Topics, but it also is led by some of the worlds leading scholars, period. It is of course the holocaust. For this session, weve asked dr. Alexander richi who serves of the con veener of our president ial countslers to lead dr. Gare hard weinberg and jeff mcgargy. Alex has been involved with the museum since her first appearance at our 2014 dproens, and in those five years weve kept her quite busy. Many meetings, committees and also as you heard this morning, leading a lot of our educational travel tours. She has a deep and personal connection to the holocaust, as her fatherinlaw, who im sure shes going to explain more about, was himself in auschwitz during world war ii. So to hear the latest in holocaust scholarship and look at what was going on in june 1944, its my pleasure to ask dr. Richie to come up. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you so much. This is indeed a topic very, very close to my heart. As most of you know i live in warsaw in poland, as you just heard my fatherinlaw was in auschwitz when released, became a Founding Member of zigota which was an organization to try and save jws, the warsaw uprising was put into stallanist prince for his pains. Later was in solidarity. And then when the wall collapsed, became foreign minister of poland a couple of times. But his great passion in life was talking about what had happened, not just in poland but in germany and the soviet union and central europe, to make sure this 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. Now Holocaust Research has constantly been changing since the war began with the horrors of the revelations of the camps and then the nuremberg trials revealed a great deal of the extent of nazi crimes. The member of the american prosecution team, rafael limbkin coined the term genocide. There were nish tives to remember the tragedy right away, things like the creation of the warsaw guetta memorial, the rediscovery of the ringel bloom archives and many other things right after the war. But Public Interest tended to wane and acdoechlic until really the eichmann trial in 1961. And Scholarly Research has exploded since the 19 yet80s. There are many new directions examining the holocaust which i know that jeff will be talking about, jeffs work which points to the tens of thousands of camps and killing sites in the holocaust. And theres new focus from everything from looking more at perpetrators, at collaboration, at the genesis of antisemitism, geography, many, many other things besides which well hear from our two magnificent speakers, im deeply honored and pleased indeed to be asked to introduce these two magnificent speakers, jeff mcgargy, Senior Applied Research scollour for holocaust studies in the u. S. Holocaust museum where he served as project director and editor in chief for the seven volume enpsychlo paidias, the first volume appeared in june 2009 received the National Award amongst other distinctions. Jeff received his doctorate in military history in 1998 from Ohio State University and is the recipient amongst others, William Fulbright grant, a work upon which he based his work inside hitlers high command, which was also the winner for the society of military historys 2001 distinguished book award. Hes the author of another book, and many other things as well. Im also deeply deeply honored to have gare hard weinberg who we hear the museum considered to be the dean of historians, internationally recognized authority on nazi germany, and origins and courses of world war ii. Hes a professor emertus at north carolina,| chapel hill. Hes the author or editor of so many books and articles its almost impossible to list them. I wanted to say i used his work when i was starting out as a historian and have wellthumbed copies of most of his work. I just site plucking one out of the blue, a world at arms, which is so extraordinary and really encapsulates his work, because not only is it scholarly and discusses the war, but it brings his incredible life experience, born in hamburg, working after the war in japan, learning about the entire world, the history of world war ii is seen from a military perspective, political perspective, social economic and 78 other per specifictics, and he manages to weave all of this into this extraordinary international, global perspective, which is extremely rare. So its with great, great gratitude and honor that i welcome gare hard first to the stand. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. Can you hear me . Thats a big help. [ laughter ] for some time, there was a scholarly debate that attracted a good deal of attention between those who called themselves or were called intentionlists and functionalists. The former argued that the systematic killing of jews was planned and organized from the top. While the latter held that the process was one of steady radicalization, pushed forward over time by those involved, as they engaged in every more radical procedures, culminating at some point in systematic mass killing. The careful attention to local detail and initiatives that characterized the work of those who called and considered themselves functionalists has certainly contributed greatly to our ability to follow the technical developments of mass murder. And the extent to which individual police, military and administrative personnel could and did exercise their own judgment about the procedures followed. Whatever the prior developments and the making of local decisions, as state of formal decision of the very top, even some of those