History 225: The Holocaust
Overview
During
World War Two, the Germans, with the help of accomplices across occupied Europe,
murdered up to eleven million civilians, including about six million Jews.
Persecution of the Jews began in Germany as soon as the National
Socialists, or Nazis, took power in 1933, but the war Hitler launched in 1939
set the stage for mass murder. Thousands
perished in Poland’s ghettoes -- essentially urban prison camps.
As German troops invaded in 1941, special killing squads shot to death
more than one million people outside communities in Poland and the western
Soviet Union. But the Nazis came to prefer more "efficient" slave
labor and death camps, in which they adapted the methods and technologies of
mass production to their genocidal purposes.
While Jews were the principal targets of this mass murder, millions of
other Europeans, including large numbers of Poles, gypsies, homosexuals,
communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other “undesirables” (including those
who spoke or acted out against this brutality) faced persecution and death.
How
could this happen? Adolf Hitler,
Germany’s leader between 1933 and 1945, envisioned a Third Reich expanding
across eastern Europe, creating “Lebensraum,” or living space for the
Germans, who he asserted to be “Aryans” at the top of a racial hierarchy.
This expansion was to take place largely at the expense of the Slavic
peoples, claimed to be racially inferior and therefore destined to serve their
“Aryan masters.” But Hitler
reserved a special hatred for the Jews. Drawing
on centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice and persecution, Hitler blamed the Jews
specifically for Germany's problems and cited them as a peril to the
“purity” of the master “Aryan” race. In fact, Jews made up less than one
percent of Germany’s population in 1933.
Of course these racial claims were absurd, but they nevertheless drove a
powerful nation to horrific acts of destruction that would destroy much of
Europe, including Germany itself.
In this course we will examine the Holocaust and its significance. What does this example of genocide reveal about the human experience? How was it different from or similar to acts perpetrated before or since? Obviously it presents humanity at its worst, but as we look more closely we also will discover stories of courage and goodness amidst the savagery.