Holocaust Flashcards

Question

Lifton (talk, 1996), numbing

Answer 1

Extreme psychic numbing - diminished capacity to feel, which Nazis underwent Auschwitz like distant planet - didn't count

Answer 2

Profess identity to maintain - psychologically significant. Wanted to feel like scientists not just killers * Nazi docs went to work, tease secretaries etc * Normal behaviours of life-saving organisation but killing

Answer 3

* Corpse, dissecting it * Ritual, telling you moving into shamanistic world, world of death, not flinch before death * Considerable numbing expected * Many docs into med out of own struggles to cope w fear of death * Docs only more prone to a degree, but show what everyone else can be capable of

Answer 4

* Otto Ranke - examples from Ger romantic lit * Niesche - torn condition of German sole * Goethe - faust - two souls, each repels other * First poet to take up Faust theme = Christopher Marlowe. But doubling in all cultures, just Germans seized upon, strong expression in Ger culture

Answer 5

* In all of us - product of modern world * Dimension of flexibility, fluidity, many-sidedness * We require this in our v protean world * Hopeful - protean self can become a species self. Can take on sense of self built from recognition we are part of human kind * Can be part of one identity e.g. Jew, American - but subsumed to sense of being a human being. At our better moments we have that. Requires sense of empathy * Genocidal process pushes us towards species consciousness

Answer 6

* Author to correct perceived historiographical imbalance, whereby Jewish victims of Holocaust have displaced all other victims of genocide * Study of Holocaust presents obstacle to larger understanding of genocide, blocks moral vision and obstructs ethical sensibilities vis-à-vis all other victims of human criminality * Clearly shown by assertion of Holocaust's uniqueness * Annoyed by surprise registered in so much of the scholarship - Europe not only witnessed other genocides, had inflicted on colonial peripheries * Holocaust simply more shocking, bc killing of Jews perpetrated in Europe by a 'civilised' European state in modern, bureaucratic, industrial manner * Claim to uniqueness of Holocaust = another instance of Western-centrism * Part of long tradition of West's attempts to universalise own values

Answer 7

Notion of Holocaust as entirely unique extracts it from its historical context, and converts it into a metaphysical and metahistorical event, sacrificing status as concrete episode in annals of human hist

Answer 8

• Attempt at contextualising Holocaust w/in broader patterns of human devel, even as it is still, paradoxically, de facto attributed a special position

Answer 9

* Genocide inherent to colonialism * Holocaust itself = largely part of a Greater European colonial undertaking and logic from which it cannot be isolated implicit assumption that Functionalism can be extended form Ger and Eur context to imperial-colonial framework

Answer 10

Holocaust not colonial genocide in common understanding of the phrase - Germans also believed themselves to be colonised by Jews and that Judeo-Bolshevism was existential threat to the Reich

Answer 11

Moses - blames Israeli hist Benny Morris for defending ethnic cleansing and genocide as integral to the formation of (some) nation states and march of human progress

Answer 12

These scholars have their history backward. Holocaust facilitates study of genocide, not obstacle: * Scholarship on genocide greatly benefited from research on H * Other genocides into public and scholarly view thanks to emergence of Holocaust as major historical event, not despite it 2. Holocaust = event that crystallised most complete definition of genocide and motivated its legal adoption * Debates over uniqueness of Holocaust evidently almost purely political today. H scholarship has largely stayed awa from political rhetoric * Statements by hists about genocide w/in context of Zionist ideology and Israeli policies are mostly rhetorical expressions of opinion, not scholarly analyses of the politics and practices of nation building and ethnic displacement

Answer 13

* Public 1st learned about the camps through reporters and photographers attached to Allied armies * Early documentaries rarely mentioned Jews, so horrors of Nazism and fate of Jews not clearly linked * 1st two historical studies of Holocaust, by Poliakov and Reitlinger (1951 and 1953 respectively) focused on perception of Jews by others rather than on Jewish experiences * (11) Ger authorities numerous trials in occupied Western zone then Federal Republic, esp following creation of Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg in 1958 * Also the case for 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem - 1st major public judicial event devoted exclusively to the Holocaust - largest public airing of witness accounts of the Jewish experience * 1948 UN Genocide Convention played lesser role than trials in public perceptions and early historiography * Historical scholarship was determined largely by judicial proceedings concerned w the specific historical event of the Holocaust * Genocide receded into background - reemerged only several decades later * Establishing Holocaust scholarship took long time * 50s - general hists of WWII generally ignored Holocaust as irrelevant to military operations * Gradual shift of Holocaust scholarship to centre stage can be gauged through growing recongition of Hilberg's work - new editions and translations coming out for three decades after original publication Only around such media events as the 1978 minseries Holocaust that the genocide of the Jews gradually entered the mainstream of public historical discourse in the US and Europe

Answer 14

1. Intentionalists - focusing on ideology and direction from above 2. Functionalists - stressed role of institutional competition and bureaucratic structures • Dichotomies still hunting scholarship, e.g. between perps and victims, centre and periphery, etc

Answer 15

* Genocide was profitable * Massive plunder of assets and properties * Genocide of Jews not irrational, ideologically driven * Helped to sustain morale of pop as expendable slave workers kept economy running * W failure of the Generalplan Ost - subjugation, deportation, mass murder of indigenous pops - all that cld be accomplished was eradication of Jews, who could no longer be 'resettled' in areas the Wehrmacht had failed to conquer * Such interps link the Holocaust w other cases of population policies and ethnic cleansing that culminated in genocide

Answer 16

Genocide of Jews = focal point of regime's thinking and retained high priority under all circumstances

Answer 17

* Massive participation in Holocaust by non-Jew pops | * Communal violence

Answer 18

* Many q's raised about other genocides guided by existing scholarship on Final Solution * Growth in genocide studies due to polit devels - fall of communism and mass murders in Rwanda and Bosnia * Expansion of EU to Eastern Eur facild confrontation w past of ethnic cleansing and genocide * Disappearance of Soviet Union made is poss for 1st time to invoke Genocide Convention and begin estab of internationally recognised legal institutions to confront it

Answer 19

- tendency to equate colonisation w genocide - 1970s, argument assoc partic w Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw colonisation by its v nature as act of cultural genocide - Kuper rejects - Cultural change does not constitute cultural genocide - e.g. borrowing of items of culture - Cultural genocide should be reserved for delib policy to eliminate a culture - Not a universal feature of colonisation - Overstated to equate colonisation w physical genocide - if this had been the case, issue of decolonisation could not arise - Distinction between colonisation-fuelled genocides and those generated by totalitarian polit ideologies

Answer 20

* Many genocidal conflicts = phenomenon of the plural or divided soc * Colonisation = major culprit in its role as great creator of plural socs

Answer 21

* devastation of Nazis prov impetus for formal recognit of genocide as crime in internat law * Western liberal worldview at root of criminalising genocide

Answer 22

* Ideological legitimisation is necessary precondition for genocide * Such ideologies act by shaping dehumanised image of victims in minds of persecutors * Danger signal of approaching genocide = where there is official sanction for talking about a minority group in non-human terms * context for exterminatory anti-semitism in the demonisation of Jews * Denial of human individuality and significance * Carried out not in blind hatred but in pursuance of some further purpose, w victims being cast in purely instrumental role * Complete expression of reduct to object = in death camps w stripping of social identity and reduction of victims to numbers * Metaphors of disease and degeneration * Repeatedly analogising European Jewry to syphilis and a cancer which must be excised

Answer 23

fundamental distinction - between situations in which some threat to interests of perps, and situations devoid of such threat • Massacres in course of conflict in which some realistic threat is case in many conflicts over national liberation, regional autonomy, secession, etc - political struggles * conversely, under Nazism, ideologies of dehumanisation reached most systematic formulations as theory of soc and blueprint for polit reconstruction and military expansion * Persecution of Jews brought several advantages: source for support in other countries; unifying factor w/in Ger * Contradictory elements in stereotype of Jews helped increase its appeal - capitalists and communists, demonic powers yet weak, diseases, degenerate * No threat but their genocide advantageous

Answer 24

source for support in other countries unifying factor w/in Ger

Answer 25

Writing about many genocides instead of just one precludes empathy Putting Poland 1939-44 and German Southwest Africa in 1904 in same explanatory framework of genocidal colonialism does not appear partic useful Studies of H should not divert hists from fulfilling task of historically reconstructing specific event of mass murder of Eur Jews

Answer 26

* Otto Adolf Eichmann * Trial in District Court in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961 * Accused on 15 counts * Crimes against Jewish people, humanity and war crimes during whole period of Nazi regime especially WW2 * Tried under Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950 * 6 psychiatrists had certified him as normal * E's office organised the means of transportation of Jews in Holocaust

Answer 27

* What he was accused of were not crimes but acts of state over which no other state has jurisdiction * His duty to obey

Answer 28

* Indictment wrong * Never killed any human being * Never order to kill Jew or non-Jew * Repeated over and over could only be accused of aiding and abetting annihilation of Jews, which he declared to have been one of greatest crimes in history of humanity * Didn't change position even under considerable pressure from lawyer * His was obvs no case of insane hatred of Jews, fanatical indoctrination

