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Fall 2007 In This Issue
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Attended by over 70 teachers from throughout New Jersey, “Barbarous Utopia: from Eugenics to Mass Murder”was the title of a Gumpert Teachers Workshop held at Ramapo College of New Jersey Friday, November 17. It was held in cooperation with the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C. Under examination was a scientific movement that had benign beginnings in post-Darwinian genetics but which ended up providing the justification for the industrialized killing in Hitler’s Third Reich. Although the Nazi regime’s attempt to realize its vision of a biologically healthy and ethnically homogeneous population through “racial hygiene” was the workshop’s primary focus, the pervasive influence of the eugenics movement in the United States and Britain was also scrutinized. Greeting participants was Ramapo College Provost Dr. Beth Barnett. She stressed the important role teachers play in imparting the lessons of the Holocaust to the younger generation and expressed the College’s support for Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in that effort. The featured speaker was Dr. Susan Bachrach, exhibition curator at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Together with Dieter Kuntz, historian at the museum, she was responsible for Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, the museum’s special exhibition on eugenics and genocidal policies of the Third Reich. Dr. Bachrach’s multi-media presentation traced the development of “Racial Science” from its ostensibly legitimate beginnings in the second half of the nineteenth century to its transformation in the Third Reich into a justification for sterilization and an enterprise for the destruction of human beings deemed unworthy of life. Shedding light on the British and American involvement in eugenics was Dr. Elaine Winshell, professor emerita of Biology at Ramapo College and an expert on bridging the disciplinary divide between the natural and social sciences. Although Eugenics is today generally regarded as a pseudo-science and was discredited in the wake of murderous abuses in Germany during the Third Reich, Winschell reminded her audience that the second largest Eugenics movement was in the United States. Starting with Connecticut in 1896, state laws were enacted that prohibited marriage and that forced sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the transmission of mental illness to the next generation. In some ways surprisingly, with the Supreme Court upholding their constitutionality in 1927, it was not until the 1950s that such legislation was finally rescinded. Mr. Eric Mayer of Wayne, who grew up in the historic southwest German city of Worms, provided a first-hand view of racism in the classrooms of the Third Reich. Before being sent by his family to the relative safety of France, Mr. Mayer spent his first school years in an elementary school that became progressively more inhospitable to Jewish children. It was not only the racially tainted instruction that he and his fellow Jewish students had to face, but also the daily torment and attacks on the part of some of their non-Jewish peers. Also taking part in the workshop was Dr. Paul Winkler, executive director of the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education, who provided an overview of the State Mandate on Holocaust Education. In his view, examining the development of “racial science” provides an opportunity for classroom teachers to not only explore the roots of genocide, but also affords an entry point to to build awareness among the young people of New Jersey that the abuse of power in any society often has seemingly innocuous beginnings. Rounding out the workshop was a presentation on “Teaching about the History of Racism,” by Helen Simpkins, a consultant to the State Commission on Holocaust Education and retired supervisor of Social Studies for the Vernon School District. Her talk provided participants with methodological and practical guidance on how to integrate instruction about racial science into today’s middle and high school classroom. An discussion at the conclusion of the day’s proceedings indicated an interest among attendees for a workshop to examine the background and development of the tragic genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. As a consequence, the Center will be holding a workshop on April 19th, which while focusing on the unfolding tragedy of Darfur, will assist educators on teaching their students about contemporary genocides generally. [ return to top ]
On March 29, before an audience of over 260 students, faculty, and community members, the noted historian Taner Akcam linked the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 to
Ottoman Turkey’s population policy implemented on the eve of World War I to maintain Turkish hegemony over a diminished and endangered empire. The event was sponsored by Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Armenian National Committee of New Jersey. Introducing Professor Akcam was Dr. Antranig Kasbarian, Nagorno-Karabagh Program Director of the New York-based Tufenkian Foundation. Making extensive use of Ottoman and other sources previously unused by historians of any nationality, Akcam placed the genocide within the context of Turkish nationalism. He showed an empire in a state of collapse plagued by dissension and contradiction. In its dying breath, as Akcam’s presents, Ottoman Turkey lashed out against and attempted to constrain its ethnic and religious minorities.
