tv Why CSPAN January 28, 2017 8:30pm-9:56pm EST
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delivered." ♪ seen a lot of things in this old world. ♪ the way they talk, didn't nothing to this girl. ♪ oh, baby. ♪ here i am, signed, sealed, delivered. ♪ i'm yours. ♪ we set this world on fire. ♪ if they go low, you better go higher. ♪ here i am, signed, sealed, delivered, i'm yours ♪ i'm yours. i'm yours. ♪ i'm yours.
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♪ i'm yours [applause] >> thank you. and good evening. ask thank you. and thank you for coming. >> thank you, alicia. so beautiful. thank you all for coming. >> thank you all. have a good evening. i need to turn this on? >> sorry. thank you thomas, damon, alicia, and we have books up there and we'll awe sign. so thank you. [applause]
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>> booktv is on twitter and facebook ask and we want to hear from you. or post a comment on our facebook page. facebook.com/booktv. >> good evening, and welcome. i am wendy lower, director of the museum center for advanced holocaust study and it is my honor to welcome you on behalf of the united states holocaust memorial museum on today's
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program, "why did the holocaust happen," you can share with the. see people think about how the holocaust happen and how was upon in one of the most civilized region of the world. -under you look at europe, and specifically germany before hit loire hitler came to pour you would find democracy good growing alaska site and fear as a result of the great war, the economic depression and rise of communist and you would fine increasing antisemitism which game a convenient explanation for every problem and crisis that beset european civilization. in germany you found of the of omost highly educated nations in the world. 25% of the ss leadership at a ph.d ored a advanced degree.
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a country with a dynamic free press. berlin had 146 newspapers. 39 nobel prize winners. the holocaust reminds us of the progress and fragility of human rights, that the unthinkable is always thinkable and in all societies human beings are susceptible to treating the other as infor to the abuse of power and tendency to justify any behavior. the museum is here to elicit the best went us and remind us with bold confidence that memory has the capacity to transform and the lessons of the holocaust have the capacity to inspire that each of us has the able and responsibility to act. what you do, what we do, what we have done and will achieve together, matters. this evening's program is the first in a gnaw programming sear
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this year do itle pie the power of memory to shape our futurity" which explores our collective understanding 0 the cost and how to create a better world. please sign up for museum newsletter and e-mails. time we are joined by peter hayes, prefer emeritus of history and professor at northwestern university. he earned hi baa bowden college and ph.d in history from yale. the author of more than 80 mayorals and 12 books and several landmark studies on "third like," hayes has been funds by the guggenheim foundation this american council of learned societies and in 1997-98 he was awarded the jb and maurice shapiro senior
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scholarship. senior in shat tour, not age. he -- stature and not age. in peter new back he disspells many miscop sings and angst the basic yet vexing questioned that remain. why the jews and not another ethnic group? why the germans? why such a swift and sweeping extermination. why didn't more jews fight back more often? why didn't they receive more help? while responding to the questions, he has been most frequently asked by students over the decade, peter brings a wealth of scholarly research and experience to bear conventional popular views, challenge the prominent recent interpretations and argues there is no-no sing theory that explain that's holocaust, rather, convergence at forces let to the catastrophe. he will share the main points of his book and offer is a behind the scenes look detailing why he
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wrote the book and. it now my great pleasure to walk peater hayes to the stage. [applause] >> good evening, thank you all for coming out a rainy night and in a busy week to hear about a book you can get delivered in a brown paper wrapper to your front door. most historians books spring from the head of zeus. they usually are full-blown idea that a person has about seeing something in a new way. the author gets an idea, what we call in trade a thesis, and guess out to try to find evidence that supports it. sometimes evidence that refutes it but more often we tend to
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follow the path we have in mind. and then to write an account that vend vicinity indicated it, this -- vicinity indicates it. the book i have written is very different in the late 1980s i began to teach a course on the history of the holocaust. i had been trained am a neurallan historian whose research impinged on the holocaust buffed debt not center on it. thus i set tout teach a course that i had to learn a great deal about. and as i learned about that course, -- about that subject and as i began teaching it and began giving public lectures about it, i discovered that most people who came to my talks, like most of the students who enrolled in the class, had the very same questions about the subject. they brought to it certain issues that they wanted explained. and this actually -- this insight dovetailed with a
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practical consideration. when i started this course and for the whole 36 years of my academic career, i taught at the same institution. it's an institution that operates on something called the quarter system. the quarter system is about -- inflicted on the students of a small number of america's leading universities, chicago, northwestern, andna stanford. it is a racket for the teachers who teach on it. because it divides the academic year into teaching units of ten weeks and a well endowed institution you an an have to teach of two of the units. youer in front of students for 18 yankees a year no wonder higher education is criticized. nonetheless, i found that i faced a problem.
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i had to teach the history of the holocaust in nine weeks. how could i possibly come -- -- compress this material into that frame of time. realized the people cog to class and come doing mr. lectures with the same questions were giving me the answer. were telling me how to do and it now my phone is telling me i should have shut it off before came up here. so i did not want, as gap to think about writing this book -- i wanted to disstill the lessons i learned from these questions and from the experience of trying to answer them. into a book that would make sense to people. i did not want to write another narrative history of the holocaust. we have a great many excellent ones. if you want one that consists of only 100 to 110 pages, read the one by david angle.
