The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry is an adaptation of an on-campus course that has been co-taught by Murray Baumgarten, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature (Literature Department), and Peter Kenez, Professor Emeritus (History Department), for over 20 years at UC Santa Cruz. In this course, you will explore the Holocaust from the overlapping perspectives of literature and history—through memoirs, historical documents, poetry, documentary footage, filmic representations, and novels. You will expand your knowledge of the literature of the Holocaust, Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, the origins and development of antisemitism, the establishment of labor and extermination camps, resistance movements, and the Holocaust as a problem for world history. There is more than one way to take this course: You can complete all of the activities (and earn a Verified Certificate) or only the activities that are most interesting to you. Whatever you choose to do, we encourage you to find a havruta (a study partner) in your community or in the Coursera community so that you can experience the course in a more interactive and meaningful way.
6.1.2 From labor to extermination
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來自 University of California, Santa Cruz 的課程
大屠杀：欧洲犹太人的灭顶之灾
126 個評分
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Establishment of the camps
In this module Profs. Baumgarten and Kenez discuss the establishment of labor and extermination camps, memorialization, Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men.
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Murray BaumgartenDistinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature
Literature
Peter KenezProfessor Emeritus
History
Well, alright.
The concentration camps are there.
The gas chambers are already there.
We'll put them together.
And the starting point, this is again so important,
that we must correlate the history of the Holocaust with the history of the war.
And the great turning point was the beginning of the war.
And, for our purposes, the most significant turning point
is the attack on the Soviet Union, because it's a different kind of war.
And I was talking about it last time when I was talking about
the story of what was happening in the Soviet Union.
That is, mass murder began.
That is, the Einsatzgruppen came to Russia,
came to the Soviet Union, with explicit intention.
With explicit purpose, order,
to kill partisans, commissars, and
those who threatened the new order.
And the Jews came under this heading.
Now, this made no sense because
the Jews were not the ones that the Nazis had any reason to worry about.
Nonetheless, they believed that to be Jewish and to be Bolshevik was the same.
Bolsheviks were Jews, the Jews were Bolshevik.
This is nonsense but nonetheless, this was their self-justification.
And so, the mass murder actually began before there were extermination camps.
That is, extermination camps were, the first one.
What I'm talking about is Chelmno, Chelmno or the German name, Kuhnhoff.
You see, this was in the [FOREIGN] of the [FOREIGN].
That is, the area of Poland which the Germans took, and planned to Germanify.
Then to remove some of the Polish population and,
of course, remove the Jews, putting them first into ghettos.
And Kuhnhoff, actually, was very close to Wutsch.
What the Germans renamed [FOREIGN] which was to be the capital of this region.
And so
now the story of Chelmno is important and
interesting inasmuch as it's a transitional institution.
It was the smallest of the extermination camps
with the smallest number of victims, which operated the shortest period.
Now, as I said, it was an intermediary step.
What was happening here, unlike in the other extermination camps,
the Germans used vans and in the vans,
stuffed in about 50 people at a time.
They used the diesel engines and they used the carbon
monoxide from the engine in order to kill the inmates
who were in these vans.
These vans actually pre-existed the attack on the Soviet Union.
They were used in Serbia,
and they were used actually in Germany itself in the euthanasia program.
Now, the euthanasia program, as I mentioned before, in fact,
I keep on saying, was very important for us.
Because this is where they developed their methods and
quite self-consciously they used they used the same methods here.
The interesting thing about the euthanasia program is that they were killing Germans.
And when you kill Germans, other Germans will be aware that something was going on.
Now they send out false reports that your
grandson died under some circumstances.
We'll send them condolence letters or whatnot.
And this created indignation, in particular, the churches.
The Catholic Church protested against the euthanasia program for
understandable reasons.
And the Nazis seemed to have stopped
the euthanasia program as a result of public protests.
I say seemed to, because in fact the euthanasia program, sub rosa, continued.
But here we are talking about a few tens of thousands of victims.
So while there was protest on the part of the Germans against the euthanasia
program, we had no record of protest against
the mass murder in the gas chambers, concerning the Jews.
Now, you might say that protesting the euthanasia program did not
in itself bring punishment to those who protested.
While if you would have protested the killing of the Jews,
you would have been in great trouble.
The distinction is that, while the euthanasia program went very well
with Nazi ideology, it was not central.
Protesting killing of Jews would have
resulted in very serious punishment.
But we really have no records of any serious protests.
That's part of another topic which we should be talking about later namely,
the response of the German population.
So, as I was saying, Chelmno was the first, relatively small scale.
In these methods in these events,
they managed to kill about 1,000 people a day.
The program started, and
German Jews, Jews from Germany, and from Bohemia.
Were delivered, this is the fall of 1941,
into the major ghetto of Wutsch.
You remember Wutsch was the second
largest ghetto that had the second largest Jewish population after Warsaw.
And the Germans didn't mind that the ghettos were overcrowded but
still there had to be some limits.
And so the first victims who were sent from Wutsch
to Chelmno, you can see it's quite close to one another.
You see here is Wutsch and there is Chelmno.
I think it's something like about 50 miles or approximately 50 miles.
The first people who were sent to the Chelmno
extermination camp were Jews from Wutsch.
And the reason that they were sent there is to make room for
the German Jews, who were crammed into the Wutsch ghetto.
This is an important point, that the extermination,
the large scale extermination started.
That the Germans were killing Russians, Poles,
Polish Jews and that was easier to do than killing Germans.
So you see they were going through this trouble delivering German Jews to Wutsch.
And then taking Jews from Wutsch to Chelmno to have them killed
rather than sending the German Jews directly to Chelmno.
Which you might think it might be easier.
This is an interesting point that how much easier it was for
the Germans to kill Slavs than to
kill western Europeans and Germans in particular.
I mustn't go on about this, but Chelmno is interesting.
Because it's an experiment.
They are experimenting how to do things.
And the later features of the extermination camps are already there.
Namely the people arrive, all has to be done very quickly
to give no chance to the Jews to recognize, to realize what was going on.
You are here because you are going to send labor camp and
you must undress and take a shower.
And then they crammed into the vans.
And in the van the death occurred 10 to 15 minutes.
It was not very quick.
And then comes the difficult task to get rid of the bodies and clean up the bodies.
And Jewish laborers were used first to bury the bodies.
And then later on it became clear that you just cannot bury tons of people a day.
And then you hit on the idea that you'll burn the bodies and so
they went into trouble to dig up the bodies which they had buried before.
And so this is the task and this was the way it was accomplished.
That is, all the way to treat the inmates.
Was already there at this first extermination camp at Chelmno.
Namely the importance of quickness, the shower,
the collecting of the clothes after the victims have undressed,
sending them back to Germany.
From the corpses, pulling up gold teeth.
That's an interesting difference between the Romanian way of doing things,
and the German way of doing things.
I will be talking about the Romanians in a separate lecture,
because it seems to me so important.
The Romanians pulled the gold teeth out while the people were still alive.
The Germans pulled out gold teeth from corpses.
Again, I don't know what we should make of this
the timing of the removal of the gold teeth.
Maybe I should stop again before I will, I am going to talk about the other camps.
>> Peter, you should mention how the euthanasia doctors.
>> Yes, as Marion's calling my attention to it.
The very same doctors who worked in the euthanasia programs
operated in these camps.
There were just moved from one job to another.
And they were practiced.
And this is very important for several reasons.
From the point of view of ideology.
From the point of view of technique.
The point of view of experiment.
The point of view of experience.
There is a clear line from the German euthanasia program
of the 1930's to the gas chambers, to the extermination camps.
