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Unit IV: READING #47
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like cattle. No food was given to them and as they died of hunger that’s where they lay. The guards would stack them in rows. And that’s what we found when we came through the gate. The stench was coming from this area. This was the smell that covered the entire countryside…for miles around. And yet, when we asked these people in the town, the civilians, a couple of days later, how could they permit such things to exist, they said they did not know there was a camp like that next to them. They were just townspeople who minded their own business, etc. etc. The first thing we saw after the barbed wire entanglement that we went through was, like, cordwood stacks, but as we got closer we saw they were human beings, were bodies, totally emaciated, many of them naked, no clothes. The ones that had clothes had the striped uniforms, which we learned after a while were the typical uniforms of the concentration camps. The ones that were naked were just bones. I have pictures that I took which I look at once in a while to remind me it actually happened, just bones. Eyes — all you saw were wide, huge eyes because the sockets were shrunken and I just can’t describe it. The thing that really bugged me was bodies were lying there stacked up, but when we saw movement, like three bodies down, an arm was moving, you realized that among these people, there were living people who were in these piles. So immediately we got to work trying to separate, trying to pull out the ones that were alive and that’s when we realized that we’re gonna have to give them medical attention. Being with the medics I left half my platoon there to untangle them, get them on litters. Meanwhile other groups came up, other medical battalions and units; infantry men dropped their rifles, dropped their guns and began sorting these people out. I took the first load of trucks and ambulances back to our clearing station, about a mile or so out of town from the camp where we had set up a station, for the handling of wounded soldiers, primarily those who’d been hit in battle. But we stopped all that and began taking care of them from a medical standpoint. These were all political prisoners and they were lumped together
indiscriminately. We ran across Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Spaniards. You name it. It just seemed as though it was a microcosm of the entire world and each one of those nationalities had Jewish representation. In other words, I remember talking to someone who looked about, oh, I would say, just, just old and emaciated. It turned out to be a seventeen year old Jewish girl. We spoke in Yiddish, too, I remember this very vividly. And she kept asking for water, “Wasser.” But we had learned by then if we give them water orally it would kill them. — David Malachowsky, Staff Sergeant, VII Corps, 104th Infantry Division, 329th Medical Battalion Company D
Our hospital went into Buchenwald about two hours after the Germans had left. The first sight that greeted me when I entered the camp with my operating room truck was a horse and wagon. And as I looked into the contents of the wagon, I could see it was filled with human bones. One could recognize the humeri, the femurs, the spinal bones and the pelves and skulls of many of the deceased prisoners who had been in the camp. Where this wagon was going I really did not know, but I was horrified at this sight. I had studied German literature while an undergraduate at Harvard College. I knew about the culture of the German people and I could not, could not really believe that this was happening in this day and age; that in the twentieth century a cultured people like he Germans would undertake something like this. It was just beyond our imagination. Many of the people were asking about their kinfolk, a brother, a father, a mother — and wanted to know what happened to the rest of the family. Unfortunately, in many cases, most of the members of their families had perished in Buchenwald concentration camp or in other similar camps. Most of the inmates had signs of malnutrition. Those who had been at the camp for longer periods of time showed more intense signs of malnutrition. That meant very little skin on the face, sunken bones, eyes, eyeballs sunken in their eye sockets, very little muscle tissue on the legs or arms. One could see all the bones of the thoracic cage, the
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47 ribs were very prominent. If the inmate took off his shirt you could see the spinal column very, very prominently The mental disturbance of the inmates was very, very apparent. Many of them did not realize the significance of having been liberated. Many of them spoke to us and said that they were ordered that morning to go on a forced march and they were sure they were going to be shot at that time, because they had heard rumors that the Americans were approaching. The Germans left in a hurry and the inmates were free and wandered about without any purpose, aimlessly, not realizing fully that finally they had been liberated. — Dr. Philip Lief, Captain First Army, 3rd Auxiliary Surgical Group
There were three ovens that had castiron doors on them, and I just didn’t have the heart to look inside and I knew the bones were all charred and things like that were in there, and I just didn’t want to look inside. We looked at the gas chambers but we really didn’t know what they were for, we saw them there but we really couldn’t comprehend what they really were for. — Alex Schoenberg, Private First Class, 90th Infantry Division
Creamatoria. Bergen-Belson. 1945 (Photo credit: YIVO)
Human beings. These are human beings. No cheeks. No muscles in the chin. Only skin and lips like paper tapes, men thrashing like animals but less graceful, begging — But your clean American hands don’t want to touch them, alive with lice. Stinking. Still, you have to. So you think of the twenty thousand others for whom things have to be done and before you can lift a finger another thousand are dead and you don’t feel anything except Jesus Christ Jesus Christ Jesus Christ. — American liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
When we saw the ovens, we were silent. Not a word spoken, not a single expression.
Not, Oh Jesus not, What is this? Not, What have we done?
— American liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
American liberators of German concentration camps found the dead and the dying. Sometimes as with these prisoners, they found survivors who stared at them with haunted and almost uncomprehending stares.
There was an area near the Elbe River called Gardelegen, a small town. It was just another area, nothing special. Outside of the town there was a red barn and it veered with the wind. And there was smoke coming up from this and, somehow, it didn’t
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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Unit IV: READING #47 look right, so it was examined and it was found that there were over a thousand people, dead, in this place. Dead! What happened was, the SS in that town heard the American guns, they heard us coming, and they knew, as all the way down the line they had known, that we would be there. So, in this town, they decided they wouldn’t give the slave laborers the satisfaction of surviving. So they herded all the slave laborers from the town, over a thousand, into this barn. And they set them on fire, they put hay and gasoline in there, and if anyone tried to get out, they were machinegunned. So there were a thousand. Now here were men who had been through some very fierce fighting. Men who had been in tanks that were torn open, pieces of metal ripped right through them. They had seen all this, had been through everything, had been burning in tanks, tanks are very flammable; a lot of them, a lot of men had burned to death. All kinds of horrors these men had been through, beyond everything. But this wasn’t war. This goes beyond: “you hit him, he hits you:’ This was total horror.
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given soup and warned to eat slowly. One living corpse was on a blanket. His mouth and lips were swollen, and had sores and pus. He tried to talk and I understood him to say in broken German and Yiddish that his brother had been murdered the day before. A medical captain ordered him to be handled with extreme care and fed intravenously. But it was too late, in a few moments the living corpse was dead. After the doctor returned, the medical aides covered the body with an army blanket. Then I became physically sick; but I stood erect and tried to give the appearance of being cool and hardened. In one building I saw boxes of soap that I was told came from human bodies. In the camp commander’s office were piles of human hair, gold dentures and teeth, eyeglasses, small boxes of jewelry and pocket notebooks, rings, some with parts of fingers, and earrings with the flesh of ears. Almost filling a small building next to the gallows and the whipping table were corpses, thrown together like dead animals in a slaughter house.
— Ben Berch, Private First Class, 102nd Infantry Division, 701st Tank Battalion
— Lewis H. Weinstein, Lieutenant Colonel and chief of the Liaison Section of General Eisenhower’s staff, April, 1945
The medical units, including my ambulance entered Ohrdruf as it was being liberated; one medic was wounded by enemy fire, but not seriously. We saw evidence of the horror: thousands of bodies thrown into shallow pits, hundreds of others stacked like cordwood or thrown about at random in buildings or sheds or along the roads. Emaciated, putrefied, covered by insects, flies, maggots, they created unbearable stench. All around me I saw the consequences of barbarism, appalling atrocities and monstrous slaughter-houses. Human beings were dying before our eyes. One moment they were slow-moving, living skeletons; the next moment they collapsed and were dead. Some uttered “essen” (food); others just held outstretched arms. I saw the tattooed numbers on their arms. The medical staff, officers and men were working with tense fury, without respite, efficient. Prisoners in their pajamalike striped suits (which seemed like bags around them) begged for food and were
When the German, SS troops guarding the concentration camp at Gunskirchen heard the Americans were coming, they suddenly got busy burying the bodies of their victims—or rather having them buried by inmates—and gave the prisoners who were still alive what they considered an extremely liberal food ration: One lump of sugar per person and one loaf of bread for every seven persons. Then, two days… before we arrived, the SS left. All this I learned from talking to inmates of the camp, many of whom spoke English. Driving up to the camp in our jeep, Cpl. DeSpain and I first knew we were approaching the camp by the hundreds of starving, half crazed inmates lining the roads, begging for food and cigarettes. Many of them had been able to get only a few hundred yards from the gate before they keeled over and died. As weak as they were, the chance to be free, the opportunity to escape was so great they couldn’t resist, though it meant staggering only a few yards before death came.
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47 Then came the next indication of the camp’s nearness — the smell. There was something about the smell of Gunskirchen I shall never forget, it was strong, yes, and permeating, too. Some six hours after we left the place, six hours spent riding in a jeep, where the wind was whistling around us, we could still detect the Gunskirchen smell. It had permeated our clothing, and stayed with us. Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all. It was a smell made up of all kinds of odors — human excreta, foul bodily odors, smoldering trash fires, German tobacco…all mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick, muddy woods, where little breeze could go. The ground was pulpy throughout the camp, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated many of the Americans who went there. It was a smell I’ll never forget, completely different from anything I’ve ever encountered. It could almost be seen and hung over the camp like a fog of death. As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn’t let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms — perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn’t walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn’t even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans. — Captain J.D. Pletcher, 71st Division Headquarters
The other Americans now came out of their tanks, too, and we shook hands overcome with joy. Only now were we free again, after we had yearned for freedom for so long now no one would take this away again. — Heinz Heger, survivor
American liberators of German concentration camps found the dead and the dying. Sometimes as with these prisoners, they found survivors who stared at them with haunted and almost uncomprehending stares.
