Peter Hayes - Why Did the Holocaust Happen?

I taught a course on the history of the Holocaust I taught it under what I regarded at the time as extremely difficult circumstances because I taught at an institution that has something called the quarter system most of you don't know what that is because most of you probably went to real college but northwestern has something called the quarter system which means that every subject is taught in a span of 11 weeks but it's not even 11 weeks because one week is reserved for final exams and one week is reserved for the students to do the reading that they should have been doing in all the preceding weeks so I was faced with the task of teaching the history of the Holocaust a subject that has a very long prehistory and a long aftermath and I was faced with the challenge of teaching this in basically 8 and a half weeks because there's always a midterm exam too and for years I tried to font somehow compress this subject into this little box not with a great deal of success because historians are used to starting at the beginning which is a very good place to start and telling the story event after event to the end after four or five years of not succeeding terribly well at fitting this subject into the box I realized doc my students were giving me the answer to my problem because year after year the students came into the course with the same questions the things that they asked me repeatedly were basic straightforward fundamental issues and it just so happened that the number of these questions correspondent almost exactly to the number of weeks I had at my disposal so I realized that the way to solve this problem was to organize each week of the course around a single burning central question and when I got to the end of my career in 2016 or as I approach the end of my career I realized that the wider world deserved a chance to benefit from this wisdom and that therefore I could write a book in which each chapter was devoted to answering a single one of those questions it was my way of extending the life of the course that I had taught over the years so what were the questions that the students kept bringing into the class first and foremost remember most of my students were not Jews I never took a census but my guess was that about 3/4 of the 200 students who would take that course every year were not Jews the first question that they almost always asked is why the Jews why was this group of people the central target of what the Nazis did and make no mistake for all of the emphasis that we give in the study of the Holocaust to other victims the Holocaust was centrally about Jews it was centrally about racial hatred of a group of people stigmatized as threatening why the Germans if you had asked Europeans in 1910 32 years from now which nationality on this continent is going to be killing Jews in massive to a massive degree and burning their bodies the answers would have been France in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair or Russia in the aftermath of so many pogroms very few people would have thought that Germany would be the answer to that question why was the method the Nazis adopted murder after all Hitler ran for office on the promise to remove the Jews from Germany he was never very much more specific than that removal can mean a great many things it can mean asking driving people out of the country but in the end it meant killing all of the ones he could get his hands on why was the murder so Swift and so sweeping we talk about 2/3 of the Jews of Europe being killed in fact it was far worse than that the Nazis killed more than 3/4 of the Jews they ever got within their control they ever got their hands on and they did it in an incredibly compressed period of time of the six million victims of the Holocaust half of them died in the eleven months between March of 1942 and February of 1943 they died at the rate of three hundred and twenty-five thousand people a month the inn and three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust were dead by the time the Russians so the Russians defeated the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad 20 months is the period in which three-quarters of the victims died why didn't fight back this is of course the most troubling question that my students always posed because it's a question that implies complete in comprehension of what the Jews were up against they were too few they were too alone and they were too divided to organize effective resistance to what was happening and very few people could imagine in advance what would happen it had never happened like this before why did survival rates vary by country 75% of the Jews of France outlived the Holocaust 75% of the Jews of the Netherlands were killed even within countries they were striking contrasts the country in Europe that killed after the Germany the largest number of Jews was Romania the country in Europe that had the largest surviving community of Jews at the end of the war was Romania why did youse get so little help both prior to the onset of the Holocaust that is in offering them refuge in places to which they could go why did they get so little assistance during the the annihilation process in fact in many cases the non-jewish inhabitants of the countries where the murder was most intense helped the Nazis along the way and what lessons and legacies are we to draw from this subject how are we to understand what has happened since with regard to restitution and punishment and so forth and what kinds of conclusions are we to draw so my students gave me a structure and I realized as I got to the end of my career that I had the chance not only to write a new history of the Holocaust but a new kind of history of the Holocaust one