Narrative Script | Professor Steven Austin

PHIL 210 World Religions · Richland Community College

Spoken script (Steven Austin), revised to match the revised Reveal.js deck

Main lecture: about 30 minutes spoken. The Pierian Spring section is required independent study for students. Cue key: a bold slide cue with the slide letter and title comes before each passage; advance to that slide when you reach it. [PAUSE] marks a moment for students to think before you go on. [POP-UP] marks a pop-up box on the slide; its text is at the end of this script.

THE LECTURE

Opening: man is a wolf to man

[SLIDE A — Man's Inhumanity to Man (title)]

Before I say anything else, look at the three words under the title. Homo homini lupus. It's Latin, and it means "man is a wolf to man."

[SLIDE B — Man is a wolf to man.]

That line is old. It goes back more than two thousand years, to the Roman comic playwright Plautus, and some eighteen hundred years later the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes picked it up again to describe what human beings are capable of when nothing holds them back. That line is the question behind everything we are about to see. Is it true? Are we wolves to one another? And if we are, what does that say about human nature, about God, about us?

[SLIDE D — The century of progress. The century of genocide.]

The twentieth century has truly witnessed remarkable achievements in human progress: medicine, sanitation, transportation, communication. Someone born in 1900 could live to see airplanes, antibiotics, radio, television, and men walking on the moon. On the left is Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the Moon, July 1969. On the right is the railway into Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland. Same century. The dark underbelly of that progress has been a toll of mass killing and genocide. In fact, the twentieth century can fairly be called the century of genocide. Violence and atrocity are nothing new. What was new was that never before did mankind have the technology and the organization to kill on such a huge scale. The Holocaust is only one egregious example.

[SLIDE E — Everyone has studied the Holocaust.]

The Holocaust, of course, is so well known that it hardly needs an introduction. In Illinois, I can count on almost every student having two or three lessons on the Holocaust somewhere in their education. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written: biographies, histories, memoirs like Primo Levi's and Viktor Frankl's. Many movies have made the Holocaust their main story line.

[SLIDE H — Two unbearable consequences]

The Holocaust is usually taught alone, in isolation, and that has two unbearable consequences.

First, learning the Holocaust in isolation leaves the impression that it was sui generis, a Latin phrase that means "one of a kind." An aberration of human history and human nature. We should learn and remember it to honor those who suffered and died. But if it was a freak event, there is nothing to learn from it, and we can go on comfortably believing that human nature is good. The undeniable fact is that man's inhumanity to man is an aspect of human nature, and until we understand that, or at least come to terms with it, we cannot hope to understand these atrocities, much less prevent them.

Second, it gives a pass to communist and other atrocities. Nazism was tried at Nuremberg and thoroughly discredited. Nothing of the sort happened for communism. There was never an international tribunal for the crimes of Soviet communism. In Cambodia, a court finally convicted a few aging Khmer Rouge leaders, more than thirty years after the killing fields. And in my view, communism as an ideology was never discredited the way Nazism was. That's why we see the sickening display of Che Guevara posters and the hammer and sickle on T-shirts, and politicians and their followers calling for socialism, while nobody would dream of wearing a swastika.

[PAUSE] Ask yourself honestly: why does one of those symbols feel unthinkable and the other one feel like fashion? Hold onto your answer.

Part One · Words

[SLIDE K — Part One · Words: Before Hitler: The "Jewish Question"]

Lets start with words, because the Holocaust began with ideas long before it began with weapons. This is a picture of the New Synagogue in Berlin, Germany, finished in the 1860s, at a time when many German Jews believed they had finally found a home. To see how that hope was destroyed, we have to start long before Hitler was born. The Holocaust is a story that moves along a path of words, to laws, to walls, to bullets, to gas.

[SLIDE M — Nationalism: one people, one state]

The long story behind the Holocaust is a story of Jews scattered across Europe after the Roman era, and of centuries of Christian hostility toward them. The modern chapter begins with something new.

