Background essay for Lecture 1 · PHIL 210 World Religions · Steven Austin
Homo homini lupus.1
1. Why begin with a wolf
The unit's epigraph, homo homini lupus, "man is a wolf to man," has a long and slightly ironic history. It began as a line of comedy. In Plautus's Asinaria (The Comedy of Asses, line 495), a merchant refuses to hand money to a stranger with the words lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit: "a man is a wolf, not a man, to another man when he doesn't know what sort he is." In Plautus the point is prudence toward strangers, not a doctrine of human nature. Erasmus collected the proverb in his Adagia. Thomas Hobbes gave it philosophical weight in the dedicatory epistle of De Cive (1642), pairing it with its opposite: "man is a god to man, and man is a wolf to man." For Hobbes, the first is true of citizens living together under law, and the second of states, and of human beings without a common power to restrain them.1 The two halves of Hobbes's sentence frame this unit. Human beings are capable of extraordinary goodness and of extraordinary predation, and the twentieth century tested which one prevails when law, conscience, and ordinary restraint are deliberately dismantled. Hannah Arendt used the same phrase in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She described the camps as an experiment that created "a society in which the nihilistic banality of homo homini lupus is consistently realized."2
2. The frame: a century of genocide, and the problem of isolation
The lecture's argument begins from a paradox. The twentieth century brought unprecedented gains in medicine, sanitation, transportation, and communication, and also killing on a scale no earlier age had the technical and bureaucratic means to achieve. Political scientists and historians differ on totals and on which episodes count as genocide in the legal sense, but it is not controversial to call the twentieth century the century of genocide. The California Indian Catastrophe (United States, 1846–1873), the Armenian genocide (Ottoman Empire, 1915–1923), the Holocaust, Cambodia (1975–1979), Rwanda (1994), and Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1995) fall within it, along with mass atrocities that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide but killed millions: the Soviet terror and famines, the Chinese famine of 1959–1961, and Japan's wartime atrocities in China and across Asia. The lecture's "Never forget: what?" slide (G) sets the Holocaust (Europe, 1933–1945, six million Jews murdered) among the main stories of Lecture 2, "Century of Genocide: A History of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in the 20th Century": the Armenian Genocide (1915–1923, up to an estimated 1.2 million killed); the Holodomor, the famine in Soviet Ukraine (1932–1933, an estimated 3.9 million starved); the Gulag (Soviet Union, 1930–1953, an estimated 18 million imprisoned); the Rape of Nanjing (China, 1937–1938, an estimated 100,000–300,000 killed); the Khmer Rouge killing fields (Cambodia, 1975–1979, nearly 2 million dead); the Rwandan genocide (1994, an estimated 500,000–800,000 killed); and Srebrenica (1995, an estimated 8,000 men and boys killed).
The lecture's framing argument is that American schools usually teach the Holocaust as a self-contained event, and that two consequences follow, both of them serious. First, the Holocaust comes to look sui generis, a freak, an aberration with nothing to teach about ordinary human nature. Second, other ideologies' atrocities, above all communist ones, escape comparable moral and historical reckoning.
That argument has respectable company on both points, and it has critics. Scholars have argued for half a century about whether the Holocaust is "unique." Writers such as Steven Katz have defended a strong uniqueness thesis, holding that only in the Holocaust did a state set out to kill every member of a people as a matter of principle. Others regard any uniqueness claim as a hierarchy of suffering. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, long the chief historian of Yad Vashem, offered a middle term: the Holocaust is best called unprecedented. It was the first total, global, ideologically driven attempt to annihilate a people, with murder as an end in itself. But once it happened, it became a precedent, comparable to other genocides and capable of recurring.3 Bauer's formulation fits the unit well. It preserves what is distinctive about the Holocaust while insisting, as Primo Levi did, that "it happened, therefore it can happen again."4
The second consequence, the absence of a reckoning with communism, is partly a matter of fact and partly a matter of judgment. As fact: no international tribunal comparable to Nuremberg was ever convened for the crimes of the Soviet state. Communist regimes collapsed in 1989–1991 mostly by negotiation, and the successor states pursued justice unevenly. The clearest exception is Cambodia. The UN-assisted Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) convicted Kaing Guek Eav ("Duch"), commandant of the S-21 prison, of crimes against humanity; his sentence was raised to life imprisonment on appeal in 2012. In 2014 the Chambers convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of crimes against humanity. In November 2018 they convicted both of genocide against Cambodia's Vietnamese, and Nuon Chea also of genocide against the Cham.5 Those trials came three to four decades after the crimes and reached only a handful of surviving leaders. Nothing on the scale of Nuremberg ever confronted communist mass crimes. The further judgment, about how communism is regarded in American culture and universities, is an argument rather than a matter of record, and the lecture presents it as the instructor's own view.
Illinois law offers a useful local hook. In 1990 Illinois became the first state to require Holocaust instruction in its public elementary and high schools. In 2005 (Public Act 094-0478) it expanded the mandate to "other cases of genocide."6 The state's own curriculum thus moved toward the contextual approach this unit takes.
