Lecture 7

LECTURE  7:   Building the Racial State

RACIAL HYGIENE – EUGENICS

Racial Hygiene

Human Betterment Foundation – USA

Eugenics

Compulsory Sterilization

Alberta Eugenics Board — compulsory sterilization of 2,832 Canadians (1929 -1972)  

Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (July 14, 1933) — taking effect January 1, 1934

Hereditary Health Courts

Alfred Hoche & Karl Binding, Authorization of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life (1920)

Karl Brandt

Philip Bouhler

Aktion T-4

Christian Wirth (“The Savage Christian”)

RSHA V D 2   Criminal Technical Institute Department of Forensic Chemistry

Aktion 14f13

Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen

70,273  Aktion

T-4 victims by August 1941 

(a total of 150,000-300,000 possible total victims through continued “unofficial” euthanasia after August 1941 and

Aktion 14f13 estimated by end of war)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM

antisemitism vs Anti-Semitism [LINK]

Antisemitism

·        Primitive classic

·        Fratricidal

·        Christian redemptive

·        Secular racist

·        Nationalist eliminationist

·        National Socialist exterminationst

Apollonius Molon, The Diatribe Against the Jews  (120 BCE)

Hellenization

Second Temple

Masada

Arch of Titus

zealots

Constantine

Council of Nicaea, 325 CE 

anti-Jewish canonical laws

Martin Luther  Concerning the Jews and Their Lies  (1543)

Napoleon

Emancipation of the Jews

Wilhelm Marr Der Weg zum Siege des Germanentums über das Judentum (The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism) 1879


ANTISEMITIC LAW AND REGULATION IN THE THIRD REICH

Destruction of European Jews, Raul Hilberg

1.     Definition and Identification

2.     Expropriation

3.     Deportation and Concentration

4.     Extermination

 

  • Decree for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service of April 7, 1933

  • Law Against Overcrowding in German Schools and Universities,  April 25, 1933

  • Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor  September 15, 1935  (“Blood Laws” or “Nuremberg Laws)

Reich Citizenship Law, November 14, 1935  (Defines “Jew”)

A Jew is:

·        A.  descended from at least three Jewish grandparents (Full or ¾ Jew)

·        B.  A Half-Jew descended from two Jewish grandparents, and:

·        a) Belonging to the Jewish community on or after September 15, 1935; or

·        b) married to a Jew on or after September 15, 1935; or

·        c) an offspring of a marriage contracted with a ¾ or full Jew after the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor came into effect (September 15, 1935); or

·        d) an offspring of an extramarital relationship with a ¾ or full Jew and born out of wedlock after July 31, 1936.

A Half Jew – (a Mischlinge ) is:

  ·        anyone who descended from two Jewish grandparents but who:

    A) did not adhere to the Jewish religion on or before Sept 15

     and

     B) was not married to a Jew

    and is classified as Mischlinge of the first degree

  •   anyone who descended from one Jewish grandparent,
      is classified as Mischlinge of the second degree

Mischlinge of the first degree

Mischlinge of the second degree

Jewish Enterprise

Aryanization

Evian Conference

IV B 4

Adolf Eichmann

Swiss-Austrian Visa Treaty

Kristalnacht

Atonement Tax

Flight Tax

SOURCES MENTIONED IN LECTURE

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide:  The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, New York:  Seabury Press, 1974.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, in Eva Fleischner (editor),“Antisemitism and Christian Theology”, in Auschwitz:  Beginning of a New Era? New York:  KTAV Publishing, 1977.

Kenneth Stow “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church:  Papal Policy Towards the Jews in the Middle Ages” in Shmuel Almog (ed), Antisemitism Through the Ages, New York:  Pergamon Press, 1988.

Goldhagen, Daniel Johan, Hitler’s Willing Executioners:  Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1996  

Gordon, Sarah, Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question”, Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1984.

Volkov, Shulamit, “The Written Word and Spoken Word:  On the Gap Between Pre-1914 and Nazi Anti-Semitism” in Furet, Francois, (ed), Unanswered Questions:  Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, New York:  Schocken Books, 1989. pp. 33-53

ADDITIONAL READINGS

Becker, Elizabeth, When The War Was Over:  Cambodia’s Revolution and the Voices of its People, New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1986

Burleigh, Michael, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ In Germany 1900-1945, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994. 

Frend, W.H.C, Martydom and Persecution in the Early Church:  A Study of Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965.

Furet, Francois, (ed), Unanswered Questions:  Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, New York:  Schocken Books, 1989.

Gordon, Sarah, Hitler, Germans and the “Jewish Question”, Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1984

Gourevitch, Philip, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families:  Stories From Rwanda, New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Gramal Hermann, Antisemitims in the Third Reich, London:  Blackwell, 1988.

Grant, Michael, The Jews in the Roman World, London:  Phoenix, 1973. 

Heer, Friedrich, God’s First Love:  Christians and Jews Over Two Thousand Years, London:  Phoenix, 1970. 

Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985.

Hsia, Po-Chia R., The Myth of Ritual Murder:  Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany, New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1988.

International Military Tribunal, Trials of the Major War Criminals, Washington, D.C.: 1947-49.

Kuernemud, Richard, Arminius or the Rise of a National Symbol in Literature From Hutten to Grabbe, Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina, 1953.

Küng, Hans, Judaism: Between Yesterday and Today, New York:  Crossroad, 1992.

Lindemann, Albert S., Esau’s Tears:  Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of Jews, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997. 

Littell, Franklin H., The Crucifixion of the Jews, New York:  Harper & Row, 1975.

MacLennan, Early Christian Texts on Jews and Judaism,  Atlanta GA:  Scholars Press, 1990.

Oberman, Heiko A., The Roots of Anti-Semeitism In the Age of Renaissance and Reformation, Philadelphia:  Fortress Press, 1981.

Olster, David M., Roman Defeat, Christian Response, and the Literary Construction of the Jew, Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Proctor, Robert N., Racial Hygiene:  Medicine Under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988

Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Faith and Fratricide:  The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, New York:  Seabury Press, 1974. 

Sax, Boria, Animals in the Third Reich:  Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust, New York:  Continuum, 2000.

Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory, New York:  Vintage Books, 1995.

Schellhase, Kenneth, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought, Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1976

Steinman, Lionel B., Paths to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History, New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1998.  

Weiss, John, The Ideology of Death:  Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, Chicago:  Ivan R Dee, 1996.

Weomreich, Max, Hitler’s Professors:  The Part of Scholarship In Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People, New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1999.

Wilken, Robert L.,  Judaism and the Early Christian Mind,  London:  University of Oxford Press, 1971.