tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/concentration-camps-10088/articlesConcentration camps – The Conversation2023-11-02T12:32:17Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2133272023-11-02T12:32:17Z2023-11-02T12:32:17ZKristallnacht, 85 years ago, marks the point Hitler moved from an emotional antisemitism to a systematic antisemitism of laws and government violence<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551873/original/file-20231003-27-t8q888.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=404%2C449%2C4588%2C2896&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Boerneplatz synagogue in flames on Nov. 10, 1938, during the 'Night of Broken Glass' in Frankfurt, Germany. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-boerneplatz-synagogue-in-flames-during-kristallnacht-or-news-photo/1371374486?adppopup=true">History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Late in 1938, Nazis across Germany attacked Jews and their homes, businesses and places of worship and arrested about 30,000 Jewish men. The attacks became known as <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-kristallnacht/">Kristallnacht</a> – the “Night of Broken Glass” – for the streets littered with broken glass from the vandalism.</p>
<p>But the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, went beyond the broken glass of Jewish-owned shops on the streets of German cities and has rightly been called a major turning point in the history of the Holocaust. </p>
<p>As a scholar specializing in the impact of the Holocaust on the law, human rights, German criminal law and international humanitarian law, I believe it’s important to see Kristallnacht as the logical culmination of Hitler’s malevolent intentions going back many years before 1938. Seeing it that way allows us to view the two different kinds of antisemitism in Hitler’s thinking, one involving emotions and the other involving the law and reason. </p>
<p>Indeed, the November pogrom and its aftermath foreshadowed the mass shooting squads and death camps of the early 1940s – institutions that were likewise products of a willful malice toward Jews.</p>
<h2>Hitler’s two kinds of antisemitism</h2>
<p>From early in his political career, Hitler’s thinking about Jews vacillated between attacking them violently or through patient, step-by-step legal measures. He even had terms to describe these two approaches.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://digitalcommons.bryant.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=hist_book">September 1919 letter</a>, Hitler recommended that the status and treatment of Jews could best be addressed through the “antisemitism of reason” rather than the “antisemitism of emotion.”</p>
<p>Hitler wrote that emotional antisemitism, which was expressed in the episodic violence of pogroms, would not have lasting effect. </p>
<p>In contrast, he wrote, the “antisemitism of reason” would work through law to achieve an enduring solution to what he called the “Jewish problem.” The “final objective” of rational antisemitism, <a href="https://multimedia.jp.dk/archive/00285/Gemlich_brevet_285325a.pdf">according to Hitler</a>, “must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst.” </p>
<p>Much of Hitler’s career reflected his adherence to this antisemitism of reason.</p>
<p>This ideological conviction, however, clashed with the antisemitism of emotion also in Hitler’s thinking. In <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hitler_s_Mein_Kampf_and_the_Holocaust/qvlXEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=michael+bryant+the+auroras+of+the+final+solution&pg=PT110&printsec=frontcover">interviews with journalists</a> in the early 1920s, Hitler sometimes said he would attack and eradicate German Jews when he came to power. </p>
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<img alt="A white man with a little mustache poses while wearing a military uniform and overcoat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551893/original/file-20231003-19-5deml0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1932 portrait of Adolf Hitler.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-reichskanzler-adolf-hitler-the-fuhrer-of-nazi-news-photo/615312714?adppopup=true">Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In one interview in 1920, he vowed to hold <a href="https://www.cataloniatoday.cat/article/1724585-interview-with-the-devil.html">public hangings of Jews</a> throughout Germany. In another interview, he admitted the best solution was to “murder” the Jews “in the night.”</p>
<p>These violent, pogrom-style musings conflicted with Hitler’s legal approach.</p>
<p>This tension would continue through the 1930s as the Nazis passed laws to remove Jews from German public life. Even as Jews were banned from the civil service, legal profession and medicine, wildcat attacks on them by the SA, the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-sa">paramilitary arm</a> of the Nazi party, were common.</p>
<p>Less radical Nazi leaders worried that such attacks would undermine Germany’s foreign relations. To allay these concerns, Hitler forbade anti-Jewish violence that could be inopportune for his government. Thus, attacks on Jews were suspended before and during <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-olympics/">the 1936 Olympics</a> as well as during the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1933-1938/munich-agreement">Munich crisis</a>, in which Great Britain and France agreed to allow Germany to annex the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia.</p>
<p>In both cases, pogrom violence against Jews resumed after the regime had achieved its goals.</p>
<h2>Hitler sets pogrom in motion</h2>
<p>On Nov. 7, 1938, a German diplomat, <a href="https://www.history.com/news/kristallnacht-started-when-this-diplomat-was-murdered-in-cold-blood">Ernst vom Rath</a>, was mortally wounded in Paris by a distraught Jewish shooter, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-teenaged-jewish-boy-went-refugee-assassin-puppet-nazi-propaganda-180971204/">Herschel Grynszpan</a>.</p>
<p>The nationwide pogrom that ensued was novel only in its intensity and scale. In fact, violence against Jews had already rippled across southern and central Germany during the summer of 1938. At this time, the synagogues in Nuremberg and Munich were both destroyed. </p>
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<img alt="Debris covers the floor inside a building that was destroyed by a fire." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551882/original/file-20231003-19-d67jn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The interior of a Berlin synagogue after it was set on fire by Nazis on Nov. 9, 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-interior-of-berlins-fasanenstrasse-synagogue-opened-in-news-photo/1371374485?adppopup=true">History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>A Security Service report in October 1938 described <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/hitler-and-the-pogrom-of-november.html">this earlier violence</a> as having “a semi-pogrom character.”</p>
<p>When the pogrom of Nov. 9-10, 1938, erupted, it was anything but a bolt out of the blue. </p>
<p>Like the destruction on his order of the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/07/06/1186049726/munich-synagogue-hitler-demolished-found-river">Munich synagogue</a> in August 1938, Hitler set the November pogrom in motion. He then distanced himself from the event to avoid being seen as the instigator, blaming the violence on the “people’s rage.” </p>
<p>Clearly, however, the pogrom took place on Hitler’s orders. </p>
<h2>The November pogrom in Holocaust history</h2>
<p>This is one of the most important truths of the November pogrom: Hitler finally resolved his internal conflicts over the most effective way to rid Jews from Germany.</p>
<p>In the November pogrom, the antisemitisms of reason and emotion, of dispassionate law and thuggish violence, were brought into alignment for Hitler. Pogrom-style violence would be channeled not through the paramilitary SA but through government channels controlled by the Nazis.</p>
<p>In short, extreme violence against Jews would no longer be left to the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization">Nazi brownshirts</a>. Rather, it would be wielded by the German government. </p>
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<img alt="A white man with blonde hair and dressed in a military uniform poses for a photograph." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=867&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551888/original/file-20231003-25-yq3386.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1089&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was a principal architect of the Holocaust.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/reinhard-heydrich-high-ranking-german-ss-and-police-news-photo/1371430740?adppopup=true">Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In a hastily convened meeting of <a href="https://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/kristallnacht/kristallnacht-introduction.html">Nazi leaders on Nov. 12, 1938</a>, the participants recommitted themselves to the antisemitism of reason. A raft of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939">anti-Jewish laws</a> would soon be passed. </p>
<p>In late January 1939, a <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/establishment-of-the-central-office-for-jewish-emigration-in-vienna-august-1938">Central Office for Jewish Emigration</a> was set up under <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3782555/What-evil-new-film-Reinhard-Heydrich-released-compelling-tale-married-musician-loving-parents-brilliant-mind-unlikely-Nazi-monster.html">Reinhard Heydrich</a>, second in command within the SS to <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-himmler/">Heinrich Himmler</a>. The role of his new office was to force Jewish emigration from Germany through terror and intimidation.</p>
<p>With the November pogrom, Hitler overcame the split between the two types of antisemitism that had pervaded his thinking since 1919. </p>
<p>The “rational” antisemitism of laws, decrees and orders would be combined with the destructive violence of emotional antisemitism. The fate of the Jews would henceforth be entrusted to the cold racial vanguard of the Nazi movement, <a href="https://www.tpt.org/nazi-mega-weapons/video/nazi-mega-weapons-scenes-season-2-ss/">the SS</a>. </p>
<p>By 1941, their actions would surpass the comparatively modest mayhem of the Nazi paramilitary soldiers as Nazi violence moved from fists and clubs to the “Final Solution” of genocide.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213327/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Scott Bryant does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The violence of the 1938 pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany known as Kristallnacht was a turning point in Hitler’s ‘Final Solution.’Michael Scott Bryant, Professor of History and Legal Studies, Bryant UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1987222023-04-11T12:04:25Z2023-04-11T12:04:25ZDefying the Holocaust didn’t just mean uprising and revolt: Remembering Jews’ everyday resistance on Yom HaShoah and year-round<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519969/original/file-20230407-3779-73o8pm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C22%2C4995%2C3513&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samuel Willenberg, the last survivor of the Treblinka uprising, poses for a picture at his art studio in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/MideastIsraelHolocaust/761dbacc01df4c75ac290d2f73100256/photo?Query=samuel%20willenberg&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=21&currentItemNo=12">AP Photo/Oded Balilty</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt">Theresienstadt</a>, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/164058/into-that-darkness-by-gitta-sereny/">he nevertheless believed</a> that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves.”</p>
<p>Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka prisoner <a href="https://karentreiger.com/">Samuel Goldberg</a>, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For <a href="https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810111691/trap-with-a-green-fence/">those around Glazar</a>, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/744548519">Still more prisoners</a> benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.</p>
<p>In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.</p>
<p>On Aug. 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of <a href="https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/2-august-1943-uprising-of-prisoners-at-treblinka/">one of the most dramatic acts of armed rebellion</a> throughout the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew. Several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed. Nonetheless, at least 70 people survived to recount what happened there. Without their actions, the camp might have continued to operate, and we would likely know next to nothing of its history. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://jewish.cofc.edu/documents/jewish-studies-faculty-and-staff-bios/chad-gibbs.php">years of research on this extermination camp</a>, I’ve come to place as much importance on the long trail of smaller acts as on the famous day itself. Long before the revolt, resistance was commonplace at Treblinka. It had to be. Here and elsewhere, prisoner revolt would have been impossible without those everyday acts of support that laid foundations for more.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows a huge smoke cloud rising across a field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519972/original/file-20230407-16-xh4te7.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A clandestine photograph of the burning death camp Treblinka II, taken by eyewitness Franciszek Ząbecki during the uprising on Aug. 2, 1943.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Treblinka_uprising_(Z%C4%85becki_1943).jpg">Franciszek Ząbecki/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>Defiance and dignity</h2>
<p>Between July 1942 and November 1943, Nazi Germany killed as many as 925,000 people at <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/treblinka">Treblinka II</a>. The vast majority of these victims were Jews, though the regime also murdered several thousand Romani people there. </p>
<p>This terrible place was unlike most other Nazi camps in that its sole purpose was <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">the destruction of life</a>. There were no slave labor industries or construction projects. The Jews responsible for the revolt were among the several hundred men and women kept alive to maintain facilities, sort the belongings of the dead, and dispose of the bodies. As <a href="https://www.aju.edu/faculty/michael-berenbaum">the historian Michael Berenbaum</a> put it, Treblinka was “<a href="https://www.kcet.org/shows/treblinkas-last-witness/episodes/treblinkas-last-witness">a factory whose end product was dead Jews</a>.” </p>
<p>In such a hell, life itself is resistance, but those held at Treblinka pushed back against Nazi designs for their destruction in every way possible. Early organized efforts took the form of escapes to warn other Jews. <a href="https://muzeumtreblinka.eu/en/informacje/krzepicki-abram-jakub/">Abraham Krzepicki</a>, for example, escaped Treblinka and went back to the Warsaw Ghetto to tell of what the camp really was – and later died there, fighting in <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/combat-resistance/warsaw-ghetto.html#narrative_info">the ghetto’s 1943 uprising</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo shows women and children in coats walking beside cattle cars." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519974/original/file-20230407-20-vejhd2.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Deportation to Treblinka from the Jewish ghetto in Siedlce, Poland, in 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deportation_to_Treblinka_from_ghetto_in_Siedlce_1942.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>These messengers of truth helped expose Nazi lies and give others the chance to try to go into hiding, fight or jump from trains. </p>
<p>Still, most people targeted by the Third Reich could not avoid transport to Treblinka or other camps even if they knew what awaited them there. For some, resistance was the way they carried themselves on the way to a certain death, such as saying prayers like <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-shema/">the Shema Yisrael</a>. Condemned for being Jewish, they steadfastly remained so to the end.</p>
<p>Samuel Willenberg, who was <a href="https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/rivlin-at-funeral-for-last-treblinka-revolt-survivor-samuel-willenberg-was-a-symbol-of-heroism-445734">the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt</a> when he died in 2016, remembered how a young woman named Ruth Dorfmann asked only if the gas would hurt, and calmly acted with such unshakable dignity that he felt compelled many years later to <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/interviews/willenberg.html">sculpt her final moments</a>.</p>
<h2>‘Choiceless choices’</h2>
<p>Court testimonies, oral histories, survivors’ memoirs and <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">other sources</a> show that over months of concerted planning, Treblinka prisoners’ “Organizing Committee” laid the groundwork for the August rebellion by building a network of trusted men and women. Organizers found ways to place them in jobs that gave prisoner planners complete access to the camp. </p>
<p>That process was a winding and perilous road. Three earlier plans failed, and Nazi guards killed many Jews they suspected of resistance. It took at least eight months of concerted effort to finally <a href="https://iupress.org/9780253025418/the-operation-reinhard-death-camps-revised-and-expanded-edition/">pull off the revolt</a>.</p>
<p>Though resistance at Treblinka eventually meant armed revolt, it could not have achieved that end without the countless little rebellions that came before. The same was true in Warsaw and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. At its core, resistance is the way a person or a people chooses to stand against the challenges thrown at them. That holds true even if those options are what <a href="https://fortunoff.library.yale.edu/film/langer/">Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer</a> called “<a href="https://sunypress.edu/Books/V/Versions-of-Survival">choiceless choices</a>” between one terrible outcome and another. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/ghettos/warsaw.html">the Warsaw Ghetto</a>, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions, residents held each other up by establishing soup kitchens and clandestine schools, organizing the removal of waste to prevent disease, and setting up everyday events to help people feel normal, even for one moment. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="People look at a museum display. In the foreground, a single slice of bread sits on a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/519968/original/file-20230407-21-lfycr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A piece of bread, equivalent of a daily food ration in the Warsaw Ghetto, displayed during a commemoration of residents’ suffering in the ghetto.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/piece-of-bread-equivalent-of-a-daily-food-ration-in-the-news-photo/149037070?adppopup=true">Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via GettyImages</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Warsaw Jews worked <a href="https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/us-005578-irn507312">to archive what they endured</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/warsaw-ghettos-defiant-jewish-doctors-secretly-documented-the-medical-effects-of-nazi-starvation-policies-in-a-book-recently-rediscovered-on-a-library-shelf-182726">documented the medical effects</a> of the starvation they faced. Both acts demonstrated hope for a future that would remember their suffering and use its lessons to ease the pain of others.</p>
<p>Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust established by the Israeli government, occurs on the 27th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar: the start of major fighting during <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/holocaust-uprising/">the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising</a>. Thousands died in the Germans’ brutal retaliation.</p>
<h2>A more complete picture</h2>
<p>The full name of Yom HaShoah is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – which, along with its tie to the Warsaw Ghetto, links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms. This pairing held great importance <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805066609/theseventhmillion">for Israel’s identity as a new state</a> and for a people so deeply wounded by years of terror.</p>
<p>Whenever we remember the Holocaust, we should remember the small rebellions, the individual stands, and the little acts of caring that Glazar found so important. Only in seeing that wider picture of everyday struggles can we understand the true variety and scope of resistance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198722/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Gibbs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Yom HaShoah, which falls on April 17-18, 2023, pointedly commemorates Jewish resistance to the Nazis.Chad Gibbs, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1982982023-01-26T19:06:11Z2023-01-26T19:06:11ZDisabled people were Holocaust victims, too: they were excluded from German society and murdered by Nazi programs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506003/original/file-20230124-13-xzjg5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=113%2C2%2C1681%2C1096&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Five handicapped Jewish prisoners, photographed for propaganda purposes, who arrived in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Holocaust Memorial Museum/Photograph #13132</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Dominic Perrottet admitted to wearing a Nazi uniform to his 21st birthday party, he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-12/dominic-perrottet-apologises-for-wearing-nazi-costume-to-21st/101849280">apologised</a> to Jews and veterans – but not to the other groups who were persecuted by the Nazis, including disabled people. </p>
<p>However, disabled people were the first victims of the Holocaust. They were murdered in a number of Nazi programs specifically targeting them, as well as those that targeted Jews, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinti">Sinti</a>, and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Rom">Roma</a>. </p>
<p>In 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks 90 years since the Nazis assumed power, and immediately began their persecution of everyone they thought of as “inferior”.</p>
<p>The Nazis frequently described disabled people as “useless eaters”, “empty human shells”, and “life unworthy of life”. They chose these labels to evoke images of people who were incapable of doing anything, and so needed to be kept in institutions for their entire lives, wasting the tax dollars of non-disabled people. </p>
<p>A suite of policies implemented by the Nazis forced disabled people out of German society and into institutions, where they worked until they were murdered.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uvrwnJ6hQ9s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Disabled people were the first victims of the Holocaust.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Most disabled people lived in the community</h2>
<p>In early 20th-century Germany, most disabled people lived in the community. In the mid-1920s, a national government survey of disabled people (the only one conducted during that era) found that few disabled people lived in institutions permanently. In fact, only a minority of disabled people lived in institutions at all – and this was often for education or rehabilitation, when they were young. </p>
<p>For example, though 17.5% of blind people lived in “schools for the blind”, the majority (80.4%) of blind people were adults living in the community. And a third of those disabled people with the highest rates of institutionalisation – the psychologically or intellectually impaired – lived in the community.</p>
<p>A network of organisations managed by and for disabled people prioritised gaining and maintaining employment. Some, such as the German Association of Blind Academics, established in 1916, focused on a particular profession. Others, such as the Self-help League of the Physically Handicapped, established in 1919, created training and jobs for its members. In 1929, it had a membership of 6,000 throughout Germany, and was a role model for a similar organisation in Austria.</p>
<p>This trajectory of increasing self-determination and community involvement of disabled people ended when the Nazis came to power in 1933. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-disability-discrimination-in-the-workplace-85183">Three charts on: disability discrimination in the workplace</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Exclusion and government hate campaigns</h2>
<p>One of the first legislative changes that affected all disabled people, as it did all Jews, was their exclusion from the new <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich">marriage loans program</a>, which lent money to each newly married couple, and forgave a quarter of the loan for each child they had. </p>
<p>Given Germany’s economic instability and high rates of unemployment, this financial assistance was significant – but only marriages “in the interest of the national community” were eligible. Both Jewish and disabled people were also ineligible later that year, when farms were made available to people who would not otherwise have an inheritance.</p>
<p>These laws were accompanied by a relentless government hate campaign. In schools, libraries, and waiting rooms, there was a succession of posters, pamphlets, and magazines, reminding “Aryans” of their superiority, and of the undesirability of everyone else. </p>
<p>Tours through institutions where disabled people were forced into scenes of helplessness became commonplace. These tours were mandatory for anyone who was planning to marry, in order to dissuade the couple from proceeding if there was any chance their child might be “unfit”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Images of physically disabled children, with a caption that reads 'deformed'." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506047/original/file-20230124-17-adihpe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nazi propaganda slide featuring two images of physically disabled children. The caption reads ‘deformed’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Marion Davy</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this atmosphere, the <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1933-1938/law-for-the-prevention-of-offspring-with-hereditary-diseases">Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases</a>, which made the sterilisation of disabled people compulsory, encountered little opposition when it was enacted on 14 July 1933. </p>
<p>When it officially took effect, on 1 January 1934, movies and travelling exhibitions were added to the hate campaign. These stifled any remaining opposition, and made it impossible for the victims of this law to maintain any privacy about their personal circumstances. </p>
<p>Those who objected to their sterilisation were labelled unpatriotic. Those who did not object to their sterilisation were labelled inferior. And either way, women who were sterilised were then targeted for rape. Foreshadowing the Nazis’ increasing incarceration of disabled people, the only way to avoid sterilisation was to commit oneself to an institution.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Four disabled men, dressed in black." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506014/original/file-20230124-22-d1d8p8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nazi propaganda, showing four disabled men. The original caption reads: ‘Hereditary illnesses are a heavy burden for the people and the state’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of G Howard Tellier</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It became increasingly dangerous for disabled people to be seen in public, let alone to work. To force them into institutions, it was now only necessary for the Nazis to target the few remaining avenues they had for remaining in the community – marriage and education. </p>
<p>In 1935, one month after sexual contact and marriage was prohibited between “Aryans” and Jews, it was also prohibited between “Aryans” and disabled people. In the same year, disabled people were not permitted to attend school past elementary level. And within two years, they were not permitted to attend school at all unless it was part of an institution.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/people-with-disabilities-in-group-homes-are-suffering-shocking-abuse-new-housing-models-could-prevent-harm-197989">People with disabilities in group homes are suffering shocking abuse. New housing models could prevent harm</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Aktion T4 and the murder of disabled people</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program">Aktion T4</a> program targeted disabled adults in Germany and Austria, murdering them in gas chambers attached to institutions. Though it is the most well-known of the programs that specifically targeted disabled people, it was not the first, and not the only one.</p>
<p>The murder of disabled children began on July 25 1939, and was soon part of the procedure of designated hospitals throughout Germany and Austria. In September, the Nazis began murdering the patients in the asylums of the countries they occupied, beginning with Poland. </p>
<p>The first victims of Aktion T4 were murdered in October – the program had a quota of 70,000 victims. When this quota was reached, most of Aktion T4’s staff were assigned to establish the “final solution”, and the euthanasia of disabled people was transferred to hospitals.</p>
<p>Disabled people were victims of every other Nazi extermination program, too. Whether they had found a way to remain in the community, or became impaired due to Nazi violence or the work they were forced to do, many disabled people were incarcerated in concentration camps and ghettos. 3,200 blind people were deported from <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt">Theresienstadt</a> alone.</p>
<p>These events are important to remember – not only as history, but as an example of how short the path from exclusion to murder can be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Tink does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks 90 years since the Nazis assumed power. Disabled people were the first Holocaust victims; Nazi programs discriminated against and murdered them.Amanda Tink, PhD Candidate, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1912402022-10-03T12:06:47Z2022-10-03T12:06:47ZHolocaust comparisons are frequent in US politics – and reflect a shallow understanding of the actual genocide and the US response<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486927/original/file-20220927-2496-g99721.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C1%2C1017%2C680&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A woman holds a sign denouncing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, with syringes in the shape of a swastika, during a 2021 rally at the Kentucky Capitol in Frankfort. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/woman-holds-a-sign-denouncing-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-news-photo/1234925521?adppopup=true">Jon Cherry/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Keith Packer, a 57-year-old Virginian, achieved a measure of infamy at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot when <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jan-rioter-wearing-camp-auschwitz-sweatshirt-sentenced/story?id=89973329">he was photographed</a> wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones along with the words “Camp Auschwitz.” “Work Brings Freedom,” the front said, a translation of the notorious motto “Arbeit macht frei” that <a href="https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/the-original-arbeit-macht-frei-inscription-is-back-in-place-at-the-auschwitz-gate,91.html">appeared on the gates of Auschwitz</a> and several other Nazi concentration camps. On the back was the word “Staff.”</p>
