GERM 357: Lecture

GERM 357 UofC

LECTURE 1

How Many Jews Were Killed During the Holocaust?

• About 2/3 of European Jews (6 million)

Holocaust vs. Shoah (2)

• Holocaust came into usage during the 1970s, but traditionally means burnt offering for the gods

• Shoah is the Hebrew term for catastrophe

Anti-Judaism vs. Anti-Semetism

• Anti-judaism is religiously/culturally based, while anti-semitism is racially based and emerged in the 19th century

Timeline: Discrimination to Mass Killings

• There were initially no detailed plans in place for mass extermination, but some Jews were killed from the moment the Nazis seized power

First Measures (3)

• 1933 a law was passed to push political enemies and Jews out of public service

• 1933 a law was passed to limit the number of Jewish students at schools

• 1935 a law was passed to exclude Jews from military service

The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 (2)

• Created a tiered citizenship model which deprived Jews of full citizenship as a basis for further discriminatory measures

• Prohibited marriage/sex between Jews and non-Jews

The November Pogrom of 1938: Kristallnacht (2)

• Marks an important transition from the discrimination of Jewish people to direct violent aggression

• Derived from Herschel Grynszpan shooting a member of the German Embassy leading to Nazis protesting the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany

The Madagascar Plan (2)

• Ideas to deport European Jews to Madagascar which dates back to the 19th century

• In 1940, the Nazi regime developed detailed plans for the deportation of 4 million Jews to Madagascar

Madagascar Plan: Developments (2)

• Did not go through, but introduced logistic elements that were later adopted in the deportation of Jews to death camps

• The plan marks an important transition from the pressure to emigrate to forced deportation into a camp-like setting

Einsatzgruppen: Task Groups

• Mass murder of Jews in extermination camps was preceded by mass shootings in the newly occupied territories of the Soviet union

• Between 1941 and 1942 over 500,000 Jewish people were killed by Einsatzgruppen (SS)

Schutzstaffel (SS): Protection Squadron (2)

• Paramilitary unit that played a leading role in the execution of the Holocaust (800,000 members)

• While the SS was largely responsible for the Babi Yar shootings, they drew on the support of the order police (Ordnungspolizei), the army, and the local population

Extermination Camps of Poland (4)

1. Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.1 million killed

2. Treblinka: 900k killed

3. Belzec: 600K killed

4. Sobibor: 250K killed

Ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow

• The Nazis created about 1100 Jewish ghettos and about a quarter of the population died

Train Transports

• Could have death tolls of around 25%

Jewish Victims by Country

• Poland is the highest (2.7 million killed), Germany had 165,000 killed, and France had the least with 32,000 killed

Trials Against the Perpetrators (2)

• Many top-ranking Nazis committed suicide before they could be charged, while others received death penalties

• Until recently, only those directly interacting with the inmates of the camps were charged for the crimes

Police Reserve Battalion 101 (2)

• About 500 men that contributed towards the murders of at least 83,500 people

• In the 1960s, only 14 men were indicted, and given light punishments

Denazification

• In 1951, German parliament passed a law that allowed most Germans who had gone through Denazification process to resume their work in public service

The First Victims of Systematic Mass Murder Were ___ and ___

Political dissidents and intellectuals

Anti-Semitism as a Motor of The Holocaust: Intentionalists (2)

• Focus on the original antisemitism of Hitler and Nazi leaders as the motivator of Nazism

• The entire war on the Eastern front was a deliberate controlled attempt to exterminate Jewish people

Anti-Semitism as a Motor of The Holocaust: Functionalists

• Analyzed the Holocaust as a result of highly developed differentiation of tasks, and a complex field of internal rivalries and tensions

The Holocaust & The History of German Colonialism

• In 1904, the German Empire committed the first genocide of the 20th century where Germans killed 2/3 (50,000) of the Herero people in Namibia

LECTURE 2

Susan Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others

• The book studies the history of the depiction of violence and its moral implications (collection of essays on war photography)

Does the Viewing of Violence & Suffering Have Any Necessary Moral Implications: Virginia Woolf

• Argued that seeing photographs of the Spanish civil war would mean one necessarily had to become a pacifist

Does the Viewing of Violence & Suffering Have Any Necessary Moral Implications: Susan Sontag (2)

• There is no inherent moral value to depicting and viewing violence and suffering

• It is the context of the images that decides over the meaning and impact of depiction of violence