A panel of holocaust scholars talk about recent scholarship trends as well as new findings. They focus on the brutality of regime and the relation of the holocaust to world war ii. This was part of the world war ii museums annual conference in new orleans. The month of was june, 1944. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Topic tom a dark probably the darkest of all also is led by some of the worlds leading scholars period. It is, of course, the holocaust. For this session, we have a asked dr. Alexander ritchie of our president ial counselors to lead dr. Gerhard weinberg. Alex has been involved with the our 2014nce conference. In those five years cannot we have kept her busy. And meetings, committees, leading a lot of educational travel tours. Deep and personal connection to the holocaust as law was himself in auschwitz. To hear the latest in holocaust scholarship and to look at what was going on in june 1940 four, it is my proof prep it is topleasure to ask dr. Richie come up. Thank you. This is a topic very close to my heart. As most of you know, i live in warsaw in poland. My fatherinlaw was an off wits in auschwitz and became a Founding Member of an aided theon which warsaw ghetto uprising. For hisut into prison pains and was later in solidarity. When the wall collapsed, he became foreign minister of poland a couple times. Wasgreat passion in life talking about what had happened, not just in poland, but in germany and central europe, and to make sure that these history was not just remembered but actually understood, that it was constantly scrutinized and new research was always listened to and scholarship was always encouraged. Has costlyesearch been changing since the war been constantly changing since the war began. Revealed arg trials great deal of the extent of nazi crimes. Member of the american Prosecution Team coined the term genocide. There were initiatives to member the tragedy right away, like the creation of the warsaw ghetto and many other things right after the war. Waned interest in it until the iceland trial in 1961. Scholarly research on the holocaust has exploded since the 1980s. Re are new directions jim examining the scale and complexity of the holocaust, which i know jeff will talk about, which points to the tens of thousands of camps and killing sides of the holocaust sites in the holocaust. And new focus, everything from collaborators and participation and geography and many things, which i know we will hear about today from our two magnificent speakers. I am honored and pleased to magnificentu to speakers. He served since 2000 as project director for the museums encyclopedia of the camps and ghettos. The first volume appeared in. Une 20 2009 jeff received his doctorate in military history from most i ohio state university. Work upon which he based his work in hitlers high command. Of war ofthe author annihilation combat and genocide on the Eastern Front, and many other things Eastern Front, and many other things. I am honored to have gerhard consider to bee the dean of historians, internationally recognized authority on nazi germany. A professor of history at the university of North Carolina at chapel hill. He is the author or editor of so many books and articles it is almost impossible to list them. We would be here until midnight. I wanted to say that i used his work when i was starting out as a historian and i have copies of most of his works on my bookshelf. Just plucking one out of the blue, which is extraordinary and calculates encapsulates his work because it brings his redible Life Experience born in hamburg, working in japan after the war, and really understanding what learning about the entire world. As aistory of world war ii scene from a military perspective, social, economic, and many other perspectives. He manages to weave these things into this extraordinary international, global perspective, which is extremely rare. It is with great gratitude and toor that i welcome gerhard the stand. Thank you. [applause] thank you. Can you hear me . That is a big help. Time, there was a that attractede a good deal of attention between those who called themselves intentional lists intentionalists and functionalists. The former argue the systematic killing of jews was planned and organized from the top. The latter held the process was radicalization pushed forward over time by engagedvolved as they in ever more radical procedures, culminating at some point in systematic mass killing. Localreful attention to detail and initiatives that characterized the work of those who called and consider themselves functionalists has certainly contributed greatly to our ability to follow the technical developments of mass murder. The extent to which individual police, military, and administrative personnel exercised their own judgment about the procedures they followed. Whatever the prior developments in the making of global state a formal decision at the top, even though thisof those writing about still prefer to ignore the relative evidence and continue to advocate something of a functionalist interpretation. Record from the romanian , that was determined to be accurate by the german official who checked in at the time, that when adolf hitler met a romanian on june 12,munich what wasasked hitler to be done about the jews in the soviet territory that their armies were about to invade. For him,ant issue since the area that would be seized initially was known to contain a large number of jews. Hitlers told him they were all instruction, and that the evidence indicates he given to heinrich. Immler we have a clear confirmation of the meeting before the invasion, official toldh ss that they were to follow the german armies into and a majornion part of their assignment was to kill all the jews. I will come back to the source when i getsolution to another point. Havehe evidence we now leaves no doubt that the ,ommanders of the battalions units with