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Time: 12 hours
Level: Advanced
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 Introduction Resource- This unit explores the Holocaust, as the destruction of European Jewry is commonly known. The mass killing represented by the Holocaust raises many questions concerning the development of European civilisation...
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- The Holocaust: a unique event? Resource
- World War I has a claim to being called the first industrialised war in the sense that, for the first time, the full power of industrial technology was deployed in concentrated ways on the battlefields....
- Anti-Semitism Resource
- Anti-Semitism was not an invention of the twentieth century, nor was it simply a German phenomenon. In the years before 1914 violent pogroms were directed against Jews, who were made scapegoats for the...
- Eugenics Resource
- Just as anti-Semitism was not unique to Nazi Germany, neither were ideas of racial superiority or attempts to create a society peopled by ‘better’ human beings. Politicians, scientists and social commentators...
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| | Nazi ideology and anti-Jewish policies
- Anti-Semitism and Hitler Resource
- Anti-Semitism was central to Hitler's world view and to that of most Nazi activists. Hitler considered Jews to have been foremost among profiteers and racketeers during World War I; they engineered the...
- Early anti-Jewish policies in the Nazi government Resource
- Hitler's government was sworn in on 30 January 1933. On 28 March all Nazi Party organisations were urged to carry out a boycott of Jewish businesses and professionals on 1 April. The exhortation came from...
- The significance of Volksgemeinschaft in Nazi ideology Resource
- Hitler made no reference to Kristallnacht in his speeches at the time of the event. Less than three months later, however, on 30 January 1939, he gave a two-hour address to the Reichstag. The speech focused...
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| | War and the Final Solution
- Terminology used during the ‘Final Solution’ Resource
- The term ‘Final Solution’ (Die Endlösung) was a euphemism. Himmler was fully prepared to talk about killing to his immediate subordinates, but much of the Nazi killing machine was shrouded in bureaucratic...
- Plans for ‘resettlement’ of the Jews Resource
- The occupation of western Poland after the brief campaign of 1939 gave the Nazis Lebensraum to colonise with ethnic Germans, some of whom were soon to be repatriated to the Reich (and thence, often reluctantly,...
- Factors leading to the ‘Final Solution’ Resource
- Two questions:
- The mass production of death Resource
- Mass shootings by soldiers and Einsatzgruppen and the use of the mobile gas vans took time and energy. There was concern about the effects on the morale of the men involved. Towards the end of 1941, even...
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| | Ordinary men? Ordinary Germans?
- The killers – portrayal and reality Resource
- Read Document II.11, Himmler's speech to the Gauleiter (leaders of the territorial divisions of the Nazi Party, found under the link below) of 6 November 1943, and answer the following questions:
- Who to blame Resource
- Browning developed his work on Police Battalion 101 into a book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992b). The same material was subsequently used, and reinterpreted,...
- The response of some of Germany's allies to Nazi anti-Semitism and the Final Solution Resource
- The Hungarians were latecomers to the killing of Jews, but when they became involved in 1944 their police and administrators appear generally to have acted with an unpleasant enthusiasm for the enterprise....
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- Relativising the Holocaust? Resource
- In the wake of the Soviet armies during 1944–45 came police units. In Poland the communist Office of State Security (Urzad Bezpieczerstwa Publicznego, UB) refilled former Nazi camps and prisons with civilians,...
- The aftermath of the Holocaust Resource
- In interwar Europe ethnic Germans had been in an overwhelming majority in the populations of both Germany and Austria. In addition, the two largest minorities spread across the states of interwar Europe,...
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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