Beginning in the late 1700s, the Jewish Diaspora came into conflict with something new in Europe: nationalism. The older world was a world of empires and kingdoms, where a king ruled many different peoples. Nationalism is the belief that each people, each nation or ethnicity, should have its own state. The woman on the screen is Germania, the German nation pictured as one person, with a sword, the black, red, and gold flag, and broken chains at her feet. She was painted in 1848, in a hurry, for the first all-German parliament, which met in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, Germany, and she hung above the speaker's podium. The painting is attributed to Philipp Veit, and here's a detail worth remembering: Veit was a grandson of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and he had been baptized a Catholic as a young man.

But if the state and the people are now one and the same, what do you do with a people who have a different religion, a different history, and, so their neighbors suspected, a different loyalty? That became known as "the Jewish Question."

At first it was asked in a hopeful way. In 1781 an official in Prussia, the leading German kingdom, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, wrote a book arguing that Jews could become good citizens if they were given equal rights. In 1791, revolutionary France gave its Jews full citizenship. In 1843 a German writer, Bruno Bauer, published an essay simply titled The Jewish Question, and the phrase stuck. By the end of the nineteenth century there were hundreds of pamphlets, articles, and books proposing "solutions."

[SLIDE N — "The Jews are our misfortune."]

And by the late nineteenth century, the Jewish Question had taken on a decidedly antisemitic tone. Increasingly, Jews were seen as a stumbling block to national identity, an enemy within. And notice the shift: the complaint was no longer mainly about religion. A Jew could be baptized and still be called a Jew. The hatred had become racial.

In 1879 a German journalist named Wilhelm Marr founded a "League of Antisemites," and his writing helped make the word "antisemitism" popular. That same year one of Germany's most respected historians, Heinrich von Treitschke, wrote a sentence that would echo for more than sixty years: "The Jews are our misfortune." The Nazis later printed it across the bottom of the front page of their weekly hate paper, Der Stürmer. Look at the photograph. This is Berlin's Sportpalast on August 15, 1935. The man speaking is Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer, and the banner on the balcony reads "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" Treitschke's sentence, fifty-six years later, in front of a packed hall.

Go back to the 1880s. In 1880 and 1881, German antisemites gathered roughly 265,000 signatures on a petition to Chancellor Bismarck. They demanded limits on Jewish immigration and wanted Jews kept out of positions of authority and out of teaching. More broadly, antisemites called for legislation to "de-Jewify" the press, education, culture, and the economy, and they condemned marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

[SLIDE O — Pogroms. Then laws. Then millions leave.]

In the Russian Empire it was worse. After a wave of mob violence against Jews in 1881, called pogroms, the government passed laws restricting where Jews could live and study. A remark is often attributed to one of the Tsar's most powerful advisers, Konstantin Pobedonostsev: that one-third of Russia's Jews would convert, one-third would emigrate, and one-third would die out. Historians aren't sure he ever said it in those words, and the versions differ. But the fact that people believed he did tells you what Jews in Russia felt was coming. Millions of them left. Many came to America.

[PAUSE] Notice what has happened to the question itself. When you call a group of human beings a "question," or a "problem," what have you already decided about them?

Part Two · Laws

[SLIDE P — Part Two · Laws: From Words to Laws]

Part Two is about laws: what happens when people who believe those words take over a government. So by the time Hitler came to power in Germany, antisemitism and the Jewish Question had a long history. He was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933. There were about 523,000 Jews in Germany, less than one percent of the population.

[SLIDE Q — The staircase: Germany, 1933–1935]

Now watch how fast the staircase goes down. April 1, 1933: a national boycott of Jewish shops; you just saw the stormtroopers at a Woolworth store in Berlin with their signs, "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews!" A week later, a law pushes Jews out of the civil service. September 1935: the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were no longer citizens, and marriage between Jews and other Germans was forbidden. This chart was printed to explain who counted as a Jew, and notice that it counts grandparents, not beliefs. Step by step the Nazis excluded Jews from German economic, social, and cultural life and pressured them to emigrate.