During WWII I served as an American Army Chaplain with front-line combat troops across Europe, attached to 8th Corps Headquarters. On what must have been the most unforgettable day in my life, while racing eastward on the Autobahn, I learned from some officers that our forward tanks had entered the Concentration Camp called Buchenwald, outside of Weimar. I heard the name before. My mind’s eye conjured up all sorts of images. I quickly ascertained the directions and drove at high speed to Weimar and then to the Camp. As I drove up to the main gate, I was struck by the large German inscription ‘Arbeit macht frei.’ I drove through the gate into the open ‘Appel Platz, and there I was in Buchenwald, so soon after the first columns of American tanks rolled through and liberated that dungeon on April 11, 1945. I did not know where to go first. A young army lieutenant recognized my insignia and approached me most reverently. He urged that I follow him to see the Crematoria. As long as I live I shall never forget that scene that is indelibly engraved upon my heart and mind. I slowly approached the site of the huge ovens, from which the smoke was still curling upward. I
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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could smell the stench of charred remnants of human f lesh. There were literally hundreds of dead bodies strewn about, piled high waiting to be shoveled into the furnaces, which were still hot. I stood riveted to this scene for what seemed like an eternity, tormented within the searing agony, until I finally tore myself away, my eyes burning from the smoke and even more so from my inner rage. I walked back from the Crematoria toward the endless rows of barracks still dazed by what I had just seen. I wondered whether there were any Jews still alive in the Camp, until we found the ‘kleiner lager.’ I walked into one of the dilapidated, filthy, foulsmelling barracks and there again I was smitten by an indescribable scene. There on a series of shelves—just raw planks of hard wood from floor to ceiling, were hundreds of men and a few boys strewn over scraggly straw sacks looking down at me out of dazed eyes. I shouted in Yiddish ‘Shalom Aleichem Yiden, Ihr sent frei. Ich bin an Amerikaner Rav…,(Greetings, Peace, Jews, you are free. I am an American Rabbi.) There they were looking at me out of their big eyes, haunted, crippled, paralyzed with fear, emaciated, skin and bones, half-crazed more dead than alive. How they miraculously survived is still a mystery. The more brave among them approached me, touched my army uniform, examined the Jewish Chaplain’s insignia, incredulously asked me over and over again, ‘Is it true? Is it over?’ I went from barracks to barracks throughout the whole area called ‘small camp’ that was reserved for special brutal treatment of Jews. As I moved about, bands of Jews were now following me pouring out tales of woe, asking me over and over, ‘Does the world know what happened to us? What will happen now? Where will we go from here?’ — Chaplain (Captain) Herschel Schacter, 8th Corps, Third US Army, American Rabbi and liberator
The Americans entered Dachau and discovered the horrific scenes that have burned themselves into the memories of the world. The armies brought in photographers to take pictures of the atrocities, then they left the camp as they had found it with the dead bodies left in
their discovered places. The soldiers locked the gates to prevent the erstwhile prisoners from spreading infection and disease to the German population and the Allied soldiers. The survivors were mostly too sick and too weak to bury the bodies. Within a week’s time they were dying in great numbers from the contagions they caught from the dead and from the cumulative weakness of their systems. When the D.P.s came down with typhus and dysentery (the two most widespread diseases), they were taken to a special barracks: it was surrounded by barbed wire, and there were almost no nurses, healthy prisoners, or trained personnel to take care of them. In its high-fever stage, typhus leaves the patient too weak and sick to feed him or herself Many D.P.s died from this neglect. The Allied soldiers were not totally insensitive to the plight of the survivors. They brought with them their own supplies of food and rations, which they freely gave to the D.P.s, but the foods were fat and rich, too fat and rich for the survivors’ digestive systems. After extended starvation, the body must be built up again gradually. — Rabbi Irving Greenberg, author
Now, the first concentration camp that I visited in my new duties [as adviser on Jewish affairs to General Eisenhower] was Dachau. I want to make it clear that I did not visit Dachau upon its liberation, or shortly thereafter. Yet, when I did visit Dachau, it had not as yet been prettied up. The corpses had been removed and buried, and the sick had been taken to hospitals, and those who were comparatively well, even though suffering from the effects of malnutrition and from various other conditions in the concentration camps, had been moved to displaced persons camps. When I came into Dachau, I saw soon after entering a large enclosure in which there were dog kennels. In my naivete, I thought that the dog kennels must have been kept for the pets of the German officers of Dachau. I was soon disillusioned when I was told that these kennels were for guard dogs who were deliberately kept famished, and a prisoner in the camp, for some infraction of the rules, in some cases not even for an
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47 infraction of the rules, was tossed into that enclosure. The dogs were let loose to leap upon the poor victim and the victim was torn apart. That was my introduction to what I was to see later in Dachau. I moved on in the camp and came to the anteroom to the gas chamber, and the anteroom had some hooks for the hanging of clothing, with a large sign in German on the door leading into the gas chamber itself reading “shower bath.” I went through that door into the gas chamber and tried to imagine what it must have been like to have been packed like sardines into that area and suddenly to have begun smelling the gas that was to take away one’s life. One cannot really imagine it, because one cannot put oneself in that position. But then I looked at the inside of the door, and I saw thousands of scratches upon it, scratches that must have been made by the fingernails of so many men and women and children because the scratches covered the entire door from high up all the way down to a low position. I went from the gas chamber into the next area, which was the crematorium, and looked into the mouths of the furnaces, into which the bodies were shoveled, one after the other, and burned in the fires. My attention was suddenly caught by some sacks that looked like potato sacks standing at the side of the crematorium. I went over to the sacks to see what they were. On the front of them was stamped the German word for fertilizer, and I looked into the sacks and what I saw there I soon realized was human ash that had been taken from the furnaces in the crematoria, ready for shipment to German farms in order to make the soil more fertile to grow more crops for the Herrenvolk [master race]. I plunged my arm into one of the sacks up to the elbow and pressed the ‘fertilizer,’ the human ash, with the fingers of my hand into my palm and ground it into my palm so that I might never forget what I had seen there. — Chaplain (Major) Judah Nadich, US Army, American Rabbi, adviser on Jewish affairs to General Eisenhower
[We held a ceremony at Woebbelin for the mass burial of 200 victims of atrocity]
Among the civilians [present] there was much weeping .. It was impossible to identify any of these dead, but it was estimated that a fourth of them were Jews. So on every fourth cross is the imprint of the Star of David. It was a scene I shall never forget .. (My homily stated that) “It is the custom of the United States army through its Chaplains Corps to ensure a proper and decent burial to any deceased person whether he be civilian or soldier, friend or foe, according to religious preference.” The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces [General Eisenhower] has ordered that all atrocity victims be buried in a public place and that the cemetery be given the same perpetual care that is given to all military cemeteries. Crosses will be placed at the head of the graves of Christians and Stars of David at the head of the graves of Jews. “A stone monument will be set up in memory of these deceased. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish prayers will be said .. for these victims as we lay them to rest and commit them into the hands of the Heavenly Father in the hope that we will not again be faced with such barbarity.” — Chaplain (Major) George B. Wood, US Army, Division Chaplain, 82d Airborne Division, American Minister
Besides soldiers, witnesses to the horror included journalists—and another future President. We saw the cremation room there. Details of Jews worked here every day. It was their job to shovel hundreds of gas victims into the ovens. Each oven was approximately coffin size, but capacity was listed at six bodies. They used Jews for this detail because they were certain to die anyhow. And the Nazis did not want the thousands of other prisoners to know about their “future” lest their work in the quarry lack spirit. We saw the initial arrival point for new prisoners to Mauthausen. Here they were stripped and chained to a wall for 24 hours, exposed to the weather, hot or cold. We saw cell blocks in which men lived, if such a word may be used for such conditions. For purposes of description, let us say the cell blocks resembled the tar paper barracks we had in the States, but just half their size. Normal capacity of these
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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The Reverend L.H. Hardman of Leeds and father I.C. Morrisen of Dublin giving the last sacrament at a mass grave in Bergen-Belsen. 1945. (Photo credit: YIVO)
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blocks was 300 human beings. It was so crowded they had to sit up a11 night. Their latrine facilities were just outside. They could not stray far from the cells or they would be shot. Often, after a year or so, they didn’t even bother to use the outside latrines. We saw their hospitals. There were two of them. One held 90 patients and was ultramodern. This one they showed important visitors. The other hospital held 5,000. Wards were just like the prison blocks, except there were bunks in tiers five high. In each bed were five human beings, each sick, half of them dying from malnutrition. Each had lost from 50 to 100 pounds. Their legs had lost all control and looked like heavy ropes. Their toilet was their bed. There were running sores on many of them. Sometimes Nazi surgeons ended their misery by squirting gasoline against their hearts. We saw their bodies, hundreds of them. Prisoners said at times there were thousands laying around camp. We saw them piled up like cordwood — big and little piles of dead. All of them were emaciated and discolored and covered with insects and worms. These were human beings.
Their crime was not being a German. — Fred Friendly, noted journalist, dispatch, May 24, 1945
..Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio, for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany and it was built to last.. I looked out over that mass of men to the green fields beyond where well-fed Germans were plowing. A German, Fritz Kersheimer, came up and said, “May I show you around the camp? I’ve been here ten years. An Englishman stood to attention saying, “May I introduce myself? Delighted to see you. And can you tell me when some of our blokes will be along?” I told him, “Soon,” and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #47 were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses; there were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.. There was a German trailer which must have contained another 50 bodies, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant — murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday I was told that there were more than 20,000 in the camp; there had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?
As the Americans and other Allies were Liberating the concentration camps in Western Europe, the Russian Forces, which were marching East toward Berlin, were liberating the camps in Poland and Eastern
— From Edward R. Murrow’s CBS Radio Broadcast from London, April 15, 1945
We, the rescued From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes, And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow — Our bodies continue to lament With their mutilated music. We, the rescued, The nooses wound for our necks still dangle before us in the blue air — Hourglasses still fill with our dripping blood We, the rescued, The worms of fear still feed on us. Our constellation is buried in dust We, the rescued, Beg you: Show us your sun, but gradually. Lead us from star to star, step by step. Be gentle when you teach us to live again. Lest the song of a bird, Or a pail being filled at the well, Let our badly scaled pain burst forth again and carry us away — We beg you: Do not show us an angry dog, not yet — It could be, it could be That we will dissolve into dust — Dissolve into dust before your eyes.
Europe, among them Auschwitz The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about midday on 27 January 1945. Charles and I were the first to see them: we were carrying Somogyi’s body to the common grave, the first of our room mates to die. We tipped the stretcher on to the defiled snow, as the pit was now full, and no other grave was at hand: Charles took off his beret as a salute to both the living and the dead. They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive. To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw. — Primo Levi, Italian-Jewish chemist and writer, Auschwitz survivor
— Nobel Prize-winning poet, Nelly Sachs
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990.