that approached these issues directly and accomplished something that a history teacher always is challenged by students who are not innately attuned to history almost always asked early in any given course how do I sort out all the facts how do I know what's more important and what's less though and I always tell them there is no answer to that question it depends on what you want to know if you know what you're trying to find out then certain pieces of information automatically become more relevant and more important to that and those are the things to concentrate on any other things become less relevant so in my course and in the structure of the book one always knows what these details are supposed to help one understand and that's what I set out to do to write a book where unlike the conventional narrative history of the Holocaust where you get to the end of 800 or 900 pages you can't remember what you learned in the first place I tried to write a book in which each of the chapters is compact they're about 40 pages apiece and you know always what the issue at hand is and what the explanation that will help us solve or answer that question what that is now obviously I can't go through all eight of those questions tonight you would be asleep even faster than I would be asleep and we are already approaching my bedtime but I can give you a flavor of what the what I tried to do by focusing on two absolutely central and fundamental questions why were Jews killed and why couldn't and didn't anyone stop it now the first question has a very long history because clearly there is a tradition in Western civilization from the point at which Christianity arose of depicting Jews as contaminating as somehow threatening or undermining something that the non-jewish population cherishes and thus Jews have to be kept at arm's length they have to be they have to suffer misery this is rooted in the Christian tradition which holds the Jews responsible for rejecting the truth that Christ supposedly brought into the world the great central starting point of Jew hatred in Western society is Jews were the people who said no when Christianity presented its gospel it's good news to the world and said this gives us a new covenant with the Almighty the Jews are the people who said thank you very much we already have one and we're not interested in changing it and that led to the tradition in the Catholic Church for hundreds of years of punishing Jews for that no and of making sure that they were in no position to undermine the faith of Christians that meant restricting them to certain occupations certain residential areas and so on now modern anti-semitism is different from that ancient religious rivalry because modern anti-semitism is a political reaction against the demise of that form of punishment to Jews beginning with the French Revolution a trend toward emancipation occurred and Jews were systematically though gradually released from residential restrictions occupational restrictions and so forth they were allowed if you will to enter European society like anyone else and to Pete with non-jews on an equal level this is the central starting point for modern anti-semitism because modern anti-semitism is about rolling back emancipation the ideology that otto of Hitler peddled was the ideology of 19th century anti-semites who said everything that he's going wrong for you and remember in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution not everybody benefited I would say to my students do you know what a Cooper is a lot of people lot of people do a lot my young people don't a Cooper is a person who made barrels it's a trade that was destroyed by the Industrial Revolution there were great many trades that were destroyed by the Industrial Revolution people who did not benefit looked for some explanation for why they were not doing as well as they hoped they would do or as their neighbors were doing and anti-semites came along and said I'll tell you why you're not doing as well because those people have been freed from restrictions and they are doing things that are hurting you this was the simple message of nineteenth-century anti-semites and Adolf Hitler streamlined it in the sense that he taught to Germans that the solution of all their problems begins with putting these people back in the boxes where they once were that was the Nazi method now message now one of the things that is striking is that in the 19th century you think of if events like the Dreyfus Affair and so forth anti-semitism was loud it was vocal it was politically a failure and it was particularly politically a failure in Germany anti-semitic political parties came and went they ran for office they never got more than four percent of the vote they never got more than five percent of the seats in the German parliament they spread animosity but people did not vote as if they believed the message of the anti-semites that everything would be fixed if the Jews were only put back in their place that all changed with World War one because after World War one with the defeat of Germany the country was plunged into economic peril the inflation reduced the value of the German mark which had once been worth a quarter to an exchange rate of four point two trillion to the dollar when the Depression struck the country it struck Germany harder than any other country in the world including the United States this was an environment in which a great many Germans came to believe that their country was in total chaos and peril and that only an extreme political movement could reverse those problems could in fact solve the nation's problems this is what Adolphe Hitler sold himself as the person who would I hate to say it make Germany great again the person who was had the will and the determination to do it unlike the other political parties on the scene and he succeeded as a result in getting up to 37% of the vote but when he became Chancellor of Germany on January 30th 1933 55% of the Germans had never voted for him he was brought into office by a conspiracy of high-ranking people around the president who thought they could use him and control him because he didn't have a university degree he'd never held a major office they thought he would be incapable and running the country and therefore that they would be the wire pullers behind the scenes it was a great miscalculation but it opened the way for the Nazis to inculcate and in in the German population a belief in the ideology that they said explained everything what was wrong in this country is the influence of the Jews if that influence is removed we will become a great nation again now the striking thing is what the Nazis succeeded in doing between 1933 and 1939 is making a society that was capable of mass murder by a combination of indoctrination intoxication with the gray beauty of being a German this is what they stressed they would there was a kind of national orgy of belonging the world was divided between us and them we owe ethical responsibilities only to each other not to anyone else there is no such thing as the golden rule or the categorical imperative there is only what is good for Germany that's moral or what is bad for Germany that is immoral and the central not sila message that they taught was that ethical obligations are racial you owe ethical obligations only to people of your kind and not to anyone else the country was a national echo chamber there were no other voices or competing voices to pedal a different measure and a different ideology to some degree the Catholic Church but the Catholic Church backed off the Christian Church has greatly reduced their emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount for instance and this created a situation in which the Nazis could make a murderous society but why did the society want to kill here one of the things one has to bear in mind is Nazi ideology contained a central contradiction above all the Nazis wanted two things a country that was free of Jews because they believed they said over and over again all Jews are subversive they are all enemies of Germany we can have none of them within the walls of the country on the other hand they wanted living space and the living space that they wanted was the spot on the globe that was more thickly settled with Jews than any other spot Poland Ukraine Lithuania the central contradiction of the ideology was an attempt to remove these people from German boundaries but to extend those boundaries to include ever more of those people and the moment at which this begins to dawn on the Nazis is almost identifiable by the day it's November 1938 around the time of Kristallnacht because at that moment for the first time leading figures of the Third Reich changed their vocabulary they no longer talked about the removal of the Jews they begin to use the word finished all annihilation the first recorded instance of the use of this word is by the number two man in the German Foreign Ministry a man named Anse von weizsäcker who went to Poland to enter Paris for the funeral of a Nazi official and had lunch with a Swiss diplomat and he said to the Swiss diplomat the Swiss diplomat wrote this home to his foreign ministry in inbound he said to the Swiss diplomat if the Jews do not leave Germany dejay and belt aurash paid a fairly and fiendish tongue and gain they are going sooner or later to their complete annihilation two weeks later the SS Weekly magazine used the very same word saying if the Jews remain in this country in an a year from now Germany will not tolerate their presence and they will have to be routed out by fire and sword that will lead to their complete annihilation and on January 30th 1939 Adolf Hitler addressed the Reichstag and said to them if Europe is plunged into a new war it will not mean the defeat of Germany it will mean the complete annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe suddenly this word crops up and it shows that the thought is out in the open having year after year said they simply wanted to remove people they now talked about annihilation why because they recognized the mathematical contradiction of Nazi ideology wanting to remove the Jews but also to expand into space that was heavily populated by Jews over the next two years the word became a deed because the Nazis increasingly recognized that all the possible means of removing Jews from their territory concentrating them in ghettos in Poland in preparatory to deporting them someplace they had a whole series of places they thought about doing Madagascar the island off the east coast of Africa was a place of choice anti-semites had been in Europe and talking about this since the 1880s but Britain held out in the Battle of Britain and there was no possible way to transport people to Madagascar then they thought about a reservation they used the word reservation on purpose because they reminded them of what was done to the Native Americans here the word in German is Givat and they were going to concentrate the Jews of Europe in a reservoir in the eastern part of occupied Poland that didn't go so well when they brought the first people there they realized that the provisions that would be required for this would be so extensive that even the Nazi state couldn't afford it and they basically let the first round of about 8,000 settlers in the region die of starvation they then thought well we're about to beat the Soviet Union and more will exile these people up beyond the Arctic Circle and that will be the place to which we'll send them