5.1.1 Wartime lunacy

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En provenance du cours de University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

130 notes

University of California, Santa Cruz

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry

130 notes

The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.

À partir de la leçon

Witness to trauma

In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the invasion of the Soviet Union, Thomas Kenneally’s Schindler’s List, and questions of witnessing. Guest speaker Dora Sorell shares her own experience of the Holocaust.

5.1.1 Wartime lunacy6:57

5.1.2 Einsatzgruppen, part 113:51

5.1.3 Einsatzgruppen, part 214:34

5.1.4 Pogroms in the east7:25

5.1.5 Forms of resistance17:44

Rencontrer les enseignants

Murray Baumgarten
Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter Kenez
Professor Emeritus
History

First I want to talk about the German institutions,

that is, the perpetrators.

Then secondly, I will talk about the behavior of the surrounding population.

That is, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians,

Ukrainians, Yellow Russians, or what have you.

And finally, I will want to talk about the victims.

Jewish behavior, including the extent of resident resistance and

Jewish participation in partisan movements.

So this is my outline.

I think we can find turning points in this history,

which we can date fairly precisely.

So I mentioned before, French Revolution, then Hitler taking power,

beginning of the Second World War in September 1939.

And then perhaps the most important turning point is June 22nd,

1941, German attack on the Soviet Union.

And my argument was, my argument is that for

extermination, there had to be the background, a war.

But not wars are all alike, there is war and then there is war.

It seems to me what happened between 1939 and

1941 was a kind of prelude, but

the real war when we are talking about millions,

enormous armies moving in large territories.

And people are dying by the millions.

That really began only in 1941, and

we can precisely date that this is the moment when mass killing of Jews began.

In the course of the 1930s a large number of Jews died,

but we are still talking about maybe a few thousand or hundred, few hundred.

It's very difficult to come up with numbers.

Now from 1939 to 1941, the Polish ghettos,

the ghettos in Poland, had among other purposes,

killing people, killing people inadvertently, so to speak.

Not feeding them properly, exposing them in circumstances,

but the Nazis knew that many of them would die, but this is one thing.

And this is all together different when you actually

begin to shoot people, shoot people by the thousands.

Now the Nazi undertaking.

It seems to me that the Nazi undertaking was not merely from the point

of view of humanity is something all together revolting, and

I'm sure that there is nobody here who would not agree with me.

But also, and this is, I like to emphasize, this was lunatic.

It was crazy, I mean the business was crazy.

The Nazis started the war with their magnificent army,

which was capable of doing blitzkrieg.

That is, well disciplined, well led armies move very quickly.

But that will last only for a few months.

The Nazis were not prepared for the war, which they actually fought.

The Nazis were not prepared for the war because they didn't have normal war aims.

One cannot imagine the Nazis winning the war because what would this have meant?

I mean, where are they going to stop?

Not only where are they going to stop,

but also they were not prepared for the war.

They were not prepared for the war,

which they should have foreseen that they would have to fight,

but the lunacy is that they were influenced by their own worldview.

What I mean by their own worldview is that Jews and Bolsheviks are the same.

The Bolshevik regime is bound to collapse,

just by, have to, just to give them a little push.

Well, this did not happen, because the Jews and

the Bolsheviks were not the same.

That is, your ideology makes it impossible for

you to look at the world as is, and

the examples of lunacy are all over, I mean really.

All right, you have this worldview according to which races differ and

the strong owes nothing to the weak, and

it is indeed the strong should eliminate the weak and what have you.

I think that Michael Thaler's lecture, his talk,

was really very important for us, for

our understanding of what we are talking here.

Namely his stress that we must put

the Holocaust Nazi Jewish policies

into the larger context of race,

of Nazi understanding of race.

But even if you accept the Nazi mentality of eugenics,

picking on the Jews from their own point of view was a bad idea.

I mean to activate, to bring about what they wanted to,

namely the glory of the German race and expansion of the German Lebensraum.

The way you go about it is not to kill a very valuable

part of your population who was completely unable,

incapable of doing any damage to whatever German aims were.

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