Answer 29

Complicated organisational work - e.g. ensuring enough Jews on hand at proper time so no trains 'wasted' - became a routine * Except for diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, E had no motives at all * Never realised what he was doing * Sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period * Strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil Fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil

Answer 30

* Concept of genocide not fully adequate - massacres of whole peoples not unprecedented * Expression administrative massacres better fits the bill * Phrase has virtue of dispelling prejudice that such monstrous acts can be committed only vs foreign nation or diff race

Answer 31

judges in all these trials really passed judgement solely on basis of the monstrous deeds Did not really lean on standards and legal precedents w which they sought to justify their decisions Fundamental problem in all postwar trials: * Have demanded humans capable of telling right from wrong even when all they have to guide them is own judgement, which happens to be completely at odds w unanimous opinion of all those around them * Moral maxims which determine social behaviour and religious commandments which guide conscience had virtually vanished

Answer 32

* Zeitgeist * Oedipus complex * So general they explain and justify every event and deed * No alternative to what happened considered and no person could have acted differently * Ghetto mentality * collective guilt of Ger people * Assertion of collective innocence of Jewish ppl * Make judgement superflous Many ppl wld agree no such thing as collective guilt/ innocent. If there were, no one person could every be guilty or innocent Only in metaphorical sense can one say feels guilty for what he but his father or his ppl have done Question of individ guilt and innocence are only things at stake in criminal court E trial no exception

Answer 33

* Vaguely defined agenda * Solutions to antisemitism not settled * Hitler wanted to be authoritarian but popular, so bound to avoid issues likely to upset nation as a whole * Believed popularity crucial to authority * Hitler wanted consensus on which to build * Hence negative selection process - persecuted those on own hate list also regarded by many Germans as social outsiders or polit enemies Hitler's hybrid regime - consensus dictatorship

Answer 34

H spoke of destroying democ and of Lebensraum to leading milit men less than week after appointment began to call for moral purification of the body politic and racially pure community of the people 1933 on: - selective coercion and terror - eliminated comunists and others already hated, feared, envied by many Germans - Set out to mobilise nation around relatively modest missions at first - E.g. eliminating recognisable social types who disturbed the peace - recidivist criminals, chronic welfare cases, others who would not conform to well-tried German values - Police, judges, civil servants quick to take initiative and sought to outdo each other in pursuit of Nazi cause

Answer 35

- Many authorities e.g. in med, welfare, justice, showed they were pleased Hitler allowed them flexibility and freedom to implement measures many only dared to contemplate in earlier years - Ger Jews not rly social outsiders - increasingly well integrated after full legal emancipation in 1871 - some frictions in rural areas where Jews lived apart from neighbours - Antisemitism not nearly as pop in Ger as a whole as in Nazi mvmnt

Answer 36

* Beginning in 1933, moves against Jews but retreat slightly if and when the people appeared to respond negatively to acts of antisemitism * E.g. when Nazis attempted boycott of all Jewish businesses in April 1933 * By end of prewar era many came to accept there was a Jewish question, tho most didn't want to see violence * Aryanisation offered many opp to gain at Jews' expense

Answer 37

* Allowed Nazis to put civilian hesitations aside * Break from established routine * Hitler - war in his mind = ideological turning point * Hitler backdated secret authorisation to doctors (given Oct 1939) to September 1 for the beginning of the mercy killing operations, as if 1st day of the war repd for him declaration of war vs all Ger's biological enemies * Not carefully laid plan * As incarcerated ever more broadly defined groups of social outsiders, grew more inclined to radical solutions, esp as gearing up for war 1938/9

Answer 38

* Participation of med specialists and learned judges in the sterilisation campaign of some 400,000 ppl helped to assure good citizens that proper procedures were being followed * Once Ger armed forces losing superior stock by taking casualties, seen as necessary to eliminate inferiors to balance off losses * Just over 70,000 murders already at least by Sept 1941

Answer 39

* Repeatedly uttered threats about what would happen to Jews should 'they' cause another world war - 1st made in days following Kristallnacht pogrom * H and other Nazi leaders made threat on more than dozen occasions

Answer 40

* Sept 7 H to army commander in chief - wish for ethnic cleansing of Poland * Following day, Heydrich stated that nobility, priests and Jews wld have to be killed off * Sept 21, Heydrich mtg Berlin, signalled begin of changes in anti-Jewish policies from emigration to resettlement * Told assembled police leaders in Berlin immediate priority = get Jews in western Poland moved off the land into ghettos, send Ger Jews there as well, and finally ship remaining 30,000 Gypsies in Ger * Final goal = move all Jews in Ger sphere of influence to reservation in the East * To be separated from Reich by eastern wall * Early 1940 mass shootings of Jews and Polish elite

Answer 41

* US public opinion mattered and by spring 1940 Nazis shifted gaze to overseas, from Eastern Europe - Hitler in interview for American public saying wld be inhumane to cram Jews into too small-an area * H embraced Himmler's May idea of Africa, and Foreign Ministry officials' idea of Madagascar * Problem - Britain controlled the seas

Answer 42

* Monumental murders of Jews with first successes in attack vs Soviet Union - hundreds of thousands of deaths of prisoners etc as many more Jews into Ger hands * Disruption of food supplies and shortages of war = additional rationale for mass murder of Soviet prisoners and Jews * Lives of those falling under Nazi dom viewed as cheap - this held partic for Jews but also for nearly all Slavic nations

Answer 43

* Deteriorated over time esp after pogrom Nov 1938 * Much worse after begin war 1939 * Hate-filled speeches from country's leaders * Forced to wear yellow star from Sept 15 1941 * 1st deportation trains of Jews from Germany left Oct 15, 16, 18, 1941, from Vienna, Prague and Berlin * Oct 24, 1941 - serious crime for any German even to be seen in public w a Jew

Answer 44

Some hists - systematic murder could not have moved from vague theory to practical reality w/o order from Hitler Other (250) hists - killing escalated in context of war vs Soviet Union and did not need such an order: * Neither direct order from H nor anything but circumstantial evd that he ever issued one * Seems he likely issued some sort of verbal wish or merely agreed to proposals put to him for the genocide to begin sometime in autumn 1941 * Until then H said solution to Jew q wld come after victorious war vs Soviet Union * Yielded to demands from regional leaders wanting to send Jews from their areas to the East already in Sept * Thus removed that obstacle, so all options now opened

Answer 45

late 1941 at Chelmo and Belzec - killed hundreds of thousands

Answer 46

* Heydrich called mtg for Dec 9 to discuss final solution options * Postponed until Jan 20, 1942, and became Wannsee conference * Thoughts H seemse to have had about holding Jews as hostages to keep US in line vanished after declaring war on US Dec 11 * Dec 12 mtgs w top officials, H turned up inflammatory rhetoric * Having declared war on US, fulfilled precondition for his declaration of war on the Jews - making them pay if they brought about world war

Answer 47

* Mass shootings almost immediately * By end of 1941 already as many as 1 mil may have been killed * East - local Nazi bosses competed to rid areas of Jews * Food shortages * In this context, toward end of 1941, H's declaration of war on US could be taken as signal to kill all Jews World war finally began on Dec 11, 1941 Thereafter mass murder of Jews accelerated dramatically: * Greatest period of killing March 1942-Feb 1943 * March 1942 - 75-80% all victims who would eventually die in Holocaust were still alive * Next yr, this was % of victims dead * Murder of Jews continued to end of Third Reich

Answer 48

* Much rounding up and killing in collab w local people * Inside Germany, little resistance to Holocaust * Bulgaria - Eastern Orthodox Church and many prominent individs and social institutions came out to protect the Jews, w upshot that nearly entire Jewish community of 50,000 survived the war

Answer 49

* Persecution to deportation to annihilation * Sinti and Roma regarded as rootless and apart in modern era of nation building * Nazis pursued not only bc thought to be prone to crime, but on racial grounds Criminal biologists and scientists: * Dr Robert Ritter etc * Concluded most dangerous variety and majority group of Sinti and Roma were those of mixed race * Initial recommendation - confined in camps * Officials pressed for more once war began * Himmler - thinking of eliminating 'Gypsy plague' * estimates for nums killed - 100,000 to 500,000

Answer 50

* Not highly regarded in Ger by tradition * Poland had gained land at Ger's expense in peace settlement 1919 - resentment * Nazi officials wanted to eliminate Poland as recognisable nation and culture * Poles to be deprived of leaders, education and culture and treated as slaves * Oct 12, 1939 - Hit ordered western section of Poland to be 'Germanised' - cleansed of Poles and 'returned' to Ger * Many Poles murdered on the spot 1939 and into 1940 * Soviets also mass murders - shipped no less than 2 mil Poles to Siberia * Central section of Poland converted into General Govt under Hans Frank * Mtg w head of armed forces Oct 17, 1939 - Hit said Poland(254) to be dumping ground to allow Nazis to cleanse Reich of Jews and Poles * Poles forced to work in Ger to help make up for growing labour shortages * Soon Nazis demanded so many, would have been economically and socially imposs for any Poland to exist and for its culture to replicate itself * Confined to workplace and billets after curfew and excluded from using public transport except w special permission * 1st in Ger forced to wear badge - purple 'P' * All social contact w Ger ppl prohibited. Death punishment if has sex w German * 1944 - 1.7 mil Poles working in Germany * Recent estimate - just over 6 mil Poles killed in war, half Christians, half Jews

