Transcripts For CSPAN2 Why 20170129

Their. But, it seemed like the right time to revisit the decade and talk to people who were activists because many of them were in their late 60s and 70s and ready to reflect and is so much had gone on in the last 45 years that there was a lot to talk about and i wanted to catch them at a time when they still remembered what they had done and wanted to reflect. You could watch this and other programs online at book tv. Org. Good evening and welcome. Time when the lower, director of the museum. It is my honor to welcome you on behalf of the United States Holocaust Memorial museum to tonights program. Why did the holocaust happened. I would like to also welcome our digital audience joining us from all around the globe. You may share your reflection and ask questions on twitter and facebook. The museum helps people think about why the holocaust happened and how it was possible in one of the most advanced civilized regions of the world. If you were to look at europe and specifically germany, before hitler came to power you would find democracy, struggling ones, but still democracy. Certainly, you would find growing anxiety and fear as a result of the great war, the economic depression and the rise of communism and you would find increasing antisemitism, which became a convenient explanation for every problem in crisis that bissett european blues civilization. In germany you would find one of the most highly educated nations in the world, 25 of the ss leadership had a phd or advanced degree. You would find a country with a dynamic free press. Berlin alone had 146 newspapers. You would find a country with 39 nobel prize winners. Of the holocaust reminds us of the progress and fragility of human rights that the unthinkable is always thinkable and that in all societies you are susceptible to treating the other as inferior. To the abuse of power and tendency to justify any behavior. The museum is to elicit the best within us and to remind us with both confidence that the memory has the capacity to transform and that the lessons of the holocaust had the intestate capacity to inspire that each of us has the responsibility to act. What you do, what we do, what we have done and will achieve together matters. This Museums Program is the first in a new series entitled the power of memory to shape our future, which explores the power of our collective understanding of the holocaust and how we can use it to create a better world. Please assign a before museum emails and follow us on social media for more details on the series. Tonight, we are joined by peter hayes, Professor Emeritus of history in german and the Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of holocaust studies at northwestern university. Professor hayes earned his ba and phd in history from yale university. The author of more than 80 articles and 12 books and several landmark studies on business of the third reich including burke books, hayes has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation and in 199798 he was awarded the jb senior scholarship. Senior in stature, not age. [laughter] he also serves as chairman of the Museum Academic any. In peters new book why explaining the holocaust he dispelled many misconceptions and answered some the most basic questions that remain, why the jews and not another ethnic group, why the germans, why such a swift and sweeping extermination, why didnt did it more jews fight back more often . Why did they receive more help . While responding has been most frequently asked and peter brings a wealth of experience on conventional popular views of the history, challenging some of the most prominent recent interpretation and argues theres no single theory that explains the holocaust, rather the convergence of multiple forces at a moment in time that led to the test catastrophe. He will share the main point of this book while also offering a behindthescenes look detailing why he wrote his new book and why it took the form it did. It is now my great pleasure to welcome peter hayes to the stage [applause]. Good evening and thank you all for coming out on a rainy night at a busy week to hear about a book that you can get delivered in a brown paper wrapper to your front door. Most historian books spring as it were from the head of zeus. They usually are a fullblown idea that a person has about seeing something in a new way. The author gets an idea, what we call him a trade a thesis and goes out to try to find evidence that supports it, sometimes evidence that refutes it, but more often we tend to follow the path we have in mind. Then, to write an account to vindicate it. This book that i have written is very different in the way it began. In the late 1980s, i began to teach a course on the history of the holocaust. I had been trained as a german historian Whose Research impinged on the holocaust, but did not better on and as i set out to teach a course that i had to learn a great deal about. As i learned about that course, about that subject and as i began teaching it and as i began giving public lectures about it i discovered most people who came to my talks, like most of the students who enrolled in the class had the very same questions about the subject. They brought to it certain issues that they wanted explain the. This actually come this insight dovetailed with a practical consideration. When i started this course and for the whole 36 years of my academic career i taught at the same institution. An institution that operates on something called supporter system. The quarter system for those of you that are not familiar with it is a barbarity inflicted on the students of a small number of americas leading universities. Chicago, northwestern and stanford are the examples i can think of. It is a racket for the teachers who teach on it because it divides the Academic Year into teaching units of 10 weeks and at a well endowed institution you have to teach for only two of those 10 week units. You can do the math. You are in class, in front of students Something Like 18 weeks the year. No wonder Higher Education gets criticized in this country. Nonetheless, i found i faced a problem. I had to teach the history of the holocaust in nine weeks. How could i possibly compress this material in a sensible fashion into that frame of time . I realize that the people who are coming to the class and coming to my lectures with the same questions were giving me the answer. Were telling me how to do it and now my phone is telling me that i should have shut it off before i came appear. [laughter] so, he did not want as a began to think about writing this book, and wanted to distill the lessons i have learned from these questions and from experience of trying to answer them into a book that would make sense to people. I did not want to write another narrative history of the holocaust. We have a great many excellent ones. If you want one that consists of only 100 to 110 pages read the one by david engel. Its superb. Doors history of the holocaust is a little longer and has won a wide audience. If you want the full narrative of the history of the holocaust from beginning to end, from top to bottom, no one will ever do better than shaw friedlanders book. What i wanted to do was to bring some clarity to the subject, to distill the insights of scholars over the last 30 years of enormously Productive Work and bring these insights into service of the practical answers to the questions that people ask. I had two additional purposes. I wanted to close the gap, which has become very wide between what the general public thinks it knows about the holocaust and what scholars think they know about the subject. And i wanted to set the record straight. I was haunted by an observation by tony chart, a historian recently deceased who quite rightly wrote that quote impossible to describe as it really was, the holocaust is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasnt. The result of that fact is a great deal of distortion about how and why it happened. The more i study the subject the more misconceptions i encountered and the more i thought that this sort of book i had in mind is needed. Now, wendy summarized for you the eight questions that propelled the book. It has eight chapters, each of which is devoted to answering one of those questions and obviously i cannot take you through all eight of those tonight. I know that comes as a source of relief to you at this hour. But, the eight questions boiled down essentially to two questions that i want to devote my attention to tonight. The first is, why were the jews killed. The second, why didnt or couldnt anyone prevent this. I want to try to devote the time i have tonight to giving you a sketch of the way i try to answer these questions. I should alert you in advance to the fact that im a very oldschool guy. Im 70 years old. I was born in 1946 and i still remember radio. [laughter] i dont normally use visual aids, but United States Holocaust Memorial museum has dragged me into the 21st century and i will in the course of this presentation at some images up to give you an illustration of what im thinking about and talking about. Some of these images are actually in the book and relates to arguments in the book and others are just there to give you a sense of the vividness and reality of what im talking about at the time. If you start with a longterm roots of the answer to why the jews were killed, one cannot avoid the long tradition in the western world of treating jews as contaminating. It is a tradition that runs through the last 25, 2000 years. The first source of contamination was of course, to the faith of christians. It explained why jews had to be kept at a distance, to be prevented from interacting with nonjews on a high level because they would corrupt the belief system of christians. By the late 18th century as religious ideas began to fade in their predominance in the west, enlightenment thinkers presented jews as the embodiment of threats to progress, people who clung to tradition of faith and customs and the repetition of oldfashioned ways in a way that violated the visions of a future emancipation of human beings. Then, after that emancipation actually extended to jews and in the 19th century they had the opportunity to enter into all ranks of society. New forms of presenting them as contaminating arose. Above all, that they were physically threatening. That they were in a sense would undermine the health of the people. I argue in the book that this is a tradition remember im an undergraduate teacher on my life and is presented jews jews as backward and bacterial. Now, over time each new argument as to why the jews were bad did not crowd out entirely the old ones, but provided new arguments to new sorts of people. The irony of the tradition of antisemitism and i want to make two points to you, all antisemitism is not alike. Modern antisemitism is different from before. Modern antisemitism is a movement that says jews are a political and moral threat that must be combated politically. The irony of this is that its an attitude towards jews that flourished and was local and was widespread in the 19th century in europe and was almost entirely a political failure in the months leading up to world war i, almost no one in germany would have suspected this movement was going to become a powerful force after the conflict. Anti semites had learned repeatedly in germany elections had never got more than 4 of the vote or 5 of the seats and as a Political Movement the notion that the jews were the source of all misfortunes did not have widespread traction. The important question is to whom it did have traction. Modern antisemitism is the creation, if you will, of the Industrial Revolution and the audience for it was expanded by the bolshevik revolution. The people who listen to the argument that jews were the source of all trouble in society were often people who were the losers by virtue of the Industrial Revolution. They were people terrified of the potential political effects of the bolshevik revolution which they link to jews. In other words the audience for anti semites at the end of the night beginning of the 20 century was not unlike the audience for populous nationalists in the world today at the dawn of the 21st, not the victims of the Industrial Revolutions anymore were people panicked, but the victims of the digital revolution and the people panicked by the threat of terrorism. The rise of antisemitism, however, was enabled not by the power of these ideas alone, but by that a norms crisis that was set off by world war i. Germany would never have been the country in which this was centered. If the defeat of the nation in 1918 had not set off a general sense of victimization events. Not only by Economic Trends that were reversed, but also political defeat and humiliation. This is the context that created equal bringing for adolf hitler. Even then, he almost did not succeed. When adolf hitler came to power in january, 1933, 55 of the germans had never voted for him. He was jobbed into office by a coalition of powerful people who thought they could use him. He had received and they wanted to use him because he had received more votes than anyone else, but never a majority of the votes. This is important to make because when we try to explain why germany became the place where the holocaust was perpetrated, where the actors came from the events that succeed 8033 are much more 1933 are much more important than the events that preceded. The long tradition of antisemitism, but eighteen echoing of antisemitic arguments did not matter politically until the minority of the people who believed in it acquired political power. Power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it and when people who hold a belief that are regarded by the general society has not quite acceptable become enormously powerful, their beliefs become steadily more acceptable. A famous historian of nazi germany once said more people became anti semites in germany because they became National Socialists then became National Socialists because they were anti semites. Of this is another weight of formulating what i just said. Power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it and if those who hold it appeared to be successful in realms that are important to some segments of the population, those segments of the population will come to think that those other ideas they hold might be mores persuasive than they thought at first glance. If the economy flourishes in the 1930s as it appeared to many germans to do, then perhaps the not nazis were not so bad after all and perhaps what they say about the jews is not so errant as we thought. Add this to a society that was thoroughly capable of creating an echo chamber, and ideological world in which only its ideas were presented to the public and in which one cannot challenge those ideas without fear of punishment and you create a situation that transforms the nation in 1933 from one in which 55 of the germans had never voted for hitler to one in 1938 and 39 is ready to do to the jews everything that hitler wanted it to do. Its ready to cooperate in every measure of persecution. None of which aroused significant public opposition in the german populace. This was what the nazis did. They created and that Coach Chamber in which only we matter and this is where the first visual aids come in. These are two illustrations of nazi propaganda about the jews and on the left what you had is a Childrens Book that says at the top the poisonous mushroom. This is a presentation to children of what jews embodied collectively, no difference among them. The nazis they never spoke in the plural because all jews are like. The collective is what matters and individualism doesnt matter. On the right you have a presentation of traditional christian antisemitism that when you look at the cross then think on the cruel murder that the jews committed at calgary. Calvary. Thats illustration you see in the next illustration you get is the notion that all life is struggle. This is the extra patient of the sick and the week in nature, the way in which animals eat each other and destroy the weaker is eaten by the stronger, the way in which defective trees are cut down and so forth. For the nazis the lessons imparted to all germans every day relentlessly, all life is struggle, struggle between us and them. They are malevolent. They are out to harm us. They must be it is a zero sum game and we must contest with them and remove them. Then come the next illustration is the positive vision. The beautiful glorious thought that will be created by the new state. A fetishization of the state in which politics will be acted out on peoples bodies. That is enough of that. In the 1930s, what the germans preach was that jews and all others who were defective or deficient or with retina perfection of the people had to be removed. The verb they used was always in german, to remove. At the end of the 1930s, in 1938 they realized that this was no longer adequate and they realized it because they did a little math. One of the things 1938 is the year in which the nazis expanded germany into austria and then into today following the munich conference. Those two moves blocked almost as many jews into germany as they had succeeded in driving out in the preceding five years and their next target in march of 39 brought in another 150,000 jews and met they had more jews than they had succeeded in driving out. This might sound as if it was not terribly significant for the evolution of nazi german policy, but the next slide points to one of the most famous events in the history of the persecution of jews. This is the event in which the third right when over to open violence on a mass scale against jews, november, 1938. Had been individual violence before. There had been a round up of 5000 jews and attempt to drive alien jews but in germany out of the country, but this was the moment at which the regime went to open violence sending 30,000 people to concentration camps, smashing homes and shops. Behindthescenes, something much more fateful happen. Or at least as people and that is that germans began speaking in your vocabulary. The german second man in the German Foreign ministry went to paris, to attend the funeral of the man who was assassinated in early november, that triggered this. He sat down with his colleague, the swiss ambassador to paris and said, if they jews do not leave germany, they are going sooner or later to their complete annihilation. Its the first recorded use of that word by a senior german official and it occurs a few days after. Late in the month, the ss magazine writes an article in which it says if they choose to leave the country they cannot expect that germans will suffer their presence any further and we will have to extirpate them with fire and sword. They will be completely annihilated. On january 30, 1939, adolf hitler proclaims that in the event of a new world war that will not mean the destruction of the german people in europe, that will mean their complete annihilation. For five years until 1938 the vocabulary of nazi ism was to expel jews from germany, to remove them, but once the leaders of nazi germany realized that every foreignpolicy gaming made meant more jews within the country. Their projection was to advance to the east, austria, check also talk you, next was poland, the home of 3. 3 million jews. Living no space was to be found in the east, next was white russia, ukraine, lithuania. This is the old pale of settlement of the russian empire. This is the location of more than half of the jews of europe in 193940. Once they began to see that their one goal of expansion clashed with their other goal of racial purification, they began to think in a different term. They didnt yet begin to plan and that term, but the word, the concept was in the open. From 1939 to 41 as their victories in the east increased they concentrated the Jewish Population forcibly, supposedly with the objective of expelling it to later to some destination, may be an island the coast of africa, maybe siberia, maybe northern russia, later if the soviet union were conquered they concentrated on these things and meanwhile what they did and this is the ghetto map, this is a demonstration of how they concentrated people in the various areas of occupied poland. Now what happened when they decided to invade the soviet union in the summer the decision is actually made in 1940, but when they invade in the summer of the 41, three things come together. The nazis have long proclaimed a motive to kill the jews. They are our mortal enemies who are always out to defeat us. They now had an opportunity to kill the jews. The cover of war as they expand into a territory where there are large numbers of jews and no foreign reporters, no one other than their own news reels to report what is happening. They recognize by september, 1941, that they have the means, motive, opportunity, means. They know that for the last two years they have been capable of killing the mentally and physically handicapped in their own mental institutions with Carbon Monoxide gas. They do a few experiments in august and september, 1941, at a little concentration camp in poland called auschwitz, experiments on soviet prisoners of war to find out if they can kill them with a pesticide that they have routinely on hand at the site in order to fumigate barracks and so forth. They discover that in a basement three window, 600 soviet prisoners of war killed in about 90 minutes. By september, 1941, they know they have a motive, opportunity and multiple means of killing people. They begin doing that on a massive scale in eastern europe. Now the map. This gives you a sense i will resort to a map again later to enforce this. Each of those dots represent the ghetto, a place with the germans concentrated the Jewish Population. Look at the density of those dots. This gives you a physical image of how concentrated the Jewish Population was and this is very important because it unlocks the secret something. With a few records we have of the planning to kill the jews of europe, is the famous conference in every one quotes it occurred january 20, 1939. They sat down with bureaucratic representatives of all kinds of other german institutions and exerted his authority over the process and got their agreement to purchase a paid he also said something that has has often been quoted that was deeply misleading. He said europe will be combed from west to east. In other words, the jews would be killed at first from france in the netherlands and so forth and then the killing process would go across the content and yet anyone who has studied the holocaust knows that that is exactly the opposite of the way it happened. The killing went from east to west at least on the northern half of the european continent. The million and a half victims of the holocaust who were dead by the end of 1941, one quarter of the total lived almost entirely in the areas where you see those dots. Occupied poland, and the parts of the soviet union that were invaded in 1941. The few additional victims of the holocaust in 1941 are mostly german jews being deported from the country. In france, people were not being killed. In the netherlands they were not being killed and so forth. Why is this so . This is the last part of my first question, why were the jews killed . Why did the killing start here . Why was it so intense your . I do not believe as Timothy Snyder has recently argued that the presence or absence of local governments had anything to do with it. Socalled statelessness. It is true that in most of these regions there were no independent governments. There was no polish government in the occupied part of poland. But, they were in many cases local administrations. Lithuania and latvia had public governments not unlike the system created in the netherlands. They were both led by former military leaders and all of these areas had local administrations and local Police Forces and works with local collaborators through which the girt germans work. The reason why the killing starts here, look at the dots. The reason why that killing starts here is because this is where germany intended to expand. This was where the largest population of jews was. This is where the rest of the germans expected the rest of the population to comply or to help with the killing of the jews and this is where the proximity of the fighting remember, they are still invading the soviet union. That par line is the limit of german advance in december, 1942 , and theyre still war going on here unlike in western europe and this is where the fighting activated german paranoia about socalled parses them in the jews being cruel of fighters behind their lines of which they air were in fact very few in 1941. In other words, the reason why the killing here first is so intense is because german ideological fashion nation with the coupled with the density of the Jewish Population, the unlikely this of local resistance to the killing of the jews and the presence of military activity all combined to suggest to german policymakers that the solution as they called it to the longstanding jewish question was to kill the people in their path. Then, it was a short step to killing the people behind them, the jews who were already occupation in other parts of europe. I do not think as david says that expectations on the germans part of either victory or defeat had anything to do with the decision. The momentum was rolling. By september and october, 1941, remember those experiments at auschwitz . Why are they testing gas on people at the end of august and beginning of september . Because they are looking for another method. The momentary likelihood of either winning or losing the war could it be and was used to throughout 1941 as an argument to expand the killing. Hitlers confidence in defeating the soviet union waxed and waned several times in the last half of 1941. Whether he thought he was winning or whether he thought he was losing, the momentum increased to killing the jews who were defined as subversive and threats. Not only did they make the test at auschwitz in early september, the location of another of the death camps, the construction begins november 1. The location of others coming third of the death camp is picked in midnovember. On november 18, a man designated to be that german minister of these concord area tells the german reporters in berlin on deep background that the physical extinction of European Jews is at hand. And the invitation to the conference actually went out november 29. It was supposed to be held on december ninth, the reason why was not held is because of the events that occurred december 7, when the jacket japanese attacked pearl harbor. There was a soviet counter attack in front of moscow on the evening december 5, morning of december 6. The meeting was canceled and therefore did not occur in early december. It occurred in january. We have no reason to think that the agenda of the meeting changed in the interval, when hyde fish called that meeting in november he knew what he intended to say and do and the preparations had already been made. So, why would the jews killed . Because of a longstanding tradition of hatred activated under particular political circumstances, fomented by a regime that was thoroughly capable of with peanut the population to put his sippy in it. Then, undertook a war into a region where they were hundreds of thousands of the people it had defined as enemies and a result under the conditions of wartime to wipe these people out. Why couldnt, didnt anyone stop this . How was it that this process was allowed it to unfold . The short answer is that because the jews were internally divided and largely powerless in the face of the nazi onslaught and every other Relevant Party always had Something Else more important to do. Germans themselves who might have been shocked by what the nazis seemed to be encouraging actually thought in 1933, about resigning. One of the most littleknown facts about the history of the third right is that the ambassadors to washington, paris, london consulted in the spring of 1933, right after hitler was appointed about whether they should all resign. Because they thought this was a potentially criminal government and in the end only one of them did, the man who is the ambassador here in washington. The others stayed and a man who was the ambassador in oslo who later became the second man in the German Foreign ministry offered this explanation for why. He said, one does not abandon ones country because it has a bad government. Leaders of german industry didnt the hate paid much better. There were a number of than that. Dot the future looked dark and this regime was troubled and many of them who are deeply opposed to the anti semitic policies based on folding and many of them consulted in the course of 1933 about what they could do. Almost all of them came up with rationalizations for staying that we should work with from within and do what we can to make this better. The head of a company had a very colorful phrase for this saying we should do our best to see that this wild grown juice becomes wine. That was their job. Over and over and many of the industrialists who consulted decided that what was being done to the jews was regrettable. The expulsion from positions of University Teachers started very early. That expulsion from some prominent economic positions also started early. They saw this. Was regrettable, but the economic revival, the improvement of conditions, the resurgence of national prestige, all of this outweighed what they called quote the inevitable excesses that come with revolution. One way or another germans found ways of rationalizing cooperation with the new regime. I dont one of my favorite quotes in history is a wonderful historian named barbara to clint who said, history never repeats itself. People always do. I dont need to tell you how many people in the spring of 1933, in prominent positions of german life said i have more to gain by going with the way these things are developing banned by resisting. So, this was the pattern that helps to explain why so few germans stood up and resisted. Europeans outside of germany had a holler of the repetition repetition of world war i and believed in the doctrine of non interference in the internal interference of other countries and feared an influx of refugees and also a very topical issue. In britain fear of immigration to palestine and the resulting political problems that would come through the british mandate was very strong. German propaganda had a certain appeal in allied countries because the germans seen only once is selfdetermination. All we want is the right that you have claimed for you ourselves before we want to bring other germans back into our country. The austrians had never been german and neither had others, but they spoke german and thus this was a kind of idealistic appeal that was made. In the us a combination of nativism, anti semitism, fear of an influx of immigrants not from germany, not from germany. There were only 560,000 german jews. Given the opponents of immigration were not necessarily convinced that this country the problem was there were 3. 3 million jews in poland. There were 800,000 jews in romania. There were almost 200,000 in lithuania and every single one of those governments in the late 1930s had publicly expressed the desire to reduce its Jewish Population and had gone to the league of nations and asked for help in that respect. That investor of the poland and investor of the poland in Great Britain in 1938 actually tried to blackmail the British Government into accepting 100,000 polish jewish immigrants per year into british colonies or, he said, we will be compelled to adopt the policies of the german right towards its jewish citizens. So, this was a world in which resistance to immigration was inflamed by a sense that the empty blocks would be even greater than was predicted. That extent of us nativism i think is what is next. Everyone will recognize the illustrator almost everyone will. This is dr. Seuss in the 1940s on the last let what you have is provided of the peacenik. This this is actually from 1940 and no matter how many countries the germans actually go after they will leave us alone because they will be tired or even more shocking the illustration on the rights where the world chewed up the children and spit out their bones, but those were foreign children and it did not really matter. Northwestern has a distinguished journalism school. Its actually named after a man who is the editor of the Chicago Tribune in the late 19th century and a vicious opponent of irish immigration to the United States, so the laundering of names that goes on in culture , but this mcdill school of journalism had a class that met january, 1939. These are journalism students and they met in 1939 and asked to assemble a list of the 10 most significant historical events of 1938. This is like a Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that did not bark. Whats not on the list . The burning of the synagogue, the attack on the jews of germany was front page on the Chicago Tribune in november, 1938. On the mostly white anglosaxon protestant students, northwestern was a Methodist University in those days and on the mostly anglosaxon protestant students of that Institution Even in the journalism students, the attack on the jews of germany had made almost no impression. Judging from their list. This is the world outside of germany that german jews were facing. Now, the miracle is how many people got away, 60 of the german jews escaped in the 1930s. 67 of the austrian ones, little less than a quarter of the jews of the occupied check, parts of that country. One of the reasons why this pattern of noninterference with holocaust continues after the war has to do with the next illustration. After the war began in 1931, 39th and after the United States came in 1941, this is a nazi propaganda poster that says behind the enemy powers as the jew. Notice the flags. Britain, American Flag and the soviet union. The depiction of all of these powers were all tools of the jewish enemy was a central theme in nazi propaganda and what it turned out to be wasnt inhibiting seam in the ability of the american and British Governments to react. Because what they constantly worried about was if we speak out against the persecution of the jews we look like we are the tools of the jews. If we make the persecution of the jews central to the war effort, we play into nazi propaganda. Now, you and i looking back on this may find that argument strange. I certainly do, but at the time it was extremely powerful. Though the allies could do not very much about the holocaust as it unfolded, about the only thing they could have done was to publicize it more. And to whip up Public Opinion on the subject and this is the reason why they enlarge major did not. One of the most Shocking Facts i discovered in my research for this book was that the United States knew about auschwitz about eight months earlier than our official declaration shows we officially acknowledged the existence of auschwitz in the spring, 1944. We were informed of it by the polish underground in early november, 1943. We had details about what was happening and we knew the location the name. We consciously repressed this information. The reason was in relation to this, the desire not to play into nazi propaganda. Now, lets me give you one other illustration of the difficulties of inhibiting or interfering with the holocaust. Once more, i have recourse to a map. The map shows you the routes by which the main routes by which people were deported to death camps in europe and the concentration of the death camps in the upper right is an important fact. What i did the book and i would like you to do with me now mentally is to stick your finger on that map at vienna. In the middle. Draw a line up, so a vertical line up from vienna, and draw a horizontal line from the right to vienna. What you have done is isolated the Northeast Quadrant of the european continent. 90 of the victims of the holocaust died there. Three quarters of the victims of the holocaust came from there. Now, think about what that means. This in the first place is a reinforcement of what i said to you before about europe was not combed from west to east and this is where the visions and presence of the jews in presence of the fighting and absence of sympathy where the cause of the carnage. Its important to notice for most of the were the only place where the United States had planes that could bomb these sites was Great Britain, over there in the upper left. Great a plane could not reach from Great Britain to the auschwitz camp which is almost the western most. A little further west, but try force almost the west most and a plane could not go from Great Britain to auschwitz and returned on a single tank of gas without crashing. Now, what this means is that until 1944, until we had fought our way to just northeast of rome and we could fly a plane from their up to auschwitz, it was not within target range. And every single other one of those well, almost every single other one of those death camps was closed by the time we could do that in 1944. Actually, they all were. The ability to bomb us on this process was not inhibited by lack of knowledge. We knew a great deal about what was happening. But, it was inhibited by the fact that it was geographically impossible until late in the war. Indeed, most of the murder the murder in the holocaust was as compressed in time as it was compressed spatially. At 90 in the Northeast Quadrant of the european cornet, 75 of the victims. 75 of the victims were killed within 20 months. They were dead by the time the russian army surrendered. 75 of the victims of the holocaust were killed while the germans were winning the war. When they stopped winning the war, their ability to kill jews declined greatly for two reasons. They had virtually killed all of the jews up there where the Jewish Population was concentrated and the remaining jews lived in countries that were normally allied to nazi germany, bulgaria, hungary, france, all of which concluded after the surrender that to cooperate further with the germans would mean that they would have a great deal of explaining to do after the war. That the germans would likely lose and the allies were likely to win and they would have to explain why they had cooperated. They largely stopped cooperating. The Romanian Government reneged on its promise to deliver the jews up the romanian homeland, which is most of it in that area called romania and refuse to deliver them to the nazis, so the romanian troops had killed almost 400,000 jews in the areas of the soviet union they invaded. The bulgarians refused to deliver jews to the germans at all aside from a small number in a part of greece they had taken over. The french began to drag their feet. More than half of the jews deported from france were deported in 1942. Then, the number of transport and so forth declined and the willingness of the French Police to help roundup jews also declined. These are some of the reasons why no one else was able to stand in the way. Lets me conclude by saying a few things about the difficulties of the jews themselves. This is where we moved to the next two slides. This is probably the most famous image of the holocaust. This is the little boy in the during the suppression and this is part of a document which is named after the german commandant of the operation that put down the warsaw project. Almost everyone has seen this photograph. It appears in book after book. I dont think i have ever seen anyone say what im about to say to you. The most remarkable thing in a photograph is that the child in it. A child under the age of 10. In fact, there are three or four children under the age of 10 in that photograph. Now, this is a photograph taken in the spring, 1943, and we know when the population of the warsaw ghetto is down to about 50000. We know from the records of the warsaw Ghetto Administration how many children under 10 were still alive. Officially acknowledged, known by the administration, fewer than 500. There had been 50000 of them when the ghetto was closed. Now, flash to the next picture. This is another one. This is people having been rounded up from the warsaw uprising and being marched off where they would be sent to auschwitz. Theres another child under the age of 10 on the right and we actually know her name. We dont know the name of the boy in the preceding photograph. I went to draw your attention to something tragic about these pictures. Who are these people . Who could these children be . Who is still alive under the age of 10 in the warsaw ghetto after three years of german persecution and deportation and suffering and starvation and so forth . Who is still alive . A few months earlier the head of the Jewish Administration had pleaded with the people, give me your children. The germans have demanded x number of people in tomorrows shipment and we dont want to give them the people working in the factors because the german my keep them alive. Give me your children. They had sent off all of the children accepted the children of the Jewish Administration in the ghetto. Except the children of the Jewish Police force. What children were still alive in warsaw when the ghetto uprising was suppressed . Children of people who were connected. Children whose parents had kept them alive somehow. What who had also probably participated in choosing who was to go on the transports and dive. Now, what i say to my students when i show them this picture and tell them that story i say do you have any less sympathy for those kids now that you know that then you had before . I hope not, but that is an illustration of the conditions that the germans created in the ghettos. In which among the jews themselves, by definition the prevailing mentality was every person for himself. Because the choices available to the inmates of these places were all bad. To expect that they would somehow have coalesced and reached a consensus on how to do this at the risk to their children because if you chose to cooperate with the germans and you were connected, there was less chance that your son or daughter would be carted off than if you rebuild, which is ultimately what happens to them when they do rebel. They are carted off the. So, if we ask why no one impeded this process one of the reasons is that for the victims of it themselves standing up against it was impossible and it is cruel for subsequent generations to look at their history and to say they should have done better. I want to say one more thing illustrated by one final illustration. This is, of course an image that everyone has in their head of people being loaded up to be sent off to death camps and this is a boxcar, which was the typical vehicle used in poland and in the east in occupied russia. Its not the typical vehicle that was used for deportation from western europe. Deportees from western europe were often sent in third class passenger cars and that was part of camouflaging from them what their fate was going to be. What i want to underline for you is as you look at that boxcar and its not apparent from the picture, but one of the reasons the holocaust was a devastating was capable of wiping out two thirds of the jews of europe. The equipment that was used for them was what they called decommissioned. They were all old cars that had been destined to be scrapped. Locomotives athe resources the germans applied to the process were tiny, they were not particularly, they do not demand a great deal. The 105,000 jews were killed by a train that went to auschwitz once a week. Over a period of about 15 months. One train a week. 20 boxcars. The germans loaded 130,000 boxcars a day. We tend to think of this, we believe that massive outcomes must have massive causes. It is our reflex that we have as people. The germans did this with their little finger. The Rolling Stock they devoted to this on any given day athey required to kill this number of people was tiny. Most gas chambers were built of two vertical stacks of wood that stand in between and tarpaper on the outside. After a few months these were replaced by poured concrete and it was very cheap. All of this was cheap and cost almost nothing to put up. It could be paid for and more than paid for and what they stole from the jews. It was not technically difficult to do this. Because the people in the Carbon Monoxide camps were killed or captured soviet tank engines. Germans didnt even buy them. So, the cost of the zyklon purchased to kill people at auschwitz from the beginning of 1942 until the last gas on the first days of november 1944 works out to one us penny per corpse. This was an incredibly inexpensive process. It did not require a great deal of resources or application. It never diverted funds or even men from the german war effort. And it was massively destructive. So, what i tried to do aand i know it is a depressing tale, what i tried to do is explain why the jews were killed and why anyone could not prevent this. And i think many that have grown up around the holocaust are part of human need to find some way out of the answers i have provided. We want to find some mistake that somebody made that could have turned this around. And i cant find it. Thank you very much. [applause] i will be happy to answer questions. That dull, was it . So you said that allied bombers could not reach the death camps from england. But we did have an ally who was in much closer distance. Yes. So you say you dont find a mistake but allied resistance to admitting the existence of a holocaust along with not pushing our eastern ally to take part in strikes. That would seem to be a big mistake. [laughter] the soviets could have hit the camps. The soviets knew about auschwitz by name and by function months before we did. Even allowing for the suppression of the information from astalin referred to the massacre of the jews just as infrequently as pope pius xii. Which is to say they each gave one speech in the course of the Second World War that had anything to do with what was happening to the jews. Stalin on november 7, 1941, while the germans were hurtling towards moscow spoke about it. The pope in december 1942 i believe, gave a christmas sermon in which he declared how sad it was that many people in europe were dying because of their race. He didnt even mention the word jew. There is a parallel kind of indifference here. When the soviet armies got within reach of auschwitz, in the summer of 1944 they were 160 kilometers away. Even allowing for the fact that soviet use of airpower during the Second World War was mostly tactical. They use it mostly for other things. That wouldve been a moment they could have struck the camp. The equivalent of the kgb knew about the camps and so forth. That information did not filter down to the troops. It was never a priority to liberate auschwitz. If the United States and britain had been willing to pressure the soviets on this, there is no sign that they would have achieved success. One issue on this that we tried to pressure the soviets on is we tried to persuade the soviets that if we were allowed to fly or send bombers from britain to relieve the warsaw uprising of 1944, not the jewish, the polish population uprising. Could we then send the planes on and land them behind soviet lines and stalin said no. So we would not have been successful in persuading them to prioritize this either. Even if we wanted to. Thank you. I just want to say, ask actually, using we allowed this to happen . I, i did not hear this. I am asking, are you saying we allowed this to happen . I still didnt understand . Did we allow this to happen . Look, the one thing the United States could have done that, for western countries could have done at least in the initial stages was to let more people and in the 1930s. And that would have put them out of harms way. In that sense our refusal to let in more refugees and so forth was an enabling factor. Once the war started, we were restricted by how much we could succeed at. We just could not reach the death camps even when we know about them. We could not impede that. There are several groups that could have done something. But remember what i said at the beginning, everybodys always has something more important to do. Why didnt the polish underground blow up the Railway Lines . From warsaw awere along the eastern part of the old border of poland which connects north to south . They thought about it, they considered it, but the strategy of the home army in poland was to conserve its strength until the moment when the germans were about to lose and then to rebel. Because that would be the moment where they could establish themselves as an independent Political Force that might be able to deal with stalin who was coming in from the east. That was their strategy. And that made them say we are not wasting, we are not spending resources on blowing up these Railroad Lines that might lead to german reprisal. Everybody always had an argument. For something that was more important to do then to aid the jews. I will go back . I assume to talk every time i come here i disagree with many things you have said. I was late so i dont know whether you talked about it but one of the main causes of holocaust was communism. And i did not see talking about it. You are late. Without it you cannot understand holocaust. The fact remains, Industrial Revolution caused athat is another reason we had the Second World War to end holocaust happened. Cause horrible conditions in the world and jews were the leader and promoting social justice. In the 19th century and 20th century. And that was one reason, and this is what hitler was using against them, that you dont want the jews here because they are kind communism. Another thing he did not mention which is very important, complicity of every country. Including United States, again it was communism. Took place at exactly the same time as the First World War ended. The jews were blamed for being very active. They were socialist, and always fighting for human rights. And we should be proud of that. That is what the jews were about. This was the downfall. And it is a matter of time in poland, poland and the third thing you didnt discuss was collaboration. And role of the church. In poland, the main reason why so many jews died was that . Okay, let me just . [inaudible] in fact, if you read the book you will see i cover all of those points. [inaudible] i cannot read to a 400 page book. Lexi dont have to to make point. One, two, three. Your point is well taken. I did refer to this at the beginning and his creation and creating ai did leave out two things number one the role of communism and the willingness of eastern populations to corroborate and the church. I cannot talk about everything it is here in the outline. But please, there is a chapter devoted to the activities or not activities of the Catholic Church and there is happy chapter devoted to the problem of poland. And you could have taken 20 minutes. I could take 20 minutes on an infinite number of subjects man. I can do that. Unfortunately that is why holocaust happened. Because the german was using . With all due respect, you write your book, i wrote mine. I grew up with that. [applause] and you are very . [inaudible] thank you very much. Can we take the next question please . Thank you for this presentation. My question for you, what is your opinion about how the Civil Registration document in Different Countries can amplify what events were happening because there was a particular school of thought that says that the Civil Registration documents or the population registries were misused and used to target the population. I have to confess im deaf in one ear so i am not quite getting everything that is being asked. What was the question . I believe the question was to what extent documents of population registrations were used as an instrument to carry out deportations and so forth. So population and demographic reports. A lot less than you would think. In the first place, in the east, and the parts of poland and the occupied soviet union, there was a great mass of murders occurred. Arnold population registries. The germans come into a village and they basically say all of the jews had to go into the ghetto. And if you dont go into the ghetto you will be shot. And of course the enforcement mechanism for that is the nonjews will denounce them. That is if they dont go into the ghetto the neighbors will say that you should be there in the germans will shoot them. And then of course when the murders start, basically what the germans say you will all assemble in the Central Square of the town if you dont assemble, it is the same penalty. People will finger you, pointing out and you will be shot. So in most of europe where these numbers of shootings are taking place, there is no registration process. There is none of that. Now, one of the terrible tragedies of the murder process from the ghettos of poland where it was organized, is the germans always dedicated the dirty work to the people in the ghetto themselves. When they go to the head of the Ghetto Administration warsaw and they say, starting tomorrow, 6000 people every day at the assembly point. Or we will take reprisals. Or we will pick them ourselves. And the jewish administrators said it is better if we do it and if they do because we will be more merciful and more gentle and will find some way to get around and will save the people we think are more worthwhile than the other people. And so they delegate the process and some of these people survived. The person who did this process survived and lived in israel for many years after the war. And give interviews and said you know, was i right . Was a wrong . I asked the rabbis if it was okay so of course athis was the impossible position was they put people. Now in germany and the netherlands where the written record of who is a jew and who is not a jew is the best. They dont rely on census data. They dont. The Ss Administration in berlin relies on the Card Registration files of the National Assembly of german jews. Because they think that file is better and easier to handle than the huge census records. So they basically go, take these files and they send to the Jewish Council in berlin heard the leading Jewish Administration. They say for the next deportation we want men between the ages of 55 and 70. You picked them. Or, send us all the registration forms of all the men who are between 55 and 70. And we will pick them. And that is the way the deportations from germany go. In the netherlands, it is delegated to the local Jewish Administration, they do the selecting and so forth. But you see, remember the children . The members of the administration are often people with little children. In their place in this position, are they going to comply with the germans . And give them the names or are they going to run the risk that the germans are going to come in and take them all and five and that is the way they experienced this impossible choice. So, census data, Registration Data and so forth turns out to be a great deal less important in this process than that kind of pressure put on people. I can take one more. One more. Thank you. Yes, i had originally asked exactly what you meant by being an impossible situation. I think you expanded on that just now. So basically said that the people were divided amongst themselves and anyone who spoke up was it killed or made to suffer. And people, i wanted too many times that if people didnt ask because they didnt fully comprehend the expansion athe horrors that were happening. The whole event is just beyond imagining, beyond i mean what any decent person could imagine. Absolutely. I mean, at first they could not comprehend because it was unprecedented. What they heard was rumors, they did not quite trust them. Then even after the flow of information thickens, they desperately find ways of denying it. Because how can you face it . There is in the book a quotation by a man. He was a jew in occupied poland who for a while was part of the Jewish Police force and went into the underground resistance. He died in 1944 but left behind a diary. One of the passengers in the diary i found powerful as he talks about in his little town, anot far from warsaw, the rumors come in that a town nearby has been totally liquidated. Where all of the people had been killed. And he goes and gives a sort of four paragraph description of how this message is received. And at first we said, how can human beings do that . And so on and so forth. By the end he says there must be an estimation for white happened to them but it cannot happen to us. There on the other side of the border, of the government between the german part and occupied soviet union maybe was that. Maybe they resisted. It goes to a process that ends up somehow denying that it can happen to them. And this is another part of the enormous tragedy of this situation. And the requirements for us of empathy. With what these people were being put through. To imagine how they could comprehended. Leo beck who was a rabbi in berlin and became the religious leader of the ghetto and occupied Czech Republic learned in, by mid 44 he knew what was happening to the people who put on the trains to auschwitz. And he decided not to tell the other people in the ghetto. And his explanation after the war was, it would have been much harder to live with the certain knowledge of death than to live with the possibility that you would survive. And so, here is somebody who actually understood, new and he said it is better that they dont know. Thank you all very much. [applause] hello i have a couple of announcements before you leave. My name is Jennifer Schmidt and im the Public Program manager here at the museum. First they want to start by thanking peter for joining us and delivering an incredible program. Very enlightening. I am sure you will agree. I also want to thank all of you in the studio audience as well as those who joined us this evening online. As wendy mentioned at the start of this evening, the next conversation is the first event in a programming series entitled