<p>Packer was sentenced <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/defendants/packer-robert-keith#:%7E:text=Pleaded%20guilty%201%2F26%2F22,days%20in%20jail%2C%20%24500%20restitution.">to 75 days in prison</a> on Sept. 16, 2022, for his role in the riot – he was tried for his actions, not his clothing. But his sweatshirt was far from the only <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-scholar-of-american-anti-semitism-explains-the-hate-symbols-present-during-the-us-capitol-riot-152883">Holocaust reference</a> on Jan. 6 or in its aftermath. </p>
<p>Rioters have <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/capitol-rioter-compares-attacks-treatment-jews-germany-rcna10162">compared their arrests</a> to <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/capitol-riot-supporter-compares-insurrectionists-to-jews-under-nazi-rule">the persecution of Jews</a>, and commentator Candace Owens <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/07/candace-owens-reichstag-fire-tucker-carlson/">compared Jan. 6 to the Reichstag fire</a>, which Adolf Hitler used as pretext to consolidate power in 1933.</p>
<p>It is a reminder of something that is all too apparent to scholars of the Holocaust, like <a href="https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/history/profile/adam-seipp/">myself</a>: Americans are willing to <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/holocaust-trivialization-and-distortion-what-are-implications-comparing-current">trivialize the genocide</a> by turning it into a tool for their own political goals. </p>
<p>As a historian who has written about the American role in <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288236277_Buchenwald_Stories_Testimony_Military_History_and_the_American_Encounter_with_the_Holocaust">liberating concentration camps</a> at the end of World War II, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how Americans have – and have not – talked about the Holocaust in the decades since. There is little evidence that outright denial of the Holocaust is widespread. Instead, the problem is a <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/01/22/what-americans-know-about-the-holocaust/">poor understanding of the tragedy</a>, including this country’s response – the focus of a remarkable documentary series, “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/">The U.S. and the Holocaust</a>,” which recently premiered on PBS.</p>
<h2>Forgetting exclusion</h2>
<p>The contemporary American story of the Holocaust focuses on the U.S. role in helping to bring the Nazi regime of terror to an end. A more nuanced understanding of America’s reaction is less comforting.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows two young girls looking through a ship porthole." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486907/original/file-20220927-26-ty30x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Two German-Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis arrive in Antwerp, Belgium, after the ship was refused entry to Cuba and Miami.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/two-young-german-jewish-refugees-at-the-porthole-of-the-news-photo/2644200?adppopup=true">Gerry Cranham/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://forward.com/news/516589/ken-burns-pbs-documentary-the-u-s-holocaust-americans-jews/">The PBS series</a>, produced by acclaimed filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, traces what Americans knew about the vast and murderous campaign against civilians in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s, as a flood of Jewish refugees attempted to flee Hitler’s Germany.</p>
<p>The U.S. did not enter the war to stop Nazi persecution of Europe’s Jews. In fact, <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate#:%7E:text=In%20January%20of%20that%20year,war%20to%20help%20the%20British.">a majority of Americans</a> opposed entering the war at all until 1940, a year before the Pearl Harbor attack brought the U.S. into the conflict.</p>
<p>Many Americans had no interest in protecting the rights of religious or ethnic minorities at home or abroad. <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/charles-e-coughlin">Antisemitism and anti-foreign prejudice</a> was a core element of American society in the early 20th century, just as white supremacy was. These forms of hatred and exclusion drew from the same well of supposedly “<a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/antisemitism-in-history-racial-antisemitism-18751945">scientific” beliefs</a> about racial hierarchy. </p>
<p>While the U.S. allowed almost <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/immigration-to-the-united-states-1933-41">125,000 Jewish refugees</a> to enter the country during the years between Hitler’s rise to power and the start of the war, many more were <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27373131">denied entry</a> or <a href="https://www.annefrank.org/en/about-us/news-and-press/news/2018/7/6/research-otto-franks-attempts-emigrate-united-stat/#:%7E:text=Otto%20Frank%20had%20been%20working,Rotterdam%20consulate%20issued%20immigration%20visas.">left in limbo</a>.</p>
<h2>Remembering liberation</h2>
<p>This part of the country’s response has been largely forgotten, in favor of a story where the U.S. plays a more heroic part.</p>
<p>The liberation of the concentration camps in the spring of 1945 plays a central role in public memories of the war today, along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-military-power-economics-and-strategy-that-led-to-d-day-27663">the Allied landings in Normandy</a> on “D-Day” in 1944. The hall through which millions of visitors have entered the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington <a href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1093242">is lined with flags of the “liberator divisions</a>” of the U.S. Army.</p>
<p>There is no question that the arrival of American forces at Buchenwald, Dachau and other camps across western and southern Germany saved thousands of prisoners facing murder or death by starvation and sickness. In reality, however, the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews had largely concluded, and primarily took place <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/holocaust-the-ignored-reality/">hundreds of miles to the east</a> in what is today Poland, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic states. By the time American forces landed in western Europe, Europe’s Jewish population had already been reduced to a few small pockets.</p>
<p>Within weeks of the arrival of American troops at Buchenwald, Americans saw images and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-6tCERMLv4">newsreel film</a> of the horrors of the camps. However, it took decades for the story of camp liberation to become the most important act of the war in Europe in Americans’ minds. It would not be until the 1980s, when the liberators and survivors were entering old age, that the Holocaust was firmly entrenched in American school curricula and popular culture.</p>
<p>One important consequence of this long wait was that the stories told by and about liberators changed in the intervening decades. As Americans became more familiar with the events of the Holocaust through <a href="https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177328">television</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/dec/06/schindlers-list-25th-anniversary-steven-spielberg-holocaust">films</a>, liberator stories began to grow more similar to each other and merged into a general story of the Holocaust, which increasingly focused on the horrors of the death camps in German-occupied Poland. <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288236277_Buchenwald_Stories_Testimony_Military_History_and_the_American_Encounter_with_the_Holocaust">Liberators of Buchenwald</a> describing the event decades afterward, for example, thought they remembered gas chambers at the camp, when in fact there were none at that location.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A black and white photo shows soldiers looking at bodies strewn in a courtyard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486910/original/file-20220927-26-tqffj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Dwight D. Eisenhower and soldiers discover 70 prisoner bodies at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, near Buchenwald, who had been executed by the fleeing Nazis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ohrdruf-concentration-camp-near-buchewald-germany-the-news-photo/104404170?adppopup=true">Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland – the most infamous camp facility, with its gates saying “Arbeit macht frei” – came to represent all concentration camps in American memory, and even in family stories. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told a crowd about his <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/obamas-staff-corrects-wwii-story/">great-uncle’s participation in the liberation of Auschwitz</a>. Auschwitz was actually liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. Obama’s campaign later clarified that his great-uncle, Charles Payne, participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. </p>
<h2>Talking about the Holocaust today</h2>
<p>The centrality of camp liberation to the American story of the Holocaust has real consequences. It turns the Holocaust into a story of American triumph over evil and overlooks the country’s refusal to do more to save the victims.</p>
<p>This simplistic version of a complex history has allowed many Americans to use “the Holocaust” and “Nazism” as <a href="https://www.adl.org/blog/holocaust-analogies-frequently-used-as-fodder-for-social-and-political-commentary">shallow symbols</a> for any kind of government action they oppose and deem oppressive, particularly public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Opponents <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59485508">have compared</a> infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci to SS physician and torturer Dr. Josef Mengele. Representative Marjorie Greene has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rep-greene-apologizes-for-comparing-face-masks-to-holocaust-but-stands-by-comparison-of-democrats-to-nazi-party/2021/06/14/552869f8-cd6a-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html">compared face mask rules</a> to forcing Jews to wear Star of David badges, and Capitol police agencies <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/09/marjorie-taylor-greene-gazpacho-police">to the Nazi-era Gestapo</a>.</p>
<p>As Burns’ documentary emphasizes, the U.S. is once again in a time of national reckoning about race, discrimination and histories of oppression. In the final minutes of “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” viewers see marchers in Charlottsville, Virginia, chanting “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/">Jews will not replace us</a>,” television pundits opining about the threat of cultural decline through immigration, the 2018 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/us/active-shooter-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting.html">attack on the Tree of Life congregation</a> in Pittsburgh, and the Jan. 6 riot. There in the crowd, wearing his sweatshirt, is Robert Keith Packer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191240/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam R. Seipp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many Americans know a simple version of Holocaust history, in which their country played the savior. The reality isn’t so comfortable, a historian writes.Adam R. Seipp, Professor of History, Texas A&M UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1846962022-06-09T15:36:40Z2022-06-09T15:36:40ZHow the Nazis tried to erase a Czech village – and British miners helped stop them<p>The village of Lidice, located a few miles outside the Czechoslovak capital Prague, was the site of a paroxysm of vindictive, pitiless Nazi violence. On the night of June 9 1942, SS guards attempted to completely obliterate the village by killing or deporting its inhabitants, by eliminating every trace of humanity and even by exhuming the dead.</p>
<p>A total of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2012.682793?casa_token=a8_5WAH4SKwAAAAA%3A1Q5eJOAMQi17Ev86-jINpXqxHkWhvFrlIrqp3oXYSLUYvEgsydfkgJO0_Q0GqItU9h0AueX2BWZw">173 inhabitants were murdered</a> on the spot. The rest were deported to the Nazi-operated extermination camps, where the village death toll rose to approximately 340. Those who survived suffered the fate of <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Topographies_of_Suffering/1tKdBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Lidice+1942+deported&pg=PP3&printsec=frontcover">forced dispersal</a>. </p>
<p>But an unlikely alliance of Staffordshire miners, a Stoke-on-Trent doctor and a town in Illinois were not prepared to let the memory of Lidice disappear. For decades they fought to put the village back on the map and to help rebuild it.</p>
<p>The fate of Lidice was sealed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the Nazi-controlled protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Participants/5nmHDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Lidice+Heydrich+gerwarth&pg=PT67&printsec=frontcover">one of the architects of the Holocaust</a>. The clandestine resistance operation, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Seven_Men_at_Daybreak/vDdoAAAAMAAJ?hl=en">code-named Anthropoid</a>, took place on May 27 1942. Heydrich was wounded in the attack and died a few days later. </p>
<p>In a token investigation conducted by the Nazi authorities immediately after the attack, Lidice and the village of <a href="https://www.lezaky-memorial.cz/en/memorial/memorial-site/history-of-the-hamlet-of-lezaky/">Ležáky</a> were singled out as symbolic targets of a <a href="https://kafkadesk.org/2021/06/09/on-this-day-in-1942-the-massacre-of-lidice-was-carried-out-on-orders-from-adolf-hitler/">brutal reprisal action demanded by Hitler</a>. This was despite scant evidence linking them to <a href="https://www.tracesofwar.com/thewarillustrated/242/the-truth-about-lidice.asp?c=twi">the Czech resistance</a> and without any proof that inhabitants were involved in the attack.</p>
<p>What followed was total annihilation. The village was surrounded in the <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Little_Village_Called_Lidice/JvnCDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Lidice+1942&pg=PT11&printsec=frontcover">late hours of 9 June</a>. By the following afternoon all male inhabitants over the age of 15 had been executed. </p>
<p>Women and children were forcefully removed to a nearby makeshift camp while awaiting deportation. Around 190 <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2012.682793?casa_token=pIo8vZxTW7kAAAAA%3ADaHdK9hlRkBh7pfLoSagvK3lQl_umCyShfG8ejf39SGEsKaWkl9cTbC9TKGUkzp-qAjg4lcqROgr">women of Lidice</a> were deported to Ravensbruck concentration camp, where about 40 of them died. </p>
<p>Of the estimated 100 children removed from the village <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-lidice-massacre-180970242/">only a handful survived</a>, mostly because they were deemed “racially valuable” and therefore suitable for “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/polishreview.59.4.0045">Germanisation</a>” by being raised by families of SS officials. The rest were deported to a concentration facility in the Polish city of Łódź and then transported to the Chelmno extermination camp in northern Poland, where more than 80 of them were gassed.</p>
<p>The final act in the extermination of Lidice took months to complete. Teams of workers worked methodically to erase every single trace of life in the village. All houses were set on fire and then obliterated with explosives. Animals were killed, roads erased, building foundations dug up, surfaces covered with new soil and plants. Even the dead were exhumed from the cemetery, the tombs and remains destroyed. </p>
<p>A terse Nazi broadcast announcing the retaliatory action against Lidice concluded with the following ominous coda: “The buildings in the village have been <a href="https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/naziseasternempire/lidice.html">razed to the ground and </a><a href="https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/naziseasternempire/lidice.html">its name erased</a>.”</p>
<h2>International response</h2>
<p>The Nazi authorities wanted to consign the village to oblivion, where all the threads of individual and community life would be made to disappear without a trace. By setting up an elaborate industry of erasure, they wished their crimes against Lidice to be expunged from history as if the massacre had never happened, as if Lidice itself and its people <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2021/08/now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/">had never existed</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Old printed map with Czech place names." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/468022/original/file-20220609-11182-fpdmxu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Where has Lidice gone? A map of the region produced by the German military in 1942/43.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this endeavour they did not succeed. News of the brutal Nazi reprisals travelled fast, generating an international outcry and spurring communities into action. The English city of Stoke-on-Trent, led by Polish-born local GP and councillor <a href="https://ipfs.fleek.co/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Barnet_Stross.html">Sir Barnett Stross</a>, and the North Staffordshire Miners Association started a campaign with the poignant slogan “<a href="https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-sentinel/20210623/281522229051620">Lidice shall live</a>”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCvqmzlYHhk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The response to Stross’s plea for support from the local community was humbling: in an extraordinary act of solidarity with a fellow mining community the Staffordshire workers donated a share of their wages to help the rebuilding of the village. Their contributions raised an extraordinary fund equivalent to approximately £1 million today.</p>
<p>The campaign for Lidice was officially launched with an event held at Victoria Hall in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, in early September 1942. It was addressed by the exiled Czechoslovak president <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edvard-Benes">Edvard Beneš</a> and attended by thousands of local supporters. </p>
<p>There was other international support for the preservation of Lidice’s memory. Across the Atlantic, a housing settlement in Illinois originally called <a href="https://lidicelives.org/2022/03/29/stern-park-ill-12th-of-july-1942/?amp=1">Stern Park</a> decided to rename itself Lidice in order to “perpetuate the name” of the destroyed Czech village. Years later Stross launched an open call for the creation of a special collection of artwork donated by international artists in memory of and protest to the Nazi brutal campaign to wipe out Lidice.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rise-and-fall-in-the-third-reich-nazi-party-members-and-social-advancement-123297">Rise and fall in the Third Reich: Nazi party members and social advancement</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Lidice did, and does, live. Following liberation, the restored Czech government decided to rebuild the village 300 metres from where the ravaged settlement once stood. Another campaign by Stross helped locate the surviving children and bring them back to the new Lidice. The initiatives launched by Stross and embraced by the local community forged a special relationship between Stoke-on-Trent and Lidice that thrives today.</p>
<p>On the 80th anniversary of the massacre, we owe it to all of them – to those who perished, to those who returned, and to all those across the world who vowed to keep the name of Lidice alive – to cherish and protect the memory of what unfolded on that night in June in an unassuming mining village, perpetrated by humans against fellow humans.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184696/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aristotle Kallis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>An international campaign to preserve the memory of Lidice – and then rebuild it – helped keep the village alive.Aristotle Kallis, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1391642020-06-24T10:49:43Z2020-06-24T10:49:43ZDark tourism memorial sites will help us heal from the trauma of coronavirus<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343481/original/file-20200623-188891-5lo013.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1880%2C1254&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We know of death, we hear of it, we see it, and we guard against it. But compared to <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past">bygone ages</a>, rarely do we have <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44289624?seq=1">direct experiences of the dying</a>. But COVID-19 has changed this for many people. </p>
<p><a href="https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/death-in-the-modern-world/book255329#contents">Death</a> now masquerades as <a href="https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/">fatality statistics</a>, as politicians and the media occupy us with morose indicators. Ordinary people are dying and the dead are becoming extraordinary by their mass numbers. But with an <a href="https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus#tab=tab_1">invisible disease</a>, questions are raised as to how we collectively remember those who have passed away. </p>
<p>In some parts of the world, moves are afoot to begin <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/coronavirus-memorials-will-be-created-real-issue-how-we-want-ncna1213101">commemorating COVID-19 victims</a>. In Germany, a <a href="https://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/4/">temporary shrine</a> has <a href="https://www.thelocal.de/20200520/nightly-blaze-of-candles-lit-in-homage-to-german-coronavirus-victims">been established</a>. Plans have been announced in the UK for an emergency services memorial, which will be dedicated to people killed in the line of duty – including recent “<a href="https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1288998/nhs-heroes-national-emergency-services-memorial-Prince-William">COVID-19 heroes</a>”. Yet a memorial to the ordinary dead of COVID-19 remains elusive.</p>
<h2>Remembering the dead</h2>
<p>Visitor sites that commemorate victims of disease are rare, but they do exist. In the UK in Derbyshire, the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-51904810">village of Eyam</a> trades on its unenviable history of encountering the Black Death in 1665. On Roosevelt Island in New York, haunting ruins of the <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/roosevelt-island-smallpox-hospital-ruins">Smallpox Memorial Hospital</a> stand as an obscure monument to this infectious disease. </p>
<p>Then there’s the <a href="https://www.aidsquiltuk.org/">AIDS Memorial Quilt</a>, a unique fabric of social history that remembers those who perished from AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. And, there’s also the “Fighting SARS Memorial Architectural Scene” in Hong Kong Park, which bears <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/hong-kong-sars-china-coronavirus-covid19/608131/">witness to the traumas</a> of the 2003 Sars outbreak. Though one of the most deadly global pandemics – <a href="https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/readwatchlisten/features/remembering-the-spanish-flu/">the Spanish flu</a> – is mostly <a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W7TfGRAAAP5F0eKS">without memorial</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343220/original/file-20200622-55021-bqr095.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Renwick Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_Hospital#/media/File:Smallpox_Hospital_2019.jpg">Chris6d/wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Despite killing up to 100 million people, the <a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/18/how-the-spanish-flu-of-1918-20-was-largely-forgotten?gclsrc=aw.ds&gclid=CjwKCAjw2a32BRBXEiwAUcugiEOPThLGTbCEgJw7PS31QWFInYST2-NG78sut0RzDC2t3LcZISFqSRoCXo0QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds">cultural amnesia</a> surrounding the <a href="https://www.cwgc.org/learn/news-and-events/news/2018/11/05/11/22/spanish-flu">1918 pandemic</a> might help explain the <a href="https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/05/11/historian-draws-parallels-between-the-1918-spanish-flu-and-todays-coronavirus-pandemic">lack of preparation</a> for COVID-19. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cwgc.org/learn/news-and-events/news/2018/11/05/11/22/spanish-flu">Spanish flu</a> has largely sunk into <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/1918-flu-memorials.html">commemorative oblivion</a>. Though a visitor exhibition in 2018 at the <a href="https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/spanish-flu-nursing-during-historys-deadliest-pandemic/">Florence Nightingale Museum</a> in London, provided a hint as to how future generations will <a href="https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/influenza">remember</a> COVID-19.</p>
<h2>Wuhan and tourism</h2>
<p>Undoubtedly, the COVID-19 pandemic will become our shared, if not contested, <a href="https://boydellandbrewer.com/displaced-heritage.html">heritage</a>. Scrutiny of political and medical responses, disaster modelling and tales from the deceased will form future memorial narratives. </p>
<p>And in some ways this may already be happening. Recent reports suggest that Wuhan – the the place where the first reports of COVID-19 emerged from – has become a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarathiessen/2020/05/19/china-covid-19-birthplace-wuhan-top-travel-attraction/#45c8b42ffcb9">desired destination</a> for Chinese tourism. It seems Chinese visitors want to <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/wuhan-travel-destination-survey/index.html">go to Wuhan</a> to support their “hero city”. </p>
<p>Though this may be more about “<a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/the-rise-of-red-tourism-in-china/article30124887.ece">red tourism</a>” – a niche market in China where <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-09-29/china-red-tourism-promotes-communist-sites-to-boost-xi-s-economy">patriotic ethos</a> is fostered by the Communist Party to provide <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19388160802313696?journalCode=wctr20">political legitimacy</a>. </p>
<p>Either way, the idea of visiting places <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/the-rise-of-dark-tourism/374432/">linked with death and disaster</a>, known as <a href="http://www.dark-tourism.org.uk">dark tourism</a>, has a <a href="https://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/26/">long historical precedence</a>. But over recent years, increasing numbers of tourists have been <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel/2018/02/dark-tourism-when-tragedy-meets-tourism">visiting these “dark” sites</a> – which includes former concentration camps, war memorials and exhibitions, natural disaster sites, decommissioned prisons and places of atrocity.</p>
<p>Dark tourism packages and sells <a href="https://clok.uclan.ac.uk/1870/">trauma as a tourist experience</a>. But <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4">dark tourism experiences</a> can also act as a <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-reminds-you-of-death-and-amplifies-your-core-values-both-bad-and-good-137588?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1590073301">reminder of death</a> – <a href="https://oneplanetrating.org/blog/just-what-is-dark-tourism-a-chat-with-dr-philip-stone/">and bring our mortality into sharp focus</a>. In this sense, dark tourism has, to some extent, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160738308000261">domesticated death</a> and grants the dead a place in the public realm. It also allows the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160738312000564">significant dead</a> to remind us of our fights, follies and failures.</p>
<h2>Tragic history</h2>
<p>The world is littered with dark tourism sites that <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-may-be-macabre-but-dark-tourism-helps-us-learn-from-the-worst-of-human-history-60966">showcase our disputed heritage</a>. And the demand for dark tourism will not diminish after this pandemic. Rather, <a href="https://theconversation.com/dark-tourism-can-be-voyeuristic-and-exploitative-or-if-handled-correctly-do-a-world-of-good-81504">dark tourism has the potential</a> to herald new visitor sites that commemorate COVID-19 victims.</p>
<p>Despite ethical ambiguities – that <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-47566-4_8">death</a> has now become a <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/19">spectacle</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhnLXMdMpyM">dark tourism</a> commodifies our noteworthy dead – it also offers space to showcase tragic memories and memorialise our <a href="https://works.bepress.com/philip_stone/">heritage that hurts</a>. While <a href="https://www.dezeen.com/2020/06/11/banksy-edward-colston-statue-slave-trader/">commemoration might be contested</a>, without it our dead are dispatched to history. Indeed, COVID-19 and its victims will eventually be forgotten without memorials. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343231/original/file-20200622-54985-ip2g12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/jewish-holocaust-memorial-museum-berlin-city-173230571">Noppasin Wongchum/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of course, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo8445230.html">memorial mania</a> and <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520271333/monument-wars">even competition between monuments</a> for the most visitors exists. But a national COVID-19 memorial for the pandemic dead has potential to be a visitor attraction in its own right. </p>
<p>It’s here that dark tourism can help shine a commemorative light on a pandemic that has gripped society – and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTsEE7TCSuM">emotion</a> of visiting such experiences can forewarn future generations of the risk of disease contagion. </p>
<p>For now, tourism has been <a href="https://www.unwto.org/tourism-covid-19">economically ruptured</a> under COVID-19. But <a href="https://www.visitbritain.org/helping-tourism-industry-recover-covid-19">it will re-emerge</a>. And, when it does, dark tourism can help commit the pandemic to our collective consciousness. Ultimately, it can signal warnings from history for future generations.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139164/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip R Stone does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dark tourism can help shine a commemorative light on the pandemic that has gripped society.Philip R Stone, Executive Director, Institute for Dark Tourism Research, University of Central LancashireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1322962020-03-27T12:15:38Z2020-03-27T12:15:38ZAuschwitz: Women used different survival and sabotage strategies than men at Nazi death camp<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323068/original/file-20200325-168894-1bbdz1i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C13%2C2908%2C1866&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Women prisoners at the Auschwitz train station around 1944.
