Transcripts For CSPAN3 Studying The Holocaust 20240713

Topics, but it also is led by some of the worlds leading scholars, period. It is of course the holocaust. For this session, weve asked dr. Alexander richi who serves of the con veener of our president ial countslers to lead dr. Gare hard weinberg and jeff mcgargy. Alex has been involved with the museum since her first appearance at our 2014 dproens, and in those five years weve kept her quite busy. Many meetings, committees and also as you heard this morning, leading a lot of our educational travel tours. She has a deep and personal connection to the holocaust, as her fatherinlaw, who im sure shes going to explain more about, was himself in auschwitz during world war ii. So to hear the latest in holocaust scholarship and look at what was going on in june 1944, its my pleasure to ask dr. Richie to come up. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you so much. This is indeed a topic very, very close to my heart. As most of you know i live in warsaw in poland, as you just heard my fatherinlaw was in auschwitz when released, became a Founding Member of zigota which was an organization to try and save jws, the warsaw uprising was put into stallanist prince for his pains. Later was in solidarity. And then when the wall collapsed, became foreign minister of poland a couple of times. But his great passion in life was talking about what had happened, not just in poland but in germany and the soviet union and central europe, to make sure this history was not just remembered but actually understood, that it was constantly scrutinized and new research was always listened to and scholarship was always encouraged. Now Holocaust Research has constantly been changing since the war began with the horrors of the revelations of the camps and then the nuremberg trials revealed a great deal of the extent of nazi crimes. The member of the american prosecution team, rafael limbkin coined the term genocide. There were nish tives to remember the tragedy right away, things like the creation of the warsaw guetta memorial, the rediscovery of the ringel bloom archives and many other things right after the war. But Public Interest tended to wane and acdoechlic until really the eichmann trial in 1961. And Scholarly Research has exploded since the 19 yet80s. There are many new directions examining the holocaust which i know that jeff will be talking about, jeffs work which points to the tens of thousands of camps and killing sites in the holocaust. And theres new focus from everything from looking more at perpetrators, at collaboration, at the genesis of antisemitism, geography, many, many other things besides which well hear from our two magnificent speakers, im deeply honored and pleased indeed to be asked to introduce these two magnificent speakers, jeff mcgargy, Senior Applied Research scollour for holocaust studies in the u. S. Holocaust museum where he served as project director and editor in chief for the seven volume enpsychlo paidias, the first volume appeared in june 2009 received the National Award amongst other distinctions. Jeff received his doctorate in military history in 1998 from Ohio State University and is the recipient amongst others, William Fulbright grant, a work upon which he based his work inside hitlers high command, which was also the winner for the society of military historys 2001 distinguished book award. Hes the author of another book, and many other things as well. Im also deeply deeply honored to have gare hard weinberg who we hear the museum considered to be the dean of historians, internationally recognized authority on nazi germany, and origins and courses of world war ii. Hes a professor emertus at north carolina,| chapel hill. Hes the author or editor of so many books and articles its almost impossible to list them. I wanted to say i used his work when i was starting out as a historian and have wellthumbed copies of most of his work. I just site plucking one out of the blue, a world at arms, which is so extraordinary and really encapsulates his work, because not only is it scholarly and discusses the war, but it brings his incredible life experience, born in hamburg, working after the war in japan, learning about the entire world, the history of world war ii is seen from a military perspective, political perspective, social economic and 78 other per specifictics, and he manages to weave all of this into this extraordinary international, global perspective, which is extremely rare. So its with great, great gratitude and honor that i welcome gare hard first to the stand. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. Can you hear me . Thats a big help. [ laughter ] for some time, there was a scholarly debate that attracted a good deal of attention between those who called themselves or were called intentionlists and functionalists. The former argued that the systematic killing of jews was planned and organized from the top. While the latter held that the process was one of steady radicalization, pushed forward over time by those involved, as they engaged in every more radical procedures, culminating at some point in systematic mass killing. The careful attention to local detail and initiatives that characterized the work of those who called and considered themselves functionalists has certainly contributed greatly to our ability to follow the technical developments of mass murder. And the extent to which individual police, military and administrative personnel could and did exercise their own judgment about the procedures followed. Whatever the prior developments and the making of local decisions, as state of formal decision of the very top, even some of those writing about the hurricane still preferred to ignore the relevant evidence and continue to advocate something of a functionalist interpretation. We know