Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons^™

When Priests Forgot About God: An Analysis Of The Catholic Church's Role In Genocide, Mary M. Fertitta

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research

The Catholic Church in Rwanda for more than a century was a witness to the atrocities of genocide. One million Rwandans died in 100 days while many Catholic priests and nuns stood by offering no assistance. Others participated in the slaughter. The majority of those killed were killed in churches or on church grounds. Since Belgium's acquisition of Rwanda, there have been ties between the Catholic Church and the government of Rwanda. The Catholic Church blamed Belgium for the ethnic class designations and for disturbing the native culture. The Church and priests, however, remained silent and maintained their silence to …

You Have A Voice Here: Implementing Armenian Feminist Literature Within Feminist Discourse, Grace Hart

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project melds personal narrative with literary criticism, as it excavates the literature of Armenian writer and political activist Zabel Yessayan, particularly with her novel My Soul in Exile and memoir The Gardens of Silihdar. I argue that the voice of Zabel Yessayan should be included in the feminist women of color discourse within institutions in the United States. I develop this argument by bringing in the works of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and showing parallels in themes and lenses such as excavating traumatic histories, the …

Contested Commemoration: The Relationship Between Politics And The Memorialization Of The Second World War In Polish Literature, Cinema, And Museums (1945-Present), Alexandria Joyner

Senior Independent Study Theses

This study examines the relationship between politics and the memory of the Second World War in Polish literature, cinema, and museums from 1945-Present. I argue that the memory of the Second World War has changed radically over the last seventy- five years as the Polish government, in both the communist and post-communist periods, pursued a politics of memory. I build this argument first by identifying three political turning points that caused the communist government to confront and reevaluate the narrative they promoted about the war: 1945, 1956, and 1967. I include a fourth turning point, 1989, to show how post-communist …

'Massacres', 'Tragedies, ‘Genocide:’ A Critical Analysis Of Differing Perspectives On The Armenian Genocide, Samuel Hugo Willner

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………………4

II. Bibliography…………………………………..31

III. Primary Documents and Headnotes………33

IV. Textbook Critique…………………………….43

V. New Textbook Entry…………………………..46

Voices Of PłaszóW: The Impact Of Schindler's List On A Former Concentration Camp, Jordan L. Riggs

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List drew international attention to the site of Płaszów, a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland near the city of Kraków. This increased attention on the site impacted the area, leading to an increase in film-tourism, shown both in organized tours and published guidebooks. The site and film also held a personal connection to two sets of individuals, the descendants of Nazi commandant Amon Goeth and Holocaust survivors, which often prompted them to return to the site and push for more interpretation. This thesis addresses the lasting impact of the film on the site and the site’s …

Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann

Artl@s Bulletin

Was the first documenta really beyond nationalism? documenta 1955 has been widely regarded as conciliation for the fascist legacy of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (1937), and as an attempt to reintegrate Germany into the international arts community. This article employs published and archival sources in order to understand if and how documenta was impacted by the legacy of nationalism in post-fascist Germany. A biographic sketch of Antonio Corpora (1909-2004) shows how the purportedly “universalist” selection criteria employed by documenta erased cultural specificity and solidified nationalist conceptions of center and periphery.

Scenarios Of Intractability: Reframing Intractable Conflict And Its Transformation, Kerry Whigham

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

For those working toward long-term conflict transformation and atrocity prevention, cases of so-called “intractable conflict” are an enduring source of frustration, continually resisting what seems to be an otherwise useful toolbox of "lessons learnt" and "best practices." Referring to these cases as intractable, however, only serves to naturalize their intractability, rendering it an essential and immutable quality of the conflicts, and thus foreclosing options for engagement and prevention. Moreover, it obscures interventions that may have already emerged from within these conflicts that are transforming the way they play out. This article suggests, instead, to perceive these cases as scenarios of …

Book Review: Hitler’S Atrocities Against Allied Pows: War Crimes Of The Third Reich, Timothy Heck

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Hitler’s Atrocities Against Allied PoWs cannot be regarded as an academic study of the fate awaiting captured Allied servicemen and women. Its narrow focus, socio-political goal, and limited engagement with the historiography prevent it from serving as more than a survey text or springboard. Chinnery attempts to tie the individual fates to a larger argument that the German armed forces and their security force compatriots were systematically responsible for the abuses described in the book. While the individual cases are compelling and some have a clear connection to explicit policies, the book does not succeed in linking its other examples …

Film Review: Operation Finale, Melanie O'Brien

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, undertook an operation in Argentina to capture the architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, and bring him to Israel to stand trial. Operation Finale [Chris Weitz, 2018] tells the story of this intelligence operation: the actions of and challenges for the agents involved, in a way that captures the banality of Eichmann’s personality before it was put on show for the world to see in his televised trial. Operation Finale is available on Netflix, rendering it a Holocaust film with an extraordinarily large reach.