but they began to realize is with that the invasion of Russia was not going to produce a victory so fast that they could do that and that they had other ways of removing Jews than dreaming of reservations in the first place when they invaded the Soviet Union they knew that they could simply kill people in the path of the armies there would be no foreign journalists there to report on it it would be a visionless crime if you will and it could be done under cover of war it could be presented as a military measure since they did not want to repeat the administrative problems of the ghettos in Poland in 1939 40 41 they decided upon invading Russia that they would kill most of the Jews in their path and leave only a few alive to serve the needs of the German army and so forth as they did that they expanded the killing first the first they killed the men whom they encountered then they decided at the end of August 1941 that they would kill the women and children too because otherwise provisioning them would be too difficult and once they had made that decision there was no going back they therefore began to think well if we can kill these people in our path we can also kill the people we have long since conquered in other countries like France and the Netherlands and so forth what's more we have a way of doing it we have a way of doing it that is likely to be not terribly expensive and that can kill large numbers of people in a short period of time with little expense the method was gas since 1939 the Germans had been gassing the inmates of German mental hospitals many of them not Jews they had been doing that because they were trying to free up hospital beds for wounded soldiers and so on and because they believed that these people were defective and they would in and they would pass on their genes to the rest of the German race once they did that once they knew that they could kill large numbers of people with carbon monoxide at first they bought it in bottled form from a chemical company then they realized they could kill people by simply locking them in the back of vans and hooking up the exhaust pipes to the back and driving them down the road and the people would die and that would be that once they knew they could do that they also realized they had another way of killing people you might be surprised to know that in Chicago we have a u-boat Chicago's in the middle of the country you kind of wonder why you would get a u-boat in Chicago but we do have one at the Museum of Science and Industry and if you go to the Museum of Science and Industry you can actually go in this thing and realize how terribly small it is 20 guys in one of these things going under the North Atlantic for maybe 30 40 days at a time then it would come back the first thing that was done when any u-boat came back to port he's the guys got off they left most of their clothing and so forth in and then two technicians would get on the u-boat at each end at the hatch they would usually wearing a rubber suit they would go in and they would take what used to be called in this country a church key you know home back before there are many people in this room who do not know the era when there were no pop-top cans the young people have no idea but back before we had pop top cans we had to have a little pointed object that we use to open the top of any coke can or beer can what these two technicians would do is they would take that pointed object and they would pop the top of two cans usually containing two to two and a half kilograms it's about five pounds of a of some pellets inside those pellets contained hydrogen cyanide gas when oxygen came in contact with those pellets it would vaporize the gas that gas was Zyklon it was used at every military installation in Germany if it wasn't for you boats it was - it was to kill lice in barracks and so forth at Auschwitz in the summer of 1941 a lieutenant who was put in charge of thinking up how can we kill sick prisoners who are at this site realized that he had this stuff in the storeroom and that it could be used to kill large numbers of people he thereupon tested it on two batches of Soviet prisoners of war and discovered that yes indeed it killed people fairly fast it was very very cheap I've done the math and all of the Zyklon that was purchased and used at Auschwitz to kill probably 900,000 people at Auschwitz were killed with gas and 200,000 died of labor and starvation and exposure and so forth the cost of the gas to kill 900,000 people was less than one u.s. cent per body in 1942 so now they realized they had the capacity to do this and the only thing they had to do was create installations where they could kill large numbers of people and bring the people to the installations the killing did not start because the areas where the killing occurred were without independent governments as Tim Snyder has recently argued neither did the killing start because the Nazis were thinking are we gonna win the war or are we gonna lose the war it was some kind of compensation for the possibility of defeat whatever the Nazis thought at Hitler and Himmler at any given moment in the last half of nineteen one whether they were talking pessimistically about the campaign in Russia or they were talking optimistically about the campaign in Russia whatever their mood was their decisions about the Jews always moved in the same direction toward more killing faster and so the decisions were made for other reasons largely because the fighting was in the East and the Nazis thought convinced themselves that Jews were partisans they were going to be fighting on the side of the Soviets therefore they had to be removed the East is where the labels calm was going to be where the living space was going to be the Jews had to be