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it's superb. doris bergen's history is a little longer than that and has won a wide audience. ifout want the full narrative the history from beginning to end, top to bottom no one will ever do better than sal friedlanders volumes. i wanted to bring some clarity to subject to distill the insights of scholars over the last 30 years of enormously productive work and bring the insights into service of the practical answers to the questions that people ask. i had two additional purposes. wanted to close the gap, chas can become very wide, between what the general public thing -- thinks it knows about the holocaust and what scholars think they know about the subject. and i wanted to set the record straight.
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was haunted by an observation by tony jutt, recent he diocese who quite rightly wrote that, quote, impossible to describe as it really was, the holocaust is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't. unquote. and the result of that fact is a great deal of distortion about how and why it happened. and the more i studied the subject the more misconceptions i encountered and the more i thought the sort of book i had in mine is needed. now, wendy summarized for you the eight questions that propel the book. it has eight chapters, each of which is devoted to answering one of those questions. and obviously i can't take you through all eight of those tonight. that comes as a source of relief to you at this hour.
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but the truth -- but the eight questions boil down essentially to two that i want to devote my attention to together. the first is, why were the jus killed and the second is why didn't or couldn't anyone prevent this? i want to try to devote the time have tonight to giving you a step of the way i tried to answer these questions. i should alert you in advance to the fact that i'm a very old school guy. i'm 70 years old. bornin' 1946. i still remember radio. i don't normally use visual aids, but united states holocaust memorial museum has dragged me into the 21st 21st century, and i will in the course of this presentation put some images up to give you an illustration of what i am thinking about and what i'm talking about.
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some of these images are in the book and relate to argument inside the book, others will be just there to give you a sense of the vividness and the reality of what i'm talking about at the time. if you start with the long-term roots of the answer to why the jews were killed, one cannot avoid the long tradition in the western world of treating jews as contaminating. it is a tradition that runs through the last 2,000 years. the first source of contamination was the faith of christians. it explained why jews had to be kept at a distance, to be prevent from enter acting with nonjews on a high level, because they would corrupt the belief system of christians. by the late 18th century, as religious ideas began to fade in their pre dominance in thewest,
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enlightment. thinkers presented jews as the embodiment of threat to progress. people who clung to tradition and faith and custom and the repetition of old-fashioned ways in a way that violated the visions of a future emancipation of human beings. and then after that eman's nation, are -- a emancipation -- new forms of presenting them as contanimating arose. that they were physically threatening. they were in a sense -- would undermine the health of the people. i argue to in the book this is a tradition -- remember i'm an undergraduate teach are dirks jews were benighted, backward and bacterial. now, overtight, each new
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argument as -- over time each new argument did not crowd out entirely the old ones but provided new argues. s to new sorts of people. the i-y of the tradition -- the irony of the tradition of antisemitism -- all ame antisemitism flight and it's and modern antisim tim is a movement that says jews are a political and moral threat that must be combated politically. and the irony of this is this an attitude towards joes that fluoroissued and was vocal and widespread in the 19th century in europe and was almost entirely a political failure. in the months leading up to world war i, almost no one in germany would have suspected this movement was going to become a powerful force after that conflict. antisemites had run repeat lid any german elects and never gotten more than four percent of the vote or five percent of the seated. as a political movement, the
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notion that the jews were the source of all misfortunes did not have widespread traction. the important question is to whom i did have traction. modern antisemitism is the creation of the industrial revolution, and the audience for it was expanded by the bolshevik revolution. the people who listenedded to the argue. that jews were the source of all trouble in society were often people who were the losers by virtue of the industrial revolution. and they were people terrified of the potential political effects of obolshevik revolution. the audience for everyone september might advertise end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, was not unlike the audience for pop lists and nationalists in the 21st 21st century.
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not the people panicked by bolshevik revolution but the digital revolution and people terrified by terrorism. the rise after antisemitism was enabled not by the power of these ideas alone but by the enormous crisis that was set off by world war i. germany would anniversary have been the country in which this was in other worded if the defeat of the nation in 1918 had not set up a general sense of victimization, not only by economic trends in four but also by political defeat and humiliation. this is the constant context that -- context that created the opening for adolph hitler, and even the he almost did not succeed. when adolph hitler came to pear in january 1933, 55 percent of the german had never voted for him.
