HIST 2117: Modern GermanySpring 2014

Lecture Twenty: The Holocaust

Stages Towards Eliminationism

• Jews in German Society before the Nazis• Persecution and Expulsion of Jews before the

War• Kristallnacht 1938• Jews in Relation to Other “Degenerate Races”• The Goldhagen Thesis• Effect of the Occupation of Poland• Ghettoization and Judenrat

Steps to a “Final Solution”

• “Intentionalist” and “Functionalist” Explanations of Decision

• From Deportation to Elimination• Jewish Forced Labor• The Wannsee Conference• Himmler and the SS

Initial Implementation

• Einsatzgruppen and their Victims: 1.5 million• From Concentration Camps as Anti-Jewish

Sites: Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen

• The Special Case of Terezin• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The Camps and the Numbers

• Logistics of Mass Murder• Gas and Ovens• Auschwitz and Treblinka• Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdenek• Effect of War on Extermination

Liberation and Confrontation

• What did Allies Know about Camps?• Moments of Discovery and Liberation• The Scale of Mass Murder – 5.9 Million/90%

of Jews in Germany, Poland, Baltic States, Czechoslovakia

• “How is Art Possible After Auschwitz?”• What Did it Mean?