Answer 51

* Initially formulated on Himmler's inspiration in 1940 * 1st version ready by July 15, 1941 * Second GPO, Nov 1941 - drafted by Heydrich's Reich Security main Office (RSHA) * Called for resettlement fo 31 mil people from occupied eastern areas * No copies survive * Detailed analysis, April 27, 1942, by Dr Wetzel, expert on race issues in Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Areas * 10 mil Germans to be resettled over 30-year period after war * To replace most of native pop from area between Russia and Germany - about 45 mil ppl, of whom 31 mil declared 'racially undesirable' and to be sent to western Siberia * About 14 mil to remain and be used as slaves * The deported - 100% of Jews, 80-5% of Poles, (256) 75% White Russians, 64% west Ukrainian pop * Imposs for any of these nations to survive as cultures or nations - plans explicitly accept thse nations wld cease to exist * Plans call for serial genocide * Wetzel's main concern = GPO underestimating num of ppl in the East - 60-65 mil, not 45 mil * Thought feasible to deport between 700,000 and 800,000 Poles each year to Siberia * Himmler, begin of 1941 - talked of decimation of Soviet peoples by 30 mil * Backe of Ministry of Agriculture - plan for mass starvation of 30 mil Soviets, to allow Germans to be fed * Hitler approved of idea

Answer 52

noted many 10s of millions of ppl in certain areas were superfluous and wld die or be shipped to Siberia Resettlement to Siberia = code phrase for mass murder, as mentioned that railway system of USSR inefficient and incapable of moving so many ppl

Answer 53

informed thinking of many leaders involved in war in USSR: * Leaders of military, SS and all civil authorities knew and apparently accepted some kind of starvation plan * Plan implemented where poss - esp against captive Soviet POWs and ghettoized Jews Hitler: • Believed invaders should avoid entering despised Russian cities altogether - they 'must completely die away'

Answer 54

1.5 mil Poles and Jews would be driven out and replaced by 100,000 Germans

Answer 55

Some planners included num of men who became noteworthy historians in Ger after 1945 - not deranged Plenty of visionaries - academics Professors shared in broader social, political, racist consensus

Answer 56

* Operation Barbarossa - war w USSR * Before - Hit insisted to be Vernichtungskrieg - war of annihilation * Soviet peoples to become people of leaderless slave labourers * (260) eve of attack - Himmler - no interest in fate of such people. Only concerned him in terms of labour power * Op Barb - many prisoners * Many shot out of hand * Thousands confined in camps - some in Germany total losses of Soviet Union in the war around 25 million, around 2/3 of whom civilians If Nazis had won war vs Stalin, results for peoples of the Soviet Union would have been even more catastrophic

Answer 57

* 5,165,381 prisoners * 2 million died * 1,030,157 supposedly shot while trying to escape * 280,000 perished in transit camps * 3.3 mil total died * Germans oft made sure no prisoners to take and had largely stopped taking any by the time of this survey

Answer 58

Mass starvation almost inevitably accompanied Ger invasion, bc troops expected to live off the land, which in many cases already combed through for provisions by retreating Soviet forces Starvation magnified in cities like Leningrad where major battles took place: * Leningrad - siege Sept 8, 1941 to Jan 18, 1943 * Hitler and other leaders repeatedly said didn't want it to surrender, nor wish any of civilian pop to escape * Civilian losses put at 632,253 in this battle alone, majority dying from starvation - losses actually higher than stated

Answer 59

* Pop in Ger became more willing to accept far-reaching measures as the regime grew more radical * Successes on battlefield fuelled Hit's ambitions * (262) victories won converts to his cause * Brought on board more of country's leading experts * New racist discourse bolder and increasingly impatient w any reservations * Hitler - doesn't seem to have given thought to what postwar Reich wld look like, w no vision of European community * One war to next, Ger needs everywhere taking precedence

Answer 60

* Jews could never be saved | * Slavs, if passed 'scientific' race tests, could become assimilated or naturalised Germans

Answer 61

Neither proponents of uniqueness of the Holocaust nor those who see other genocides as paradigmatic provide helpful ways of furthering scholarly understanding of genocides New generation of genocide - synthesis promising to respect extremity of Holocaust as well as specificities of other genocides, positioning them in a history that sees genocide as continuum of practices throughout modern period that must also encompass hist of racism, colonialism, imperialism and nation-building Scholarship on Holocaust has been great boost to study of genocide in general If genocid

Answer 62

* Elie Wiesel - Auschwitz can't be explained bc Holocaust transcends history. Fundamental uniqueness = the plan, intention, to obliterate a whole people down to the last person * Nora Levin - ordinary human beings cannot rethink themselves into such a world and ordinary ways to achieve empathy fail, for all the recognisable attributes of human reaction, are balked at the Nazi divide. World of Auschwitz was a new planet

Answer 63

* This is the cultural mainstream w/in Jewish communities * Best-known reps of this position - Lipstadt, Yahil, Dawidowicz, Jäckel, Katz, Yehuda Bauer * Dawidowicz - argues badly - (129) - fate of Jews under National Socialism = unique * Lipstadt - places comparativists in same camp as deniers. Nazis' methods = sui generis * Jäckel - National-Socialist murder of the Jews unique bc never before had nation w the authority of its leader decided and announced that it would kill off as completely as poss a partic group of humans and actually put this decision into practice

Answer 64

Historical grounds for defending Holocaust's uniqueness are in fact ideologically driven attmpts to maintain Holocaust as a kind of sacred entity NOT bc of Holocaust industry thesis - using it to win support for Israel and extract money from guilt-ridden nations Stems from: * belief that Jewish identity wld be massively threatened if one of its mainstays were to lose 'sacred' aura * Belief Holocaust's status as unique constitutes bulwark vs revived anti-Semitism

Answer 65

If one asks, from pragmatic point of view, what diff it makes to understanding the Holocaust historically whether it is unique or not, answer is patently none

Answer 66

unpalatable Eurocentric position that perversely implies that 'our' genocide was better than yours Separating Holocaust from genocide prevents consensus and solidarity among victim groups when it is precisely that solidarity that these groups should be aiming at In what way are the gas chambers any more unrepresentable than the mass buchering of Tutsis? Bauer avoids dealing with the comparison. Argues the Rwandan genocide, unlike Holocaust, was 'pragmatic' Problem common to all diff categories of 'uniquists' - overlook fact other genocides more in common w Holocaust than they do differences Absence of conflict dynamic between perp and victim might make Holocaust an extreme example of widely (139) recognised phenomenon, but will not place it in a category all of its own

Answer 67

In reality unprecedentedness thesis is only a more sophisticated version of the uniqueness thesis Effect of talking about uniqueness or unprecedentedness the same: * Either Holocaust irrelevant to understanding history bc nothing can be compared to it * Or, if Holocaust total destruction, Holocaust not a Holocaust bc did not succeed in killing all Jews * Bauer's 1991 argument that Total physical annihilation is what happened to the Jews is simply incorrect * This is what Alexander calls the dilemma of uniqueness

Answer 68

mystificatory and actively deflects consideration of extent to which what Nazis did was in fact unprecedented. B concludes what Nazis did unprecedented in terms of nature of Nazis' intentions

Answer 69

* Holocaust uniquely unique * Genocide for purpose of reinstalling the right to genocide * Hitler dreamt of overturning bedrock of Judaeo-Christian civilisation - prohibition on murder, and returning to virile age characterising ancient world, where acceptable for conquerors to wipe out vanquished * Necessary for Nazism to target Jews bc they were bearers of this Western code of ethics

Answer 70

* Uniqueness in fact Nazi plan not to stop w the Jews but to go on to reshape demography of Europe through genocide of Gypsies, Slavs and other victims * Grand scale is what separates Holocaust * doesn't restrict definition of Holocaust to the Jews alone

Answer 71

* Vinay Lal - Holocaust, alongside killings of homosexuals, gypsies, deranged, visited upon peoples of Europe the violence that colonial powers had routinely inflicted upon 'natives' all over the world for nearly 500 yrs * general statements about West's genocidal history and ongoing potential * Uniquists fail to take seriously genocides which have occurred elsewhere in the world * Critiques suggest large gap in Western consciousness concerning histories of the founding modern settler states - US, Canada, etc - urgently needs to be addressed

Answer 72

* Single out own preferred genocide and attmpt to put it forward as the worst * E.g. Ward Churchill, Dave Stannard - fight for recognition of the genocide perp vs native Americans

Answer 73

Churchill, Stannard, have simply installed genocide of native Americans as unique Churchill: • genocide of native Americans was and remains unparalleled, both in terms of its magnitude and the degree to which its goals were met Stannard: • When advocates of the allegedly unique suffering of Jews during Holocaust themselves participate in denial of other historical genocides - and such denial is inextricably interwoven w the v claim of uniqueness - they thereby actively participate in making it much easier for those other genocides to be repeated Neither approach is any longer tenable: • All scholars must cease competition for ethnic suffering