removed for that reason the East was the place where the other residents were least likely to object to the killing of the Jews in fact many of them could be won over by giving them the property of the Jews and thus for all these reasons the Nazis decided now is the time to kill and they began the process once they did why didn't anyone stop it why was it impossible or why was it not interfered with in the first place the Jews were internally divided and largely powerless they were too few and they were too alone in most cases to be able to put up effective resistance one of the hardest jobs I had in teaching the Holocaust to a predominantly non-jewish student body is to explain to most Gentiles that Jews are not all alike that there are lots of differences between Orthodox and conservative and reform and so forth in Poland there were enormous political differences people who were integrationists they wanted to stay in Poland people who were Zionists there were at least six different kinds of Zionists there were left-wing Zionists there were Jabotinsky right-wing Zionists there was something that I've never been able to figure out called general Zionists so there were all these different groups they were they were divided by religion by religious practice and ritual they were divided by political attitudes and loyalty and so forth it was very difficult in the face of Nazi aggression for those groups to come to an agreement of about what they were up against what will they do next and then what do we do in response so that was one problem the problem or the other problem was that all of the people who could or the institutions or the entities that could have come to the aides of Jews always had something more important to do and then finally the Nazis developed a fast and cheap process of killing so that they could indeed wipe out three hundred and twenty five thousand people a month and in the face of these three things it was almost impossible to slow or stem the tide now there are a lot of different ways of explaining why people always had something better to do the one I want to share with you first is partly autobiographical my full name is Peter Francis Hayes now they could have named me Francis Xavier that would have been a little more Catholic but not much Peter Francis Hayes they they were looking for a cardinal and so I'm gonna talk right first about the Catholic Church because the failures of the Catholic Church in the face of the Holocaust were legion and they were continuous that is there was very little willingness to speak up in the 1930s though both of the Pope's pius xi and pius 12 fully understood that the nazis were an idolatrous and dangerous political movement but they always had something more important to do than to stand up and criticize that movement there was no public statement from the Pope after the synagogues were burned in November 1938 there was no public statement from the Pope after he knew in 1942 and he knew what was happening to Jews throughout Eastern Europe because he had first-hand reports from people on the site of the shooting and then he got direct reports of the gassing process and so forth now how do we explain something like this because the Pope could have done a great many things short of issuing a public statement he could have alerted many monasteries throughout the continent to what was happening and say hide people he didn't do that he could have done something which in Catholic doctrine a an archbishop a metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine did this was a remarkable man named kept its key kept its key knew that Ukrainian Catholics were involved in the shooting of Jews and he issued a pastoral letter saying that any that parish priests could not absolve those people of their sins they could not go to confession and expect that their sins would be wiped away by doing a penance that only he kept its key would have the power to absolve now this was a public act of saying this is bad behavior the Pope could have done something like that he didn't why well the under the heading of they always had something better to do one has to remember a certain fundamental feature of Catholic theology Catholic theology teaches that at least taught before Vatican 2 that you cannot go to heaven without the exercise of the sacraments you cannot go to heaven without having been baptized had Holy Communion been confirmed and on and on on right and to get the sacraments you have to have priests because those other people who dispense them now what this means is the Catholic Church is always willing to compromise with any political power as long as it keeps as the churches open because if you closed the churches and you arrest all the priests then the ability of the church to save souls which is its central mission appears its reason for being is gone now you and I might not take this sort of theological talk very seriously maybe you do maybe you don't but for the leaders of the Catholic Church it was absolutely central and the rationalization they used the excuse that they used to themselves when they did not carry out the humane mission of their religion the excuse was it's more important for us to keep the possibility of salvation open than it is to stand up against this sin now I can tell this story for almost any given group I can tell this story about the non bombing of Auschwitz why did it we did not become capable of bombing Auschwitz until the summer of 1944 when Auschwitz was at that point the last remaining death camp that was functioning we didn't become capable because you could never throughout the Second World War fly a bomber from the only basis we had in England across Germany into Poland hit the death camps and get back on a single tank of gas you