According to Akcam, the Turkish government adopted a policy of “ethnic cleansing.” Greeks and Albanians were deported from southwestern Turkey, while Moslem Kurds, Central Asians and Arabs were moved from their domiciles in eastern Turkey and subject to “Turkification.” The culmination of this process was the first of the 20th Century’s genocides, in which over a million Armenian men, women and children lost their lives and livelihoods through organized killing, rape and deportation. Professor Akcam made this tragedy come alive by citing from telegrams and other documents penned by the Ottoman Turkish leadership. They poignantly depicted a situation in which the government pursued its policy of maintaining minority representation in most areas to five to ten percent of the total population against the Armenians with particular vehemence. Among the Turkish claims that Ackam puts to rest was that the government drafted a policy and set aside funds to compensate Armenians for confiscations and loss of income incurred during the expulsions. Documents unearthed by Ackam reveal that the authorities erected a deliberate smokescreen to hide widespread persecution and expropriation. Taner Akcam was born in the province of Ardahan, Turkey, in 1953. He became interested in Turkish politics at an early age. As the editor-in-chief of a student political journal, he was arrested in 1976 and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. Amnesty International adopted him as one of their first prisoners of conscience, and a year later he escaped by digging a tunnel with a stove leg and fled to Germany, where he received political asylum. In 1988, Akcam began work as a research scientist at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. While researching the late Ottoman Empire and early Republic, especially the history of political violence and torture in Turkey, he became interested in the Armenian genocide. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of Hanover. His dissertation thesis was titled “The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922.” Since 2002 he has been a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Akcam is the author of ten books and numerous articles in Turkish, German, English and other languages. [ return to top ] Over the last academic year, Ramapo College’s Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies brought a number of original and informative programs to the attention new audiences. Presenters included Holocaust survivors providing first-hand accounts of their ordeals of living through the Holocaust inferno and academics shedding new light on various aspects of that horrific and perplexing time.
Staring the fall series was a dual-language program in which Jorge Klainman, who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina, spoke in Spanish on October 23 to an audience of students and community members about his odyssey of survival. Kal Wagenheim, who translated Klainman’s book, The Seventh Miracle, rendered the author’s remarks into English. Among those attending the event was a sizable contingent from Ramapo College’s Spanish Studies, program which co-sponsored the event. Jorge Klainman began the story of his struggle to remain alive with the depiction of a near-death experience as a slight fifteen-year-old. Marked for death by notorious concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth (unforgettably portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List), he miraculously survives his own execution. Klainman is a retired businessman who put his past behind him when he left Europe for Argentina in 1947. After celebrating his 68th birthday in 1996, he decided to break down “the wall of silence” that he had built “brick by brick.” His explanation of the title of his book comes as no surprise. “Six actual miracles occurred, and saved my life,” he says. “The seventh was my being able to write the story, after so much time.”
At a joint commemoration with Temple Beth Haverim of Mahwah on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum fellow Ilana Offenberger spoke on “Kristallnacht in Vienna: Fragments of a Shattered World.”Also known as the Night of Broken Glass, the pogrom night of November 9 – 10, 1938, with its widespread and organized nature of attacks, represented a turn in the history of Hitler’s war against the Jews. As Offenburger depicted, Nazification proceeded with such unrelenting rapidity that Jewish families soon found themselves unable to meet the financial requirements to emigrate. Offenberger’s participation in the Kristallnacht commemoration and classroom visit was made possible through a generous donation from Jack and Goldie Wolf Miller to the United States Holocaust Memorial Foundation’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Jan Gross is known for his work, Neighbors (2001), which argued that Poles, not the German occupiers, as previously believed, conducted a massacre in the Polish town of Jedwabne. The results were the subject of a vigorous debate that is likely to be repeated once Gross’s new book appears in Polish translation. By far the most well attended program of year was a lecture by Turkish born historian Tan Akcam on “Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide that led off the Spring semester’s programming. Held on March 29th and drawing about 270 community members, it will be discussed in a separate article.