[SLIDE R — Herschel Grynszpan, 17]

Then came the fall of 1938. Germany expelled some 17,000 Jews of Polish citizenship across the border into Poland, many of them born in Germany. One expelled couple had a seventeen-year-old son living in Paris, France, Herschel Grynszpan. When he heard what had happened to his family, he walked into the German embassy and shot a German diplomat. The Nazis had their excuse.

[SLIDE S — Kristallnacht]

On November 9 and 10, 1938 came Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." Nazi leaders staged what they wanted to look like a spontaneous riot. More than 1,400 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Jewish homes and shops were smashed. About 26,000 Jewish men were thrown into concentration camps for no reason except that they were Jewish. And then the government fined the Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks for the damage that had been done to them.

[SLIDE T — January 30, 1939]

Eleven weeks later, on January 30, 1939, Hitler stood before the German parliament and said this: "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."

Seven months later, Germany started that world war.

[SLIDE U — Wannsee: 15 officials. 11 million Jews.]

World War II gave the Nazis the pretext for what they called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Listen to that phrase. Final. The apocalyptic tone is unmistakable. They intended the annihilation of the entire Jewish people. In January 1942, fifteen senior officials met at a lakeside villa in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, Germany, to coordinate it. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy, chaired the meeting. The figure on the table was eleven million Jews, every Jew in Europe, including in countries Germany hadn't even conquered. The minutes were taken by a mid-level SS officer named Adolf Eichmann, the man who organized the trains.

Part Three · Walls

[SLIDE V — Part Three · Walls: Behind the Walls]

Part Three is about walls. Before the Nazis killed Poland's Jews, they caged them, and for hundreds of thousands the cage itself was enough to kill. The sign on the screen says it plainly: "Ghetto! Epidemic danger. Entry forbidden."

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe, more than three million people. Under the pretext that Jews were a threat to Germany, the occupiers confined them to ghettos, sealed-off sections of cities, often walled, always guarded. The first was created that October. Before long there were more than a thousand. And the Germans later deported tens of thousands of Jews from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia into them.

[SLIDE W — Warsaw, Poland]

Take Warsaw, the capital of Poland. More than 400,000 people were squeezed into about one and a third square miles, roughly seven people to a room, behind a wall almost ten feet high. In 1941 the average food ration in the Warsaw ghetto came to about 1,100 calories a day.

[SLIDE X — "Children starving to death."]

The Germans ran each ghetto through a Jewish council, a Judenrat, forced to carry out German orders. [POP-UP: Jewish councils] Imagine that job. The head of the Warsaw council, an engineer named Adam Czerniaków, wrote three words in his diary in May 1941: "Children starving to death." Both photographs on the screen were taken in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941.

[SLIDE Y — Warsaw ghetto, 1941: 83,000 dead of hunger and disease]

These children are standing in front of a bakery on Nowolipki Street in the Warsaw ghetto, in May 1941, photographed by a German propaganda company. Between 1940 and the summer of 1942, about 83,000 Jews died of hunger and disease in the Warsaw ghetto alone. Across Poland and eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands died this way.

[SLIDE BX — Children on Mariańska Street (full-bleed photograph)]

Look at their faces. These are children on Mariańska Street in the Warsaw ghetto, in German-occupied Poland, photographed in 1941. That year the average Jew in the ghetto lived on about 1,100 calories a day. Jewish welfare organizations inside the walls, financed until late 1941 mainly by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, tried to keep a starving population alive.

[PAUSE] Let the picture sit for a moment before moving on.

[SLIDE BY — Over the wall]

The official rations were not enough to keep anyone alive. What kept the death rate from climbing even higher was smuggling: food and medicine carried into the ghetto over the wall, through holes in it, and past the gates. Children often did it. Hunger changed family roles, and in many families a child became the one who brought food home for parents, brothers, and sisters. It was dangerous: smugglers who were caught could be shot.