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/germany-third-reich-concentration-camps-1939-45-women-at-news-photo/545959785?adppopup=true">ullstein bild via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nearly all the 1.3 million people sent to <a href="http://auschwitz.org/en/">Auschwitz</a>, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, were murdered – either sent to the gas chambers or worked to death. Life expectancy in many of these camps was between <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/auschwitz-birkenau.asp">six weeks and three months</a>. </p>
<p>Over a <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/final-solution/auschwitz.html">million of the Auschwitz dead were Jews</a>, and scholars have concluded that more than <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300080803/women-holocaust">half of them were women</a>.</p>
<p>While male and female slave laborers in Auschwitz faced the same ultimate fate, my <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Ej6tkQ0AAAAJ&hl=en">research on gender and the Holocaust finds</a> that some of their behaviors and responses to captivity differed. </p>
<h2>Methods of sabotage</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/double-jeopardy-gender-and-the-holocaust/oclc/607116356">Gender</a> has been long overlooked in Holocaust research. Writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, early scholars such as <a href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn560446">Joan Ringelheim</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623520120097170?journalCode=cjgr20">Sybil Milton</a> had to fight for their legitimacy in a field that insisted that separating stories of Jewish men and women under the Nazi regime was a <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300080803/women-holocaust">blow to their joint fate</a> or to <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/schoenfeldggmailcom/auschwitz-and-the-professors/">Jewish solidarity</a>.</p>
<p>Today, however, the topic is being explored in depth, allowing us to better understand not only how Jews died during the Holocaust, but also how they lived.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C27%2C4616%2C3666&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/322747/original/file-20200324-155645-1ha5npx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Of 1.3 million men and women sent to the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, 1.1 million died.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>During the late 1980s, I conducted a study of Jewish men and women who had been part of Auschwitz’s “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/corruption/">Canada Commando</a>,” the forced labor detail responsible for sorting through the possessions inmates had brought with them to the camp and preparing those items for reshipment back to Germany for civilian use. </p>
<p>Since the barracks were the only place in the camp where one could find almost unlimited food and clothing, this forced labor troop was named after Canada – a country seen as a symbol of wealth.</p>
<p>Examining the behavior of the men and women of the Canada Commando, I noted an interesting difference. Among the items of clothing sorted there were fur coats. While both male and female prisoners in the Canada Commando tried to sabotage this work, <a href="http://auschwitz.org/en/history/punishments-and-executions/executions">acts punishable by death</a>, their methods differed. </p>
<p>Male prisoners would usually rip the lining and seams of the coat to shreds, keeping only the outer shell intact. At first use, the coat would come apart, leaving the German who wore it coatless in the winter.</p>
<p>The few surviving women in the commando whom I interviewed did not use this tactic. Rather, they told me, they decided together to insert handwritten notes into the coat’s pockets that read something along the lines of: “German women, know that you are wearing a coat that belonged to a woman who has been gassed to death in Auschwitz.” </p>
<p>The women, in other words, chose psychological sabotage. The men, physical.</p>
<h2>Coping with hunger</h2>
<p>One of the most central experiences of all camp prisoners during the Holocaust was hunger. While both men and women suffered from hunger during incarceration, male and female prisoners <a href="https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0277539599000321">used disparate coping methods</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323004/original/file-20200325-168922-1m7yagf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The former Auschwitz Nazi extermination camp, in occupied Poland, now a public museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium">Peter Toth/Pixabay</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While men would regale each other with tales of the fantastic meals they would enjoy once liberated, women would often discuss how they had cooked the various dishes they loved before the war, from baking fluffy cakes to preparing traditional Jewish blintzes. Cara de Silva’s 1996 book, “<a href="http://www.caradesilva.com/in_memory_s_kitchen__a_legacy_from_the_women_of_terezin_115136.htm">In Memory’s Kitchen</a>,” movingly documents how this phenomenon played out among women prisoners in the Terezin camp. </p>
<p>The differences between men’s and women’s coping methods may have derived from the gendered behavior in their lives before the war, in which men ate and women cooked – at least in the middle and lower classes. </p>
<p>In the case of women, this may also have been a female socialization process meant to solve two dilemmas simultaneously: the psychological need to engage – at least verbally – with food, and the educational need to prepare the young girls in the camp for culinary and household tasks after the war. </p>
<p>Under normal circumstances, mothers would have taught their daughters by example – not story.</p>
<h2>Motherhood under Nazi rule</h2>
<p><a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300080803/women-holocaust">Various historical studies</a> make mention of motherly sacrifices during the Holocaust, such as women who chose to accompany their children to death so that they would not be alone during their last moments on Earth. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/323011/original/file-20200325-168885-wdakt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish women and children, some wearing the yellow Star of David patch on their chests, undergoing ‘selections’ at Auschwitz circa 1943.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/jewish-women-and-children-some-wearing-the-yellow-star-of-news-photo/3240826?adppopup=true">Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some mothers, however, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23256249.2016.1126983?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=rdap20">acted otherwise</a>, as documented by the Polish non-Jewish Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowsky in his book “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/es/book/show/228244.This_Way_for_the_Gas_Ladies_and_Gentlemen">This Way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen</a>.” </p>
<p>During the “selections” at Auschwitz – when prisoners were sent either to live or die – prisoners arriving were usually divided by sex, with the elderly, mothers and small children being separated from men and older boys. The mothers with small children, along with the elderly, were <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1995.tb00014.x">automatically sent to death</a>.</p>
<p>Borowsky writes about a number of young mothers who hid from their children during the selection, in an attempt to buy themselves a few additional days or possible hours of life.</p>
<p>If a German soldier found a small child alone at a “selection,” Borowsky writes, he would take the child up and down the rows of prisoners while screaming, “This is how a mother abandons her child?” until he tracked down the hapless woman and condemned them both to the gas chambers. </p>
<p>At first, the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3675505?seq=1">female Auschwitz survivors I’ve interviewed</a> said they’d never heard of any such thing. Eventually, however, after I returned to the question several times via different topics, a few women admitted to hearing that a handful mothers who arrived in Auschwitz with small children did indeed try to hide to save their own lives.</p>
<p>Historians are not judges. I do not mention the actions made in mortal fear to condemn these women but rather to contribute, 75 years later, to our understanding of Jewish life and death under Nazi terror. Doing requires relinquishing preconceived notions about both men and women, mapping out a broader canvas of the grim reality at Auschwitz. </p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklysmart">You can get our highlights each weekend</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/132296/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judy Baumel-Schwartz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While male and female prisoners at Auschwitz faced the same ultimate fate – torture, forced labor and near-certain death – women sometimes reacted differently to Nazi captivity.Judy Baumel-Schwartz, Director, the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar-Ilan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1305462020-01-26T09:15:43Z2020-01-26T09:15:43ZSurviving genocide: a voice from colonial Namibia at the turn of the last century<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311811/original/file-20200124-81369-1gzexmq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A human skull on display in Berlin in 2018. Germany handed back human remains seized during the Namibia genocide from 1904 to 1908.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA-EFE/Hayoung Jeon</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Germany committed genocide in Africa 40 years before the <a href="https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/what-was-the-holocaust/">Holocaust</a> of the European Jews. In 1904 and 1905 the Ovaherero and Nama people of central and southern Namibia rose up against colonial rule and dispossession in what was then called German South West Africa. The revolt was brutally crushed. By 1908, 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/herero-people-south-west-africa-now-namibia-begin-uprising">had died</a> of starvation and thirst, overwork and exposure to harsh climates. </p>
<p>The army drove survivors into the waterless Omaheke desert. Thousands more died in <a href="http://en.rfi.fr/Paris-exhibition-20th-centurys-first-genocide-massacre-Namibias-Herero-and-Nama">concentration camps</a>. </p>
<p>For <a href="https://books.google.de/books/about/The_Kaiser_s_Holocaust.html?id=CSqc0CsnL-AC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">many historians</a> this first genocide committed by Germany provided the template for the horrors that were to come 40 years later during the Holocaust of the European Jews. The <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/">philosopher Hannah Arendt</a>, herself a Holocaust refugee from Germany, <a href="https://koneensaatio.fi/en/hannah-arendt-the-origins-and-consequences-of-ideological-racism/">explained</a> in 1951 that European imperialism played a crucial role in the development of Nazi totalitarianism and associated genocides.</p>
<p>We know very little about the experience of those who lived through this first systematic mass extinction of the 20th century. Forty-seven testimonies were recorded and published in 1918 in a scathing official British report about German colonial rule in Namibia, known as the Blue Book. One eyewitness <a href="https://www.ascleiden.nl/publications/words-cannot-be-found-german-colonial-rule-namibia-annotated-reprint-1918-blue-book">remarked</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Words cannot be found to relate what happened; it was too terrible.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following on an earlier <a href="https://bokbyenforlag.no/butikk/fakta/debatt-politikk-og-samfunn/mama-penee-jenta-som-gjennomskuet-folkemordet/">Norwegian edition</a>, a new book, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide, by Uazuvara Ewald Kapombo Katjivena, to be published by <a href="http://www.unam.edu.na/unam-press/publishers-welcome">UNAM Press</a> in Windhoek in February, makes an extraordinary attempt to present the lived experience of the genocide. </p>
<h2>Surviving a genocide</h2>
<p>Based on oral and family history, Katjivena, a former exiled liberation Namibian fighter until the country’s independence from South Africa <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/namibian-struggle-independence-1966-1990-historical-background">in 1990</a>, tells his grandmother’s story in a biography deeply infused with family and oral history. His grandmother, Jahohora, survived the genocide as an 11-year-old girl. </p>
<p>In the book’s opening scene young Jahohora witnesses her parents’ murder at the hands of German colonial troops in 1904. Following this traumatic experience, she wanders into the veld. The young girl survives on her own, using skills that her mother had imparted to her, to scavenge from the environment. She traps rabbits and birds, eats berries and wild honey, and occasionally feasts on an ostrich egg.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312033/original/file-20200127-81341-1gzpnqt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
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<p>The remaining connection with her parents is cruelly cut after she is caught and forced to work for a German farmer. During the “civilising” washing and changing of her attire, her ceremonial Ovaherero headgear is cut into pieces and burnt by the farmer’s wife. </p>
<p>The headgear was her mother’s significant gift for the growing daughter just before the start of the hostilities in early 1904. Jahohora suffers deeply humiliating experiences.</p>
<p>Katjivena’s grandmother was a remarkable woman of deep thought, insight, and immense resolve. Her parents and grandparents belonged to a section of the Ovaherero called the Ovatjurure. They played a significant role in their communities by helping to maintain peace among families in the nearby homesteads and in the neighbouring villages.</p>
<p>Their daughter passed on this remarkable tradition to the children and grandchildren she brought up during Namibia’s colonial era under Germany and South Africa.</p>
<h2>Regaining agency</h2>
<p>Katjivena intersperses Jahohora’s personal perspective with historical facts. We read a detailed, chilling account of General Lothar von Trotha’s <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/general-lothar-von-trotha-extermination-order-against-herero">extermination order of 2 October 1904</a>. The oral history telling, however, also indicates instances of humanity during an entirely inhumane era. </p>
<p>Who were these white people, the survivor wondered. Why had some German soldiers saved her from certain death and given her a chance of life while their fellows had mercilessly killed her parents? As Jahohora meets other survivors and hears their stories, she begins to understand the genocide and especially the role of Von Trotha, who is locally known as omuzepe (the killer).</p>
<p>Katjivena’s story looks simple, yet it exudes deep meaning. It turns the gaze onto the oppressors. The resisting gaze of the colonised, the cultural theorist Elizabeth Baer <a href="http://www.unam.edu.na/news/unam-press-latest-book-confronts-genocide">writes</a>, is an act of self-creation. It “begins to recognize and restore agency to the victims of imperialism”.</p>
<h2>Transcending the genocide</h2>
<p>The subtitle of Katjivena’s book is Transcending the Genocide. It adds a tremendous living voice to the symbolic commemorations of Germany’s African genocide that have taken place over the past few years. </p>
<p>Importantly, human remains of genocide victims were repatriated from Germany to Namibia in 2011, 2014 and 2018. These had been shipped to academic and medical institutions in Germany, and had remained there <a href="https://theconversation.com/namibian-genocide-victims-remains-are-home-but-germany-still-has-work-to-do-102655">until recently</a>. </p>
<p>In 2019 some significant items of cultural memory, which had been stolen during colonial conquest, were <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/namibia-dispute-over-return-of-the-witbooi-bible/a-47712784">returned to Namibia </a> from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. These included the slain Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi’s Bible and his riding whip.</p>
<p>In Windhoek a Genocide Memorial, built in 2014, signifies a noteworthy shift in post-colonial Namibian memory politics. The statue’s North Korean aesthetics and symbolism <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/266/250">remain controversial</a>. That aside, the new monument shows that the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama has belatedly entered the public history narrative of Namibian nationhood. This would have been impossible a <a href="https://www.njas.fi/njas/article/view/266/250">few years earlier</a>.</p>
<h2>Reconciliation and reparations</h2>
<p>On the political level, the German government finally acknowledged the colonial genocide <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-the-relationship-between-namibia-and-germany-sunk-to-a-new-low-121329">in 2015</a>. Ever since, Namibian and German envoys have been talking about an official apology by Germany. </p>
<p>Most controversial have been negotiations about <a href="https://theconversation.com/namibian-traditional-leaders-haul-germany-before-us-court-in-genocide-test-case-71222">reparations</a>. Also controversial has been the role of the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by the genocide. But in January 2020 Germany’s new ambassador to Namibia, Herbert Beck, hinted that important political developments might be <a href="https://www.namibian.com.na/87306/read/Aid-no-compromise-for-reparations?fbclid=IwAR3C7KiUAnOK1ZABLJoRjt0jRB3Y4w-U2vhX7u20gtKW1nQTTGG00vQb8Ww#close">about to happen</a>. </p>
<p>It is not clear yet where the complicated process of post-colonial reconciliation is going. Yet, with stories such as Katjivena’s remarkable biography of his grandmother, the dead and the survivors of the colonial genocide are finally given a face.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130546/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heike Becker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>An oral history based biography of a survivor of colonial genocide in Namibia indicates instances of humanity during an entirely inhumane era.Heike Becker, Professor of Anthropology, University of the Western CapeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1303292020-01-24T13:29:33Z2020-01-24T13:29:33ZHolocaust archaeology: uncovering vital evidence to prove the deniers wrong<p>It’s now 75 years since Soviet troops liberated the notorious death camp at Auschwitz and the vast majority of Holocaust survivors are no longer with us. The impact of continuing to research the Holocaust can, therefore, not be underestimated. The further away we move from the events and the more first-hand witnesses we lose, the more disconnected we feel, both individually and as a society. </p>
<p>As an archaeologist, I have experienced first hand how using a measured, scientific approach to the investigation of these atrocities can help to answer questions, heal communities, bring closure and allow for a more balanced approach to the representation of the subject.</p>
<p>The presentation of rigorously researched scientific evidence to support the known (and sometimes forgotten) history, has become ever more important at a time when this is being challenged by misinformation, competing narratives and populist movements.</p>
<p>As is the case for most British people, what I knew about the Holocaust was originally limited to what I had learned during secondary education and through my exposure to the subject in the media. I did not study the Holocaust at degree level or make a determined effort to develop a greater awareness. Now, through my work in the field of Holocaust archaeology I know different.</p>
<p>For my generation growing up in an age when the internet was just emerging, the information on the Holocaust was limited to academic research disseminated through school and traditional media. Today’s students have access to an unmanageable amount of material and the choice to search without restriction. But this access does not guarantee increased awareness or knowledge. </p>
<p>Recent surveys have suggested that <a href="https://www.hmd.org.uk/news/we-release-research-to-mark-holocaust-memorial-day-2019/">one in 20 people</a> in the UK don’t believe the Holocaust happened, while <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/europe/antisemitism-poll-2018-intl/">one-third of people</a> from seven surveyed European countries know little or nothing about these events. </p>
<p>Additionally, a <a href="https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk/research/young-people-understand-holocaust/key-findings/">study of English secondary schools</a> found that few students could accurately describe the events of the Holocaust, even though this is a compulsory part of the curriculum. This is a worrying trend for future generations. </p>
<p>Traditionally, Holocaust education has centred on historical sources and testimony from survivors. But – as these statistics show – new and innovative methods of collecting and presenting these facts are required to engage and, crucially, generate an awareness in people to ensure that these events are not forgotten or become rewritten. The use of an archaeological approach to research and present the Holocaust is therefore relevant and timely. </p>
<p>Our knowledge of the Holocaust tends to focus on the main camps rather than the tens of thousands of more diverse Holocaust sites across Europe. Many of these remain unprotected, understudied and known only to comparatively few people. Each of these sites contains individual stories which, when told, can illustrate direct relevance to our contemporary society.</p>
<h2>Respecting remains</h2>
<p>The practice of Holocaust archaeology, uses desk-based archival research, satellite imagery, aerial photographs, remote sensing, topographic survey and geophysical techniques to identify <a href="https://www.campscapes.org/">destroyed camps</a>, <a href="https://rohatynjewishheritage.org/en/">lost killing sites</a> and <a href="http://www.protecting-memory.org/en/">hidden mass graves</a>. Importantly, these techniques avoid excavation that would disturb human remains, a practice which is forbidden under Jewish Law. Staffordshire University’s <a href="http://blogs.staffs.ac.uk/archaeology/">Centre of Archaeology</a>, of which I am a member, has worked at more than 40 sites across Europe.</p>
<p>To provide an example, several killing sites and mass graves that were regarded as lost and under immediate threat have recently been identified by our team using these innovative archaeological methods. Sites in <a href="https://rohatynjewishheritage.org/en/history/timeline-shoah/">Rohatyn</a> and across the regions of <a href="https://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/index.asp?cid=686">Vinnytsia</a> and <a href="http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/ukraine/en/en_exposition4-radicalisation.htm">Zhytomir</a> in the Ukraine, now have protected status and newly dedicated memorials to the victims.</p>
<p>Collected data can be <a href="https://www.recordingculturalgenocide.com/">visualised in a multitude of innovative ways</a> with the primary objective being digital preservation, simplicity of access and increased awareness to a wide audience. </p>
<h2>An emotional task</h2>
<p>During my time on these projects, I have personally seen and been subject to the unequivocal evidence of the true scale of the Holocaust. I have experienced the profound effects of being presented with the graves and the remains of the victims and have seen the positive effects of presenting the evidence of the research to the public. </p>
<p>My experiences have been viewed through the eyes of someone who knew our modern history and was aware of the scale and effect of war – but I had no direct involvement in it. My archaeological background, however, meant I was more familiar with our ancient past than the generation that preceded me. </p>
<p>Working in this field, the effect on me has been thought-provoking and life-affirming. Put simply, I am more appreciative of the everyday opportunities and freedoms of life. I have been able to see the victims as individuals, whose lives and aspirations were cut short and whose memory should not be so easily manipulated or forgotten.</p>
<p>Many of these experiences would have been made all the more difficult without the collective support of my colleagues. The discussion that follows the analysis of victim testimonies, historic photographs and archaeological fieldwork is an important part of processing the raw reality of the Holocaust.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311612/original/file-20200123-162221-10tlcdw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">3D restored Matzevah fragment recovered from Oswiecim Jewish cemetery, Poland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">William Mitchell</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My work in this field has taken me to more than 15 sites across Europe, from Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, Croatia to Poland and the Ukraine. It is evident that governmental and personal responses to the recognition and presentation of these sites vary in each nation. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-antisemitism/anti-semitic-attacks-rise-worldwide-in-2018-led-by-us-west-europe-study-idUSKCN1S73M1">Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism</a> is ever-present in the UK and across Europe more generally – and this is even more apparent at these sites. It is partly as a response to these continued pressures that these research projects are undertaken.</p>
<h2>Raising awareness</h2>
<p>There have, on many occasions, been causes to be pessimistic about human nature. I have encountered Jewish memorials that have been used for target practice, cemetery sites that have been historically and recently desecrated, and denial and hostility by local residents.</p>
<p>Distressingly, there have been several sites that have been looted, resulting in human remains, clothing and belongings being scattered across the surface, perhaps due to the misguided belief that mass graves contain items of value. These encounters highlight the fact that indifference and prejudices, but also social inequalities, are still prevalent. </p>
<p>Thankfully, positive events and achievements outweigh the bad. The grateful thanks of <a href="https://www.matzevah.org/">relatives, religious leaders and heritage groups</a>, the raising of awareness within <a href="http://ldhp.org.uk/">communities, schools and the media</a>, and the identification of the exact boundaries of mass graves and camp buildings resulting in protection and memorialisation, are the successes to hold on to.</p>
<p>These projects also lead to the re-interment of remains. And, at sites that were erased by the Nazis, we were able to provide physical evidence relating to the nature of incarceration and extermination. </p>
<p>I am grateful to be in a position to continue to tell the story and get recognition for the sites that have been disturbed or neglected for decades. Helping to tell the stories of these lost individuals is especially important at a time when intolerance and indifference is becoming an accepted part of society. </p>
<p>The scale and extent of the devastation of the Holocaust means there is still much work to be done, especially given the current challenges of continued prejudice and misinformation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130329/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Mitchell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As the last survivors die out, it is more important than ever to uncover physical evidence of Nazi atrocities.William Mitchell, Project Archaeologist, Staffordshire UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1296652020-01-19T13:25:12Z2020-01-19T13:25:12ZThe ominous metaphors of China’s Uighur concentration camps<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310677/original/file-20200117-118365-rfa9v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3838%2C2441&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chinese paramilitary police stand duty in People's Square where hundreds of Uighers first started a protest that erupted into rioting in July 2009. Five years later, China started imprisoning Uighers in "re-education hospitals."