Answer 74

* Seek to understand genocide in historical context w/o either eliminating diffs between them or collapsing the phenomenon into a unitary and undifferentiated form of societal crisis * Three diff overlapping approaches: world historical, nation-building and anthropological World-historical and nation-building: * Variants on a theme * Genocide as fundamental characteristic of world hist World-historical approach: * More stress on structural or global economic factors * Devel of the state system has more oft than not been dynamic for homogenisation and the elimination of difference Anthropological approach: * Fundamentally shares presuppositions of the two 'systemic' approaches * Doesn't necessarily imply absence of sociopolit framework for understanding. Simply seeks to add human dimension to that systemic framework, explaining sociocultural dynamics in specific genocidal circumstances * Doesn't suggest genocide is automatic response of species hard-wired for aggression and violence * Seeks to find sociological explanations for the apparently contingent occurrence of mass violence, negotiating between 'human nature' and 'social structure'

Answer 75

* Gd example of nation-building * Reproaches mainstream historiography for trying to see genocide of the Armenians in the light of a Holocaust paradigm * Places acts of Ot Emp in relation w global politics of the day - conflict between Eur/ Americal great powers, hist of Christian-Muslim relations w Ot world * Traditional nation-state framework insufficient for understanding evolution of genocide * Even in case of Rwanda, approach does not deal adequately w the facts

Answer 76

* most insistent arguing that genocide outcome of nation-building drive in context of globalised market * Claims that origins of something which we specifically call genocide, and persistence and prevalence, is intrinsically bound up w that emerging system and is indeed an intrinsic and crucial part of it * Genocidal mentality is closely linked w agendas aimed at accelerated or forced-paced social and economic change in the interests of catching up, or alternatively avoiding/ circumventing, rules of the system leaders * Danger of thinking in terms of minority rights, since this presupposes dom of nation-state, which will always trample on such 'rights' when its self-perceived interests require it to do so * Nation-state system itself creates conditions under which genocide becomes viable otion - Genocide is the mainstream - by-product of current global polit economy

Answer 77

* Genocide = outcome of the 'racial century' - 1850-1950 * Competition between rival projects of nation-building and people-making that culminated (137) in Holocaust of European Jewry and other racial minorities in the 1940s * European hist dynamic process * Hist of imperialism integral to understanding of era of fascism - takes cue from Arendt

Answer 78

* Before 1994 genocide, had done fieldwork on Rwandan notions of medicine * Explains extraordinary ferocious sexual aspects of the genocide as outcomes of popular Rwandan beliefs in 'blockages' and 'flows' * Tutsis were 'blockage' preventing realisation of a stable society * Vicious impalings, breast oblations and rapes which characterised murders repd unblocking of natural flows

Answer 79

Explains genocide using long-estab notions of disproportionate revence ('a head for an eye') in Cambodian culture

Answer 80

* human behaviour both enabled and constrained by sociocultural structures * Those who articulate genocidal ideologies oft use highly salient cultural models to motivate individs to commit violent atrocities * Anthropologists don’t contrib to understanding of genocide by putting forward sociobiological or evolutionary psychological explanations about our species' innnate aggression * They contrib by pointing out how cultural models come to serve as templates for violence, since such implicit cultural knowledge oft provides fodder for genocidal ideologies

Answer 81

* Hists no longer scarred by ethnic suffering? * Katz - remains to be seen whether subsequent generations will be more successful in evolving some line of thought adequate to deal w what, for generation that lived through it, can only be classified as trauma. Wounding experience beyond the reach of intellectual conceptualisation * Those who condemn defenders of uniqueness thesis as exclusivist Jewish zealots fail to understand break in experience the Holocaust repd * Lit on trauma has alerted scholars, sensitising them to reality of post-1945 genocide * New generation of scholars of Holocaust has begun to recognise similar break in experience undergone by other groups that have suffered horrors of genocide

Answer 82

Inaccurate and wrong to call genocide of the Jews Holocaust - ancient Greek word Holokaustos meant whole-burnt offering - obvs not what happened during the Shoah

Answer 83

* Most extreme form of a malady that racks the human race - danger to its v existence * Paradigm * Immediate topicality for Jews - Jews again openly threatened by radical Islamic genocidal ideology * Direct connection between the Shoah and present-day genocidal events and threats

Answer 84

* Suffering of victims always the same * No gradation of suffering * To argue otherwise morally unacceptable and provides platform for distortion of Holocaust by setting it apart, outside of history All genocidal events (10) committed w best poss means available to the perps: * E.g. Armenians murdered w machiine guns and telegraph, telephones, railways used * Hutu in Rwanda used centralised bureaucracy inherited from Belgian colonialism and radio comms * Germans had gas etc, so used these

Answer 85

1. All other genocides committed away from the center of the perps' regime * Armenians in Istanbul and Izmir were, except for leadership, mostly left alive, and genocide concentrated in the Anatolian provinces * Rwanda - genocide at centre, but by Hutus from north-western provinces never under Tutsi rule * Holocaust at centre of what was probs most advanced civilisation of the 20th C 2. Germans searched for, found, murdered, etc, every single individ defined as Jewish, by definit of perpetrator 3. Jews to be killed everywhere in the German writ, which ultimately was to be whole globe * Nov 28, 1941 - Hitler in interview w Mufti of Jerusalem - said after victory he would approach all govts everywhere to deal w the Jews as Germany was doing * Never before had there been a universally conceived genocide 4. Nazi antisemitic ideology not based on any economic or social or political basis * Building military road from Lwow to the Crimea - took 40,000 or so Jews from ghettos near the planned road and estabd slave labour camps for them to build it * As they were building the road, Jews killed * Then no labourers * Killing totally anti-pragmatic, anti-modern, anti-capitalistic, anti-cost effective * Murdered the inhabs of the Lodz ghetto tho they were producing essential goods for the German Army 5. New concept of world racial hierarchy * This was the only really revolutionary attmpt at reordering soc in the 20th C * Quasi-religious - Aryans sons of light, w Hitler as messiah

Answer 86

* Nazi ideology regarding Jews had quality of a series of nightmares - talked about Jewish desire for world control, accused Jews of corrupting Aryan civilisation, etc * Most of this inherited from Christian antisemitism * however some (13) protection through Christian morality that took its cue from the Jewish heritage * Nazis were anti-Christian, bc Christianity seen as essentially a Jewish invention • Removed Christianity from Christian antisemitism and left w pure antisemitism Nazi-Jew hatred purely ideological * Jews = last remnant of the roots of European civilisation. Continuum w Jerusalem in way there is no longer w Athens and Rome * Nazis wanted to destroy the civilisation from which they came, to do away w heritage of the French Revolution, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, democracy, pacifism, etc * Jews symbolised what Nazis wanted to destroy

Answer 87

Have not used term 'uniqueness'. Stopped using it 2 decades ago uniqueness suggests never to be repeated Everything done by humans can be repeated by humans - never in exactly same way, but in v similar ways Uniqueness would mean intervention of some kind of transcendence Ppl talking about transcendence mystify and therefore distort the Holocaust to live w it more comfortably

Answer 88

* Shoah can be repeated, approximately, and Shoah theology is fascinating intellectual exercise, but does nothing to explain what happened * Shoah unprecedented, but was a precedent * Hutu genocidaires wanted to kill every single Tutsi * Should examine possibility their ideologists consciously learned from the germans * Main Hutu genocide ideologue, Nahimana, studied at European universities

Answer 89

Most of us inbetween completely good and bad

Answer 90

* Based on sanatisation of the Jews by their Christian opponents * Origins in Christian-Jewish (43) confrontation that started off as family quarrel of Jewish sects * Need to show differences, crystallising into enmity and mutual sanitisation * Christian ideology had to show Jews driven by pact w the devil, otherwise pagan who wanted to accept monotheism wld go to the Jewish source rather than Christian imitation * False accusation of Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion - who would want to kill God but a people possessed by Satan? * Nazis accepted Christian antisemitism w/o the Christianity, seeing this rightly as a Jewish invention * Hierarchy of races based on Christian precedents - e.g. purity of blood, no Jewish or Moorish, essential in individs aspiring to certain import positions in Spanish kingdom after expulsion of Jews 1492

Answer 91

* Stronger better, deserves to rule * Antisemitism may have been the motivation for adopting a Social Darwinistic approach * Jews in Nazi eyes = the central enemy * Nazis externalised their concepts of absolute good and evil into Aryan race/ Jewish ante-race

Answer 92

central guiding force

Answer 93

* Satan incarnate, out to control the world * Corrupting parasites - elimination was a problem of world racial hygiene - medical problem * Utopian dream of humanity that would arise after Jews eliminated * Friedländer - this set of motivations = redemptive antisemitism * Pseudo-religious utopianism

Answer 94

Novel in extremity not essence

Answer 95

* Term fits the Nazis if anything * They dehumanised themselves * Transferred to hapless victims their own abandonment of all previous norms accepted as 'civilised' * doubtful whether torturers returned to normal civilised ways of life, unless repented, which apparently v few did * Nazis remained dehumanised even after nightmare ended - those of victims did not

Answer 96

* Much leeway given to individ initiatives * Might dare to suggest - long as experienced pre-Nazi bureaucrats filled responsible positions, system worked more or less smoothly qua bureaucracy * As time went on, Nzi regime impacted more and more on routines and policies of govt, and efficiency slackened considerably * Competition between quasi-feudal Nazi lords responsible for one or another bureaucratic structure * Cost-efficiency not in evd in Nazi genocidal policies