[SLIDE BZ — Behind the wire]

The Germans sealed the ghetto in November 1940 behind a brick wall almost ten feet high, topped with barbed wire and closely guarded. Its borders did not stay fixed. This is Krochmalna Street in 1941: after the ghetto border was changed, barbed wire was strung down the middle of the street. On one side, the ghetto; on the other, the rest of the city.

[SLIDE AA — July 22, 1942: 265,000 from Warsaw to Treblinka]

The ghettos were never meant to last. In the summer of 1942, starting on July 22, about 265,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to a place called Treblinka, a killing center hidden in the woods about fifty miles northeast of the city. They were gathered here, at the Umschlagplatz, the deportation square. The Germans told them they were being "resettled in the East." Adam Czerniaków was ordered to supply the daily quotas. Instead, the next day, he took his own life.

[SLIDE BW — Janusz Korczak: He would not leave the children.]

Two weeks later, on August 5 or 6, 1942, the Germans came for the orphanage of Janusz Korczak, a doctor and one of Poland's best-loved children's authors. Friends had offered to hide him. He would not leave the children. He and his staff walked nearly two hundred orphans through the ghetto to the trains, and went with them to Treblinka.

[SLIDE AB — "Give me your children."]

In September, in the ghetto of Łódź, Poland's second-largest city, the Germans demanded the sick, the elderly, and children under ten. The head of that ghetto's council, Chaim Rumkowski, stood before the people and begged parents to give up their children, in the hope of saving the rest. About 15,000 people were taken to their deaths.

Part Four · Bullets

[SLIDE AD — Part Four · Bullets: The Holocaust by Bullets]

Part Four is about bullets. When most people picture the Holocaust, they picture trains and gas chambers, but before the first killing center in Poland was even running, Germans and their helpers had already shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, one ravine and one forest at a time. A word of care before I go on: the next slides are about mass shootings. No photograph I'll show you depicts a killing; you'll see belongings, a map, memorials, and the forest.

[SLIDE AE — Mobile killing squads]

On June 22, 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The army was told this would be a "war of annihilation" against the Nazis' racial and political enemies. Right behind the front lines came mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and thousands of other Germans and local helpers joined them. [POP-UP: Who did the shooting?] The map on the screen is the killers' own: each little coffin counts the Jews shot in that region. By August 1941 they were no longer killing only Jewish men. They were murdering whole communities: women, children, the old.

[SLIDE AF — What they left behind]

A massacre usually began when Jews were rounded up or ordered to report to a central place. They were marched or driven to a site outside town. If a pit had not already been dug, they were forced to dig one. They were stripped of their clothes and valuables and driven in groups to the edge, and they were shot. Families often had to watch their loved ones die before them. And this happened mostly in daylight, in full view and earshot of the neighbors. Afterward the killers tried to hide the graves. Many are still unmarked today, and some have never been found.

[SLIDE AG — Babyn Yar: 33,771]

At a ravine outside Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, a ravine called Babyn Yar, or Babi Yar, on September 29 and 30, 1941, the Germans and their helpers shot 33,771 Jews in two days. That number isn't an estimate. It comes from the killers' own report.

[SLIDE AH — Up to 2,000,000: nearly 1 in 3 victims]

Those shootings were resource-intensive. They needed many shooters and guards, guns, ammunition, trucks. And they wore on the shooters' nerves. So the Nazis developed gas vans, trucks with the engine exhaust piped into a sealed compartment. People were packed in and driven to a mass grave, and they suffocated on the way.

Altogether, as many as two million Jews were murdered in mass shootings and gas vans in the occupied East. That's nearly one-third of all the victims of the Holocaust, and it's the part most Americans have never heard about.

