History Commons^™

From Massachusetts To Ravensbrück: Betty Laurie, The United States, And The Holocaust, Delainey Bostley

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The United States has taken a large responsibility in regards to the remembrance and legacy of the Holocaust and World War II, yet the way in which the U.S. remembers the event is fairly narrow. Despite both the war and the Holocaust being a transnational event, remembrance in the United States is so focused on American triumphs and victories that it ignores many elements that give insight into the the overall understanding of the events. Why is that? The life and story of Betty Laurie will provide insight into the answer. Born in the 1890’s in Scotland, she immigrated to …

A Summer Of Mass Murder: 1941 Rehearsal For The Hungarian Holocaust, George Eisen

Purdue University Press Books

Most accounts of the Holocaust focus on trainloads of prisoners speeding toward Auschwitz, with its chimneys belching smoke and flames, in the summer of 1944. This book provides a hitherto untold chapter of the Holocaust by exploring a prequel to the gas chambers: the face-to-face mass murder of Jews in Galicia by bullets.

The summer of 1941 ushered in a chain of events that had no precedent in the rapidly unfolding history of World War II and the Holocaust. In six weeks, more than twenty thousand Hungarian Jews were forcefully deported to Galicia and summarily executed. In exploring the fate …

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History Of The World’S Greatest Hero By Roy Schwartz, Gabriel C. Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

In Is Superman Circumcised?, Russell Schwartz provides a historical overview of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creation of the comic book character Superman, arguing that Siegel and Shuster's backgrounds in Jewish immigrants gives a particularly Jewish subtext to their character. Schwartz builds on this argument with a larger historical overview of American comic book publishing, showing how Judaism and Jewish-American immigrant experiences have informed that industry from its earliest days.

Round Table (Part 2): Reflections & Questions, Sarah Federman

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Critique Beyond Judgment: Exploring Testimony And Truth In The Classroom, Sean Sidky

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This essay offers a set of strategies for utilizing the words of survivors and of witnesses to genocide in the classroom. Including the voices of survivors and victims in our classroom conversations about genocide, its impact, representation, and the possibilities for its prevention is crucial to an ethical and wholistic pedagogy of genocide. Discussion of these events in the classroom often finds us confronting questions from students about truth, historical accuracy, authenticity, and authority. Addressing such questions requires careful framing that takes into account student assumptions and cultural discourses about memory and witnessing, as we work with students to develop …

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities Of Space, Time, And Memory In Twentieth-Century War And Genocide, Volker Benkert, Michael Mayer

Purdue University Press Books

Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide investigates interconnections between space and violence throughout the twentieth century, and how such connections informed collective memory. The interdisciplinary volume shows how entangled notions of time and space amplified by memory narratives led to continuities of violence across different conflicts creating “terrortimes” and “terrorscapes” in their wake. The volume examines such continuities of violence with the help of an analytical framework built around different themes. Its first part, spatial and temporal continuities of violence, looks at contested spaces and ideas of national, ethnic, or religious homogeneity that …

Bibliography For Charlotte Salomon Display, Ruby Blakesleay

Library Displays and Bibliographies

A bibliography created to accompany a display about Charlotte Salomon in September 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University. This display was created in partnership with the Sala and Aron Samueli Holocaust Memorial Library and the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education.

“I Held On At Any Price”: Victim Self-Preservation In The Sonderkommando In Auschwitz And Treblinka, Jessica Christina Foster

All Theses

Many Holocaust victims have expressed uneasiness or even shame regarding the actions they took to stay alive in the death camps. These acts of self-preservation were usually humiliating and often came at the expense of their fellow victims. This comes out most clearly in the testimonies of the members of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Writers such as Filip Müller, Zalmen Gradowski, and Richard Glazar recount how they survived the lethal environment of the camp by appropriating the food, clothing, and valuables of the people murdered in the gas chambers. Although most scholars have interpreted these testimonies, and the …

Book Review: The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel: Quests For Meaningfulness, Sabah Carrim

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Holocaust Paradigm As Paradoxical Imperative In The Century Of Anthropogenic Omnicide, Mark Levene