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Tanks, trucks, ammunition carriers, blood spattered soldiers, bedraggled soldiers-worn, dying, on horses, on feet, pitiful, not brave, just spent, wretched looking. They have no nationality, no politics, no ideology. They are just battle weary and worn. Who are they, What do they want from us? Why don’t they go home and get bandaged with gauze and love? Men, you need care. Do not spend the little strength you have on killing us. Seek solace, not hate. Seek out your children. They need your love. They need to give you theirs. Stop killing. Stop it. But wait. Wait. These men are wearing strange uniforms. They are not German or Hungarian. They are unfamiliar. And there is a red flag — red, red. What is red? Red is not German, red is Russian. We are…we are—What! What are we? We are…we are…we are liberated! Barefoot, wearing only a single garment each, we all surge out into the brutal January frost and snow of eastern Germany and run toward the troops. Shrieks of joy. Shrieks of pain. Shrieks of deliverance. All the pent-up hysteria accumulated over years of pain and terror suddenly released. I have never since heard sounds like those we uttered, sounds released from the very depths of our being. The sheer force of it must have scattered the ashes of
Auschwitz to every corner of the universe, for our cries of joy suddenly turned into a bitter wail: ‘We are liberated’ We are liberated, But where are they all? They are all dead! — Isabella Leitner, Auschwitz survivor
And there were bones. God, there were bones, all over the place, wherever you looked, like pebbles, wherever you stepped there were little bits of bones. — American liberator, in the words of poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett
Source: U.S. Department of Defense. “Resources for Ceremonies and Education Programs, Section 1: The Liberators.” Department of Defense Guide for Annual Commemorative Observances. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1990. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #48
excerpts from:
Man’s search for meaning Viktor Frankl
A. Freedom of Choice in Suffering The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of himmentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. Do not think that these considerations are unworldly and too far removed from real life. It is true that only a few people are capable of reaching such high moral standards. Of the prisoners only a few kept their full inner liberty and obtained those values which their suffering afforded, but even one such example is sufficient proof that man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate. Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.
B. The Power of Love A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
© COPYRIGHT, The Center for Learning. Used with permission. Not for resale. Source: “Excerpts from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.” Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993.
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Unit IV: READING #48 Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love my thoughts, and the image of my beloved.
C. The Loss of Human Values Everything that was not connected with the immediate task of keeping oneself and one’s closest friends alive lost its value. Everything was sacrificed to this end. A man’s character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt. Under the influence of a world which no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, which had robbed man of his will and had made him an object to be exterminated (having planned, however, to make full use of him first—to the last ounce of his physical resources)—under this influence the personal ego finally suffered a loss of values. If the man in the concentration camp did not struggle against this in a last effort to save his self-respect, he lost the feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom and personal value. He thought of himself then as only a part of an enormous mass of people; his existence descended to the level of animal life… It is very difficult for an outsider to grasp how very little value was placed on human life in camp. The camp inmate was hardened, but possibly became more conscious of this complete disregard of human existence when a convoy of sick men was arranged. The emaciated bodies of the sick were thrown on two-wheeled carts which were drawn by prisoners for many miles, often through snowstorms, to the next camp. If one of the sick men had died before the cart left, he was thrown on anyway—the list had to be correct! The list was the only thing that mattered. A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant: the life of a “number” was completely irrelevant. What stood behind that number and that life mattered even less: the fate, the history, the name of the man.. The prisoners saw themselves completely dependent on the moods of the guards—playthings of fate—and this made them even less human than the circumstances warranted.
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Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the prisoner…had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a future goal to which he could look forward. Instinctively some of the prisoners attempted to find one on their own. It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future-sub specie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task… The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With the loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment—not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more… As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why — an aim — for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost… What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
© COPYRIGHT, The Center for Learning. Used with permission. Not for resale. Source: “Excerpts from Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.” Night: Curriculum Unit. USA: The Center for Learning, 1993. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #49
animal Carl Friedman
“I
n nineteen forty-four, the factory was bombed,” he tells us. “There was a small passageway under the concrete floor, at most three feet wide, where the gas mains ran. You could get into it at the base of the outside wall, through a manhole, which was usually closed with an iron lid. As soon as the first bomb dropped, the SS pulled the cover off and lined us up against the wall. ‘Down, you bastards!’ It didn’t matter to them how we got down: most of us never got a chance to get hold of the narrow ladder, and fell down backwards or head first. But we didn’t fall fast enough, so they aimed the fire hoses at us and literally washed us underground. “We stood there packed like sardines, soaked to the skin and teeth chattering, the whole time the air raid went on. The earth shook and we rocked backwards and forwards, passageway and all. Because that made the gas pipe behind us creak ominously, we weren’t too cheerful either. The SS kept us shut up in there for thirty-six hours. When we were finally allowed up again, the air was so full of smoke we couldn’t tell if it was day or night. That could also have been because our eyes had sunk so deep into their sockets with fear that they were somewhere at the back of our heads. “We walked around in a daze. I fled the smoke and found myself in a part of the factory that was still burning. Suddenly there I was, face to face with Willi Hammer. His sleeve had caught on fire. He was beating the flames out with his cap. How he’d ended up there, I didn’t know. What I did know was that he’d never get away from there again. “As soon as he saw me, he reached into his pants pocket. Scarcely had he brought out the chain with the lead ball than I was sitting on top of him with the chain tight around his neck.”
“Did he die?” Max asks. “Did he die?” My father nods. “I strangled him.” He spreads his fingers and looks at them as if they weren’t his. “That’s something I will never forgive those brutes. They did everything they could to turn me into an animal. A new chapter of the Creation,” he laughs grimly.” ‘Come, let us make man after our likeness!’ And they succeeded. I became their image. I can no longer look in a mirror without coming face to face with a murderer.” He bows his head and whispers, “I would do anything to bring Willi back to life, anything! I’d pray for weeks to make that happen. I’d descend to hell to bring him back, even if the road there was paved with splinters of glass and I had to crawl all the way on my belly.” Max goes behind my father’s chair and places a hand on his shoulder. “Then you aren’t an animal,” he consoles him, “because animals can’t feel sorry for what they’ve done.” “Sorry?” My father curls his upper lip and bares his teeth menacingly. “Sorry? The only reason I want to bring him back to life is so I can murder him all over again. I did it much too quickly the first time, This time I’d take it nice and easy. I’d wring his neck at my leisure, little by little. Now and then I’d give him just enough breath to squirm or scream. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t make him suffer in mortal fear long enough.” None of us speaks now, Simon sips his milk but doesn’t dare swallow. Now we know why my father keeps strangling his blankets at night. He’s practicing for the day when he’ll haul Willi back out of hell. He wants to make sure he’s still got the right touch.
Source: Friedman, Carl. “Animal.” Nightfather. New York: Persea Books, 1992.
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Unit IV: READING #50
street for arrivals, street for departures Charlotte Delbo Charlotte Delbo was born near Paris in 1913. When France was invaded by the Germans, she was touring in South America with a company for which she worked as a theatrical assistant. She decided to return from safety abroad to join her husband, Georges Dudach, in occupied Paris. Dudach was involved in the resistance movement. Delbo and Dudach were arrested, and he was subsequently executed by the Nazis. Delbo, a political prisoner, was incarcerated in Paris before she was sent to Auschwitz in January 1943. She was incarcerated there and in Raisko for the next year. She was transferred to Birkenau and then to Ravensbruck, where she remained until her release shortly before the end of the war. The Red Cross sent her to Sweden to recover from her experiences in the camps. These experiences provided Delbo with the subject matter for her books, including None of Us Will Return, from which the following excerpt is taken, Days and Memory, and Auschwitz and After. She died in 1985. This powerful selection creates a haunting metaphor of the concentration camp as a railway station.
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here are people arriving. They scan the crowd of those who wait seeking those who wait for them. They kiss them and they say that they are tired from the journey. There are people leaving. They say good-by to those who are not leaving and they kiss the children. There is a street for people arriving and a street for people leaving. There is a cafe called “Arrivals” and a cafe called “Departures.” There are people arriving and there are people leaving. But there is a station where those arriving are the same as those leaving a station at which those arriving have never arrived, to which those leaving have never returned. It is the biggest station in the world. This is the station at which they arrive, wherever they come from. They arrive here after days and nights after crossing whole countries they arrive here with children, even babies, who were not supposed to have been taken. They have brought their children because you do not part with children for this journey. Those who had gold brought it along because they thought that gold might be useful. Everyone brought his dearest possession because you must not leave what is dear to you when
you go far away. Everyone has brought his life along, above all it was his life that he had to bring along. And when they arrive they think they have arrived in Hell possibly. Still they did not believe it. They did not know that you could take a train to Hell but since they are here, they steel themselves and feel ready to face it with women, children, aged parents with family keepsakes and family documents. They do not know that you do not arrive at that station. They expect the worst-they do not expect the unthinkable. And when the soldiers shout to them to line up by fives, men on one side, women and children on the other, in a language they do not understand, they understand the blows of the truncheons and line up by fives since they are ready for anything. Mothers clutch their children—they shudder at the thought that the children might be taken away from them-because the children are hungry and thirsty and crumpled from not having slept across so many lands. At long last they are arriving, they will be able to take care of them. And when the soldiers shout to them to leave bundles and blankets and keepsakes on the platform
Source: Delbo, Charlotte. “Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures.” Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #50 they leave them because they ought to be ready for anything and do not wish to be surprised at anything. They say “We’ll see”; they have already seen so much and they are tired from the journey. The station is not a station. It is the end of a line. They look and they are stricken by the desolation about them. In the morning, fog hides the marshes. In the evening, spotlights illuminate the white barbed-wire fences with the sharpness of stellar photography. They believe that this is where they are being taken, and they are terrified. At night, they wait for daylight with the children weighing down their mothers’ arms. Wait and wonder. In the daytime they do not wait. The lines start moving right away. Women and children first, they are the most weary. The men next. They are also weary but relieved that wives and children are being taken care of first. For the women and children always go first. In the winter they are gripped by the cold. Especially those who come from Crete. Snow is new to them. In the summer the sun blinds them as they step down from the dark boxcars that were sealed shut at the start of the journey. At the start of the journey from France from the Ukraine from Albania from Belgium from Slovakia from Italy from Hungary from the Peloponnesus from Holland from Macedonia from Austria from Herzegovina from the shores of the Black Sea from the shores of the Baltic from the shores of the Mediterranean and from the banks of the Vistula. They would like to know where they are. They do not know that this is the center of Europe. They look for the name of the station. It is a station without a name. A station which for them will never have a name. There are some who are traveling for the first time in their lives. There are some who have traveled to every part of the globe, businessmen. All landscapes were familiar to them but they do not recognize this one. They look. Later on they will be able to tell how it was. Everyone wants to recall what his impression was and how he had the feeling that he would never return. It is a feeling one might have had already in one’s life. They know feelings should not be trusted. There are those who come from Warsaw with big shawls and knotted bundles