Our Center’s annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) commemoration, held together with Temple Beth Haverim of Mahwah in their sanctuary on April 25, provided the next opportunity for an audience to hear a poignant account of survival. Told in a matter-of-fact tone by Ms. Lola Kaufman of New City, NY, it chronicled her odyssey in hiding following the murder of her parents in the summer of 1942, about a year after the Germans occupied her eastern Polish native city of Czortkow. Only eight at the time, she was eventually forced to join another Jewish family in a cramped hole beneath a barn the house of another woman. Considered an outsider and another mouth to feed, Ms. Kaufman related in an astonishingly self-effacing manner how just before liberation she was evicted from the hole. Advancing Soviet soldiers took her into their care and found her uncle, with whom she emigrated to the United States in 1951. Throughout her ordeal, Ms Kaufman was only clothed in the summer dress made her mother gave her before she was killed. Five years ago, in January 2002, Ms. Kaufman donated the dress to United States Holocaust Museum. It is now in the museum’s permanent collection and symbolizes the fate of countless Jewish children who experienced a similar fate as Ms Kaufman. Most were less fortunate than she was and did not survive the Holocaust. Lola Kaufman’s presentation was part of commemorative service in which the Choir of Beth Haverim, under Cantor David Perper, and the Ramapo Chorale and the CantaNova of Ramapo College, under assistant professor of music Lisa Lutter, performed.
Rounding off the year’s programming was a talk on April 26 by another local scholar and author, Professor Steven P. Remy of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He spoke about his recent book, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Harvard University Press, 2003) in which he offers a sobering account of the German academic community from 1933 to 1957. In words and photographs he presented a picture that depicted how, focusing on Heidelberg, the professoriate for the most part willingly embraced Nazi ideology and policy In elaborate postwar self-defense narratives, they portrayed themselves as unpolitical and uncorrupted by the nationalism, authoritarianism and racism of the Nazi years. As a consequence, denazification was resisted and compromised scholars remained in or were restored to their previous positions. Professor Remy is currently working on a book about German-Jewish refugees in the U.S. Army in World War II. It is our intention to have him back to Ramapo to discuss this new work as soon as possible. [ return to top ]
Held on April 19 and attended by over 70 educators from New Jersey and New York, Teaching About Contemporary Genocides Real-Time: Darfur and Beyond was the title of the latest Gumpert Teachers’ Workshop sponsored by the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies in cooperation with the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education. Setting the tone for the day’s presentation was Ramapo College’s Provost, Dr. Beth Barnett, who acknowledged the work of classroom teachers in fostering civic education and the international responsibility among the young people of our society. Providing a welcome on behalf of the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education was one of its newer members Dr. Dennis Papazian, professor emeritus of History at the University of Michigan. Emphasizing the importance of genocide education in the face of the increasing presence of deniers of various stripes, especially on the Internet, he focused on the attempt not only to deny Turkish responsibility for the Armenian Genocide, but also to harass and criminalize those who assert otherwise. Delivering the keynote was Dr. Joyce Apsel, a Master Teacher in Humanities at New York University where she teaches Social Foundations and sophomore seminars on genocide, human rights and peace studies. Dr. Apsel holds a M.A. degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester as well as a J.D. from the Rutgers School of Law in Newark. A resident of Ridgewood, New Jersey, Dr. Apsel is the founder and director of Rights Works International, a not-for-profit human rights education project. She lectures and writes on issues of genocide, peace and human rights and is co-editor of Teaching about Genocide (3rd ed. 2003), and editor of Teaching About Human Rights (2005). Most recently, she compiled and helped write the highly acclaimed teaching guide Darfur: Genocide Before Our Eyes (2005), on which her hands-on