UCSB Hist 33D,
L 11: Collaboration: Judenrat & Ghetto Police
by Prof. H. Marcuse, UCSB, Oct. 28, 2003
Why do people commit (participate in) mass murder?
- Journals due; announcements; Q3
- Discussion of Browning and Goldhagen
- motivations
- categories of perpetrator
- Collaboration: questions of power, morality
Administrative
- Please hand in journals
- Film tonight Escape from Sobibor, 1hr 55m.
- Field trip to LA: Sunday 8am at bus loop
- sign up sheet missing 4 names; 1 driver
- meet at MOT at 10:15, LA Holo. Mus. at 2pm
- pack a lunch, bring an ID, but no metal
- Wed. office hours: anyone for 1pm?
- Thursday
- Final project group proposals due
- Names: contributions, contact info
- E-mail list: why only 29/44? Use for Q4?
Midterm Q3
- Goldhagen's occupation statistics show that the men of Batt. 101 were disproport.
from: a. lower classes b. middle stratum c. elite
- In Lomazy Lt. Gnade selected 20-25 elderly Jews and made them crawl.
What did he tell his men to do to them?
- Who else besides children does Rumkowski ask for?
- Why doesn't Perechodnik's wife take poison?
Browning vs. Goldhagen
"Ordinary" or specifically German?
What sources do they use?
Methods? (How do they analyze sources?)
What arguments do they make?
What do they conclude about the men's motives?
Roundup of (indiv.) Motivations (again)
- racism (race-based antisemitism) (hate)
- ideological indoctrination (master race)
- obedience to orders (role of situation)
- deference to authority (bible: Abe vs. Sarah)
- careerism (preemptive obedience)
- conformity (peer pressure; solidarity)
- special selection of perpetrators
- wartime brutalization (situation)
- segmentation & routinization of task (sit.)
See how these individual motives fit into the causes of "big" events
- Economic / Int'l / Elite / Ideology / peOple
Categories of Perpetrator
- Bureaucratic organizers ("desk murderers"):
- ideologues (intellectuals)
- administrators
- businessmen: factory CEOs
- Organizers in the field
- Höss in Auschwitz; Major Trapp
- Participants in "assembly line" murder
- distanced: engineers, architects
- immediate: loading trains, dumping cyclon B
- Hands-on murderers
- one-on-one shooters
- guards in camps
- doctors/medical personnel who inject
Collaboration
- In order of most choice to least:
- Germans (non-Jewish)
- Occupied countries
Norway: Vidkun Quisling
Denmark: King Christian
- Jewish: Judenrat (Jewish Council), policemen
- Moral question: Is there a "higher" justification?
- issues of power, where to draw the line
- Survival statistics:
- Holland & occ. France: only 40% of Jews surv.
- Italy and Vichy France: 78% of Jews survived
prepared for web by H. Marcuse, Oct. 28, 2003
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