those who come from Zagreb, women with kerchiefs on their heads those who come from Danube with garments knitted by the hearth in multi-colored yarns those who come from Greece, bringing black olives and Turkish Delight those who come from Monte Carlo they were in the casino they are in white tie with shirt fronts that the journey has completely ruined pot-bellied and bald they are bankers who played at banking newlyweds who were leaving the synagogue with the bride dressed in white, wearing a veil, all wrinkled from lying on the floor of the boxcar the bridegroom dressed in black and top hat with soiled gloves the relatives and guests, women with beaded bags who all regret that they were not able to stop off at their homes and change into something less fragile. The rabbi holds his head up high and walks first. He has always set an example for the others. There are little girls from boarding school with their identical pleated skirts and their hats with blue streamers. They pull up their stockings carefully as they alight. They walk demurely five by five as though on a Thursday outing, holding one another by the hand and not knowing. What can they do to little girls from boarding school who are with their teacher. The teacher tells them: “Be good, children.” They have no wish not to be good. There are old people who have had news from their children in America. Their knowledge of foreign lands came from postcards. Nothing looked like what they see here. Their children will never believe it. There are intellectuals. Doctors or architects, composers or poets, recognizable by their walk, by their glasses. They too have seen a great deal in their lifetimes. They have studied a lot. Some have even imagined a great deal in order to write books and nothing they have ever imagined resembles what they see here. There are all the furriers of the big cities and all the gentlemen’s and ladies’ tailors all the clothiers who had emigrated to the West and who do not recognize in this place the land of their forebears. There are the inexhaustible multitudes of the cities where each man occupies his own pigeonhole and now in this place they form endless lines and you wonder how all that could fit into the stacked pigeonholes of the cities. There is a mother who slaps her five-year-old
Source: Delbo, Charlotte. “Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures.” Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
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Unit IV: READING #50 because he does not want to give her his hand and because she wants him to keep still at her side. You run the risk of getting lost you must not become separated in a strange place in such a crowd. She slaps her child and we who know do not forgive her for it. Besides it would make no difference if she were to smother him with kisses. There are those who journeyed eighteen days who went mad and killed one another in the boxcars and those who had been suffocated during the journey because they had been packed in so tightly of course they do not get off. There is a little girl who hugs her doll to her heart, you can smother dolls too. There are two sisters in white coats who went out for a walk and did not return for dinner. Their parents are still worrying. In ranks of five they move along the street for arrivals. They do not know it is the street for departures. You only pass this way once. They move in strict order-so that you cannot fault them for anything. They come to a building and they sigh. At last they have arrived. And when the soldiers shout to the women to strip they undress the children first taking care not to wake them up completely. After days and nights of
travel they are fretful and cross and they begin to get undressed in front of their children, it can’t be helped and when the soldiers hand each one of them a towel they worry if the water in the shower will be warm because the children might catch cold and when the men come in to the shower room through another door naked too the women hide their children against their bodies. And then perhaps they understand. And it is useless for them to understand now since they cannot tell those who are waiting on the platform cannot tell those who are riding in the dark boxcars across all the countries on the way here cannot tell those who are in detention camps and are apprehensive about their departure because they fear the climate or the work and because they are afraid of leaving their belongings cannot tell those who are in hiding in the mountains and in the woods and who no longer have the patience to stay in hiding. Come what may they will return to their homes. Why would they be taken away from their homes they have never done any harm to anyone cannot tell those who did not want to go into hiding because you cannot go and leave everything…
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Source: Delbo, Charlotte. “Street for Arrivals, Street for Departures.” Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #51
the shawl Cynthia Ozick Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City on April 19, 1928. Her short stories and novels are highly regarded for their reflection of Jewish life and faith in the twentieth century. She has explored the psychological implications of the Holocaust in a number of works, including Levitation: Five Fictions and The Cannibal Galaxy. Among her other works are The Messiah of Stockholm (a novel) and Metaphor and Memory (a collection of essays). In this powerful short story, Ozick examines the horror of a mother desperately trying to help her infant survive.
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tella, cold, cold the coldness of hell. How they walked on the roads together, Rosa with Magda curled up between sore breasts, Magda wound up in the shawl. Sometimes Stella carried Magda. But she was jealous of Magda. A thin girl of fourteen, too small, with thin breasts of her own, Stella wanted to be wrapped in a shawl, hidden away, asleep, rocked by the march, a baby, a round infant in arms. Magda took Rosa’s nipple, and Rosa never stopped walking, a walking cradle. There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones. Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road. As if teetering on the tips of her fingernails. She looked into Magda’s face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl’s windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa’s bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa’s coat. You could think she was one of their babies. Rosa, floating, dreamed of giving Magda away in one of the villages. She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road. But if she moved out of line they might shoot. And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it? She might be surprised, or afraid; she might drop the shawl, and
Magda would fall out and strike her head and die. The little round head. Such a good child, she gave up screaming, and sucked now only for the taste of the drying nipple itself The neat grip of the tiny gums. One mite of a tooth tip sticking up in the bottom gum, how shining, an elfin tombstone of white marble gleaming there. Without complaining, Magda relinquished Rosa’s teats, first the left, then the right; both were cracked, not a sniff of milk. The ductcrevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind-eye, chill hole, so Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead. She sucked and sucked, flooding the threads with wetness. The shawl’s good flavor, milk of linen. It was a magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights. Magda did not die, she stayed alive, although very quiet. A peculiar smell, of cinnamon and almonds, lifted out of her mouth. She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink or nap, and Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness. On the road they raised one burden of a leg after another and studied Magda’s face. “Aryan,” Stella said, in a voice grown as thin as a string; and Rosa thought how Stella gazed at Magda like a young cannibal. And the time that Stella said “Aryan,” it sounded to Rosa as if Stella had really said “Let us devour her.” But Magda lived to walk. She lived that long, but she did not walk very well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round. Rosa gave almost all her food to Magda, Stella gave nothing; Stella was ravenous, a growing child herself, but not growing much. Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate. Rosa was ravenous, but also not; she learned from Magda how to drink the taste of a
Source: Ozick, Cythia. “The Shawl.” In Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, by Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, Eds. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1997.
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finger in one’s mouth. They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella’s bones without pity. She was sure that Stella was waiting for Magda to die so she could put her teeth into the little thighs. Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already, but she had been buried away deep inside the magic shawl, mistaken there for the shivering mound of Rosa’s breasts; Rosa clung to the shawl as if it covered only herself. No one took it away from her. Magda was mute. She never cried. Rosa hid her in the barracks, under the shawl, but she knew that one day someone would inform; or one day someone, not even Stella, would steal Magda to eat her. When Magda began to walk Rosa knew that Magda was going to die very soon, something would happen. She was afraid to fall asleep; she slept with the weight of her thigh on Magda’s body; she was afraid she would smother Magda under her thigh. The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less; Rosa and Stella were slowly turning into air. Magda was quiet, but her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers. She watched. Sometimes she laughed-it seemed a laugh, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh. Still, Magda laughed at her shawl when the wind blew its corners, the bad wind with pieces of black in it, that made Stella’s and Rosa’s eyes tear. Magda’s eyes were always clear and tearless. She watched like a tiger. She guarded her shawl. No one could touch it; only Rosa could touch it. Stella was not allowed. The shawl was Magda’s own baby, her pet, her little sister. She tangled herself up in it and sucked on one of the corners when she wanted to be very still. Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die. Afterward Stella said: “I was cold.” And afterward she was always cold, always. The cold went into her heart: Rosa saw that Stella’s heart was cold. Magda flopped onward with her little pencil legs scribbling this way and that, in search of the shawl; the pencils faltered at the barracks opening, where the light began. Rosa saw and pursued. But already Magda was in the square outside the barracks, in the jolly light. It was the rollcall arena. Every morning Rosa had to conceal Magda under the shawl against a wall of the barracks and go out and stand in the arena with Stella and hundreds of others, sometimes for hours, and Magda, deserted, was quiet under the shawl, sucking on her corner. Every day Magda was silent, and so she did not die. Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosa’s two palms, her fingers were on fire, she was astonished, febrile:
Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling. Ever since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples, ever since Magda’s last scream on the road, Magda had been devoid of any syllable; Magda was a mute. Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx; Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf-, there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb. Even the laugh that came when the ashstippled wind made a clown out of Magda’s shawl was only the air-blown showing of her teeth. Even when the lice, head lice and body lice, crazed her so that she became as wild as one of the big rats that plundered the barracks at daybreak looking for carrion, she rubbed and scratched and kicked and bit and rolled without a whimper. But now Magda’s mouth was spilling a long viscous rope of clamor. “Maaaa—” It was the first noise Magda had ever sent out from her throat since the drying up of Rosa’s nipples. “Maaaa .. aaa!” Again! Magda was wavering in the perilous sunlight of the arena, scribbling on such pitiful little bent shins. Rosa saw. She saw that Magda was grieving for the loss of her shawl, she saw that Magda was going to die. A tide,of commands hammered in Rosa’s nipples: Fetch, get, bring! But she did not know which to go after first, Magda or the shawl. If she jumped out into the arena to snatch Magda up, the howling would not stop, because Magda would still not have the shawl; but if she ran back into the barracks to find the shawl, and if she found it, and if she came after Magda holding it and shaking it, then she would get Magda back, Magda would put the shawl in her mouth and turn dumb again. Rosa entered the dark. It was easy to discover the shawl. Stella was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones. Rosa tore the shawl free and flew-she could fly, she was only air-into the arena. The sunheat murmured of another life, of butterflies in summer. The light was placid, mellow. On the other side of the steel fence, far away, there were green meadows speckled with dandelions and deep-colored violets; beyond them, even farther, innocent tiger lilies, tall, lifting their orange bonnets. In the barracks they spoke of “f lowers,” of “rain”: excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty floating smoke that greased Rosa’s skin. She stood for an instant at the margin of the arena. Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum; even Stella said it was only an imagining, but Rosa heard real sounds in the wire: grainy sad voices. The
Source: Ozick, Cythia. “The Shawl.” In Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, by Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, Eds. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1997. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #51 farther she was from the fence, the more clearly the voices crowded at her. The lamenting voices strummed so convincingly, so passionately, it was impossible to suspect them of being phantoms. The voices told her to hold up the shawl, high; the voices told her to shake it, to whip with it, to unfurl it like a flag. Rosa lifted, shook, whipped, unfurled. Far off, very far, Magda leaned across her air-fed belly, reaching out with the rods of her arms. She was high up, elevated, riding someone’s shoulder. But the shoulder that carried Magda was not coming toward Rosa and the shawl, it was drifting away, the speck of Magda was moving more and more into the smoky distance. Above the shoulder a helmet glinted. The light tapped the helmet and sparkled it into a goblet. Below the helmet a black body like a domino and a pair of black boots hurled themselves in the direction of the electrified fence. The electric voices began to chatter wildly “Maamaa, maaa-maaa,” they all hummed together. How far Magda was from Rosa now, across the whole square, past a dozen barracks,
all the way on the other side! She was no bigger than a moth. All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine. And the moment Magda’s feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence; but of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot, and if she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried.
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Source: Ozick, Cythia. “The Shawl.” In Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology, by Jean E. Brown, Elaine C. Stephens and Janet E. Rubin, Eds. Lincolnwood IL: NTC Publishing Group, 1997.