from the romainian record that was determined to be accurate by the german official who checked it at the time, that when adolf hitler met romanian in munich on june 12th, 1941, the latter asked hitler what was to be done about the jews in the soviet territory that their armies were about to invade. An important issue for antonesscue, since the area that would be seized initially was known to contain a very large number of jews. Hitler told him that they were all to be killed. An instruction that the evidence indicates he had earlier orally given to heinrich himmler. We also know now, we have a clear confirmation of the meeting before the invasion at which a high ss official told the commanders of the iansat, murder commandos, that were to follow the german kmapders into the soviet union, that a major part of their assignment was to be, to kill all the jews. Ill come back to the source for this resolution of a subject that was once quite controversial when i get to it at another point. All the evidence we now have leaves no doubt that the commanders of the battalions of the order police, units with members more than ten times as numerous as the famous ianzats grutman, were similar instructed by the invasion of june 1941. Hitlers own telling, the minister of war of croatia in late july 1841, that all jews in europe were to be killed, and was telling the grand muffti in jerusalem that all jews in the middle east and in the rest of the world were also to be killed, are both recorded in the german documents published decades ago, although these very clear and explicit records are still ignored by many scholars. A trend in the literature that has not moved as far and as widely as this speaker thinks is needed is that of the very close interrelationship of the war as a fight between germany and those it attacked on the one hand, and the holocaust on the other. Its only quite recently that those writing on the war other than myself include any references to the holocaust at all. And similarly, those who write on the holocaust pay very much too little attention to the realities of the fighting. Let me illustrate this issue with some examples. The murder commandos in many cases killed men, not whole families, in the first weeks of the german invasion of the soviet union. This is occasionally used as evidence for a first step that would be followed by radicalization subsequently. What is missing here is any reference to the reality of the early fighting on the Eastern Front. The german assault surprised the red army that stalin had held back as he disregarded all warnings from his own Intelligence Service and from the british and American Governments. The German Forces, under these circumstances, advanced very rapidly, and the german armys chief of staff, general hol dug, was sure, on july 3rd, 1941, that the campaign had succeeded and the rapid advance of German Forces showed that a quick victory was certain. This meant, as a practical matter, that a murder commander that had to follow in advancing German Military unit through some of the most densely jewish settled part of europe, at the rate of about 30 miles a day. They were simply not in a position to do anything else. The members of the unit would shoot the local men and come back from the front slowed down to kill the women and children. The units members did what they could in the circumstances of the moment, and had no need either for new orders or the personal supervision of heinrich himmler, who as we know repeatedly went to the east in the summer of 41 to watch the progress of his new program, and just as subsequently i would visit auschwitz in the summer of 1942 to observe the killing procedure implemented there. Neither hitler nor antonessco cared whether jews were killed by gas or other means. That was the subject left to local initiatives and preferences. A most critical point about the fighting, namely that the allies first contained and then ended the holocaust also rarely receives the attention it deserves. Please do not be offended if i suggest that if the germans had won and obtained control of the 47 of the then 48 states of the usa, that the japanese were willing for them to have, there would surely have been in my american group, some whom themselves or their parents or grandparents would have been killed because they were jewish. Some in this audience would have been killed as jews. Some nonjews would have been killed because of some handicap. And some would have con tralkted polio and either died as a result or been crippled and then killed because the two doctors, joanna salt and albert saban who whos discovery concurred that disease in the 1950s would both have been killed because they happened to be jewish. On the other side of the relationship between the cause of the fighting and the holocaust, those who written endlessly about field marshal rammel and his campaigns in north africa generally ignore a critical part of his assignment. He was indeed originally sent there in april 1941 to salvage italys colony of libya, left the italian people dump mous mousseoliny when that colony was lost to british forces, a point that was a major worry for hitler. But why push the africa corps as it was called on into equippgyp the middle east in 1942, and do this at a time when the primary military theater for germany was the Eastern Front where things in the had obviously not gone the way hitler and his generals had confidently anticipated . An. The germans intended italy to have egypt and the middle east for its oil while germany would get its oil from the caucuses. In spite of these realities and plans, and in spite of the necessity for a renewed major summer offensive against the soviet union, the moment in the summer of 1942 it looked as if the africa corp might get to cairo and beyond, a special murder commander was attached to