THE HOLOCAUST, 1941–1945 term paper

The Holocaust (or Shoah, the Hebrew word for the event) was the deliberate effort by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis during World War II to annihilate all the Jews of Europe. Anti-Semitism had always been an important part of the Nazi ideology, but only in the course of the war did the Nazis come to believe they could carry out a policy of genocide.

In 1939 and 1940 the Holocaust began to take shape, first in the brutal treatment of Poles, both gentile and Jewish, and, second, in the so-called euthanasia (mercy killings) effort in Germany that targeted the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. The euthanasia effort was temporarily suspended because of protests, but it had already provided the Nazis with experience in selecting particular groups, collecting them at convenient points, systematically murdering them, and efficiently disposing of the bodies.

With the decision to invade the Soviet Union, the Holocaust as such began. Task forces, the Einsatzgruppen, accompanied the German army in search of communist officials and Jews. The army and other non-Nazi groups often participated enthusiastically in the slaughter of Russian Jews and Slavs.

In 1941 the decision was made to construct death camps, concentration camps with facilities for the killing of large numbers of people in ways that were systematic, routine, and highly bureaucratic. Heinrich Himmler oversaw the entire process, but Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking official in the SS (Schutzstaffel, originally Hitler’s bodyguards), was given the task of implementing the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference, which met in January 1942 in a Berlin suburb, dealt with coordination of tasks necessary to the Holocaust.

The process of genocide involved, first, systematic efforts to identify the Jewish inhabitants of the European countries occupied by the Nazis and to isolate them from the rest of the population. The Warsaw ghetto was one such attempt. After that, Jews were rounded up and shipped in cattle cars across Europe to the death camps. At the camps, the old, the very young, and women with young children were sent immediately to the gas chambers, where they were killed and their bodies destroyed in crematoria. Those who were selected for work details faced appalling conditions that led in most cases to death.

Some Jews tried to survive by going into hiding or by seeking help in reaching neutral countries. The diary of Anne Frank records the efforts of the Frank family to hide from the Nazis in Amsterdam.

At the end of the war the world was stunned to learn of the enormity of the horror of the Holocaust. Between 5 and 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. Other groups singled out were the Roma and Sinti (gypsies), homosexuals, and members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Millions of Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians also were murdered in the course of the war, but not in the same concerted and systematic way as the Jewish people. Suggestions for Term Papers
1. The so-called euthanasia (mercy killing) campaign that targeted the mentally ill and physically handicapped in Germany between 1939 and 1941 foreshadowed the Holocaust. Discuss what happened in this campaign and the ways in which it contributed to methods used in the Holocaust.
2. Heinrich Himmler is probably the single individual most responsible for the actual course the Holocaust took. Study his career in the late 1930s and the 1940s and discuss the extent to which he shaped the experience of the Holocaust.
3. Read several survivors’ accounts of their experiences and write a paper that discusses factors that might account for surviving an experience like the Holocaust.
4. Review the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and write a research paper about the difficulties involved in the decision to stage an armed uprising against enormous odds.
5. As a group project, do one or more oral histories with Holocaust survivors or children of Holocaust survivors. In addition to asking about experiences during the Holocaust, you may want to talk with survivors about their lives after the Holocaust.
6. Since the publication of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, historians have tended to follow either Goldhagen’s view that most Germans by the 1930s were deeply anti-Semitic and eager to help the Nazis with the Holocaust or the views of Christopher Browning, who holds that ordinary people may decide to do terrible things for many different reasons. Read Goldhagen and Browning and write a paper presenting your ideas about the motivations of the perpetrators in the Holocaust.

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entries for “Kristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’), 1938” (#31), “The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942–1943” (#33), “D-Day, 1944” (#35), and “The Yalta Conference, 1945”(#36). Search under Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Zyklon B, Judenraete (Jewish Councils), Genocide, Elie Wiesel, and Pope Pius XII. SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944. Edited by Lucjan Dobroszycki. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Documents from one of the main ghettos in Poland that provide a picture of the terrible conditions endured by the inhabitants.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl. The Definitive Edition. New York: Viking, 1997. While there are still a few pages not included, this new translation includes portions of the diary not printed in the original edition.

Hillesum, Etty. An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943 and Letters from Westerbork. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Etty also lived in Amsterdam, but was in her twenties in the period covered by the diaries. Just as interesting as Anne Frank but on a different level.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity.New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Originally published in English as If This Is a Man. An important memoir.

Shoah. Directed by Claude Lanzmann, 1985. Five videotapes, 570 minutes. Distributed by New Yorker Films. Text of the film is available in Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). A long but often moving and powerful documentary.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Twenty-fifth anniversary edition. A brief but very powerful portrait of a young man’s descent into the hell of Auschwitz.

Secondary Sources

Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis and the War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. A revisionist history that argues that the German army was heavily implicated in some aspects of the Holocaust.

Bauer, Yehuda. A History of the Holocaust. New York: Franklin Watts, 1982. A dependable and comprehensive discussion of the Holocaust.

Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. A very effective presentation of the Holocaust.

Breitman, Richard. The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution. New York: Knopf, 1991. An excellent study of the man in charge of the Holocaust.

Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. An important book that concludes that even “ordinary men” are capable of great cruelty in certain circumstances.

Epstein, Eric Joseph, and Philip Rosen, eds. Dictionary of the Holocaust: Biography, Geography, and Terminology. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. An excellent reference book.

Fischel, Jack R. The Holocaust. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. A convenient source of a great deal of information on the Holocaust.

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996. An important book. It contains a wealth of information about the Holocaust, but its perspective on anti-Semitism in Germany before World War II is highly controversial.

Hilberg, Raul. Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. A most helpful series of essays by one of the leading experts on the Holocaust.

Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: Macmillan, 1996. Compiled under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Consists of a computer laser optical disk plus a guide.

The Holocaust: In Memory of Millions. Video, 92 minutes, 1994. Narrated by Walter Cronkite and produced by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this is a gripping introduction to the Holocaust.

Langer, Lawrence L. Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. An important critical study of versions of the Holocaust that appear to dilute its powerful message.

Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987. A superb introduction to the topic.

Schindler’s List. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, 1994. 2 videocassettes, 197 minutes. Distributed by MCA Universal Home Video. A powerful presentation of the true story of a deeply flawed man who, in many ways because of his flaws, was able to save the lives of scores of Jews.

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945. New York: The New Press, 1998. First published in 1984. An indictment of the failure of the United States to do more to stop the Holocaust.

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: Fate of the European Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. An excellent, comprehensive study of the Holocaust. World Wide Web

“United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” http://www.ushmm.org. A valuable Web site with a searchable “Museum Collections and Archives” section and links to other sites.