[SLIDE AI — Józefów: Reserve Police Battalion 101]

The killing by bullets did not stay in the Soviet Union. Before dawn on July 13, 1942, about five hundred German policemen climbed down from their trucks in Józefów, a village in German-occupied Poland. They were Reserve Police Battalion 101. Most were middle-aged family men from Hamburg, Germany: dockworkers, truck drivers, clerks, salesmen, too old to be drafted into the army. They had never done anything like what they were about to do.

Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, gathered them in a half-circle. His voice was choking, and there were tears in his eyes. He told them their orders came from above. The roughly 1,800 Jews of Józefów were to be rounded up. Several hundred working-age men would be sent to a labor camp. Everyone else, the women, the children, the elderly, was to be shot.

[SLIDE AJ — One stepped forward.]

Then Trapp made an extraordinary offer. 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 five hundred.

[SLIDE AK — About 1,500 men, women, and children. One day.]

The rest went to work. They went house to house and drove the Jews to the market square. Anyone too old or too sick to walk there was shot on the spot. The battalion doctor showed the men where to aim. Trucks carried the Jews to the edge of a forest outside the village. There each policeman was paired with one Jewish man, woman, or child, face to face, and walked that person into the trees. The victims were made to lie face down in a row. On command, the policemen shot them in the back of the neck from point-blank range. Then they walked back to the trucks for the next person. It went on all day and into the evening. Some men broke down. Some found ways to slip away. Most kept shooting. By nightfall about 1,500 Jews of Józefów lay dead in the forest. Major Trapp never went into the woods. Witnesses remembered him weeping.

[SLIDE AL — Ordinary Men: 16 months · 83,000]

That was their first day. Over the next sixteen months, this one battalion shot at least 38,000 Jews and put another 45,000 on trains to Treblinka. The historian Christopher Browning, who told their story from their own postwar testimony, called his book Ordinary Men.

[PAUSE] They had a choice, and they knew it. About a dozen men out of five hundred took it. Why didn't the others?

Part Five · Gas

[SLIDE AM — Part Five · Gas: The Killing Centers]

Part Five is about gas. Shooting was slow, expensive, and hard on the shooters, and it could never reach the Jews of western and southern Europe, so the Nazis turned to killing centers in German-occupied Poland, where railway lines like this one simply ended. But the method they used there was not invented for Jews. It was first tested inside Germany itself.

[SLIDE AN — First built for Germans with disabilities]

The Nazis' gas chambers were not first built for Jews. They were first built for Germans with disabilities, in a secret murder program called T4. [POP-UP: T4 and Nazi eugenics]

From 1940, doctors in Germany and Austria picked patients out of hospitals and asylums and sent them to gas chambers disguised as showers, at places like Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, the building on the screen. By August 1941 more than 70,000 had been murdered that way. Then the men who ran those gas chambers went east.

[SLIDE AO — The five killing centers]

Starting in late 1941 the Nazis built five killing centers whose only purpose was to murder Jews with poison gas. All five were in German-occupied Poland. The first gassings came at Chełmno on December 8, 1941. Then Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, staffed in part by T4 veterans. And Auschwitz-Birkenau, outside the Polish town of Oświęcim. From 1942 on, deportation trains came to those camps from across Europe: from Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, and Hungary.

At Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka almost no one was spared. Fewer than two hundred people survived all three camps together.

[SLIDE AP — Auschwitz: killing center and slave-labor camp]

Auschwitz was the largest, and it was different, because it was both a killing center and an enormous slave-labor camp. It began in 1940 as a prison for Polish political prisoners. Over its gate the SS put the words "Arbeit macht frei," "Work sets you free." In March 1942, mass gassing of Jews began at Birkenau. By the spring of 1943, Birkenau had four large gas chambers with crematoria in operation, and at the height of the deportations an average of about 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.

[SLIDE AQ — Selection]

When a train arrived, SS doctors stood on the platform and made a "selection." They had arrived after days in sealed freight cars, often without food or water, and some were already dead. Young, strong-looking people were picked for forced labor. Most of the others, mothers with small children, the elderly, the sick, were sent straight to the gas chambers. They were told they were going to shower. Those chosen to work were stripped, shaved, and given a striped uniform, and from 1942 a number was tattooed on their arm. From then on, that number replaced their name.

