good afternoon you can slowly get your seats can you hear me all okay my name is Nils Roma I'm the director of the a command center for Holocaust Studies and it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to the Alumni Center and to UT Dallas today's lecture marks yet another one of the famous angel lecture so it's not has gone to sleep here apparently which existed now for almost 20 years but I think today's lecture in many ways in our minds marks also what would have been very torturous and painful weekend considering the shooting that had occurred yesterday and it just made me realize this morning when I was I'm thinking about this that in lots of ways our worlds are so immensely connected that I wasn't and all surprised that amongst our faculty is actually a member of that synagogue in Pittsburgh who's taught here for many years math in the School of Engineering William permanently sits right there so our Walt's in other words are touched in unfortunate ways at times as we are once again this year honoring the memory of the Holocaust by the way of inviting yet another distinguished lecturer who will shortly address you but I think in the midst of this it's very easy at times to feel almost a little bit overwhelmed and I think a good way of thinking about our task and obligation to remember and to continue to study the past is to think about the Mishnah which says it is not upon us we are not obligated to complete the task but we're equally not freed to liberate ourselves from the burden from the task of remembrance so we have to understand that in many ways most of the things that we do in many of the things that we cherish are required of our ongoing attendance and of our ongoing engagement and therefore I'm all the more pleased to see as many of you here today you will have realized that we were hopeful but that you surprised us and therefore we had to open up the second part so thank you all for being here let me now welcome to this stage of the president of UT Dallas dr. Richard Benson thank you thank you nails wise words so good afternoon everyone and welcome to UT Dallas it is an honor to host this lecture series that is supported by endowment created sixteen years ago both the endowment in the series are named for Burton eins Brooke a chairman emeritus of the acronym Center Advisory Board and I believe he's here thank you [Applause] thank you dr. Heinz Brooke other special guests include the founder of the Holocaust Studies program the incomparable Susana Elspeth [Applause] let's see where was I we passed Board Chair mr. celli belowski he sees here somewhere [Applause] Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities Dennis Kratz [Applause] and executive vice president Hobson Wilton Thal most of you here are familiar this evening with the acraman senator for Holocaust Studies while the Ackerman's center has existed now it says 12 years I know it's longer than that programs in Holocaust Studies go back for more than three decades these programs owe their existence to the to the vision of dr. Oz faith she deserves much credit for using her personal journey as a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor to create a focus on the history and legacy of one of the most tragic epochs in world history sadly the lessons that our society should have learned from the Holocaust continue to challenge us and we at UT Dallas stand in solidarity with our friends in Pittsburgh it is important for me to publicly state that we respect diversity and we strive to be a campus that honors all people so we are indeed fortunate that dr. oz faith continues to teach and inspire us to shape a better future through a rigorous scholarship and community engagement thank you Judy Holocaust Studies at UT Dallas attract a broad range of university students including some that earn a certificate in Holocaust Studies the demographics of those who are part of the program mirror those of our broader university population UT Dallas is in the top 25 nationally for the most diverse student populations and you will find the same diversity among those enrolled in Holocaust Studies courses please indulge me as I highlight some additional points of pride about UT Dallas we have a few guests here we have been designated as r1 research institution by the Carnegie classification we are one of three public universities in Texas to be eligible for state support through the National University Research Fund we are the fourth fastest growing public doctoral university in the country this fall we have our largest student body twenty eight thousand seven hundred and fifty seven students and two-thirds are undergraduates we have a record freshman class three thousand eight hundred and sixty six and of those freshman 172 our National Merit Scholars a year ago when we had 152 that was the third largest total in the country so we're pretty sure we're still in a good spot and finally next year we will celebrate our 50th year as part of the University of Texas System in a moment I will turn over the program to dr. David Patterson but first I want to share a few things about our introducer dr. Patterson was previously a speaker at this very lecture in 2010 the university wisely brought him aboard as a Hillel a Feinberg chair in Holocaust Studies I also understand that he played football for the fame Permian High School Panthers the adesso team featured in the book Friday Night Lights so again to you all welcome to our campus and now it's my pleasure to invite dr. Patterson to the podium [Applause] thanks so much dr. Benson thank you for getting that part in about Odessa Permian High School that was I mean that's significant you wouldn't believe it but I play guard they were we were smaller back then anyway yes we have to the crucial matter at hand I just I also need to mention in the light of the events of yesterday in Pittsburgh the the importance of the Ackerman center for Holocaust Studies the things that we do we study not just the Holocaust but the the but anti-semitism ways in which the road to Auschwitz was haven't been you know we're paved so was paved and we we do have a unique Center here at UT Dallas in the Ackerman center for Holocaust Studies unique in the country and and I would say in the world one of the extraordinary things that we do is to have world-class scholars come to UT D for the inche Brook lecture series and if you look at the past scholars who have been here that tells you that I'm not exaggerating these are indeed world-class scholars and Peter Hayes is at the top of the with world-class scholars in Holocaust Studies today professor Hayes was the Theodore zy Holocaust educational foundation professor of Holocaust Studies emeritus at Northwestern University where he taught for 36 years he is the author or editor of 12 books there's the award-winning industry and ideology IG Farben and the nonce the era he's famous for his work with biannual conference called lessons and legacies he's published numerous collections out of lessons and legacies he's co-editor with John Roth of the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies he's also the editor of the anthology how was it possible a holocaust reader and his most recent book in print it's called why explaining the Holocaust which will be the subject of his remarks tonight and he's of course like all great scholars still working he's working on a volume with steven linder of munich called profits and persecution german big business in the third reich i should add that professor hayes is not only a noted award-winning scholar he's a noted award-winning teacher back today he had lunch with a former student who came all the way from austin to have lunch he's the winner of Northwestern University's highest honor for teachings the Charles Deering McCormack professorship of teaching excellence and he's won other several other awards for his outstanding teaching so it's all you know great an excellent to be among the great scholars but we also need great teachers Peter Hayes is to be counted among the great teachers he was here for a teacher's workshop for us in fact and finally just just this month I believe professor Hayes was received the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum National Leadership Award and since I know you came to hear professor Hayes I won't go through his whole CV which would take considerable amount of time but please join me to welcome Peter Hayes [Applause] thank you for your invitation and thank you all for coming as I was coming up to my retirement two years ago I realized I was in a position to write not only a new history of the Holocaust but a new kind of history of the Holocaust and I was in this position not because of any special genius on my part but because I had taught at Northwestern for 36 years and in 25 of those years I taught a course on the history of the Holocaust northwestern operates on something called the quarter system it should be called the drawn and quartered system what you have here is real college with semesters at Northwestern we have 11 week units three of them to teach a subject except it's not 11 weeks one week is reserved for final exams down to 10 another week is reserved for the students to do the reading that they should have been doing in the preceding weeks you're down to nine you got to give a midterm exam I had eight and a half weeks to teach the history of the Holocaust my whole educational career I operated on the semester system except for two years at Oxford where they have nine week terms but they don't do lectures at Oxford and it's all tutorials and it's an entirely different world so I came into this assignment in the late 1980s sort of trying to apply my past to my present function and that meant I kept trying to fit things I had studied in like 13 or 14 or 15 week units into 8 and a half weeks this is the proverbial blanket that is too small for the bed you pull it one way and your feet are cold you pull it the other way and your shoulders are cold so and this is a subject with long antecedents and a very complicated past and the subject itself is intricate and I had to try to fit this into eight and a half weeks well the first few years I floundered around and I had no idea quite how to do it so I failed in different ways in the first few years and then I suddenly realized I should do something I don't hope I'm not gonna offend anybody here I should do something that I don't necessarily normally recommend as a good practice I should listen to my students because in the first years I taught all the discussion sections myself so on every Friday afternoon I would do three or four of these and I would actually be able to ask people why are you taking this course what do you want to learn from this what do you expect to learn from this and I would get a series of things that they would tell me about and I realized after a while I wasn't real quick picking this up but I realized after a while that the central things they came into the class wanting to know were almost exactly the questions I got when I went out and talked to adult audiences about the Holocaust there was a tremendous overlap between these questions that they posed before they even started with the subject and the penny dropped and I said well that's what I should do organize each week around one of these questions that's how I can pack the material in a framework that will interest people that will allow me to get away from the sort of one event after another tell the story from beginning to end and fit it into eight and a half weeks what were the questions what did people keep asking me all the time why the Jews why was this group of people attacked so vehemently why the Germans if you had asked people in Europe in 1912 in 30 years what nationality in this country is in this on this continent is going to be killing Jews and burning their bodies the answer in the aftermath of the pogroms of the 1880s or the Dreyfus Affair would have been Russia or France very few people would have predicted Germany why murder if the attack on this group of people was to take place why did the nots want to kill them there are lots of other ways of getting getting rid of people you don't like why were they so successful we tend to think that the Holocaust killed two-thirds of the Jews of Europe six million out of nine million in 1939 in fact the German record was far worse than that the Germans killed between 75 and 80 percent of the Jews they ever got their hands on the other survivors are people who were out of their lines beyond their reach this is a remarkable quote-unquote accomplishment on their part and they did it in an incredibly compressed period of time half the victims of the Holocaust died in a period of eleven months from March of 1942 to February of 1943 over 3 million people three quarters of the victims of the Holocaust died between the invasion of Poland and the German surrender at Stalingrad so this is a remarkably rapid carnage carried out with remarkable efficiency how is that how is that possible why didn't use fight back this is of course the question that I found most upsetting in dealing with students because it's a question that comes out of living in a comfortable liberal society maybe it comes out of growing up in a state where the image of the Alamo is so powerful and we think human beings have the capacity to individually assert themselves against power so why didn't more Jews stand up how come the survival rates vary so much 75% of the Jews and the Netherlands were killed 25% of the Jews of France 95 percent of the Jews of Lithuania 20% of the Jews of Romania as of the beginning of the war why why is there so much variation why did youse get so little help how is it that the Nazi state was able to attack them with this kind of intensity and nobody virtually nobody came to their aid and finally what lessons and legacies are we to draw from this what what what is the the meaning of this subject for us in the contemporary world these are the eight questions that I gradually distilled out of what people said to me and what my students asked so I got to the ripe old age of seventy I was approaching the ripe old age of seventy and thinking maybe a