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/podcasts/the-daily/china-ethnic-minory-crackdown.html?showTranscript=1">leak of Chinese Communist Party documents to the <em>New York Times</em></a> offers a chilling glimpse into the 21st century’s largest system of concentration camps. </p>
<p>A million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are now detained in a Chinese operation that combines the forced labour and re-education of <a href="https://www.laogai.org/page/what-laogai-system">Mao-era laogai</a> with the post-9/11 rhetoric of the “war on terror.” U.S. President Donald Trump’s <a href="https://apnews.com/753968e412fab06e6fb8180e7ac98d47">Muslim ban</a>, <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/">border camps</a> crowded with migrant children and <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2005/6/1/guantanamo_bay_a_gulag_of_our">America’s global archipelago of so-called black sites</a> detaining terror suspects deserve condemnation. So too do the concentration camps of the world’s newest superpower.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310542/original/file-20200116-181589-1or5u7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this July 2015 photo, Uighurs living in Turkey and their supporters, some carrying coffins representing Uighurs who died in China’s far-western Xinjiang Uighur region, chant slogans as they stage a protest in Istanbul, against what they call oppression by the Chinese government against Muslim Uighurs in the province.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/13/china-minority-region-collects-dna-millions">Retina scans, DNA databanks</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html">facial recognition technology</a> are now ubiquitous across China’s Xinjiang province. They are modern-day updates to earlier surveillance technologies like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/26/archives/soviet-announces-new-internal-passport-system.html">Soviet internal passports.</a> </p>
<h2>KGB tactics</h2>
<p>Satellite images and clandestine video footage of watchtowers, concrete barracks and barbed-wire perimeters conform to the prison esthetic described by Holocaust survivor <a href="https://www.biography.com/scientist/primo-levi">Primo Levi</a> and Russian labour camp detainee <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn">Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.</a></p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">CBC News.</span></figcaption>
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<p><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/10-000-uighurs-missing-in-china-activist-1.842522">Nighttime roundups</a> resemble KGB tactics, while <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uighur-muslim-china-sterilisation-women-internment-camps-xinjiang-a9054641.html">involuntary medical injections</a> recall the dark history of forced sterilization, from Nazi eugenics to the targeted sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/canadas-shameful-history-of-sterilizing-indigenous-women-107876">Canada's shameful history of sterilizing Indigenous women</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Another haunting parallel is the language Chinese officials use to justify their actions. Speaking of the concentration camps of totalitarian Europe, the <a href="https://baumaninstitute.leeds.ac.uk/this-is-not-an-obituary/">late social theorist Zygmunt Bauman</a>, himself a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, wrote that <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Modernity_and_the_Holocaust.html?id=wxDw7y0l0mYC&redir_esc=y">“gardening and medicine”</a> have offered “archmetaphors” for the management of unwanted populations. </p>
<p>To cultivate a garden is to ensure the survival of some plants while eliminating others. Gardens require fences, walls and the extermination of weeds. As if to illustrate Bauman’s point, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inmates-of-chinas-muslim-re-education-camps-tell-of-brainwashing-torture/2018/05/16/32b330e8-5850-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html">a Chinese official in Kashgar</a> recently informed a crowd of Uighers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one. You need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The tenderly pruned gardens of classical China were peaceful retreats for poets and philosophers. By contrast, the association of human beings with noxious weeds and the Chinese Communist Party’s embrace of industrial agricultural metaphors have yielded <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/opinion/china-muslims.html">dystopian results</a>.</p>
<h2>Language of disease</h2>
<p>More than anything, Chinese statements about Uighur concentration are saturated with the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/china-pathologizing-uighur-muslims-mental-illness/568525/">language of disease.</a> Likening Islam to a contagion, an official <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html">Communist Party document</a> suggests Uighers have “been infected by unhealthy thoughts.” </p>
<p>“Freedom is only possible,” it adds, “when the ‘virus’…is eradicated.” </p>
<p>In an exercise in victim blaming for which cultural theorist Susan Sontag argues <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12216695-000-the-fatal-power-of-language-review-of-aids-and-its-metaphors-by-susan-sontag/">medical metaphors are especially conducive</a>, Chinese officials have warned: “If you were careless and caught an infectious virus, like SARS” (a scenario that led to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/world/the-sars-epidemic-beijing-quarantine-set-in-beijing-areas-to-fight-sars.html">mass medical detention</a> in China in the recent past), then “you’d have to undergo enclosed isolated treatment. Because it’s an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-detention-directive.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=EBA527D71C6260111BD7D459AD5D9EC8&gwt=pay&assetType=REGIWALL">infectious illness.”</a></p>
<p>Chinese officials are thus defending the camps as quarantine cells that will safeguard China from the Uighur epidemic while eliminating religious and cultural pathogens.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Natural_Symbols.html?id=rp6s2NpnyFYC&redir_esc=y">human body</a> has long served as a metaphor for state and society both in Western and Chinese thought. And medical analogies have proven central in the political calculus of extrajudicial detention. With a pseudo-scientific endorsement, policy-makers around the world have classified unwanted populations <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/finn-who-believes-that-migrants-are-parasites-to-be-guest-at-tory-conference-2363374.html">as parasites</a> or social pathogens that need to be cured, physically isolated or excised completely. </p>
<h2>First concentration camps</h2>
<p>The first concentration camps in contemporary history, established by Britain during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), were <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520293977/barbed-wire-imperialism">directly inspired by plague quarantine camps</a> in India and South Africa. The goal was to “cleanse” besieged towns of “disease, crime and poverty” by introducing wartime refugees to sanitary enclosures administered by British
medical officials. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Boer War concentration camp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Soviet Union likewise consigned <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Landscaping_the_Human_Garden.html?id=KStML5rSbQ4C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">“parasitic classes”</a> to the gulag, while earlier generations in China referred to political prisoners as <a href="https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/6.1/muhlhahn.html">“convalescents.”</a> Even today, xenophobic voices in America associate Latino migrants with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/06/donald-trump-mexican-immigrants-tremendous-infectious-disease">“tremendous infectious disease.”</a></p>
<p>The biological metaphors revealed by the Chinese government’s recent document leak, however, find their most sinister analogies with Nazi Germany. </p>
<p>“The battle in which we are engaged” against the <a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016/2016-07-11-rak-h2.html">“Jewish virus,”</a> Hitler proclaimed, “is of the same sort as the battle waged…by Pasteur and Koch. We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.”</p>
<p><a href="https://bigthink.com/stephen-johnson/maybe-its-no-coincidence-hitler-was-a-germaphobe">A germaphobe,</a> Hitler imagined fighting “battles against a veritable world sickness, which threatens to infect the German people, a plague that devastates whole peoples.” In this imaginary landscape, Nazi apologists invariably depicted concentration camps as sanitary spaces that isolated <a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/Bein-The_Jewish_Parasite.pdf">Jewish “parasites”</a> in the name of racial hygiene. </p>
<p>The genetic emphasis of Nazi racism ultimately meant “curing” Jews was an impossibility. By Hitler’s logic, outright extermination — or “euthanasia” in sanitized state-speak — was the only recourse. China, by contrast, holds out hope that Uighur camps, or <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/21/magazine/german-doctors-and-the-final-solution.html">“re-education hospitals”</a>, can cure their “patients” and thus “clean the virus from their brain.” </p>
<p>Yet like cancer, Chinese Communist officials fear, “there is no guarantee the illness will not return.” And just because an inmate has “recovered from the ideological disease doesn’t mean they are permanently cured,” the documents reveal.</p>
<p>The language of disease justified some of the 20th century’s worst crimes. If left unchecked by the international community, China is poised to continue that tradition in the 21st century. And where China leads, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/world/asia/india-kashmir-camps.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage">others are likely to follow</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129665/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Foundation, Anglo-California Foundation, London Goodenough Association, Stanford University.</span></em></p>The metaphors used to defend the 21st century’s largest system of concentration camps are chillingly similar to Nazi Holocaust-era justifications.Aidan Forth, Assistant Professor, History, MacEwan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1243402019-10-15T22:18:16Z2019-10-15T22:18:16ZConcentration camps have deep roots in liberal democracies<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296204/original/file-20191009-3935-w0umos.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C103%2C1770%2C964&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In this March 2019 photo, Central American migrants wait for food in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process a surge of migrant families and unaccompanied minors in El Paso, Texas. The migrants were then destined for detention centres.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <em>New York Times</em> recently reported that U.S. President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html">wanted to authorize shooting Central American migrants in the legs and building snake- and alligator-infested moats</a> to stop them from entering the United States. </p>
<p>Instead, his administration continues to house them in overcrowded detention camps on the southern border.</p>
<p>United States congresswoman <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-concentration-camps-migrants-detention/index.html">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a> condemned the Trump administration for running “concentration camps” earlier this year.</p>
<p>Though she was by no means the first to describe migrant detention centres as concentration camps — disgraced Arizona Sheriff <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2019/06/20/joe-arpaio-self-proclaimed-concentration-camp-ocasio-cortez/1508251001/">Joe Arpaio</a> boasted his “tent city” in the Sonora Desert was just that — her comments ignited a firestorm of controversy.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1141392943787520001"}"></div></p>
<p>Republican congresswoman <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/450219-liz-cheney-hits-back-at-ocasio-cortez-over-concentration-camp">Liz Cheney</a> complained concentration camp comparisons “demeaned the memory” of six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and she urged AOC to learn some “actual history.” </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/statement-regarding-the-museums-position-on-holocaust-analogies">U.S. Holocaust Museum</a> also issued a statement rejecting analogies between the Holocaust and other events, prompting more than <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/451268-hundreds-of-scholars-urge-dc-holocaust-museum-to-stop-rejecting">500 historians</a> to petition the museum to reverse its “radical” and “ahistorical” position: “Similarities across time and space” were essential to learning lessons from the past, they argued. </p>
<p>An American Holocaust survivor <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Holocaust-survivor-likens-childhood-in-14442146.php">even recently compared her childhood</a> in a concentration camp in German-occupied Poland to the separation of migrant families in the southern United States.</p>
<p>And so looking back on a summer of heated and often misleading debate, two important points bear repeating. </p>
<h2>British work camps</h2>
<p>First: Concentration camps are by no means only synonymous with Nazi terror or totalitarianism. In fact, concentration camps have deep roots within the culture and politics of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracies.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520293977/barbed-wire-imperialism">Victorian India</a>, for example, Britain concentrated millions of “migratory people” fleeing drought and famine in a system of work camps designed to prevent unwanted populations from entering colonial towns. </p>
<p>And the term “concentration camp” itself dates back to the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070.2015.1073065?journalCode=cjss20">Anglo-Boer War</a> (1899-1902), when Britain detained a quarter million civilians, mostly women and children, displaced by scorched-earth warfare. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296136/original/file-20191009-3846-nal2gy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Boer War concentration camp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Heeding advice from a young <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807856536/the-blood-of-government/">Winston Churchill</a>, the United States soon established its own camps during the <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/this-isnt-the-first-time-concentration-camps-have-appeared-on-american-soil-595af161f701/">Philippine War</a> (1899-1902), contributing to an American tradition — already prevailing in the form of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4139057?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">guarded Indigenous encampments</a> — of concentrating unwanted groups behind barbed wire. </p>
<p>Some decades later, <a href="http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/2/1/words-do-matter/">President Franklin D. Roosevelt</a> revived this well-established practice when he ordered Japanese immigrants and their descendants into what he called “concentration camps” (like the one at <a href="https://time.com/5605120/trump-migrant-children-fort-sill/">Fort Sill</a>, recently proposed as a migrant detention facility). </p>
<p>The Anglo-Saxon world therefore has a long history of concentrating “undesirables” in facilities historically known as “concentration camps.” </p>
<p>Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric denigrating asylum seekers as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/02/trumps-most-insulting-violent-language-is-often-reserved-immigrants/">“criminals,” “rapists”</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/06/donald-trump-mexican-immigrants-tremendous-infectious-disease">“disease carriers”</a> may well resemble <a href="https://forward.com/culture/403526/infest-the-ugly-nazi-history-of-trumps-chosen-verb-about-immigrants/">Nazi statements</a> directed at Jews, but it also revives a longer discourse of colonial racism in Britain and the United States.</p>
<p>South African refugees, British officers maintained, were a <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520293977/barbed-wire-imperialism">“dirty, careless, lazy lot”</a> who spread disease, crime and poverty.</p>
<p>As America carried the <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/209518">“white man’s burden”</a> across Latin America and the Pacific, it articulated a familiar language when detaining <a href="https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/andrea-pitzer/one-long-night/9780316303583/">“semi-civilized” “half-breeds” in Philippine camps</a>.</p>
<p>Stemming from racist tropes rooted in Euro-American settler expansion, meanwhile, concentration camps during the Second World War were aimed at preventing Japanese newcomers from <a href="https://qz.com/1201502/japanese-internment-camps-during-world-war-ii-are-a-lesson-in-the-scary-economics-of-racial-resentment/">“taking over” American jobs</a>. </p>
<p>The crisis mentality in the U.S. following Pearl Harbor facilitated longstanding ideas about racial cleansing. In this context, it’s hardly surprising that Trump’s White House has used militarized language to present migrant flows as an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-regarding-emergency-measures-address-border-crisis/">“invasion” and “national crisis.”</a> It revives an Anglo-American practice of suspending civil rights and constitutional protections under the guise of a declared emergency.</p>
<p>Trump routinely violates democratic norms, but his statements and policies sit within an established continuum —an “American way” — of establishing concentration camps.</p>
<h2>Parallels and lessons</h2>
<p>History provides both parallels and lessons. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296218/original/file-20191009-3856-1k3ibfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Horatio Herbert Kitchener, circa 1914-1916.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like today’s migrant shelters, <a href="https://theconversation.com/concentration-camps-in-the-south-african-war-here-are-the-real-facts-112006">British concentration camps in South Africa</a> were hastily improvised, often with impermanent canvas tents, and administrators struggled to cope with a mass influx of inmates amid limited resources. </p>
<p>Statements from leaders like Lord Kitchener lambasting refugees as “<a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/591094">savages with only a thin white veneer</a>” framed official attitudes. Private letters deprecating the homes inmates left behind as “fit only for pigs” further served to justify appalling conditions.</p>
<p>South Africa, according to the British at the time, was a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/11/politics/immigrants-shithole-countries-trump/index.html">“shithole country”</a> (to use Trump’s modern-day lexicon) and its residents deserved only the most basic facilities.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/data-on-canadian-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-might-surprise-trump-90088">Data on Canadian immigrants from 'shithole' countries might surprise Trump</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/us/migrant-children-border-soap.html">U.S. migrant camps</a>, British concentration camps did not provide soap or sanitary facilities, and they were hopelessly overcrowded. </p>
<p>Worse still, inhuman conditions resulted in the outbreak of epidemic diseases — measles and typhoid in particular — that killed thousands of inmates. With modern vaccinations, America is unlikely to see similar death rates, yet Britain’s crowded camps are ominous portents as <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/24-immigrants-have-died-ice-custody-during-trump-administration-n1015291">mortality rates rise</a> at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/politics/border-center-migrant-detention.html">standing-room-only cells</a>.</p>
<h2>What not to do</h2>
<p>Britain’s concentration camps demonstrate what not to do. But they also offer lessons in the virtues of engaged journalism and open democracy.</p>
<p>As images of detained and suffering children infiltrated London newspapers, humanitarian activists like <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/emily-hobhouse">Emily Hobhouse</a>, who travelled to South Africa to personally visit the camps, and opposition politicians like Liberal Party leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who condemned the camps as <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2019/01/methods-of-barbarism-how-emily-hobhouse-exposed-the-humanitarian-crisis-of-the-boer-war.html">“methods of barbarism,”</a> mobilized civil society.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=874&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1099&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1099&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/296219/original/file-20191009-3872-qtdzkx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1099&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Hobhouse was as controversial as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her efforts to raise awareness about the brutality of detention camps.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After months of complaints about <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gender-race-and-the-writing-of-empire/FF5AB92306FDEA689128B05F5782C493">“hysterical women”</a> meddling in politics — Hobhouse was no more popular than Ocasio-Cortez — daily revelations about “prison camps” surrounded by “barbed-wire fences” eventually forced action. </p>
<p>War Secretary St. John Brodrick appointed an independent <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/fawcett-commission-concentration-camps-south-africa">commission to report on camp conditions</a>, and he rapidly accepted its recommendations. </p>
<p>In doing so, the government drastically reduced camp mortality and silenced its critics. More importantly, High Commissioner Alfred Milner conceded the camps had been a tragic mistake —the <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520293977/barbed-wire-imperialism">“one black spot of the war”</a> —and rapidly disbanded them as soon as inmates could viably return home.</p>
<p>Britain went on to develop future camps —most controversially in Kenya during the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/britains-gulag-the-brutal-end-of-empire-in-kenya-by-caroline-elkinshistories-of-the-hanged-by-david-748263.html">Mau Mau rebellion</a>. But in the immediate future, lessons from South Africa helped <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Internment-during-the-First-World-War-A-Mass-Global-Phenomenon-1st-Edition/Manz-Panayi-Stibbe/p/book/9780415787444">prevent Britain from interning German women and children</a> during the First World War, a policy lauded as a moral and political success</p>
<p>If Trump wishes to mitigate further fallout from migrant detention, he might forsake his fantasies of terrorizing migrants as they attempt to enter the U.S. and listen instead to activists, journalists and lawyers. </p>
<p>Far from peddling “fake news,” their oversight, historically, has offered an important check on detention camps.</p>
<p>[ <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=expertise">Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.</a></em> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124340/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aidan Forth receives funding from:
James B. Weter Memorial Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship
Social Sciences Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC-IDRF)
London Goodenough Association of Canada Fellowship
Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University grant
Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Dissertation Fellowship awarded by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University
Anglo-California Foundation Scholarship
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Scholarship
Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)</span></em></p>Concentration camps are by no means only synonymous with Nazi terror or totalitarianism. In fact, concentration camps have deep roots in the culture and politics of Anglo-American liberal democracies.Aidan Forth, Assistant Professor, History, MacEwan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1165362019-05-30T10:59:40Z2019-05-30T10:59:40ZAnne Frank and the Holocaust: how death rates varied across the Netherlands under Nazi occupation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275193/original/file-20190517-69169-cr4cyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kamp Westerbork.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/former-kamp-westerbork-1201307671?src=ZF3XLDNfqZAE-hYpUPmq3g-1-10">Shutterstock/Arjen Dijk</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005f08/episodes/guide">diarist Anne Frank</a> was born almost 90 years ago. But she lived for only 15 years, dying in a Nazi concentration camp shortly before it was liberated by Allied forces in 1945.</p>
<p>To mark the anniversary of her birth, a <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/anne-frank-the-collected-works-9781472964915.html?utm_source=editoriallink&utm_medium=merch&utm_campaign=article">new collection</a> of Frank’s writing has been published, and a <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/11/anne-frank-novel-reveals-schoolgirls-literary-skills/">“novel” version</a> of her famous diary released in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. </p>
<p>Anne and her family had left Nazi Germany for Amsterdam and were among the 140,000 or so Jews living in the occupied Netherlands. Her diary recounts the harrowing details of hiding to escape Nazi persecution until the family was arrested and deported. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277183/original/file-20190530-69059-1bn6f08.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Amsterdam memorial.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/anne-franks-memorial-amsterdam-347062784?src=_RSuGSn8z_G9tcLN82PqjA-1-1">Shutterstock/Andreia Baptista</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anne, her sister and her mother were among the around 73% of Jews living in the occupied Netherlands who did not survive Nazi persecution. But who survived and who didn’t varied significantly across the country. </p>
<p><a href="http://hdl.handle.net/11370/0b491a3e-55de-4b54-8683-e9d0efbfd18e">Previous research</a> has shown huge variation in Jewish death rates in different Dutch locations over the course of World War II. Updated figures in my <a href="https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/188/5/896/5301285">recent article</a>
show about 75% of Jews in Amsterdam perished, while in Eindhoven, Utrecht, The Hague and Assen, the respective death rates were around 38%, 55%, 70% and 89% respectively.</p>
<p>Those differences in death rates raise interesting questions about who was most at risk of persecution and why this was the case. But answering those questions requires a new way of looking at the data.</p>
<p>In recent decades, an increasing amount of information on the persecution of Jews during World War II has become available. Techniques in analysing that data have also improved. Yet within Holocaust literature, studies using statistical methods are still unusual. </p>
<p>As a social scientist with an interest in the persecution of Jews and their <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2017.12">position in Dutch society</a> before the war, I feel that using statistics could vastly improve our understanding of the Holocaust and the variation in death rates.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/quantifying-the-holocaust-measuring-murder-rates-during-the-nazi-genocide-108984">Quantifying the Holocaust: Measuring murder rates during the Nazi genocide</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In my <a href="https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/188/5/896/5301285">recent study</a>, I applied epidemiological methods to data for more than 118,000 Jews from 102 <a href="http://doi.org/10.18352/tseg.434">retrieved municipal Nazi registration lists</a> – that’s about 84% of all Jews living in the Netherlands in 1941.</p>
<p>Using socio-demographic information about both the Jewish inhabitants and where they lived, I examined the influence of individual and local characteristics on chances of deportation to Nazi concentration and killing camps. </p>
<p>What stood out was that Jews living in areas with a higher proportion of collaborating Dutch policemen and fewer potential hiding opportunities were more likely to be deported. Also, Jews living in areas with a stronger sense of segregated living were more likely to be deported. Within such areas, Nazi regulations to isolate Jews might have been more acceptable and thereby facilitated deportation. </p>
<p>Jews living in areas with relatively more Catholics were more protected against deportation. The Catholic church in the Netherlands protested strongly against the deportation of Jews in July 1942. The Nazi sanction to deport Jewish converts to Catholicism might have strengthened Catholics’ resistance to the Nazi persecution of Jews.</p>
<p>On an individual personal level, the following groups of people were less likely to be deported: females, those aged five and under, those aged 15-30, Jewish migrants, Jewish converts to Christianity, and Jews in mixed marriages. </p>
<p>The results suggest that Nazi occupiers relied on local non-Jewish assistance or facilitation to persecute Jews. Meanwhile, the chances of a Jewish person being deported depended to a large extent on the Nazis’ own regulations, which privileged groups such as those married to non-Jews, converted Jews, and which did not require young children to wear the yellow star of David. </p>
<p>These privileges provided vital opportunities for mixed-married and converted Jews to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dym006">mobilise their non-Jewish contacts</a> for help and gave younger children better opportunities to hide. The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.543">reduced deportation chances</a> of Jewish migrants might be related to these refugees’ increased awareness of persecution and better ways to acquire temporary protected status through their positions in the Jewish council and in transit camp Westerbork.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/272529/original/file-20190503-103049-r31dy1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jewish star at the Holocaust Museum, Amsterdam.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/jewish-star-exhibition-holocaust-museum-amsterdam-1352620475?src=nwxUBH97MOBYMdgMLXV0Pg-1-0">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For those who were deported, the risk of subsequent death differed over time depending partly on the deportation train’s destination, with the highest risk in September and October 1942 and in July 1943. Those at lower risk of death included Jews who were aged 15-30, in mixed marriages, and converts. </p>
<p>Whereas deported men had a reduced risk of death until the summer of 1943, thereafter women showed reduced risk of death. This latter result suggests that in the earlier stage of the war, men were more often selected for works in the camps than women. The men survived while they were considered able to work, although this selection did not offer long term protection.</p>
<p>The stronger decimation of Jews aged six to 15 might have affected the post-war community reconstruction – for example, in Amsterdam, where the proportion of Jewish inhabitants was reduced from about 10% before the war to less than 3% afterwards.</p>
<p>Among Amsterdam Jews, the survival rate was higher for the <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10680-016-9403-3">highest social classes</a>.