it. This was not done because hitler wanted the members to get a good tan or the hitler expected them to dismantle one of the pyramids so that it could be reerected next to the hall in berlin. The whole point was that all of the jews in the middle east, about 1 million at the time, were to be killed before the area was turned over to italy because hitler and for good reasons of Prior Experience did not trust the italians to do so but did trust rammel to direct the murder command to do what hitler had personally promised the grand mauve ty of jerusalem a little more than half a year earlier. In recent decades there have been on hand significant and positive developments in the study of the holocaust as a result of several trends. And especially important trend has been the declassification of very important relevant records. The agreement of the British Government in 1996 to the opening of their interception and decoding of the reports of the German Order Police has transformed our understanding of the early stages of the holocaust in 1941. It is now clear that these Police Battalions included not only about ten times as many men as the murder commandos, over 25,000 as compared with close to 3,000. But also undoubtedly killed far more jews than the commandos whose report because of their far earlier availability for research had been a central piece of evidence in all prior studies of the subject and remain of great importance. The recent publication by the german city of bremhan on the participation in the holocaust of two Police Battalions from that city both supplements what we already knew about such units and also provides vivid details about their participation in such specific operations as the notorious september 1941 mass murder of over 30,000 jews in the ukraine at kiev as well as their guarding of transports of jews from the restibbal transit camp in the netherlands to auschwitz beginning in the summer of 1942. Perhaps other german cities will follow the example of brayman and facilitate first the research on and then the publication of the activities of Police Battalions that originated in them. Additional Important Information has come to light with the declassification that came out of the 1998 nazi war crimes disclosure and Imperial Japanese records act passed by the american congress. A major feature of that law was that it lifted the automatic exclusion from declassification with you and from the implementation of freedom of information requests of two categories of american records. Those relating to intelligence sources and methods and those called Foreign Government information. A general name utilized by u. S. Government for material provided to the United States by a Foreign Government that had a security classification at the time it was given to our government. While records in the former category could now be and were subjected to systematic de classification review in the latter case the government that had provided the material and for world war ii this generally meant Great Britain would be asked for its consent to declassification. The procedure in the former category relatively promptly led to massive declassifications and work on these newly open records is only just beginning. In the process of requesting permission to declassify in the latter category, it turned out that the british were unusually cooperative. As chair of the Historical Advisory Panel the group established to implement the new law, i was told by several of those at the working end of the declassification process that this rather dramatic break with all of their Prior Experience in dealing with the british on declassification records was most likely due to the widely known personal interest of then president clinton in the general topic. If there were a hold up reported to him he might telephone his friend, british Prime Minister tony blair at 10 downing street and those in the relevant offices in and near london did not want the rocket from 10 downing street. Since by definition the records in question were at least half a century old. The highly unusual repeatedly to declassify was unlikely to cause any real problems for british security. An important biproduct of american intelligence records was the publication of books by Richard Brightman and others about the post war american recruitment of nazis, some with exceedingly dubious records by american intelligence agencies. One significant product of the declassification of Foreign Government information with consent of the British Government is the collection of summaries of british interrogations of murder commando leader otto ollendorf in the summer of 1945 before he was turned over to the americans in december of that year and which hillary could utilize for her book on the nuremberg trial of the murder commando leaders. Its reasonable to expect that in the coming years other researchers will find Important Information in the material that the british allowed the American Government to open up. Obviously the American Government could ask for de classification of only those british documents of which copies had been given to it at the time. That left open the question of british records, especially if their Intelligent Services of no copies were to be found in american archives. That process also has been moving forward slowly but steadily in recent years and scholars like steven tireas has been making good use of the newly open records. We could expect important publications based on the declassified records in the coming years. There is also now a clearer perspective on two quite different facets of the events. A way in which some tried to profit from the murder of their former neighbors is illustrated quite dramatically by the 2012 book of jan gross, golden harvest, events at the periphery of the holocaust which offers insight into