course which I had shaped in this way would be useful to present to a wider audience and so this book why explaining the Holocaust is a book with eight chapters seven of the chapters are the same length and one of them has three sections instead of two that's the half in the eighth and a half weeks and I turned this course into a book in hopes that it would a might not loud enough it sounds like you're breaking up with me you think it's us not me okay I've used that line anyway I'm sorry I lost my train of thought anyway so I constructed this book with these eight and a half chapters and so forth and that's what is the now I'm bellowing okay better all right so I mean I can yell so what I did is I prepared I turned these this course into a book and now what I want to do with you this evening is to give you a flavor of I obviously can't go through all eight questions and so forth and you might go to sleep on me but I will give you a flavor of the argument in a sense of how I proceeded by looking at two central questions why were Jews killed and why didn't anybody stop it now the question why were Jews killed obviously goes back a very long way to a tradition in Christianity of regarding Jews as contaminating potentially undermining the faith of Christians after all Jews are the people who said no Christ came into the world with a promise of new revelation a new relationship with God and Jews are the people who said thank you very much we already have one and we do not wish to adopt the new one Christians then began to erect not immediately but over time began to erect a series of ways of keeping Jews at arm's length occupational restrictions residential restrictions the whole point of which was Jews must not be allowed to come into too close contact with Christians lest they undermine the faith of the Christians and this is a tradition that dominated Western history from the end of the Roman Empire roughly 400 in you know of the Common Era to roughly the end of the 18th century and beginning at the end of the 18th century rulers began to release Jews from all these restrictions that had been created the movement was called emancipation it began with the emperor of Austria in 1782 who declared that Jews should be made useful like all other citizens now from the point of view the emperor you know what useful meant taxable and so Jews should be released from all these restrictions so they could flourish and prosper like everyone else so that they could give off revenue for the state twenty years later the armies of the French Revolution now propelled by different motivations human rights individual freedom so forth the armies of the French Revolution spread across Europe and everywhere they opened the gates of the ghettos they tore down the restrictions on what Jews could do and where they could live and how they could be separated from the rest of the population now the movement that we nowadays call anti-semitism a word incidentally that didn't exist until 1879 the movement that we now call anti-semitism was a reaction against emancipation it was a political movement designed to put the Jews back in the boxes that they had been in why because freedom for some can mean losses for others Jews were now allowed to enter into society in a way that they never had been allowed to before and enter into means to compete to go to university and this if there's a limited number of university places and Jews can now take some of them there are people who feel that they are losing out Jews also were emancipated at a time of enormous economic change in which whole professions disappeared we tend to think of the Industrial Revolution as this great period of expansion of opportunity and so forth and it was and of rising incomes over time it was but whole categories of people lost their livelihoods how many of you know what a Cooper is I'm noticing that the younger people don't a Cooper is a barrel maker and it's a common name in English because there used to be lots of people who made barrels like a shoemaker the Industrial Revolution put these people out of business and so there was an audience out there for agitators who said things are going bad for you and you know why because things are going well for these newcomers these people who have been emancipated and who have new opportunities they are in some cases not all but in some cases they're flourishing and meanwhile you're not doing so well and these things are not just a correlation they're causally related the movement of 19th century anti-semitism was a movement that kept telling people who were who were losing out that we know why it's not because of some abstract process it's not cause of economic change it's not cuz factories have arisen and so on and so forth it's cuz they're doing this to you who benefits is the famous ad slogan of agitators cui bono and they would say anything going wrong for you is caused by the people who are doing well now this was the lifeblood of 19th century anti-semitism in every European country there were people who were only too quick to come forward and say we know what's ailing you and we know how to fix it we put these people back in a box and you will have the opportunities you used to have now the remarkable thing about this movement in the 19th century is it was loud it was vocal it was characteristic of virtually every European country it never went away and politically it was a marginal phenomenon no major anti-semitic agitator across the continent became a decisive leading political figure with the single exception of the Lord Mayor of Vienna Karl Luger who got elected in the 1890s and served for roughly twenty years but the year he got elected hu got elected to be the Lord Mayor of Budapest so there were counter examples and so forth there there was always enough of an audience for anti-semitism to be constant and vocal but not enough for it to succeed and a place where it was particularly vocal and particularly unsuccessful was Germany before World War one there were a host of anti-semitic political parties that came and went they never got more than 4% of the vote in a parliamentary election they never got more than 5% of the seats in parliament as of 1912 the last election before World War one flash forward 20 years 1932 Adolphe Hitler is getting 37% of the vote it's a long way from 5% what happened what makes this marginal political movement into suddenly a menacing force in German political life and about to be the dominant party in the state the short answer is World War one and its effects on Germany but the primary answer is the way in which Germans process these effects after the war they regarded their defeat as unfair they regarded the peace that was imposed upon them as entirely different than the basis on which they had surrendered because in 1918 the Germans agreed to an armistice on the basis of Woodrow Wilson's promise of a piece without annexations and without indemnities and then eight months later they got the Versailles Treaty which had annexations and indemnities and then there were a series of catastrophes that followed in 1923 the