Unit IV: READING #52
for remembrance Bill Glovin When I was liberated, I wept for the first time in my life. No family, no friends. I had no one anymore. So there I stood liberated. And I said to myself: “For whom and with whom should I live?” —Simon Wiesenthal
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ot until years later did the seven children of the Holocaust realize just how fortunate they were to have survived. Three were hidden, moving one step ahead of the German army. Two bore the scars of the concentration camps. Two escaped on the ship St. Louis, only to be turned away by Cuba and the United States and returned to the battleground that was Europe. Some lost their parents and siblings; all lost huge portions of their extended families. Those who found their way out of Europe saw their parents beaten down, either by the war’s aftermath or the difficult adjustment to a new culture in a new country. All still carry the Holocaust somewhere deep inside, where it has become a driving force in their personal and professional lives. The seven—Hans Fisher, Joel Lebowitz, Ruth Mandel, Philip Orenstein, Lillian Robbins, Gabor Vermes, and Neha Weinstein—are all Rutgers professors. Education, each says, has helped them understand and overcome the past. On the way to building lives that count, they have inspired thousands of students and colleagues. Their achievements, their dedication to teaching and serving others, and the lives of their children and grandchildren honor the 6 million who weren’t so fortunate. No words can ever fully capture the enormity of the worst genocide in history, but these seven survivors have agreed to share their memories and childhood photographs. Stories like theirs must be told, for, if nothing else, remembrance.
Joel Lebowitz The question about the cattle car that took him and his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau is unavoidable, but Joel Lebowitz, on the phone from Paris, falls silent. After an awkward pause, he suggests that the caller read Elie Wiesel’s memoirs. “Wiesel lived only 20 miles from where I grew up,” he says. “We were about the same age when we were sent to Auschwitz and had many common experiences.”
It remains unreal, writes Wiesel in All Rivers Run to the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). It’s only a dream, I told myself as I walked, hanging on my father’s arm. It’s a nightmare that they have torn me from those I love, that they are beating people to death, that Birkenau exists and that it harbors a gigantic altar where demons of fire devour our people. It’s in God’s nightmare that human beings are hurling Jewish children into the flames. Lebowitz, the George William Hill Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Rutgers–New Brunswick, was raised in Taceva, a small Czechoslovakian village of 10,000 that is now part of Ukraine and sits on the border of Romania. By the time the local militia helped transport the hundreds of thousands of Jews in the region to death camps in 1944, the world already knew that Germany would lose the war. But before the final battle was fought, Germany and other anti-Semitic forces throughout Europe were determined to slaughter as many Jews as possible. Lebowitz’s world had begun to unravel in 1939 as the rights of Jews started to erode and local attitudes shifted. After his family was forced to close their small textile store in 1943, the months leading up to Auschwitz were particularly harsh. His family was forced to wear the yellow star and was relocated twice within the shrinking Jewish ghetto of Taceva. In May 1944, when Lebowitz was 14, his family was ordered to forfeit their property and report to the train station for deportation. In the crowded, filthy cattle car, his younger sister, Freidi, hardly stopped crying during the terrible week they spent traveling through the Carpathian Mountains and into Poland. And if I bear within me a nameless grief and disillusionment, a bottomless despair, it is because that night I saw good and thoughtful Jewish children, bearers of mute words and dreams, walking into darkness before being consumed by the flames. When they arrived at Auschwitz, where 1.3 million people were murdered, family members were separated by gender and age. His mother, Ida, and Freidi were sent to the gas chambers. His father was
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #52 assigned to slave labor in a small camp a few miles from Auschwitz. Joel lied about his age, saying that he was older, so that he could accompany his father. “We worked cutting wheat and loading hay 12 hours a day, six days a week, with a half-hour break for lunch,” he recalls. “On Sunday we worked half a day fixing wagons inside the camp. We were always hungry. On a ‘good day,’ we received some diluted substitute coffee and about one-third of a pound of very coarse black bread. Sometimes they provided soup with some pieces of potato and meat.” In the early fall, Joel and his father, Herman, were transferred to the main camp at Auschwitz. Herman, who was Orthodox, feigned illness to avoid working during the High Holy Days. “When they selected people for the gas chambers, they commonly went to the infirmary,” says Lebowitz. “That’s where my father was when they took him away.” In January 1945, the Germans evacuated Auschwitz as the Russian army advanced. Lebowitz and the other emaciated prisoners were forcemarched for two days through the snow and freezing temperatures to Gleiwitz, another camp. He was moved again in an open cattle car to Mittel-bau Dora and Bergen-Belsen before being liberated by British troops in April 1945. He estimates that at least onethird of those who marched from Auschwitz perished on the way to other camps. Others died when the liberators—horrified to find adults weighing under 80 pounds—unknowingly distributed food that proved fatal to their starved digestive systems. “I weighed only 60 pounds; there was no flesh left and it was painful to sit,” says Lebo-witz. “I don’t know why I didn’t get sick, and I don’t know how I survived. I would have to say it was mostly luck.” I see them now, and I still curse the killers, their accomplices, the indifferent spectators who knew and kept silent, and Creation itself, Creation and those who perverted and distorted it. I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that the world, the world of murderers, might know it will never be forgiven. Following his release from a British infirmary, Lebowitz searched for family members, first in Budapest and then back in his village. His mother, father, and sister had perished; only one aunt and one uncle of 11 living in Europe had survived. He went to Romania for six months to study at a Talmudic school. He then made plans to go to Belgium, where he would train to become a diamond cutter and emigrate to Palestine. As he attempted to enter Belgium, he was stopped at the border for not having proper documents and was sent to a camp for displaced refugees in American-occupied Germany. The United States seemed out of reach, but he obtained a visa with the help of an organization for orphans that was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. He
The Gates of Hell Located 37 miles west of Cracow, Poland, Auschwitz was actually a complex of three camps. Birkenau, the most heavily populated camp, was the site of the gas chambers and crematoria, where an estimated 1.3 million people were murdered. They had entered the camp by passing under a gate emblazoned with the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” —Work Leads to Freedom. left the camp for New York in August 1946. Lebowitz lived for two weeks in a children’s home in the Bronx and then moved for two years to a dormitory at Yeshiva Academy in Brooklyn. His work as a waiter at a restaurant on the Lower East Side helped put him through Brooklyn College, where he graduated summa cum laude. He went on to receive his doctoral degree in physics from Syracuse University in 1956. Lebowitz had already become known for his work in statistical mechanics at Yeshiva University in New York when he joined the Rutgers faculty as a tenured professor in 1977. A few months after his call from Paris, in his office on the Busch campus, Lebowitz discusses how the upheaval of his childhood shaped his life. Face to face, he seems more comfortable than he had been on the phone from Paris. As founder and former chair of the Human Rights Committee of the New York Academy of Sciences, he has achieved international recognition for his defense of persecuted scientists throughout the world. His determination to help scientists who suffer under tyranny and oppression is fueled, he says, by his Holocaust experiences. The walls of his office are decorated with paintings created by his late wife, Estelle, and two posters of one of his heroes, Albert Einstein. “They say there are two kinds of scientists,” he says with a gentle smile. “There are those who, as children, played with radios and those who played with chemistry sets. I played with neither. If the Holocaust had never occurred, it is not likely that I would be a scientist. I probably would have become a rabbi or a storekeeper. Who will ever know?” How to evoke a childhood buried in ashes? How to speak of masters whose eyes are veiled forever and yet whose glance still burns into ours? What to make of the silence wrenched from the blackness that covered heaven and earth in those days?
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine.
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Gabor Vermes
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The fighting was so fierce that the little boy would hold his beat-up winter coat over his head, trying to block out the sound of artillery. It was the winter of 1945 in Budapest, and the Germans and Russians were tearing the city apart. In Buda, Gabor Vermes, 11, was among a group of Hungarian-Jewish children that Gabor Sztehlo, a Lutheran pastor, hid in a children’s home under the guise that they were Christian refugees. The boy prayed that the German officers who came to hear the children sing Bavarian songs wouldn’t learn his true identity. On the Pest side of the city, his father, a prosperous and well-educated economist, was hidden by a Christian neighbor who would later receive a medal from Israel’s Yad Vashem for her selfless deed. His mother survived by posing as a gentile. “If the Germans suspected that you were Jewish, they would pull your pants down to see if you were circumcised,” says Vermes, now an associate professor of history at Rutgers–Newark. “That’s why my father and I hid and my mother didn’t.” Following Germany’s occupation of Budapest in March 1944, thousands of Hungarian Jews began converting to Christianity. The rumor among Jews was that the Nazis surely wouldn’t persecute those who had denounced their religion. Vermes’s father, who was more devoted to the arts than to Judaism, had the family convert. “But one Sunday, it was time to go to church, and my father looked up from his newspaper and declared that we were not going anymore,” Vermes recalls. “He would no longer submit to the humiliating farce, even if it meant the loss of our lives.” The Vermes family were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing and were restricted from working and leaving their home. The atmosphere grew desperate in October when Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian head of state, attempted to abandon the country’s delicate alliance with the Third Reich and the fascist Arrow Cross Party came to power. Thousands of Hungarian Jews, including those who had converted to Christianity, were either deported to the death camps or brought down to the banks of the Danube, tied together, and shot into the river. “It was a death sentence to remain in a Jewish house, so we dispersed,” says Vermes. The janitor of the bank in which his father worked hid Gabor and his father temporarily in a cold and dank warehouse, where an ill-timed sneeze or cough during a search could have cost them their lives. His father’s cousin, the daughter of a mixed Christian-Jewish marriage, learned of the children’s home run by Sztehlo and took young Gabor across the Danube to the sympathetic pastor in Buda. The
day after Christmas, the Russians launched a ferocious attack on the city, and the children’s home was suddenly thrust onto the frontline. Gabor and the other children crawled out of the house on their bellies, bullets whizzing by their ears. For two miles, they fled in darkness through the hills to the villa of a Jewish publisher who had escaped, leaving his home in the care of Sztehlo’s family. With the city under siege, all food supplies were cut, and the children, hiding in the basement of the villa for a month, were slowly starving. Then, suddenly, it was over. “I still remember the round face of the first Russian soldier, motioning to us from the top of the narrow staircase to come up to the main floor,” he says. “At the windows, soldiers were shooting at neighboring houses that were still in German hands.” With all the bridges connecting Pest and Buda destroyed, Vermes’s mother crossed the frozen Danube on foot three times before finding her son and bringing him home. “I was 11 years old but I might as well have been 30,” says Vermes. “From a very normal, upbeat kid who loved to play soccer, I became a hermit, afraid of the world. I would drag out homework that should have lasted an hour for six or seven hours so that I could hide in my cocoon. But after what we had gone through, my mother was just happy to have me at home.” Following the war, the Communists ruled with an iron hand and the once-prosperous family continued living under oppression. His father died young, a defeated and broken man. In Vermes’s junior year of high school, the school authorities demanded that students decide on a career. “I loved words and was terrible with numbers, but we knew not to choose anything having to do with humanities. There was no freedom in liberal-arts pursuits, and I would have been subjected to years of MarxistLeninist ideology. Because it sounded adventurous, I chose to study geology.” Soon after the violent and unsuccessful Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Vermes and a friend, with false papers in hand, found their way across the border into Austria. With a geology degree from the University of Budapest, but penniless and with limited language skills, he eventually landed in New York. A Jewish refugee organization used his geology degree to find him work for an oil company that moved him around Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. “One day, I was walking down the street in Lafayette, Louisiana, when out of the blue, it hit me,” he says. “I wasn’t unhappy, but something suddenly told me that I needed to do something else with my life.” Back in Houston, Vermes went to Rice University
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #52 and asked a secretary if he could talk for a few moments with a history professor. The professor became a mentor and en-couraged him to return to school. In 1966, he received a doctoral degree in history from Stanford University. He taught at San Francisco State College and UCLA before accepting a position at Rutgers– Newark in 1972. Even now, almost 50 years removed from that villa basement, Vermes still feels compelled to talk and write about his Holocaust experiences. He meets once a month with Hungarian Hidden Children, a sixyear-old self-help group for Holocaust survivors. This past May he gave a personal account of his Holocaust experiences during a conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. One former student, Eric Hausker (NCAS’77), remembers that his professor’s stories were so compelling that he often visited Vermes during office hours to hear more: “Gabor has a fairly pronounced Eastern-European accent, but it hardly got in the way because we would be hanging on every word.” While in Houston, Vermes became close to a Jewish family. The wife, a survivor of Auschwitz and a Hungarian native, married a successful Texas businessman, bore two children, and became a patron of the arts. “She was 16 when she left Auschwitz. She started over in the United States and completely lost her Hungarian accent,” he says. “Only once did I hear her mention the Holocaust; she treated it as if it had never happened. She was in her 40s when the effects of her repression hit her all at once like an exploding time bomb. She was institutionalized for a considerable period and never fully recovered. It’s foolish to think that we can put aside this terrible experience. The Holocaust will remain with me until the day I die.”