members more than 10 times as numerous as the famous group, were similarly instructed junee the invasion of 1941. s own tellinger the minister of croatia that all jews in europe were to be killed jerusalem inng november of 1941 that all jews in the middle east and in the rest of the world were also to inkilled are both recorded s publisheddocument decades ago, although these clear and explicit records are still ignored by many scholars. Literature that widely moved as far and as this speaker things as needed is that of the very close war aslationship of the a fight between germany and those it attacked on the one hand and the holocaust on the other. Recently thatte those writing on the war, other than myself, include any references to the holocaust at all. Similarly, those who write on the holocaust pay very much too little attention to the realities of the fighting. Let me illustrate this issue with some examples. Commanders in many cases killed men, not whole families, and the first weeks of the german invasion of the soviet union. This is occasionally used as step thator a first will be followed by radicalization subsequently. Here is anying reference to the reality of the early fighting on the Eastern Front. Assault surprised the red army that stalin had held all as he disregarded warnings from his own Intelligence Service and from the british and American Governments. Forces, under these circumstances, advanced rapidly, and the german armys chief of on july 3, 1941, that the campaign had succeeded and that the rapid advance of German Forces showed that a quick victory was certain. Meant, as a practical matter, that a murder commander that had to follow and advancing German Military unit through some of the most densely jewish settled part of europe at the day. Of about 30 miles a they were simply not in a position to do anything else. The members of the unit which shoots the local men and come back with the front when the and had no need for new orders or the personal supervision of as wech himmler who, know, repeatedly went to the east in the summer of 1941 watch the progress of his new program. Just as subsequently, he would visit auschwitz in the summer of 1942 to observe the killing procedure implemented there. Nor cared if the jews were killed by shooting, gas or on the means. Subject lefted the to local initiatives and preferences. A most critical point about the fighting, namely that the allies first contained and then ended the holocaust also rarely receives the attention it deserves. Offended if ibe suggest that if the germans had one won, and contained control of the 47 of the then 48 states of the usa, that the japanese were willing for them to have, they surely would have been in any american groups, some of them themselves, parents or grandparents commode would have been killed because they were jewish. Would haves audience been killed as jews. Some nonjews would have been killed because of some handicap. Some would have contracted polio and either died as a result, or had been crippled and then killed because the two doctors whose discovery conquered that disease in the 1950s would both have been killed because they happen to be jewish. Happened to be jewish. On the other side but those who have written endlessly about field Marshal Rommel and his companions in north africa generally exhort a critical part of this assignment generally ignore a critical part of this assignment. He was originally sent their in april 1941 to salvage italys conquering of libya, lest the italian people dump mussolini. Was a major worry for hitlers. Africa corps the onto egypt and the middle east in 1942 and do this at a time when the primary military theater for germany was the Eastern Front . Thanks, obviously had not gone the way the generals had confidently anticipated. Things. The germans intended italy to have egypt and the middle east while germany would get its oil. Rom the caucuses in spite of these realities and aans, and in spite of necessity for a resistance against the soviet union, in the summer of 1942 it looked as if the africa corps might get to cairo and beyond a commander attached to it. Because not done settler wanted the members to or that hitlers expected them to dismantle one of the pyramids so that it could reerected. D that all ofint was the jews in the middle east, about one million at the time, or to be killed before the area was turned over to italy because settler and himmler because and himmler did not trust the italians, but did trust rommel to direct the murder commander to do what hitler had promised to do so a year earlier. There haveecades, been on hand significant and positive developments in the study of the holocaust as a result of several trends. Trend has important been the declassification of very important relevant records. The agreement of the british 1986 to then interceptioneir and decoding of the german order ource has transformed understanding of the early holocaust in 1941. It is now clear that these notce battalions included only about 10 times as many men overe murder commandos, but also compared with kill more jews than the commanders whose reports because of their far earlier ability for research had been a central piece of evidence in all prior stazi publications are the recent publications in german city of in pursuit both supplements what we already knew about such units, and also provides in detail their specifiction in such notorious as the september 1941 mass murder of ukraine,00 jews in the as well as their guarding of juice jews in the netherlands beginning in the summer of 1942. Perhaps other german cities will follow the example and facilitate first the research of , and the publication of the activities of Police Battalions that originated in them. Additional Important Information has come to light with the declassification that came out of the 1998 nazi war crimes disclosure and Imperial Japanese records passed