<a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2019.1589688">Jews in these classes</a>, such as doctors, showed a stronger tendency to assimilate with non-Jewish society, with one in four having abandoned Judaism. Higher survival rates among mixed married and foreign born Jews also contributed to a changed composition of the Jewish community after the war.</p>
<h2>Conflict and violence</h2>
<p>There is plenty we can learn from all of this. Many decades after World War II ended, the <a href="https://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/world_report/en/summary_en.pdf">World Health Organisation declared</a> acts of violence to be a leading global public health problem. Violent conflict is still among the <a href="https://issuu.com/theepidemiologymonitor/docs/final-february-2019-the-epidemiolog">top public health issues</a> in the world, with related deaths the top ranked cause of preventable loss of life.</p>
<p>Public health researchers, epidemiologists and others who study patterns and causes of deaths during and after violent conflict or genocide, can help to increase our understanding of violence. </p>
<p>Identifying factors and situations of increased risk of victimisation in historical genocide cases could inform epidemiological (and other) studies of more recent global events. My sincere hope is that they will help to improve interventions to lessen the impact of violence in future conflicts and genocides.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/116536/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tammes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Social status and location affected Dutch Jews’ chances of survival.Peter Tammes, Senior Research Associate, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1146552019-05-23T13:35:11Z2019-05-23T13:35:11ZRecent attempts at reparations show that World War II is not over<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275725/original/file-20190521-23848-16qgujk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chen Yabian, 74, of Hainan Province, southern China, testifies during the International Symposium on Chinese 'Comfort Women' in 2000 in Shanghai that she was 14 when Japanese Imperial Army soldiers forced her to work as a sex slave during the war. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-China-CHINA-COMFORT-WOMEN/410224f891e6da11af9f0014c2589dfb/44/0">AP/Eugene Hoshiko</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>World War II ended in 1945. </p>
<p>But the world has never stopped debating its legacy and how to make restitution for the damage done to the war’s victims. Consider some recent events.</p>
<p>In February, the <a href="https://franceintheus.org/spip.php?article6343">Holocaust Deportation Claims Program</a>, which compensates Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps transported on French trains, doubled its compensation payments, from US$200,000 to nearly $400,000. This makes it the most generous of any of the recent compensatory programs worked out by U.S. and European governments. This one is paid for by the French government, but administered by the U.S. State Department.</p>
<p>In March, a <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/South-Korean-court-approves-seizure-of-Mitsubishi-Heavy-assets">South Korean trial court</a> ordered the seizure of property owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation in South Korea. Such efforts are apparently needed to enforce a November judgment by the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/asia/south-korea-wartime-compensation-japan.html">South Korean Supreme Court</a>, ordering Mitsubishi to pay $100,000 to each of five Koreans who performed forced labor during the war.</p>
<p>Whether the Koreans will ever see that money, or die before the forfeiture action is completed, remains up in the air.</p>
<p>These are among the latest manifestations of global efforts to review, revise, repair and remember the war – akin to the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/nuremberg">Nuremberg or Tokyo War Crimes Trials</a> - but for the 21st century.</p>
<h2>Restoring human dignity</h2>
<p>In the 1990s, a renewed interest in human rights, greater access to historical materials and a less polarized international political environment converged to <a href="https://www.dw.com/cda/en/world-war-ii-reparations-germany-must-show-willingness/a-46208757">spur reflection on World War II</a>. </p>
<p>In the United States, civil lawsuits emerged as one tool, among many, to probe wartime human rights violations. </p>
<p>Federal courts in <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/67/424/2375384/">New Jersey</a>, <a href="http://www.swissbankclaims.com/Overview.aspx">New York</a> and <a href="https://www2.gwu.edu/%7Ememory/data/judicial/POWs_and_Forced_Labor_US/ClassAction/Jan212003DeutschTurnerDecision.pdf">California</a> presided over cases against Swiss banks, French insurers, German corporations and even the Austrian government. </p>
<p>Plaintiffs sought wages for unpaid labor, return of looted art, restitution of bank accounts and other assets, and the restoration of their human dignity. </p>
<p>Two cases ended up in the United States Supreme Court. <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-13.ZO.html">One</a>, in which an elderly refugee mounted a lawsuit to recover family artwork seized by the Nazis, got a Hollywood ending. In “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2404425/">Woman in Gold</a>,” Ryan Reynolds helps Helen Mirren sue Austria to recover a painting by Gustav Klimt.</p>
<p>Most cases did not follow the Hollywood script. Plaintiffs generally lost, either because the claims were too old or already resolved by postwar treaties.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/275731/original/file-20190521-23829-eqhan6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jews await deportation from French internment camp Rivesaltes to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, 1942.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1109851">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Friedel Bohny-Reiter</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Selective leadership</h2>
<p>But that did not dispel the pressure from Jewish organizations or human rights activists to provide reparations. </p>
<p>During President Bill Clinton’s second term (1996-2000), the U.S. government, led by Ambassador <a href="https://www.conference-board.org/bio/index.cfm?bioid=971">Stuart Eizenstat</a>, worked with European allies to craft international agreements and reparations mechanisms. </p>
<p>Germany set up <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-15-9912150077-story.html">a $5 billion fund</a> to compensate wartime forced laborers and slave laborers, and to support projects on history and human rights.</p>
<p>Later, the State Department set up additional programs, including the 2016 Holocaust Deportation Claims Program. The French government still runs the <a href="http://www.civs.gouv.fr/home/">Commission for Reparations of Victims of Spoliation</a>, established in 1999 to process claims about seized property and art.</p>
<p>In East Asia, survivors of World War II human rights abuses have had their day (decades, actually) in court. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/17/world/unmasking-horror-a-special-report-japan-confronting-gruesome-war-atrocity.html">Chinese victims of wartime medical experimentation</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/world/asia/south-korea-japan-compensation-world-war-two.html">Korean forced laborers</a> and <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgmzea/filipina-comfort-women-demand-reparations-from-japan">Filipina “comfort women,”</a> among others, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/law/help/pow-compensation/japan.php">have sued Japan and the Japanese government</a> throughout the Asia-Pacific, including the United States. </p>
<p>But instead of using these lawsuits to reevaluate Japan’s role in World War II – as other programs did for European countries – the U.S. government has either absented itself from these discussions, or <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/186456/hwang-geum-joo-v-japan/">challenged</a> the lawsuits on various grounds. </p>
<p>The moral leadership that yielded transatlantic solutions to war responsibility issues in Europe dissolved when the topic emerged in East Asia. </p>
<p>Whereas the Clinton administration, especially Stuart Eizenstat, worked with European officials to set up compensation mechanisms in France, Germany and Switzerland, the administration of President George W. Bush asked <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-31-me-28622-story.html">U.S. courts</a> to dismiss the East Asian cases.</p>
<h2>US security interests</h2>
<p>South Korea and Japan are America’s closest and most important allies in a region simmering with geopolitical tension, from trade wars with China to nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. U.S. regional security interests hinge upon the successful coordination of relations among Japan, Korea and the United States.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://law.case.edu/Our-School/Faculty-Staff/Meet-Our-Faculty/Faculty-Detail/id/1020">an international legal scholar</a> with a background in Asian legal systems, international human rights and international economic law, I believe the United States ignores the Asian tensions over World War II at its peril. </p>
<p>The Obama administration understood this, and tried to persuade both Japan and South Korea to resolve their “<a href="https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/030414_Testimony%20-%20Daniel%20Russel1.pdf">difficult historical issues</a>.” Chief among those issues is, of course, making reparations for <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-forcedlabour-southkorea/thousand-koreans-sue-government-over-wartime-labor-at-japan-firms-idUSKCN1OJ0F7">injuries</a> that Japan visited upon Koreans during the war: from the comfort women system to the forced mobilization of Korean laborers.</p>
<p>But the Trump administration seems unconcerned. It has exhibited indifference or hostility to human rights matters generally, refusing to respond to <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-administration-stopped-responding-un-human-rights-investigators-91920a35-d1c9-4ed7-82a4-b9b451a78889.html">U.N. investigations</a> about U.S. abuses along the Mexican border, and withdrawing from the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621435225/u-s-announces-its-withdrawal-from-u-n-s-human-rights-council">U.N. Human Rights Council</a>. Nor does the administration place much stock in international relations or diplomacy, with its attempts to starve the State Department of <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004372/trump-budget-state-department-defense-cuts">funding</a>, and belatedly <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/28/politics/trump-harry-harris-ambassador-to-south-korea/index.html">appointing</a> an ambassador to South Korea. </p>
<p>In Asia, civil litigation has emerged as the key method to seek war reparations, though the track record is spotty. </p>
<p>Japanese courts have largely dismissed these suits, although a small handful of Japanese corporations decided to settle the cases and to pay modest amounts of compensation.</p>
<p>That state of affairs changed with recent decisions from the South Korean Supreme Court. The November judgment against Mitsubishi suggests compensation is still possible, at least in certain jurisdictions. Henceforth, Korean courts will almost certainly order other Japanese companies to pay compensation. </p>
<p>But even if plaintiffs win, they might still encounter difficulties enforcing the judgment. Losing Japanese companies may refuse to pay the Korean judgments, requiring Korean courts to seize Japanese assets located in South Korea. </p>
<h2>Transforming the tragic past</h2>
<p>The agreements reached in the 1990s and early 2000s by the United States with Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria to provide war reparations are not perfect, but each aspires to transform and repair a tragically forgotten past. </p>
<p>The United States’ failure to do the same in Asia perpetuates a pernicious double standard set after the war. </p>
<p>The United States has the experience, leverage and opportunity to resolve simmering animosities between its allies in Asia, as it did in Europe.</p>
<p>But does it have the ambition?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy Webster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>US agreements with Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria provide reparations to WWII victims. But an international law scholar writes that the US has failed to address war crimes in Asia.Timothy Webster, Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1120062019-02-18T13:03:18Z2019-02-18T13:03:18ZConcentration camps in the South African War? Here are the real facts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259529/original/file-20190218-56246-3rfis.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">One of the Boer concentration camps.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>More than a century after 48 000 people died in <a href="https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/15941">concentration camps</a> in what’s known as the South African War between 1899 and 1902 – or the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-anglo-boer-war-1899-1902">Anglo-Boer War</a> – the events of that period are back in the headlines.</p>
<p>The camps were established by the British as part of their military campaign against two small Afrikaner republics: the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State.</p>
<p>The scandalous campaign is back in the news following controversial <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-politics-47247835/jacob-rees-mogg-comments-on-concentration-camps">comments</a> by British Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on a BBC television programme.</p>
<p>Rees-Mogg’s statements have caused consternation because they were riddled with inaccuracies. It’s time to set the record straight and to refute his inaccuracies one by one. I do this based on the <a href="https://www.up.ac.za/historical-heritage-studies/news/post_2437602-b1-rating-for-professor-pretorius">historical research</a> I’ve done on the South African War for the last 49 years.</p>
<h2>Setting the record straight</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://citizen.co.za/news/news-world/2084411/uk-politician-says-boers-were-in-concentration-camps-for-their-own-protection/">claim</a> that caused the most upset was Rees-Mogg’s allegation that the concentration camps had exactly the same mortality rate as was the case in Glasgow at the time.</p>
<p>This is simply factually incorrect. </p>
<p>In its recent Glasgow Indicators Project the Glasgow Centre for Population Health gives the <a href="https://www.understandingglasgow.com/indicators/population/deaths/historic_trends">death rate</a> of people in the city as 21 per 1000 per annum in 1901. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259531/original/file-20190218-56212-2gktp7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Inside one of the British concentration camps.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Anglo-Boer-War-1899-1902-Fransjohan-Pretorius/dp/1868721795">death rate</a> for Boer civilians in the concentration camps in South Africa exceeded this by a factor of 10. It’s well established that <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902">28 000 white people</a> and 20 000 black people <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/black-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-2-1900-1902">died</a> in various camps in South Africa. Between July 1901 and February 1902 the rate was, on average, 247 per 1000 per annum in the white camps. It reached a high of 344 per 1000 per annum in October 1901 and a low of 69 per 1000 per annum in February 1902. </p>
<p>The figures would have been even higher had it not been for the fact that British welfare campaigner <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/emily-hobhouse">Emily Hobhouse</a> exposed the deplorable conditions in the camps. A subsequent report by the Government’s Ladies Commission prompted the British Government to improve conditions. Another factor that reduced the fatality rate was that <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/alfred-milner">Lord Milner</a>, High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony, took over administration of the camps from the military from November 1901.</p>
<p>Rees-Mogg also revealed his total lack of understanding why the British military authorities established the concentration camps in statements such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where else were people going to live when … (the Boers were fighting the war)?</p>
<p>People were put in camps for their protection.</p>
<p>They were interned for their safety.</p>
<p>They were being taken there so that they could be fed because the farmers were away fighting the Boer War.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reality was very different.</p>
<h2>The origins of the camps</h2>
<p>After <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/field-marshal-lord-roberts-appointed-british-supreme-commander-south-africa">Lord Roberts</a>, chief commander of the British forces, occupied the Free State capital, Bloemfontein, on 13 March 1900, he issued a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Anglo-Boer-War-1899-1902-Fransjohan-Pretorius/dp/1868721795">proclamation</a> inviting the Boers to lay down their arms and sign an oath of neutrality. They would then be free to return to their farms on the understanding that they would no longer participate in the war. </p>
<p>Eventually about 20 000 Boers – about a third – made use of this offer. They were called the <a href="https://www.exclusivebooks.co.za/product/9780798141925">“protected burghers”</a>. Roberts had banked on this policy to end the war. But after the British occupation of the Transvaal capital, Pretoria, on 5 June 1900, there was no end in sight. On the contrary, the Boers had started a guerrilla war, which included attacks on railway lines. </p>
<p>In reaction Roberts issued a proclamation on 16 June 1900, stating that, for every attack on a railway line the closest homestead would be burnt down. This was the start of the scorched earth policy. When this didn’t work, Roberts issued another proclamation in September stating that all homesteads would be burnt in a radius of 16 km of any attack, and that all livestock would be killed or taken away and all crops destroyed.</p>
<p>This <a href="https://www.exclusivebooks.co.za/product/9780798141925">policy</a> was intensified dramatically when Lord Kitchener took over from Roberts as commander in November 1900. Homesteads and whole towns were burnt down even if there was no attack on any railway. In this way almost all Boer homesteads – about 30 000 in all – were razed to the ground and thousands of livestock killed. The two republics were entirely devastated.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the Boer leaders were reorganising their commandos after some major setbacks. One action was to remobilise the Boers who had laid down their arms. </p>
<p>Roberts felt he should protect his oath takers and gather them in refugee camps. The first two were established in Bloemfontein and Pretoria in September 1900. </p>
<p>But the <a href="https://www.labuschagne.info/scorched-earth.htm#.XGqE-KIzbIU">scorched earth</a> policy had led to more and more Boer women and children being left homeless. Roberts decided to bring them into the camps too. They were called the “undesirables” – families of Boers who were still on commando or already prisoners of war. They were given fewer rations than others in the camps.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/259526/original/file-20190218-56232-mv7b07.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Boer family looks on at their house that was set alight by the British forces during the South African War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photographical Collection Anglo-Boer War Museum, Bloemfontein SA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These families eventually <a href="https://www.exclusivebooks.co.za/product/9780798141925">outnumbered</a> the protected burghers and their families by 7:3. </p>
<p>These families were taken against their will. They were forcibly put on ox wagons and open railway trucks and taken to the camps. They were not, as Rees-Mogg claimed, moved for their protection and safety. Nor were they moved to the camps to be fed. Rather, their internment had everything to do with ending the resistance of Boers still fighting the British. </p>
<p>The administration of the camps was appalling. Food was of a very poor quality, sanitation deplorable, tents were overcrowded and medical assistance shocking. Little was known at the time about how to handle epidemics of measles and typhoid.</p>
<p>This isn’t all. Rees-Mogg is also obviously unaware of the action that the British commanders took against black South Africans. A total of 66 black concentration camps where set up across the Transvaal and Free State where conditions were just as bad and the death rates similar.</p>
<p>These camps were set up to get black people off the land so that the Boers couldn’t get supplies from them. In addition, forcing black farmers off their land also enabled the British to use black men as labourers on gold mines. </p>
<p>Rees-Mogg was right on one point: the concentration camps didn’t have the same aims as Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps during the Second World War. The aim in South Africa wasn’t systematic murder. </p>
<p>But this shouldn’t detract from his numerous other falsehoods.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112006/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fransjohan Pretorius receives funding from the National Research Foundation.. </span></em></p>A British Conservative MP has brought concentration camps during the South African War back into the spotlight.Fransjohan Pretorius, Emeritus professor of History, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1020232019-01-24T11:54:26Z2019-01-24T11:54:26ZDigital technology offers new ways to teach lessons from the Holocaust<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255204/original/file-20190123-135157-1yskuoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A student speaks with Holocaust survivor William Morgan using an interactive virtual conversation exhibit at the the Holocaust Museum Houston in January 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Interactive-Holocaust-Testimonies/333051c52da54d908a60dfa146a0b95a/16/0">David J. Phillip/AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When it comes to understanding the horrors of the Holocaust, most millennials are woefully lacking in knowledge. That much was laid bare in a <a href="http://www.claimscon.org/study/">2018 study</a> commissioned by the <a href="http://www.claimscon.org/">Claims Conference</a> – an organization that supports survivors of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>For instance, the study found that nearly half of all <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/millennials/">millennials</a> – that is, those born from the <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-113.html">early 1980s through the 1990s</a> - are unable to name even one of the more than <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps">42,000 camps and ghettos</a> in existence during the Holocaust. The same study found that 41 percent of millennials believe that substantially fewer Jewish people were murdered during the Holocaust than the accepted <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust">6 million</a> figure.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk/">The Centre for Holocaust Education</a> at the University College London found similar <a href="https://www.holocausteducation.org.uk/research/young-people-understand-holocaust/key-findings/">gaps in knowledge</a>. For instance, the University College London study found that a third of England’s high school students “massively underestimated the scale of the murder of Jewish people.”</p>
<p>This is a problem when you consider that millennials and young people worldwide have entered or will soon enter classrooms in the United States and elsewhere as teachers.</p>
<p>I’ve found similar deficits in knowledge in my own <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tB-wZZ0AAAAJ&hl=en">research into Holocaust education</a>. Several years ago, I conducted a study that measured what student teacher candidates in New Jersey knew about the Holocaust.</p>
<p>The study – which is soon to be published in the journal <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vtss20/current">The Social Studies</a> – found that teachers had giant gaps in their knowledge. Their responses prompted me to probe deeper.</p>
<h2>Deficits in knowledge</h2>
<p>In my survey of nearly 200 future teachers, I found that only 30 percent knew that the Jewish people were the primary victim of the Holocaust. Even fewer knew the correct century in which the Holocaust took place. Auschwitz was the only concentration camp they identified – although, in their responses, the teaching students spelled it 28 different ways. </p>
<p>This past fall – spurred in part by a <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/2017-audit-of-anti-semitic-incidents">rise in anti-Semitism</a> – I conducted a follow-up survey to measure if these future teachers were learning anything more than in the past. The sample was modest but representative - 75 students, all on track to become teachers in another year or so. All had attended New Jersey public schools.</p>
<p>When the student teachers saw the questions, they groaned and uttered things such as, “I can’t believe I don’t know this.” (If you want to figure out how you might have done on the survey, you can ask yourself if you know the answers to the following survey questions: When did the Holocaust take place? What was the political party that perpetrated the Holocaust? Who were the victim groups? Who was the American president? What other genocides can you identify?)</p>
<p>After they completed the survey, the student teachers immediately began to search for the correct answers online. They were disappointed to see just how far off they were. One student teacher after another placed the Holocaust in the 1800s. Others listed Ronald Reagan as the American president during the Holocaust. Perhaps most disturbingly, many listed the number of victims in the thousands, which falls way short of the actual figure.</p>
<h2>Digital lessons emerge</h2>
<p>Every person cannot be expected to know every single facet of the Holocaust. At the same time, it’s deeply disturbing when large segments of the population don’t know basic facts about one of the most horrendous atrocities – actually a series of atrocities – ever perpetrated against humanity.</p>
<p>Knowing about the Holocaust is a <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/457/Lindquist.pdf?1548256318">vital part of historical understanding</a>. It is a means of <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/458/Cowan.pdf?1548256389">promoting tolerance and inclusion.</a> And it also serves as a <a href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/456/Jennings.pdf?1548256205">form of innoculation</a> against future atrocities.</p>
<p>Fortunately, new advances in learning about the Holocaust through digital humanities offer new ways for American students and teachers – or anyone who cares to learn more about the Holocaust - to learn about an event that took place nearly three-quarters of a century ago. </p>
<p>Here are three examples:</p>
<h2>Courtroom 600</h2>
<p>The University of Connecticut recently unveiled <a href="https://today.uconn.edu/2019/01/reviving-holocaust-history-virtual-reality/">Courtroom 600</a>, a project that places users inside the courtroom at the Nuremberg trials where Nazis and collaborators were tried. This project, still in prototype form, allows users to engage with virtual reality technology in order to interact with a fictitious member of the United States team of prosecutors. It also enables users to read primary source documents, gather evidence and prosecute select defendants.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255205/original/file-20190123-135136-1cn696f.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ken Thompson, assistant professor-in-residence of game design, takes 3D scans of Courtroom 600 in the Justizpalast in Nuremberg, Germany.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://today.uconn.edu/2019/01/reviving-holocaust-history-virtual-reality/">University of Connecticut</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>IWitness and holograms</h2>
<p>Another digital resource is available through the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. The foundation, perhaps best known as the holder of thousands of Holocaust survivor testimonies, has created the <a href="https://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/">IWitness program</a>. This is a collection of 1,500 testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide – the Holocaust, as well as others like the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/japan/nanjing-massacre">Nanjing Massacre</a> in China. The testimonies can be searched by subject. There are also ready-made lessons for teachers that can be accessed from anywhere and used freely at any time.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/255206/original/file-20190123-135145-1b32p3o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Dimensions in Testimony exhibit featuring Holocaust survivor William Morgan using an interactive virtual conversation is shown at the the Holocaust Museum Houston. The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation has recorded 18 interactive testimonies with Holocaust survivors over the last several years.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Interactive-Holocaust-Testimonies/007b24d3db4e448a9dec464322d72278/17/0">David J. Phillip</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Shoah Foundation has also recently launched 3D holograms of survivors, giving users the experience of having a conversation with a survivor rather than passively viewing testimony. This project, called <a href="https://sfi.usc.edu/collections/holocaust/ndt">Dimensions in Testimony</a>, is groundbreaking. It encourages students and others to engage with survivor testimony in new ways. For instance, each survivor hologram is able to participate in a “conversation,” with responses to commonly asked questions about faith, life before, during and after the war. </p>
<h2>Digital source documents</h2>
<p>Finally, a partnership between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Wiener Library in London, and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has produced two online sourcebooks that feature primary sources that deal with the Holocaust. These online sources focus on <a href="https://archive.org/details/bib267157_001_001">the camp system</a> and <a href="https://archive.org/details/bib259530_001_001">women under Nazi persecution</a>.</p>
