Holocaust

1. Holocaust • Nature of the Task • Impact • demographic • qualitative destruction • the State of Israel???

2. Holocaust History • how does it differ from World War II history? • what are its tasks? • impact on Jewish identity has been both immediate and slow: • war against the Jews aimed at extermination • theological -- is there religious significance? • world reaction; nature of international power

3. Stage I (1933-39) • Jan. 30, 1933 Nazis come to power • c. 500,000 Jews within 65,000,000 • April 1, 1933 mass boycott • April 4, 1933 eliminated from civil service • April 22, 1933 social security eliminated • April 26, 1933 quotas in schools

4. Cont. • May 10, 1933 book burning • Sept. 15, 1935 Nuremberg Laws revoke emancipation • 1938 Aryanization of Jewish corporations • Anschluss imposes all laws in Austria

5. Kristallnacht • 1938 Polish Jews expelled and forced into detention centers • November 6, 1938. Hershel Grynspan kills Ernest von Rath in Paris • November 9-10, 1938. Anti-Jewish rampage in Germany. Night of the Broken Glass. Burnings, arrests and beatings

6. Jewish Reaction • 160,000 flee • restrictions in Palestine, America, elsewhere • creation of independent schools and self-help organization • suicide

7. Final Solution • not officially adopted until 1941 period of total war

8. Ghettoization • Warsaw: 1940 500,000 in 1500 buildings • questions of Jewish leadership • Chaim Rumkowski (Lodz) Adam Czerniakow (Warsaw) • this is not the pre-modern ghetto • stages: segregation; strangulation; deportation and liquidation • illusory continuity of normalcy

9. Jewish Reactions • the Jews don’t know how to react to this unprecedented institution • initial hope of status quo gives way to snatching at any hope • traditional philosophy of patience is abandoned only gradually • most enlightened are the least able to cope

10. Passivity? • ability to react is clear • experience misleads • passive restraint • active demoralization by Germans • this issue remains as a defining topic in later years

11. Ghettoization (cont.) • education; medical research • inversion of values; smuggling is necessary to survive • competing leadership centers; youth movements • Ghetto humor (“Hitlerplatz”)

12. Jewish Response • organization in the ghettos • inversion of moral code and predictability • partisans • tradition of survival are now useless

13. Massive Exterminations • 1941 Russian invasion: Einsatzgruppen • (cf. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners) • death camps • Chelmno 1941 • Auschwitz 1942 etc

14. Concentration Camps • loss of personality • Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” • Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and The Truce • invention of a rhetoric of suffering and dignity -- “lest we forget”

15. Concentration Camps (cont.) • total loss of personality • train ride in box cars ends space demarcations • selection; numbered; shorn; Arbeit macht frei; • reversal of status and role definitions • end of predictability • racial anti-Semitism has reached its apex • no limit on human behavior; not hell but a toilet

16. Power and Survival • odd cases of Bulgaria, Finland and Denmark • could this have been extended? • internal affair • UN commission for Refugees • international commission 1938 • 1939 white paper

17. 1938 32-power conference; no quota revision • Britain • 1941 Stürmer sunk • neutrality between Jews and Arabs • Dec. 17, 1942 Parliament stands in silence • April 1943 Bermuda conference