German currency inflated to the point that it was worth four point two trillion marks to the dollar it literally was not worth the paper it was printer and then that was situation was stabilized and in 1930 the Depression hit Germany and it hit Germany harder than any other country in the world the stock market fell further than even in the United States the unemployment rate went up higher than it was in the United States gross terminal product fell further and we were hit probably is the second hardest country in the world there was a series of catastrophes which increased that audience for an agitator who came along and said this is not your fault I know who did this to you Hitler spoke to the Germans in a way that was simultaneously flattering you deserve better than this you are the best people on the globe you did not create this situation and made excuses for them and said I know who did this to you the Allies did this to you with the Versailles Treaty the Communists did this to you because there was a left-wing uprising in 1918 that overthrew the Emperor and the Jews did this to you because the Jews are the wire pullers behind all of these phenomena this is the ideology that Hitler peddled and that and the thing that it was cut that was so potent something for us to remember perhaps today is that the willingness to be brutal to others often begins with a sense that somebody has already been brutal to you victimization is a very dangerous feeling because once people conclude that they have been victimized they feel entitled to lash back any way they feel entitled to do anything to the supposed victimizers because it's just self-defense we didn't start this and this is the way the Nazis sold their ideology to the Germans you've been robbed you've been cheated the phrase in German is below gonpa Tolkien lied to and deceived this is what they've done to you you have to stand up and fight back and all means are legitimate because they did it first and this is the method this is what Hitler did now it's important to realize that this was a potent message in Germany in the 1920s but it was not a message that won over a majority when Adolphe Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany On January 30th 1933 roughly 55% of the Germans had never voted for him he was he was jobbed into power by a coalition of powerful people around the president he did not have a majority support in the Parliament he did not have a majority support in the cabinet he had three Nazis out of 12 seats this is very important to realize because though the potential was there in the German public enough to make him the biggest party in the country even though he believed terribly and terrible and terribly simplified things was not enough to give him much a majority the Nazis turned that society into a murderous Society after they acquired power this illustrates the very important proposition that power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it once Hitler came into power he was able to use the force of the state legitimate legal means other forms of pressure to gradually turn the nation into a one-party dictatorship and not only a one-party dictatorship a one-party dictatorship that was willing to do things to people that Nazi ideology said it should do Germany was converted in it was Germany who descended in the 1930s into an orgy of belonging in which Germans defined themselves as morally different from everybody else in the world in the world they have there the teaching of the party was life is eternal struggle they will get you unless you get them first your moral obligations are only to people just like us we and you have no moral obligations to them the golden rule goes out the window it will just make you weak in the struggle among a what matters what is right what is good is what is good for Germany and what is wrong and what is bad is what is bad for Germany it was a simple moral calculus that divided the world between us and them and the Nazis had a monopoly on discussion of this there was one voice relentlessly telling Germans that this is the way the world is and through a combination of intimidation indoctrination and intoxication the Nazis forged a society that was willing to murder people the intimidation is of course the threat of concentration camps if you buck us if you challenge us you know what could happen to you couldn't the indoctrination is that I'll give me an illustration of the indoctrination there are two that are particularly powerful beginning in 1933 any german law student who was preparing to take the law boards the german equivalent of law boards had to go to boot camp in the summer to be trained in nazi ideology any applicant for a teaching certificate to go have a teaching job in an elementary school or a middle school or high school had to do the same thing these summer camps were milk quasi military institutions where everybody was drilled and everybody was both physically drilled marching and then drilled in Nazi ideology and the intoxication came from the fact that Hitler achieved some successes by 1936 Germany had recovered from the depression had more than full employment was implement was bringing in workers from the outside mostly from Poland the depression was over every virtually everyone had a job who wanted one by 1936 the country had rearmed so that it could say our military might is equal to that of our neighbors and we did this without firing a shot by 1936 German forces had marched into the demilitarized Rhineland and they had reunited the Saarland with the Reich they were on the verge of further diplomatic victories such as the unification of Austria with Germany and so forth everywhere people looked even critics of Hitler had to admit you know he's accomplished some things of course he's a con there's been a price socialists have been arrested and sent to concentration camps Jews have been marginalised from the society and many of them have been driven to emigrate but you know as the German proverb goes Volga hobos Fiat filin spinner where you plane there are wood shavings that fall to the floor this is the price you have to pay for success and this was what happened in the course of the 30s now the problem that were the situation that turned this society which had now been primed to act on Nazi ideology into a society that would kill was almost a matter of mathematics the Nazis realized in the course of 1938 that they were pursuing two central goals that were contradictory one goal the expansion of Germany so that it would acquire ever more living space Hitler believed the Germans needed more territory in order to support themselves and produce enough food and so forth so the first objective was living space but the second objective the Nazis taught is that we cannot expand successfully we cannot compete with other nations as long as there are Jews within our lines because Jews are the eternal enemy they are subversives they will be the fifth columnist so I know that sort of I bet everybody in the room over 50 knows what a fifth columnist is and almost nobody under 50 knows what if