Answer 97

* what the Nazis did to Jews, 'Gypsies,' and the German handicapped * (60) Nazis' policies regarding Roma and the handicapped motivated by same kind of racist ideology as policy on Jews

Answer 98

* Roma technically Aryan bc originated northwestern India * Solution - labelled low-type Aryans who had mingled w lowest of the European Aryans * Had become hereditary asocial criminals * 1938 - Himmler declared the solution of the Gypsy problem should be in accord w racial principles: * In wake of arrest of many German Roma, and many put in special camps/ concentration camps, problem arose for Himmler - Sinti Gypsies not Jews, and in principle Nazi ideology supposed to respect the unique qualities of every race * Himmler decided to separate Ger Gypsies in accord w Ritter's findings: * Pure Gypsies and those more Gypsy than German to be protected from destruction in arrangement reminiscent of the Jewish Councils * Himmler met w Hitler Dec 6, 1942, and as result, on Feb 27, 1943, Himmler informed minister of justice, Thierack, that Gypsy question should be discussed further * 'Recent research' made it clear there are positive racial elements also among the Gypsies * Gypsies wld be permitd to (62) travel in circumscribed area outside Reich's boundaries * Appears as a result of discussions w Hit, rest of the German Roma to be murdered after being used as working force * Dec 16, 1942 - Himmler orered all Roma in Reich not included in pure category (and some others) to be sent to concentration camps * Those not sent there to be sterilised Pure Roma had chance of survival - pure Jews did not Gypsy problem of marginal import to Nazi regime

Answer 99

In occupied Soviet territory: * Orders given to Einsatzgruppen in Aug 1941, to extend murder from Jews and Communists to Roma * 3 Einsatzgruppen, A, B and C, did not look for Roma, so relatively few victimised (65) worst treatment of Roma oft due to local initiative: * E.g. Croatia * 25,000-50,000 Roma murdered 150,000 Roma killed in total (figure calculated from Zimmerman's work). This = genocide, not Holocaust:

Answer 100

* We differentiate for pragmatic reason - to facil struggle vs all these kinds of murder * Mass murder for polit reasons must be fought diff than genocides and Holocausts, for example

Answer 101

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch - spent yrs preparing yourself to die and suddenly you're still here. Thought we were dreaming. Every Br soldier looked like a god to us

Answer 102

* Twisted piles of bodies * Thousands of dead * Hugely skinny * Appalling smell * Hopelessness, depression * Bodies like dummies, dolls • Could never assoc what you were doing w your own life - completely separate. Another world. If too involved, would have gone mad

Answer 103

amazing how quickly ppl reduced to animal states returned to being human. Women soon started to dress themselves up a bit - w/in 2 or 3 weeks. Had been completely dehumanised

Answer 104

Autumn 1945: * Commandant Kramer and staff at Bergen Belsen * Convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death

Answer 105

Historical analyses of the German conquest and occupation of ‘the East’ during the Second World War neglect an important tradition that can help in understanding National Socialist politics, namely, colonial rule. These two historical phenomena are structurally similar in that they both are based on the same concepts of ‘race’ and ‘space’. Zimmerer first examines the colonial elements of Nazi occupation policy, the war of extermination and genocide, and identifies precursors and models. A number of things that appear*/from a narrow Eurocentric perspective*/to be unique prove to be extremely radicalized variants of colonial practices. S To take the colonial roots of Nazi policy seriously helps us to understand why so many ‘ordinary Germans’ were willing perpetrators or untroubled observers. At the very least, colonialism, which had very positive connotations at the time, offered the Nazi perpetrators the possibility of exculpating themselves and obscuring the enormity of their own crimes According to the National Socialists’ view of history and society, the preservation and expansion of the Volk, an organic entity, had to be secured by any means. Lebensraum (living space) was needed to preserve the numbers of this ‘racially pure Volk’. Thus the concept of space was connected directly to racial ideology Both concepts also stand at the centre of colonialism. Colonial empires */sometimes even individual colonies*/formed economic systems stretching over vast areas . Fundamental to their control was the model on which the relationship with the local inhabitants was based, not one of equal partnership, but one of subjugation, at times extending even to extermination. R National Socialists, too, saw the East as a huge tabula rasa that had to be developed according to their ideas, an ideal field of operation for regional developers, demographers, engineers and business economists. The perception that many areas of Belorussia were ‘primitive, desolate and backward’, as Christian Gerlach has noted,23 resulted in the total reorganization and modernization of the whole country Preferential treatment within this ‘racially privileged society’ was not solely the result of the formal colonial legal system.31 A situation coloniale was evident in all social interactions between colonizers and colonized. Europeans enjoyed privileges generally The ideal of the ‘racially privileged society’ underpins the following statement by Hitler: ‘The Germans*/this is essential*/will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. The least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native The slave trade involving millions of Africans being taken to America and the Caribbean islands is the most blatant precursor to the National Socialists’ forced labour scheme. Space was a similarly protean concept in both the colonialism of the nineteenth century and that of the Nazis. The idea of a vacant land waiting to be developed corresponded with the deprivation of indigenous peoples’ rights and their degradation, right down to the level of becoming disposable items to be used in the interest of the colonizer n German South-west Africa, Herero and Nama prisoners of war, including women and children, were incarcerated in purpose-built concentration camps, as they were called at the time, in which the mortality rate was 30/50 per cent. They were deliberately left to die from lack of food and inadequate shelter.41 ‘Extermination through deliberate neglect’ was the term for a similar practice, although much larger in scale, with regard to the murder of millions of Russian prisoners of war during the Second World War. Massacres and the destruction of all essentials for life were common practices in both colonial wars and the German war in the East. In the campaigns against the Wahehe in German East Africa in the 1890s, burning villages and fields and ‘devouring the Mkwawa [leader of the Wahehe] land’, as Governor Eduard von Liebert called it, were already seen as valuable tactics. During the Second World War, the German army designated ‘dead areas’ in order to combat resistance fighters. These areas were encircled by large armies who systematically destroyed villages, infrastructure and sources of food and shelter. Colonial tactics for fighting partisans that included the destruction of the means of subsistence and the deliberate neglect of prisoners were part of these wars against whole populations, including women and children. They were part of the racial war (Rassenkrieg) that General Lothar von Trotha, a prote´ge´ of General von Schlieffen, chief of staff of the German army, waged against the Herero and later the Nama In an order of the day, he clarified that, for the maintenance of the good reputation of German soldiers, the instruction to ‘shoot at women and children’ meant ‘that shots are to be fired above them, to force them to run’. He said that he assumed that his decree would lead to ‘no more male prisoners [being] taken, but not to cruelty against women and children’. They would ‘run away when shots [are] twice fired above them’.49 The only place, however, to which they could run was the desert where, due to his orders, thousands died of thirst. Von Trotha’s strategy ‘to drive them into the desert’ became proverbial. In October 1941, for instance, Hitler answered those who objected to his hardline stand by commenting: ‘Let nobody tell me that we can’t drive them into the marshes of Russia It has often been argued that, due to the role of the state, the Holocaust differs from all other mass murders in history. This is a rather reductive and ahistorical view. The state certainly played a different role during genocides in the colonies than it did during the Holocaust 4 This is unsurprising since the state in North America and Australia was far ‘weaker’ than in Germany between 1933 and 1945. If one historicizes the notion of ‘the state’ then the differences between colonial and Nazi genocides do not appear so great. ultimate breaking of a taboo*/not only contemplating the extermination of whole ethnic communities but actually executing such a plan*/was first committed in the colonies . The Holocaust represents therefore an extreme, radical form of behaviour that was not unfamiliar in the history of colonialism A truly global history of military or political occupation should disregard a Eurocentric distinction between occupation in Europe and colonial rule overseas. Nazi policies for the occupied areas of Poland and the Soviet Union must also be viewed as part of the global historical tradition of colonial rule.

Answer 106

. Although research here is in its infancy, three channels*/first-hand experience, institutional history and collective memory*/can be perceived First-hand experience is the most obvious source, although the most difficult one to trace, as no prosopographical study has been undertaken, with regard to either the German colonial administrators and military personnel or the settlers. Nonetheless, some individuals were in possession of such experience:56 for example, Herero fighter Hermann Ehrhardt (Marinebrigade),57 Ludwig Maercker (Freikorps),58 Wilhelm Faupel (Freikorps),59 Franz Ritter von Epp (Freikorps and the Imperial Colonial Office),60 Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (‘Hero of East Africa’, participant in the Kapp Putsch, and the settlement commissioner for South-west Africa), Paul Rohrbach (journalist),61 and Friedrich von Lindequist (Governor of South-west Africa and later head of the Third Reich’s Colonial Office). During the Nazi regime, von Lettow-Vorbeck, Rohrbach and von Lindequist contributed mainly as propagandists. Directly involved in the administration of the occupied districts was Dr Viktor Boettcher, district president (Regierungspra¨sident) of Posen in the Warthegau, who had been Deputy Governor in Cameroon before the First World War As the example set by the Freikorps demonstrates, the experience of colonial violence could be transferred to other contexts.67 I am concerned here with indirect transmission, such as that conveyed through personal networks or teacher/student relationships. Another example would be the racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who was granted a professorship for his work ‘Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen’, that is, on an ethnic group of German South-west Africa. He was later appointed director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fu¨ r Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (institute of anthropology, the teaching of human heredity and eugenics), and served from 1933/5 as chancellor of Berlin University.68 Institutional connections also played an important role. In addition to military academies,76 universities and individual academic disciplines acted as major transmission channels for colonial ideas. Universities have been subject to more recent attention, as their significance for the Third Reich’s ‘race’ and ‘space’ politics has become a focus for historians. But, whereas the involvement of individual researchers in National Socialist politics has been examined in detail,77 in-depth studies of the different disciplines have for the most part not been undertaken. Both at the time of the German empire and in subsequent decades, the German population’s awareness of colonial history, including the conquest and rule of wide areas of the world by the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch and so on, was much stronger than is generally presumed.