3. Before Hitler: the "Jewish Question" and modern antisemitism
Because the course treats the Diaspora and the roots of antisemitism in the Judaism chapter, the lecture does not re-teach ancient and medieval Christian anti-Judaism (deicide charges, blood libel, expulsions, ghettos of early modern Italy). It picks up the story at the modern turn: the collision between the Diaspora and the rise of nationalism.
In the old European order, dynastic states and empires ruled many peoples, and Jews lived as a separate, legally defined corporate community, tolerated on restrictive terms. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution offered a new bargain: citizenship in exchange for the dissolution of corporate separateness. Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civil Improvement of the Jews, 1781) argued that Jews' supposed defects came from oppression and would disappear under equal rights. Revolutionary France emancipated its Jews in 1791. Emancipation spread unevenly across Europe through the nineteenth century, reaching the whole of the new German Empire by 1871.7 The phrase "the Jewish Question" became a catchword in the German debates of the 1840s, especially after Bruno Bauer's Die Judenfrage (1843) and Karl Marx's reply, Zur Judenfrage (1844). It then spread across Europe in a flood of pamphlets proposing "solutions."
Nationalism sharpened the question. If the nation is a people bound by descent, language, and culture, and the state exists to express that nation, then a dispersed people with its own history, religion, and transnational ties appears anomalous, even disloyal. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the debate took a decidedly antisemitic tone, and it also changed its basis. Religious hostility, which baptism could in principle end, gave way to racial antisemitism, which nothing could end. The journalist Wilhelm Marr helped popularize the word Antisemitismus and founded a League of Antisemites in 1879. That November the eminent historian Heinrich von Treitschke published, in the Preussische Jahrbücher, the line "Die Juden sind unser Unglück," "The Jews are our misfortune." The Nazi weekly Der Stürmer later printed it on every front page.8 In 1880–81 the Antisemites' Petition, circulated by Bernhard Förster and others and backed by the court preacher Adolf Stoecker, gathered about 265,000 signatures. It asked Bismarck to restrict Jewish immigration, exclude Jews from positions of governmental authority and the judiciary, limit Jewish teachers, and restore special census registration of Jews. Bismarck did not act on it.9 These are the concrete demands behind the call for legislation to "de-Jewify" the press, education, culture, and economy, and behind antisemites' condemnation of intermarriage.
In the Russian Empire, home to the largest Jewish population in the world, the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 was followed by waves of pogroms. Then came the "Temporary Regulations" (May Laws) of 1882, educational quotas in 1887, and other restrictions. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod and the most influential conservative adviser to Alexander III and Nicholas II, is widely credited with predicting that one-third of Russia's Jews would convert (or assimilate), one-third emigrate, and one-third die out. Historians have long cited the remark. But its wording varies from source to source, no primary source has been securely identified, and specialists treat it as an attribution of uncertain authenticity. I. Michael Aronson argued that it does not accurately describe official policy in the 1880s.10 The lecture presents it that way. Between 1881 and 1914 roughly two million Jews left the Russian Empire, most of them for the United States.
4. From words to laws: Nazi Germany, 1933–1939
When Hitler was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, Germany had about 523,000 Jews, under one percent of the population. Europe as a whole had about 9.5 million Jews, more than 60 percent of the world's Jewish population.11 Nazi policy before the war aimed at exclusion, impoverishment, and forced emigration, and it advanced by steps. On April 1, 1933 there was a national boycott of Jewish businesses. On April 7, 1933 the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service purged Jews (with temporary exemptions) and political opponents from state employment. Exclusions followed from the professions, the press, and cultural life. On September 15, 1935 the Nuremberg Laws (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor) restricted citizenship to those of "German or related blood" and prohibited marriage and sexual relations between Jews and "Germans."12
1938 was the turning point. After the annexation of Austria, persecution there was immediate and violent. In late October 1938, Germany expelled more than 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship, many born in Germany, to the Polish border (the Polenaktion). Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old whose family was among them, shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris, France, on November 7. When vom Rath died on November 9, Goebbels, with Hitler's approval, unleashed a nationwide pogrom made to look spontaneous. During Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), more than 1,400 synagogues were burned or destroyed, thousands of businesses and homes were wrecked, hundreds of Jews died in the violence and its aftermath, and about 26,000 Jewish men were sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen. The regime then fined German Jewry one billion Reichsmarks and confiscated its insurance payouts. A rapid series of decrees followed, completing Jews' removal from economic life and forcing "Aryanization" of their property.13
On January 30, 1939, Hitler told the Reichstag: "I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."14 He returned to this "prophecy" repeatedly during the war. Historians do not read the speech as a blueprint for the gas chambers, since Nazi policy in 1939 still aimed at expulsion. But it shows the eliminationist logic and the habit, central to the Final Solution, of blaming the victims for the war that would destroy them.