fifth columnist is it's a saboteur behind the lines the Nazis defined the Jews as this the Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany losing in World War one and they said we cannot be successful in the next conflict unless we get rid of them but every time the Nazis expanded they acquired more Jews and when they took Austria in 1938 and the Sudetenland in late 1938 in just that those two steps they acquired almost as many Jews as they had succeeded in driving out of Germany between 33 and 38 and they looked at the horizon and they knew the next target was what is called today the Czech Republic where there were 150,000 Jews and after that they wanted living space in Poland where there were 3.3 million Jews and after that they wanted Ukraine where there were one and a half to two million Jews they could not drive Jews out of Germany as fast as they acquired more Jews through expansion and what this did is in the course of 1938 Nazi policymakers actually began to talk about what they were doing in a different way up until then if you look at Hitler speeches if you look at the Goering speeches and what they said to Germans they said our goal is the removal of Jews from Germany in in German that word is enter found on the jury the Jews were to be and felt removed and that was the word always used and beginning in 1938 in the aftermath of Kristallnacht leaders of the Nazi state begin to use a new word they always use it in sentences that go something like this if all the Jews don't leave if other nations don't take the Jews if it comes to another war in Europe then the result will be definitional day you know the annihilation of the Jews in other words the idea of removal which always had meant expulsion maybe deportation now they begin actually to give voice to the thought that they're going to kill people and not just kill individual people all of them finished all is a total totalizing word and this basically is the moment of pivoting in Nazi policy in the aftermath of the Christiana they prophesy and Hitler does it to the German Reichstag on January 30th 1939 he says if it comes to a new world war that will mean the annihilation of the Jews in Europe well in the course of 1939 1940 all of these conditional prophecies came true the Jews could not get out of Germany all of them because most other countries wouldn't take very many it did come to war the Jews were impoverished and at that moment in 1941 as all of these things become true the Nazi leaders decide that the implication of what they have been saying is here they cannot drive the Jews out they cannot ship the Jews out they must in fact kill them and they do this in two steps the first step is when they are about to invade the Soviet Union they decide that we're not going to do in the Soviet Union what we did in Poland which is round two Jews up and put them in ghettos and then deal with the issues of how much to feed them and how to prevent these epidemics from breaking out and so on and so forth we're just going to bring death to the Jews as we march in and so what happens in the Soviet Union in 1941 is the reverse of what happens in Poland in 1939 in 1939 most of the Jews in Poland were rounded up and put in cities and a minority of them were killed in 1941 in the Soviet Union it's the opposite almost everybody is killed as the Germans arrived the heavy shooting units the Einsatzgruppen and then they sent police units and SS units and they kill roughly a million people between the invasion at the beginning they start killing at the beginning of July and and the end of January 1942 so that's the first step and then the second step is they realize that they can not only bring death to the Jews in their path they can bring the Jews they already control to death because in the summer of 1941 it dawns on the leaders of the Nazi Party that they already have two methods of killing large numbers of Jews unmask the first is the method of gassing people with carbon monoxide that the Germans used against the handicapped people in German mental institutions from 1939 to 1941 and they begin to transfer the personnel at these mental institutions to the eastern border of Poland where they become the staff for the camps that are belcheck Zoe Bor Treblinka and also the one that was in the annexed German territories hell no these people have experience with applying carbon monoxide they know how to do it and in the next two years beginning with hell no in December of 1941 and running into 1943 at those four camps they kill over two million people with carbon monoxide and then they realize that they have one other method that at most German military installations and and most the u-boats I guess the best illustration of this is a u-boat in Chicago we have a u-boat this seems unlikely the Chicago being in the middle of the country but at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago you can go and visit a u-boat you can walk in it and walk through it and so it's incredibly tiny I mean the full length of it is from that wall to this wall and it's incredibly compressed the first thing that happened to a u-boat when it came back into Harbor in Germany is the crew would get off the hatches to be open at each end the crew would get off and men with a full rubber suit would walk in at each end with a can looks about like that and they would pop that can with what in my day was called a church key I don't know does that translate anymore okay it would pop that can with two openings the canned contained Zyklon which is hydrocyanic acid it was it's a liquid that is in absorbent pellets when they come in contact with oxygen and a temperature above 70 degrees they vaporize and the vapor a 130 third of an ounce if you can grasp that I can't even imagine what 130 third of an ounce is but one third the width of one thirty third of an ounce of that vapor will kill a hundred and fifty pound person within two minutes that cyclone it was used on the u-boat and it was used in barracks to fumigate them to kill lice that accumulated I mean after all if you're under the water in the North Sea with twenty five guys at close quarters you know for a month and a half it certainly needs fumigating when it comes home and that's what cyclone was used for and that and that the transfer of that to the killing of people occurs at Auschwitz in September of 1941 when an instruction comes down prepare a method for disposing of large numbers of ill inmates and the SS people who receive this think the Ilia inmates are gonna be Soviet prisoners of war who were brought in there in fact and and so they say well we have this stuff it's you know it's in a storage room over here we know it's lethal let's see how it works and they can find 600 Soviet prisoners of war to the basement of one of the barracks at Auschwitz it has kind of a recessed cantilever windows at the bottom they open the window they pop the can they throw it in they close the window and they wait to see what happens this is September 1941 and they discovered that it's very efficient at killing people although it would be better if the basement did