Answer 107

Poland had to face unique consequences after liberation: half the country was taken over as Soviet territory; shifting the territory to the west was accom- panied by a massive forced resettlement of the German inhabitants; and, little by little, by 1947 – 48 Poland had become a communist state. The human losses were enormous. For a long time, the figure of six million dead, or one sixth of the population, was undisputed. Only during the 1990s did criticism of these statistics, which were calculated by the government immediately after the war, surface. 179 The attempt to establish reliable data faces several obs- tacles: the loss of files, the complicated territorial situation, disagreement on the number of victims of Stalinist rule in eastern Poland. Today, one can assume that around three million Polish Jews died in the Holocaust; probably more than 1.5 million ethnic Poles fell victim to the German occupation;

Answer 108

The colonised population tended to become invisib Did German women working in occupied Poland witness different things from men, or witness things differently? Often women seemed to be seeing Poland through the same eyes as men: they recorded their impressions in terms similar to those used by the soldiers passing through, the male students on their vacation assignments, or the male journalists writing in the Nazi press.43 Like the men, they remarked upon Jews in callous or malicious terms, and allowed their gaze to shift quickly to German achievements. In assessing such texts one should remember the pressure to write reports that conformed to expectations, but one can also note examples of antisemitism and anti-Polish prejudice expressed with a zeal that exceeded the minimum requirements of conformity. Concerning the question of how far German women were expected to witness violence, using the example of forced evictions, there is evidence that it was not uncommon for women to be present at the time or immediately following evictions, and that women sometimes expressed a positive willingness to be there, despite the division of labour between the sexes that dictated that driving Poles from their homes was 'men's work'. Nevertheless, that division of labour meant that women had opportunities to avert their gaze to a greater extent than men, and there are examples of women refusing to witness expulsions and of men seeking to shield women from such sights. However, no-one working in Poland could credibly pretend ignorance of the fact that Poles and Jews were being, or had been, hounded from their homes and dispossessed. Women were thus by no means operating in a different world or with a necessarily different perspective on Poland than me available to them a comforting myth of a womanly sphere of action that enabled them to blot out for much of the time an awareness of the presence and treatment of the non-German population. Not all the women sent to work with ethnic Germans in occupied Poland found refuge in this strategy of self-protection. Some, in subsequent written recollections and oral testimonies, remember feeling shock at the time at the injustice and brutality of Nazi occupation, together with unease at playing any role in maintaining such a system. The women quoted above who in interviews remembered expulsions taking place in their locality recalled feeling such unease.44 At the same time, while acknowledging the significance of those who inwardly rejected the regime and sought in various ways to dissociate themselves from its policies in Poland, it is also important to remember that few would have voiced any dissenting opinions at the time. In the absence of critical voices, a notion of women's work as harmless and constructive could prevail, pervading the internal reports written by keen activists and reproduced in propaganda depictions of'women's work in the new East'.45 In such accounts, the barbarism of Nazi rule in Poland could be kept at bay while attention was focused on the picture of smiling women activists, eager children and grateful farmers' wives, drawn together in a community in which women were crucial motors of community life. This myth of a sphere in which women selflessly served and cared for the ethnic Germans, unsullied by involvement in measures taken against the Poles and Jews, also drew on notions of women's moral superiority and greater 'idealism'. Such a notion of women's nature and women's work, it would seem, helped motivate and mobilise many women at the time. It also proved a refuge for some unrepentant former activists who after 1945 persisted in their view that women could claim to have played an important role in serving the German cause in Poland while bearing no responsibility for the policies of discrimination and persecution that underpinned German rule there.

Answer 109

ld. Particularly novel for us four from the Altreich was the treatment of the Jews. While in Litzmannstadt and Kutno we had looked with a certain revulsion at the ghettos where the members of this crooked-nosed race were gathered, it struck us here in Leslau that the Jews could walk freely in all the streets, though not on the pavement but only on the thoroughfare, and each wears a yellow triangle on their back. We often came upon a Jewess waddling along the road with her Polish woman friend walking beside her on the pavement. But when we reached the Vistula we forgot all Jews and Poles and enjoyed the wonderful view that presented

Answer 110

Hitler himself supposedly coined the definition of 'Volksdeutsche' that appeared in a 1938 memorandum of the German Reich Chan cellery. The Volksdeutsche, that document rather blandly explained, were people whose 'language and culture had German origins' but who did not hold German citizenship.' But for Hitler and other Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, the term 'Volks deutsche' also carried overtones of blood and race not captured in the English translation 'ethnic Germans'. According to German experts in the 1930s, about thirty million Volksdeutsche were living outside the Reich, a significant proportion of them in eastern Europe - Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Romania.2 The nazi goal of expansion to the east ensured that Volksdeutsche in those areas occupied a special place in German plan In a fundamental way, the dichotomy in nazi racial policy between Jews and Volksdeutsche created incentives for open sup port of anti-semitic activity. Nazi regulations made ethnic Germans the prime beneficiaries of property stolen from Jews The Einsatzgruppen who slaughtered Jews in the Soviet Union in 1942 also distributed 'loot, cattle, and harvesting machines' to the ethnic German population Jews who experienced expropriation witnessed how greed increased the ranks of their enemies. Many of the most eager predators, some Jewish observers noted, the newly minted ethnic Germans, were in fact their old Polish or Ukrainian neighbour A Jewish survivor from Radomsko recalled a Polish chemist who 'declared himself a Volksdeutsche' in order to take over a family enterprise that manufactured paints and dyes y. The 'Deutsche Volksliste' was set up in 1941 to gather information on ethnic Germans and divide them into four categor ies, ranging from the 'pure and politically clean' specimens of category one to the 'renegades' of category four who had to be won back to 'Germanness'. Members of all four groups qualified for resettlement. Politically undesirable men and women, however, were to be sent to concentration camps Given the difficulties of defining Volksdeutsche, aspiring ethnic Germans in the east found the easiest way to prove themselves good Germans was to prove themselves good nazis. t even while they quibbled over the details of what consti tuted an ethnic German, nazi authorities showed themselves more concerned with destroying Jews and expanding German power in the east than with maintaining the purity of their own ideological principles of Germanness. In early 1940, the Minister of the Interior announced that, in the interests of the fatherland, Volksdeutsche should be defined as generously as possible. Po litical reliability was not to play a role in that consideration In two important ways, developments related to ethnic Germans as members of Christian communities paralleled issues discussed above. On the one hand, the tenuousness of the concept of Volksdeutsche encouraged anti-semitism as a way of establish ing German credentials. On the other hand, nazi authorities, in an attempt to placate the churches in the east, further distorted their own principles of ethnic Germanness but in ways that only worsened the situation of the Jews. In 1936, Glaube und Heimat, a publication of ethnic German Lutherans in Poland, bemoaned the fact that the size of Poland's Jewish population would make it difficult to imitate Germany's 'solution of the Jewish question'. T By facilitating the fusion of Christian anti-Judaism and nazi anti semitism, the concept of Volksdeutsche helped produce something both more virulent and destructive than the former and more effective than the latter alone. The revised anti-semitism that resulted from that alliance was more vitriolic than traditional Christian anti-Judaism because it abandoned the idea of potential conversion of Jews in favour of a policy of extermination. It was more effective than nazi ideas alone because the churches' willingness to tolerate and even promote it generated a broader base of support. instead of impeding the advancement of nazism's genocidal plans, the very tenuousness of the notion of 'Volksdeutsche' actually contributed to the intensification of anti-semitism.