5. The "Final Solution": how a policy became genocide
The Nazi phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage, "Final Solution of the Jewish Question," has an unmistakably apocalyptic tone. Historians disagree about exactly when and how the decision for total murder crystallized. "Intentionalists" emphasize Hitler's long-held aims. "Functionalists" or structuralists emphasize cumulative radicalization within competing agencies. Most current scholarship, represented by Christopher Browning's The Origins of the Final Solution and Peter Longerich's Holocaust, sees a process. Mass murder of Soviet Jews began in summer 1941. It widened to whole communities by August. Decisions to murder the Jews of the rest of Europe took shape in autumn 1941, when deportations from the Reich to the East began and construction of Bełżec and Chełmno, in German-occupied Poland, got under way.15 The Wannsee Conference, held at a villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, Germany, on January 20, 1942, did not make the decision. Reinhard Heydrich convened fifteen senior officials there to coordinate an operation already under way, and the protocol, drafted by Adolf Eichmann, listed about eleven million European Jews as targets, including those in neutral and enemy countries.16
The lecture follows the sequence of the slides (ghettos, mobile killing squads, killing centers), which corresponds roughly to the chronology and to the three main methods of murder.
5.1 Ghettos
After the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Germany ruled more than two million Polish Jews; with the Soviet territories seized in 1941, millions more. The first ghetto was established at Piotrków Trybunalski, in central Poland, in October 1939. In total, the Nazis and their allies created more than 1,300 ghettos, about 1,100 of them German, nearly all in occupied Poland, the Baltic states, and the occupied Soviet Union.17 Ghettos began as ad hoc holding areas while Nazi leaders debated expulsion schemes (the "Lublin reservation," the Madagascar plan). They became sites of deliberate starvation and, after 1941, collection points for murder. German Jews were deported into them as well. Nearly 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, and the Czech lands were sent to Łódź, Poland, alone in October–November 1941.18
Warsaw, Poland's capital, illustrates the scale. More than 400,000 Jews were confined to about 1.3 square miles behind a wall almost ten feet high, an average of 7.2 people per room. Official rations in 1941 averaged about 1,125 calories a day. Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Jewish council, wrote in his diary on May 8, 1941: "Children starving to death." Between 1940 and mid-1942 about 83,000 Jews died in the ghetto of starvation and disease. The Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940, and what kept the death rate from climbing higher was smuggling: food and medicine carried over and through the wall and past the gates, often by children, who could be shot if caught. Across all ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps, USHMM estimates that between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Jews died of deliberate privation, disease, and violence.19
The Jewish councils (Judenräte) faced impossible choices. When the Great Deportation from Warsaw began on July 22, 1942, Czerniaków killed himself the next day rather than supply the daily quotas. By September 21 about 265,000 Warsaw Jews had been deported to the Treblinka killing center, about fifty miles northeast of Warsaw, and some 35,000 killed in the ghetto. On August 5 or 6 the Germans cleared the orphanage of Janusz Korczak (Henryk Goldszmit), physician and children's author, who refused offers of rescue and walked with his staff and nearly two hundred children to the Umschlagplatz and on to Treblinka. In Łódź that September, during the Gehsperre (general curfew) action, the Germans demanded the sick, the elderly, and children under ten. The council head, Chaim Rumkowski, publicly urged parents to surrender their children in the hope of saving the remainder. About 15,000 people were deported to Chełmno.20
Jewish response was not passive. Ghetto communities ran schools, soup kitchens, orphanages, and religious life, often illegally. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum organized the Oyneg Shabes (Oneg Shabbat) group, which collected diaries, studies, posters, and testimony. Its members buried the archive in ten metal boxes (August 1942), two milk cans (February 1943), and a third cache (April 1943). The first two were recovered in September 1946 and December 1950; the third has never been found.21 In January 1943 armed resistance halted a deportation from Warsaw. On April 19, 1943, on the eve of Passover, the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) and other groups, about 700 fighters, began the Warsaw ghetto uprising. They resisted for nearly four weeks until SS General Jürgen Stroop declared the operation complete on May 16 by dynamiting the Great Synagogue. Stroop's illustrated report to Himmler, titled "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!", is the source of many of the best-known photographs of the uprising. The deck's photograph of young women of the Hehalutz Zionist movement captured with weapons (slide AC, in the Pierian Spring) comes from that report.
