Blog Questions for November 18 & 20 on the Holocaust

Blog Questions

For each day, pick one question on the textbook and one question on a primary source to answer.

November 18: The Holocaust: The Jews in Nazi Germany (1933-1939)
Readings:
JAH 375-386

1. What role did Jews play in Hitler's worldview? (see also the two articles by Hitler in Mendes-Flohr)
2. Once the Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933, how did they move against the Jews? 
3. What were the various responses of German Jews to persecution?
4. How did other Germans think about the persecution of Jews in Germany?
5. How did the Nazis organize mass theft from German Jews?
6. What did Jews try to do to save themselves from the Nazis, prior to WWII?
7. What happened on Kristallnacht? Why did the Nazis do it?

Primary Sources, in Mendes-Flohr, 

p. 716-719 - Adolf Hitler: “A Letter on the Jewish Question” (1919) and Mein Kampf.

1. What does Hitler mean by the distinction between "emotional antisemitism" and "racial antisemitism"?
2. What is the image of "the Jew" that he builds up in the selection from Mein Kampf?

pp. 722-726, 729-732 - Laws against Jews in Nazi Germany

How do these laws define Jewish identity? What do they do to exclude Jews from public life, and to restrict their private lives? What is the rationale behind these laws?

p. 733 - Response of the Christian population in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws

How did Christians respond to the Nuremberg laws?

pp. 735-739 - Reports on Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938)

What do these official German reports tell us about the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938? What was public response to it?

pp. 742-744 – “Prophecy of Jewry’s Annihilation, January 30, 1939” (by Hitler).

What does Hitler predict for the Jews if war should break out again in Europe?

November 20: The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry (1939-1945)
Readings:
JAH 386-404 The extermination of the Jews of Europe occurred in three stages: ghettoization, mass shootings (murder squads following the German Army as it invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941), and extermination camps. 

1. How did each of these stages occur? 
2. Why were the ghettos set up? What were the conditions in the ghettos?
3. How did the Einsatzgruppen (the murder squads) proceed in killing the Jews of the Soviet Union?
4. Why did the Nazis change their method of extermination from mass shooting to gassing in the death camps? How many Jews, and from which countries, were killed in the camps?
5. How did Jews resist the Nazi genocide?
6. Should the US or Britain have bombed the death camps?

Primary Sources in Mendes-Flohr: 

pp. 744-749 - The Plight of the Refugees, The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai

These articles describe Jewish attempts to escape Nazi German - by going to Egypt, Cuba, and Shanghai. What happened to them in all three places?

 

pp. 755-761 Life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto)

What do these two diaries (by Chaim Kaplan and Janusz Korczak) reveal about life in the Warsaw Ghetto?

pp. 491-493 Report of the Iraqi Commission of Inquiry on the Farhud

The Farhud was an attack on the Jews of Baghdad in 1941 - what happened and why did it happen?

pp. 750-754: “We Must Finish with the Jews,” by Hans Frank; and “Protocols of the Wannsee Conference"

How was the extermination of the European Jews planned at the Wannsee Conference?

pp. 762-769 Warsaw Ghetto uprising

Who were the Jewish rebels and how did their fight against the Nazis proceed?

p.p 777-778 “A Secret Speech on the Jewish Question,” by Heinrich Himmler

What does this speech reveal about the mentality of Himmler, one of the architects of the Final Solution?

 

pp. 787-788 Estimated number of Jews killed by the Nazis