Third Reich & the Holocaust, Week One

As Americans and several generations removed from this era of history, it is difficult to fathom the Third Reich and the Holocaust. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I became fascinated with World War II-- I've read Reminisce magazine for decades and my grandad was in the Navy, serving in the Pacific-- and my German lineage turned my interests to the European fronts. At the time, I was weekly unleashed upon the Kemp Public Library in Wichita Falls, Texas. I was, and still unashamedly am, a voracious reader. In my search for this history, I stumbled across the many volumes of World War II Time Life Books, where for the first time I was confronted with war-- what one man can do to another. I was immediately struck by two historical occurrences: Japanese-American internment camps in the US during the war and Hitler and the Holocaust. It was beyond comprehension that one group of people could subjugate and detain another group of people in pens like animals-- and then exterminate them after putting these humans through forced labor, scientific experiments, and death marches.

I found these volumes in an antique store in Fort Smith, AR last summer and it was like touching my younger years... so I bought all the European front tomes.

The years have gone by and my interest has never waned. I've read many hundreds of books on the subject of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. My personal collection of books is nearing a hundred volumes. I am slightly ashamed to say that I do not own The Diary of Anne Frank, but I'm fairly certain I wore out the library copy. I took two years of German in college, took a history course on the Holocaust, did my college internship at a Holocaust museum sorting transcripts from the Nuremberg Trials, and completed my BA in history with a senior paper dealing with Holocaust themes. I've made a few trips to Germany. I've spent hundreds, if nots thousands, of hours watching documentaries on the subject. But for all this, the Third Reich and the Holocaust is not something I could ever pretend or hope to understand in all its complexities and inhumanities. For this class, the undertaking has verged on the overwhelmed so many times.

So I began this class in the most unusual of starts: liberation. What I wanted for the class was to put behind everything we've heard about the holocaust and experience as if for the first time, as the first Americans became aware of the what the Third Reich had done.

On April 27, 1945, the Kaufering IV sub camp of Dachau was stumbled upon by a division of the US 7th Army, soldiers of the 101st Airborne, and a group of men that would one day become known as the Band of Brothers. Their objective was to capture Munich, but what they found was the Dachau system of labor camps. Kaufering IV was one of eleven camps in the area, and was where prisoners no longer able to work were kept. The others camps were evacuated, yet this one was left with the dead and those close to death.

Band of Brothers: Liberation of a Concentration Camp

Some terms:
Arbeitslager: work camp
Juden: Jews
zigeuner: gypsies

The question is now-- what do we do with this?

We could start with the First World War and its aftermath.

We could start with Hitler's rise to power.

We actually start thousands of years before this date of liberation in 1945. We start with the concept of antisemitism.

Antisemitism is a recent word in its etymology. It was a word created in 1878 or 1879 by a German racist ideologist named Wilhelm Marr. It was a modern, scientific term that sounded hygienic, neutral, cleverly devoid of the word "Jew." (A History of the Holocaust by Yehuda Bauer, page 51). This new term replaced the older word Judenhass, translated as Jew Hatred.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem are two giants in preserving this history and educating.

We watched about ten minutes of the Yad Vashem video on Antisemitism. This link succinctly covers antisemitism through the ages.

The book we will be using this semester is Night by Elie Wiesel. This is a clip of the news from the day he died a few years ago that covers his life and endeavors.