“Righteous Gentiles” “Righteous Ones Among the Nations” is the title bestowed on Christians who, like the neighbor who hid Gabor Vermes’s father, risked their lives to protect Jews from the Nazis. Since 1962, Israel’s Yad Vashem has honored 13,000 of these heroes with a medal, certificate, and a tree or plaque in the Garden of the Righteous. It has been estimated that 100,000 Christians saved 250,000 Jews.
Neha Weinstein A small woman with wise and knowing eyes, Neha Weinstein is troubled by making parts of her story public. Many of her experiences as a young girl in a concentration camp in Ukraine are incommunicable encounters that lie beyond human understanding. But Weinstein bravely plods on, talking not only of the misery, hopelessness, and misplaced trust that defined her four years in the camp, but also of her recent efforts to overcome the rage, guilt, and loss of faith caused by the nightmare that, after more than half a century, is impossible to erase. “I do not really know how I was able to survive,” says Weinstein, an associate professor of library science at Rutgers–New Brunswick. “We lived one day at a time, and when it was over, some of us were still alive.” She pulls out a paper she recently completed while on sabbatical. Under the title, “The Romanian Jews During WWII,” is this qualifying statement: “This is a first draft of an article intended for publication. However, I need some psychological distance from the subject for a period of time before I show the manuscript to scholars and prepare the final draft.” The 44-page paper, she explains, is the story of the slaughter of 500,000 Romanian Jews. From the perspective of 50 years, it seems to Weinstein that her family had always been on the run. In the early 1920s, her parents and their siblings fled the pogroms and anti-Semitism in Ukraine, looking for a better life in the city of Iasi in Romania. But in 1940 the atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Iasi had become so great that her family relocated to Soroca, a small Bessarabian village on the Dniester River. Her family lived peacefully until a beautiful June morning in 1941 when the Germans began shelling her village as they began their assault on Russia. “Everyone was surprised by the suddenness of the bombs,” Weinstein recalls. “We thought that the Russians would fight to keep the Germans out of their territory and that, if we were able to cross the Dniester and move further into Ukraine, we would be protected.” The bombs brought panic. Although there was no bridge across the Dniester, hundreds of people flocked to the river. A few Russian barges ferried livestock and prisoners safely across, but ignored the Jews who begged for their lives. Many of those who attempted to swim across drowned in the river’s mighty current. In a desperate attempt to save their daughter, Weinstein’s parents squeezed her onto a neighbor’s make-shift vessel. Miraculously, the small craft, its passengers, and a few suitcases crossed to safety, but Neha would never see her mother again.
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine.
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On the Ukrainian side of the Dniester, a stranger with a truck offered to take Weinstein and a group of Jews who had survived the crossing east to safer territory. Stopping in a field to rest, they awoke to find that the stranger and his truck had vanished along with all their belongings. Weinstein and a small contingent walked further east for several weeks. They had little food, some water, and the clothes on their backs. They spent restless nights in fields, bombs falling around them. As instructed by her parents, Neha finally made it to Miastkovka, a village in Transnistria, the region in Ukraine where her mother had been born and where an aunt and uncle still lived. A few weeks later her father appeared and broke the news to Neha: In the panic by the river, husband and wife had lost one another when the crowd surged, pushing him onto a barge. For weeks, he had lingered on the other side of the Dniester, waiting in vain for her to come. In Miastkovka, Weinstein and her father prayed that her mother would join them, but that hope was soon lost. The German and Romanian armies overran the village, enclosing it in barbed wire and turning it into a concentration camp. Within the month, camp guards stripped and viciously beat her father, leaving him to die in the snow. “We were treated worse than animals; we worked all day in the fields and slept with cows and pigs,” she says. “I had no stockings to help me through the terrible winters. We lived in filthy conditions with lice. When I was sick with typhoid fever, they isolated me with other sick people. They did not waste food and water on the sick.” Survival, says Weinstein, often depended on one’s ability to trade with the Ukrainians—valuables for food. “To keep me alive through my illness, my aunt traded my father’s coat for some bread and potatoes. On the way to bring me my slice of bread each day, my uncle would eat it. I only survived because a woman with a sick baby shared her food with me.” After the Russians liberated the camp in the spring of 1945, Weinstein became obsessed with finding her mother. Her search over several years proved futile; the Germans and Romanians had done an effective job covering up their atrocities. Any information she found, she documented; some was used in her paper. “My mother was probably murdered in a camp in Bessarabia,” she speculates. Weinstein, by then a teenager, moved to Bucharest an orphan, found a menial job, scrounged for food, and moved in with an older woman seeking companionship. Determined to make something of her life despite the oppression of the Communists and constant long work hours, she went back to
school, eventually receiving graduate degrees in chemical engineering and Russian language and literature. She worked as an interpreter in a chemical institute headed by Madame Elena Ceausescu, the wife of the man who would later become one of the most notorious dictators in modern history. Working at the institute, Weinstein realized the future was bleak and secretly made plans to leave the country. After two years, she received official permission to visit a friend in Switzerland; once there, she headed for a Jewish relief organization in Geneva. They sent her to Rome for six months to wait for a visa to the United States. In 1970 she arrived penniless in New York and moved to Highland Park, where an uncle and some cousins lived. “When I left Romania, it was too risky to take my diplomas or any official documents so I had no credentials,” she says. “Three weeks after I arrived I managed to get an hourly job at Rutgers’ Center for Alcohol Studies, where, over three years, I worked my way up to co-editing The Journal of Alcohol Studies and co-authoring an international bibliography.” She soon decided to apply to Rutgers College and, in 1973, received a master’s degree in library science from SCILS and became a faculty member in Rutgers’ library system. Despite more than 25 years at Rutgers, very few colleagues know her history. “I never talked about the past; it was too painful,” says Weinstein. “When I was in Rome, I would visit these beautiful cathedrals and envy people who were believers. I would say to myself, ‘Life would be so much easier if I, too, could believe.’ ”
Danger Zone Transnistria—an artificial geographic term created during WWII—was part of Ukraine before it was conquered by German and Romanian forces in 1941. Weinstein f led there seeking safety, but many of the area’s 300,000 Jews were slaughtered by Germany’s mobile killing unit D. Of the150,000 Jews deported to Transnistria from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and northern Moldavia, 90,000 perished. Finally, after years of alienation and depression, she found a determined young psychiatrist who helped her. The progress she made in therapy led to her paper about the Romanian Jews and the Holocaust, which has been a catharsis of sorts. But Weinstein says she still hasn’t been able to watch a video of herself that was made for Steven Spielberg’s
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #52 Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a project to record the memories of Holocaust survivors. “America is a wonderful place; institutions are accountable and important balances are built into the system,” she says. “These are things I never take for granted.”