Answer 111

Unlike policies toward the Slavs, or toward any other identifiable human group, policies toward the Jews were an end in themselves. Read backward, the fmal solution to the "Jewish question" appears as the logi? cal culmination of an essential ideological predisposition, whereas policies toward Slavs appear as constant improvisation, in which opportunity and ideology shaped one another.148 The absolute dominance of ideological considerations?whether or not Nazi leaders knew from the beginning precisely where they would lead?accounts for the total and uncompro mising nature of the final solution of the Jewish question. There was but one attempt to destroy the whole of a people, there was but one Holo? caust. Dr. Hans Ehlich, expert on Volkstum at the RSHA, wrote in December 1942 that the fate of 70 million people in the East could not be decided by "total physical destruction . . . because we would never have enough people to even come close to replacing these 70 million."137 During the war the Nazis did not approach the complete destruction of those parts of Slavic populations supposedly slated for immediate de? struction: the intelligentsia. Hitler had said in the fall of 1940 that "all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed,"138 but the wartime losses of members of the Polish intelligentsia?including Jews?amounted to 57 percent of all lawyers, 39 percent of all physicians, 29.5 percent of all university teachers; and in general 37.5 percent of all Polish citizens with higher education.139 Many ofthe 20,000 Polish officers captured by the Germans in 1939 belonged to the intelligentsia, but the Nazis did not attempt to kill them off, though they remained in POW camps through? out the war.140 What if the Nazis had won the war? All available evidence suggests that massive use of Slavic peoples, as labor of all sorts, would have con? tinued, precisely because of the assumption that Slavs were potentially "useful." In 1940 a confident Himmler had predicted that Slavs would become a "leaderless work force . . . and be called upon, under the strict, consistent, and fair direct

Answer 112

fascism is a problematic concept. While not denying the importance of political sub ordination, war-mongering, and the racial persecution of such groups as Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, this essay takes as its starting point the fact that fascism occurred in a number of authoritarian social systems and was supported by diverse social interests-including those of certain social sci entists and demographers. There were consequently varied racial and popu lation policies both within such regimes as Nazi Germany, and between such fascist states as Italy and Germany. The rise of movements for social planning, based on social science and applied by armies of newly profession alized social workers, permitted the formulation and application of state supported population policies. Fascist regimes could appropriate these for racial ends y, I should mention the gap between noble scientific rhetoric and actual brutality in the implementation of fascist policies. Coercion and killing were sanitized by such rhetoric as "the alleviation of suffering" or care for the interests of future generations. In practice, racial and demographic sur veys and medical diagnoses were often based on flimsy evidence Declining birth rates were feared as causing strategic weakness and internal divisions, along with the loss of power by the intellectual and propertied elites Ideology shaped policies, just as it influenced perceptions of demo graphic trends. In 1927 Mussolini set the goal of 60 million Italians by 1950. The Falange demanded 40 million Spaniards (de Miguel, 1976; de Miguel et al., 1977). Italians and Germans felt threatened by 200 million Slavs The importance of the Church or of the surrogate religious tone of pronatalist propaganda derived from recognition that ideological approaches to population problems were as important as fiscal and other inducements. It was necessary to reinculcate the "will to have children." C In Germany the Protestant Church's medical and demographic ex pert, Hans Harmsen, campaigned on behalf of the Union for Health for a state supported Mothers' Day. Certain German towns had had a Mothers' Day since 1924, and it was popular among the Southern Germans of the South Tirol. Support came from churchmen, doctors, demographers, and such com mercial interests as the Association of German Flower Sellers. Nazi policies were remarkable in their attempt to supplant the Church and traditional elites. Whereas the Italians merely wished to retain existing demographic characteristics, the Germans sought to attain a higher level of racial vitality. From 1933 a combined race and population policy was implemented that differed markedly from the more voluntaristic Weimar eugenics (Weindling, 1984 and in press). For example, marriage loans depended on satisfying racial and political requirements, as well as those of good health, appropriate ancestry, and that the woman not be in paid employment.

Answer 113

nd'. Sixteen years after A.J.P. Taylor came out with his thesis that Hitler was merely a traditional statesman, of limited aims, who was only responding to a given situation without any preconceived plan of world con quest, the controversy among historians has not yet receded. Taylor's extravagant statements, however, are now being regarded with much less credibility owing to the additional evidence which he either ignored or which was simply not accessible to him er, the Weltherrschaft was to represent a new revolu tionary phase in the development of civilization, precisely because it was to begin with the procreation and cultivation of the new super-human species: the so-called Herrenvolk. How this would be achieved was foreshadowed by the adoption of the 'Final Solution' against the so-called inferior human species, involving mass exter mination not only of the Jews, but of the entire strata of intelli gentsia of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This was indeed the ultima ratio of Hitler's 'Programme' and he maintained his apocalyptic vision through the war despite German defeats and withdrawals from 1942 onwards. While he was concentrating on the destruction of Jews in the East, the Red Army was already counterattacking along the entire front. Why did he intensify this mass genocide when, from the pragmatic strategy stand alone, he badly needed the railway carriages and the manpower for military purposes? Now the Blitzkrieg strategy was all over, but Hitler car ried on his fanatical determination whose sinister meaning had already been spelled out in the 1920s: 'Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany as led to speculate that the decisive duel between the 'Teutonic Empire of the German Nation and the American World Empire', in other words the second stage of his 'Programme', would have to take place after he had died.42 Thus, not even at the peak of his military successes was Hitler sure whether he could complete the first stage of his expansionist plan As Hitler's Second Book shows, even between 1919 and 1928 he had already developed a certain set of ideas about Germany's future role in the world - the 'Programme' - which he consistent ly held until the end of his life. the postulate of an undisputed racial superiority implies that it is the Nordic race which is ultimately destined to dominate the whole world.

Answer 114

Nazi policy toward the Jews of occupied western Europe evolved in three phases, determined by far-flung strategic concerns of the Third Reich.' In the first, from the outbreak of war in the west in April 1940 until the autumn of 1941, all was provisional: Nazi leaders looked forward to a "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe," but that final solution was to await the cessation of hostilities and an ultimate peace settlement. No one defined the final solution with precision, but all signs pointed toward some vast and as yet unspecified project of mass emigration. When the war was over, the Jews would leave Europe and the question would be resolved. Until that time, the various German occupation au thorities would pursue anti-Jewish objectives by controlling the movements and organizations of Jews, confiscating their property, enumerating them, and sometimes concentrating them in certain regions. Throughout this phase, the circumstances of Jews varied importantly according to various occupation arrangements worked out by Germany following the spectacular Blitzkrieg of 1940. In the second phase, from the autumn of 1941 until the summer of 1942, Hitler drew implications from a gradually faltering campaign in Russia: the war was to last longer than he had planned, and the increasingly desperate struggle against the Bolsheviks prompted a revision of the previous timetable and general approach to the Jewish problem. Now Nazi leaders were told to prepare for the final solution itself, which could not be postponed. The Jewish question had to be solved quickly, before the end of the war The third phase began in the summer of 1942, and continued to the end of the war in the west. Following a conference of experts in Berlin in June 1942, deportation trains to Auschwitz began to roll from the west, and the facilities for mass murder in that camp began to function. Jews were first systematically deported from France, Belgium, and Holland in the summer of 1942. Norwegian Jews left at the end of the year. Some Italian Jews followed, sent from areas controlled by the Germans after the surrender of the Italian forces to the Allies in September 1943 The toll varied significantly from country to country, ranging from the Netherlands, where about 75 percent of the Jews were lost, to Denmark, where virtually the entire Jewish community was saved What governed the scale of killing was, for the most part, the degree to which the Nazis were willing and able to apply themselves to their task. But the occupied people themselves could affect the outcome, as we shall see The final solution did not succeed in western Europe because the war ended too soon and the Nazis did not have time to complete their task. Nevertheless, the scale of destruction was staggering-some 40 percent of west European Jews were killed concentration in the port of Copenhagen, only a few miles from freedom, helped save the Danish Jews. Without it, the rescue could not have succeeded. Clearly the Nazis felt that Denmark, with a mere 8,000 Jews, could wait for the implementation of the final solution, whereas France, with the largest concentration in the west, received a high priority. But in France, owing to the circumstances of the military defeat in 1940 and the peculiar armistice arrangement with the Germans, the Jews remained scattered across a large and, relatively speaking, sparsely settled country Generalizations break apart on the stubborn particularity of each of our countries. Nowhere is this more obvious than in considering the dominant religious traditions in western European states. Catholic Italy and Protestant Denmark provide the two outstanding cases of consistent popular resistance to the persecution of the Jews. Lutheran theologians made the earliest and most forceful denunciation of anti-Semitism in Denmark, which was decidedly not the case among their coreligionists in Germany. The notable lack of public protest against Jewish deportations from the Vatican, about which there has been so much discussion, does not seem to have affected the deep antipathy toward anti-Semitism among the Italian population, including the Catholic clergy.