can never do it so the chances of Treblinka was unhittable in its entire existence so also by the Soviets for that matter we became capable of hitting outfits in the summer of 1944 because we had advanced far enough up the Italian peninsula that you could send planes north and east and get to Auschwitz and get back so why didn't we bomb them well in the summer of 1944 there were some other things going on there was d-day there was the V ones and the v2 s raining down on London and those and so taking out the launch ramps and supporting the invasion seemed to the Allies the most important use of their equipment and then in addition to that there was also the fact that they wanted to paralyze the German armies by cutting off their fuel supply so they concentrated on bombing manufacturing plants and refineries for fuel they always had something better to do and this is the explanation for why so little interference with the process ever occurred everyone always had another higher ranking priority and then the last thing I want to stress for you is that we have to remember where the murders took place and when back to those statistics I cited to you at the beginning three quarters of the victims of the Holocaust were dead by February 1943 when the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad three quarters of the victims of the Holocaust were killed while the Germans were winning the war while the Allies were on the defensive and then imagine if you will a map of Europe now if you if you imagine a map of the United States and I tell you stick your finger right in the middle of the map the United States you'll hit Kansas okay now if you imagine a map of Europe and I tell you stick your finger in the middle of the map of Europe your finger will land somewhere around Vienna draw a line up and then from your perspective draw a line this way you will have marked the northeast quadrant of the European continent three-quarters of the victims of the Holocaust came from there ninety percent of the victims of the Holocaust died there and that's precisely the area where the planes couldn't get so you think of the time period and the location and you have one of the most profound explanations for how they could get away with this add that to the machinery that they created and then to the fact that they were able to do this with a tiny allocation of resources one of the great myths about the Holocaust is the idea that somehow this regime was was damaged or handicapped by what it did that its war effort was somehow undermined that all those trains must have diverted from the supplying of the troops or so on and so forth nothing could be further from the truth the trains that they used to deport people in the first place they're only 2,000 of them at them at the most used throughout the period of the Holocaust to send people to camps the Germans sent 2500 trains a day to the staging areas for the invasion of the Soviet Union for a whole month day after day they ran probably 30 million trains between 1941 and 1944 you get a sense of how small the traffic was and then it was even worse than that because they used the same railroad cars over and over they ran they went through Poland like a rolling barrage of artillery one village one sector day after day the same two trains would pick up those people in that village and take them to belch etch or Sobibor Treblinka and roll back to the next village the next day and take them again so for all of these reasons the Germans were able to do this with very little allocation of men or machinery or resources and that made the the murder process all the more devastating finally let me just say one word about the issue of Jewish resistance there was of course more Jewish resistance than people thought in 1945 there were remarkable acts of individual resistance the SS named a barracks at Treblinka after an SS man who a person got off a train and stabbed in the neck there was an officer's club in krakow that was blown up by jewish resistors there were outbreaks of resistance in several ghettos and so forth but on the whole there was very little resistance and I think one of the reasons can be captured in a you know in a powerful image almost everybody knows the picture of the little boy in the cloth cap in the Warsaw Ghetto who's hands up almost everybody knows this we don't know for sure who the little boy was but we do know some things about him that I think are very revealing when the Warsaw Ghetto was closed in at the end of 1940 there were about 55,000 children under the age of 10 that boy looks to be about nine years old when that picture was taken there were fewer than 500 left who's left in the Warsaw Ghetto a Jewish child in March of 1943 somebody whose parents were connected somebody whose parents had influenced they were either in the Jewish Council or they knew somebody in the Jewish Council they may very well have been involved in drawing up lists of people who were deported earlier now that strikes me as the most fundamental human behavior I used to say to my students when I told him that story I said now that now that you know the background now that you know that that child's parents might have participated in the deportation of somebody else's children in order to save that child's life do you have any less sympathy for that child than you did before I hope not that's what parents do that's what human beings do when they're placed in excruciating situations they adopt a policy of soft keeper in French every person for himself do what you can somehow play for time and try to succeed and that's what most people who were put in this dreadful situation did and I think to look back and say why weren't they better people why weren't they stronger why weren't they heroes