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The Holocaust and today's climate emergency are not obvious bed fellows. But the post-Holocaust mantra “never again” has also been voiced by some climate activists who see similarities in the failure of Western governments in the 1930s to act to stop Hitler and an equivalent failure now to effectively halt state and corporate drives to biospheric catastrophe. This article examines whether the way Western society has understood the Holocaust in recent decades has relevance to the urge for climate action. It finds the mainstream, state-centred Holocaust paradigm wanting as a framework for empathy and solidarity with those in the Global …

Dossier: The Hunger Plan: The Holocaust, Resource Scarcity, And Preventing Genocide In A Changing Climate, Emily Sample

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Nazi leadership sought to exploit the biological fear of starvation and scapegoat the Jewish population and other “useless eaters” for taking more than their fair share. The Nazis utilized and hyperbolized well-known prejudices against Jewish people, and entrenched narratives of Jewish parasitism as a threat to current and future German lives. In this analysis, food scarcity was one of several reasons for the Holocaust, and the first step to seeking Lebensraum for pure Germans to live to the highest international standard. This article will focus on different aspects of the complex antisemitic rhetoric surrounding issues of resource scarcity, including Hitler’s …

A Comparative Historical Analysis Of The Spanish Inquisition And The Holocaust, Jon Wininger

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This work delves into the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust and indentifies the eras that preceded these events that laid a foundation, the major players in these events, and how the players interacted. Common features and differences are identified as well as a common philosophical thread that crossed generational gaps to link these events. The corruption that found such fertile soil created by the regimes that preached hatred was common to both events. The claim by the Inquisition that it preached Anti-Judaism as a philosophical, religious tenet rather than a racial antisemitic bigotry was in truth not even believed by …

“The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm”: The Repatriation Of The Benin Bronzes And Nazi-Looted Jewish Art, Reeve Pacen Churchill

Senior Theses

The purpose of this research is to consider the question of Benin Bronze repatriation through the context of Jewish repatriation which has spanned the decades following World War II. By studying ownership and property rights, cultural heritage, and repatriation efforts of each movement, this study seeks to draw distinctions between European repatriation and African repatriation to show that success is limited in both cases because of the historic legality of looting in both cases. Ultimately, it becomes clear that a comparative repatriation study becomes problematic when European standards are superimposed on to African standards, when African countries struggle with vastly …

Undergraduate Holocaust Education And Biomedical Ethics: What's The Connection?, Tatiana Thompson

Psychology Department Student Scholarship

This poster represents the research results of two studies used to examine Holocaust education in undergraduate colleges and universities.

The Forgotten Concentration Camps Of 2022, Morgan R. Schroeder

History: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Many people would like to believe they could never be a Nazi, but as we speak a genocide not unlike the Holocaust is happening in China and North Korea. We must address this issue if we are to see ourselves as capable of taking on a threat as great as the Nazis. Millions of people are facing the worst oppression this world has ever seen and they need our help in any way we can afford it. In this paper, I compare Nazi Germany to China (1930s-present) and report on how Americans perceive the latter country. Although the terror and …

From Madness To Medicine: How Nazi Medical Experimentation Morphed Into Today’S Medical Field, Alexandria Daughn Kerby

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

It is no secret that many of our current scientific and medical advancements stem from a long history of research, trials, and experimentation, but not enough is known about the origins of our routine practices. The Holocaust enabled Nazi doctors to explore countless victims in search of the ultimate answer to the Jewish question. The answer: to alleviate the burden that those deemed “unworthy of life” placed on the greater society. The mass extermination practices which highlight the atrocities of the Holocaust are the end result of constant scientific developments disguised as medicine. Tiergarten 4 (T4) serves as the beginning …

Examining The German Public's Response To The Third Reich's Anti-Jewish Policies, Georgetta M. Moore

Masters Theses

The anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich progressed from anti-Jewish legislation, stripping German Jews of their rights, to systematic mass murder. Deeply rooted antisemitism and Nazi propaganda serving as a vehicle for ideology fostered an environment of approval among most of the German public for certain anti-Jewish policies such as the Nuremberg Laws. The non-Jewish, German public responses to these anti-Jewish policies by the Third Reich shifted over the course of the Nazi’s rule and during World War II. Most of the German public supported anti-Jewish legislation such as laws removing German Jews from civil service occupations because it made …