Answer 115

Majdanek, set up in the summer 1941 on the outskirts of Lublin in Nazioccupied eastern Poland, was an unusual camp because of its multiple functions. The GG can be called the “far East” of the German empire. It was considered as a foreign land A look at the weather reports of the Wehrmacht show that the climate conditions were indeed harsher than those to which the Austrian and German SS staff were accustomed Not only was the climate unfamiliar to the SS personnel; other factors also served to underscore the foreignness of the place. The composition of the inmates and the scale of the camp were quite new. While the female and male guards had been employed in camps within the Reich to supervise prisoners who mainly originated from Austria and Germany and with whom they shared a common language and culture, in the GG they were confronted with people who came predominantly from Eastern Europe. Majdanek disposed only of 19 Aufseherinnen to supervise over 7,000 female inmates. Unsurprisingly, Majdanek was a quite chaotic place when contrasted with the better-organized camps in the Reich. During its existence there were constant problems with the water supply and drainage that regularly caused large-scale typhoid fever epidemics. GG can be categorized as an “apartheid” society in which the imperial Germans (Reichsdeutsche) were able to take up a leading position vis-a`-vis the Jews, the Poles and also the indigenous ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). The colonial political context also shaped gender relations in wartime Poland, where German women were authorized to give orders and issue instructions to Polish men. the guards encountered the inmates, who were indeed potential disease carriers, with increasing fear and violence. As Elias Canetti elaborated in Crowds and Power, the fear of contagion shifts the social relations in alienating people to others within social groups. When they came face to face with the physically deteriorated and filthy prisoners, the camp guards experienced disgust and revulsion. “The Aufseherinnen were afraid to touch a prisoner,” remembered Rywka Aweonska in the Majdanek trial. “They always screamed ‘itchy Jewess’.” The female and male SS guards did not merely reproduce Nazi ideology, but rather appropriated it, by charging with meaning and activating it. As the Polish historian Tomasz Kranz pointed out, 60% of the prisoners did not die in the gas chambers in Majdanek, but as a result of starvation, exhaustion, epidemics and ill treatment by the SS personne Images of “the East,” constituted during World War I and the period in between the two Wars, served as a basis for the Nazi conception and policies of a “people without space” (Volk-ohne-Raum). A culturally defined German feeling of superiority vis-a`-vis the Slavs had already existed during World War I,77 but with National Socialism came a greatly amplified political-racial component. To this was added geopolitical fears of the “Asian” Soviet superpower. The war of extermination on the Eastern front was meant to create a new living space (Lebensraum).78 The Nazi image of “the enemy” targeted on the one hand the so-called Judeo-Bolsheviks as the evil incarnations par excellence, and on the other the Slavs who, according to the ambitious German conquest and settlement plans, were “sub humans” and should play the role of working slaves. the female and male guards did not simply reproduce emotion labels diffused by the propaganda, but appropriated them in an individual way and therefore contributed towards shaping the Nazi social imaginary.

Answer 116

The consequence for the shaping of opinion was less the creation of dynamic hatred than of a lethal indifference towards the fate of the Jewish population The greatest achievement of Nazi propaganda—Goebbels himself thought so—was the creation of the ‘Führer myth’ The supra-dimensional image of the Führer was not only a propaganda product injected into the population, but to a large extent the result of naive popular expectations of national salvation The image of the Führer, far removed from reality, was crucial as an element of integration since it was ever more plain that the party itself was divisive rather than unifying, and incapable of overcoming the grievances and resentments of ‘everyday’ life. Popular opinion, largely indifferent and infused with a latent anti-Jewish feeling further bolstered by propaganda, provided the climate within which spiralling Nazi aggression towards Jews could take place unchallenged. But it did not provoke the radicalization in the first place. The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.

Answer 117

(36) As the Holocaust unfolded, approximately 50,000 to 80,000 Jews, predominantly from Eastern Poland, sought refuge in nearby forests (37) 0 Occupied by forest fugitives, peasants, partisans and, frequently, Nazi troops, the forest became another important socio-spatial arena for agency and power relations.1 I argue the forest, as a liminal space, enabled a transformation of culture and norms during the Holocaust. 13 This transformation enhanced their efforts to survive

Answer 118

Throughout Europe the Jews were identified w liberalism and oft w the revolutionary brand of socialism Revolutionary right in all its guises targeted Jews as reps of the worldviews they fought and more oft than not tagged them as instigators and carriers of these worldviews Crisis of liberalism and reaction against communism = ideological sources of anti-Semitism itler's own brand of anti-S ='redemptive anti-Semitism' Beyond immediate ideological confrontation w liberalism and communism, which in Nazi leader's eyes were worldviews invented by Jews and for Jewish interests, Hitler perceived his mission as a kind of crusade to redeem the world by eliminating the Jews Jew = principle of evil in Western history and soc W/o victorious redemption, Jew would ultimately dominate the world Hitler's view - Jews were first and foremost an active (eventually deadly) threat. Yet, in the wake of the Polish campaign, the first German reactions to the sight of the ostjuden were more immediately dominated by disgust and utter (17) contempt Sept 10, Hitler toured Jewish quarter of Kielce, press chief Otto Dietrich described impression of visit in a pamphlet published at the end of that yr - 'if we had once believed we knew the Jews, we were quickly taught otherwise… the appearance of these human beings is unimaginable… physical repulsion hindered us from carrying out our journalistic research

Answer 119

most genocides characterized by at least three key primes - deep structural divisions and an identifiable victim group; legitimating ideology of hate; breakdown in moral restraints

Answer 120

(128) effect of bureaucratic context of action = dehumanization of the objects of bureaucratic operation - possibility to express these objects in purely technical, ethically neutral terms Pictures of Auschwitz inmates represent only an extreme manifestation of a tendency which may be discovered in all bureaucracies, however benign and innocuous the tasks in which they are currently engaged I suggest that the discussion of the dehumanizing tendency, rather than being focused (129) on its most sensational and vile, but fortunately uncommon, manifestations, ought to concentrate on the more universal, and for this reason potentially more dangerous, manifestations Dehumanization starts at point when, thanks to distantiation, the objects at which the bureaucratic operation is aimed can, and are, reduced to a set of quantitative measures

Answer 121

before war 2500 lived in town, w Jews making up about 2/3 50% adult men of Jedwabne (88) are ident by name among participants in the pogrom \)Poles called to town hall Jews ordered to assemble at the square for allegedly cleaning duty Rivka Fogel - she meant to bring along a broom. Since Jews had previously been pressed into debasing cleanup jobs, one cld imagine at first that this was to be but a routine exercise in humiliation (98) murderers determined to take away victims' dignity before they took their lives. 'I saw how Sobuta and Wasilewski took some dozen Jews from among the assembled and ordered them to do some ridiculous gymnastics exercises' abbi (99) told to walk in front w his hat on a stick and all had to sing 'the war is because of us, the war is for us' While carrying the statue all Jews chased toward the barn, and the barn was doused w gasoline and lit, and in this manner 1500 Jewish ppl perished (100) bodies in the upper layer of the heap had been consumed by fire, but those beneath had been crushed and asphyxiated, their clothes in (101) many cases remaining intact. 'They were so intertwined w one another that bodies couls not be disentangled' recalled an elderly peasant who as a young boy had been sent w a group of local men to bury the dead In spite of this ppl trying to search the corpses, looking for valuables sewn into clothing by partaking in the persecution of Jews during the summer of 1941, an inhabitant of these territories could simultaneously endear himself to the new rulers, derive material benefits from his actions, and go along w local peasants' traditional animosity toward the Jews

Answer 122

* Writes in despair (162) following entry on Nov 26, 1942: * Peasants afraid of reprisals catch Jews in hamlets and bring them to town or sometimes kill them on the spot. In general some terrible demoralization has taken hold of people with respect to Jews. A psychosis took hold of them and they emulate the Germans in that they don't see a human being in Jews, only some pernicious animal, which has to be destroyed by all means, like dogs sick with rabies, or rats'

Answer 123

SS police battallion 101 (info in notes if needed)

Answer 124

The Jew became life unworthy of life not bc the ordinary German bureaucrat fantasized about past Aryan glories or Jewish materialism or the Aryan nation: rather, in the post-Wannsee period, the Jew, in both professional and popular literature, took on the status of an imminent and major blood threat

Answer 125

'ordinary Germans', were animated by antisemitism, by partic antisemitism that led them to conclude that Jews ought to die (88) Nothing occurred in Nzi Germany to undermine or erode the cultural cognitive model of Jews that had for decades underlain german attitudes and emotions towards the despised minority among them Everything publicly said or done worked to reinforce the model (162) genocide was outgrowth of Hitler's ideal to eliminate all Jewish power - ideal broadly shared in Germany

Answer 126

some believe in uniqueness of Holocaust. Can't be compared We strongly believe Holocaust part of larger category of genocides and that it must be compared w earlier cases of mass killing b4 its origins, significance and measures needed to prevent its recurrence can be understood Only by comparing Holocaust w other cases of genocide can one fully grasp fact that the Holocaust was the most carefully conceived, efficiently implemented and fully realized case of ideologically motivated genocide in the history of the human race Holocaust was unique among genocides in several vital respects that must be recognized: 1st among these was Hitler's definition of the Jews as mems of a subhuman race and insistence that they be annihilated immediately and totally to save Germany and the Aryan race from racial pollution and death: • All-encompassing (324) assault on their most precious right - to live Germany's outstanding progress in science, industry and administration gave Hitler the tools to carry out the most thorough and pervasive genocide in history - this = 3rd unique characteristic of the Holocaust, esp its modern bureaucratic organization (no ppl in history had every been attacked by such an array of scientific, industrial and administrative weapons in a program specifically designed to insure its complete and immediate biological destruction

Answer 127

German bureaucrats who contributed their skills to the destruction of the Jews all shared in experience of killing 5 mil Jews The most important problems of the destruction process were not administrative but psychological 1941, Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Centre von dem Bach sook Himmler w the remark, 'Look at the eyes of the men of 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 Stress: All of Jewry rose from criminal roots and criminal in v nature. Jews are no people like other people, but a pseudo-people welded together by hereditary criminality Annihilation of Jewry is no loss to humanity, but just as useful as capital punishment or protective custody against other criminals 5. Jungle theory. (1104) Himmler addressing mobile killing personnel at Minsk - told them to look at nature. Wherever they wld look, they wld find combat. Among animals and plants. Whoever tired of the fight went under. From this philosophy Hitler himself drew strength in moments of meditation. At dinner table - One must not have mercy with people who are determined by fate to perish

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