<p>Each guide provides images of primary sources found in the International Tracing Service database, descriptions, questions to guide conversation and further avenues of investigation for students. A high school teacher who is using these guides – even though they were originally intended for university-level classes – told me that the documents are easy to modify. She uses them to discuss how to read and engage with primary sources.</p>
<p>The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen has also produced an “<a href="https://eguide.its-arolsen.org/en/">ITS e-guide</a>,” intended to help families and scholars better understand the vast array of paperwork that was produced for any given survivor or victim of the Holocaust. By clicking on an image of a document, users are able to learn more about what the document was used for, how to decode it, who created it, and what to consider when reading the document. Examples include prisoner registration cards, malaria cards and personal effects cards. These artifacts show the great lengths that Nazis went to keep records – even as they carried out one of the most horrific massacres that humanity has ever experienced.</p>
<p>Ultimately, there is not a single solution for the challenges that face Holocaust education. Still, these digital examples all move teaching and learning from passively reading textbooks to actively engaging with history.</p>
<p>As for the answers to the survey questions I mentioned above, the Holocaust took place <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-holocaust-and-world-war-ii-key-dates">from 1933 to 1945</a>. The <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/remember/the-holocaust-survivors-and-victims-resource-center/survivors-and-victims">victim groups</a> included Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with disabilities and other groups deemed inferior. The American president during the Holocaust was <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/franklin-d-roosevelt/">Franklin D. Roosevelt</a>. <a href="https://libguides.enc.edu/genocide/timeline">Other genocides in the 20th century</a> include the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan and Bosnian genocides.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102023/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Rich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In anticipation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a scholar explains how digital technologies can help close knowledge gaps about the catastrophe that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.Jennifer Rich, Assistant Professor; Director of Research and Education for the Rowan Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Rowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1017252018-08-18T00:01:14Z2018-08-18T00:01:14ZFive questions about Nazi Germany and how it relates to Australian politics today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232430/original/file-20180817-165958-4zk318.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The primary legacy of Nazism was the second world war, which led to the deaths of more than 50 million people.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Almost every day comparisons of contemporary politics to Nazi Germany are cropping up in the news. But are these comparisons historically grounded, or are they an abuse of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/08/14/the-creator-of-godwins-law-explains-why-some-nazi-comparisons-dont-break-his-famous-internet-rule/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.daca02a23c55">Godwin’s law</a>? Here are some answers to some questions that have cropped up recently. </p>
<p>1) <strong>What is Nazism? What is fascism? Would Australia’s right-wing populists fit into either of these categories?</strong></p>
<p>Nazism and fascism were aligned far-right political movements that came to power in Germany (Nazism) and Italy (fascism) after the first world war. There were also fascist parties elsewhere, including in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1934/jun/08/thefarright.uk">Britain</a> and in Nazi-allied states like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/31/world/pro-nazi-rulers-legacy-still-lingers-for-croatia.html">Croatia</a> and <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/02/romania_s_unusually_morbid_fascist_movement_blended_nationalistic_violence.html?via=gdpr-consent">Romania</a>.</p>
<p>Their policies were grounded in radical nationalism (which often drew on racist ideas), economic corporatism (that is, a particularly authoritarian form of capitalism), anti-democratic, authoritarian and violent politics, anti-unionism and anti-communism. </p>
<p>These parties were an outgrowth of the specific political and economic conditions of the post-war period, but they have attracted some on the radical right globally, who either consider themselves or are considered by others to be neo-Nazi or neo-fascist. In Australia, there are few avowed neo-Nazis or neo-fascist parties, and those that exist are not popular.</p>
<p>Populist parties in Australia that are seeking to gain votes by appealing to anti-immigration and racist sentiments are generally outgrowths of the long-standing tradition of such politics in the political history of post-1788 Australia.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-a-ray-of-bipartisan-good-comes-out-of-obscure-senators-hate-speech-101611">View from The Hill: A ray of bipartisan good comes out of obscure senator's hate speech</a>
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<p>Unlike the Nazis and the fascists, who ruthlessly destroyed democratic institutions upon coming to power, the most prominent anti-immigration parties in Australia don’t claim to want to abolish democracy. Instead they want to use the liberal democratic system to entrench what might be called “white” or “settler” privilege, at the expense of migrants and Indigenous people. Their model is generally the <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/online_features/defining_moments/featured/white_australia_policy_begins">White Australia Policy</a>, not Nazi Germany. </p>
<p>2) <strong>Why do people talk about Nazism or fascism with such fear and horror?</strong></p>
<p>The primary legacy of Nazism was the second world war, which led to the deaths of more than 50 million people. Nazis killed almost 6 million European Jews and (directly and indirectly) around 20 million Russians, all in pursuit of an illusory territory secure from racial or political threats. It has been usefully referred to as <em>thanatopolitics</em> – a politics of death founded on the false promise of securing life. </p>
<p>3) <strong>Senator Fraser Anning used the phrase ‘final solution‘ and it upset people. Why?</strong></p>
<p>The phrase is a direct reference to the Nazi term <em>Endlösung der Judenfrage</em> (The final solution of the Jewish question), which in the end meant genocide. It is clear that this goes well beyond “dog whistling”. It is instead the kind of language that (until now) only the most rabid and marginal of Nazis would deliberately choose to use. </p>
<p>The term recalls the desire of the state to kill its citizens and the citizens of states around it to secure its own racial fantasy. Anning argues that his usage was unintentional. This is difficult to believe, given the context of the speech.</p>
<p>What is especially chilling about it is that evokes not only the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime, but also its earlier “final solutions” (grounded in the global eugenics movement for 'racial hygiene’) which included halting Jewish migration, then taking away the civic rights of Jews, then expelling Jews, and then finally murdering them.</p>
<p>To use this kind of historically and racially charged language to talk about migrants was a new low, even in Australian politics, where tolerance of racially charged political statements is extraordinarily high.</p>
<p>4) <strong>Some Australian <a href="https://twitter.com/vanOnselenP/status/1030055293990789120">press commentators</a> have said that Nazism was left-wing. Is this right?</strong> </p>
<p>No. Nazis and fascists were decidedly right-wing and fervently anti-communist. There was a small and short-lived group of Nazis clustered around the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism">Strasser brothers</a> who were interested in a racial strain of anti-capitalist politics. They might loosely be termed “socialist”, but they were completely purged from the Nazi party very early on. </p>
<p>On coming to power, the first targets of the Nazis were communists and socialists. The formal name of the Nazi party, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), was a failed attempt to attract workers to the party and away from the left. It failed, and the main voters for the Nazis remained the lower middle classes - the economically vulnerable who most feared the spectre of socialism. </p>
<p>5) <strong>Some activists have likened Australia’s offshore detention centres to <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/our-detention-centres-are-intentionally-cruel-and-must-be-closed-20160504-golr04.html">concentration camps</a> **Is that a fair description?</strong></p>
<p>It pays to be careful here. Firstly, not all concentration camps were in Nazi Germany. Concentration camps were used by the British in South Africa, by the Spanish in Cuba and by the US in the Philippines.</p>
<p>Secondly, when talking about Nazi Germany, a distinction should be drawn between concentration camps (which were places of detention without trial used by the state to sequester undesired non-criminal elements from other citizens) and extermination camps, which were places of execution.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/george-brandis-warns-liberals-against-rise-of-populist-right-91408">George Brandis warns Liberals against rise of populist right</a>
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<p>It was in the extermination camps (among other, less organised sites) that the Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust.</p>
<p>No two historical examples of concentration camps are exactly alike, but Australia’s offshore mandatory detention centres fit most elements of the description. Those in them are detained without trial. Their purpose is political rather than penological. These are not places of rehabilitation or even punishment. They are indefinite holding centres for those classed as politically problematic.</p>
<p>However, to say Australia is running a detention network with many of the attributes of earlier concentration camps does not mean that Australia is a dictatorship, or that the policy is intrinsically “fascist”. Liberal democracies have their own forms of inhumanity and nations such as <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4850592/Photos-reveal-plight-Afrikaners-concentration-camps.html">Britain</a> and the <a href="http://pinoy-culture.com/the-philippine-american-war-the-concentration/">US</a> have also made use of such camps in the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101725/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matt Fitzpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council for his Discovery Project DP 180100118 'Monarchy, Democracy and Empire'. </span></em></p>Nazi, fascist, ultra right-wing - these terms seem to be bandied about a lot these days. But what do they really mean?Matt Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor in International History, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/988152018-07-06T10:37:53Z2018-07-06T10:37:53ZWhat the Nazis driving people from homes taught philosopher Hannah Arendt about the rights of refugees<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226348/original/file-20180705-122247-fnyu4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">ccac a o</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Facing a political revolt over immigration policies from the Christian Social Union partner in her coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/merkel-and-seehofer-strike-refugee-deal/">agreed to a compromise</a>, which would create “transit zones” or refugee camps along Germany’s southern border. </p>
<p>Under the agreement, migrants would be housed in designated transit areas, until German authorities determined their eligibility. If found to have registered in another EU country, immigrants would be turned back, assuming that country would accept them.</p>
<p>Merkel had earlier opposed this step, fearing it would trigger border closures. Already, Italy and Austria have refused to accept returnees. And these are not the only ones. In <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/149232/tyrants-dehumanize-powerless">the United States</a>, in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/world/europe/hungary-viktor-orban-election.html">Hungary</a>, and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/migrants-suffer-rising-anti-immigration-sentiment-italy-180524174927467.html">in Italy</a>, governments are justifying policies of expulsion and restrictive immigration. <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/19/trump-border-children-inflammatory-rhetoric-655479">Inflammatory language</a> is often being used to defend policies aimed against the most vulnerable peoples. </p>
<p>That millions of refugees exist in legal limbo, sadly, is not a new story. The twentieth century Jewish political theorist, Hannah Arendt, analyzed refugees’ plight in the period between and after the two world wars. As a <a href="https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/diving-for-pearls-a-thinking-journey-with-hannah-arendt">scholar of Arendt’s political thought</a>, I believe her writing is relevant to understanding today’s refugee crisis and their lack of rights. </p>
<h2>Who was Hannah Arendt?</h2>
<p>Born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, Hannah Arendt studied theology and philosophy during her university years. The <a href="https://voxeu.org/article/how-anti-semitism-interwar-germany-was-influenced-medieval-mass-murder-jews">explosion of anti-Semitism in the late 1920s</a> led Arendt to turn her attention to politics and questions of human rights. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226350/original/file-20180705-122247-uc43d6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=890&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Hannah Arendt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/g4gti/6246088123">Ryohei Noda</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>A few months after the Nazis gained power in 1933, they deprived certain German citizens, particularly Jews and Communists, of basic rights, subjecting many to detention in prisons. Becoming stateless, Arendt fled to France, where she worked for Jewish causes. When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, the French government began ordering refugees to internment camps. In May 1940, Arendt was sent to a <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005298">concentration camp in Gurs, France</a>, along with thousands of other Jewish women considered to be “enemy aliens.” </p>
<p>Taking advantage of imperfect security at the camp, Arendt escaped. Helped by the American journalist, <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005740">Varion Fry</a>, who <a href="https://www.rescue.org/">secured asylum</a> for several thousand people in danger of being turned over to the Nazis, Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher, immigrated to the United States in 1941.</p>
<h2>History of suppressed rights</h2>
<p>In 1943 – two years after she arrived in New York – Arendt wrote <a href="http://www.arendtcenter.it/en/2016/10/11/hannah-arendt-we-refugees-1943/">“We Refugees,”</a> an essay expressing her outrage at the existential crisis her people faced. </p>
<p>Driven from one country to another not because of anything they’d done, but simply because of who they were, she explained how Jews had been forced to seek refuge wherever they could find it in a world increasingly hostile to their existence.
Seven years later, in her monumental work, <a href="https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayb1.html">“The Origins of Totalitarianism,”</a> Arendt pursued the question of refugees’ rights further.</p>
<p>If human rights were inalienable, she asked, why hadn’t those rights protected asylum-seekers or precluded Jewish expulsion and extermination throughout Europe? </p>
<p>To Arendt, the answer lay in breakdown of the delicate balance between state and nation resulting in national interest taking priority over law. </p>
<p>Following World War I, <a href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/minority-rights">European states redrew their boundaries</a>, breaking up empires, such as czarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, into single nation-states populated by a dominant ethnic group, identified as citizen nationals or “state peoples.” Several minority groups also resided in the same territory, but lacked the same rights. </p>
<p>In these new states, minority rights were supposed to be protected through Minority Treaties guaranteed by the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/league-of-nations">League of Nations</a>, an organization established after World War I to foster international cooperation and prevent further conflict. Yet, increasingly in the 1920s, these treaties proved unenforceable, leaving millions subject to national governments arbitrarily denying minorities their rights. The treaties, along with the League, collapsed with the outbreak of World War II.</p>
<p>Minorities in newly formed states, such as Ukrainians and <a href="https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/resistance-during-holocaust/jewish-life-poland-holocaust">Jews in Poland</a> and <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/1993/06/19/yugoslavia-new-war-old-hatreds/">Croatians in Yugoslavia</a>, lacked equal rights. At the same time, growing numbers of stateless peoples, deported or otherwise forced from their countries of origin as a result of civil wars or other conflicts, such as the <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008191">Armenians in Turkey</a>, were dispersed throughout Europe and the Middle East in this same period.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226377/original/file-20180705-122274-1k66sd9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Greek and Armenian refugee children in barracks near Athens, 1923.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002709156/">Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA</a></span>
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<p>Arendt identified statelessness with the refugee question or the “existence of ever-growing new people … who live outside the pale of law.” <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=Zm_f-8NCE9UC&pg=PA35&lpg=PA35&dq=but+because+of+what+they+unchangeably+were%E2%80%94born+into+the+wrong+kind+of+race+or+the+wrong+kind+of+class+or+drafted+by+the+wrong+kind+of+government.&source=bl&ots=3URuEMvw4B&sig=7J_se6W4CBz5IFpuYvqtowWqwKw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjK6-jIsOjbAhUBKqwKHTA4D2EQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=but%20because%20of%20what%20they%20unchangeably%20were%E2%80%94born%20into%20the%20wrong%20kind%20of%20race%20or%20the%20wrong%20kind%20of%20class%20or%20drafted%20by%20the%20wrong%20kind%20of%20government.&f=false">She explained</a> how these new refugees were persecuted “because of what they unchangeably were – born into the wrong kind of race or the wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government.” </p>
<p>Without legally enforceable rights they were treated as less than human, forced to live under what Arendt called conditions of “absolute lawlessness.” Even if they were fed, clothed and housed by some public or private agency, their lives were being prolonged by charity, not rights. No law existed that could have forced the nations of the world to feed or house them. </p>
<h2>The right to have rights</h2>
<p>The postwar presence of growing numbers of stateless refugees, who lacked the legal right to residence in countries to which they had been sent or sought to enter, brought into sharper relief a fundamental conflict at the heart of international law. </p>
<p>States had long recognized the right of someone persecuted in her home country to seek asylum in another country. Yet, these same states asserted the right to sovereign control over nationality, immigration and expulsion.</p>
<p>Arendt identified this conflict as a paradox at the heart of the long-held belief that <a href="https://www.unfpa.org/resources/human-rights-principles">human rights were inalienable</a>. In the absence of enforceable laws mandating states accept asylum-seekers, refugees remained at the mercy of the receiving authority, which established its own rules governing who, if any, would be allowed to stay within its national borders.</p>
<p>Without legal residence, refugees lack basic rights long considered intrinsic to being human. </p>
<p>In reality, Arendt argued, human rights, supposedly independent of citizenship and nationality, are guaranteed only as the rights of citizens or, most restrictively, as the right of nationals of a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/world/europe/denmark-immigrant-ghettos.html">“folk” or ethnic identity</a>.</p>
<p>Thinking about the stateless led Arendt to identify something more fundamental than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=8f2y0F2wzLoC&pg=PA296&dq=due+to+charity+and+not+to+rights,+for+no+law+exists+which+could+force+the+nations+of+the+world+to+feed+them&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN2NvFy-jbAhUGi6wKHQfDBM4Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=due%20to%20charity%20and%20not%20to%20rights%2C%20for%20no%20law%20exists%20which%20could%20force%20the%20nations%20of%20the%20world%20to%20feed%20them&f=false">She called it</a> “the right to have rights,” or the right to belong fully to a political community, even if it was not one’s native land. She said,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[T]he right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible…[because] the present sphere of international law… still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states.”</p>
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<h2>Arendt’s resonance today</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/226351/original/file-20180705-122247-bh1nn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">People protesting against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies outside Downing Street in London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/alisdare/32601766806/in/photolist-REUzrG-V6oxwA-TSsNVh-TVhRtV-Uywa7c-TV1nrV-UyKhFS-RvsZPS-UXebD4-UU4gQq-V6hbRE-QXMXVh-UWTUV8-Qs2BqG-Rv2PMs-UUuQZw-UUg62N-TVgqvR-UUwBWd-TSiuNJ-TUTEVB-TS26Kw-V9MC6R-TVeSbx-UWQwq4-RJnUYz-TUNuaD-Ra11Qm-REY3af-UUevEQ-RELmY1-V6j6om-QXBhKd-QuAUve-RWsss1-TS344h-V9WuyZ-TV1kXH-V9Fm1r-V6rM1y-Vxos9m-UX1Gr6-UWRcvD-TSrgBs-V6hWEw-TRZiVN-UytjZS-UyBqEJ-UX4JVD-S4d1Yx">Alisdare Hickson</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, there are <a href="http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199652433.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199652433-e-021">international laws</a> related to refugee protection. These laws and treaties create “exceptions” to a state’s sovereign right to control which “noncitizens” can enter and remain within its territory. In some case, they could grant at least temporary asylum to refugees. </p>
<p>However, no legal means currently exist that could require sovereign states to comply with international conventions and rules. Individual states, thus, retain the power to deny parts of humanity “the right to have rights” simply by asserting national sovereignty. </p>
<p>This is evident when far-right political parties in Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary, along with the current administration in Washington, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/27/world/europe/europe-migrant-crisis-change.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer">call for harsher, draconian border policies</a> to prevent refugees from seeking asylum.</p>
<p>With the precarious conditions that are affecting ever-growing populations of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/04/world/asia/un-myanmar-rohingya-investigate.html">minorities</a> and the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/refugees-economic-migrants-europe-crisis-difference-middle-east-africa-libya-mediterranean-sea-a7432516.html">economically vulnerable</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/world/five-conflicts-driving-refugees.html">refugees across the globe</a>, Arendt’s words matter more than ever today.</p>
<p>The idea of humanity, excluding no one, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=5872U7QQl8oC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Arendt wrote</a>, “is the only guarantee we have that one ‘superior race’ after another may not feel obligated to follow the ‘natural law’ of the right of the powerful, and exterminate ‘inferior races unworthy of survival.’” As she herself witnessed, the first steps are the abrogation of minority rights and the refusal of asylum to refugees.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98815/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kathleen B. Jones received funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a registered Democrat and member of the ACLU. </span></em></p>The 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote how refugees, in the absence of legal rights, were forced to live in a state of ‘absolute lawlessness.’ Her words matter today.Kathleen B. Jones, Professor Emerita of Women's Studies, San Diego State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/985492018-06-20T23:03:49Z2018-06-20T23:03:49ZThe dreadful history of children in concentration camps<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224101/original/file-20180620-137720-1su7b84.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Child survivors of Auschwitz are seen in this 1945 photograph.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Creative Commons)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Children and family have been central to the institution of the concentration camp from its beginnings 120 years ago. Wikipedia has now added the notorious American border detention centres to its <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3kjma/wikipedia-us-detention-centers-concentration-camps-vgtrn">list of concentration camps</a>, and the #<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23FamiliesBelongTogether&src=tyah">FamiliesBelongTogether</a> Twitter hashtag has brought up frequent comparisons. </p>
<p>The merits of the comparison between detention centres and concentration camps <a href="https://qz.com/1308141/are-us-immigrant-child-detention-centers-concentration-camps/">have been debated elsewhere</a>, but can we learn anything from this dreadful history of children behind barbed wire, even as the Trump administration <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigration-children-executive-order.html">finally moved to end the practice?</a></p>
<p>The British constructed camps during the 1899-1902 South African War in order to divide families. They hoped that Boer men who were fighting British forces would give up once they discovered that their wives and children were held in camps. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224108/original/file-20180620-137741-184qykf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A deceased young girl is seen at a concentration camp where the British housed Boer women and children during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Creative Commons)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Similar to the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/politics/family-separation-deterrence-dhs/index.html">Trump administration’s apparent hope that the breakup of families would deter unwanted migration</a>, the British sought to deter Boer fighters. British parliamentarians critical of the policy labelled these “concentration camps,” alluding to the Spanish policy of the “reconcentration” of civilians during the Spanish-American War (1898).</p>
<p>Conditions in the British-run camps were horrific, particularly for children, with <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/591094">mortality rates upwards of 25 per cent</a>. An <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1171343">epidemic of measles</a> accounted for roughly 40 per cent of childhood deaths in these camps, and other diseases such as typhus and dysentery were also devastating.</p>
<h2>Families broken up in former Soviet Union</h2>
<p>The Soviet Union’s system of camps that reached their peak during Joseph Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the 1950s also reveals the destruction of families. While mass arrests broke up the family, and children of “enemies of the people” were separated from their parents, there were also many children in the Gulag itself.</p>
<p>Prison camps developed an infrastructure that, on the surface, <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/579144">supported pregnancy and childbirth</a>. There were maternity wards in some camp clinics, as well as nurseries, and pregnant women and nursing mothers officially received increased rations. </p>
<p>In practice, the system was regularly a nightmare. Children born in the camps were separated from their mothers, who only managed to see them at set times for nursing. </p>
<p>Hava Volovich, whose own daughter died in the camps, remembers that hundreds of camp children died each year, meaning that there were “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=YWHvXP7VfxAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=vilensky+till+my+tale+is+told&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2v7b_p-HbAhVdIDQIHUtmBBMQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=plenty%20of%20empty%20beds&f=false">plenty of empty beds in the infants’ shelter even though the birth rate in the camps was relatively high</a>.” </p>
<p>At the age of two, many of the surviving children were sent either to orphanages or to relatives — a forced redistribution of children away from their parents, who, as Gulag prisoners, were at best stigmatized, and at worst seen as a major threat to Soviet society. </p>
<p>The Gulag also held camps for young offenders, where teenagers worked as forced labourers and faced horrific living conditions.</p>
<h2>Nazis crushed families</h2>
<p>Nazi policy included both large-scale deportations and large-scale importations of population groups, with major implications for families. </p>
<p>The Nazis removed citizenship from German Jews then, during the Second World War, sent most Jews, from Germany and elsewhere, to camps outside the borders of pre-war Germany. Yet, as the war progressed, Germany brought in huge numbers of forced labourers from all over Europe (U.S. Attorney General <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/19/politics/jeff-sessions-immigration-border-separation/index.html">Jeff Sessions’ claim that German-run camps were designed to keep Jews in</a>, rather than out, is unfounded). </p>
<p>Nazi family policy was a pivotal part of the concentration camp. Once the death camps were operational, the Nazis crushed the family unit among undesirable populations, focusing on Jews. </p>