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he was jobbed into office by a coalition of powerful people who thought they could use him. he had received -- wanted to use him because he received more votes than anyone else. but never a majority of the votes. and this is an important point to make because when we try to explain why germany became the place where the holocaust was perpetrated, where the actors came from, the events that succeed 1933 are much more important than the event that's preceded. the long tradition of antisemitism, the echoing of antiseptember mittic arguments did not matter politically until the minority of the people who believed in it acquired political power. power mag malignant any -- power magnifies the idea offed those
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who hold it and when people hold beliefs regard bid the general society as not quite acceptable, become enormously powerful, their beliefs become steadily more acceptable. a famous historian of nazi germany once said, more people became antisemites in germany because they became national socialists, then became national socialist because in we antisemite is. another way of formulate what i just said. power michigan magnifies the ideases of those who hold and it of the who appear to be successful in realms that are important to some selling. s of the population to the segment of the population will come to think the other ideas they hold might be more persuasive than that it thought at first glance. if the economy flourish inside
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the 1930s, as it appeared to do. then perhaps the nazis were not so bad after all and perhaps what they say about the jews is not so errant as we thought. add this to a society that was thoroughly capable of creating an echo chamber,en ideological word in which only its ideas were presented to the public. and in which one could not challenge those ideas without fear of punishment. and you create a situation that transforms a nation in 1933 from one in which 55% of the germanned had never voted for hitler, to one in 1938 and. 39 is ready to do to the jews everything that hitler wants it to do. is ready to cooperate in every measure of persecution. none of which arouse significant public opposition in german pop
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populist. this was what the nazi is did. they created an echo chamber in which only we matter and this where is the first visual aids come in. these or two illustrations of nazi propaganda about the juice. on the left a children's book called -- they says at the top, the poisonous mushroom and this is a presentation to children of what jews embody collectively. no difference among them. the nazi always spoke of the jew or jewry. they never spoke in the plural because all jews are alike. the collective is what matters, individualism is illusory. on the right is a presentation of traditional christian antisemitism, the notion when you look at the cross, then think on the terror of the cruel murder that the jews committed at cavalry.
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that's the illustration you're seeing next elm next illustration is the notion that all life is struggle. this is the sick and the weak in nature, the way in which animals eat each other and destroy, the weaker eaten by the strong, they we in which defective trees are cut down for naysays the lessons for all german, all life is struggle, struggle between us and them. they are malevolent, out to harm us, and they must be because all life is struggle. and it is a zero sum game. and thus we must contest e test women. the re we must remove them. and then the positive vision. the beautiful, florae glorious now state. the way poll ticked will be agency acted out on people residents bodies.
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now that's enough of that. in the 1930s what the german preached wheres that jews and all would who are we defective or desist or thenned the perfection of the people had to be removed. the verb they used was always in german, to remove. at the end of the 1930s, in 1938, they realized that this was no longer adequate. and they realized it because they did a little math. one of the thing that was -- 1938 is the greer which the nazi expanded germany? austria. the two moves, expansion of the boundaries of if the reich, but almost as many jews into the germany has they citied teed driving out in the preceding five years. and their next target in march of 1939 was the protectorat of
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bohemia. this might sound as if it was not terribly significant for the evolution of nazi jewish policy but the next slide points to one of the most famouses event in the history of the persecution of the jews of this is the event in which the third reich went into mass violence again the jews in 1938ed there hadbroken individual violence before. a roundup of jews in the spring of 1938 and attempt to drive alien jews, foreigners, livering in germany out of the country. thrift was the moment at which the regime went over to see vert violence, sending 30,000 people to concentration camps, smashing homes and shops. behind the scenes, something much more fateful happened. or at least as fateful.
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and that is the germans began to speaking a new vocabulary. no longer was the decisive word. the german second man in the german foreign ministry went to paris to attend the funeral of the man who as was assassinated and sad down with his colleagues this swiss ambassador to paris and said, if the jews do not leave germany, they are going to sooner or later to their complete annihilation. the first record use of that word by a senior german official and occurs a first days after. late in the month, the ss magazine, writes an narl which it says jews don't leave the country they cannot expect the germans will suffer the presence any further. we'll have to expatriate them with fire and sword.
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they will be completely finished. annihilated. and on january 30, 1939, adolph hitler proclaims that in the event of a new world war, that will not mean the destruction of the german people in europe. that will mean for jewry they're complete finish. annihilation. for five years up until 1978 the -- 1938 the slow cab -- vocabulary was to remove them. but once the lighter realized every foreign policy gain they made meant more jews wind the country, their projection was to advance to the east austria. heck check slovaca, poland, living space was to be found in the east, next was who it
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russia, ukraine, lithuania, the old pale of settlement. of the russian empire. the location of more than half of the jews of europe in 1939 and '40. once they began to see that their one goal of expansion clashed with their other goal of racial purification that began to think in a different term. they didn't yet begin to plan in that term, but the world, the concept, was out in the open. from 1939 to '41, as their victories in the east increased, as they annexed more territory, they concentrated the jew wish population forcibly, supposedly with the objective of expelling it later to some destination. maybe an island off the coast of africa, maybe siberia. maybe northern russia, later if the soviet soviet soviet union e
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conquered. this us how thigh condition send traited people in various areas of occupied poland. now what happened, when they decided to invades the soviet union in the summer of 19 -- the decision was indiana in 1940 but when they invade the soviet union in the summer of 1941, three things come together. the german -- the nazis had long proclaimed a motive to kill the jews. they are our mortal enemies who are always out to defeat us. they now have an opportunity to kill the jews. the cover of war as they expand into a territory where there are large numbers of jews and no foreign reporters no one other then their own news reels to report whats is happening. and they recognize by september of 1941, that they have the
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means, motive, opportunity, means. they know that for the last two years they have been capable of killing the mentally and physically handicapped capped in theirs own mental imconstitutions with carbon monoxide gas. they do a few experiments in august and september of 1941, at a little concentration cam in poland called auschwitz. experiments on soviet prisoner's were to find out if they can kill them with a pesticide that they have routinely on hand at the site, in order to fumigate barracks and so forth. and they discovered that pulling it into a basement through a window will kill 600 soviet prisoners of war in 90 minutes. so by september of 1941, they know they have a motive and an opportunity and multiple means of killing people. and they begin to doing that on a massive scale in eastern europe.