[SLIDE AR — Women and children from Subcarpathian Rus, May 1944 (silent beat)]

[PAUSE: no words. The on-screen content note reads "Women and children on their way to the gas chambers." Let the image stand in silence for a few seconds, then advance.]

[SLIDE AS — Hungary, 1944]

In the spring of 1944, Germany occupied its ally Hungary, and in less than two months, from mid-May to early July, about 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary, most of them to Auschwitz. The people on this ramp came from Subcarpathian Rus, a region Hungary had taken from Czechoslovakia, today part of Ukraine. The SS photographed them in May 1944, waiting for the selection.

[SLIDE AU — 200,000 Jews registered. About half died.]

Of the people selected for labor, many were worked to death: starved, beaten, infected, overworked. Of roughly 200,000 Jews registered as prisoners at Auschwitz, about half died in the camp.

[SLIDE AV — Auschwitz I gas chamber, 1941–1942]

This is the gas chamber and crematorium at the main camp, where the SS gassed people in 1941 and 1942. [POP-UP: Why parts of Auschwitz I were rebuilt] The great mass killing took place two miles away at Birkenau, where the SS blew up the gas chambers to hide the evidence before they fled.

[SLIDE AW — January 27, 1945]

At Auschwitz the Nazis murdered about 1.1 million people. About a million of them were Jews. As the Soviet army closed in, the SS burned records and drove tens of thousands of prisoners out on death marches through the January snow, shooting anyone who fell behind. Soviet soldiers reached the camp on January 27, 1945, and found about 7,000 prisoners still alive, many too sick to walk. That date is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

[SLIDE AY — 6,000,000]

By the end of World War II, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators had murdered six million Jews, about two of every three Jews in Europe. Roughly 2.7 million died in the killing centers. About two million in the shootings. Close to a million in ghettos and camps, from starvation, disease, and brutality. And at least a quarter million more were killed in riots, on death marches, in hiding. This is the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem: the faces of some of the victims above, and around the walls, pages of testimony, filled out by people who remembered their names.

[PAUSE]

THE PIERIAN SPRING · INDEPENDENT STUDY

Required reading for students after the lecture. Each story is on its slide under "Read the story"; the text below matches the slide. Review questions are quoted verbatim from the slides.

[SLIDE BP — The Pierian Spring · Independent Study]

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." (Alexander Pope)

Today's lecture ends here, but the history doesn't, and this part is required, not extra. Continue on your own: first, five slides of recommended documentaries (choose at least one and watch it); then the seven stories below finish this chapter's history, from how the "Jewish Question" became racial to how the people of the Warsaw ghetto wrote and fought back. Five end with a review question to answer; stories 5 and 6, on the Warsaw ghetto, deepen story 4 and share its question.

[SLIDE CL — Pierian Spring, Recommended Documentaries 1 of 5: Watch the camps: then and now]

Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) (1956 · Alain Resnais · 32 min · French, English subtitles). Ten years after liberation, Resnais filmed the empty grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek in colour and cut them against black-and-white wartime footage. One of the first films about the camps, it asks whether such horrors could happen again. Where to watch (US): Criterion Channel · HBO Max · rent on Amazon or Apple · free through library Kanopy · all options. Content note: Graphic: real footage of the dead and of bulldozed mass graves.

Horrors of the Holocaust (2023 · Danielle Winter (UK) · 50 min · TV-14). Survivors, among them Eva Schloss and Manfred Goldberg, and historians Guy Walters and Lisa Pine trace Nazi eugenics and the medical experiments carried out on prisoners. Where to watch (US): Free with ads on Tubi · Prime Video · all options. Content note: Disturbing descriptions and images of medical experiments.