5.2 Mobile killing operations: "the Holocaust by bullets"
The invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was conceived as a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg) against "Judeo-Bolshevism." Four Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD, about 3,000 men in all, followed the army, with orders to kill Jews, communist officials, Roma, and others the regime counted as enemies. They were far too few to kill on the scale that followed, and they did not kill alone. Battalions of the Order Police, ordinary uniformed policemen, carried out many of the shootings. Waffen-SS units and the regular German army (Wehrmacht) took part or helped by rounding up victims, guarding the sites, and supplying trucks and ammunition. Local auxiliary police and militias in occupied Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, and Ukraine joined in, and Germany's ally Romania carried out mass shootings of its own. At first the units shot mainly Jewish men of military age. By August 1941 they were massacring entire communities.22 The documentary record shows a recurring procedure. Victims were rounded up, marched to the outskirts, forced to undress and sometimes to dig pits, and shot at or in the graves, often in full view of local residents. At Kamenets-Podolsk, in Soviet Ukraine (August 26–28, 1941), about 23,600 Jews were murdered. At Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, Ukraine, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine (September 29–30, 1941), the Einsatzgruppen's own reports count 33,771 Jews killed in two days. Babyn Yar remained a killing site, and about 100,000 people, many of them non-Jews, were murdered there by 1943. A handful of surviving photographs show such massacres: the Jews of Lubny, Ukraine, gathered under guard in a field on October 16, 1941, before Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C shot them; women and children on the Šķēde dunes near Liepāja, Latvia, shortly before they were shot in December 1941; a soldier aiming at a mother shielding her child at Ivanhorod, Ukraine, in 1942; and the murder of the Jews of Mizocz, Ukraine, on October 14, 1942, by German Security Police and gendarmes with Ukrainian auxiliary police. The largest single shooting operation, however, took place in occupied Poland: "Operation Harvest Festival" (Erntefest) on November 3–4, 1943, which killed some 42,000 Jews at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa in the Lublin district of German-occupied Poland.23
Gas vans were developed partly because of the shootings' cost in personnel and ammunition, and partly, as USHMM notes, because of the psychological toll on the shooters. Exhaust was piped into a sealed compartment. The vans were unreliable, and shooting remained the main method in the East. Older USHMM wording put the toll at "at least 1.5 million and possibly more than two million"; current USHMM figures give about two million Jews murdered in mass shooting operations and related massacres. Altogether, as many as two million Jews were murdered in mass shootings and gas vans in the occupied East, nearly one in three of all Holocaust victims.24 The Germans later tried to erase the evidence (Aktion 1005, the exhumation and burning of bodies), and many mass graves remain unmarked. The work of Father Patrick Desbois and the organization Yahad-In Unum in locating these sites gave rise to the phrase "Holocaust by bullets."
Christopher Browning's study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has become the classic case for how ordinary men became killers. The battalion, about 500 men of the Order Police, was raised in Hamburg, Germany. Most were middle-aged family men, working- and lower-middle-class reservists (dockworkers, truck drivers, clerks, salesmen), average age thirty-nine, too old for army service and with little police experience; few were committed Nazis. Browning built his account from the interrogations of 210 former members by West German prosecutors in the 1960s. Before dawn on July 13, 1942, the battalion arrived at Józefów, a village of about 1,800 Jews some twenty miles from its base at Biłgoraj in the Lublin district of German-occupied Poland. Major Wilhelm Trapp gathered the men in a half-circle and, "with choking voice and tears in his eyes," told them their orders, which, he said, came from above: several hundred working-age Jewish men were to be sent to a labor camp, and everyone else, the women, children, and elderly, was to be shot. He then offered that any of the older men who did not feel up to the task could step out. One man stepped forward, then ten or twelve more, out of about 500. The rest went house to house and drove the Jews to the market square, shooting on the spot those too old or too sick to walk. The battalion doctor showed the first firing squads where to aim. Trucks carried the victims to the edge of a forest, where each policeman was paired face to face with a victim, walked him or her into the woods, and, with the victims lying face down in a row, shot each at point-blank range in the back of the neck. Alcohol appeared by midday; some men broke down or asked to be relieved, others shot past their victims or slipped away; most kept shooting, all day and into the evening. About 1,500 Jews were killed that day. Trapp never went into the woods; witnesses remembered him weeping. Back in their barracks that night, Browning records, the men ate little but drank heavily, and afterward the massacre was, by silent consensus, simply not discussed. Over the next sixteen months, through the "Harvest Festival" massacres of November 1943, the battalion shot at least 38,000 Jews and deported at least 45,000 more to Treblinka, a total of at least 83,000. Browning found that ideology mattered less than conformity, deference, careerism, and the wish not to leave "dirty work" to comrades; one man, asked why he had not stepped out, answered, "I was cowardly." Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) read the same evidence as proof of a uniquely German "eliminationist antisemitism." The Browning–Goldhagen debate bears directly on the question of human nature that runs through this unit.25
5.3 From "euthanasia" to the killing centers
The relationship between the "euthanasia" program and the killing centers is real but needs to be stated precisely. The "euthanasia" program came first and supplied the method and much of the personnel. But the killing centers in occupied Poland were new installations, built to murder Jews.