writing about the hurricane still preferred to ignore the relevant evidence and continue to advocate something of a functionalist interpretation. We know from the romainian record that was determined to be accurate by the german official who checked it at the time, that when adolf hitler met romanian in munich on june 12th, 1941, the latter asked hitler what was to be done about the jews in the soviet territory that their armies were about to invade. An important issue for antonesscue, since the area that would be seized initially was known to contain a very large number of jews. Hitler told him that they were all to be killed. An instruction that the evidence indicates he had earlier orally given to heinrich himmler. We also know now, we have a clear confirmation of the meeting before the invasion at which a high ss official told the commanders of the iansat, murder commandos, that were to follow the german kmapders into the soviet union, that a major part of their assignment was to be, to kill all the jews. Ill come back to the source for this resolution of a subject that was once quite controversial when i get to it at another point. All the evidence we now have leaves no doubt that the commanders of the battalions of the order police, units with members more than ten times as numerous as the famous ianzats grutman, were similar instructed by the invasion of june 1941. Hitlers own telling, the minister of war of croatia in late july 1841, that all jews in europe were to be killed, and was telling the grand muffti in jerusalem that all jews in the middle east and in the rest of the world were also to be killed, are both recorded in the german documents published decades ago, although these very clear and explicit records are still ignored by many scholars. A trend in the literature that has not moved as far and as widely as this speaker thinks is needed is that of the very close interrelationship of the war as a fight between germany and those it attacked on the one hand, and the holocaust on the other. Its only quite recently that those writing on the war other than myself include any references to the holocaust at all. And 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. The murder commandos in many cases killed men, not whole families, in the first weeks of the german invasion of the soviet union. This is occasionally used as evidence for a first step that would be followed by radicalization subsequently. What is missing here is any reference to the reality of the early fighting on the Eastern Front. The german assault surprised the red army that stalin had held back as he disregarded all warnings from his own Intelligence Service and from the british and American Governments. The German Forces, under these circumstances, advanced very rapidly, and the german armys chief of staff, general hol dug, was sure, on july 3rd, 1941, that the campaign had succeeded and the rapid advance of German Forces showed that a quick victory was certain. This meant, as a practical matter, that a murder commander that had to follow in advancing German Military unit through some of the most densely jewish settled part of europe, at the rate of about 30 miles a day. They were simply not in a position to do anything else. The members of the unit would shoot the local men and come back from the front slowed down to kill the women and children. The units members did what they could in the circumstances of the moment, and had no need either for new orders or the personal supervision of heinrich himmler, who as we know repeatedly went to the east in the summer of 41 to watch the progress of his new program, and just as subsequently i would visit auschwitz in the summer of 1942 to observe the killing procedure implemented there. Neither hitler nor antonessco cared whether jews were killed by gas or other means. That was the subject left 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. Please do not be offended if i suggest that if the germans had won and obtained control of the 47 of the then 48 states of the usa, that the japanese were willing for them to have, there would surely have been in my american group, some whom themselves or their parents or grandparents would have been killed because they were jewish. Some in this audience would have been killed as jews. Some nonjews would have been killed because of some handicap. And some would have con tralkted polio and either died as a result or been crippled and then killed because the two doctors, joanna salt and albert saban who whos discovery concurred that disease in the 1950s would both have been killed because they happened to be jewish. On the other side of the relationship between the cause of the fighting and the holocaust, those who written endlessly about field marshal rammel and his campaigns in north africa generally ignore a critical part of his assignment. He was indeed originally sent there in april 1941 to salvage italys colony of libya, left the italian people dump mous mousseoliny when that colony was lost to british forces, a point that was a major worry for hitler. But why push the africa corps as it was called on into equippgyp the middle east in 1942, and do this at a time when the primary military theater for germany was the Eastern Front where things in the had obviously not gone the way hitler and his generals had confidently anticipated . An. The germans intended italy to have egypt and the middle east for its oil while germany would get its oil from the caucuses. In spite of these realities and plans, and in spite of the necessity for a renewed major summer offensive against the soviet union, the moment in the summer of 1942 it looked as if the africa corp might get to cairo and beyond, a special murder commander was attached to it. This was not done because hitler wanted the members to get a good tan or the hitler expected them to dismantle one of the pyramids so that it could be reerected next to the hall in berlin. The whole point was that all of the jews in the middle east, about 1 million at the time, were to be killed before the area was turned over to italy because hitler and for good reasons of Prior Experience did not trust the italians to do so but did trust rammel to direct the murder command to do what hitler had personally promised the grand mauve ty of jerusalem a little more than half a year earlier. In recent decades there have been on hand significant and positive developments in the study of the holocaust as a result of several trends. And especially important trend has been the declassification of very important relevant records. The agreement of the British Government in 1996 to the opening of their interception and decoding of the reports of the German Order Police has transformed our understanding of the early stages of the holocaust in 1941. It is now clear that these Police Battalions included not only about ten times as many men as the murder commandos, over 25,000 as compared with close to 3,000. But also undoubtedly killed far more jews than the commandos whose report because of their far earlier availability for research had been a central piece of evidence in all prior studies of the subject and remain of great importance. The recent publication by the german city of bremhan on the participation in the holocaust of two Police Battalions from that city both supplements what we already knew about such units and also provides vivid details about their participation in such specific operations as the notorious september 1941 mass murder of over 30,000 jews in the ukraine at kiev as well as their guarding of transports of jews from the restibbal transit camp in the netherlands to auschwitz beginning in the summer of 1942. Perhaps other german cities will follow the example of brayman and facilitate first the research on and then 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 act passed by the american congress. A major feature of that law was that it lifted the automatic exclusion from declassification with you and from the implementation of freedom of information requests of two categories of american records. Those relating to intelligence sources and methods and those called Foreign Government information. A general name utilized by u. S. Government for material provided to the United States by a Foreign Government that had a security classification at the time it was given to our government. While records in the former category could now be and were subjected to systematic de classification review in the latter case the government that had provided the material and for world war ii this generally meant Great Britain would be asked for its consent to declassification. The procedure in the former category relatively promptly led to massive declassifications and work on these newly open records is only just beginning. In the process 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 the group established to implement the new law, i was told by several of those at the working end of the declassification process that this rather dramatic break with all of their Prior Experience in dealing with the british on declassification records was most likely due to the widely known personal interest of then president clinton in the general topic. If there were a hold up reported to him he might telephone his friend, british Prime Minister tony blair at 10 downing street and those in the relevant offices in and near london did 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 repeatedly to declassify was unlikely to cause any real problems for british security. An important biproduct of american intelligence records was the publication of books by Richard Brightman and others about the post war american recruitment of nazis, some with exceedingly dubious records by american intelligence agencies. One significant product of the declassification of Foreign Government information with consent of the British Government is the collection of summaries of british interrogations of murder commando leader otto ollendorf in the summer of 1945 before he was turned over to the americans in december of that year and which hillary could utilize for her book on the nuremberg trial of the murder commando leaders. Its 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 de classification 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 if their Intelligent Services of no copies were to be found in american archives. That process also has been moving forward slowly but steadily in recent years and scholars like steven tireas has been making good use of the newly open records. We could expect important publications based on the declassified records in the coming years. There is also now a clearer perspective on two quite different facets of the events. A way in which some tried to profit from the murder of their former neighbors is illustrated quite dramatically by the 2012 book of jan 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 numbers of on the other side the way a few jews tried to protect themselves and their families by aiding the nazis is described