They weigh in on the u. S. Drone program. To talk with local authors and in visit the citys literary sites. As just a few of the programs you will see on book tv on cspan two this weekend. For complete Television Schedule book tv. Org. Television for serious readers. First up here is peter hayes discussing his book why explaining the call cost. Holocaust. Good evening and welcome im wendy lower director of the museums advanced holocaust studies. To tonights program. Why did the holocaust happen. Like to welcome the digital audience joining us from around the globe. With the hashtag u. S. Hh why. What happened and how it was possible and where the most advanced civilized regions of the world. If you were to look at Continental Europe and specifically germany before hitler came to power unified democracy. Your fine democracy. Struggling once. Youd also find growing anxiety and fear as a result of the great war the economic depression and the rise of a communism and you would find increasing antisemitism which is a convenient explanation for every problem in crisis you would find where the most highly educated nations of the world. 25 percent of the leadership have a phd or an advanced degree. Youd find a country with a dynamic free press. The holocaust reminds us of the human rights that the unthinkable is always thinkable in the in all societies human beings are susceptible to treating the other as inferior. The tendency to justify any behavior. And to remind us with both confidence that memory has a capacity to transform that the lessons of the holocaust have the capacity to inspire by each of us has the ability and responsibility to act. What you do what we do what weve done and will achieve together matters. This Evenings Program is the first in the new programming series this year called the power of memory to shape our future. It explores the power of our collective understanding of the holocaust and how we can use it to create a better world. Please sign up for our emails and follow us on social media tonight we are joined by peter hayes professor in the towel holocaust studies at northwestern university. The author of more than 80 articles and 12 books in several landmark studies. Including books hayes has been funded by the American Council of society and in 1997 and 98 it was awarded the senior scholarship. Senior in stature not age. In the new book why explaining the holocaust he dispels many misconceptions and answers some of the most basic and vexing questions that remain. Why did the jews and not another ethnic group. What it more jews fight back more often. Why did they not receive more help. Responding to the questions hes been asked by students over the decade. He rings a wealth of scholarly experience. Challenging some of the recent interpretations. He argues there is no single theory that explains the holocaust the convergence of multiple forces at a particular moment in time lead to their catastrophe. Tonight peter will share the main parts of the book with us and offer us a behindthescenes look detailing why he wrote his new book and white it took the form that it did. And its not my great pleasure to watch to welcome peter hayes to the stage. Good evening. Thank you all for coming. On a rainy night in a busy week. Take your about a book that you can get delivered in a brown paper wrapper to your front door. Most historian books explains as it were from the have of zeus. They usually are of fullblown idea that a person has about seeing something in the new way. The author gets an idea what we call 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 that we have in mind. And then to write an account that vindicates it. This book that i had 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. Ive been check chick trained as a german history and his research did not center on it. I set out to teach a course that i have to learn a great deal about. As i learned about that course about that subject and begin 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 and the very same questions about the subject. They brought to a certain issues it certain issues that they wanted explained. On this actually insight to tailed with a without practical consideration. When i started this course and for the whole 36 years of my academic career i taught at the same institution. When the upper something called the quarter system. For those of you who are not familiar with it is a barbarity inflicted on the students of a small number of the leading universities. As a racket for the teachers who teach on it. Because it divides the Academic Year into teaching units of ten weeks. And as a will endowed in the institution you have to you can do the math. You are in front of students 18 weeks a year. No wonder Higher Education gets criticized in this country. I found that i faced a problem. I do teach the history of the holocaust and nine weeks. How could i possibly compress this material in a sensible fashion into that frame of time. I realized that the people who were 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 up. I did not want as i began to think about writing this book to distill the lessons that i have learned in from the experience of trying to answer them. Until book that would make sense to people. I did not want to write another narrative history of the holocaust. Weve a great many excellent ones. If you want one that consists of only 100 to 110 pages read the one by david engle. The history of the holocaust is a little longer than that. And has won a wide audience. If you want the firm narrative of the history of the holocaust from beginning to end from top to bottom no one well ever do better than the two volumes. 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 a 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 a very wide between what the general public thinks it knows about the holocaust and what scholars think they know about the holocaust. I wanted to set the record straight i was haunted by an observation by tony judd a historian recently deceased who quite likely wrote that impossible to describe as it really was. The holocaust is vulnerable to being remembered as it wasnt. And the result of that fact is a great deal of distortion about how and why it happened. And the more i studied the subject the more misconception conceptions i encountered in the more i thought that this or a book i have in mind as needed. Now she summarized for you summarize for you the eight questions that propel the book it has eight chapters each of which is devoted to answering one of those questions. And obviously i cant take you through all of those to the i know it comes as a source of release to you at this hour. They questions will done essentially to two that i want to vote my attention to tonight. The first is why were where the jews killed. In the second is 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 ive tried to enter these questions. I should alert you in advance the fact that im a very old school guy. Im 70 years old. I was born in 1946. I still remember radio. I dont normally use visual aids. The Holocaust Memorial museum has dragged me into the 21st century and i well in the course of this presentation put some images up to give you an illustration of what im thinking about and what im talking about. Some of these images relate to the book. And relate to arguments in the book. Others will read their to give you a sense of the vivid mess and the reality of what im talking about at the time. If you start with the longterm roots the answer to why they were killed one cannot avoid the long tradition in the western world of treating them as contaminating. Its a tradition that runs through the last 2000 years. The first source of contamination was of course to the faith of christians it explains why they have to be kept at a distance 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. Enlightened thinkers presented them as the embodiments of threats to progress. People who clothed and and the repetition of oldfashioned ways in a way that violated the vision of a future emancipation of human beings. And then after that emancipation actually extended to jews in the 19th century they have the opportunity to enter into all ranks of society new forms of preventing them as contaminating arose. They were physically threatening. That they were in the sense undermined the health of the people. I argue in the book that this is a tradition that presented them as benighted backward, and bacterial. Overtime each new argument as to why they were bad did not crowd out entirely the old ones but it provided new arguments to new sorts of people. The irony of the tradition of antisemitism i anti semitism i want to make two points to you. All of it is not like. Modern is different from what came before. Its a movement that says they are political and moral threat that must be combated politically. And in the ironing of this as this is an attitude towards jews that flourished and was vocal 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 wouldve suspected that this movement was going to become a powerful force after the conflict. They have run repeatedly in german elections. They have never gotten more than 4 of the vote or 5 of the seats. As a political movement. The notion that they were the source of all misfortunes did not had widespread traction. The important question as to whom it did have traction. Modern antisemitism is the creation of Industrial Revolution and the audience for it was expanded by the bolshevik revolution. The people who listened to the argument that they were the source of all trouble and society were often people who were the losers by future. And they were people terrified of the potential political effects. With which they linked jews. In other words the audience for them at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century was not unlike the audience for a popular nationalist in the world today. At the dawn of the 21st. Not the victims of the Industrial Revolution anymore or the people panicked. But the victims of the digital revolution. And the people in it by panicked by the threat of terrorism. The rise of antisemitism however was enabled not by the power of these ideas alone but by the enormous crisis that was set up by world war i. Germany would never had been the country in which this was centered if the defeat of the nation in 1918 have not set off a general sense of victimization by events. But also by political defeat. This is a the context that created the opening and even then he almost did not succeed. When he came to power in january 193355 percent of the germans have never voted for him. He have received and wanted to use him because they received more votes than anyone else. But never a majority of the votes. This is an important point to make because when we try to explain why germany became the place where the holocaust was perpetrated. Its much more important than the events that preceded. The long tradition it 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 beliefs that are regarded by the general society is not quite acceptable become enormously powerful their beliefs become more acceptable. A famous historian in nazi germany once said more people became anti semites in germany because they became National Socialist. That became National Socialist because they were antisemites. This is another way of formulating what i just said. Power magnifies the ideas of those who hold it. In realms that are important to some segments of the population those segments will come to think that those other ideas might be more persuasive than they thought at first glance. As it appeared to many germans to do. Then perhaps the 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 could not challenge those ideas without fear of punishment. You create a situation that transforms a nation in 1933 from one in which 55 percent of the germans have never voted for hitler to one its everything that hitler wants him to do. Is ready to cooperate in every measure of persecution none of which arise with significant public opposition in the populist. This was what the nazis did. They created a 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. Poisonous mushroom. And this is a presentation to children of what they embody collectively. No difference among them. They never spoke there. Because all are alike. The collective is what matters. With the traditional christian antisemitism. When you look at the crude all life is struggled. This is the sick in into the week in nature. The way in which defective trees are cut down and so forth. For the nazis the lessons imparted to all germans. Relentlessly it is a struggle between us and them. They are malevolent. They are out to harm us. It must be because all life has struggled. We must contest with them. We must remove them. The next illustration results with the positive vision is. It will be created by the new estate. The way in which politics will be acted out on peoples bodies. Thats enough of that. In the 1930s what the germans preached was jews and all others who were defective or deficient head to be removed. The verb they used was always in german and fair to remove. In 1938 they realized that this was no longer adequate. They did a little math. One of the things that they did. Those two moves brought almost as many jews into germany as they have succeeded in driving out in the preceding five years. The next target was the protector which brought in another 50,000 jews. It might sound as if it was not terribly significant but the next slide points to one of the most famous events in the history of the persecution of the jews. The event in which it went over to open violence on a mass scale. There had been individual of violence before. This was the moment at which the regime went over to overt violets. Smashing homes and shops. Behindthescenes something much more fateful happens. And that has the germans began speaking a new vocabulary. And found them no longer with the decisive word. They went to paris to attend a funeral of the man who was assassinated in early november that triggered it. And he sat down with his colleague. The swiss ambassador to paris. Theyre going sooner than later. Is the first recorded use of that word by a senior german official and it occurs a few days after. Late in the month i think says if they dont leave the country they cannot expect the germans will suffer their presence any further. Well had to take them out with fire and sword they will be completely annihilated. They proclaim. Not in the event of a new world were that will not mean the destruction of the german people in europe that will mean their complete annihilation. For five years up until 1938. That vocabulary was to expel jews from germany. But once the leaders realize that every Foreign Policy gain they made met more within the country their projection was too advanced to the east. Next was poland. Living space was to be found in the east next was russia. The old pale of settlement of the russian empire. This was the location of more than half of the jews of europe in 1939 and 40. Once you begin to see that that one goal of expansion clashed with their other goal of racial purification they begin to think in a different term. They did not plan in that term but the word in the concept was out in the open. From 39 to 41 as the victories in the east increased they concentrated the population forcibly with the objective of expelling it later to some destination. Maybe an island off the coast of africa. Maybe siberia. They concentrated on these things meanwhile what they did and this was the get a map. Its how they concentrated people in various areas. Now what happened when they decided to invade the soviet union in the summer of 19413 things come together. The nazis have long proclaimed motive to kill the jews. Theyre always out to defeat us. The cover of war as expand into a territory where there are a large number of jews and no foreign reporters to report what is happening. And they recognize that they have the means motive, opportunity. For the last two years they had been capable of killing the mentally and physically handicapped in their own mental institutions with carbon my neck said gas. At the low concentration camp in poland. With the pesticide that they have routinely unhand at the site. In order to fumigate barracks and so forth. It will kill 600 soviet prisoners of war. Theyve a motive and opportunity and multiple means of killing people. This gives you a sense and im going to resort to a map again a little later to reinforce this. Each of those dots represents a ghetto a place where the germans concentrated the Jewish Population look of at the density of those dots. This gives you a physical image of how concentrated the population was and this is very important because it unlocks the secret to something. One of the few records that we have of the pleated to pleading to kill the jews of europe. Everyone quotes it. They sat down with bureaucratic representatives of all kinds of other german institutions and asserted has authority over the process. Got their agreement to participate in. He also said something as it has often been quoted that was deeply misleading. He said europe will be cold from west to east in other words they will be killed first from france in the netherlands. And then it would go across the continent. Anyone who has studied the holocaust knows it was exactly the opposite of the way it happened. It 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 so