not have dividing walls if it was all wide open because the gas would disperse better and that was it by September 1941 they knew that we can kill all of the Jews that are behind our lines by putting gathering them together putting them on trains or trucks and sending them to places that will administer these treatments they have the method they have the opportunity the motive the opportunity and the means so why didn't anybody stop this once it hit once it was in motion why didn't anybody stop it the shootings in Russia the gassings and so forth well there are three answers I think because the Jews themselves were internally divided and largely powerless everyone else always had something more important to do and the Nazis developed a fast process of killing at installations that were out of reach of anybody interfering now let me take that last point first because this is one of the most disputatious aspects of the study of the Holocaust why was an Auschwitz bombed it's usually the way the question goes the first thing to remember is that the death camps were situated on the well let's see if I can do this with your imagination look at my nose okay let us assume that my nose is located at the exact middle midpoint of the European continent okay now you know if I did this for continental United States my nose would be Topeka right we're all agreed about that all right if we do this for the continental Europe my nose is Vienna all right draw a line up from Vienna draw a line this way from Vienna what you've done is you've marked off the northeast quadrant of the European continent three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust came from there 90% of the victims of the Holocaust died there okay keep your mind fixed on this the closest Allied aircraft and this is where all the death camps are the closest Allied aircraft to that are here this is the British Isles see the fist I'm actually of Irish descent I like to do this all right now in the course of the Second World War no aircraft could ever fly from here to those instant death installations and get back to here on a full tank of gas none never the only time we became capable of hitting a death camp was from here the Italian boom and we didn't reach the point at which you could launch aircraft from Italy and get to the last remaining death camp which is Auschwitz until July of 1944 and remember three quarters of the victims of the Holocaust were dead by February of 1943 you get a sense of the the problem of interdicting this this was done out here where the prospects of interfering with it were very few and to give you an idea that about the process I think we are we mislead ourselves when we talk about factories of death because it makes it sound like what was done was you know hyper organized like an efficient assembly line and so forth these places were disassembly lines but they were not complicated to establish leave Auschwitz aside for a minute now Fritz is the one that had brick buildings and a large scale garrison and so forth but the camps that killed two million people in hell Noam Sobibor belcheck Treblinka the first death camps the first gas chambers at these places consisted of two rows of wood vertical with a layer of sand in between and a layer of tar paper on the outside can you imagine how cheap this was to construct and you could run people through those and kill them at a rate initially of about 4,000 a day and then to give you a sense of how improvised this was in the summer of 1942 the delivery of people by train to the death camps was interrupted because the Germans needed all the railroad equipment to supply the troops that were marching towards Stalingrad and the managers of belcheck and Sobibor and Treblinka used the opportunity to turn these wooden gas chambers into stone ones where'd they get the stone the Commandant of Treblinka realized that in little village called mal Kenya which is a few miles away where the railroad line turns off toward Treblinka he had seen a factory with a giant red brick chimney he blew it up and he Reaper the bricks to make the new stone the bigger new stone gas chamber at Treblinka now imagine for a minute how little that cost it was improvised and easy and then they brought the people in and when Treblinka was operating at full capacity in September of 1942 they were killing 10,000 people a day this was a low cost low overhead low tech process and it was financed entirely with money they stole from the Jews this did not interfere with the German war effort at all they used the same railroad cars over and over again going back and forth the same locomotives they were not a diversion from the war effort when they had the potential to interfere with military operations the deportations were stopped so the Germans had this method now what about the Jews as I said they were internally divided and largely powerless one of the things I found over the years and I taught large classes on the history of the Holocaust usually over 200 people a very small percentage of those students were themselves Jews and so I had to I found myself a great there's a very common misconception among non Jews about Jews which is they're all the same and that and the Jews in the audience especially are laughing at this because you know this is this is crazy but Jews in Eastern Europe were divided in a host of ways they were divided politically some of them were left-wing some of them were right-wing they were divided about their sense of the future some of them saw their future in the countries they lived in some of them saw their future in the land of Israel Zionists there were neo log Jews that is Reform Jews there were conservative Jews there were Orthodox Jews they were Hassidim ecstatic Jews there are all kinds of these differences in Eastern Europe all of these factions of Jews had different institutions they had different traditions they had different practices moment the Nazis appeared on the horizon these things didn't disappear overnight these communities were under siege from the Nazis it took a long time for people who had different world views to agree what are they gonna could agree about what are they gonna do to us that took a long time to figure out and then what are we gonna do in response and the Nazis remember profited from that time because the onslaught was so intense in 1942 when virtually the whole of Polish Jewry is wiped out and most of the Jews of Ukraine and so on the Nazis moved faster than the Jews had time to respond the other thing I want to stress to you is that everyone else always had something more important to do and I don't want to talk too long so I'm going to abbreviate this I can tell I can talk about this in several different ways first look at us the United States we took more Jewish refugees than any other country on the world between 1933 and 1945 but we took only about 225,000 in comparison to the number who were murdered obviously we didn't do as well as we should have why didn't we the arguments against admitting Jews are arguments that are going to sound very familiar to you they'll take your