Jackson, Harry Lucellus, 1907-1985 (Mss 171), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid for Manuscripts Collection 171. Correspondence and papers of Harry L. Jackson, a Warren County, Kentucky native and Cleveland, Ohio executive. Includes his World War II correspondence, genealogical research, and papers of his wife Evelyn’s family, the Minshalls of Ohio. A sampling of Jackson's World War II letters to sisters Sallie and Bernice can be viewed under "Additional Files" below.

Administration Versus Extermination: The Wehrmacht’S Initiatives Toward Executing The Final Solution Between The Eastern And Western Fronts, Charles J. Calcaterra

Grand Valley Journal of History

This article compares and contrasts the Wehrmacht’s execution of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question between the Eastern and Western fronts of the Second World War. It seeks to answer the broader question of why regular Wehrmacht infantry contributed directly to the atrocities of the Eastern Front in Poland and Soviet Russia while the Western Front--France, Belgium, and the Netherlands--remained comparatively quiet, even under German occupation. This article’s thesis concludes that the war in the East was intended as a ‘war of extermination’ against world Jewry while the war in the West was more so an ‘administrative …

Contextualizing Britain’S Holocaust Memorial And Museums: Form, Content, And Politics, Rebecca D. Pollack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The quantity of Holocaust memorials in Britain and their prominence in public debates beseeches the question: Why does a country with a modest Jewish population, that was neither occupied by the Nazis nor lost its citizens in the horrors of the Holocaust, devote large quantities of resources and time to memorializing the events of the Holocaust? While there are private and synagogue-based Holocaust memorials in Britain, this dissertation centers on Britain’s statefunded Holocaust memorials and museums, a substantial network of memorials that is often left out of the abundant literature on Holocaust memory. Each memorial project is examined through the …

Umaine Office For Diversity And Inclusion_Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022 (And Everyday) Email, Anila Karunakar

Social Justice: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Email from the UMaine Office for Diversity and Inclusion with various details of the Office's work and Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Kalmar Family Diaries (2021.01), Robyn Conroy, Lamisa Muksitu, Tara O'Donnell

Strassler Center Archival Collection Finding Aids

Karl Kalmar (September 17, 1871 (Vienna, Austria) – December 26, 1942 (Theresienstadt)) and Margarethe Kalmar (Pollak) (December 5, 1881 (Vienna, Austria) – After May 16, 1944 (KZ Auschwitz)). They had two sons Paul Kalmar (May 31, 1908 (Vienna, Austria) – August 3, 1977 (Scotland, UK)) and George Otto Kalmar (November 16, 1913 (Vienna, Austria) – November 12, 1994 (Copake, NY)).

George Kalmar studied painting at the Kunstgewerbschule (now University of Applied Arts) in Vienna. He married Vera Rosa Kalmar (Raschkes) (August 24, 1914 (Vienna, Austria) – August 24, 1988 (Acton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts)), a fellow artist, on July 10, 1938. …

From The Eyes Of Art, Lauren E. Anderson

Geifman Prize in Holocaust Studies

No abstract provided.

"The Women's Hell": Distinctions Between Forms Of Sexual Violence At The Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, The Liberalization Of Sexuality In The Weimar Republic, And The Exploitation Of Sexuality In The Third Reich, Ashley Ruth Lamoureux

Masters Theses

The Ravensbrück concentration camp located in northern Germany acted as the only Nazi concentration camp designated exclusively for women following the closure of the Lichtenburg camp. Beginning in 1939, women held in other camps, ghettos, prisons, and sanatoriums across the Reich were transported to Ravensbrück, “the women’s hell”. Until recently, Holocaust scholarship has largely overlooked the history of Ravensbrück as well as the complicated demographics of prisoners in the camp. A majority of the female prisoners at Ravensbrück were asocials or political and religious dissidents. The distinction of asocials as a separate prisoner categorization was not invented by the Nazi …