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now, the map. this gives you a sense of -- i'll resort to a map again a little later to reinforce this -- those -- each of those dots represents a ghetto, place where the germans concentrated the jewish population. look at the density of those dots. this gives you a physical image of how concentrated the jewish population was, and this is very important because it unlocks the secret to something. one of the few record wes have of the planning to kill the jews of europe is the famous conference. everybody says it occurred on january 20, 1939. the ss sat down with bureaucratic representatives and asserted his authority over the process. and got their agreement to participate in it.
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he also said something that has often been quoted, that was deeply misleading. he said, europe will be combed from west to east. in other words the jews would be fill fir from france and netherlands and then the killing process would go across the continent and yet anyone who has studied the holocaust knows that is exactly the opposite of the way it happened. the killing went from east to west, at least on the northern half over the european continent. the million and a half victims of the holocaust who were dead by the end of 1941, so one quarter of the total, lived almost entirely in areas where you see those dots. occupied poland, and the parts of the soviet union that were
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invaded in 1941. the few additional victims of the holocaust in 1941 are mostly german jews being deported from the country. in france people were not being killed. in netherlands not being called and so forth. why? this is the last part of my first question. why were the jews killed. why did the killing start here, why was so it intense here? i do not believe, as timothy snide schneider has argued, that the presence or absence of local governments had anything to do with it. so-called statelessness. it is true that in most of these regions, there were no independent governments. there was no polish government in the occupied part of poland but in men case is local administrations. light wayney and latee ya --
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lithuania and latvia had puppet governments, all right by former military leaders and local administrations and local police forces. all thick by staffed with local collaborators, through which the germans worked. the reason why the killing starts here -- -- look at the dots. the reason wife the killing starts here is because this where is germany intended to expands. this where is the largest population of jew is was. this is where the rest of the -- the germans expected the rest of the population to comply or help with the killing of in the jews and this is where the proximity of the fighting -- remember, still invading invading the solf soviet union. there's still war going on here. up like in western europe.
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and this is where the fighting activated german paranoia about so-called partisans, and the jews being guerrilla fighters behind their lines, which the there were in fact very few in 1941. in other words, the reason why the killing here first is so intense is because german ideological fascination with the region coupled with the dense si of the jewish population, the unlikeliness of local resistance to the killing of the jews, and the presence of military activity, all combined to suggest to german policymakers that the solution, as they called it torques long-standing jewish question, was to kill the people in their path. and then it was a short step to killing the people behind them. the jews already in occupation.
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i do not think that expectations on the german's part of every victory or defeat had nothing do with the decision. the momentum was rolling. remember the experts in auschwitz? why are the testing gas on people at the end of august and the beginning of september? because they're looking for other method. the moment e momentary likelihood of either winning or losing the war could be and was used throughout 1941 as an argument to expand the killing. hitler's confidence in defeating the soviet union waxed and waned several times in the last half of 1941. whether he thought he was win organize whether he thought he was losing, the momentum increased to killing the jews, who were defined as subversives
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and threats. and thus it was that not only did they make the test at auschwitz in the early september, the location of another of the death camps, the construction of begins on november 1st. the location of a third of the death camps is picked in november. on november 18th, man who is designated to be the german minister of these conquered areas, tell this german reporters in berlin on deep background that the physical extinction of european jewry is at hand. and the invitation to the conference actually went out on november 29th. supposed to be held on december 9th. and the reason why it wasn't held is because of the events that occurred on december 7. in the japanese attack on pearl harbor struck the germans as a
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surprise. they weren't alerted in advance. there was soviet attack in moscow, berlin was in in consternation. the meeting occurred in january. we have absolutely no reason to think that the assed of -- the agenda of the meeting changed. when the meeting was called he nude what he ended to stay and do, and at the preparations had already been made. so why were the jews killed? because of a long-stand tragic digs of hatred, activated under particular political circumstances, fomented bay regime that was thoroughly capable of whipping up the population to participate in it. then undertook a war interest a region where there were hundreds of thousand odd people it defined as enemies and it resolved under the condition's
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wartime to wipe these people out. why couldn't, didn't, anyone stop this? how was it that this process was allowed to unfold? the short answer is that because the jews were internally divided and largely powerless in the face of the nazi onslaught, and every other relevant party always had something else more important to do. germans themselves, who might have been shocked by what the nazis seemed to be encouraging, actually thought in 1933, about resigning. one of the most little known facts about the history of the third reich is that the ambassadors to washington, london, pairs paris, and oslo, consulted in spring raith after
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hitler was appointed whether they should all resign. because they thought this was a potentially criminal government. and in the end only one of them did. the man who was the ambassador here in washington. the others stayed, and a man named -- the ambassador in oslo, who later became the second man in the german foreign minimum ministry said why. he said, one does not abandon one's country because it has a bad government. leader otherwise german industries didn't behave much better. number of them thought the future was dark and the are regime would bring trouble and men were deeply opposed the antiset mimick policies they saw, and many of them consulted in course of 1933 about what they could do. almost all of them came up with
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rationalizations for saying, we should work within from within, we should do what we can to make this better. the head of a company had a very colorful phrase. do our bess to see that hate to wild grown juice becomes wine. and that was their job. over and over the people -- and many of the industrialists who consulted decided that what was being done to the jews was regret e greatable. the expulsion from positions at university teachers started very early. the expulsion from some prominent economic positions started early. wait regrettable, but the economic revival, the improvement of conditions, the resurgence of national prestige, all of this outweighed what they called, quote, the inevitable excesses that come with
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revolution. unquote. one way or another, germans found ways of rationalizing cooperation with the new regime. and i don't need -- one already my favorite quotes in history is said history never repeats itself. people always do. and i don't need to tell you how many people in the spring of 1933 in prominent positions of german life, say said have more to gain with going with the these things are developing than by resisting them. so this was the pattern that helped to explain why so few germans stewed up and resisted. europeans outside of germany were -- had a hero of the repetition of world wore 1, they believed in the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. they feared any influx of
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refugees, a ven topical issue. in britain, fear of immigration to palestine and the results political problems that would come for the british mandate, was very strong. german propaganda had certain appeal in allied countries because the germans sent signature i all with want is self-determination, the right you have claimed for yourselves before we want to bring other germans back into our country. the austrians had never been german. neither had the people in the -- but the spoke german and thus this was aned a idealistic appeal. in the united states a combination of nativism and antisemitism, fear of an influx of immigrants not from germany. only 560,000 german jews. even the opponents of immigration were not necessarily
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convinced that this country could not absorb half a million people. the problem was there were 3.3 million jews in poland, 800,000 jews in romania. there were almost 200,000 in lithuania, and every single one of those governments in the late 1930s had publicly expressed the desire to reduce its jewish population. and had gone to the league of nations and asked for help in that respect. the ambassador of poland in great britain in 1938 actually tried to blackmail the british government into accepting 100,000 polish jewish immigrants per year into british colonies or, he said, we will be come excelled compelled to adopt the policies the j. january -- german reich.
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the extent of u.s. nativism -- everybody will recognize the illustrator? almost everybody will. this is dr. suess. this is from 1940. no meat how many countries the germans go after they will leave us alone because they'll be tired. or even more shocking, the illustration on the right, the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their boned bit those were foreign children and didn't matter. i said, i taught at northwestern for 36 years. northwestern has a distinguished journalism school. it's actually named an man who was the editor of the "chicago tribune" in the late 19th 19th century and a visual opponent of irish immigration to the united states. the laundering of names that goes on in culture.
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but this -- the school of journalism halved a class that met in january 1939 -- here'ses journalism students. >> they were asked to abell he lest of the known historical events of 1938. this is like the sherlock holmes story about the dog bat didn't bark. what's not on the list? the conference. the burn offering the synagogues, attack on the jews of germany was front page only the chicago transcribe "chicago tribune." in november of 1938. on the mostly white anglosaxon protestant students. northwestern what a methodist university in those days. on the mostly whitaker low saxon protestant students the alaska tang of the germany had made almost know impression judging from the list. this is the world outside of germany that german jews were facing.
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now, the miracle is how many people got away. 60% of the german jews escaped in the 19 o's. 67're of austrian, a little less than a quart are of the jew 0 the occupied czech. parts of that country. one reason why this pattern of noninterference with the holocaust continues after the war has to do with the next illustration. after the bargain 1939, and after the united states people and the war in 1941, this is a nazi propaganda poster. it said, behind the enemy power us this jew, and notice the flag. it's britain, the american flag, the soviet union. the depiction of all of these powers were all tools of the jewish enemy. was a central theme in nazi
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propaganda and was an inhibiting theme in the ability of the american and the british governments to react. because what they constantly worried about was if we speak out against the persecution of the jews, we look like we are the tools of the jews. if we make the persecution of the jews central to the war effort we play into nazi propaganda. you and i looking back on this may find that argument a little strange. certainly do but at the time it was extremely powerful. and though the allies could do not very much about the holocaust as it unfolded, about the only thing they could have done was to publicize it more. and to whip up public opinion on the subject, and this is the reason why they in large measure did not. one of the most shocking fact is discovered in any research is that the united states in fact
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knew about auschwitz. about eight months earlier than our official declarations show. we officially acknowledged the existence of auschwitz in spring of 1944. we were informed of it by the polish underground in early november 1943. we got details what was happening there well newell the location, the name. we consciously repressed this information. and the reason was in relation to this 'the desire not to play into nazi propaganda. now, let me give you one other illustration of the difficulties of inhibiting or interfering with the holocaust. once more, i had recourse to a map. the map shows you the helping -- the main ways at the people were deported to death camps and the concentration of the death camps is an important fact.
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what i have i did in the book and would like you to do with blow now mentally is to stick your finger on the map at vienna. in the middle. draw a line up. so a vertical line up from vienna and a horizontal line toty right from eenvie enna. you have identity latest the northeastern quo dropped of europe. 90% of the victims of the holocaust died there. three-quarters of the victims of the holocaust came from there. now, think about what that means. this in the first place is reinforcement of what i said to you about before europeas not combed from west to east, and that this is where the visions of -- the presence over the jews, presence of the fighting and absence of sympathy were the cause for their carnage bus for
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mow of the war the only place where the united states had planes that could bomb these sites was great britain, on the upper left. a plane could not reach from great britain to the auschwitz camp which is almost the westernmost. a little further west. but auschwitz is almost the westernmost. a plane could not go from great britain to all-and its return on a single tank of gas without crashing. now, what this means is that until 1944, until we had fought our way up the boot of italy to northeast of rome, and fly a plain from there up to ash witness ith, it was not within -- auschwitz, wait not a within target range and am lever angel other one of those death camps was closed by the time we
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could do that in 1944. actually they all war because juan was liberated by the soviets. the able to bomb and stop the process was not inhibited by lack of knowledge. we knew great deal about what was happening. but it was inhibited by the fact that is was geographically impossible until late in the war. and indeed, most of the murder, -- murder in the holocaust was as come pressed -- pressed in time as it was compressed specially. spatially. 90% of the continence, 567% of the victim. s 75% of the victims were killed within 20 months. they were dead by the time the russian army century surrendered at stall lynn grad. 75 force of the victims of the holocaust were killed while in the germans were winning the
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war. who than i stopped winning the war, their ability to kill jews declined greatly. for two reasons. they had virtually killed all of the jews up there where the jewish population was concentrated, and the remaining jews lived in countries that were nominally ally teed edded to nazi. romaina, -- all of the concluded after the surrender stalingrad, and they would have a great deal of explaining to do after the war. the germans were likely to lose and the allies would win ask they would have to explain why they had cooperated and they largely stopped cooping. the romanian government reneged on the promise to deliver the jews of the romanian homeland, which is in that area called
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romania and reduced to deliver them to the nazis. the romanian troops had killed almost 400,000 yous any areas of the soviet union than i i invadement bulgarians refused to deliver jus at all except a install somebody in greece that it hads taken over. the french ban gag -- dragging their feet. then the number of transports and so forthgreatly declined and the willingness to french police to help round up jews declined. these are some 0 the reason us why nobody else was able to stand in the way. let me conclude by saying a few things about the difficulties of the jews themselves. and this is where we move to the next two slides. this is probably the most famous image of hoe holocaust.
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this is the little boy in the cloth cap during the suppression of the ghetto and this is part of the report named after the german commandant of the operation that put town the war saw uprisings. almost everybody has seen this photograph. it appears -- who ticks any interest in the holocaust, appears in book after book. i don't think i've ever seen anyone say what i'm about to say to you. the most remarkable thing in the frustrate is the child in it. a child under the age of 10. in fact there are three or four children under the age of ten in that photograph. now, this is a photograph taken in the spring of 1943. with know when the population of the warsaw ghetto was down to 50,000. we know from the records of the warsaw ghetto administration how many children under ten were still alive.
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officially. acknowledged. known by the administration. fewer than 500. there had been 50,000 of them when the ghetto was closed. now, the next picture. this is another one. a show -- people having been rounded up from the warsaw uprisingrising and marched off. another child under the age of ten on the right. we know the name. we do not know the name of the boy in at the plea -- preceding photograph. want it to draw your attention to something tragic about these pictures. who are these people? who could these children be? who is still alive under the age of ten in the warsaw ghetto after three years of german persecution and deportation and suffering and starvation and so forth. who is still alive?
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a few months earlier in -- the head of the jewish administration had pleaded with the people, give me your children. the germans have demanded x number of people and tomorrow's shipment. we don't want to give them me people who are work neglect factories bass the german is might keep them alive. give me your children and they had sent off all the children in -- except the children of the jewish administration in the ghetto. except the children of the jew wish police force. what children were still alive in warsaw when the ghetto upriding was suppressed, children of people who were connected. children whose parents had kept them alive somehow. but who had also probably participated in choosing who was
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to gophone otransports and die. now, when say toe my students and tell them the background story i say do you have any less sympathy for those kids now that you know that, than you had before? i hope not. but that is the illustration of the conditions that the germans created in the ghettos. in which among the jews themselves, by definition, the prevailing mentality was what in french is called -- every person for himself. the choices were all bad and to expect they would somehow have coalesced and reached a consensus how to do this, at the risk to their children, because if you chose to cooperate with the germans and played for time,
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and you were connected, there was less chance that your son or daughter would be carted off than if you rebelled, which is what happened to them when the do repel. ... >> one more thing illustrated today. this is, of course, an image everybody has in their head of people being loaded off to go sent to death camps and this is a boxcar which was the typically vehicle used in poland and
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russia. deportees from western europe sent in third place passenger cars and that was part of camouflaging to them what their fate was growing to be. you look at the box car and it isn't apparent from the picture but one of the reasons why the holocaust was so deb stating, was capable of wiping out 2/3rds of the jew in europe, three quarters of the jews the nazi's got their hands on, all in the space of 20 months. half the victims die 11 months before. how can we do that? we came to think they do this because they could apply all of the massive resources of a modern state.
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that the factories of death, industrialized murder, an efish anlt bureaucracies that handled the deaths. almost all of the trains and equipment used for them is what the germans called decommissioned. they were old cars that were destined to be scraps. the resources were tiny, they were not particularly -- they didn't demand a great deal. 105,000 jews of holland were killed by a train into the camp once a week over a period of 15 months. one train a week. 20 boxcars. the germans loaded 130,000
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boxcars a day. we came at a think of this, we believe omassive outcomes must have massive causesism the germans did this with this little finger. the rolling stock they devoted to this on any given day was infinitesimal. most of the gas chambers were ramshackle affairs. the first ones in poland were basically built of two vertical stacks of woods with fans on the inside and tar paper on the outside. they were replaced by concrete a few weekz later. it was very cheap. it could be paid for and more than paid for out of what they stole from the jews of europe.
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it was not technically difficult to do this because the people in the carbon monoxide plants were killed with captured tanks. they used an industrially produced product to kill people. so the cost of the ziquan purchased to kill people at augs wits from the beginning of 1942 until the last gassings in the days of november 1944 works out with one u.s. penny per corpse in 1941. this was an incredibly inexpensive process and didn't require a great deal of resources or applications.
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it never diverted funds or men from the generally war effort and it was massively destructive. what i tried to do and i know it is a depressing tale but i tried to explain why the jews were killed and why anyone could not prevent this. i think many of the myths that have grown up around the holocaust are part of our human need to find some way out of the answers i have provided. we want to find some mistake tat somebody made that could have turned this around and i can't find it. thank you very much. [applause]
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>> i will be happy to answer questions. that dull, was it? >> you said al >> you said allied bombers couldn't reach the death camps from england but we had an ally much closer. so you say you don't mind a mistake but allied resistance to admitting the existence of a holocaust along with not pushing our eastern ally to take part in
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strikes. that would seem to be a big mistake. >> the soviets could have hit the camps. the soviets knew about auschwitz month before we did. stalin referred to the massacre of the jews just as infrequently as pope pius the 12th which is saying they each gave one speech that had anything to do with what happened to the jews. stalin, november 7th, 1941 while the germans were hurdling toward moscow spoke. the pope in december of 1942, i believe, gave a christmas sermon and declared how sad it was many people in europe were dying because of their race. he didn't even mention the word
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jew. there is a parallel kind of indifference. when the soviet armies got within reach of auschwitz even allowing for the use of soviet airfare was tactical mostly that would have been a moment they could have struck. the nkd, equivalently to the kbg, new about the camps but it didn't filter down and wasn't a priority to liberate. if they would have been willing to put pressure on the soviets there is no indication of success. we tried to persuade the soviets
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if we were allowed to send bombers from britain to help with the polish population uprising could we send the planes on and land them behind soviet lines and stalin said no. so we would not have been successful in persuading them to prioritize this even if we had wanted to. >> i just wanted to ask are you saying we allowed this to happen? >> i didn't hear this? >> i am asking are you saying he allowed this to happen? did we allow this to happen? well, you know, look, the one thing i think with could have done or western countries could
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have done is let to let more people in in the 1930s and that would have put them out of harms way. our refusal to let in more refuges was an enabling fact. once the war started, we were restricted by how much we could succeed at. we could not reach the death camps even when we knew about them. we could not impede that. there are several groups that could have done something but remember what i said at the beginning everybody always had something more important to do. why didn't the polish underground blow up the railway lines from warsaw along the eastern part of the order of poland which connects north to south? they thought about it, they considered it, but the strategy of the home army in poland was
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to preserve its strength until the moment when the germans were about to loose and then to rebel because that would be the moment where they could establish themselves as an independent, political force that might be able to deal with stalin who was coming in from the east. that was their strategy and that made them say we are not spending resources on blowing up railroad lines that might lead to german reprisal. everybody had an argument that was more important to do than to aid the jews. >> i assume to talk over time i come here. i disagree with many things you have said. i was late so i don't know whether you talked about it but one of the main causes of holocaust was communism.
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>> you were late. >> without it you cannot understand holocaust. the fact remains, industrial revolution caused the second world war and two and caused horrible conditions in the world and jews were the leader in promoting social justice in the 19th and 20th century. that is one reason, and this is what hitler was using against them, that you don't want the jews here because they are behind communism. another thing you did not mention which is very important, complicit of every country, including united states, again it was com munism. the jews were blamed for being
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very active, they were socialists, zionists and always fighting for human rights and we should be proud of that. that is what the jews were about. this was the downfall. and in poland, poland, and the third thing you didn't discuss was collaboration and role of church. in poland, the main reason why so many jews died was that -- >> okay. let me just say so don't go on all night. if you read the book you will see i covered all those points. >> but you didn't cover them here. >> i cannot read a 400-page book. your points are well taken. i did refer this to the
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beginning and read out two things you said. the role of communism and the role of the catholic church. i could not talk about everything but please there is a chapter devoted to the activities or non-activities of the catholic church and there is half a chapter devoted to the problem of poland. >> you could take 20 minutes. >> i could take 20 minutes on a number of subjects. >> unfortunately, that is why the holocaust happened. >> with all due respect, you write your book, i write mine. >> i grew up with that. and you are very -- [applause] >> i am very sad about that. >> thank you very much. can we take the next question, please? >> thank you for this deeply insightful presentation. my question pertains to civil
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documents and population registry. what is your opinion about the civil registration documents amplified what happened. there is a line of thought that the population registries are misused and used to target the population. >> i got to confess i am deaf in one ear so i am not getting everything that was being asked. what was the question? >> i believe the question was to what extent documents of population registrations were used as an instrument to carry out deportations and so forth? so population and demographic reports. >> a lot less than you would think. in the east, in the parts of poland where the great mass murderers occurred, there were no population registry.
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the germans came in and said all the jews have to go into the ghetto and if you don't go into the ghetto you will be shot and the enforcement mechanisms is the non--jews will denounce them. then of course when the murderers start what the germans say is you will all assemble in the central square of the town and if you don't assemble people will point you out and you will be shot. in most of europe, where these great numbers of shootings are taking place, there is no registration process or none of that. one of the terrible tragedies from the ghettos of poland is the germans delegate the dirty work to the people in the ghettos themselves. when they go to the head of the ghetto administration in warsaw
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and say starting tomorrow 6,000 people every day at the assembly point or we will take reprisals or we will pick them ourselves and the jewish administrators say we will be more gentle and find ways to get around and save the people we think are more worthwhile than others. so they delegate the process and some of these people survived. the person who did this process survived and lived in israel from a many years after the war and gave interviews and said was i right? wrong? i asked the rabbis and they said it was okay. so this is the impossible positions in which they put people. in germany and the netherlands where the written record of who is a jew and who is not a jew is the best.
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they don't rely on census data. they don't. the ss administration in berlin relies on the card files of the national assembly of german jews. they think that file is better and easier to handle than the huge census records. they basically take these files and they send to the jewish council in berlin, the leading jewish administration, they say for the next deportation we want men between the ages of 55-70. you pick em. or send us all the registration forms of all the men between 55-70 and he will pick them. that is the way the deportations from germany go. in the netherlands it is dedicated to the local jewish
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administration and they do it. remember the children? the numbers of the administration are often people with little children and they are placed in this position are they going to comply with the germans and give them the names or run the risk that the germans are going to come in and take them all? and that is the way they experienced this impossible choice. so census data, registration data, turns out to be a great deal less in this process than that kind of pressure put on people. i can take one more. one more. >> thank you. yes, i had originally asked what you meant by being in an impossible situation and i think you espounded on that.
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you said the people were divided amongst themselves and anyone who spoke up was either killed or made to suffer and people -- i wondered too many times if people didn't act because they didn't fully comprehend the expansion and horrors that were happening -- the whole event is beyond what any decent person could imagination. >> absolutely. at first could not comprehend because it was unprecedented. then even after the flow of information thickens they desperately find ways of denying it because how can you face it? in the book there was a quotation by a man named carla
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pair who was a jew in occupied poland who was part of a jewish police force and went into the underground and resistance and died in 1944 but left behind a diary and he talks about in his little town not far from warsaw, the rumors came in that a town nearby has been totally liquidated and all the people have been killed. he goes and gives a sort of four paragraph description houf this message is received. at first we said how can human beings do that and by the last paragraph he said there must be an explanation for why it happened to them but can't happen to us. on the other side of the government between the german part and occupied soviet union maybe it was that.
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maybe they resisted. it goes through a process denying it can happen to them. this is another part of the enormous tragedy of this situation and the requirements for us of empathy with what these people were being put through to imagine how they could have comprehended. leo beck, a rabbi in berlin who became a leader of the ghetto and occupied czech republic learned by mid-'44 he knew what was happening to the people put on the trains and he decided not to tell the other people in the ghetto. his explanation after the war was it would have been much harder to live with the certain knowledge of death than to live
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with the possibility that you would survive. so there is somebody who actually understood, knew, and said it is better that they don't know. athank you all very much. hello. i am jennifer smid, the public program director at the museum. i want to start they thanking peter for joining us and delivering an incredible program. i want to thank our in-studio audience as well as those who joined us online. as wendy mentioned, tonight's conversation is the firs event in a programming series titled the power of memory to shape our future. the theory explores our
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understanding of the holocaust and how we can use it to create a better world. to learn more about public programs and digital content please visit the museum's event calendar, please sign up for museum e-mails and also follow us on social media. we have facebook and twitter channels. finally, you can purchase peter's incredible book, w"why? explaining the holocaust" as you exit this evening and peter is available to sign copies outside the theater. thank you again for coming and have a wonderful evening. [applause] [inaudible conversations]
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