Hist 33D, L 13: Germans who resisted
by Prof. H. Marcuse, UCSB, Nov. 4, 2003

The vast majority of (non-Jewish) Germans were bystanders or perpetrators. What made the minority choose to resist?

• Preliminary: midterm evals.; drivers, Hist 133Q (&P); 60th anniversary
• field trip discussion
• Context & examples of German resistance

Administrative

• Please pass forward midterm evaluations
• Sign-up sheets:
  • drivers+# passengers for reimbursement
  • Hist 133q "Readings on the Holocaust" (W2-5): read 8 of best books on Holocaust topics
• Hist 133p Proseminar in spring: do real research (papers published on Oral History Project website)
• I'll hand journals back on Thu; due next Thu (11/13)
• Visit by a survivor on 11/13; drivers to/from Pomona?
• E-mail list: now 36/44. I'll use for Q4.

Hist 133q books

• Roseman: Past in Hiding
• survivor memoir: Alicia
• Women in Nazi Germany
• Filip Muller: Sonderkommando in Auschwitz
• Eva Fogelman: Rescuers
• Evans: David Irving trial
• Grobman/Shermer: denial (in reader)
• Elinor Langer: 100 Little Hitlers
• (Schlink: The Reader)

60th Anniversary date: "Aktion Erntefest"

• "Aktion Erntefest" (Operation Harvest Festival): Nov. 3 dawn - Nov. 5, 1943
• 10,000 in Trawniki
• 15,000 in Poniatowa
• 18,000 in Maidanek
• consequence of Warsaw, Treblinka, Sobibor uprisings
• bloodiest day of intentional murder in history?
• Babi Yar (near Kiev, Ukraine): Sept. 26-9, 1942: 33,000 in two days

Discussion of Museums

• Museum of Tolerance (1993: Beit Hashoah - Museum of Tolerance) (my on-line article)
• Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust

Examples of German Resistance

• Left-wing: Communists, Social democrats
• Common people (Resistenz: impedance)
• Churches
  • Bishop van Galen and euthanasia (Aug. 1941)
  • Martin Niemöller & Confessing Church; Quotation (link)
    [time ran out here, will be continued next time]
• Students: White Rose in Munich: July 1942 - Feb. 1943 (Stalingrad)
• Rosenstrasse, Berlin, Feb. 1943: "Aryan" wives of Jewish men
  recent film by Margarete von Trotta
  book by Nathan Stolzfus
• July 20, 1944 plot (military-led conspiracy), after June 1944 Normandy landing