<p>The selection process at Auschwitz could result in the temporary survival of one or both parents, if they were physically fit (or just lucky), but children were usually sent directly to their deaths.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224112/original/file-20180620-137750-1jq7c28.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The late Elie Wiesel is seen in this 2012 photograph.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jewish writer <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007176">Elie Wiesel</a> lost his mother and sister right away, and only survived selection because he lied about his age, claiming he was 18 and not 15, his actual age. </p>
<p>The unimaginable cruelty of many practices —the smashing of babies’ heads against walls, the medical experimentation, particularly on twins —reveals an extreme dehumanization. </p>
<p>Even at the show camp of Terezin, which included a family camp, <a href="http://www.terezin.org/the-history-of-terezin/">only 150 of the roughly 15,000 children sent there survived</a>.</p>
<h2>High mortality rates</h2>
<p>What do these historical cases have in common? All involved the separation, either immediate or eventual, of children from one or both parents, and all involved horrific conditions and extremely high mortality rates for the children. </p>
<p>In all cases, the dehumanization of the unwanted population was a key starting point. As <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/591094">historian Aidan Forth writes</a> of the South African case, Gen. Herbert Kitchener referred to the Boers as “savages with only a thin white veneer,” and British officials often described the Afrikaners as “dirty, careless, [and lazy.]”</p>
<p>Former Gulag prisoners frequently reported that guards and officials <a href="http://gulaghistory.org/exhibits/days-and-lives/guards/4">referred to them as animals or as “scum.”</a> As <a href="https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=page&num=11058">one former prisoner wrote</a>, quoting a camp boss: “A person? … There aren’t any here! Here are enemies of the people, traitors of the motherland, bandits, crooks. The dregs of humanity, scum, riff raff, that’s who is here!” </p>
<p>The dehumanization of the Nazi camps is well known, as Nazi propaganda frequently likened the Jews to vermin or to an infectious disease, making Trump’s tweet about asylum seekers particularly chilling:</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1009071403918864385"}"></div></p>
<p>Another commonality can be found in the experiences of the victims.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-long-term-separation-from-parents-harms-kids-97515">Why long-term separation from parents harms kids</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In all cases, children separated from parents could not have known if they would ever see their parents again, or under what circumstances. The children of the camps had to rely, for the most part, on other children, for any support or security. Often, the separation was permanent.</p>
<p>These comparisons only take us so far, however. Some commentators have looked not at European powers, but to a long North American history — <a href="http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/americas-legacy-slavery-seen-trump-policy-separating-children-families/">including slavery</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Goodeeeeee/status/1009272719257604097">residential schools</a> — of separating non-white children from their parents.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/224109/original/file-20180620-137714-1l4ugnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Children at a residential school in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories, are seen in this undated photo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(National Archives of Canada)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If there is any optimism to be found in the historical examples of children in concentration camps, perhaps the history of public reactions can provide some hope. </p>
<p>In South Africa, reports by Emily Hobhouse and then the Fawcett Commission, particularly on starving children, galvanized public pressure to force the British government to <a href="https://www.angloboerwar.com/other-information/16-other-information/1847-emily-hobhouse">improve conditions at the camps</a>. </p>
<h2>Outcry helped end practice</h2>
<p>In contrast, in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, there could be neither public nor parliamentary discussion of inhumane internment conditions. </p>
<p>Bu today, some U.S. reporters and lawmakers have visited the American detention centres, and non-governmental organizations such as <a href="https://act.amnestyusa.org/page/25820/action/1">Amnesty International</a> and even the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/methodists-bring-church-charges-against-jeff-sessions_us_5b28fc2ee4b0a4dc9920b9dd">Methodist Church</a>, as well as many elected officials, maligned the policy. </p>
<p>The public discussion, and the public outcry against the separation of children from their parents that eventually caused U.S. President Donald Trump to cave and end the policy, perhaps makes the American case more similar to that of South Africa than either the Nazi or Soviet camps. </p>
<p>This similarity, however, depends on the actions now of the Trump administration, <a href="https://theconversation.com/trumps-war-on-children-is-an-act-of-state-terrorism-98612">which for several weeks before its reversal included denial, deflecting blame and even justification</a>. </p>
<p>But with reports of children being torn away from <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/migrant-children-border-facility-w521518">their mothers’ arms while breastfeeding</a>, the more notorious concentration camps of the 20th century must serve as a stark reminder that the act of dehumanization is a slippery slope towards violence and further atrocities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98549/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wilson T. Bell received an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), June 2015-May 2018. He is a member of the Canadian Association of Slavists and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. </span></em></p>The more notorious concentration camps of the 20th century must serve as a stark reminder of the depravity of tearing children away from their parents and putting them in camps.Wilson T. Bell, Assistant Professor of History and Politics, Thompson Rivers UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840982018-01-25T11:39:28Z2018-01-25T11:39:28ZFor a North Korean refugee raising her kids in the UK, the past is never far<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202896/original/file-20180122-182938-vzbc26.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jihyun Park finds joy in the little things many take for granted, whether it's being able to drop her kids off at school or having family dinners. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Grace Park is an 8-year-old girl from Manchester, United Kingdom, who likes making colorful bracelets with plastic lanyards, playing games with her two older brothers, and writing poems for her mum. </p>
<p>The childhood of Grace’s mother, Jihyun Park, wasn’t so carefree. She grew up in Chongjin, North Korea, where political life begins at an age when children are supposed to be watching cartoons and goofing around with friends.</p>
<p>As an 8-year-old, the elder Park was tasked with memorizing the biographies of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. She spent hours perfecting synchronized musical performances for the leaders’ birthdays and meticulously ironing her red scarf for school. On the playground, her classmates played war games and pretended to kill American soldiers.</p>
<p>Park has a <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/north-korea-other-interview">harrowing</a> <a href="http://www.aprilmag.com/2017/04/17/jihyun-park-defector-refugee-survivor-freedom-fighter-north-koreans/">life story</a> that includes two escapes from North Korea, forced repatriation, torture in a North Korean political prison camp, and being sold into sex trafficking. Through unyielding perseverance, she made her way to the United Kingdom, where she now lives with her husband and three children. </p>
<p>As a U.S.-born Korean-American, I have been researching various aspects of North Korea, from the underground network of people <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2016-11-28/opening-north-korean-mind">who smuggle outside information into the isolated country</a>, to the <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217810/north-koreas-hidden-revolution">country’s defectors</a>. </p>
<p>I first became aware of Jihyun Park’s remarkable story after reading about her online in 2014. When I learned she had children, I was particularly interested in what it was like to raise a child in a world that, compared to North Korea, has unparalleled freedoms.</p>
<p>So in October 2017, I met with Park at her home in Manchester. She talked about the joy she gets from being able to raise her kids in ways that would have been impossible under the shadow of political oppression. At the same time, there’s a real struggle to explain her past to her children – a life that differs so starkly from their own. </p>
<h2>Worlds apart</h2>
<p>As she prepared lunch for her two young children (the eldest is in college), Park told me that she would wake up as a child and never see her own mother. </p>
<p>Like most North Korean mothers, Park’s mother was required to tend to collective chores before her own household chores. While it was still dark outside, she would sweep the neighborhood roads before sweeping her own home. Even as a housewife, she never made lunch for her daughter because she had so many collective duties to perform – picking up trash, collecting wood and picking vegetables to meet the neighborhood quota to donate to the state. She never saw her daughter off at school. Nor did she ever pick her up. </p>
<p>Park said that she often thinks about this as she drops off and picks up her children from school. A simple daily task that so many parents take for granted (or begrudgingly do) wasn’t even possible in North Korea. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/202157/original/file-20180116-53302-s3aiv0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A group of North Korean women bow to a statue of the late leader Kim Il Sung, as another group sweep the stairs in front of the statue in Haeju, North Korea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/North-Korea-Daily-Life/755c725c506b48e7aaa335a88b3e2726/12/0">AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet life in the United Kingdom hasn’t been without its own set of challenges.</p>
<p>When she first dropped off her daughter Grace at nursery school a few years ago, Park couldn’t communicate with the teachers about her toddler. When teachers tried to tell her that Grace had a good day or a challenging day, Park didn’t understand. For a young mother from North Korea, the language and cultural barriers resulted in a spate of misunderstandings and missed opportunities.</p>
<p>When Grace entered preschool, Park worried that she would be discriminated against. After all, she and her family were in “someone else’s country,” as Park put it; they were Asian refugees with little to no money. </p>
<p>But she was pleasantly surprised that Grace ended up meeting a diverse group of friends, some of whom were also refugees. Grace taught her fellow preschoolers how to say hello in Korean (“ahn-nyoung”) and Grace learned how to say a few phrases in Russian, Arabic, Urdu and Polish. </p>
<p>Today, Grace speaks English with a thick Manchester accent and speaks Korean with a heavy northeastern North Korean accent.</p>
<h2>The scars of the past</h2>
<p>Because Grace was born in the U.K., Park has struggled with how to tell her about her past and her home country without scaring or worrying her. </p>
<p>Two years ago, Grace noticed the deep scar on her mother’s leg and asked how mum got hurt. Park delicately tried to explain the torture she experienced in a North Korean political prison camp. (She was sent there as punishment for trying to escape the country in 1998.) </p>
<p>When Grace started watching some interviews and documentaries featuring her mother, much of it went over Grace’s head. But while watching <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.uk/north-korea-other-interview">an interview conducted by Amnesty International</a>, Grace did lean over and silently hug her mother.</p>
<p>Something must have resonated.</p>
<p>Other disconnects seem more difficult to overcome. Many kids are unable to appreciate a routine as commonplace and mundane as a family dinner.</p>
<p>But to Park, these dinners are filled with meaning: They’re when she feels the most blessed. Meal time with her family in North Korea was rushed. Bellies were never full, and if there were any talking, it would be her father sternly lecturing the family about politics.</p>
<p>Now she’s able to eat second helpings of tasty food, tell jokes and laugh with her children. When Grace does occasionally complain about the food, Park is quick to remind Grace that they have relatives in North Korea who are never able to eat until they’re full. </p>
<p>“So why can’t we send them food?” Grace and her brother wonder. </p>
<h2>Communication breakdown</h2>
<p>How does a mother raised in a totalitarian state explain North Korea’s political situation to her young daughter? Where to begin? Why <em>can’t</em> they send them food? </p>
<p>Grace has asked several times to make a phone call to her aunties and uncles in North Korea. Or they could use Park’s phone to FaceTime them. Or at least email them pictures for Christmas. </p>
<p>When Park tells her daughter that their aunts and uncles don’t have internet, Grace suggests communicating “the old-fashioned way” – handwriting a letter, sticking a stamp on the envelope, and dropping off the letter at their local post office. Maybe they’ll write back and send them pictures of their families in North Korea?</p>
<p>Grace and her brother do recognize Kim Jong Un. When his image appears on television, they giggle and make fun of his weight and his hairstyle. They also blame Kim Jong Un for their mother’s scar on her leg, and for not being able to call their relatives in North Korea. But Grace and her brother still don’t seem to grasp why they can’t just pick up the phone and call their relatives.</p>
<p>Park told me that the challenge of explaining her life and the country she is from extends beyond educating her children. With her newfound freedom, she feels the moral duty to be the voice of millions of voiceless North Koreans to anyone who will listen. </p>
<p>To ensure that future generations don’t forget the tragic experiences and memories of North Korean citizens, she founded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SteppingStones527/">Stepping Stones</a> in 2017. The nonprofit organization raises awareness about human rights violations in North Korea, with a specific focus on women and children. The group is lobbying to make Feb. 17 an international day to remember all North Korean citizens who have been oppressed by the North Korean regime. (Stepping Stones chose this date to coincide with the day that the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s Human Rights released <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/CommissionInquiryonHRinDPRK.aspx">their report</a> in 2014.)</p>
<p>In the meantime, Grace continues to live life like an ordinary kid. She rides her bike, makes glittery bracelets, and runs around with her classmates. Her days are filled with crayons, coloring books, play dates and fuzzy hairbands. </p>
<p>It’s a childhood couldn’t be any more different from her mother’s.</p>
<p>For that, Park couldn’t be more grateful.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/t6xIUyh3Wqg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A short video featuring Jihyun Park and her daughter Grace.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84098/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jieun Baek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jihyun Park escaped North Korea and is now living in Manchester. But how to explain her scars to her children? Or why they can’t call their relatives still living in North Korea?Jieun Baek, PhD candidate in Public Policy, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/759032017-04-25T07:51:29Z2017-04-25T07:51:29ZWhy the RAF destroyed a ship with 4,500 concentration camp prisoners on board<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165123/original/image-20170412-25894-5ffrhy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Cap Arcona burning.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>On the afternoon of May 3, 1945, a squadron of RAF Typhoons began their descent to attack Axis shipping in Neustadt Bay, Germany. Below them, the former luxury liner SS Cap Arcona was laden with over 4,500 concentration camp prisoners who had been “evacuated” to the coast – and at around 3pm, the Typhoons from the Second Tactical Air Force, launched their assault. </p>
<p>The result was one of the world’s worst maritime disasters, leaving the prisoners and the ship’s crew struggling for survival in the icy Baltic waters. An estimated 4,000 prisoners perished. More than 70 years on from the tragic sinking, crucial questions remain regarding the role of British forces in the final days of the Second World War. </p>
<p>The disaster has long been <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3606747/How-German-Titanic-transformed-Hitler-luxury-ocean-liner-Nazi-barracks-floating-concentration-camp-mistakenly-blown-RAF-pilots.html">sensationalised</a> by the print media. Headlines such as <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Features/The-friendly-fires-of-hell%5D">“Friendly fires of hell”</a> have been the norm – thanks, in part, to a surprising lack of scholarly attention.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=343&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166611/original/file-20170425-23807-c3fld5.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Cap Arcona in 1927.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cap_Arcona_(1927)#/media/File:Cap_Arcona_1.JPG">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In turn, this has led to a number of conspiracy theories about the sinking. One such rumour claimed that important British records related to the incident had been <a href="https://m.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/20/wwii-nearly-39-years-parts-skeletons-washed-ashore-ss-cap-Arcona-carrying-around-5500-concentration-camp-inmates/">sealed until 2045</a>. In fact, all of the records were publicly released in 1972 after the Public Records Act 1967 reduced the amount of time they were to <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/legislation/public-records-act/history-of-pra/">be kept secret</a> – and I have spent a great deal of time researching them. </p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the war, Britain’s focus was on attempting to prosecute Nazi war criminals, and investigations into British misadventures were sidelined. And shortly after that, attentions shifted east, as the Cold War gathered pace. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, it is now possible to reconstruct what really happened – including Britain’s role in the tragedy – with a closer examination of archival files.</p>
<h2>Endgame</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>No concentration camp prisoner must fall alive into enemy hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That was Himmler’s last order concerning the fate of Germany’s remaining camp prisoners. But as the Nazi camp system continued to contract in March 1945, it would be wrong to assume that it was the real driving force behind the <a href="http://media.offenes-archiv.de/capArcona_summary.pdf">evacuation of Neuengamme camp</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005539">Neuengamme</a>, near Hamburg, was largely unique within the Nazi camp system. Local politicians, in particular Nazi Gauleiter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kaufmann">Karl Kaufmann</a>, had developed close business links with local industrialists and supplying slave labour from the camp to nearby businesses became a profitable enterprise. </p>
<p>But by early 1945, the Allied advance placed increasing pressure on local politicians – and complicit businesses – to eradicate any evidence of slave labour from within Hamburg city limits. The “problem” had to be moved elsewhere.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166489/original/file-20170424-12650-1pzpema.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karl Kaufmann.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kaufmann#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1973-079-70,_Karl_Kaufmann.jpg">Bundesarchiv Bild via Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the absence of another option, Kaufmann made arrangements in March 1945 to requisition a passenger liner to act as a “temporary” holding camp for Neuengamme’s prisoners. Any long-term planning was simply nonexistent. Indeed, once the camp was emptied in mid-April, the local politicians no longer concerned themselves with the fate of the prisoners now held in squalor aboard the Cap Arcona in nearby Neustadt Bay. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, the “prisoner hierarchy” continued on board the ship. The prisoners remained segregated according to nationality and religion. In addition, SS troops stayed on board to supervise the prisoners. This indicated that the Arcona was intended as a temporary extension of the original Neuengamme, albeit one that was largely out of sight and out of mind.</p>
<h2>Liberation or destruction</h2>
<p>Following the Allied <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/ir2/yaltaandpotsdamrev1.shtml">Yalta Conference</a> of February 1945, British military policy was geared towards a swift advance to the Baltic coast. </p>
<p>There were two reasons for this. First, Britain wished to halt the Soviet advance as it swept ever further west. To achieve this, Lübeck on the Baltic coast was considered the strategic goal. </p>
<p>Second, by halting the Soviets here, British forces would be able to liberate Denmark and restore the Danish monarchy. With the monarchy restored, Britain would gain a valuable ally in the months ahead. </p>
<p>But the speed of the Soviet advance meant that the normal protocols and procedures that had been well established throughout the war fell to the wayside as British troops raced for their objective. To make matters worse, communication lines became strained, and intelligence was not always processed in a <a href="http://harbourofhope.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/HoHTheWhiteBuses.pdf">thorough and timely manner</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165126/original/image-20170412-25882-1b0eina.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Casualties of the tragedy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Imperial War Museum Image Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the afternoon of May 2 and the morning of May 3, two pieces of intelligence were handed to British commanders. The first was handed to the liberating forces of Lübeck, the 11th Armoured Division, by an International Committee Red Cross delegate (ICRC). The second was presented to British forces by a Swedish Red Cross (SRC) delegate. </p>
<p>Both informed the British that camp prisoners were being held aboard ships in Neustadt Bay. But the warning arrived too late. </p>
<p>As the German Reich contracted, British forces remained heavily engaged in an important battle to reach their objective on Germany’s north coast. But while the German retreat was often marked by disorder, Britain’s military campaign also became frantic and chaotic, particularly in the final weeks. A breakdown of efficient communication and intelligence sharing meant that frontline forces were often ill-prepared for the actual situation ahead of them. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/164710/original/image-20170410-31911-wsrcej.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cap Arcona Memorial, Neustadt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this case, the latest intelligence on the ships in Neustadt Bay never reached the pilots who attacked them. As they made their final descent, the airmen likely believed they were attacking bona fide hostile targets. </p>
<p>Ultimately, the fate of the Cap Arcona and its passengers was a tragic consequence of the fog of war.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75903/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Long does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The chaos that led to a disastrous attack in the final days of WWII.Daniel Long, PhD Candidate, School of Art and Humanities, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/620242016-07-07T10:28:33Z2016-07-07T10:28:33ZElie Wiesel survived Auschwitz to give us a vivid glimpse of the ‘kingdom of night’<p>There is huge symbolism in the death of Elie Wiesel. He is not simply a survivor of the Holocaust; he became the best-known chronicler of it, too – and in 1986 <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-bio.html">was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize</a>. Wiesel, <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21701712-end-lifelong-search-answers-he-died-july-2nd-aged-87-obituary-elie-wiesel">who died on July 2 aged 87</a>, emerged as the voice of Holocaust survivors in part because his short memoir, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=0">Night</a>, was published at what, in retrospect, was the right time. </p>
<p>Written originally in Yiddish – and then reworked and published first in French in 1958 and then in English in 1960 – Night emerged on the cusp of growing interest in the events of the Holocaust in general and Auschwitz in particular. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005179">1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann</a> in Jerusalem was pivotal in bringing events such as the deportation of Jews like Wiesel living in wartime Hungary to the awareness of the Israeli public and the wider world. Initially, it had been the western camps, including Belsen, that had dominated awareness after the liberation in the 1940s. But by the 1960s, it was Auschwitz – and the industrialised killing in its gas chambers – that emerged as the motif. It was Auschwitz where Wiesel, along with more than 400,000 other Jews from wartime Hungary, was taken. </p>
<p>Night is a powerfully simple narrative given the nature of his experiences. Wiesel’s story of being forced into the ghetto, crammed into cattle cars, separated from his mother on the selection ramp in Birkenau and then moved through a succession of camps, is a relatively typical story of Hungarian survivors who were teenagers or early 20s at the time.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129668/original/image-20160707-30685-186esir.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Child survivors of Auschwitz.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">By Alexander Voronzow/ USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Captured in the photographs that make up the Auschwitz Album, this national deportation above all others came to represent the Holocaust. More recently, our awareness has moved further eastwards to include the mass killing of Polish Jews in the Operation Reinhard camps of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor in 1942, and the shootings of Jews in Soviet territory in the second half of 1941. </p>
<h2>Making sense of evil</h2>
<p>But while the historical context goes some way towards explaining why Night has emerged as a singular Holocaust memoir, there is also a need to think about the memoir itself. </p>
<p>Sparsely and brilliantly written, Night captures the moment of familial separation on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau with the haunting line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ … Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wiesel was working as a journalist in France when he wrote Night. He was a gifted writer and not simply a survivor. As he narrated his past, Wiesel did more than simply describe – however powerfully – the events that unfolded around him. He also interpreted them, desperately trying to make sense of them both for himself and his audience. </p>
<h2>Voice from hell</h2>
<p>Auschwitz became a place where the anchors of his world were loosed. His once devout faith in God was tested and found wanting. Night is not simply a description of the violence of Auschwitz, but a meditation on the vexed question of theodicy – the idea that God must exist as a counter to extreme evil – that the Holocaust brings to the fore with particular force. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129676/original/image-20160707-30702-1ni8uaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Birkenau: human remnants.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Night not only reveals Wiesel’s wrestling with his understanding of God. It also shows a world of reversal where sons look after fathers and others abandon them in order to survive. Whether to protect or abandon his father becomes for Wiesel an overwhelming concern. Night doesn’t only offer us a glimpse of Auschwitz, it also allows us into the interior world of a teenage boy in Auschwitz and beyond. </p>
<p>For the rest of his life, Wiesel powerfully argued that survivors had a privileged insight into the places and events of the Holocaust by dint of having dwelt a while in what he called the “<a href="http://www.bethankful.com/quotearchive/090101wiesel_kingdomofnight.htm">kingdom of night</a>” – a place he felt that he had never fully left. It was this place that continued to pervade his words and made his a compelling voice in the second half of the 20th century. </p>
<p>His death is a reminder that a time is coming when the last survivor of that kingdom of night will die and our flesh-and-blood connection to that place – and those events – will be severed. Memory will be replaced by history and memoir.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62024/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Cole does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Nobel laureate chronicled a world gone mad.Tim Cole, Professor of Social History, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/479652015-09-28T05:33:38Z2015-09-28T05:33:38ZWWII trial poses uncomfortable questions of guilt and complicity for Germans<p>Seventy years after the end of World War II, the defeat of the Nazi regime and the liberation of the death camps, a German court has charged a 91-year old woman who worked as a radio operator at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The woman, who has not been named, is accused of accessory to murder in more than 260,000 cases between April and July 1944. The case itself – and the fact these cases still command such enormous media attention after so long – raise a number of questions about the war, the responsibility of individuals and the effect the war still has on us.</p>
<p>The question of how much responsibility ordinary Germans had for Nazi atrocities has haunted Germany since 1945. It has raised questions such as whether there should be such a thing as collective guilt for Germans and prompted a great deal of soul-searching over how much Germans knew about the death camps and massacres on the Eastern front. It is difficult to distinguish clearly between perpetrators, fellow travellers and bystanders – and assess their responsibility. These categories are not as clear-cut as they might appear and they reflect our own moral standards on human behaviour. </p>