the digging up of both the dead and related materials for profit by substantial numbers of on the other side the way a few jews tried to protect themselves and their families by aiding the nazis is described by peter wines 1991 book which recounts the activities of a notorious jewish woman who assisted the nazis in catching jews trying to survive with false identities or in hiding in wartime berlin. If the descendants of the woman who betrayed jews to the nazis have problems engaging their situation with this ancestry, it is worth considering those of jennifer teague, the woman who hasnt a doubt makes her discovery that her mother was the daughter of the murderer who is shown shooting jews as a form of morning entertainment in the famous movie schindlers list. She, not unreasonably, entitled her memoirs, my grandfather would have shot me. She does speaking for the Holocaust Memorial museum about her experiences and findings. May i suggest that a significant issue only to confront engage in is this divergence between a clearer and more thoroughly published scholarship about the holocaust on the one hand and a gentle mental distance from it and the war of which it was an essentially part on the other. Another Significant Development in the field of holocaust studies has been its inclusion with other genocides in centers, programs and courses. This is a development that should not in this opinion be opposed. It is essential, however, that in the process there not be any gliding over of distinctive features of the holocaust that have not been a part of any of the other horrors that we call genocide. Im not suggesting that the holocaust is worse than other genocides, but that there are significant differences between it and the other genocides that the courses and programs engage. The most obvious of these features fundamental differences i would suggest is the geographic one. All other genocides had a specific geographic focus. Those who killed others did so to remove a hated population element from a specific area the Armenian Genocide was a terrible event in the ottoman empire. Those who ordered and perpetrated it were not interested in armenians who settled in the United States, latin america or anywhere else outside of the ottoman empire. The who were busy murdering eastern Orthodox Christians in the world war ii puppet state of croatia were not planning to kill eastern Orthodox Christians who moved to chicago or lives anywhere else in europe. The holocaust was a project to clear all jews on the globe regardless of location. The allies were successful in containing it and thereby saving approximately twothirds of the intended victims. But that was most certainly a great disappointment to those who initiated and implemented that particular genocide. Another difference between the holocaust and other genocides is the routineized implementation by vast numbers of officials, soldiers and others over a period of four years before they were halted. This development and holocaust studies making even more important than the special professional concern of historians and other scholars the major issues of access to records on the one hand and the preservation of records on the other. The american records relating to the holocaust have been systematically de classified. The relevant germany records in germany and any still held in the United States, britain and france, are also as far as we know accessible or in the process of being opened. The germans have been working hard to observe permission to microphone german records that were captured by the advancing red army and are scattered in archives all over the Russian Federation in exchange for giving the russians a set of the films. The extent to which these provide Additional Information on the holocaust is largely unknown at this time. But suggests an important collection of material to be utilized in future investigations. As i mentioned earlier, the british have been declassifying their holdings of intelligence files from world war ii and it is reasonable to expect that before too long that process will be completed. In other European Countries the process differs some from state to state. A complete survey of that issue remains to be prepared and publicized. This situation leads for consideration that two major types of relevant records of the existence of which wed know but that are not as yet fully accessible for research. These are some of the files of the president ial archive of the soviet union and the world war ii intelligence files of the soviet union, both held and kept closed by the current regime as moscow. As no one needs to be reminded, the soviet union resolved over two decades ago. At first there was thereafter a very substantial opening of access to records, but over the years there has been in the Russian Federation something of a reversal. Ironically precisely in the years in which in other countries there has been an increasing willingness to open records up. Certainly there has been more access both to russian scholars and to those from other countries than was true in the former soviet union, but the reality remains that the access has been for some years and is currently behind that of all other major world war ii allies. And our point in the next portion of this talk, the current restrictive policy is extremely likely to keep even those who insist on locking up parts of the record from ever being able to benefit from reading it themselves. The issue of access is very closely related to the issue of preservation. In world war ii, all religions deliberately utilized poor paper in order to use their resources for more important things. The paper is in the process of disintegration and some of it is already no longer readable. This is not micro filmed, it will be permanently inaccessible to its guardians as well as to