jobs they'll cost you money and there will be spies among them nowadays we say terrorists and these were the arguments that were used to say you can't open the doors it's too dangerous to let them in and then beyond that there was the argument among of numbers the people who were opposed to letting people in before the Holocaust started said it's not just the half million Jews of Germany half a million people we can absorb them but if the Nazis succeed in driving their Jews out one of the poles and the Romanians gonna do they have also asked the League of Nations to help them reduce the size of their Jewish populations if you let in the half million German Jews you create a precedent then you have to letting the three million polish shoes the 800,000 Romanian Jews this was the boogeyman that was used as an argument against it and so we decided most Americans decided most college students decided in 1938 seventy-five percent of American college students said don't let in any more refugees because they'll compete with us when we graduate and so we all decided that we had our interests were more important let me give you another illustration of that based on my own biography my full name is Peter Francis Hayes I think they wanted a cardinal they could have named me Sean Patrick and produced something a little more Irish Catholic but that's about it and I was raised in the Catholic Church and so I have a take on the silence of the Pope and the passivity the large scale passivity of the Catholic hierarchy in the face of all this which illustrates how important thinking about something else thinking I have some other obligation that's more important how important that was in interfering with helping Jews the Catholic Church that I learned my catechism in in part incidentally in San Antonio in Houston because my dad was attached to Air Bases they're taught that there is no salvation without the sacraments you cannot go to heaven unless you have access to baptism I'm gonna blow this baptism communion confirmation marriage Holy Orders confession anointing of the sick the last rites have I skipped something I think there were seven and I might have just said six my castle my catechism was a long time ago but anyway the doctrine is there's no salvation without the sacraments and this li and and in catholic teaching you cannot get the sacraments unless there is a priest there to administer them that means there's no salvation without priests now this makes the Catholic Church supremely black male Abul in context of dictatorship because the dictator can always say I'm going to arrest the priests and close the churches and then the very raison d'être the reason for being of the Catholic Church disappears because the Catholic Church is there to save your soul you are where we are right now this is not the real world this is the antechamber to the real world the thing that you're doing a rehearsal and so you have to have the sacraments in order to get to the destination and you need the priests and so you see how this works the Pope was always extraordinarily cautious in dealing with the Nazis because they arrested priests sometimes but they never closed the churches that was the contrast that he drew with the Soviet regime where they closed the churches and turn them into stables and so the Pope always pulled his punches and so did most of the Cardinals and most of the bishops in much of Europe they basically said we have something more important to do our jaw our primary job is to save souls our secondary job may be to act out the gospel towards suffering fellow human beings but the primary job is saving souls and this was true even when it comes finally to the decision about bombing Auschwitz because in July 1944 we're finally in a position to bomb the concentration camp why don't we because it's the same time that the v1 rockets and the v2 rockets are raining down on England and the military planners say it's more important to take out those launch sites it's also the same time of the preparation or the actually the landing had already occurred in Normandy and so making the invasion of the breakout from Normandy had not occurred yet so making that happen was more important military planners were always able to say and then the last thing that more important is we have to shut off the Germans fuel supplies so we will send planes over Ashe wits to bomb the synthetic fuel factory that is just beyond Auschwitz but we won't use planes to bomb the camp now what I want to the whole point here is the the notion that the people responsible always had a higher priority and that's why nobody stopped the process for the most part they couldn't in the early stages and then when they could they wouldn't because they had something more important to do all right I hope I've given you the flavor of the book that I tried to write in some sense of how I try to make the arguments that I did and there are microphones set up I'll be glad to answer your questions do your worst [Music] [Applause] please just use the mic so everybody can hear you is it working yeah I'm sort of scared there were not see from what I understand comes from the words not your null national and we've heard this world recently from our leader can you comment on that because I am worried well the word Nazi comes from two words National Socialist Nacional Hotel is dish Germans make abbreviations for political parties usually with some form of Z so there were Nazis there were Zoet C's socialists there were coatsy's communists that's that's where that comes from it's political yeah I do think that you you did hear what I said about we US on them I do think the division of the world along national lines which are then said to be the same thing as ethical lines is a very unfortunate thing I'm not much of a religious believer but if you are going to take the traditions of Christianity seriously there is an involvement to look there is a requirement to love your fellow man and to care about your fellow man and if you're going to take the traditions of Judaism then he'll l's formulation is the one you know do you want to treat others as you would want to be treated everything else is commentary and so the proclamation of selfishness as a national purpose strikes me as shameful did I answer your question well enough we should be better than that I'm sorry I have the mic so my question and I'm a Christian and I think you're giving Christians a pass to be honest with you on our apathy during the war years and and as a Christian I'm allowed to say that and I just want to read a verse because this is the essence of Christianity or what I believe Christianity should be it's from first John 3 it says we know love by this that he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the Brethren and so my question is why why are you giving a pass to Christians who were apathetic during the Holocaust I'm not sure I am but I would say that Christianity is an extremely demanding religion and most adherents of it fail for precisely precisely by their standard of that text most Christians fail to live up to that text