The child "euthanasia" program began in 1939, and Aktion T4 (named for its office at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, Germany) followed. Starting in January 1940, T4 sent institutionalized patients selected by physicians to six gassing centers in Germany and Austria: Brandenburg (near Berlin), Grafeneck (southwestern Germany), Bernburg and Sonnenstein (Saxony), Hartheim (near Linz, Austria), and Hadamar (Hesse). There they were killed with bottled carbon monoxide in gas chambers disguised as showers, and their families received urns and falsified death certificates. One documented victim, Helene Melanie Lebel of Vienna, Austria, was gassed at Brandenburg in 1940, one of 9,772 people killed there that year. The program became an open secret. Clemens August Count von Galen, Catholic bishop of Münster, Germany, denounced it in a sermon on August 3, 1941, and Hitler ordered the gassing halted in late August. T4's own count was 70,273 people gassed. Killing continued in decentralized form by overdose, injection, and starvation until the end of the war. Estimates of the total number of disabled victims run from 250,000 to 300,000.26 T4 personnel, including Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl, later served at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
The five killing centers were Chełmno (Kulmhof), Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka II, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in German-occupied Poland: Chełmno and Auschwitz in western Polish territory annexed to the Reich in 1939, the other three in the General Government. The first mass gassing of Jews took place at Chełmno on December 8, 1941, in gas vans. Bełżec (from March 1942), Sobibór (from April 1942), and Treblinka (from July 1942) were the camps of "Operation Reinhard," the murder of the Jews of the General Government. They used carbon monoxide from stationary engines. At these camps almost everyone was killed on arrival. USHMM's estimates are: Chełmno at least 152,000 Jews; Bełżec about 435,000; Sobibór at least 167,000; Treblinka about 925,000; Auschwitz about one million. In all, about 2.7 million Jews were killed in the killing centers. Fewer than 200 people survived the three Reinhard camps. Majdanek, which older literature often counted as a sixth killing center, is now usually classified as a concentration camp where gassings also occurred.27
Gassing began in December 1941 at Chełmno, and deportations from the Reich to the East began that autumn. But the great deportations from across Europe to the killing centers were mainly a phenomenon of 1942–1944. In 1942 alone more than 1.5 million Jews were murdered at the killing centers.28
5.4 Auschwitz
Auschwitz had a dual character, and that is why it became the symbol of the whole. Established in spring 1940 in a former Polish army barracks at Oświęcim, Poland, it first held Polish political prisoners. Auschwitz II–Birkenau, begun in October 1941, functioned from March 1942 as both a concentration camp and a killing center. Auschwitz III–Monowitz (October 1942) supplied slave labor to IG Farben's Buna works, where Primo Levi was a prisoner. Zyklon B was first tested on Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners in September 1941. Mass gassings at Birkenau took place first in two converted farmhouses ("bunkers") and then, from spring 1943, in four large purpose-built gas chamber and crematorium complexes (Crematoria II–V). These are the "four gas chambers" usually cited. USHMM's older encyclopedia text states that at the height of the deportations an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed per day at Birkenau. Another USHMM page says "up to 6,000."29
Arrivals underwent "selection" on the ramp, usually by SS physicians, among them Josef Mengele. The minority judged fit for labor were registered, shaved, and tattooed (from spring 1942) with a number. About 400,000 people were registered as Auschwitz prisoners. Of some 200,000 Jews registered, about half died in the camp. Very many of those selected for labor were worked to death, and "annihilation through labor" is a term historians use for the regime's intent. But tens of thousands of Jews did survive selection for labor, most of them deported in 1944.30
The single largest deportation to Auschwitz followed Germany's occupation of Hungary in March 1944. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, about 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, most to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were gassed on arrival.31 Among them was Frieda (Fritzie) Weiss, from the village of Klučarky in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, a region of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hungary in 1939 and today part of Ukraine. Her mother and two brothers were murdered. She survived by claiming to be older than she was, was sent to forced labor in a factory, and survived a death march in spring 1945. As Fritzie Fritzshall she became president of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie. She died in June 2021 at 91.32 For Richland students she is a near-at-hand witness, and the museum is a feasible field trip.
The SS evacuated Auschwitz from January 17, 1945, driving tens of thousands of prisoners, most of them Jews, on death marches west. Soviet troops entered the camp on January 27, 1945, and found about 7,000 prisoners, more than 200 of them children. A Soviet film crew recorded the liberated camp. Stills from that footage, including the children behind barbed wire used on slide AW, became iconic, and the film was shown at Nuremberg.33 In total about 1.1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz: about one million Jews, 70,000–75,000 Poles, about 21,000 Roma, more than 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and 10,000–15,000 others.34
One caution about images. Slide AV shows the gas chamber and ovens of Crematorium I in the main camp. That building was converted by the SS into an air-raid shelter in 1944. After the war the museum reconstructed the chimney and two furnaces from original parts and reopened the roof openings. The reconstruction is documented by the Auschwitz Memorial itself. Deniers exploit it, so it is better for students to hear it plainly; the script puts the explanation in a pop-up so the lecture keeps moving. The great majority of Auschwitz victims were murdered in Birkenau's crematoria, which the SS dynamited in late 1944 and January 1945; their ruins remain.35
6. The toll
USHMM's current breakdown of the six million Jewish dead (about two-thirds of Europe's prewar Jewish population) is as follows: about 2.7 million murdered in killing centers; about 2 million in mass shootings and related massacres; 800,000–1,000,000 in ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps; and at least 250,000 in other violence (riots, individual executions, death marches, and transports). The figure of six million rests on demographic comparison of prewar and postwar populations together with German documentation. Serious scholarly estimates have long fallen within roughly 5.1 to 6 million (Hilberg's lower count of 5.1 million and others' higher counts). There is no scholarly dispute about the order of magnitude.36
The Nazis and their allies also murdered millions of non-Jews. USHMM's estimates: around 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war; around 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians; at least 250,000 and perhaps 500,000 Roma; more than 310,000 Serb civilians murdered by Croatia's Ustaša regime; 250,000–300,000 people with disabilities; tens of thousands of German political opponents and people labeled "asocial" or "professional criminals"; about 1,700 Jehovah's Witnesses; and hundreds, possibly thousands, of gay men.37 The Roma genocide (called Porajmos or Samudaripen by some Romani communities) shares with the Jewish case an explicitly racial rationale. For the purposes of this unit, it is worth noting that the murder of the Jews was distinctive in its totality: only Jews were marked for death everywhere, without exception for age, usefulness, or conversion.