talk was largely based. Next on the agenda was Adelbagy Abushanab, president of the Newark-based Darfur Rehabilitation Project and, like Dennis Papazian, also a member of the New Jersey State Commission on Holocaust Education. A native of the troubled Sudanese region, he depicted how the military dictatorial elite in the Sudanese capital essentially engineered the tragedy in Darfur to extend and reifroce its control over the country’s vast western region. In recounting his experiences growing up in a village and studying accounting in Khartoum, Mr. Abushanab stressed how until the 1990s the local “African” (settled farming) and “Arab” (nomadic herder) peoples lived along side each other in relative harmony. At that time, however, the increasingly Islamist central government began exploiting competition over resources, replacing traditional conflict resolution mechanisms with conflict itself, which it organized and financed. Following lunch, there were two more presentations. The first was by Hunterdon Regional High School (Clinton, New Jersey) teacher Ann Helfant, who in her previous position at Ridge High School (Basking Ridge, New Jersey) developed a course covering genocide throughout history, ranging from the Hereros in Africa to Darfur and was also the advisor for the Ridge branch of Help Darfur Now. In addition to finding her enthusiasm infectious, many of the teachers attending the workshop commented on how grateful they were for Helfant’s suggestions about lesson plans and teaching strategies. Concluding the day’s events was a presentation by two Ramapo College student activists, Andy Simon and Steve Pardalis, who founded the campus’s Save Darfur Club. In recounting their club’s activities on campus and in local secondary schools, they modeled and depicted how students were not only able to raise awareness about the unfolding tragedy of Darfur, but also engage in activism and play a significant part in genocide education. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the Save Darfur Club received the “Outstanding New Organization of the Year Award” of 2006/2007 from Ramapo College’s Division Student Affairs. [ return to top ]
This situation is complex and a long time in the making. Untangling it is not easy. But this is exactly what Gerard Prunier does in the recently revised edition of his book, Darfur: the Ambiguous Genocide. As he explains, at the heart of the crisis is the determination of the present-day Khartoum-based Arab elite to assert its hegemony over the mostly African Muslim farmers of the embattled western region that in pre-colonial times constituted an independent and significant sultanate. The tragedy of Darfur, as Prunier makes clear, was at least twenty years in the making with Arab nationalism, drought, foreign interference and civil conflict across the border in Chad all playing their part in its unfolding. One matter, perhaps, requires a bit of criticism. Prunier sometimes sounds dismissive in noting the influence of the increasingly vocal advocacy groups and the celebrities who have played a key role in making their voices heard in the arena of world opinion. Without rallies and letter-writing campaigns and the likes of George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Mia Farrow, whose pronouncements have been heard from Washington to Beijing, it is unlikely that there would be any hope at all of resolving the conflict. [ return to top ]
One of the first Turkish scholars to systematically study slaughter of one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I, Taner Akçam lays to rest claims by apologists and deniers who minimize the deaths and claim that they were incidental to the war effort, or the fault of the Armenians themselves because they were disloyal.
Akçam end his study with an examination of the role of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in failing not only to take responsibility for the genocide, but also for continuing the pre-war policy of removing or limiting the non-Turkish peoples living on the new republic’s territory. Ironically, the title for Akcam’s book, “A Shameful Act,” comes from a speech by Ataturk himself. Unfortunately, however, instead of coming to terms with the crimes that the wartime regime perpetrated, Ataturk set a course of denial from which the government of Turkey has not veered to this day. [ return to top ]
Ten years in the making and anxiously awaited, Saul Friedlander’s second volume of the Holocaust, The Years of Extermination, displays the author’s unique talents as a meticulous scholar, insightful analyst and artful chronicler of the past.
Taking into account and countering much recent scholarship, Friedlander re-focuses attention on the role of anti-Semitism in explaining the murderous campaign of the Nazis and their collaborators. While accepting that economic motives played a part in Hitlers campaign against the Jews, he believes that there are enough contradictions to warrant further assessment:
While assessing Leni Riefenstahl’s legendary career as a filmmaker and favorite of Hitler, Bennington College and Columbia film school professor Steven Bach opens a window into the idiosyncratic world of Nazi Germany in which the strange, evil, familiar and banal combined to produce such harrowing consequences. More than talent, skill and determination Leni Riefenstahl’s success, as a filmmaker, Bach makes abundantly clear, was determined by the patronage she cultivated and enjoyed at the top.
Bach’s meticulous and engaging book confirms her presence at the notorious 1939 massacre of Jews in Konsakie during the Nazi invasion of Poland and her use of interned Roma (gypsy) extras later deported to Auschwitz in her film Tiefland. Riefenstahl’s claims of ignorance and political naiveté should be put to rest forever. [ return to top ]
Today, as we grapple with issues like universal health care and the high cost of Social Security, it is little known that Nazi Germany during the Second World War not only expanded, but also introduced numerous social programs that would serve as models for much of the rest of world for years to come.
Put bluntly, as the Berlin-based Aly clearly shows, to pay for their welfare state the Nazis robbed the Jews and the occupied countries. And if we are to accept his analysis, the material benefits gained through the direct seizure of Jewish property, including furniture and other household effects, made the German people less likely to oppose the Nazi regime and more than willing to turn a blind eye to physical persecution. Aside from the fiscal incongruity that expropriations never accounted for more than 5% of the Third Reich’s budget, pointed out by a number of reviewers, the element most missing from Aly’s account is the role of anti-Semitism. Simply put, before greed and self-interest came into play for their plunder to take place, the Jews of occupied Europe had to become the “other.” It was a dynamic borne of indifference, denial and outright hatred. [ return to top ] |
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Despite pronouncements from world leaders, resolutions from international bodies and negotiations among the parties involved, genocide continues in the Darfur region of Sudan. The marvels of technology have enabled Google and the United Staes Holocaust Museum to display satellite photographs of the crisis zone with explicating material that make it possible to know what is going on there in real-time. And the humanitarian disaster continues with at least 200,00 people killed and 2.5 million Darfur “Africans” driven from their homes by the infamous state-supported “Janjaweed” militia.
Basing his account on newly available archival sources, Akçam makes it clear that the persecution of the Armenians was part of an overall Ottoman population policy that aimed at Turkification and the limitation of its non-Turkish population. The policy began in the years before the First World War with the “ethnic cleansing” Greeks and Albanians from southwestern Turkey and spread to encompass Moslem Kurds, Central Asians and Arabs in the eastern part of the country. As Akçam points out, it was an outgrowth of the empire’s decline and was fueled by the nationalism of a younger generation of intellectuals and military leaders schooled in Central Europe.
Born and raised in Prague, Friedlander survived Hitler’s war against the Jews hidden in a French Catholic boarding school. Emigrating to Israel in ?, he today holds joint appointments at Tel Aviv University and UCLA. Without the slightest hint of pathos or sentimentality, relying heavily on their testimonies [of one kind or another], he consistently weaves into his chronicle the perspective of the Shoah’s Jewish victims.
He also makes it clear that her longest-lasting influence will be as the author of the book on propagandist imagery, even if unknowingly, her haunting and masterful films glorifying Hitler and the Third Reich, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, are the paradigms for putting the modern political campaign on screen.
Ever attuned to public sentiment, Hitler and his henchmen established a “redistributive state” on an unparalleled scale. They introduced a marriage tax credit in 1934 and health insurance for retirees in 1941. The number of public holidays was doubled in1934, and in 1940, the Nazi government the taxes on overtime were rescinded. In some ways ever more astonishing, the wives of German servicemen during the war received subsistence benefits twice that of their British and American counterparts. What is more, fearing public opposition, even though the needs of the treasury and the need of labor might have dictated otherwise, this situation was never tampered with.  |
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