<p>The distinction between <a href="http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1230&context=gov_fac_pubs">four types of guilt</a> offered by the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/">German philosopher Karl Jaspers</a> in 1946, though flawed, is still instructive. First, there is criminal guilt of those individuals who committed crimes. Second, political guilt refers to the responsibility of ordinary citizens for the actions of the government that they had supported or tolerated. </p>
<p>Moral guilt, by contrast, means that individuals have to examine their own conscience for having taken part in crimes, no matter whether they did so voluntarily or by obeying orders. Finally, metaphysical guilt relates to the lack of human solidarity shown by perpetrators and bystanders with the victims as fellow human beings by not preventing crimes against humanity. </p>
<p>This distinction also helps understand why some of the perpetrators are only being tried now. The definition of “criminal guilt” and the “perpetrator” changed in the course of the trial of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12321549">John Demjanjuk in 2011</a>. Until then, prosecutors of Nazi war crimes had to prove that individual perpetrators held responsibility for or had been directly involved in committing murder. Since the Demjanjuk trial, courts are no longer required to prove that individuals had actually committed murder. </p>
<p>By working in a death camp they were “part of the machinery of extermination”. As such they were culpable as accessories to genocide and they can face criminal charges. The Demjanjuk ruling resulted in a re-investigation of cases, which in turn led to the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/auschwitz-guard-oskar-groening-jailed-over-mass-murder">trial of Oskar Groening</a> earlier this year and now the proceedings against the 91-year old radio operator at Auschwitz. This wider interpretation of criminal guilt takes into account some of the political, moral and metaphysical dimensions of guilt that Jaspers had separated from criminal guilt. </p>
<h2>National responsibility</h2>
<p>It also reflects a different understanding of the active role ordinary Germans played in the Third Reich. There is a greater awareness of the <a href="http://www.johndclare.net/Weimar6_Geary.htm">high levels of popular support</a> for <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-fuehrer-myth-how-hitler-won-over-the-german-people-a-531909.html">Hitler</a> and Nazi policies, including <a href="http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/293">the exclusion of Jews</a>, and of how much ordinary Germans knew – or could have known – about the Holocaust. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/11fl8AykFqo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">January 1939: Hitler predicts annihilation of Jews if war occurs.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Only few Germans actually knew about the death camps in Eastern Europe. Knowledge was normally limited to the Nazi leadership and those who worked in the camps. Yet, many more Germans had at least a vague idea that Jews were being systematically slaughtered. Not only was the phrase the <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10007271&MediaId=5700">“annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”</a> in the public domain – ordinary German soldiers and policemen were involved in the <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005130">mass shootings of Jews</a> on the Eastern front. These mass killings are estimated to account for well over a million of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Those who witnessed them shared their knowledge with friends and families at home. <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XXBmDlHwod8C&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Reports of the Security Service</a> showed that rumours about the mass killing of Jews were fairly widespread in Germany.</p>
<p>Was it possible for ordinary Germans to resist actively against the Nazi regime in the climate of fear created by the Nazi terror state? It would be ludicrous to deny that fear played a role. But at least equally important was that many Germans supported the regime and became actively involved, thereby contributing to its stability. </p>
<p>The exclusion of Jews from public life was widely approved or at least accepted. It provided new opportunities for Aryan Germans to advance their careers, benefit economically, or to assert their alleged superiority through <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y7jCBAAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s">“self-empowerment”</a>, suggesting that some “fellow travellers” and “bystanders” were actively involved in exclusion. There were occasional acts of human decency and resistance such as Germans providing food or shelter for Jews or Germans even speaking out in public against the deportation of Jews. But these remained isolated incidents.</p>
<p>Just as interesting as the question of guilt and the possibility of resistance of the former radio operator at Auschwitz and others is the question why the recent court cases are so widely reported in the media and stimulate heated debates. Over the past 20 years, the Holocaust has become such an important part of how we remember the war and define our identities in Germany, Britain and elsewhere. </p>
<p>With fewer and fewer survivors around to share their gruesome stories with younger generations, there is a concern over the how the memory of the Holocaust and its lessons can be kept alive. Putting the last perpetrators on trial is also part of a quest to remember and find meaning in the Holocaust.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47965/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephan Petzold is a member of the Green Party. </span></em></p>A 91-year-old radio operator from Auschwitz death camp has been charged as an accessory to the murder of 260,000 inmates of the notorious death camp.Stephan Petzold, Lecturer in German history, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/399292015-06-10T05:19:09Z2015-06-10T05:19:09ZTwo steps forward, one step back: how World War II changed how we do human research<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83828/original/image-20150603-2946-6di6df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nazis subjected Jews, political prisoners and other 'undesirables' to a range of experiments that resulted in death and disability.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tsaiproject/6927486111/in/photolist-byabgH-p7AWHV-4YQnTQ-4aj26j-4aeZ8T-YWKXc-PUSB8-aDKL8C-rFtqaX-rHKJP7-4af5cz-a4mmLe-4AdZYW-4S5qBN-4aj4Qo-gyjo1-61bfoC-nx9Nj2-nxa4ff-nPmmP6-bQn1BP-8nNcn7-7XhQZZ-nxaria-nxaqSF-nxa3T3-nPmnJ2-nMASBm-nPuj1q-nx9PDB-nx9NWK-nxa47Q-nx9PxK-nxapza-9PAcrB-4af5UZ-5zDsgG-nPmkJk-nxap6p-nx9Kvf-dsuUVc-nPDsCF-ouwfgS-oLKgF4-nRqYQX-oLZ84s-oM2acp-ouwXVF-ouwUsP-oJZg6L">tsaiproject/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s easy, in retrospect, to portray World War II as a major turning point in the history of medical ethics. But it’s a portrayal we should resist because it blinds us to the troubles that persist to this day in matters of informed consent.</p>
<p>When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the victors’ worst fears were confirmed: the Nazis had committed innumerable and horrific war crimes, including the attempt to annihilate the Jewish people. So severe were the depredations of Hitler and his henchmen and women that new words were invented to describe their actions: <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007043">genocide</a> (the obliteration of an entire people) and <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/589963/thanatology">thanatology</a> (the science of producing death).</p>
<p>As the extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland and the concentration camps in Germany were liberated, the scale of human destruction wrought by Nazi ideology both confounded and shocked. But, in their efforts to reap the benefits of Nazi scientific research, intelligence officers rapidly discovered the devastation of human medical experimentation. </p>
<h2>Nuremberg trials</h2>
<p>Jews, political prisoners and other “undesirables” were subjected to a range of experiments that resulted in death and disability. The Luftwaffe, for instance, wished to know how to protect and revive pilots shot down in the sea who suffered from hypothermia. The Nazi solution was to immerse experimental subjects in freezing water to the point of death and beyond.</p>
<p>Following the assassination of high-ranking Nazi <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/reinhard_heydrich.htm">Reinhard Heydrich</a>, a cry went out to experiment more boldly with <a href="http://www.drugs.com/drug-class/sulfonamides.html">sulphanomides</a> (drugs that curb the growth of bacteria) since Heydrich had died of wound infection. The solution: scarify the legs of experimental subjects, infect the wounds and see what happens with or without drugs.</p>
<p>These examples are the tip of the iceberg. Experiments with transplants, bacteria, gases and other chemical agents were carried out on thousands of hapless prisoners. Worst of all was <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200">the T4 programme</a>, which paved the way for the destruction of all “life unworthy of life” between 1939 and 1941. Thousands of disabled and mentally ill people were “euthanased” using a variety of techniques including mass gassing, a method that was later transferred to the extermination camps.</p>
<p>As part of trying to find out how Germany, one of the most scientifically sophisticated and humanistic cultures had become so perverted, a military tribunal was established as a corollary to the 13 <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials">Nuremberg trials</a>. And between December 1946 and August 1947, <a href="http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/NurembergDoctorTrial.html">23 medical doctors were tried</a> for war crimes and crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>The defence mounted by the doctors was founded on three points: first was the classic Nuremberg defence of only obeying orders in a time of national emergency. The second was that war was a time of national emergency where sacrifices had to be made for the greater good of the population, particularly troops. </p>
<p>But the most interesting was the final defence, which claimed what the Nazi doctors had done was little different from experiments carried out by the allies on their own prison populations, inmates of mental asylums, conscientious objectors and troops.</p>
<p>This final point was undeniable: in both the United States and Britain, experiments had been carried out on vulnerable groups. In 1941, for instance, patients at a Michigan state mental hospital were <a href="http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/historiesofcomsn/section2.html">deliberately infected with the influenza virus</a>. And in the early 1940s, predominantly African-American prisoners at the Statesville Penitentiary were <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health__care/t/ugly-past-us-human-experiments-uncovered/%20were%20deliberately%20infected%20with%20malaria">deliberately infected with malaria</a>.</p>
<p>These are only two of the many experiments carried out on vulnerable populations; people who could not be said to have the freedom to consent.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/84230/original/image-20150608-8674-95khjf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adolf Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt, later sentenced to death for participation and consent to medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karl_Brandt_SS-Arzt.jpg">USHMM, courtesy of Hedwig Wachenheimer Epstein</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was apparent a general code of ethics developing standards for informed consent in human research needed to come out of the trial so the judges formulated the Nuremberg Code as part of their judgement. They used the work of <a href="http://www.the-aps.org/fm/presidents/introaci.html">Andrew Ivy</a>, the American Medical Association representative, and psychiatrist and neurologist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/24/us/dr-leo-alexander-79-nuremberg-trial-aide.html">Leo Alexander</a> who was appointed to the prosecution team, both of whom had supplied the trial with their own ethical codes.</p>
<p>The code is generally regarded as the foundation of the <a href="http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/17c.pdf">World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration</a> (1964), which has become the bedrock of ethical standards for human experimentation and informed consent. But the story doesn’t have as happy an ending as all this would suggest. </p>
<h2>Things stay the same</h2>
<p>Despite the impact of the Nazi doctors’ trial and the promulgation of the new code of ethics, neither the United States nor its European allies, adhered to the code until a series of scandals suggested the need for a closer look at how medicine was conducting itself.</p>
<p>The existence of the code was not enough to halt the <a href="http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/techniques/tuskegee.aspx">Tuskegee syphilis study</a> in which 400 African-American men with syphilis were simply observed though treatment was available. Or to prevent the <a href="http://www.hhs.gov/1946inoculationstudy/factsheet.html">Guatemala syphilis experiments</a>, which involved about 1,500 children, prisoners, soldiers, sex workers and psychiatric patients. </p>
<p>Neither did it impact the deliberate exposure of military personnel and civilians <a href="http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/ethics_online/0032.html">to radioactive fallout from atomic testing</a>. Or the testing of nerve agents and other chemicals on conscripts at <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/west/series1/porton-down.shtml">Porton Down in the United Kingdom</a>. Clearly, the dictats of the Cold War overrode the post-Nuremberg ethical regime.</p>
<p>And when the Helsinki Declaration was finally released, key principals of the Nuremberg Code and its tight legal language had been watered down, giving more leeway to those conducting human experiments. Still, we are considerably better off today because of it, and should not forget the price that was paid for the institution of an effective ethics regime.</p>
<p>Perhaps there was a pragmatism in the actions of the United States that undermined their insistence on the prosecution of Nazi medical war crimes. In the Asian theatre of the war, the scale of human medical experimentation carried out by <a href="http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuneishi-Keiichi/2194/article.html">Japan’s Unit 731</a> was also staggering and brutal. </p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of lives are thought to have been lost to experiments that tested germ and chemical weapons. But not a single Japanese medical practitioner was held accountable for his actions.</p>
<p>Had the defendants at the Nuremberg doctors’ trial known this, the force of <a href="http://chinesejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/3/1/87.full.pdf">their third, tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) defence</a> would have been immeasurably strengthened. As it was, the disparity between Japan and Germany might explain why, at most, only lip service was paid to the Nuremberg Code. It might also explain how it was that the code became diluted in the Helsinki Declaration. </p>
<p>The judges and the prosecutors at Nuremberg were fully aware of the high stakes. But the implementation of their ethical vision required a political will that was sadly lacking.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/on-human-experiments">Click here</a> to read more articles in The Conversation’s series <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/on-human-experiments">On Human Experiments</a>.</strong></p>
<p><em>An error was introduced into the article during the editorial process that confused the Guatemalan syphilis experiment, in which subjects were deliberately infected with syphilis, with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in a group in the US. This has been corrected.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39929/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Bradley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The horror of the human experiments by Nazi doctors led to the Nuremberg Code but the international declaration it inspired was watered down for political purposes.James Bradley, Lecturer in History of Medicine/Life Science, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/390122015-04-14T09:49:07Z2015-04-14T09:49:07ZProgressive social movements spurred Holocaust consciousness by helping survivors tell their stories<p>Today, the destruction of European Jewry is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. A <a href="http://www.ushmm.org">museum</a> commemorating the destruction sits in our nation’s capital. Numerous states mandate <a href="http://hef.northwestern.edu">Holocaust education.</a> And when they speak in high school auditoriums and public libraries across the nation, the remaining survivors garner large, attentive audiences. </p>
<p>But it was not always so. For at least the first few decades after World War II, schoolchildren did not learn about the genocide of European Jewry. It was absent from lessons about the war, or about the waves of immigration to America’s shores. </p>
<p>While there were small-scale commemorative efforts in Jewish communities, there were no public memorials or museums to the murdered millions. In fact, the term “Holocaust,” separating the genocide of European Jewry from the events of the war, barely existed. </p>
<p>How, then, can we account for the enormous interest in the Holocaust today? </p>
<p>The conventional belief is that by raising money for memorials, lobbying elected officials to build museums, and producing big-budget films like <em>Schindler’s List</em>, Jewish elites were responsible for this shift. Of course, there is some truth to this. </p>
<p>But <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reluctant-witnesses-9780199733583?cc=us&lang=en&">my research</a> suggests that survivors and their descendants played pivotal roles in bringing their private stories out the shadows. They did so at a time when progressive social movements changed how Americans think about victimhood.</p>
<h2>The difficulty of speaking out</h2>
<p>One hundred fifty thousand survivors settled in the US after the war. Even before anyone began to collect their testimonies, or Steven Spielberg and others made films about them, survivors told stories about what they had endured – mainly to other survivors.</p>
<p>For the first few decades after WWII, these stories, which spoke of death and destruction, were exceedingly difficult to share with outsiders. Americans were preoccupied with returning soldiers, whom they feted as heroes. It was a time before post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognized as a psychological condition. </p>
<p>No wonder early survivor organizations chose to commemorate acts of wartime resistance, such as the <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188">Warsaw Ghetto Uprising</a>, rather than experiences of persecution. Persecution was far more common than heroism, but much more difficult to talk about.</p>
<p>Because few survivors were actually able to resist Nazi aggression, the focus on heroism during the early post-war period meant that few survivors could share their stories. And in fact, survivors were often discouraged from speaking publicly by friends, neighbors, and even <a href="http://www.ushmm.org/research/publications/academic-publications/full-list-of-academic-publications/case-closed-holocaust-survivors-in-postwar-america">social service professionals</a> who came into contact with them. Psychologist Yael Danieli has characterized this as the “conspiracy of silence.”</p>
<p>It would take shifts in American culture and the aging of the baby boom generation, to change this. By encouraging their parents to speak about their experiences, the “second generation,” at least 250,000 strong, played a pivotal role in bringing their parents’ stories into public view.</p>
<h2>Recognizing the victim</h2>
<p>Children of survivors were armed with ideas from therapeutic culture and influenced by identity politics, feminism and the black civil rights movement. Beginning in the mid-1970s, these descendants formed a collective identity and began to reclaim their hidden family histories. Small, therapeutically oriented “2G” support groups spread quickly throughout the country, the sign of a shifting generational consciousness. </p>
<p>As Malka, a descendant I quote in my book, <em><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reluctant-witnesses-9780199733583?cc=us&lang=en&">Reluctant Witnesses</a></em>, recalled: “Our parents’ generation survived by forgetting. Denial was a survival mechanism.” In contrast, she said, “the second generation ‘survives’ by remembering”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Our parents grew up in a generation and a culture where you didn’t talk about ‘unpleasant’ things, you swept them under the carpet, you put on a brave face. Emotions were something negative that you tried not to reveal. ‘Don’t be so emotional!’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Descendants were acutely aware of the lingering effects of their parents’ traumatic experiences. They were more likely to have a more positive view of self-expression, including the expression of negative emotions. They believed that being a victim should not be a mark of shame; it could even be a source of personal strength. Telling Holocaust stories, much like telling the stories of slavery, was important, they argued.</p>
<p>Survivors did not generally share their children’s more introspective orientation. Nonetheless, it was through their encouragement, example and coaxing that they came to speak more openly about the past. </p>
<p>By the 1980s, survivor Irene Hizme <a href="http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn60513">told</a> the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “It was becoming a little bit more OK to be a Holocaust survivor. People were finally interested.” </p>
<h2>People were finally interested</h2>
<p>Holocaust stories, first told within the worlds of survivors and their families, began to circulate far beyond them, in a culture where painful memories – of the continuing effects of slavery, sexual abuse or war – are increasingly discussed in public. </p>
<p>Partly through their children’s coaxing, survivors gained the moral authority to bear witness, commanding an increasingly important presence in Jewish communities and beyond. This history, however, has been largely forgotten.</p>
<p>Today, when the rise of Holocaust consciousness is often seen as a retreat from American Jewish liberalism, and when memory of the genocide is frequently exploited by those in power, we should remember that speaking about the Holocaust did not come easily. Progressive social activists created cultural openings that made such talk possible.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39012/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arlene Stein received funding from Rutgers University Research Council.</span></em></p>April 15 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. But how did we come to commemorate the genocide of European Jewry in this way when survivors could barely speak of the horrors they endured?Arlene Stein, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/259332014-04-25T05:18:17Z2014-04-25T05:18:17ZEurope’s hidden shame: Romani Nazi death camps barely merit signposts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47018/original/qjpbjn8w-1398345721.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Europe's untouchables: the Roma and Sinti</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/kristinaulmer/4815485236/in/photolist-36WAp4-DckTv-7WpPbs-aqgcT7-6PnMvh-8ct79x-dvjKmw-iDBHUY-6kqwjN-cZv4Cw-nh9wxY-5UKPvp-C4ef9-kzo9nT-czfENu-kfGoCe-5SampL-6ud6z8-82V6od-8kwBZw-b48pQ-bMwp2H-GvChK-6aD3ey-2ATA1x-8ct8wR-ao1VdE-JwJdW-5Scsqw-8FoaTm-2J9sfs-6QqzJV-2J58Pt-CoF3n-644qA9-8dQzXm-91tAcS-4tSj7s-CoF33-6QPqob-z3Fkr-jt8Hdg-4ufvjg-7yFQKG-2jCrFi-dgvDSs-dgvCvT-5Vv5Bc-d6Zsi-4fk3BZ">Kristina Ulmer</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Gypsies, tinkers, pikeys, travellers – everyone knows the terms, not to mention the even more derogatory ones. The <a href="http://www.sintiundroma.de/en/sinti-roma.html">Roma and Sinti people</a> have been the subject of prejudice and discrimination in Europe for centuries. </p>
<p>This has ranged from gypsy hunts in 16th century Bohemia, to incarceration and extermination under the Nazi regime, to present day discrimination against a population of more than 12 million people across Europe. </p>
<p>In the UK, <a href="http://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/1402/Prejudice-Rife-As-Stonewall-Launches-New-Project-To-Combat-Discrimination.aspx">a third of residents said in a survey</a> a few years ago that they were prejudiced against gypsies, travellers and Eastern European Romani. This scale of bigotry pervades much of Europe. </p>
<p><a href="http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/people/victroma.htm">Somewhere between 220,000 and 500,000</a> Roma and Sinti people are estimated to have lost their lives during the World War II. This imprecise statistic is a deliberate result of the disregard given to the process of forced labour and extermination that they went through.</p>
<h2>The people beneath the Jews</h2>
<p>In Nazi racist ideology such people were beneath contempt and considered to be worth less than Jews, so they did not see a need to record their incarceration or death. The lack of detailed record by an otherwise fastidious and technically obsessed regime is one of the reasons for the absence in history and concentration camp museums of the gypsy holocaust, or <em>porrajmos</em>, as the Romani call it. </p>
<p>Of the concentration camp sites across many of the countries that the Third Reich successfully invaded and annexed during World War II, there are few signs of the places where the Roma and Sinti were incarcerated and the vast majority lost their lives. It would seem that even remembrance is denied to a culture where the oral rather than written tradition is more common in recounting history. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/DARK-TOURISM-FOLEY-LENNON/dp/0826450644">My own research</a> into the field known as dark tourism – the attraction by visitors to sites of death, destruction and mass killing – has recognised the enduring attraction of concentration camps and sites associated with the Nazi holocaust. </p>
<p>These sites exist to preserve a memorial and educate future generations about the mistakes of the past. Their preservation is normally linked to education, promoting future tolerance and understanding. Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland records more than one million visitors per year; and Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin achieves close to 400,000 visitors every year. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=376&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47016/original/c4wnjngn-1398344998.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Lety camp only has this sign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Lennon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The limited number of sites associated with the gypsy holocaust has also been the subject of exploratory work. For example the remains of so-called gypsy camps in many parts of the Czech Republic – where there was a significant Roma and Sinti population prior to the war – have been lost and their locations are rarely commemorated. Indeed, <a href="http://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/camps/lety">Lety Concentration Camp</a>, one of the largest Roma and Sinti camps is commemorated by a single sign (in Czech) and just one interpretive board. </p>
<p>The site of this former camp is now covered by a sprawling industrial pig farm and pork processing plant established after the war and of such a scale that there is no vestige of the former buildings. <a href="http://www.antifa.cz/content/czech-roma-holocaust">Czech nationals collaborated and participated</a> in identifying and incarcerating Roma and Sinti, but this dark period of the country’s history is a narrative that is yet to find a proper voice.</p>
<h2>Echoes of the past</h2>
<p>This lack of commemoration and concern is not limited to the past. In contemporary Europe, Roma and Sinti still suffer discrimination and prejudice. It is notable that the European Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg <a href="http://www.romea.cz/en/news/world/the-shameful-history-of-anti-gypsism-is-forgotten-and-repeated">declared in 2008</a>, “today’s rhetoric against the Roma is very similar to the one used by Nazis and fascists …” </p>
<p>Roma and Sinti <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/looking-past-poverty-life-roma-ghettos">often live in ghetto-like conditions</a> around Europe. Their settlements are characterised by crumbling infrastructure, high rates of unemployment, low educational participation and poor levels of educational attainment.</p>
<p>In the UK between 75,000 and 300,000 gypsies and travellers <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/181669/DFE-RR043.pdf">are functionally illiterate</a>. The average school leaving age <a href="http://www.sec-ed.co.uk/news/roma-children-spread-the-word-on-their-culture">is under 13 years</a> and the propensity for depression and other mental health problems <a href="http://romasupportgroup.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Roma-Mental-Health-Advocacy-Project-Evaluation-Report.pdf">is 20 times higher than the norm</a>. Domestic abuse is common and infant mortality rates are among the nation’s highest. </p>
<p>This depressing and tragic evidence of discrimination has set these peoples apart from much of Europe for centuries. Their problems and issues go largely unreported and even their tragic past is either partially ignored or deliberately overlooked. </p>
<p>It has been said that until a nation can confront the very worst of its past, it cannot progress and grow. Here we have a tragedy that is both part of our shared past and a real element of our present. This excluded and oppressed minority require both a voice and our urgent attention.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25933/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Lennon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gypsies, tinkers, pikeys, travellers – everyone knows the terms, not to mention the even more derogatory ones. The Roma and Sinti people have been the subject of prejudice and discrimination in Europe…John Lennon, Director of Moffat Centre for Travel and Tourism Business Development and Vice Dean for Glasgow School for Business and Society, Glasgow Caledonian UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.