7. "Holocaust" and "Shoah"
Holocaust derives from the Greek holokauston, "wholly burnt," the term the Septuagint uses for the burnt offering (olah). It came into general English use for the Nazi genocide in the late 1950s and 1960s and was fixed in popular usage by the 1978 NBC miniseries. Because of its sacrificial connotation, many Jews and scholars prefer the Hebrew Shoah, "catastrophe," the term used in Israel (Yom HaShoah). The lecture uses "Holocaust" throughout.
8. The film: Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955)
8.1 Origins
Night and Fog grew out of France's commemorations of the tenth anniversary of liberation. Historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser of the Comité d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, a government body, curated the exhibition Resistance, Liberation, Deportation, which opened in Paris, France, in November 1954, and edited a volume of survivor testimony. The film was commissioned by the Comité together with the Réseau du souvenir, an association devoted to the memory of the deportees. Producer Anatole Dauman of Argos Films took it on, with co-financing from the Polish state's Film Polski.38 Alain Resnais (1922–2014) at first refused, believing that only a survivor could make such a film. He agreed on condition that the poet and novelist Jean Cayrol write the text.
Cayrol (1911–2005) had joined the Confrérie Notre-Dame resistance network. Betrayed and arrested on June 10, 1942, he was deported in 1943 under the Nacht und Nebel regime to Mauthausen, near Linz in annexed Austria, and then to its subcamp Gusen, where quarry labor nearly killed him. In 1946 he published Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard.39 The film's title alludes both to Cayrol's poems and to the decree itself. The Night and Fog decree of December 7, 1941 was issued by Hitler and signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. It provided that people in the occupied western countries suspected of endangering German security who could not be quickly tried and executed would be taken secretly to Germany, with their families told nothing. About 7,000 people were seized under it, nearly 5,000 of them in France.40
8.2 Making the film
Resnais shot in color (Eastmancolor) at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, from September 29 to October 4, 1955, and at Majdanek, outside Lublin, Poland, from October 7 to 10. He intercut long tracking shots of the silent, overgrown camps with black-and-white archival photographs and film. Sources included Polish and Soviet newsreels, footage from the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, and Allied liberation footage, including British film of bulldozers at Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. French, British, and German military archives did not supply material.41 Chris Marker helped Cayrol shape the narration to the rhythm of the images. The actor Michel Bouquet spoke it in a deliberately flat, unemphatic voice. The score is by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, a communist, and a refugee from Nazism. Eisler worked in Hollywood until the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of 1947 led to his deportation from the United States in 1948. He later composed the East German national anthem.42 He arrived in Paris on November 30, 1955 and wrote the score under great time pressure. It was recorded on December 19, conducted by Georges Delerue. Eisler's music often works in counterpoint to the images: restrained, even lyrical, where one expects horror. Critics have read this as a refusal of melodrama and a way of keeping the viewer thinking rather than merely reacting.43 The finished film runs thirty-two minutes.
