Week 7 9/30 Lecture notes

Monday 9/28: Exam 1

Wednesday 9/30 Lecture Notes

EXAM 2 Preperation:

What you do not need to know:

• all dates of the holocaust. There is an emphasis on the WHY and not the WHEN and HOW

• know major turning points/explain importance

• know intellectual context:

  • mein kampf

  • antisemitism

  • Bauman reading

  • unit 1 concepts

Introduction to the Holocaust:

• 8 march 1938 germany annexed austria. hitler invaded before their election with real cruelty/intensity. it gave the nazis hope to inplement it in their own country

• november 1938 kristalknacht. This event marked a significant escalation in anti-Semitic violence, as synagogues were set on fire, Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized, and thousands of Jewish men were arrested and hundreds sent to concentration camps (kept for weeks-months and then let go if they promised to emigrate). Spurred a new wave on emmigration. 200,000 jewish people left germany.

• flight tax- made it difficult to leave, you had to pay almost everything you had. it was difficult to get a visa. the nazis wanted to punish them but also get rid of them. manynjews thought that it wouldnt last forever, and that they could wait it out.

• September 1939 WW2 starts. as germany moves eastward, this meant that there were more Jews under German control. In poland/ eastern europe the jews were not as assimilated. they looked different, had different hair, and spoke different language.

• nazis concentrated them into jewish ghettos/ move them to small sections of the cities. there was overcrowding, starvation, and they were locked into the ghetto.

• organized mass killings in 1941. the nazis had plans to move them to africa, and siberia, but it was too costly, they needed the ships, and there were wayyyy too many. as they were figuring out what to do with them, they were rounding them out out of the ghettos, forcing them to dig their mass graves, and then killing them all and thenn burrying them. they used mobile killing units. these were not very efficient, not pleasant work as a nazi (had to kill every jew individually) so they came up with ways of seperating the killing from them (less close to the violence).

• methods of killing: concentration camps (gas chambers. they were large prisons, they were used to extract labors of jews, gypsies, political enemies, worked in factories, construction, mining, quarries. they became places for mass killing, but originally they were mass labor camps. the ss would decide who was fit to work (children, old, sick) and if you couldnt work then you were sent to die), mobile killing units (gas vans, bullets) nazis didnt want germans to know about the killings and they kept it a secret, once the nazis realized they would loose, they were less discreete

• killing centers: no work done. just place where jews were murdered. they were all in poland, there were 5 of them, relativly small, jews would show up off the train, they were funneled like cattle into the gas chambers. there were small crews of jews and ukranians who were the ones who were operating the gas chambers and the dirty work. those jews were not protected, and they would kill them every few months. zonnercommando was the special unit of jews. they worked int eh concentration camps and at the killing centers.

• 1940 jews were forced to do hard labor (dig graves, clean streets, mining)

• 1941 first killing centers pop up

• 1942 Wannsee conference. nazis met there, and nazis formalized plan that they would kill all jews in europe. expand from just german jews, but all european jews. “evacuate the jews to poland” work them to death and then kill them. this meetign was formalizign how the jews were going to be killed.

• most important turning points: nuremberg laws, annexation of austria, kristalnacht, beginning of ww2, wansee conference

• from the perspective of the german view: