In class you heard that the "Jewish Question" began hopefully. Here's how it turned. When Christian Wilhelm von Dohm wrote in 1781 that Jews could become useful citizens, he assumed Jews needed "improving." Emancipation came with strings: give up your separateness and we'll accept you. Many Jews did enter German universities, professions, and culture with enormous energy. When Germany was unified in 1871, Jews had full legal equality.

That success itself became the new complaint. Wilhelm Marr's 1879 pamphlet claimed Jews had already "conquered" Germany. Treitschke, a respected professor, gave the prejudice academic respectability with "The Jews are our misfortune." The Antisemites' Petition of 1880–81 asked Bismarck to roll emancipation back, by limiting Jewish immigration, keeping Jews out of positions of authority, and restricting Jewish teachers. Bismarck didn't act on it, but around 265,000 men had signed. In Russia, after the pogroms of 1881, the "May Laws" of 1882 restricted where Jews could live, and quotas soon limited Jewish students in schools. By then hostility no longer depended on what Jews believed. It depended on their "blood." That shift from religion to race made conversion useless as an escape and made "solutions" more and more extreme.

Review question 1: How did nationalism and racial thinking change the old religious hostility toward Jews into the modern "Jewish Question," and why did that change make a Jew's conversion to Christianity no protection?

Helene Melanie Lebel was a young woman from Vienna, Austria, raised Catholic, who loved swimming and opera and was studying law. In her early twenties she developed schizophrenia and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. In August 1940 her mother was told she had been transferred to another hospital. In fact she was taken to the T4 killing center at Brandenburg, near Berlin, Germany, undressed, examined, and led into a "shower room." Her death certificate gave a false cause of death. She was one of 9,772 people gassed at Brandenburg that year.

Programs like T4 rested on an idea the Nazis called "life unworthy of life." Doctors, nurses, and administrators, many of them highly respected, carried it out. Bishop von Galen's sermon of August 3, 1941 shows that public protest was possible. Historians still debate how much the protests mattered, but weeks later Hitler halted the central gassing. But the killing went on in quieter forms, and the men who ran the T4 gas chambers became staff at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka in German-occupied Poland.

Review question 2: In what ways was the Nazi "euthanasia" program a rehearsal for the murder of Europe's Jews, in its ideas, its methods, and its personnel?

Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not an elite Nazi unit. Its men were mostly working- and lower-middle-class men from Hamburg, Germany, with an average age of thirty-nine, and few were committed Nazis. Browning reconstructed their story from the interrogations of 210 former members, questioned by West German prosecutors in the 1960s. After Józefów, the battalion took part in shootings across the Lublin district of German-occupied Poland and in the deportation of ghettos to Treblinka. By November 1943 it had shot at least 38,000 Jews and deported at least 45,000 more, a total of at least 83,000 people murdered by a unit of fewer than five hundred men. Most of the men found that the killings after Józefów got easier.

Why did they do it? Browning found no single answer: conformity and not wanting to leave the "dirty work" to comrades, deference to authority, careerism, wartime brutalization, and years of propaganda all played a part. Asked decades later why they had not stepped out, some said they had not wanted to look like cowards. One answered simply: "I was cowardly." The men themselves said little about hatred. That is exactly what makes the story frightening.

Review question 3: What does the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 suggest about how "ordinary" people come to take part in mass murder, and why does it matter that they were offered a way out?

Resistance in the Holocaust took many forms. Keeping a school running in a ghetto, praying in secret, smuggling bread, and keeping a diary were all forms of resistance. So was Emanuel Ringelblum's Oyneg Shabes archive. Its members buried ten metal boxes in August 1942 and two milk cans in February 1943. The boxes were found in 1946 and the milk cans in 1950. A third cache has never been found. Ringelblum himself was discovered in hiding in 1944 and murdered.

There was armed resistance too, though the odds were hopeless. Besides the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April–May 1943, prisoners revolted at Treblinka on August 2, 1943, and at Sobibór on October 14, 1943, where dozens escaped and survived. At Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944, the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria, rose up and set fire to one of them. Others escaped to tell the world: two Jews from Slovakia, Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, escaped Auschwitz in April 1944 and wrote a detailed report on the gas chambers.

Review question 4: Name three different forms of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and explain why historians count documenting the crimes as resistance alongside armed revolt.

When Germany occupied Warsaw in 1939, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum began keeping a private chronicle of what he saw. After the Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940, his chronicle grew into a secret organization with several dozen contributors. They called it Oyneg Shabes, Yiddish for “Joy of the Sabbath,” because they held their clandestine meetings on Saturdays. Ringelblum worked through the ghetto’s self-help network of soup kitchens, refugee shelters, house committees, and underground schools, collecting testimonies from the people who came there for help.

