Holocaust

• Nature of the Task

• Impact– demographic– qualitative destruction– the State of Israel???

Holocaust History

• how does it differ from World War II history?

• what are its tasks?• impact on Jewish identity has been both

immediate and slow:– war against the Jews aimed at extermination– theological -- is there religious significance?– world reaction; nature of international power

Stage I (1933-39)

• Jan. 30, 1933 Nazis come to power

• c. 500,000 Jews within 65,000,000

• April 1, 1933 mass boycott

• April 4, 1933 eliminated from civil service

• April 22, 1933 social security eliminated

• April 26, 1933 quotas in schools

Cont.

• May 10, 1933 book burning

• Sept. 15, 1935 Nuremberg Laws revoke emancipation

• 1938 Aryanization of Jewish corporations

• Anschluss imposes all laws in Austria

Kristallnacht

• 1938 Polish Jews expelled and forced into detention centers

• November 6, 1938. Hershel Grynspan kills Ernest von Rath in Paris

• November 9-10, 1938. Anti-Jewish rampage in Germany. Night of the Broken Glass. Burnings, arrests and beatings

Jewish Reaction

• 160,000 flee– restrictions in Palestine, America, elsewhere

• creation of independent schools and self-help organization

• suicide

Final Solution

• not officially adopted until 1941 period of total war

Ghettoization

• Warsaw: 1940 500,000 in 1500 buildings• questions of Jewish leadership

• Chaim Rumkowski (Lodz) Adam Czerniakow (Warsaw)

• this is not the pre-modern ghetto• stages: segregation; strangulation;

deportation and liquidation• illusory continuity of normalcy

Jewish Reactions

• the Jews don’t know how to react to this unprecedented institution

• initial hope of status quo gives way to snatching at any hope

• traditional philosophy of patience is abandoned only gradually

• most enlightened are the least able to cope

Passivity?

• ability to react is clear

• experience misleads

• passive restraint

• active demoralization by Germans

• this issue remains as a defining topic in later years

Ghettoization (cont.)

• education; medical research

• inversion of values; smuggling is necessary to survive

• competing leadership centers; youth movements

• Ghetto humor (“Hitlerplatz”)

Jewish Response

• organization in the ghettos

• inversion of moral code and predictability

• partisans

• tradition of survival are now useless

Massive Exterminations

• 1941 Russian invasion: Einsatzgruppen– (cf. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men, and

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners)

• death camps– Chelmno 1941– Auschwitz 1942 etc

Concentration Camps

• loss of personality– Bruno Bettelheim, “Individual and Mass

Behavior in Extreme Situations” – Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz and The

Truce

• invention of a rhetoric of suffering and dignity -- “lest we forget”

Concentration Camps (cont.)

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

Power and Survival

• odd cases of Bulgaria, Finland and Denmark

• could this have been extended?

• internal affair

• UN commission for Refugees

• international commission 1938

• 1939 white paper

• 1938 32-power conference; no quota revision

• Britain– 1941 Stürmer sunk– neutrality between Jews and Arabs– Dec. 17, 1942 Parliament stands in silence

• April 1943 Bermuda conference