by the american congress. Law wasfeature of that that it lifted the automatic exclusion from declassification review and from the implementation of freedom of information requests of two categories of american records. Relating to intelligence sources and methods, and those called Foreign Government information. Utilized by the u. S. Government for material provided to the United States by Foreign Governments that had a security classification at the time it was given to our government. While records in the former category could now be subjected to systematic declassification in the latter case, the government that had provided that information, in general great britain, would be asked for its consent for declassification the procedure and the former category promptly led to massive deep , and work onns these newly opened records has just begun. Of requesting permission to declassify in the latter category, it turned out that the british were unusually cooperative. As chair of the Historical Advisory Panel advising the Interagency Working Group that had been established to implement the new law, i was told by several of those at the working end of the declassification process that with alldramatic of their Prior Experience with dealing with the british in declassification records was most likely due to the widely known personal interest of then president clinton and the general topic. Up, hee were a hold might telephone his friend pray minister 20 blair at 10 downing street. Relevant offices in and near london would not want the rocket from 10 downing street. Since by definition the records in question were at least half a century old, the highly unusual rapidity of the agreement to be declassified was unlikely to cause any real problems for british security. An important byproduct of the declassification of american intelligence records was the publication of books by Richard Brightman and others about the postwar american recruitment of nazis. Some with exceedingly dubious records by american intelligence agencies. One significant product of the declassification of Foreign Government information, with the consent of the British Government is the collection of summaries of british interrogations of murder theando leader oldendorf in beforeof 1941 1945, he was turned over to the americans in december of that year in which hillary earl could refore utilize for rural her goal on the trial of commando leaders. Reasonable to expect that in the coming years, other researchers will find Important Information in the material that the british allowed the American Government to open up. Obviously, the American Government could ask for declassification of only those british documents of which copies had been given to it at the time. That left open the question of british records, especially their Intelligence Services, of which no copies were to be found in american archives. That process also has been moving forward slowly but steadily in recent years, and scholars have been making good use of these newly opened importante can expect publications based on these declassified records in the coming years. Now a clearer perspective on two quite passage of the events. Toay in which some type profit on the murder of their former neighbors is illustrated dramatically by the 2012 book of anet gross, Golden Harvest events at the periphery of the holocaust. Which offers insight into the digging up of both the dead and related materials for profit by substantial nobles numbers of dignitaries. Way a fewer site, the jews try to protect themselves and their families by eating the by the 1992cribed book which recounts the activities of the notorious jewish woman who assisted the tois in catching jews trying survive with false identities, or in hiding in wartime berlin. Of thehe descendents woman who betrayed jews to the problems engaging their situation with this ancestry. With worth considering those of the woman who was makes the discovery that her mother was the daughter of the murderer who is shown shooting , in as a form of morning the movie schindlers list. She now does speaking at the Holocaust Museum about her speaking sent findings paired may i suggest that a significant issue we all need to confront and engage in is this divergence between a clearer and more fairly published scholarship about the holocaust on one hand, and the general mental distance war from whiche it was a central part on the other. Another Significant Development in the field holocaust studies has been its inclusion in other centers, programs and courses. This is a development that should not, in this offices opinion, should not be opposed paired it is essential that in the process, there not be any gliding over distinctive features of the holocaust that have not been a part of any of the other horrors that we call genocide. That theggesting holocaust is worse than other there are but that significant differences between genocides thatr the courses and programs engage. The most obvious of these are fundamental differences i would suggest is the geographic one. All other genocides have a specific geographic focus. Those who killed others invariably did so to remove a hated population element from a specific area. Who was aan genocide terrible event in the ottoman empire. Those who ordered, and those are perpetrated in it were not interested in armenians who had settled in the United States, latin america, or anywhere else outside the ottoman empire. Murdering busy eastern Orthodox Christians in the world war ii puppet state of croatia were not planning on killing eastern Orthodox Christians who had moved to chicago, or lived anywhere else in europe. The holocaust was a project to clear all jews from the globe, regardless of location. Successful ine containing it, and thereby saving approximately two thirds of the intended victims. That was most certainly a great disappointment to those who thatated and implemented p