interested scholars. This is an aspect of the still closed records that has not received the attention that both in my judgment and in my experience it deserves and desperately needs. Closely related to the issue of deteriorating paper, though only rarely mentioned, is the issue of inaccessible electronic records. No one wants to hear this. But it happens to be a case. In an American Government Advisory Committee in the late 90s, members were informed that our government could no longer access very substantial portions of its own records of the vietnam war. This is certain to be a continuing problem. People refuse engage the reality of ideological change. Digitalization is fine as long as all involved recognize that this is a format that facilitates access from widely scattered and distant locations, but only for a short time. Perhaps 15 years at the most, 15. The point that i want to stress is that this issue of technological change and deteriorating paper mean that unless records are micro filmed and those micro films are reproduced after 75 years, a great deal is simply going to disappear from access and we need to remember that in our libraries there are risks of books, manuscript collections and journals also deteriorating over time and being subject to technological changes that will affect not only obviously the particular subject of the holocaust, but all research in the history of the recent past. Thank you. [ applause ] good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. We all know now how pivotal the month of june 1944 was in the european theater. With the success of overlord and the destruction of Army Group Center by the soviets the third rights was clear. Unfortunately the germans didnt read the memo. They would fight on with a mix of ideal logical and panic and cooers and every day they fought on millions of prisoners suffered and died in the complex of camps that still functioned in the territory that the germans controlled. For nearly 20 years ive been the project director and general editor of the United States Holocaust Memorial museum encyclopedia of camps and ghettos. That project is focused on the individual camps, who ran them and the conditions and so on. There was a sense that the whole was more than the sum of the parts. And after 20 years were beginning to see the big picture and that is what i want to discuss with you today. We all know that nazis ran camps and we have images of them in our minds. But what do we really know about these places . And ill point out that im using this word camps as a shorthand. Were going to talk about a lot of different kinds of facilities. But lets start with the basic point. If you think of all of the different kinds of camps that you know about, concentration camps, extermination centers, p. O. W. Camp, forces labor camps, how many do you think there were . In the encyclopedia well cover 45,000 individual sites. Ill give you a moment to think about that. And ill tell you that that is a low figure. That is less than half of what really exists but a lot of documentation is missing and some categories are just too big for us to put into the encyclopedia. Now the numbers themselves are significant but the key point about the camp is how essential they were to the nazi program. The nazi regime had four overlapping goals. Ensuring the dominance of the arian race and keeping a Peaceful Community which also had a racial component. Conquering living space to guarantee germanys selfsufficienty and defeating germany enemies, internal and external. The camps were a set of practical tools which the nazis tried to achieve those goals. This is how we make sense of a collection of so many different kinds of camps with different prisoners under different agencies. Really the camps were a system. Not like a computer or a car designed and produced as a unit. But as a group of organizations that acted independently to acleave related goals. So i want to examine the purposes that the camp served and that way we could get a sense of how the system worked. Well start with detention. Control of prisoner space and time was the most fundamental goal for every site. But detention was never a purpose in and of itself. It makes no sense to lock people up no reason. Detention facilitated other purposes. For example, there were internment camps for foreign nationals, especially westerners, people just on the wrong side of a border when the war broke out or Something Like that. It seems like a case of pure detention. Little was demanded of these people. They werent being punished and they didnt have to work or targeted for elimination. But there was a connection to the war effort. They were potential spies for saboteurs and they had to be detained and observed. This was common in every country that took part in the war. In other cases, other aims became more prominent very quickly. We could talk about the ghettos. There were about 1,150 ghettos created on an ad hoc basis to detain jews but eventually labor and extermination also became part of their purpose. The inmates were put to work and denied food and medicine. By june of 1944 the ghettos were pretty much all gone. That was also true for the socalled forced labor camps for jews of which there are about 1,900. These were linked with the ghettos very often. People were taken out of the ghettos and put into camps and worked until they were too weak to work any more and thrown back in the ghetto again. You dont want enemy soldiers wandering around the neighborhood. But labor soon became very important. The germans wanted to put these people to work. And tens of thousands of subcamps sprung up at labor sites all over germany. Some p. O. W. Camps were de facto killing sites. Soviet p. O. W. S were condemned for reason of race and politics and suffered a 53 death race, that is about 3. 3 million soviet soldiers died in german captivity through shooting, starvation, exposure and disease and overwork. You could compare that to a 2 to 3 death rate for most other p. O. W. S. So you could see how detention worked and youll start to see how these purposes overlap as well talk about more of them. We just talked about labor in ghettos and p. O. W. Work sites and now well focus on it as another purpose, a main purpose for the camps. Frankly it is hard to find a camp that didnt use labor. Labor fulfilled two overlapping objectives, productive and punitive. The productive objective was making up for a labor shortage and producing military supplies and performing other functions at minimal cost and after all most young german men were fighting a war and so the germans had to pull other people in to perform the labor. And in fact the largest category of camps were the camps for foreign forced laborers, that is nonjews. There were more than 36,000 of these camps. How many more we dont know. Were going to be counting them up for years to come. The prisoners who were in them were there simply to work in every con seepable sector of the economy, agriculture, manufacture, mining, retail and trarpgs and even social services. Individual firms and factories had their own camp and when there was demand for small number of workers at many sites say in a small Farming Community the germans put together Community Camps where the prisoners would sleep at night and then during the day they would go out in twos and threes and half dozen to perform work on many sites. The punitive objective was to establish punishment and control. The nature and the pace of work could be adjusted to exhaust, humiliate ando press and sometimes even to kill. The work itself could kill. And prisoners who became too weak to work were often murdered. This is done in concentrations. There were 24 main concentration camps at about 900 subcamps at work sites and there were camps for soldier who broke some regulation and Justice Ministry and gestapo prison and police camps and other sites that used punitive labor. This could be a tool for reform for the very small number of prisoners whom the nazis wanted to reform and release. Really it was a matter of establishing so much harsh work for them that you broke their spirit and they would never give you any trouble again. There were also camps called these were work education camps, there were about 235 of these. An interesting case because they show you the links between some of the types of camps. If you were a forced laborer and you refused to work or you werent working hard enough or you broke some regulation, you could be sent to an lager for up to eight weeks and you would be forced to work under very harsh circumstances. And after eight weeks if youre attitude had improved you could go back to your forced labor camp which would seem like a garden party in comparison. If it was judged your attitude had not improved you would be sent on to a concentration camp which would be considerably worse. And there is a huge gray area. Concentration camp prisoners and gitto inmates were supposed to be performing Productive Work even while being worked to death. And ordinary forced laborers from Eastern Europe who werent being punished for anything were often starved and beaten and tens of thousands of them died. This gives us our segue. It was a tool for reform, a means of control and a deterrent to people outside. Germans knew that if they misbehaved and people in occupied europe as well of course, if they miss behaved they would wind up in someplace that was going to be extremely unpleasant. A punishment could take many forms. Weved about labor already. Detention was another form of punishment obviously. And every normal part of camp life could be adapted for punishment. The food and housing and clothing and roll call add confinement and beatings and torture and execution. Much occurred without cause or justification. There were excesses even though brutality was supposed to be officially regulated, there were supposed to be rules for such things, but there was plenty of room for gratuitous cruelty. So the nazis, some people just deserved to be punished because of who they were or how they behaved. These includes jews, socalled gypsies, career criminals, hoaxo sexuals, drugs, slobs, members of certain religious fects and soldiers from the army and anyone hostile to the regime. These people were a dangerous to the peoples community. Theyre treatment could be whatever the authorities decided upon. Next were going to talk about enforcing racial policy. Nazism was based on the idea that races compete for resources the way animals compete in a darwin sense and some deserve to take what they need, lesser races could be enslaved or eliminated. This ideology created real world consequences for the people in the camps. The eastern forced laborers who were beaten and starved, the russian p. O. W. S who died by the millions were among the victims whose camp experiences were harsher and fatal because of who they were. Then there were facilities that served racial goals directly. There were places that we termed germanization facilities, over 300 of them mostly in german medical facilities. These were places where Young Children from russia or poland or czechoslovakia who appeared to have valuable racial characteristics, blond hair and blue eyes would put in a facility and evaluated and if they were found valuable they would be given to german couples to be raised as germans. Then there were the euthanasia centers. Now were careful how we talk about this phrase. This is not euthanasia as we debate it today. This is how the germans dealt with people in germany, children and adults, who had disabilities and congenital diseases. There were about 170 and we suspect more euthanasia centers where they used poison gas on human beings an they killed up to 300,000 people in these places. And then of course there were the extermination camps that were an outgrowth from the euthanasia certainties. And the sites that placed the nazi regime in my estimation most firmly aport from any other. About 2. 7 million victims mostly jews died on route to the extermination camps. Most of the camps had shut down and been eliminated by june of 44 but auschwitz was still in operation murdering the jews of hungary. Racial theory was central to the plan to reorder the map of Eastern Europe and the resources that went with it. They would be useful in the shortterm for fighting the war and in the longterm for supporting the arian race. And to that end the germans created poland lager, camps for polls, so hold polls being expelled from homes and businesses so that ethnic germans from far east could take over and the poland lager were such harsh places that they became de facto death camps. And then finally there is fighting a total war. I have often heard it asked why did the germans waste so much effort and so many resources to imprison and kill people when they had a war to fight. Well the short answer is this is not a waste. The camp served a central purpose as part of the war effort. Labor camps, ghettos and other sites contributed to the war through production and the destruction of the jews was certainly not a distraction. Not a waste. This was a war aim. This was one of the reasons why they were fighting to begin with. To rid the world of the jewish race. In a lesser sense, so were other efforts to strengthen the a total war required the control or elimination of anyone who weakened society or threatened the nations ability to fight. The used camps as part of the total war effort under the guise of military necessity. Civilians in the east were incarcerated, screened and often executed as communist, partisans or jews. The army used hundreds of thousands of people for forced labor, working on roads and fortifications in the east. It sent more of those people back to germany for forced labor there. This was part of their socalled antipartisan campaign. Now im going to ask you to give me a show of hands if you have heard of the socalled comfort women . All right. I thought so. Ill bet that most of you dont know that the germans did exactly the same thing. They set up a network of what they called field brothels in cities throughout occupied europe and the women who worked in those brothels, the vast majority of them, were not there voluntarily. They were rounded up in the streets, they were taken out of concentration camps, and sometimes they were put in there because they were being punished for some violation. Now, from all of this i think you can see just how pervasive, how dominant and how significant the camps were. They were a central part of the nazis regime. They conspired to control the german lives for their own good. Anyone not a member was a target. Racial and political enemies and social outcast and military opponents all faced detention and indoctrination and abuse and even. This was war on many levels. Total war. In pursuit of which the germans forced millions to sacrifice freedom and their health and their lives. The camps were tools in that effort. They were centers of production and means of combatting resistance and weakness all for the benefit of the socalled arian race. In the end they achieved none of those things and in fact became the most visible reason why so much of the world banded together to defeat the nazi regime. Thank you very much for listening. [ applause ] thank you to our panelists. We have time for a few questions before our hard end at 3 30. So if you please raise your hand, well start in the front to your right. Thank you very much for your presentation. Perhaps you folks could answer a question ive posed to some military experts in the last month or so with regards to the normandy camp. In the summer of 1944 from a military standpoint field marshalls ramal and roonstead and others i understand felt that the war was lost and the answer was for the germans to settle with the west and then combine forces to combat the communist hoard. My question that i havent had answered and ill expand it a little bit is could they really expect to settle with the west if in light of the final solution. So my question is at least on thever mock side, who knew that all of this was going on, especially in light of your explanation of how pervasive and scattered and multiple purposes and like a web of intrigue is to how terrible and awful this thing truly is was. So youre talking, i want to make sure i understand, youre talking about who knew in germany . Yeah. At what level. Im sure on the s. S. But in the general army, the ver mauch, who knew. Soldiers were taking pictures of shootings. They werent taking pictures in the extermination camps. Those were supposed to be a secret. Although word of that got out pretty quickly too. Word got out of all of this. And especially when you get to the last year of the war and last half of the war. The number of camps, the number of prisoners who were doing all kinds of things, you couldnt turn a corner in any german city or town without running into people who were being held against their will, forced to work, abused, there is no secret about this. There was no secret about the concentration camps from the very start. Because the German Government wanted people to know about these places. They wanted the deterrent effect from people knowing that these places existed. There is another aspect to this that i think is very important and that is enormous participation of the military and the killing program. There is a very good recent book by waitman bjorn that deals with the german army in belarus in white russia where the shooting of jews becomes a part of standard procedure for german soldiers so that while obviously they do not know the details and coverage and so on, this is in general very well known at the time and for those higher up in normandy they are told that the reason that the german army cannot send as much ammunition to the german soldiers fighting the british americans and canadians in naturormandy is thn march of 44 germany occupied hungary and there are a lot of trains running from the Rural Communities of hungary to auschwitz carrying jews and they cannot simultaneously, while carrying jews to their death in auschwitz, carry ammunition from german factories to northern france. Just a quick end note to that when you talk about the delusional germans who thought they were going to join forces with the americans and fight the soviets. The day after hitlers birthday, 1945, so the 21st of april meets with the head of the representative of the World Jewish Congress from sweden, first time he met a jewish person in the house and he shakes him by the hand and said lets say bygones be bygones and be gone. Crazy. I would like to know what was the extent of the role of german women, particularly s. S. Wives in this extermination of jews and the holocaust, to what extent did that happen . There were very substantial numbers of women guards in the camps. There were also others who performed a duties for the german killing units. And so the participation in the killing program was predominantly male but there was a very substantial female participation. There were also wives of usually senior s. S. Personnel at their at cities in the east or at camps. Ill recommend a book by wendy lauer, l. O. W. E. R. , if i could remember the hitlers furies. Yeah, hitlers furies. The question is all the way to the right with connie, please. I think i speak for everyone in the room when i say what an honor it is to hear you speak again dr. Weinberg. We had a discussion the other day about auschwitz and why it was not bombed by the allied forces so i go running out to the table to try to find your book that was mentioned, of course i dont have the title, so perhaps you could give us some sort of indication of your opinion of why the allies did not bomb auschwitz and what was in the chapter in your book that im missing, thank you. The allies had a general idea of what was going on. But they prioritized the military side of the war. And it was the military side of the war that saved twothirds of the worlds jews. What the allies knew was that, yes, if you bomb the ig farm and an ex to auschwitz, but the camp, the germans would simply find another way to kill jews. What one has to remember is that the holocaust had a high priority for the regime. And there is substantial literature, a recent book by luron pasher about how the holocaust interfered with the daytoday conduct of the war by the germans. What we tend to overlook is that from the perspective of hitler and his immediate associates, at times the war might make the holocaust more difficult and other times the holocaust might make the fighting more difficult. But from their perspective, and please remember they always act on their views, not yours, not mine, but theirs, these were the two interrelated important issues. They were not trying to conquer the globe for entertainment purposes. The conquest of the globe was to be for a demographic revolution on the globe and that demographic revolution would include the disappearance not only of jews, but of slavic people of roma and jgypsies and the killing of all of the handicap, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to keep in mind that a regime that is in the process of killing its own disabled world war i veterans finishes that in the fall of 44 and has started on the systematic killing of its disabled world war ii veterans. It is putting its ideological objectives high and on roughly the same level. The last question is going to be in our front row to your far left, panelists. A few weeks ago in the site was jewish light an article was printed once again arguing that president roosevelt is responsible for the death of jews because he refused to bomb Railroad Lines. Ive read this repeatedly. What is your reaction to that theory. I think it is a lot of nonsense. The reality is that a president is bound by the constitution of the United States and roosevelt took that very, very seriously. The one time on the basis of the rules under which a president can temporarily bring prisoners of war during the war to the United States, german, italian, japanese, the president decided at one time to bring just short of a thousand refugees into this country. This is the famous os weego experiment. Immediately impeachment proceedings procedures begin in the congress. And i do not think it is a coincidence that two things happened within 24 hours of each other. The white house announces there will be no further such experiments and impeachment procedures are dropped. I think we have to see this in terms of the political realities of the time where there were limitations on the president which the president adhered to and on the other hand when it was possible and where it was, he assisted jewish refugees. And ill just add one point and that is that you can repair a Railroad Line in a day. You have to hit them again and again and again. It has to be a sustained attack and, again, as gerhart points out, the American Army was more interested in winning the war. That was the best way, they thought, to stop the killing. Thank you to all of our panelists. [ applause ] [ proceedings concluded ] American History tv products are now available at the new cspan online store. Go to cspan store. Org to see what is new and check out all of the cspan products. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Created by cable in 1979. And brought to you today by your television