is the wrong question to ask I think the thing to do is to focus on the excruciatingly pressures that to which they were subjected and to have sympathy for the ways in which they as struggling human beings tried to get through it all right that is a summary of pretty much what I tried to do in the book I'll be happy to answer any questions or to address issues that I might have left out so what I talked about FDR and his engagement or lack of engagement in the Holocaust yep I grew up in a in a household who thought that up until the advent of John F Kennedy FDR was the greatest political sankt in American history okay so this is the background I'm coming from FDR was in person not anti-semitic and not unsympathetic to Jews he appointed more Jews to office than any president ever had before a number of isolationist Republicans in 1944 ran against in 1940 and 1944 ran against FDR as the leader of the Jew deal so he was subjected to a lot of lumping in the Nazis and other people in America said that Roosevelt was actually not his real name his real name was Rosenfeld so you get this is the kind of environment in which he was operating on the other hand FDR he was always a politician he knew that he had to win elections nationally and he knew that sympathy for Jews was not a winning political issue in the United States if you look at the polling data in the late 1930s when Americans were asked repeatedly should we let in more refugees from Europe and refugees was always understood to be a code word for Jews three-quarters of the respondents said no there was a there was a poll of students in the United States at the end of 1937 after Kristallnacht more than two-thirds said no don't let him in I had a remark another story in my book that I like to tell about northwestern I like to tell mostly to tease the kids in the audience who write for the student newspaper but if you go back you go back to the daily Northwestern at the beginning of 1938 a news writing class in our journalism school met and they were asked to draw up a list of the 10 most significant events of 1937 guess what's not there Kristallnacht now northwestern was a white anglo-saxon Protestant institution in the Midwest but pictures of burning synagogues had been on the front page of the Chicago Tribune three months before and to the students it just didn't register that wasn't their world you know so so this is it you get a sense of how detached the country was from what was happening there Roosevelt had to operate in that political context when he asked his own cabinet should we relax the quotas on that on immigration annually from given countries the cabinet told him no don't do it you'll never get it through Congress so that was the principal impediment and then during the war he always thought what did I say before he had other things that were more important to do and thus the he finally begins to release or to devote attention to the plight of Jews in Europe at the beginning of 1944 with the formation of the war refugee board and even then the war refugee board which is what and eventually supports Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest the money for the war refugee board overwhelmingly comes from Jewish donations rather than from the federal budget so this is the context in which he operated and and he he took care of his own priorities yes I think the pivotal moment is the middle of August 1941 that's the moment at which they decide that and Himmler instructs the shooting units in the Soviet Union to kill the Jewish women and children too and once they've decided that there's nothing stopping him Oh denial is always anti-semitic I mean not to put too fine a point on it why would you go to all this trouble to deny something that is so elaborately documented unless you're animated by hostility issues I mean I just I just can't otherwise explain the process so that the the Holocaust is in the first place one of the most thoroughly documented events of human history we have transportation lists of everybody who was put on a train in Salonika and sent to Auschwitz we have we can reconstruct all the deportation trains the 73 that went from France to the death camps we have even in the National Archives in Washington we have a vinyl recording of Heinrich Himmler making the famous speech at Posen in October 1943 where he said to the SS officers most of you know what it is like to have waded through blood and yet remain decent this is a never to be recorded page of glory in our history is the way he put it so you know you can you can go to the National Archives you can hear him lers voice saying this so you know on and on it's just so the the desire to say it didn't happen is animated by hostility to the principle victims of it because what the deniers want to do is say Jews were not subjected to this kind of punishment they just tell you those stories because that's the way Jews are and this is a kind of closed circle of anti-semitism you're referring to Arthur Butz our engineering professor at Northwestern who was a great Holocaust of ism visible Holocaust and IR for years well I actually read his book the hoax of the 20th century and one of the most stunning passages in that book is he says you know how I know that the Jews lie when they say there were six million victims because if you go back into early Jewish texts and talk about the massacre in Alexandria they give a number for the Jews Massacre in Alexandria that is bigger than the population of Alexandria could have been at the time in other words he's saying this didn't happen in the 20th century because these people lied 2,000 years ago in the same way now if you if you follow that line of reasoning its bigotry pure and simple it's just you there's no other way that I can