Embedded Files
Activity 1:
Night and Fog
Although we assume most students have studied the holocaust and the events of WWII, its good to make sure to remind students of some of the key features of the systematic nature of the mass murder that was conducted under Nazi rule throughout Europe. To that end I showed Night and Fog, a 1955 French documentary that offers images and descriptions of the concentration camps. There is a full teacher's guide by Social Studies School Service. Before beginning the film, I review Raul Hilberg's "Stages of Mass Murder" and part of Milton Mayer's interview with a college professor. The full text is quite powerful and may be worth the time to study it in full if your curriculum allows. We also look at the chronology of how Germany took over parts of Europe.
Overview of Night and Fog:
"Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again." (http://www.criterion.com/films/238-night-and-fog)
Raul Hilberg's Stages of Mass Murder
1. Definition: Jews and other minorities are defined as the “other” through legalized discrimination.
2. Isolation: Through the accumulation of hundreds of anti-Jewish laws, social practices, residential living restrictions, job displacements, and property expropriation, Jews are marginalized in German society.
3. Emigration: Jews are encouraged through laws and terror to leave German territory.
4. Ghettoization: Jews are forcibly removed to segregated sections of Eastern European cities and are made to endure terrible living conditions.
5. Deportation: Jews are transported from ghettos to concentration and death camps.
6. Mass murder: Mass murder occurs through shooting, gassing, and confinement in labor and death camps where Jews are overworked and/or murdered.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985)
Milton Mayer's Interview with a college professor
Another way to understand how these small steps played out in the life of ordinary Germans is through the work of an American college professor, Milton Mayer. Seven years after World War II, Professor Mayer interviewed German men from a cross-section of society. One of them, a college professor, told Mayer how he responded to the policies of the Nazis from 1933, when they first came to power, until their fall at the end of the war:
If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
Milton Mayer, They Thought TheyWere Free: The Germans 1933–45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 172
Chronology of Nazi Occupation in Europe
1938: Austria, parts of Czechoslovakia
1939: Czechoslovakia, Poland
1940: Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Hungary, Romania
1941: Yugoslavia, Greece, parts of the Soviet Union
Reflection Questions:
1. The film takes you through the history of The Holocaust from the Nazis coming to power to the liberation of the camps. Do you feel like the film gives you an accurate picture of what happened? 2. The film is only a half-hour long; did it feel longer to you? 3. Did the images from the camps disturb you? Do you know that there are people who deny The Holocaust ever happened? Can someone really look at these images and deny the events they record ever happened? What do you think? Discussion Questions: 1. What points are emphasized in this film production? If your class has done extensive reading on the Holocaust, what points were omitted from this film production? 2. The goal of the Nazis was to dehumanize their victims. How did the manifest in this documentary? 3. Most of the pictures shown were taken by the Nazis - except the final scenes which were taken in the liberated camps by the Allies. Why would the Nazis wish to document such horrors? 4. All doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, embodying a code of medical ethics. What can one say about the doctors who conducted experiments for the Nazis? 5. The largest industrial corporations in Germany used slave labor during the war to make larger profits. Does the author of this film have a point to make regarding this use of prisoners as slave labor? 6. The author has a dreaded fear of the future. What is this fear? Why does he view the camp scene like "another planet"? 7. The author uses the figure "9,000,000 dead haunt this landscape." The correct figure should be 11,000,000. Six million Jews and five million non-Jews. In the words of Elie Wiesel, "It defies language, it defies memory, it defies categories. Yet one can remember and one must." What does Wiesel mean here? What do you think?
Activity 2:
Judging Responsibility
Have students imagine that they are judges in a courtroom. Ask them to assess the "responsibility" of the people listed below for what happened in the world between 1993 and 1945. Student should do this individually, then compare their decisions with a neighbor and then share out discrepancies with the class to begin a discussion on how and by what measure students evaluate levels of responsibility. The refection questions are also a good guide for class discussion.
Reflection:
What were your priorities is assigning responsibility?
How was the experience? Was it easy or difficult? Why?
Did you develop a philosophy with which to judge? What was it?
Did you need more information? Why?
Judging Responsibility
Directions: If you were a judge, how would you assess the “responsibility” of these people for what happened in the world between 1933 and 1945? Indicate one of the following: Not responsible; Slightly responsible ; Responsible ; Very responsible
One of the Nazi Officials working directly under Hitler, such as Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbles
A German who voluntarily joined Hitler’s special forces – the SS
A German businessman who financially supported Hitler’s rise to power and continued to support his throughout his time in power
A doctor who participated in forced sterilization of Jews
A worker in a plant making Zyklon B gas (poison gas used in death camps)
The pope – who refused to make a public statement against Nazi policy
A businessman who made enormous profits by producing Zyklon B gas
A manufacturer who used concentration camp inmates as slave labor in his factories
American industrialists who sold weapons and materials to Hitler
A person who served as a concentration camp guard
A person who voted for Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s
A person whose job it was to turn the lever to release poison gas into the chambers
A driver of the trains that went to the concentration camps
The US government which limited emigration of the Jews to the US in the 1930s
The German who refused all pleas to participate in hiding or smuggling Jews
Julian Streicher, the publisher of “Der Strummer,” a German newspaper that focused on publishing anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the 1930s and 1940s
A teacher who taught Nazi Propaganda
The “little guy” who claimed he was “not interested in politics” and went about his business quietly during the Hitler regime
Children who joined the Hitler Youth
Parents who allowed or sent their children to Hitler Youth meetings
Reflection:
What were your priorities is assigning responsibility?
How was the experience? Was it easy or difficult? Why?
Did you develop a philosophy with which to judge? What was it?
Did you need more information? Why?
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