Victims Why Didnt more Jews fight back more often Birmingham Holocaust Education Center January 30 Dr Clark Hultquist Professor of Modern European History University of Montevallo Introduction ID: 812595
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Slide1
Peter Hayes, Why: Explaining the Holocaust“Victims: Why Didn’t more Jews fight back more often?”
Birmingham Holocaust Education Center, January 30
Dr. Clark Hultquist, Professor of Modern European History, University of Montevallo
Slide2IntroductionCompliance and ResistanceThe World of the Camps
Concluding Thoughts
Hehalutz women captured with
weapons, “Stroop Report,” 1943
Slide3II. Compliance and resistanceRaul Hilberg Jewish “Collapse” and “A Manifestation of Failure”
Hannah Arendt
“role of Jewish leaders …darkest chapter of the whole dark story”
Jews did not resist: only meaningful resistance was armed actionJews actually made things worse by trying to survive in other ways than fighting
Slide4II. Compliance and resistanceYehuda Bauer rejected both argumentsResistance: any undertaking to frustrate Nazi intentions of harming/killing Jewish people
A “spectrum” of responses
Avoid blaming the victims for their fates
Slide5II. Compliance and resistanceNazi Occupation of Poland policies1: Had previous experience in marginalizing Jews in Germany/Austria
2: “Colonial Practice”
Indirect rule through favored natives who gained privilege or exemptions in exchange for controlling everyone else3: “Divide and Conquer” hard to resist
Coupled with forceAppointees could refuse and die now or consent and die later (or not at all)Playing for time
Judenrat of Lublin, Yad Vashem
Slide6II. Compliance and resistanceWhy Little Resistance to Deportations?
German Camouflage
Carrot & Stick, Bait & Threat
Delegation to JudenräteWeakened Condition of JewsViciousness of German reprisals
Only recourse: avoid starving to death
Jews from the Lodz ghetto are loaded onto freight trains for deportation to the Chelmno killing center, between 1942 and 1944. — National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia
Slide7II. Compliance and resistance“Whether they lived or died depended on two things alone: the actions of the Nazi regime and the progress of the Allied armies”
Peter Hayes, Why, page 195
British troops, Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Slide8Iii. The World of the Camps
Arrival Conditions
Collective Punishment
Presence of spiesEscape?Stripping of humanityExhaustionSelf-pity and paralysis
Slide9Iii. The World of the CampsTerrence Des Pres, The Survivor (1976)
Who outlived the camps?
Discovery of purpose
Preserving appearanceCoping with initial arrival shockLiving with & against terms of existence Complete following of rule or defiance meant death
Buchenwald (Elie Wiesel), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.;
US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Slide10IV. Concluding ThoughtsBBC: How to Survive a DisasterJohn Leach, University of Portsmouth
In life-threatening situations:
75% of people are so bewildered by the situation that they are unable to think clearly or plot their escape15% manage to remain calm and make decisions to save their lives
10% break down and hinder othersPassivity, mental paralysis, or carrying on as normal in crisisCaused by failure to adapt to a sudden change in the environmentSurvival involves goal-directed behavior
New, stressful environment events happen faster than one can process them
Situation outruns capacity to think out of it
Slide11I think the story of Kosów is also appropriate. It exemplifies most vividly the refusal of so many Jewish victims to yield their humanity in the face of impending murder.Kosów was a small town in eastern Galicia, and it had a Judenrat which was not very different from others. On Passover, 1942, the Gestapo announced it would come into the ghetto. The Judenrat believed that this was the signal for the liquidation of the ghetto, and told all the Jews to hide or flee. Of the twenty-four Judenrat members, four decided to meet the Germans and offer themselves as sacrificial victims—to deflect the wrath of the enemy. With the ghetto empty and silent, the four men sat and waited for their executioners. While they were waiting one of them faltered. The others told him to go back and hide. The three men of Kosów prepared to meet the Nazis on Passover of 1942. Was their act less than firing a gun?
Yehuda Bauer,
The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness