>> watch on c-span's q and a. >> next on american history tv, a panel of holocaust scholars talk about recent scholarship trends as well as new findings. they focus on the brutality of the nazi regime and the relation ship of the holocaust to world war ii. this was part of the world war ii museum's annual conference in new orleans. this year's theme was the month of june, 1944. mr. crean: ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. we go from a dark topic to probably the darkest of all topics, but it also is led by some of the world's leading scholars, period. it is, of course, the holocaust. for this session, we have asked

dr. alexander ritchie of our presidential counselors to lead dr. gerhard weinberg. alex has been involved with the museum since her first appearance at our 2014 conference. in those five years we have kept her quite busy. many meetings, committees, and leading a lot of educational travel tours. she has a deep and personal connection to the holocaust as her father-in-law -- who i am sure she is going to explain more about -- was himself in auschwitz. to hear the latest in holocaust scholarship and to look at what was going on in june 1944, it is my pleasure to ask dr. richie to come up. [applause] dr. richie: thank you so much. this is a topic very close to my heart. as most of you know, i live in

warsaw in poland. as you just heard, my father-in-law was in auschwitz and became a founding member of an organization which aided the warsaw ghetto uprising. the uprising was immediately put into a stalinist prison for his pains. was later in solidarity. when the wall collapsed, he became foreign minister of poland a couple times. but his great passion in life was talking about what had happened, not just in poland, but in germany and central europe. to make sure this history was not just remembered but actually understood, that it was constantly scrutinized and new research was always listened to and scholarship was always encouraged. holocaust research has constantly been changing since the war began. the nuremberg trials revealed a

great deal of the extent of nazi crimes. the member of the american prosecution team coined the term genocide. there were initiatives to member the tragedy right away, like the creation of the warsaw ghetto memorial, the rediscovery of the archives, and and many other things right after the war. public interest in it waned until the iceland trial in 1961. scholarly research on the holocaust has exploded since the 1980's. now there are many new directions -- first of all, examining the scale and complexity of the holocaust, which i know jeff will talk about. jeff's work, which points to the tens of thousands of camps and killing sites of the holocaust

everything from collaborators , anti-semitism, many other things besides, which i know we will hear about today from our two magnificent speakers. i'm deeply honored and pleased indeed to have been an produced -- asked to introduce these magnificent speakers. scholar in the holocaust memorial museum or he has served since 2000 as project director for the museum's of theolume encyclopedia camps and ghettos. the first volume appeared in june 2009, received the jewish book award. amongst other distinctions. his doctorate from ohio state university.

of a fulbright grant for research in germany. upon which he based his work on hitler's high command. of war of the author annihilation, combat and genocide on the eastern front, and many other things as well. i am also deeply honored to have gerhard weinberg, who we here at the museum consider to be the dean of historians, internationally recognized authority on nazi germany. he is a professor emeritus of history at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. he is the author or editor of so many books and articles it is almost impossible to list them. we would be here until midnight. i wanted to say that i used his work when i was starting out as

a historian and i have well-formed copies -- well-thumbed copies of his works on my bookshelf. just plucking one out of the blue, which is extraordinary and encapsulates his work because it brings his incredible life experience -- born in hamburg, working in japan after the war, and really understanding what -- and learning about the entire world. the history of world war ii as a -- is seen from a military perspective, social, economic, and many other perspectives. he manages to weave these things into this extraordinary international, global perspective, which is extremely rare. it is with great gratitude and honor that i welcome gerhard to the stand. thank you. [applause]

dr. gerhard: thank you. can you hear me? that is a big help. for some time, there was a scholarly debate that attracted a good deal of attention between those who called themselves intentionalists and functionalists. the former argue the systematic killing of jews was planned and organized from the top. the latter held the process was one of steady radicalization , pushed forward over time by

those involved as they engaged in ever more radical procedures, culminating at some point in systematic mass killing. the careful attention to local detail and initiatives that characterized the work of those who called and consider themselves functionalists has certainly contributed greatly to our ability to follow the technical developments of mass murder. and the extent to which individual police, military, and administrative personnel could and did exercise their own judgment about the procedures they followed. whatever the prior developments in the making of local decisions

as a state of formal decision at the top, even though some of those writing about the hurricane still prefer to ignore the relative evidence and continue to advocate something of a functionalist interpretation. we know from the romanian record , that was determined to be accurate by the german official who checked in at the time, that when adolf hitler met a romanian dictator in munich on june 12, 1941, the latter asked hitler what was to be done about the jews in the soviet territory that their armies were about to invade. an important issue for him,

since the area that would be seized initially was known to contain a large number of jews. hitler's told him that they were all to be killed. an instruction that the evidence indicates he had earlier given to heinrich himmler. we also now have a clear confirmation of the meeting before the invasion, at which a high ss official told commanders that they werers to follow the german armies into the soviet union. that a major part of their assignment was to kill all the jews. i will come back to the source

for this resolution of a subject that was once quite controversial when i get to another point. all the evidence we now have leaves no doubt that the commanders of the battalions of autopolice, units with members more than 10 times as numerous as the famous group, were similarly instructed before the invasion of june 1941. hitler's own telling the minister of croatia that all jews in europe were to be killed and his telling the grand mufti of jerusalem in november of 1941 that all jews in the middle east and in the rest of the world

were also to be killed are both recorded in the german documents published decades ago, although these very clear and explicit records are still ignored by many scholars. a trend in the literature that has not moved as far and widely as this speaker thanks is needed is that of the very close interrelationship of the war as a fight between germany and those it attacked on the one hand, and the holocaust on the other. it is only quite recently that those writing on the war, other than myself, include any references to the holocaust at all. and similarly, those who write

on the holocaust pay very much too little attention to the realities of the fighting. let me illustrate this issue with some examples. the murder commanders in many cases killed men, not whole in the first-- weeks of the german invasion of the soviet union. this is occasionally used as evidence for a first step that would be followed by radicalization subsequently. what is missing here is any reference to the reality of the early fighting on the eastern front.

the german assault surprised the red army that stalin had held back as he disregarded all warnings from his own intelligence service and from the british and american governments. the german forces, under these circumstances, advanced rapidly, and the german army's chief of staff was sure on july 3, 1941, that the campaign had succeeded and that the rapid advance of german forces showed that a quick victory was certain. this meant, as a practical matter, that a murder commander that had to follow an advancing german military unit through some of the most densely jewish settled part of europe at the

rate of about 30 miles a day. they were simply not in a position to do anything else. the members of the unit which -- would shoot the local men and .ome back to the front the units members did what they could in the circumstances of the moment and had no need for new orders or the personal supervision of heinrich himmler who, as we know, repeatedly went to the east in the summer of 1941 to watch the progress of his new program. just as subsequently, he would visit auschwitz in the summer of 1942 to observe the killing procedure implemented there. neither hitler's nor antonin

onescu cared if the jews were killed by shooting, gas, or another means. that was indeed the subject left to local initiatives and preferences. a most critical point about the fighting, namely that the allies first contained and then ended the holocaust also rarely receives the attention it deserves. please do not be offended if i suggest that if the germans had won, and contained control of -- obtained control of the 47 of the then 48 states of the usa, that the japanese were willing for them to have, they surely would have been in any american groups, some of them themselves,

or their parents or grandparents, would have been killed because they were jewish. some in this audience would have been killed as jews. some non-jews would have been killed because of some handicap. and some would have contracted polio and either died as a result, or had been crippled and then killed because the two doctors whose discovery conquered that disease in the 1950's would both have been killed because they happen to be jewish. -- happened to be jewish. on the other side of the break, those who have written endlessly about field marshal rommel and his companions in north africa generally ignore a critical part of his assignment.

he was indeed originally sent there in april 1941 to salvage of libya, lest the italian people dump mussolini. when the colony was lost to british forces. a point that was a major worry hitler's ---- four for hitler. but, why push the africa corps onto egypt and the middle east in 1942 and do this at a time when the primary military theater for germany was the eastern front? where things had obviously not going the way hitler's and his generals had confidently anticipated.

the germans intended italy to have egypt in the middle east while germany would get its oil from the caucuses. in spite of these realities and plans, and in spite of a necessity for a resistance against the soviet union, in the -- the moment in the summer of 1942 it looked as if the africa corps might get to cairo and beyond a special murder commander who was attached to it. this was not done because hitler wanted the members to get hitlertan or that expected them to dismantle one of the pyramids so that it could erected next to the

memorial in berlin. the whole point was that all of the jews in the middle east, about one million at the time, were to be killed before the area was turned over to italy because hitler and himmler did not trust the italians to do so, but did trust rommel to direct the murder commander to do what hitler had personally promised jerusalem inti of little more than a year earlier. in recent decades, there have been on hand significant and positive developments in the study of the holocaust as a result of several trends.

and -- an especially important trend has been the declassification of very important relevant records. the agreement of the british government in 1996 to the opening of their interception and decoding of the reports of the german order police has transformed our understanding of the early holocaust in 1941. it is now clear that these police battalions included not only about 10 times as many men as the murder commandos, over 25,000 as compared to 3000.

but also undoubtedly killed more jews than they commandos whose reports because of their far earlier ability for research had been a central piece of evidence in all prior stazi publications -- studies of the subject. the recent publications in the the two police battalions from that city, both supplements, what we already and alsot such units, provides vivid details about their participation in such specific operations as the notorious september 1941 mass

murder of over 30,000 jews in the ukraine, as well as their guarding of transports of jews in the netherlands beginning in the summer of 1942. perhaps other german cities will follow the example and facilitate first the research of , and then the publication of the activities of police battalions that originated in them. additional important information has come to light with the declassification that came out of the 1998 nazi war crimes disclosure and imperial japanese records act passed by the

american congress. a major feature of that law was that it lifted the automatic exclusion from declassification review and from the implementation of freedom of information requests of two categories of american records. those relating to intelligence sources and methods, and those called "foreign government information." a general name utilized by the u.s. government for material provided to the united states by a foreign governments that had a security classification at the time it was given to our government. while records in the former category could now be subjected

to systematic declassification review, in the latter case, the government that had provided that information, in general great britain, would be asked for its consent for -- to declassification. relatively promptly led to massive declassification's and work on the newly opened records is only just beginning. in the process of requesting permission to declassify in the outer category, it turned that they were unusually cooperative. as chair of the historical advisory panel advising the interagency working group that have been established to implement the new law i was told by several of those at the

working end of the declassification process this dramatic break with all their prior experience in dealing with the british on declassification due to was most likely the widely known personal interest of then-president clinton in the general topic. if there were a holdup reported to him, he met telephone his minister tony blair and those in the relevant .ffices in and near london did not want that. since by definition the records for at least half a century old repetitiveunusual

call for declassification was unlikely to cause problems for british security. byproduct of the declassification of american intelligence records was the publication of books by richard brightman and others about the postwar american recruitment of nazis. some with exceedingly dubious records by american intelligence agencies. product of the declassification of foreign government information with a consent of the british government is the collection of summaries of partition interrogations -- british interrogations in the summer of

1945 before he was turned over to the americans in december of that year. that was then used in the nuremberg trials. it is reasonable to expect that in the coming years of the researchers will find important information in the material the british allowed the american government to open up. obviously the american government could ask for declassification of only those british documents of which copies had been given to it at the time. that left open the question of british records, especially their intelligence services of which no copies were to be found in american archives. that process also has been moving forward slowly but

steadily in recent years and scholars have been making good use of these newly opened records. we can expect important publications based on these declassified records in the coming years. now a clearer perspective on two different passages of the event. a way in which some try to profit of the murder of their former neighbors is illustrated quite dramatically by the 2012 "golden harvest: events of the periphery of the holocaust." it offers insight into the digging up of the dead and

related material for profit by substantial numbers of figures. the way a few jews tried to protect themselves and ther families by aiding nazis is described by the 1990 1992 book "stella" who was a who was trying to help azis find the jews. considering those of

jennifer teagan, the woman who, as an adult, makes the discovery her mother was the daughter of the murderer who is shown shooting jews as a form of morning entertainment and the famous movie "schindler's list." she not, unreasonably, entitled her memoirs "my grandfather would have fought me." she now does speaking for the holocaust memorial museum about her experiences and findings. suggest that a significant confront and engage in is the divergence between a clear and more thoroughly

published scholarship about the holocaust on the one hand and the general mental distance from it in the war of which it was an essential part on the other. another significant development in the field of holocaust studies has been its inclusion centers,r genocides in programs, and courses. this is a development that, should not in this office, be opposed. it is essential that in the process there not be any gliding over of distinctive features of the holocaust that have not been a part of any of the other horrors we call genocide. i'm not suggesting the holocaust

is worse than other genocides but that there are significant differences between it and the other genocides that the courses and programs engage. the most obvious of these features -- the fundamental differences i would suggest -- the geographical ones. all of the genocides have a specific geographic focus. those who killed others invariably did so to remove a hated population element from a specific area. the armenian genocide was a terrible event in the ottoman empire. those who ordered and those who perpetrated it were not interested in armenians who settled in the united states, latin america, or anywhere else outside the ottoman empire.

those who are busy mentoring east orthodox christians in croatia were not planning to kill eastern orthodox christians who moved to chicago or lived anywhere else in europe. the holocaust was a project to clear all jews on the globe regardless of location. the allies were successful in containing it and thereby saving approximately two thirds of the intended victims. but that was most certainly a great disappointment to those who initiated and implemented that particular genocide. another difference between the holocaust and other genocides is the preparation of it and its implementation by vast numbers

of official soldiers and others of four years before they were halted. development in holocaust studies makes even more important than the professional concern of historians and other scholars the major issues of access to records on the one hand and the preservation of records on the other. records relating to the holocaust have been systematically declassified. the relevant german records in germany are still wild in the united states -- are still held in the next states and are still

accessible or are in the process of being opened. the germans have been working permission from german records that were captured by the advancing red army and are scattered in archives all over the russian forration in exchange giving the russians a set of the films. the extent to which these provide additional information on the holocaust is largely unknown at this time but suggests an important collection of material to be utilized in future investigations. earlier, thed british have been declassified their holdings of world war ii and it is reasonable to expect, before too long, that process will be completed.

in other european countries the process differs some from state to state. a complete survey of that means to be prepared and publicized. puts forthion consideration the two major types of relevant records of the existence of which we know but that are not as yet fully accessible for research. finds of some of the the presidential archive of the soviet union and the world war ii intelligence files of the soviet union. both held and kept closed by the current regime in moscow. reminded needs to be the soviet union dissolved over two decades ago. there was a very

substantial opening of access to records but over the years there has been, in the russian federation, something of a reversal. ironically precisely in the years in which, in other countries, there has been an increase in willingness to open records up. certainly there has been more access both to russian scholars and those from other countries than was true in the former soviet union but the reality beenns that the access has and issome years othertly behind that of world war ii allies. our point on the next portion of this talk is the current

restrictive policy is extremely likely to keep even those who insist on locking up parts of the record from ever being able to benefit from reading it themselves. the issue of access is closely related to the issue of preservation. ii, all countries' religions utilized paper in order to use their resources for more important things. the paper is in the process of disintegration and some of it is already no longer readable. this is not microfilmed. it will be permanently inaccessible to its guardians as well as interested scholars. this is an aspect of the still

closed records that has not received the attention that both , in my judgment and my experience, it deserves and desperately needs. issue ofelated to the -- the onlyg paper rarely mentioned -- is the issue inaccessible electronic records. but itwants to hear this happens to be a case. in an american government advisory committee in the late 1990's members were informed that our government could no longer access very substantial portions of its own records of the vietnam war. this is certain to be a continuing problem. people refuse to engage the

reality of ideological change. fine as long as all involve recognize that this is a format that facilitates access from widely scattered and distant locations but only for a short time. most.s 15 years at the the point that i want to stress is that this issue of technological change and thatiorating paper means unless records are microfilmed and those are produced after 75 years a great deal is simply going to disappear from access

that, ined to remember our libraries, there are risks of books, manuscript collections, and journals also , beingrating over time subject to technological changes that will affect not only obviously the particular subject of the holocaust but all research in the history of the recent past. thank you. [applause]

>> good afternoon. thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. pivotal thenow how month of june 1944 was in the european theater. and the success of overlord destruction of army group center but the soviets the third reich's ultimate fate was sealed. the germans did not read the memo. they would fight on from a mix of ideological fear, blissfulness, and coercion. every day they fought on millions of prisoners suffered and died in the complex of camps but still function in the territory that the germans controlled. for nearly 20 years i have been the project director and general editor of the united states holocaust museum, encyclopedia

of camps and ghettos. that is focused on the individual camps, who ran them, who the prisoners were, the conditions and so on. there was always a sense there was something bigger at work. that the hole was more than the sum of the parts. after 20 years we are beginning to see the big picture and that is what i would like to discuss today. we all know the nazis ran camps and we have images of them in our minds. but what do we really know about these places? i will point out i am using this word "camps" as a shorthand. we will talk about a lot of facilities. let us start with a basic point. if you think of all the different kinds of camps you have, extermination centers, concentration camps, forced labor can't, prisons, p.o.w. camps how many do you think there were? in the encyclopedia, we are going to cover about 45,000

individual sites. i will give you a moment to think about that. i will tell you that is a low figure. half of whatthan really existed. a lot of documentation is missing and some categories are just too big for us to put into the encyclopedia. themselves are significant but the key point about the camps is how central they were to the whole nazi program. the nazi regime had four overlapping goals -- ensuring the dominance of the area and creating aan, community that had a racial spaceent, covering living to guarantee se germany's

self-sufficiency, and getting rid of enemies internal and external. the camps were a set of practical tools with which the nazis try to achieve those goals. this is how we can make sense of a collection of so many different kinds of camps with different prisoners under different conditions by different agencies. the camps were a system. not like a computer or a car designed and produced as a unit but as a group of organizations that acted independently to achieve related goals. i want to examine the purposes the camps served and talk about how they contributed to the larger nazi aim. that way we can get a sense of how the system worked. we will start with detention. control of prisoner space and time was the most fundamental goal for every site. -- the tension was never detention was never a purpose. it makes no sense to lock people up for no reason. detention facility other purposes.

for example, there were internment camps for foreign nationals. these were people who were just on the wrong side of a border when the war broke out. it seems like a case of pure detention. little was demanded of these people, they were not punished, they did not have to work, the amount targeted for elimination but there was a connection to the war effort. they were potential spies or saboteurs and they had to be detained and observed. this was common in every country that took part in the war. aimsher cases, other became prominent quickly. we could talk about the ghettos. ghettos to detain jews but labor and extermination also became part of their purpose. the inmates were put to work and they were denied food and medicine. ghettos were the

pretty much all gone. that was also true for the so-called forced labor camps of which there were 1900. these were linked with the ghettos very often. people were taken out of the ghettos and put into these camps, worked until they were too weak to work and thrown back in the ghettos again. camps, a mainr goal there. you don't want enemy soldiers wandering around. labor soon became very important. the germans wanted to put these people to work and tens of thousands of sub camps sprung up at labor sites all over germany. camps were defective killing sites. condemned.w.'s were for race and politics and suffered a 50% death rate. that is about 3.3 million soviet

soldiers died in german captivity through shooting, starvation, exposure, disease, and overworked. you can compare that to a 2% or 3% death rate for most other p.o.w.s. you will start to see how these purposes overlap as we talk about more of them. we just talked about labor and ghettos and p.o.w. worksites. we are going to focus on it as a main purpose for the camps. that hard to find a camp did not use labor. labor fulfilled two overlapping objectives -- productive and punitive. the productive objective was making up for a labor shortage in producing military supplies and performing other functions at minimal cost. after all, most young german men were fighting the war. the germans had to pull other people in to perform the labor.

in fact, the largest category of camps were those for foreign forced laborers -- non-jews. there were more than 36,000 of these camps. how many more? we don't know. we are going to count them for years to come. theirisoners who were in were simply there to work. agriculture, manufacturing mining, transportation, even social services and they had their own camps. when there was demand for small numbers of workers at many sites like a small farming community -- they would put small housing up where they would go out in twos and threes to perform work. objective was to

establish punishment and control. the nature and pace of work could be adjusted to exhaust, humility, oppress, and even kill. the work itself could kill and prisoners who became too weak to work were often murdered. this was done in concentration camps. there were 24 main concentration camps and about 900 sub camps at worksites. units for penal soldiers who broke regulation. there were justice ministry and gestapo prisons as well as police camps and other sites that used punitive labor. a tooluld be for reform for a small number of prisoners the nazis wanted to reform and release. establishinger of so much harsh work for them you broke their spirit and they would never give you any trouble again.

camps that were work education camps. there were 235 of these. they show you the links between some of the types of camps. if you are a forced laborer and you refused to work or were not working hard enough or you broke a regulation, you could be sent to one of these camps for up to eight weeks. you would be forced to work under harsh circumstances. after eight weeks, if your attitude improved, you could go back to your labor camp which would seem like a garden party in comparison. judged your attitude had not improved, you'd be sent on to a concentration camp. that was going to be considerably worse. areathere was a huge gray between productive and punitive labor. concentration camp prisoners and ghetto inmates were supposed to be performing productive work much of the time.

even while they were being worked to death. an ordinary forced labor from eastern europe who -- theoretically -- not being punished were often starved and beaten. tens of thousands died. this gives us the segue into punishment, the next objective. this was central to many parts of the camps. it was a to forward form and a means of control as well as a deterrent to people outside. germans knew if they misbehaved and people in occupied europe as well, if they misbehaved, they were going to wind up in a place that was extremely unpleasant. a punishment could take many forms. we talked about labor already. detention was another form of punishment. life normal part of camp could be adapted for punishment -- the food, housing, even roll call. confinement, beatings, torture,

executions and much occurred without cause or justification. there were excesses even the brutality supposed to be officially regulated. there were supposed to be rules for such things. but there was plenty of room for gratuitous cruelty. to the nazis, some just deserve to be punished because of who they were or how they behaved. these included jews, roma gypsies, career criminals, homosexuals, the unemployed, drunks, slots, members of certain religious srcts, soldiers that detracted from the fighting strength and anyone hostile to the regime. these people were a danger to the people's community. their treatment could be whatever the authorities decided upon. next we are going to talk about racial policy. naziism was based on the idea

races compete for resources in the way animals do and that some are better than others and deserve to take what they need. lesser races can be enslaved or eliminated. this ideology created real-world consequences for the people in the camps. the eastern forced laborers who were beaten and starved, the russian pows that died by the millions, these with the victims whose camp experiences were harsher and even fatal because of who they were. then there were facilities that served racial goals directly. there were places we termed termination facilities. over 300 of them and most were medical facilities. these were places where young children from russia, poland, czechoslovakia who appeared to have valuable racial characteristics, blonde hair, blue eyes, they would be put in a facility and if they were

found valuable, they would be given to german couples to be raised as germans. then there were the euthanasia centers. we are careful how we talk about this phrase. this is not euthanasia as we debated today. this was how the germans dealt with people in germany, children and adult, who had disabilities and congenital diseases. there were about 170 -- we suspect many more -- euthanasia centers. these with the first places the germans used poison gas on human beings. they killed up to 300,000 people in these places. then of course there were the extermination camps. we cut five of them. they were the ultimate expression of nazi racial theory and the sites that place the regime -- at least in my estimation -- most firmly apart from any other.

about 2.7 million victims -- mostly jews -- died in or on route to these extermination camps. most of the extermination camps had shut down and been eliminated by june of 1944 the auschwitz was still in operation. murdering jews of hungary. racial theory was also central to the nazi plan to reorder the map of eastern europe. the resources would be useful in the short term for fighting the war and in the long-term for supporting the aryan race. the germans created camps for poles to hold them who were being expelled from their homes. places and they became defective death camps.

finally there is fighting a total war. i have often heard it asked why did the germans waste so much effort and resources to imprison and kill people when they had a war to fight? the short answer is this was not a waste. the camps served a central purpose as part of the war effort. ghettos and other sites contributed to the war effort of production. the destruction of the jews was certainly not a distraction, not a waste. this was a war aim. this was one of the reasons they were fighting to begin with. to rid the world of the jewish race. in a lesser sense, so were other efforts to strengthen the war effort of the limitation of anyone who weakened society or threatened the ability to fight. the wehrmacht use them as camps of a effort under the guise of

military necessity. civilians in the east were incarcerated, screens, and executed as communists, partisans or jews. they used hundreds of thousands for forced labor working on roads and fortifications in the east. it sent more people back to germany for forced labor there. this was part of their so-called anti-partisan campaign. mem going to ask you to give a show of hands if you have heard of the comfort women. i thought so. i will bet most of you don't know the germans did exactly the same thing. they set up a network of what they called field bubbles in cities throughout occupied europe and the women who worked in those bubbles -- the vast majority -- were not there voluntarily. they were rounded up in the streets, taken out of concentration camps, sometimes

they were put in their because they were being punished for some violation. from all of this i think you can see just how pervasive, dominant, and significant the camps were. they were a central part of the nazi regime. the nazis aspired to control every aspect of german' life. anyone not a member was a target. racial and political enemies, social outcast, and military opponents all faced detention, indoctrination, abuse, and even death. this was war on many levels. total war and pursuit of which the germans forced millions to sacrifice their freedom, health, and lives. the cans were tools in that effort. they were centers of production and a means of combating resistance and weakness for the benefit of the so-called aryan race. in the end, they achieved none

of those things and became the most visible reason so much of the world banded together to defeat the nazi regime. thank you very much for listening. [applause] >> thank you to our panelists. we have time for a few questions 3:30. our heart and at if you would raise your hand, we will start in the front you're right. -- your right. >> thank you for your presentation. perhaps you can answer a question. i posed vista military experts with regards to the normandy campaign. summer of 1944 from a military standpoint field

others feltmel and that the war was lost in the answer was for the germans to settle with the west and combine forces to combat the communist cord. de.hor my question -- and i will expand it -- could they really expect if, inle with the west light of the final solution -- at least on the wehrmacht side who knew all this was going on? especially in light of your explanation of how pervasive and scattered and multiple purposes -- it was like a web of intrigue to how terrible and awful this was. >> i just want to make sure i understand.

you are talking about who knew in germany? >> yeah. ss but in thehe general army, who knew? >> wehrmacht soldiers were taking pictures of shootings. they were not taking pictures in the extermination camps. those were supposed to be a secret all the word of that got out pretty quickly too. word got out of all of this. especially when you get to the last year of the war or the half of the war. the number of camps, the number of prisoners who were doing all kinds of things -- you could not turn a corner and any german city or town without running into people who were being held against their will, forced to work, abused. there was no secret about this. there is no secret about the concentration camps from the start. the german government wanted

people to know about these places. they want to deterrent effect from people knowing these places existed. >> there is another aspect i think is very important and that is enormous participation of the military in the killing program. book is a very good recent jorn that deals with the german army in belarus and with the shooting of choose becomes a part of standard procedure for german soldiers. know obviously they do not the details and coverage and so general, very well known at the time. normandy higher up in they are told that the reason the german army cannot send as

much ammunition to the german soldiers fighting the british, americans, and canadians in that, in march of 1944, germany occupied hungary and there were lots of trains running from the rural communities of hungary to auschwitz carrying jews and they -- whilemultaneously carrying jews to their death in auschwitz -- carry ammunition from german factories to northern france. >> just a quick and noted that. when you talked about the delusional germans they thought they were going to join with the americans. birthdayfter hitler's he meets with the head of the

representative of the world jewish congress from sweden. first time he met a jewish person in the house. says,kes about hand and let say bygones be bygones and carry on. [laughter] it is crazy. i would like to know what was the extent of the role of german wives-- particularly ss -- in this extermination of jews and the holocaust? to what extent did that happen? >> there were very substantial numbers of women guards in the camps. there were also others who performed the duties for the so thekilling units and participation in the killing program was predominantly male

but there was a very substantial female participation. wives ofwere also usually senior ss personnel at their -- at cities in the east or camps. byould recommend a book wendy lower. furies."r's >> the next question is to the right toward connie. >> i think i speak for everyone to say what an honor it is to hear you speak dr. weinberg. thank you for your comments. we had a discussion about auschwitz and why it was not bound to the allied forces.

i go running to the table to try and find your book that was mentioned. i don't have the title. perhaps you could give us some sort of indication of your opinion on why the allies did not bomb auschwitz and what was in the chapter in your book i am missing. thank you. allies had a general idea of what was going on but they side ofzed the military the war. it was the military side of the war that saved two thirds of the world's jews. that,he allies knew was the camp, themb

germans would find another way to kill jews. what one has to remember is that the holocaust had a high priority for the regime. there is substantial literature sher aboutt book by pa how the holocaust interfered with the day to day conduct of the war by the germans. overlook is to that, from the perspective of hitler and his immediate times the war might make the holocaust more times theand other holocaust might make the fighting more difficult. but from their perspective --

and please remember they always act on their views, not yours, not mine, but there's -- these with the two important issues. they were not trying to conquer the globe for entertainment purposes. globe was toof the be for a demographic revolution on the globe and that demographic revolution would include the disappearance, not only of jews, but of slavic people, roma gypsies, the of all the handicapped, etc. you need to keep in mind a regime that is in the process of killing its own disabled world war i veterans finishes that in the fall of 1944 and has started

on the systematic killing of its disabled world war ii veterans. ideologicalg its objectives high and on roughly the same level. >> the last question is going to be in our front row to your far left. an articleeks ago was printed arguing that president roosevelt is responsible for the death of choose because he refused to bomb railroad lines. i have read this repeatedly. what is your reaction to that theory? >> i just think it is a lot of nonsense. is that a president is bound by the constitution of the united states and roosevelt

took that very, very seriously. basis of theon the rules under which a president can temporarily bring prisoners of war during the war to the united states -- german, italian, japanese -- the president decided to bring just short of 1000 refugees into this country. this is the famous experiment. immediately impeachment proceedings begin in the think itand i do not is a coincidence that two things happen within 24 hours of each other. the white house announces there will be no further such experiments and the impeachment proceedings are dropped.

i think we have to see this in terms of political realities of wereime where there limitations on the president which the president adhered to and on the other hand, when it was possible and where i was, he assisted jewish refugees. >> i would just add one point and that is you can repair a railroad line in a day. you would have to hit them again and again and again. it has to be a sustained attack. army was more interested in winning the war. that was the best way they thought to stop the killing. >> thank you to all of our

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announcer: next american history tv. the united states holocaust memorial museum in washington, d.c. has the commemorative ceremony to remember those who perished. to mark international holocaust remembrance day, observed every generally 27th on the anniversary of the ashworth birkenau liberation during world war ii. among the speakers we hear from two survivors who offer their memories and a prayer. ♪ >> good money. my name is lisa and on behalf of the museum leadership i want to welcome the many ambassadors, diplomats, representatives from