8.3 Censorship and controversy
Two controversies surrounded the release. First, the French censorship board objected to a photograph from the Pithiviers internment camp in the Loiret department, south of Paris, France (some accounts say Beaune-la-Rolande, its sister camp). In it, a French gendarme guarding Jewish internees is identifiable by his képi. Faced with the threat of losing the film's last ten minutes, Resnais obscured the cap with a painted-in beam, a compromise he later described with grim amusement. The censors also sought cuts to shots of corpses. The original image was restored in later releases, including the 2003 Criterion DVD. The episode is now read as emblematic of postwar France's reluctance to confront Vichy's role in the deportation of Jews. That reluctance lasted officially until President Jacques Chirac's 1995 acknowledgment of state responsibility for the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup.44
Second, after the film was selected for the 1956 Cannes festival, the West German embassy asked that it be withdrawn, and the French government's selection authority complied. The result was an outcry in the French press, a threat of mass resignation by the selection committee, and protests from deportee associations. The film was finally screened out of competition at Cannes on April 29, 1956, coinciding with the national day of remembrance of the deportation. It won the Prix Jean Vigo. West Germany soon ordered a German-language version, translated by Paul Celan, and distributed it widely, including to schools.45
8.4 What the film does and does not say
The narration names Jews only once. In a list of ordinary people living their lives unaware that a place had been assigned to them, it mentions "Stern, étudiant juif d'Amsterdam," alongside a German worker, a Kraków merchant, and a schoolgirl from Bordeaux. Roma are not mentioned. The film blurs the distinction between concentration camps and killing centers. Its interpretive frame reflects the dominant French memory of the 1950s, which centered on resistance and political deportation and treated the Jewish catastrophe as one part of the "concentrationary universe." Sylvie Lindeperg, the film's principal historian, cautions against anachronistic judgment. The images of Birkenau and Majdanek, the piles of hair and belongings, and the deportation footage from Westerbork plainly show the destruction of the Jews, and the film has repeatedly been used in France against antisemitism. It was broadcast on all three national channels after the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, France, in 1990.46
The film also repeats claims of its time that later scholarship revised. Its closing line, "Neuf millions de morts hantent ce paysage" ("Nine million dead haunt this landscape"), reflects 1950s estimates of total camp deaths, not current figures. Its line "avec les corps on veut fabriquer du savon" ("with the bodies they want to make soap") repeats a wartime rumor; historians regard large-scale production of soap from human fat as a myth, apart from possible isolated experiments. Students who hear these points flagged beforehand are less likely to be confused, or to be exploited later by deniers who seize on such errors.47
The narration's ending speaks directly to this unit's argument. Over a retreating shot of the ruined gas chambers, Cayrol asks (my translation of the French), "Who among us keeps watch from this strange observation post to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Do they really have a different face from ours?" (The deck quotes the widely circulated subtitle, "Are their faces really different from our own?") He goes on to indict "we who pretend to believe that all this belongs to a single time and a single country, and who do not think to look around us, and who do not hear the endless cry."48 Cayrol's "single time and single country" is almost exactly this unit's "taught in isolation." The question about the executioners' faces is the question of Reserve Police Battalion 101.
8.5 Teaching the film
The deck introduces the film in two slides: CA, on the film and its makers (France, 1955, 32 minutes; Resnais, Cayrol, Eisler), and CB, on what to watch for and the film's limits (the content warning, the near-absence of Jews from the narration, the blurring of concentration camps and killing centers, the nine-million figure and the soap line, the censored képi, and the closing question about the executioners' faces). The schedule gives the film a full block, which suits it: the film's power lies in its rhythm and in the long alternation of past and present. Students should be told that real footage of the dead appears, especially in the final third (the Bergen-Belsen bulldozer sequence), and that looking away is acceptable. Reception history offers a useful discussion thread. The film was criticized in Israel in 1956 for its universalism, at a time when France criticized nothing of the kind. It has been praised by filmmakers from François Truffaut to Michael Haneke for refusing to manipulate its audience. Critics in a 2014 Sight and Sound poll ranked it the fourth-best documentary of all time.49
Notes
1. Plautus, Asinaria 495, in Plautus, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo, Loeb Classical Library 60 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), Epistle Dedicatory to William, Earl of Devonshire, in On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Renzo Tosi, "Homo homini lupus: da Plauto a Erasmo a Hobbes," Eikasmós 19 (2008). Translation of the Plautus line is my own. [back]
2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), chap. 12, "Totalitarianism in Power," sec. 3, "Total Domination"; pp. 458–59 in the edition cited in the course notes. [back]
3. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Bauer's position is paraphrased. [back]
4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), Conclusion. [back]
5. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02 (Phnom Penh, November 16, 2018); ECCC, Case 001 (Kaing Guek Eav alias Duch), Supreme Court Chamber Appeal Judgement, February 3, 2012. [back]
6. Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission, "About the Commission," State of Illinois, accessed October 28, 2026, https://hgc.illinois.gov/about-the-commission.html; Illinois Public Act 094-0478 (2005). [back]
7. Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). [back]
8. Heinrich von Treitschke, "Unsere Aussichten," Preussische Jahrbücher 44, no. 5 (November 1879): 559–76, excerpt in German History in Documents and Images (GHDI), German Historical Institute, Washington, DC; Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Antisemitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). [back]
9. "Antisemites' Petition (1880–81)," GHDI, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, accessed October 28, 2026. [back]