Lillian Robbins Last February, Lillian Robbins opened the New York Times to a story about an exhibition of photographs of French children who had been deported to concentration camps during the Holocaust. Accompanying the story was a portrait of a well-dressed woman, Fanny Cukier, and her two little girls. “When I looked at the caption and saw the name Cukier, my mouth dropped,” says Robbins. “I had spent part of my childhood in France, and Cukier was my maiden name.” Although the family in the photograph was not related to her, seeing it made Robbins rethink the impact of the Holocaust on her own childhood. “As the danger mounted for my family in 1939, we moved quite a bit before finally settling in a small town in the part of France that wasn’t occupied by the Germans,” she says. “Many of the children who were deported were living in the unoccupied zone in 1942, as was I. The photos of the French children had an uncanny resemblance to photos in our family albums. For the first time I realized that I could just as easily have met the same fate. It was just sheer luck that no one turned us in.” Robbins, a professor of psychology at Rutgers–Newark, was the oldest of three daughters in a family of two working parents. Her father, Bernard, was an electrical engi-neer, and her mother, Cecile, was an attorney. The family lived in the AlsaceLorraine region of northern France, close to the German border and the first part of France to fall. With her father in the French army and the Germans about to overrun the region in September 1939, her pregnant mother buried the family’s fine china and silver in a neighbor’s garden, packed a few belongings, and moved southwest to Poitiers and then north to Lille. Soon after Robbins’s sister Danielle was born, her father was demobilized and sent by the Army to work in a steel mill near Vichy, the capital of unoccupied France. The family and some 15 relatives settled in nearby Montluçon. Her grandmother, who came on a separate train, was taken off by Nazis who had discovered that the family’s gold had been made into the buttons on her dress. Although the dress was confiscated, Robbins’s aunt was able to obtain the grandmother’s release. “We were fortunate that it
was a time when negotiation with the Germans was still possible,” says Robbins. It wasn’t long before French Jews, like those of every other European country in Hitler’s grasp, were forbidden to work in professional occupations. With no incomes, members of Robbins’s family traveled to nearby villages to exchange soap and stockings for food and necessities. “One great-uncle went to Lyons one day and never returned,” says Robbins. “My father carried poison; he said that the Germans would never capture us alive.” Robbins, six years old when the war started, remembers attending first grade in three separate schools. As the Nazi threat heightened and anti-Semitism grew, her parents decided to try to leave France. Her father contacted the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and offered to give them privileged information on the steel mills, which were being used to help the German war effort, in exchange for American visas. The OSS agreed to the exchange, but as the Germans threatened to occupy all of France, Lillian’s father realized that it was too dangerous to wait for the visas any longer. The family left by train for Spain on October 31, 1942. Just 11 days after they fled, the Germans overran the unoccupied zone and many of Robbins’s relatives who had remained in Montluçon were forced into hiding. Robbins, who was nine, and her younger sister both survived scarlet fever while on the run in Spain and Portugal. Before boarding a ship that would take them to Philadelphia, all of the family’s savings— about $2,000 in cash—was sewn into the lining of Lillian’s coat. “There was an awful lot at stake if we were caught; I was very proud to be given the responsibility,” she remembers. The family finally settled in New York in January 1943, but her parents were never able to find work in their professions again. They understood the value of an education, however, and passed it on to their children. Robbins received her bachelor’s degree at City College and her doctoral degree in social psychology from New York University. She joined the Rutgers faculty in 1971; and, for 17 years, she was the director of the honors program at Rutgers– Newark. This fall she began her new role as co-director of the Faculty Alliance for Education. The Holocaust, says Robbins, gave her a sense of “keeping what really matters in front of you.” For her, what really matters is family. When she was a young mother, remembers Robbins, her husband, a physician, worked long hours in a Manhattan hospital. The couple considered moving out of the city, but they decided against it. “I wanted my kids to see their father as often as they could, and I knew
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine.
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that if we moved to the suburbs, he would have been home a lot less. Keeping the family close was more important than having a lot of space.” Fifty years after being dispersed by war, Robbins’s extended family is reconnecting. This past summer, several generations, including her 89-yearold mother, Cecile, and her mother’s sister and two brothers—all in their 80s—attended a wedding in the south of France. At the reception, Robbins was seated at a table with her aunt and a woman who had saved her aunt’s life by hiding her during the war. “They’ve been very close friends for more than 50 years, even though they no longer live in the same town,” says Robbins, who has close to 40 relatives still living in France. “Many people like my aunt were saved because of the kindness of others.” Because Robbins’s family lived communally with her aunt and uncles when Robbins was a little girl, they have always had a special bond. She was delighted to observe new ones being formed between her son, daughter, and grandchildren and many of their cousins whom they had never met before. “I found that perhaps because many in the older generation are now very old, their children—cousins who didn’t pay much attention to the family before — seemed to be more interested in getting to know us.” Robbins, who has been battling cancer since 1980, believes that having survived the persecution of the Nazis, she can survive almost anything. “I think I’m a more resilient person than I probably would have been. And despite having rarely attended synagogue as a kid, it was important to me to instill in my children a sense of Jewish culture and education. It’s up to us as survivors to preserve the culture and tell the story of those who weren’t as lucky.”
Monuments on Paper The photograph that Robbins saw came from the book French Children of the Holocaust (New York Universty Press, 1996), a 1,902-page memorial to the Jewish children sacrificed to the Nazis by the collaborative French government. Author Serge Klarsfeld, himself a child of the Nazi occupation, calls the 2,500 photographs “the children’s collective gravestones.”
Hans Fisher Throughout his videotaped interview for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation project, Hans Fisher (Ag’50) has remained composed. For more than an hour, he has calmly recounted story after harrowing story: Gestapo agents escorting his father to the Buchenwald concentration camp, Hitler Youth chasing and beating him and his friends, his ill-fated odyssey aboard the German passenger ship St. Louis, and the months he spent away from his family in a French camp for Jewish refugee children. But when he tells how his mother, prone to seasickness, suffered a debilitating bout of illness on the family’s second Atlantic crossing—the one that finally brought them to safety—the tears well in his eyes. Fisher, a professor of nutritional biochemistry at Rutgers since 1954, is one of the few living survivors of the 1939 journey of the St. Louis, in which 917 Jewish refugees who had escaped from the Nazis were turned away by several countries and forced to return to Europe. The saga of the St. Louis is the focus of one of the best-read books on the Holocaust, Voyage of the Damned. Fisher was interviewed for that book, as well as for Spielberg’s project, which is attempting to interview all remaining Holocaust survivors. On the videotape, Spielberg’s interviewer asks for spellings of street and family names, details about the apartment in Breslau, Germany—now Wroclaw, Poland—in which the Fishers lived, and information on how the family celebrated various Jewish holidays. In one particularly chilling recollection, Fisher describes looking out his apartment window as a 10-year-old boy in 1938 and watching Adolf Hitler pass in a motorcade. “People were sieg heiling away,” he says. Fisher’s father was an attorney who, upon marrying, went into his father-in-law’s bootmanufacturing business. Fisher and his younger sister, Ruth, were raised in a traditional Jewish home; they followed kosher dietary laws and enjoyed their studies at a Jewish school. But even as a young boy, Fisher couldn’t help but notice the growing atmosphere of hatred: the harassment by neighbors; the expulsion from Germany of Polish-Jewish classmates; and Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, with its riotous attacks on Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938. He remembers discussing the worsening conditions with school chums, “most of whom felt that the British and President Roosevelt wouldn’t let things get out of hand.” The growing anti-Semitism led his parents to make plans to emigrate to Palestine; they ordered modular furniture for a tiny apartment there and
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #52 applied for permission to leave Germany. His maternal German-Jewish grandfather, who had lost four sons in World War I, resisted the flight from his homeland. Recalls Fisher: “He said, ‘What are they going to do to an old man who gave four of his sons to Germany?’ ” The morning after Kristallnacht, Gestapo agents came to the Fisher apartment and took Hans’s father to Buchenwald. A few hours later, two agents returned and ransacked the premises. “Those in camps at the time were still allowed to leave the country if they could get visas,” says Fisher. After two months in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which Fisher calls “a relatively mild precursor of what was soon to follow,” his father obtained a Cuban visa with the help of a lawyer friend and was soon on a ship that sailed for New York before heading on to Cuba. Several months later, the rest of the Fisher family boarded the St. Louis in Hamburg and set sail to join the father in Cuba. In Havana, the St. Louis was so near to shore that Hans heard his father call out to him from a small boat in the water below. Little did Hans realize that Cuba would deny the refugees entry, as would the United States. Forced to recross the Atlantic, the ship carried its unwanted human cargo to the four European countries—France, Great Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands—that had agreed to accept them. The Fishers were assigned to France, and Hans was sent to a friendly children’s camp on the outskirts of Paris. After war broke out on September 1, 1939, the Nazis soon began dropping bombs on the French countryside, the camp closed, and Hans was reunited with his mother and sister in Laval in central France. The Joint Distribution Committee, an organization that helped Jewish refugees, was able to obtain visas and train and boat tickets for the Fishers. He recalls that as his family detrained in Le Havre, a bomb hit the engine and passengers were thrown to the ground in an ear-shattering explosion of steam. It was a miracle, he says, that no one was killed by flying shrapnel. The Fishers then boarded an antiquated ship, passengered mostly with loyalists of the Spanish civil war, and set out across the Atlantic once again. The ship, accompanied by a military convoy looking for German U-boats and hampered by stormy seas that made his mother gravely ill, landed safely in New York, where they were taken to Ellis Island. A few days later the Fishers boarded another boat, this one headed for a reunion with Hans’s father in Cuba. The family lived there for a year before coming back to New York in February 1941. With the United States still in a depression,
Hans’s father had trouble finding a job in New York, so the family moved to a small farm in Vineland to raise chickens. Fisher graduated as valedictorian of his high school class, earned an undergraduate degree at Rutgers, and received his doctoral degree in 1954 from the University of Illinois. After the war, the Fishers found no survivors among their many relatives who had remained in Germany. Fisher, who considers himself fortunate to have survived, has worked hard to make the most of his life. His long and distinguished career at Rutgers includes collaborating on ground-breaking research on cholesterol, trauma, and alcoholism. He founded the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Cook College, and, in 1996, received one of the University’s highest faculty honors, the Daniel Gorenstein Award, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and exceptional service to Rutgers. In 1989, Fisher was invited back to Wroclaw to lecture at the University of Wroclaw. He found that the apartment house in which his family once lived was gone, but his grandparents’ homes were still intact. The interviewer for Spielberg’s video project asks Fisher about the Holocaust’s effect on the way he raised his three children; a clinical psychologist, an oncologist, and a cardiologist. He hesitates for a moment before answering: “I tried to instill in them a sense that education is vital and that they should live life to the fullest,” he says. As his children appear in photographs on screen, Fisher proudly identifies each one, their wives, and each of his eight grandchildren. The words inscribed on the bottom of the video case are: “So Generations Never Forget What So Few Lived To Tell.”
Abandoned Ship Turned away by Cuba and the United States, the St. Louis returned its 917 passengers to Europe, where four countries—France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands—finally agreed to accept them. Those sent to Britain were safe; the others once again faced the Nazi threat. No one knows for sure how many returnees perished; one estimate holds that only 240 survived.
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine.
