The Holocaust was an inconceivable historical event, which forever robbed Western culture of its innocence. As civilized human beings, we fail to understand how events of such horror could have taken place, and how an idea so inhumanly warped could have spread like wildfire through an entire continent, instigating the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews. This free online course was produced jointly by Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. This course is the second of the two courses and covers three themes in its three weeks: Week 1: The Final Solution We’ll look at the cultural and mental processes that paved the way to the comprehensive and systematic mass murder of Jews in Europe – that is, the Final Solution. As part of this hard lesson we will discuss the various characteristics of the murder sites and death camps, and reveal selected aspects of the horror that occurred in them. Week 2: Jewish and Non-Jewish Responses to the Holocaust We will try to explore questions regarding knowledge about the application of the Final Solution, as well as a variety of responses and annihilation of victims, local populations and perpetrators. Week 3: The End of the War We will dedicate this lesson to the events that occurred in the last years of the Holocaust, as well as questions of memory, commemoration and future research. We strongly recommend that you register for "The Holocaust - An Introduction (I): Nazi Germany: Ideology, The Jews and the World" as well. Taking both parts of the course would enable you to obtain a fuller and more comprehensive knowledge about The Holocaust. This online course is offered in an innovative, multi-level format, comprising: Comprehensive lectures by leading researchers from Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem. A wealth of voices and viewpoints presented by guest lecturers Numerous documents, photos, testimonies and works of art from the time of the Holocaust. Novel learning experience: Crowdsourcing – involving the learners themselves in the act of collecting and shaping information, via unique, exciting online assignments.
Did the world remain silent?
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來自 Tel Aviv University 的課程
The Holocaust - An Introduction (II): The Final Solution
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從本節課中
The Free World, the last months, the Aftermath and the Implications
This lesson will describe the steps taken by Nazi Germany, with the Allied advance across Europe, to increase efforts to exterminate the Jews and to destroy all evidence of their crimes. We will deal with questions of memory and commemoration, examine the significance of the Holocaust for different audiences, and present the latest research in the field of Holocaust studies.
與講師見面
Professor Havi Dreifuss, PhDProfessor
Havi Dreifuss is a historian of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe; senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at TAU; heads the Center for Research of Holocaust History in Poland, Yad Vashem.
Dr Na'ama Bela Shik, PhDDirector, Educational Technology Department, The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
The International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem
[MUSIC]
Welcome to our last lesson of the course, The Holocaust, An Introduction.
So did the world remain silent?
Information regarding the repression of the Jews, first in Nazi Germany,
later in the Greater Reich, Occupied Poland, Western European countries and
all over Europe, was described in press and radio coverage as of 1933.
Though the Jewish plight was different in it's ideological origins,
in it's enormous extent and it's radical implementation it was understood
by many at that time at least until 1942 as being part of the so
called regular war atrocities, not demanding any exceptional attitude.
Even after the systematic mass murder began, long months would pass
until with the others grasp is valid information would arrive and
the true destructive meaning of the final solution would be understood.
Though German radio communication reports on mass shooting of the Jews in
the summer of 1941 were intercepted by the British,
who decoded the German Enigma transmission code, the full terrifying meaning
was not clearly understood, and didn't provoke any practical measures.
More could have been understood by the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942.
As part of the Soviet counter-offensive, some territories were recaptured
in which Germany's special atrocities toward the Jews were very evident.
Yet, while making those crimes public,
the Soviets concealed the fact that the Jews had been the major target.
In May 1942, a detailed report written by Polish Jewish worker party The Bund,
reached the Polish government in exile in Brittain.
And it's main themes were broadcast over the BBC world service
saying hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were murdered.
Yet as research had shown, those who heard them in the free world,
saw them as part of the propaganda war, not really to be believed.
First shift to our comprehension and internalization of the total anhilitation
of European Jewry can be preserved only in the summer of 1942 with a so
called Riegner Telegram sent on August the 8th, 1942,
from Geneva Gerhart Riegner to the World Congress in New York.
Received alarming report that the Fuehrer's Headquarters, plan discussed and
under consideration, all Jews in countries occupied or controlled [by] Germany,
numbering 3 1/2 to 4 million, should after deportation and
concentration in East, at one blow [be] exterminated, to resolve,
once and for all Jewish question in Europe [stop].
Action reported planned for
autumn; methods under discussion including prussic acid [stop].