10. I. Michael Aronson, "The Attitudes of Russian Officials in the 1880s toward Jewish Assimilation and Emigration," Slavic Review 34, no. 1 (1975): 1–18; Anastasiia Strakhova, "Unexpected Allies: Imperial Russian Support of Jewish Emigration at the Time of Its Legal Ban, 1881–1914," Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 20 (2021); "Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich," Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007). [back]
11. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), "Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country" and "Germany: Jewish Population in 1933," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
12. USHMM, "Nuremberg Laws," Holocaust Encyclopedia; Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). [back]
13. USHMM, "Kristallnacht," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
14. USHMM, "Hitler's Reichstag Speech," Holocaust Encyclopedia, timeline event, January 30, 1939 (translation as given there). [back]
15. Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004); Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). [back]
16. USHMM, "Wannsee Conference and the 'Final Solution'" and "Wannsee Protocol," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
17. USHMM, "What Were Ghettos During the Holocaust?," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
18. USHMM, "Nazi Killing Centers: An Overview," Holocaust Encyclopedia, media caption on deportations from the Łódź ghetto. [back]
19. USHMM, "Warsaw," Holocaust Encyclopedia; USHMM, "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?," Holocaust Encyclopedia, last edited September 26, 2023. [back]
20. USHMM, "Warsaw"; USHMM, "Janusz Korczak," Holocaust Encyclopedia; USHMM, "What Were Ghettos During the Holocaust?," caption on the Gehsperre action. [back]
21. USHMM, "The Oneg Shabbat Archive," Holocaust Encyclopedia; Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). [back]
22. USHMM, "Mass Shootings of Jews during the Holocaust," Holocaust Encyclopedia, last edited August 31, 2021. [back]
23. Ibid. The photographs of Lubny, Liepāja, Ivanhorod, and Mizocz are credited in the deck to Johannes Hähle (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung), Carl Strott (Bundesarchiv/USHMM), an unknown photographer (Historical Archives, Warsaw), and the USHMM Photo Archives (the Mizocz ravine photograph by Gustav Hille). [back]
24. Ibid.; USHMM, "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?"; Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). [back]
25. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), chaps. 1, 7–8, 18 (chap. 7 for the evening at Biłgoraj); Browning, "One Day in Józefów: Initiation to Mass Murder," in The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 169–83; USHMM Library catalog summary of Ordinary Men (figures of 1,800 Jews, 1,500 shot, at least 38,000 shot and 45,000 deported, 83,000 total); David Silberklang, seminar paper (PDF), Yad Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies, yadvashem.org (500 men, 12 stepped forward); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). [back]
26. USHMM, "Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4," Holocaust Encyclopedia, last edited March 17, 2026; Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). [back]
27. USHMM, "Nazi Killing Centers: An Overview," last edited September 15, 2026. [back]
28. Ibid. [back]
29. USHMM, "Auschwitz," Holocaust Encyclopedia, last edited September 15, 2026; USHMM, "Killing Centers: An Overview" (earlier edition) and "Gassing Operations," Holocaust Encyclopedia. [back]
30. USHMM, "Auschwitz." [back]
31. USHMM, "What Were Ghettos During the Holocaust?," section on Hungary. [back]
32. USHMM, oral history biography of Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, in "Nazi Killing Centers: An Overview"; Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, "World Mourns Fritzie Fritzshall, Auschwitz Survivor and Innovator in Holocaust Education" (June 2021). [back]
33. USHMM, "Auschwitz." [back]
34. Ibid. [back]
35. Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, "Crematorium Chimney" (Stop Denial series) and "Gas Chamber I," accessed October 28, 2026, https://www.auschwitz.org/en/. [back]
36. USHMM, "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?"; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). [back]
37. USHMM, "How Many People did the Nazis Murder?" [back]
38. Sylvie Lindeperg, "Night and Fog": A Film in History, trans. Tom Mes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Peter Cowie, "Night and Fog: Origins and Controversy," The Criterion Collection, June 23, 2003. [back]
39. KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen, Mauthausen-Erinnerungen 3: Jean Cayrol; Amicale de Mauthausen, "Jean Cayrol (1911–2005)." [back]
40. USHMM, "Night and Fog Decree," Holocaust Encyclopedia; "Directives for the Prosecution of Offences Committed within the Occupied Territories against the German State or the Occupying Power, of December 7th, 1941," Nuremberg document L-90, in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946), Avalon Project, Yale Law School. [back]
41. Lindeperg, "Night and Fog"; Ewout van der Knaap, ed., Uncovering the Holocaust: The International Reception of "Night and Fog" (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). [back]
42. Hanns Eisler, Film Music to "Nuit et brouillard," ed. Knud Breyer and Oliver Dahin, Hanns Eisler Gesamtausgabe, ser. VI, vol. 23 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2014), introduction; "Deportation Near for Hanns Eisler," New York Times, February 7, 1948. [back]
43. Eisler, Film Music, introduction; van der Knaap, Uncovering the Holocaust. [back]
44. Lindeperg, "Night and Fog"; Cowie, "Origins and Controversy"; "Le képi entraperçu… Nuit et brouillard d'Alain Resnais," 24 images (Érudit). [back]
45. Cowie, "Origins and Controversy"; "'Film Diplomacy': The Controversy about Night and Fog (1956)," GHDI; van der Knaap, Uncovering the Holocaust. [back]
46. Jean Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (narration text), Musée de la Résistance de Châteaubriant, PDF transcription; Lindeperg, "Night and Fog"; van der Knaap, Uncovering the Holocaust. [back]
47. Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (narration text); on the soap rumor, see Yad Vashem's published statements and Daniel Panneton, "The Soap Myth," Literary Review of Canada, May 2019. [back]
48. Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (narration text). English translation mine; published subtitles vary. [back]
49. Nitzan Lebovic, "An Absence with Traces: The Reception of Nuit et Brouillard in Israel," in van der Knaap, Uncovering the Holocaust, 86–105; "Silent Film Tops Documentary Poll," BBC News, August 1, 2014. [back]