[SLIDE CM — Pierian Spring, Recommended Documentaries 2 of 5: The liberation films]

Night Will Fall (2014 · André Singer · 75 min · narrated by Helena Bonham Carter). How Allied cameramen filmed the liberated camps in 1945, and why the British documentary made from their footage, with Alfred Hitchcock advising, was shelved for nearly 70 years. Where to watch (US): No US streaming right now: DVD only, or ask your library · check availability. Content note: Very graphic liberation footage.

Memory of the Camps (FRONTLINE) (1945 footage, completed 1985 · PBS FRONTLINE · 57 min · narrated by Trevor Howard). The unfinished 1945 British film itself, found in the Imperial War Museum and broadcast by FRONTLINE: what the soldiers found at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps. Watch it with Night Will Fall, or on its own. Where to watch (US): Free on PBS · FRONTLINE on YouTube. Content note: Very graphic: piles of corpses and mass burials.

[SLIDE CN — Pierian Spring, Recommended Documentaries 3 of 5: Survivors and bystanders]

The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022 · Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein · 3 episodes, about 6 hrs · TV-14). What Americans knew, and how quota laws, red tape and public indifference kept the door nearly shut to refugees fleeing Hitler, told through survivors who were children at the time. Where to watch (US): Free on PBS · all options. Content note: Some archival atrocity images.

The Last Days (1998 · James Moll (USC Shoah Foundation) · 87 min · PG-13 · Academy Award). Five Hungarian Jews tell how their lives were destroyed in 1944, when Hungary’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the last year of the war, and return to the places where it happened. Where to watch (US): Netflix · rent on Amazon or Apple · all options. Content note: Survivor testimony; some archival footage of the dead.

[SLIDE CO — Pierian Spring, Recommended Documentaries 4 of 5: Inside Auschwitz, and the children who escaped]

Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005 · Laurence Rees (BBC) · 6 episodes, about 50 min each · TV-14). The history of Auschwitz from its founding to liberation, built on interviews with survivors and with former SS men, with dramatized scenes from the documents. Where to watch (US): Free with ads on The Roku Channel · BritBox · all options. Content note: Dramatized reconstructions; perpetrators speak on camera.

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000 · Mark Jonathan Harris · 122 min · PG · Academy Award). In the nine months before the war, about 10,000 mostly Jewish children were sent alone to Britain. They, their rescuers and a surviving parent tell what it meant to be saved and to lose their families. Where to watch (US): Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, Fandango · all options. Content note: Emotional, but little graphic content.

[SLIDE CP — Pierian Spring, Recommended Documentaries 5 of 5: Going back: witnesses at the sites]

Kitty: Return to Auschwitz (1979 · Peter Morley (Yorkshire Television) · about 82–90 min). Kitty Hart-Moxon, prisoner 39934 as a teenager, walks through Birkenau with her son and explains, place by place, how the camp worked and how she survived. Where to watch (US): Vimeo On Demand (Concord Media). Content note: Harrowing spoken detail; little graphic imagery. Older picture quality.

Shoah (watch excerpts) (1985 · Claude Lanzmann · 9 hrs 26 min · French, English subtitles). No archival footage at all: Lanzmann interviews survivors, bystanders and perpetrators at the sites of Chełmno, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Start with the barber Abraham Bomba or the Auschwitz escapee Rudolf Vrba. Where to watch (US): Philo · Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-ray · rent on Amazon · all options. Content note: Emotionally intense testimony; not graphic.

Streaming catalogs change. If a link no longer works, check the RCC library’s Kanopy, or search the title on JustWatch.

[SLIDE BQ — Pierian Spring, Story 1 of 7: The Jewish Question becomes a racial question (1781–1881)]

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?

[SLIDE BR — Pierian Spring, Story 2 of 7: The first victims of the gas chambers]

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?

[SLIDE BS — Pierian Spring, Story 3 of 7: Ordinary men]

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?

[SLIDE BT — Pierian Spring, Story 4 of 7: Resistance: writing, fighting, surviving]

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.

[SLIDE Z — Pierian Spring, Story 5 of 7: They buried the truth in milk cans]

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.