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Philip Orenstein, with his hair sticking straight up and paint chips sprinkling his dark wool sweater, seems dwarfed by the unfinished 20-foot-long canvas that stretches across his Livingston campus studio. After a debilitating stroke in 1994 that left him with a pronounced limp and an inability to paint with his strong hand, he’s back at work, more determined than ever to complete the final two of a series of seven billboard-sized murals that trace France’s involvement in World War II. The ambitious project has dominated his life for most of the decade. “My wife, Joyce, believes I’m obsessed with the Holocaust,” says Orenstein (RC’61,GSNB’74), an associate professor of art at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts. “Besides the fact that it changed world history, it had incredible personal implications on my life. There came a point in the late 1980s when I realized that if I truly wanted to make a contribution as an artist, I had to deal with my Holocaust experiences.” Orenstein’s obsession stems from his childhood in France, a childhood spent under the shadow of war. His father, who, as a 12-year-old, had set off by himself from Poland to Paris in 1921, joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 as a way to get citizenship papers. After the German army captured Paris and France and Germany signed an armistice in 1940, his father was captured and sent to a POW camp in Salzburg, Austria, for five years. Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, he was compensated for his labor and sent his family, who were living in the 11th arrondissement in Paris, a regular stipend. By 1942, however, the 11th arrondissement had become the scene of many roundups and deportations of Jews. One day that July, while young Philip’s aunt and uncle were at work, his three-yearold cousin, Henri Herzorn, was taken away by the French police and never heard from again. Philip and Henri were the same age, and, 55 years later, the memory of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup continues to haunt him. “It really wasn’t the Germans who wanted Jewish kids at that time,” Orenstein says. “It was the French police, who were looking to impress the Germans. The tragedy is that they eventually deported more than 4,000 French-Jewish children under the age of 16.” With life growing increasingly risky in Paris, his mother, with the help of the Red Cross, sent him and his brother into hiding with a Christian family in Houdan, a small town about 60 miles west of Paris. The town was occupied by Germany, but a local priest who was active in the French Resistance threatened to excommunicate anyone who betrayed the Jewish children there. “Philippe Pétain, who was the puppet
head of the Vichy regime, made a bargain that, in the first wave of deportations, only Jewish refugees, as opposed to French-Jewish citizens, would be taken,” explains Orenstein. “Sometimes Jews were better off if they didn’t live in the Free Zone. French citizens who lived in occupied territory hated the Germans and were less cooperative in giving up the Jews.” Houdan became a rear staging area for German soldiers fighting in nearby Normandy, which brought the war very close to young Philip. He clearly remembers August 18, 1944, the day that Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army liberated Houdan and American GIs threw candy and chewing gum to the children from their tanks. Five years old at the time, Philip dealt with the war by sketching images on the wallpaper next to his bed. Drawing seemed to come to him with ease. With post-war Europe in turmoil and many family members moving to the United States, the Orensteins emigrated to Brooklyn in December 1949. Philip, who was 11, experienced culture shock. He missed soccer, short pants, and taking the Metro to art museums by himself. Eventually, the family moved to Lakewood to farm chickens. After attending New York University for a year, he transferred to Rutgers, where he spent as much time painting abstract art as he did pursuing his physics and philosophy studies. Around this time, he returned to Paris for the first time in 10 years and realized that he had become an American. Allan Kaprow, an art teacher at Rutgers and one of the key artists in what was then known as the Happenings movement, visited his studio one day, took a look around, and convinced Orenstein that his true calling was art. He spent the next 10 years building a reputation in New York’s Pop Art movement. In 1971, with a family to support, Orenstein started teaching courses at Rutgers and working towards his master’s degree. In 1974, he joined the faculty. His earlier math experience came in handy when, a year later, he opened one of the country’s first computer-art centers at MGSA. Many of Orenstein’s works have militaristic themes based on the scenes he saw as a young boy. It is fitting then that he now paints from what used to be the officer’s mess at Camp Kilmer, a World World II barracks on the Livingston campus. Some of the officers who were fed from that kitchen may have been among the American troops that liberated his village in France. The murals, which are meant to be part of a single work, are nearly finished after almost 10 years. They start with The Fall of Paris and end with The Liberation of Paris; in between are The Battle of Britain, Pétain and DeGaulle, The Vel d’Hiv Roundup, The Battle of Stalingrad, and D-Day. Each of
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
Unit IV: READING #52 the first several murals took about six months to complete, but his stroke has slowed him down. It now takes him a year to finish each one. “In the D-Day mural, I’m using the idea of a wall as a metaphor for time,” he explains. “Students are help-ing me with the graffiti, which serves as the base. Over the graffiti I’m placing images that deal with the war and the invasion. Across the top, I’m going to pay tribute to women who played a role in the period by providing portraits of female Holocaust victims, female Russian soldiers, my mother, wives of American soldiers, and Marlene Dietrich.” Orenstein, who has four grown children, had hoped to show his murals at the 11th arrondissement’s city hall in Paris in 1994 to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the city. He ran into all kinds of pitfalls, caused, he believes, by the perception of some that the murals are antiFrench and controversial. Instead, he showed earlier works relating to his growing up in France at the city hall in Houdan. “There is a problem with showing my murals,” says Orenstein. “They need a huge space and don’t fit into any particular category of art, so art museums are not interested in showing them. And Holocaust museums are more interested in documentation than art—besides, they don’t have art curators. One day, when they look back on the 20th century, I’m confident that my murals will be very relevant.”
“Le Grande Rafle” In July 1942, Orenstein’s cousin was one of 8,000 French Jews—half of them children—taken to the Véldrome d’Hiver bicycle stadium to await deportation. With little food or water and no room to lie down, said one witness, “all these wretched people lived five horrifying days among the screams and cries of those who had gone mad or the injured who had tried to kill themselves. “
Ruth Mandel At a conference on Genocide, Religion, and Modernity this past spring at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Ruth B. Mandel congratulated her daughter, Maud, as she left the stage following a presentation on the impact of the genocides of World Wars I and II on Armenian and Jewish religious practices in France. Ruth, director of Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics and
vice chair of the museum’s U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, was clearly pleased by her daughter’s presentation in front of some of the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholars. “It’s nerve-wracking to give this kind of talk, especially when your mother is in the audience,” quipped Maud, who joined the faculty of Brown University this fall as a specialist in modern Jewish history. The fact that Maud’s work focuses on Holocaust survivors is especially poignant: Her mother spent years avoiding her own Holocaust history. “Every time I told the family’s story my teeth would start to chatter,” says Ruth. “I didn’t read about the Holocaust. I didn’t watch movies about it. In 1979, when Maud was 12, we took a trip to Vienna. As we approached the door to my parents’ former apartment, I had a hysterical, emotionally paralyzing reaction.” Ruth was finally ready to come to grips with her family history in 1989 after reading an article about plans for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The article mentioned that the museum would house an exhibit about the St. Louis, the passenger ship of 917 Jewish refugees that was turned back by Cuba and the United States in 1939. Mandel’s parents had given her a photograph of her father holding her as an infant on the ship, with a life preserver bearing the name St. Louis in the background. She contacted the museum, which welcomed the photo and sent her its newsletter. “I made some inquiries about ways I might be able to contribute to the museum. I didn’t have a million dollars to give, but I had conviction and commitment to offer,” says Mandel. In 1991, Mandel, who was then director of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers, was appointed by President Bush to serve on the 65-member U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. The council sets policy and oversees the operation of the museum, its research institute, and special programs, such as the Days of Remembrance held each spring. In 1993—the year the museum opened—President Clinton named her the council’s vice chair. “I consider myself an escapee, rather than a survivor, of the Holocaust,” says Mandel. “But the fact that we ended up in the United States—that I was educated here, established a career here, have my own family here—all of it derives from events linked to the Holocaust.” Mandel’s Polish father, Michael Blumenstock, moved to Vienna at age 18, established several successful clothing shops by the time he reached his mid-30s, and married her mother, who was a young bride in her early 20s. “My mother came from a prosperous family, and she envisioned a life as a dignified Viennese hausfrau,” says Mandel. “My
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine.
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parents’ newly decorated apartment was featured in an architectural magazine; they were anticipating a growing family and a lovely life together.” When Kristallnacht, the Nazi attack on Jewish people throughout the German Reich, came in November 1938, her father was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Mandel’s 24-year-old mother, working frantically over several months, won his release, secured a boat ticket to Shanghai, and encouraged him to flee. “My father refused to leave for China without us; instead, he tried to escape to Belgium, with plans for us to follow him there,” she says. Soon after he left, however, he was caught at the border and sent back to Austria. Meanwhile, her mother was working another angle: the St. Louis. “If we hadn’t left on the ship, the plan would have been to return to my father’s family in Novy Tag, Poland. There, we would surely have perished, as my father’s parents and siblings and their children did later on,” she says. The St. Louis was turned away by Cuba and the United States and the passengers eventually were divided among four countries in Europe. The Blumenstocks were accepted by England. Mandel’s father was drafted into the British army during the war. She and her mother spent many hours in air-raid shelters, living first in Spalding and then in Wigston Fields, a suburb of Leicester. In 1947, the family emigrated to Borough Park, Brooklyn, where her maternal grandparents had settled after fleeing Austria. Her father worked as a shipping clerk in a small factory until he scraped up enough money to rent a clothing shop in a Coney Island basement. Although the family rarely attended religious services, they instilled in their only daughter a Jewish identity. Mandel, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and her master’s degree and doctoral degree in American literature from the University of Connecticut, firmly believes that her personal history is part of the reason she became a student of American democracy and a founder of Rutgers’ Center for the American Woman and Politics. “All my life I’ve been aware that the people who hold political power have a tremendous impact on individual lives,” says Mandel. “The Holocaust teaches us that the power of the state can be used for unspeakably evil purposes. Our individual and collective responsibility as citizens is to participate in the larger community and to exercise whatever power we hold for the common good.” Mandel says that the U.S. Holocaust museum is primarily “about remembrance in the service of education. It’s important to remember the past and to know what happened during the Holocaust; but it’s
even more important to live better in the present and future, both individually and as part of a human community.” In light of that mandate, a Committee on Conscience was formed and met for the first time in June 1996 with Mandel as its founding chair. “We are walking a delicate line,” says Mandel. “Some believe that the museum should educate by simply telling the historical story; others argue that there’s little point unless we make connections with contemporary situations.” She describes the committee as “people of moral stature who are highly informed and will speak out about existing and potential genocides.” At a retreat this past January, the committee spent more than a day discussing Bosnia and the role of the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal with its chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone, a supreme court judge in South Africa. Ruth and her daughter have often discussed the Holocaust in terms of lessons learned. Says Ruth: “Whether human beings have learned lessons from the Holocaust is rather unclear and controversial. The events that took place between 1933 and 1945 represented a state-sponsored and state-implemented effort explicitly aimed at eradicating an entire people. Since that time, we have witnessed other grotesque slaughterhouses—Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Large-scale annihilation continues to appear on the human landscape. Until the day comes when that’s no longer the case, there is much educating to do.”
A Tribute in Stone As vice chair of the council that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ruth Mandel is dedicated to its mission: to remind and to educate. Mandated by a unanimous act of Congress and built entirely through private donations, the Washington, D.C. museum, with its exhibits, programming, library, and archive, serves more than 1 million scholars and citizens each year.
Bill Glovin is the senior editor of Rutgers Magazine.
Source: Glovin, Bill. “For Remembrance.” Rutgers Magazine: For Alumni & Friends of New Jersey’s State University. Vol. 77, No 3. Fall 1997. from Rutgers Magazine, Fall 1997. © Copyright 2002 Rutgers Magazine. Reprinted with permission from Rutgers Magazine. New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education