explain it it happened and the reason but the reason why that happened is that conditions in the ghettos were often so terrible people were remembered before they start the deportations from the ghettos in Poland I watch had been at that point a ghetto for over two years Warsaw for by the time the big deportation starts it's it's 22 months these people have are being systematically starved to death exposed to disease so on and so forth and the Germans say we're gonna start deporting people for labor in the east if you show up when you're supposed to they will be sausage and jam and marmalade and various things for you and some people did it I have a some people bought that and went I have a colleague at Northwestern whose grandmother was deported from Warsaw and he was told by a friend of the family who survived that she went because she in the way you just described because she was so exhausted she had lost the will to live and she said I don't care what they're gonna do to me I can't stay here any longer and this too sounds to me like a human being responding to this enormous stress in a way that human beings respond so yes that that did happen in some cases a lot there's a there's a long account I I don't like to quote sources at great length but there's one place in this book where I quote a long description from a person who was in the Jewish police force and then later in the resistance and he talks about when word reached his ghetto of what was happening to people in other ghettos and the sort of four paragraphs and start out by saying isn't that shocking and by the time you get to the fourth paragraph he doesn't believe what he heard this is the way in which the mind works when faced with enormous threats and and you can see in this process how he just found a way to say that at first that sounds terrible and by the end that can't really be true that won't happen to us these were people who didn't always get along very well you know they because I I was walking through Krakoff this summer with a Jewish friend of mine and we and the old part of Krakov you you there are several different jewels all very close together and you sort of say really there you know this is this is the Catholic boy who thinks you know that that churches are where parishes are and so you don't have two Catholic churches right next door to each other right so I'm looking I'm saying why are there so many so close together he says every Jew has at least two synagogues right you know where you know where I'm going right his own and when he wouldn't be caught dead in right and so this is this was part of the the problem and and again what I what I'm trying to do is get people to humanize the subjects of this story because we we tend to be judgmental about the past we too we sometimes we need to be we need to think the world it could have all turned out better if only somebody FDR had behaved better and what I'm trying to do is say look it's there was so much at work here that it's very hard to say it would have been different and particularly you can't say that if you impose unrealistic expectations on the people in the past who were subjected to this so that's what I'm trying to sort of stress yes there is documentation but the documentation is in the form of when you look at the major watersheds in Nazi policy toward Jews the best way to figure out how they happened is look at Heinrich Himmler's daily calendar because they almost always follow a meeting between Himmler and Hitler Himmler walks out of those meetings and he issues orders now it strains belief to think that he walks out of those meetings and then does what he intended to do in the first place there's there's some consultation there Hitler was very careful not to have his name on a piece of paper about this though he did sign the order for the killing of the people in the mental institutions there is a written order for that you get but here - you know a little little triangulation is in order that central subject of the first speech out of Hitler ever gave to a political meeting was the Jews and the central subject of his last will and testament before he killed himself in the bunker is the Jews so the obsession was real the future of Holocaust Studies the future of Holocaust Studies is they're going east I'm a discontinued model I learned German and studied it largely through German the next generation is going to have studied this through Yiddish polish Ukrainian though that's gonna that's the cutting edge and that's utterly fitting because of the fact that this is where it all happened and and this is also where there these countries are wrestling with and are wrestling with the extensive complicity of their own non-jewish citizens in the murders this is obviously causing a great deal of trouble in Poland and Hungary right now and so this is where this is where the real work needs to be done what do they after I taught the course what did the non-jewish students feel about the Holocaust and the Jews I don't think I know I do know what they thought about the course boy they told me what they thought about the course but I don't think I know whether I raised any conscience --es you know that's I thank you all very much we would be pleased to send a complimentary DVD of this program to anyone who wishes to support jbs the Jewish Broadcasting 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Channel: JBS

Views: 40,918

Keywords: Holocaust, History, Germany, Nazi, Nazis, Jews, Murder, Mass Murder, Genocide, Evil, Holocaust Studies, Labor Camps, Concentration Camp, Concentration Camps, Forced Labor, Third Reich, Gas chambers, World War II, WWII, Jewish Community Center, Holocause Memorial Museum

Id: LFCYo_3CjxU

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017