because that's a text that imposes an saintliness on us and most of us can't be Saints I'm trying not to I certainly didn't mean in the case of the Pope to be giving him a pass but what I was trying to do is give you a sense of what thoughts were going through his head the challenge in history is to explain why things turned out a certain way the danger in doing that is people hear it as saying it was justified it was it was okay that it turned out that way that's not what I was saying I'm just saying you have to know what people are thinking and people in different roles in life think in the boxes of those roles the Pope was also a Catholic theologian and he thought very much in these terms but I don't mean certainly there's no and remember what I said about the 225,000 we did better than any other country and we still failed that's not given him a pass so I was wondering as you look at the what seems to be the rise of hate crimes against Jews in America and France and so forth in recent years does it make any sense or is it worthwhile to compare the anti-semitism that exists here with the anti-semitism at ism or maybe even jihadist anti-semitism and is that even a worthwhile discussion to go through well I think the roots of anti-semitism are whatever the form it takes are the same is this sort of sense that those people have robbed us somehow those people have taken away something in the case of land it would be the argument about the jihadists or the kind of people who are contemporary anti-semites the United States think that these people are so powerful that they are exerting influence over us they're manipulating us and that's dangerous and bad I think we will learn more about this guy in Pittsburgh over the next few days but I'm pretty sure that he believed what I just said and that so that's common to these various manifestations and and of course anti-semitism is a superstition it's a belief that this tiny tiny sliver of humanity you know there were three quarters of 1% of the German population they are what 2% of the American population they are a tiny proportion of the people in countries now where anti-semitism is on the rise Hungary Ukraine Russia and so it's this superstitious belief that this tiny fraction of people can exert superhuman power and everything bad that is happening can be traced back to them well you know I mean that's like believing in astrology it's worse than believing in astrology and how do you argue with it because it is so irrational you can I mean you have to you I think what we have to do as a culture is not so much argue with it but shame it you shame it into the corners where it used to exist and the second thing we have to do is and this is something I meant to say earlier and I haven't remember what I said that Hitler did not have a majority of the people behind him in 1933 that 55% of them had never voted for him but 45% had and if there's one thing they knew about the Nazi Party is the Nazi Party hated Jews and those people did not think that a party running on this platform was by definition disqualified from office building up to saying the problem was not the number of anti-semites in Germany the problem was the small number of anti anti-semites that allowed this here I'll invoke the phrase that allowed these people to get a pass and that's the other thing we can do we can be anti anti-semites we can be anti and anti haters of any kind in a sense we can be anti dehumanize errs anti demonize errs that's within our reach as individuals so regarding the consolidation of Nazi rule of Germany could you talk to us a little bit about two things one is the Reichstag fire decree which reminds me of the alleged coup that helped err to win put 200 journalists and 100,000 people in prison and to the Enabling Act which passed only because the centrum party which was controlled by the Vatican voted with the Nazis and the right-wing Hugenberg party so those are two things that early in 1933 gave Hitler essentially dictatorial rule can you talk to us a little bit about that well the Reichstag fire occurred in February 1933 and there's a lot of the Reichstag is the German parliament building and there's a lot of dispute to this day as to how that fire was there was a young Dutch radical who claimed that he had set it on fire himself to create a beacon for the working class to rise up and resist the Nazis there's some evidence it's a little fragile but there's some evidence that the Nazis themselves set the fire in order to create an incident and then seize the opportunity this nowadays ironically would be known as a false flag event other side perpetrating it in any case the crisis was used by the Nazis to say we're on the verge of civil war in this country because burning the Parliament building shows how how corrupt and evil our enemies will be and that justifies us in taking extreme measures to repress them and the Reichstag fire decree made it possible for the Nazis to control the police force and to begin arresting and harassing their opponents and putting them in concentration camps and so on the enabling act was different the enabling act was passed a month later and it was established that Hitler had it established Hitler had four years to rule by decree without the interference of parliament and it was passed partly because the Catholic political party voted in favor but it was also the liberal bourgeois parties that were left also voted in favor all the communist deputies had been arrested and already put in the concentration camps so the parliament that passed the Enabling Act was a kind of rump it had been reduced in the opposition and the only party that voted against it was the Social Democrats that was not enough to stop it be carried by two-thirds majority and Hitler had formal parliamentary sanction to rule by decree now one of the things that's very important to notice about that because I I get asked this a lot about comparisons of then and now one of the things that's very important to notice is that in 1933 the level of political violence was so much higher than what we have experienced up until now things may be on the verge of changing but the stormtroopers were in the street beating people up there were political incidents created that this massive pressure to arrest and put behind bars political opponents of the leading party that was much more intense in Germany in the spring of 1933 what we really have to be afraid of now is if the level of violence escalates [Applause] just a few things before we conclude just stay here because you still have another important task outside signing of books and selling of books and I don't want to shorten this too much but in the meantime we're entrepot is coming up just to thank you again and to express our gratitude for your wonderful lecture well I appreciate what you had to say it was not pleasant listening to you but we all heard it as a token of our appreciation to you this is a very small thing I plan to give you an armadillo there's some of the doctors here no he carries a certain type of leprosy but I like Tiffany [Applause] [Music] you