Human Rights? What A Good Idea! From Universal Jurisdiction To Crime Prevention, Daniel Feierstein

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a “comfort zone.” With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as …

Film Review: The Trial Of Ratko Mladić, Iva Vukušić

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Phenomena Of Power: Authority, Domination, And Violence, Kerri J. Malloy

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Making Discrimination Legal: A Comparison Of The Penal Laws In Ireland And The Nuremberg Laws And Other Laws In Nazi Germany, Gage Overton

Honors College Theses

The Penal Laws and the Nuremberg Laws were sets of legal codes which stripped away basic rights and civil liberties from Irish Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s respectively. My research into these laws has allowed me to discover that the methods used by the English Crown and the Nazi German state to separate the groups targeted by their laws, as well as the circumstances which led to their implementation, were eerily similar, nearly identical. Besides this, they ultimately used this strategy as a way to justify the elimination of the …

New Perspectives On Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, The Nazi Pogrom In Global Comparison, Wolf Gruner, Steven J. Ross

Purdue University Press Book Previews

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes …

Let Me Be Myself, Brandon Stettenbenz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Let Me Be Myself is a collection of short stories, essays, oral history, and poems that deals with generational trauma, history, traveling, family, war, oppression, and healing. This project serves to inform, evoke understanding, lend perspective, and inspire others. It aims to help others understand the trauma of being born from a Holocaust surviving family, and its impact on somebody in modern day society. It explores the story of a first, second, and third generation Holocaust refugee. It connects a timeline of eighty years of trauma through violence and oppression, and a pursuit to find healing from Nazi Germany.

Risky Times And Spaces: Settler Colonialism And Multiplying Genocide Prevention Through A Virtual Indian Residential School, Andrew Woolford, Adam Muller, Struan Sinclair

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

In this article, we examine how the logic of genocide prevention aligns with a settler colonial logic of elimination. We examine how the exclusion of cultural techniques of destruction from consideration contributes to the logic of elimination, and we suggest this is, in part, a structural problem built into the logic of genocide prevention. Along these lines, we interrogate linear and molar approaches to genocide prevention and propose, in addition to existing macro-level strategies, a molecular, everyday ethos of genocide prevention that is attuned to genocidal intimacies and seeks to foster anti-genocide habits and practices. In so doing, we argue …

Eva And Otto: Resistance, Refugees, And Love In The Time Of Hitler, Tom Pfister, Kathy Pfister, Peter Pfister

Purdue University Press Books

Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister (1910–1991) and Otto Pfister (1900–1985). It is an intimate and epic account of two Germans—Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic—who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue …

Past, Present, And Future: Connecting To The Holocaust Through Literature, Danielle Demke

History in the Making

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Divide Through Graphic Novels: Teaching Non-Jews’ Holocaust Narratives To Jewish Students, Matt Reingold

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The following paper considers how integrating Holocaust graphic novels that prominently feature non-Jewish characters can be effective in introducing Jewish students to new perspectives on contemporary understandings of the Holocaust. Drawing on the results of recent studies about rising anti-Semitism and Jews' concerns for their safety, feelings of insularity are understandably becoming more pervasive within the Jewish community. The author argues that in order to combat the negative aspects of this entrenchment, Jewish students need to be introduced to thoughtful and complex narratives that relate to historical anti-Semitic incidents which also model ways of building relationships between the disparate communities …

From Complaisance To Collaboration: Analyzing Citizens’ Motives Near Concentration And Extermination Camps During The Holocaust, Jordan Green

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

The role of local peoples near concentration camps, extermination camps, and mass shooting sites in Europe during World War II is a widely unexplored area of the Holocaust. Although locals both knew of these sites and their purposes, many chose to be complaisant while others collaborated with the Nazi regime. Therefore, non-persecuted Germans and occupied peoples near the camps played a substantial role in the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. These civilians’ actions, or lack thereof, in response to the crimes against humanity before their eyes were driven by three main factors: economic gain, antisemitism, and fear. Regardless of motive, …