They saved almost anything that could show how Jews lived and died: diaries, testimonies, poems, songs, underground newspapers, ration cards, tram tickets, candy wrappers, theater posters, and hundreds of postcards from Jews in small towns about to be deported to an “unknown destination.” They also gathered evidence, town by town, of what the Germans did, when, and who helped them, so that there could be justice after the war. Even during the Great Deportation of summer 1942, when several of their own members were sent to Treblinka, the work went on.

Story 4 told you where the archive was buried. Here are the people who buried it. On August 3, 1942, a teacher, Israel Lichtensztajn, and two of his former students, Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzywacz, hid the first part in ten metal boxes in the cellar of their old school at 68 Nowolipki Street, adding their own last testaments. Grzywacz was deported and killed soon afterward. In February 1943, Ringelblum and Lichtensztajn buried the second part in two milk cans beneath the same building. In March 1943, Ringelblum escaped with his family into hiding on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw. He went back into the ghetto during the uprising, was deported to the Trawniki labor camp, and escaped with the help of a Polish man and a Jewish woman. In March 1944 the family’s hideout was discovered, and they and the Jews hiding with them were taken to the ruins of the ghetto and murdered.

After the war, two surviving members, Rachela Auerbach and Hersz Wasser, led searchers to the first burial site; the ten boxes came out of the rubble on September 18, 1946. The milk cans were found by construction workers on December 1, 1950. Today the archive is kept at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which bears Ringelblum’s name. Much of what we know about daily life in the Warsaw ghetto, we know because of it, and in the ghetto’s own voices. As you read, ask yourself why people who expected to die spent their last strength saving paper, and what it means that we can hear the ghetto through its own words rather than only through the records of the men who destroyed it.

Review question 4 (shared with story 4): Name three different forms of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and explain why historians count documenting the crimes as resistance alongside armed revolt.

Story 4 mentioned the Warsaw ghetto uprising in a single line. Here is the fuller story. By early 1943, after the Great Deportation of summer 1942, only about 70,000 to 80,000 Jews remained in the Warsaw ghetto, and most now understood that “resettlement” meant death. Underground groups had already joined to form the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB); a second force, the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW), grew out of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar. In January 1943, when the Germans returned to resume deportations, a small group of fighters with pistols slipped into a column of Jews being marched to the Umschlagplatz and attacked the guards. Most of them were killed, but the Germans halted the action after seizing 5,000 to 6,500 people. Encouraged, people in the ghetto began digging bunkers.

On April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, German forces entered to deport the rest. SS General Jürgen Stroop commanded about 2,000 soldiers and police, with artillery and tanks. Against them stood about 700 young Jewish fighters, about 500 in the ŻOB and 250 in the ŻZW, led in the ŻOB by Mordecai Anielewicz, who was twenty-four. They had pistols, grenades (many homemade), and a few rifles and automatic weapons, and on the first day they drove the Germans back out of the ghetto. Thousands of civilians resisted in their own way, refusing to report and hiding underground. The Germans answered by burning and demolishing the ghetto block by block. On May 8 they captured the ŻOB headquarters at 18 Miła Street; Anielewicz and many of his commanders are thought to have taken their own lives rather than be captured. On May 16, Stroop blew up the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street and reported to Berlin that the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw was no more.

At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding. About 7,000 more were sent to Treblinka and murdered, and about 42,000 were deported to labor camps and Majdanek, where most were shot in November 1943. The uprising was still the largest Jewish revolt of the war and the first urban uprising against German occupation in Europe, and it inspired revolts in other ghettos, such as Białystok. The photograph on this slide comes from Stroop’s own illustrated report on the destruction of the ghetto; it shows young women of the Hehalutz Zionist movement captured with weapons. Look at their faces, and ask yourself what it takes to fight when you know you will almost certainly lose, and why the fighters chose to fight anyway.

Review question 4 (shared with story 4): Name three different forms of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, and explain why historians count documenting the crimes as resistance alongside armed revolt.

In class I argued that teaching the Holocaust as sui generis, one of a kind, lets us treat it as a freak of history with nothing to teach us about human nature. Historians have argued about this for decades. Some insist the Holocaust was unique, in a way that sets it apart from all other mass killing. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer suggested a different word: unprecedented. In his view, it was the first time a modern state set out to murder every member of a people, everywhere in the world it could reach, for ideological reasons alone, and treated that murder as a goal in itself. But "unprecedented" means it has a precedent now. It can be compared, and it can happen again.

That is very close to the argument of this unit. The Holocaust had features no other atrocity shared, and it also belongs to a larger human story. Both are true.

Review question 5: What is the difference between calling the Holocaust "unique" and calling it "unprecedented," and which word fits the argument of this unit better? Explain.