We transmit information with all necessary reservation
as exactitude cannot be confirmed [stop].
Informant stated to have close connections with highest German authorities and
his reports generally speaking reliable.
Though that information coming from the German industrialist
Eduard Schulte contains some inaccuracies,
especially the very fact that at this stage the mass murder of the Jews
was already in full force, it was grasped by Jewish organizations as reliable.
Yet at the same time, it was hindered and disbelieved by the Allies.
The British Foreign Office delayed forwarding it to the intended Jewish
recipients and U.S. State Department rejected its credibility, and asked
Jewish leaders not to make its contents public until it could be verified.
Significant reinforcement for this terrifying information came,
among other things, at the end of November 1942 from Jan Karski,
a Polish underground courier to the Polish government in exile in London.
Karski had left occupied Europe after, among other things,
entering the Warsaw ghetto and visiting what he thought was a death camp.
He carried with him the sights and the sounds, and became one of
the clearest voices which made public the murderous character of the Holocaust.
Thus, it was only on the 17th of December, 1942,
a year and a half after the beginning of the murder campaign
that an authoritative joint statement on behalf of the Allies was declared.
"The attention [...] has been drawn to numerous reports from Europe,
that the German authorities, [...] are not carrying into effect
Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe".
As you can see in the full version of the declaration below,
the estimated number of its victims were very low and
the declaration ended in condemnation of the atrocities, a promise to end them
by defeating Hitler, and the threat of those responsible for them.
But no concrete action was mentioned.
>> Following the Allied Joint Declaration of December 17th,
1942 in which the allies condemned the Nazis for the murders of the Jews,
tremendous public pressure grew within the United States and in the United Kingdom
on the Allied governments, and this was not only Jewish pressure.
And that pressure, public and
internal within the government, led President Roosevelt
to create a new agency in the government that would be a rescue agency.
The war refugee board which he created in January 1944,
and according to most historians, the war refugee board during
the last year of the war contributed to the rescue of tens of thousands of Jews
in Europe particularly in Hungary and particularly in Budapest.
And that brings us to a related subject, the controversy around the bombing
of Auschwitz, or the lack of the bombing of Auschwitz, by the Western Allies.
As we know, on April 7 of 1944, two Jews from Slovakia escaped from Birkenau,
the murder center of Auschwitz, succeeded in making their way to Slovakia.
They wrote a detailed report about Auschwitz.
This was translated and sent out to the West.
It reached the Allies in mid June of 1944,
arriving together with a request from those who were passing it on,
to bomb the rail lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz.
Hungarian Jews were then being deported to Auschwitz.
And also to bomb the crematoria at Birkenau.
The allies consistently over the following months
refused to bomb either the rail lines or the camp.
They argued that bombing rail lines from allied experience was inefficient
as a war tactic and therefore they would not do that.
And they argued that bombing the camp itself was
first of all technically not possible because Allied airplanes could not
reach Birkenau from where their bases were in Italy or in other parts of Europe.
Which we know today was actually not true, they could reach them.
They were actually in the vicinity at the time.
But they also argued,
the allies argued that bombing the cap would be only a symbolic gesture.
It would not really rescue the Jews because after all, the Nazis has many
methods for killing Jews and this would, therefore, not really rescue people.
How could they rescue people, they argued?
Only by a speedy allied victory and hence,
the allies argued the only way to really rescue the Jews,
would be to pour all allied energies into the war effort.
Meaning no diversion from the war effort.
And this policy was consistent by the allies right to the end of the war.
We could conclude by asking, and
would have happened had the allies said yes to bombing the camp?
Of course we have no idea what would have happened.
Yet at the same time we know that if they had said yes it would have taken them
many weeks at the very least to organize the operation,
by which time the camp was already beginning to be dismantled by the Nazis.
In other words they could not have rescued most of the Jews in this camp.
But by the same token they did not know that.
They also did not offer any alternatives to the Jews.
>> If the free world was merely occupied with ending the war, what was done or
known by other influential factors that is a holy seed?
That is a Pope, the head of the Catholic church,
regarding the mass murder of millions of innocent victims.
>> What did the Vatican know, and
what was the reaction to the extermination of the Jews?
Pius XII became a very controversial pope because of these questions.
Information about the systematic murder of the Jews reached the Vatican quite early.
And in fall 1942,
the Allies asked the Vatican to join the Declaration of December.
Yet the Pope decided not to join and
he talked indirectly about these crimes in his Christmas speech.