[SLIDE AC — Pierian Spring, Story 6 of 7: The Warsaw ghetto rises]

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.

[SLIDE BU — Pierian Spring, Story 7 of 7: Unique, or unprecedented?]

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.

[SLIDE BV — Sources and image credits]

Not spoken. Sources on the slide: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia; Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (2003); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1 (1997); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (2007); Sylvie Lindeperg, "Night and Fog": A Film in History (2014); Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (2001); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988). Full notes and citations are in the companion essay, L1-holocaust-essay; image credits open from the button on the slide.

POP-UPS

Text of the pop-up boxes cued above with [POP-UP: …]. Students read these on the slide; they are not spoken.

Jewish councils (slide X)

In each ghetto the Germans appointed a Jewish council, a Judenrat (plural Judenräte), usually made up of respected community leaders. The councils had to carry out German orders: register residents, collect money and valuables, supply workers for forced labor, and keep order with a Jewish police force. They also tried to keep people alive, running soup kitchens, hospitals, orphanages, and schools. When the deportations began, the Germans demanded that councils produce lists and quotas of people to be sent away. Council leaders faced impossible choices. Some, like Adam Czerniaków in Warsaw, Poland, refused and took their own lives. Others, like Chaim Rumkowski in Łódź, Poland, complied in the hope that giving up some would save the rest. Few council members survived; the Germans murdered most of them along with the people they led. Historians today judge them with great caution, because no one chose the situation they were in.

Who did the shooting? (slide AE)

The Einsatzgruppen ("operational groups") were four mobile units, labeled A, B, C, and D, drawn from the SS Security Police and the SD, the SS intelligence service. Together they had about 3,000 men. They followed the German army into the Soviet Union in June 1941, with orders to kill Jews, communist officials, Roma, and others the Nazis called enemies. They were far too few to kill on the scale that followed alone. Battalions of the German Order Police, ordinary uniformed policemen, carried out many of the shootings. Units of the Waffen-SS and the regular German army took part or helped by rounding up victims, guarding 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. The killing needed many hands.

T4 and Nazi eugenics (slide AN)

Eugenics was a movement, popular in the early 1900s in many countries, including the United States, that claimed a nation could "improve" itself by controlling who was allowed to have children. The Nazis turned it into "racial hygiene," the belief that the German people had to be cleansed of anyone judged hereditarily "unfit." A 1933 law ordered the forced sterilization of people with conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, or deafness; about 400,000 were sterilized. In 1939 the regime moved to murder. Its secret program for killing disabled people in hospitals and institutions was code-named T4, after the address of its Berlin office, Tiergartenstrasse 4. The Nazis called it "euthanasia," a "mercy death," and spoke of "life unworthy of life." Between January 1940 and August 1941, about 70,000 people were killed in gas chambers at six centers in Germany and Austria. After protests the gassing stopped, but killing went on by drugs and starvation; in all, about 250,000 or more died. T4's gas-chamber methods and many of its staff then went to the killing centers in occupied Poland.

Why parts of Auschwitz I were rebuilt (slide AV)

The gas chamber and crematorium in the Auschwitz main camp (Auschwitz I) were used to murder people with poison gas in 1941 and 1942. (The very first gassing at Auschwitz, in September 1941, took place in the cellar of a prison block nearby.) When larger gas chambers opened at Birkenau, two miles away, the SS stopped using this one, and in 1944 they turned the building into an air-raid shelter, adding walls and blocking the roof openings through which the poison was poured. After the war, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum partly reconstructed the room, reopening roof holes and rebuilding two of the ovens from original parts. The museum says this openly. Holocaust deniers point to the reconstruction to claim that the gas chambers were a hoax. They were not. The evidence for mass gassing at Auschwitz comes from German documents, the ruins of the Birkenau gas chambers the SS blew up in 1945, physical evidence, and the testimony of survivors, of Polish witnesses, and of the SS men themselves, including the camp commandant.