Transcript Lecture 5

Lecture 5
The Holocaust
Alexander Watson
Religion, Peace and Conflict
25 March 2014
INTRODUCTION
The Holocaust: murder of 6
million European Jews
between 1941-5
• Nazi Anti-Semitism
• The Holocaust and
Modernity
• Conclusion
Corpses of prisoners at Buchenwald
concentration camp, near Weimar,
Germany, photographed by the Allies
on 24 April 1945
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Anti-Semitism and Nazi Germany (1)
• 30 Jan. 1933 – Hitler
appointed Chancellor
• 1 April 1933 – Anti-Jewish
Boycott
• 7 April 1933 – Law for the
Restoration of the
Professional Civil Service
• 15 Sept. 1935 – The
Nuremburg Laws
• 14 Nov. 1935 – Reich
Citizenship Law Supplementary
Decree
Anti-Jewish commercial boycott, 1933.
The sign reads: ‘Germans! Defend
Yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!’
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Anti-Semitism and Nazi Germany (2)
• 9-10 Nov., 1938 – ‘The
Night of Broken Glass’
(Reichskristallnacht)
- nearly every synagogue
in Germany burned down
- 7,000 businesses destroyed
- 26,000 Jews sent to
concentration camps
- 91 murdered
‘Reichskristallnacht (‘The Night of
Broken Glass), 9-10 Nov. 1938
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Adolf Hitler’s January 1939
Prophecy
‘In the course of my life I have very often been a
prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. ...
Today I will once more be a prophet: if the
international Jewish financiers in and outside
Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once
more into a world war, then the result will not be
the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus a victory of
Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in
Europe!’
Speech in the German Reichstag, 30 January 1939
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Nazi Germany’s Conquests
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The Holocaust & Modernity
“Without modern civilization and its most
central essential achievements, there would
be no Holocaust.”
Zygmunt Bauman
• Product of post-Enlightenment rational thought?
• Product of modern state bureaucratic
organisation and control over populations?
• Role of modern technology?
The Holocaust – A Chronology
• Sept. 1939 – World War II begins
• 30 Oct. 1939 – Jews in annexed Polish territories to be deported to
Generalgouvernment. Also, ghettoisation.
• Summer 1940 – Madagascar Plan
• 22 June 1941 – Attack on Soviet Union
• Likely that between Oct. and Dec. 1941, Hitler orders (verbally)
extermination of Europe’s Jews
• 15 July 1941 – Generalplan Ost presented to Himmler
• Summer 1941 – First Soviet Jews, then women & children killed
• Sept. 1941 – German & French Jews to be deported to east
• 20 Jan. 1942 – Wannsee Conference
• Holocaust killings peak in 2nd ½ of 1942. Complete apart from
Hungarian Jewry by end of 1943
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The Einsatzgruppen
• Einsatzgruppen tasked in the
autumn of 1939 with
murdering the Polish
intelligentsia
• 6 June 1941 – Commissar
Order – instant execution of
all Soviet political
representatives
• Initially, c. 3,000 men. By end
of 1941 had 33,000
• 2.2 million Jews murdered.
Shot, gassed or beaten to
death
Einsatzgruppe at work
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Extermination Camps
March 1933 – Concentration
camp opens at Dachau
6 major extermination centres
• Chełmno (Dec. 1941) - van
• Bełżec (Dec. 1941)
• Sobibór (April 1942)
• Treblinka (July 1942)
• Majdanek
• Auschwitz (1942- for
extermination; it was also a
labour camp)
Prisoners, guards and new arrivals at
Auschwitz. The famous entrance
tower is in the background.
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Extermination & Concentration
Camps
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GENERALPLAN OST, 1941
Himmler examines a model
eastern farming settlement
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CONCLUSION
• The extreme anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime
• The ‘Modern’ Aspects of the Holocaust
- ‘Rational’ Planning
- State Bureaucracy
- Modern Technology
• The irrational nature of modern racial Anti-Semitism
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