And there he spoke about the hundreds of thousands of innocent people,
who because of their origin of race were consigned to death.
So it did refer to a genocide but it failed to mention the victims.
Meaning the Jews or the murderers meaning the Germans.
And yet we can find people who listen to it and
understood it as a condemnation of the Nazi atrocities.
Research and documentation that only recently was open proved that a previous
claim of some historians that Pius was pro-Nazi were inaccurate.
Pius saw Nazism as a heresy that was dangerous to Christianity and
to whole manhood.
And some historians believe that the reason was actually anti-Semitism, or
fear of communism, which brought the Vatican to prefer Nazi Germany and
therefore to avoid any conflict with it,
even at the cost of ignoring the systematic murder of the Jews.
Others suggest that the Pope kept silent and vague enough since he feared a split
within church as Europe was riveted with anti antisemitism.
As most of the material is still inaccessible to scholars,
we still can give only very partial explanations and answers.
But, hopefully when documentation will be available, we will be able to reach
a better understanding of this very controversial topic.
>> Those questions regarding action and
reactions can not be limited only to the non Jewish circles.
What about the Jews of the world, did they know?
Did they act?
Could they have acted?
True, Jewish communities were not independent states.
And it goes without saying that their actual abilities were much more limited.
And yet, two Jewish communities should be discussed.
The Jews in the United States, almost 5 millions and
those in what will become Israel about half a million.
For many reasons Russian Jewry understanding regime
was very much limited in its abilities.
During the war, American Jewry faced many challenges.
First, a raising wave of antisemitism including accusation for
dragging the US into a foreign war even though it had entered the war after having
being attacked by Japan And with intention to defend American interest in Europe.
Second, since entering the war, all American connections with occupied
countries were forbidden, including passing money for philanthropic needs.
The most important American Jewish aid organization,
The Joint, like almost all of the Jewish organizations, halted its activity in
occupied Europe in order not to break federal laws or be accused of doing so.
Only a few small Jewish American groups claimed that the total shuttering of all
human moral convictions demands using all available tools including
breaking local laws in order to save lives in faraway and attacked countries.
And what about the Jews of the Yishuv?
The Jewish community proceeding the establishment of the State of Israel.
>> Today looking back with insight from the reality of the State,
that can help Jews in distress,
the activities of the Yishuv during the Holocaust period seems little and
inappropriate regarding the terrible events.
But, one should take into consideration the situation from at least
three major angles.
The first is the Yishuv that numbered less than half a million Jews
living among a million Arabs, and was politically under the British Mandate,
the Yishuv had no Army, no Navy or airplanes.
It had no natural resources such as oil, it did not have financial resources, and
not any geographic way to get closely or directly into Europe,
and itself was struggling with difficulties doing everything voluntarily.
The second angle was the allies were determined,
definitely, to fight and get unconditional surrender from the Germans.
And anything else, any other plan,
looked to them as a disturbance that they did not want.
Third, the Germans were determined to kill the Jews of Europe, and
if possible, the Jews of all the world.
And they cut out every possibility of rescue,
of coming close, of bringing anything for the Jews of Europe.
Therefore only after more information got from a number of sources,
the Jewish agency then the political leader of the issue announced
that the reason the systematic extermination going on and
it was done on November 23rd 1942.
Since that moment it served as a Watershed.
A long line of rescue plans, such as exchange, ransom,
paratroopers, taking multitude of Jews out to the Sahara Desert.
Collecting money, sending parcels,
falsified documents, all this began, perhaps not enough was done.
But a lot was done compared to the possibilities.
>> Could Jews in the USA or Yishuv save European Jews?
Could more powerful entities of the Holy See or the allies save them?
Unfortunately, hardly.
The aforementioned understandings matured when most of the Jews were already dead,
and the practical steps which could have been taken were very limited.
Yet should they have done more?
Should they have at least tried to do more as making the end of the mass murders
their top priority?
Historians don't deal with ifs.
We just don't have the tools to analyze imagined situations.
Maybe Nazi Germany's ability to commit the mass murder of Jews in 1944,
as an example, would have been compromised.
Maybe the murders would have been sped up or maybe a determined position of
the world, of the church, would have caused individuals or
large systems to hesitate regarding participation in mass murders.
We simply don't know.
And what can be said is that if anything of the sort would have happened
the burden of the Holocaust on post 1945 world might have been easier.
[MUSIC]
