Taking the stand
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Annenberg Presidential Learning Center - Speaker Series Slides. Slides to accompany the presentation of Taking the Stand.
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Taking the stand
- 1. Taking the Stand Eyewitness to the Holocaust and Nazi Tyranny 16 October 2015 The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
- 2. Why Study The Holocaust?
- 3. Why/How Did It Happen? 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
- 4. 10 Stages of Genocide 1. Classification: People are divided into "us and them". 2. Symbolization: People are forced to identify themselves. 3. Discrimination: People begin to face systematic discrimination. 4. Dehumanization: People equated with animals, vermin, or diseases. 5. Organization: The government creates special groups (police/military) to enforce the policies. 6. Polarization: The government broadcasts propaganda to turn the populace against the group. 7. Preparation: Official action to remove/relocate people begins. 8. Persecution: Beginning of murders, theft of property, trial massacres. 9. Extermination: Wholesale elimination of the group. It is “extermination” and not murder because the people are not considered human. 10. Denial: The government denies that it has committed any crime. Stanton, Gregory (2012); 10 Stages of Genocide, Genocide Watch
- 5. It’s Not About The Numbers… Victims Killed Jews 5.93 million Soviet POWs 2–3 million Ethnic Poles 1.8–2 million Serbs 300,000–500,000 Disabled 270,000 Romani 90,000–220,000 Freemasons 80,000–200,000 Slovenes 20,000–25,000 Homosexuals 5,000–15,000 Jehovah's Witnesses 2,500–5,000 Spanish Republicans 7,000 Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia (2000). The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust. Columbia University Press. p. 49.
- 6. It’s About The People
- 7. Who Took Part? The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke
- 8. PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 9. German customs officials supervise the packing of a moving van containing the belongings of a Jewish family preparing to emigrate. Part of the officials’job was to prevent the smuggling of valuables that law prohibited Jews from taking with them. Bielefeld, Germany, 1936. Stadtarchiv Bielefeld PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 10. PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 11. Amember of the Lithuanian auxiliary police auctions off property of Jews who were recently executed in the nearby Rase Forest. Lithuania, July–August 1941. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Saulius Berzinis PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 12. PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 13. A police official distributes Jewish badges after German occupation orders require Jews residing in the northern occupied zone of France to wear badges. Paris, 1942. Nationaal Archief/Spaarnestad Photo/Cl. Aveline PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 14. PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 15. SS officers and female assistants at an SS resort 18 miles from Auschwitz. July 1944. Many of those depicted were involved in processing the Jewish deportees who arrived at Auschwitz from Hungary in summer 1944. US Holocaust Memorial Museum PHOTO ACTIVITY: DECONSTRUCTING THE FAMILIAR
- 16. Was It Only Against Jews?
- 17. Why Didn’t Anyone Do Anything? • Anti-Semitism was widespread throughout the world and many countries didn’t want to help. • The Great Depression made many countries feel that they could not support Jewish immigrants. • Many people did not believe the reports of the Holocaust, thinking that no one could commit such atrocities.
- 18. Why At The Reagan Library? Good and decent people must not close their eyes to evil, must not ignore the suffering of the innocent, and must never remain silent and inactive in times of moral crisis. – Ronald Reagan
- 19. Who Are The Speakers? Renée Firestone Hermine Liska Renée at 21 Hermine at 10
- 20. APLC <Your Response> From a text message Participating with Poll Everywhere How to vote via web/text messaging 22333 Pollev.com/APLC From any browser
- 22. Questions To Ask Big Picture Questions • How did this experience cause you to think differently about… • What did you learn about… Connection Questions Thematic Questions • What did this teach you about (citizenship, bravery, etc…)?
- 23. Questions To Avoid Right There Questions Anything you can find easily in a biography or online • What year did you… • Where did you… Yes/No Questions Inappropriate Questions
- 24. Speaker Series for Students Logistics Information and Expectations for Teachers, Chaperones, and Students
- 25. 1) Each student should label his/her lunch with FIRST and LAST NAME 2) Please place all of your group’s lunches in a box that has: a. SCHOOL b. TEACHER LAST NAME 3) When you arrive at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, please designate two students to help load lunches onto carts. Carts will be stored until designated lunch time. 4) Please work with your chaperones to ensure all waste is disposed of following lunch. 5) Students will NOT be able to purchase lunch in the café.
- 26. State ofCivicsToday Think Business CasualBoys We ask that boys wear slacks and a shirt with a collar Girls We ask that they wear skirts, dresses or slacks below the knee, and a blouse or collared shirt equivalent
- 27. State ofCivicsToday 1) Please position your chaperones so that they are evenly distributed throughout your student population. 2) During the panel, students are allowed to text or tweet their questions, comments, and reactions to the discussion, but they should not do so in such a way that it becomes distracting. 3) Students should sit quietly and give their full attention to the panelist(s) and the discussion taking place. 4) All texts, tweets, or questions should be respectful in nature. 5) Students should remain with their group.
- 28. State ofCivicsToday 1) There is no food, drink, or gum allowed in the museum. 2) Photography is permitted (except for on Air Force One), but there is no flash photography allowed. 3) Students should remain with their group. 4) There are many exhibits that are hands on and interactive, feel free to touch and utilize these. However, please do not touch exhibits that are not designed to be interactive. 5) Students and chaperones should listen to the docents (they are extremely knowledgeable).
- 29. Questions?
Editor's Notes
- Freedom and democracy don’t flourish on their own, they need to be taught and we need to study what happens when those values are allowed to expire. Ignoring the civil rights of others is becomes tacit approval, and may lead to your rights being eroded. The Holocaust was not destined to happen. It was created as a systematic and bureaucratic program to eliminate an entire group of people. Understanding the motivations and reasoning behind the Holocaust can help us avoid similar tragedies. The Holocaust is part of all human history and it needs to be remembered. The more we understand about how abuses of power and oppression occur, the better prepared we will be to resist such measures. Picture on the left: Selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Picture on the right: Propaganda poster stating ‘Who is to blame for the war!’ and pointing at a Jewish person. From 1943.
- Anti-Semitism isn’t something that just arose during the Holocaust; it has existed for centuries if not millennia. The Jewish people have a long history of culture and advancement and this makes them a target of resentment for many people. That is not to say that the Holocaust was inevitable, but the existing bias and discrimination against Jews made them a relatively easy target for Hitler and the Nazis. Fascism requires some form of scapegoat and Hitler took the easiest path by feeding an already burning resentment and fanned the flames of all out hatred. 1925 – Hitler writes Mein Kampf and outlines his argument for Aryan racial purity and the culpability of the Jewish people in holding Germany back from its rightful place in the world. He says that the two greatest evils in the world are Communism and Judaism and that there is a grand conspiracy by the Jewish people to take over the world. 1933 – Hitler becomes chancellor and now has the authority to put in place his plan. The first concentration camp (Dachau) is started for political prisoners and would become the template for all the other camps. 1935 – Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and made it illegal for them to marry non-Jews. 1937- Jews banned from many professional jobs. 1938 – Evian Conference. The U.S. calls a meeting of 32 countries to discuss the plight of the Jewish people in Germany and Europe though no country offers to help or to take in refugees. Hitler takes this as a sign that many countries did not really care about Jews. Kristallnacht: ‘Night of Broken Glass’, Jewish synagogues and businesses are burned or destroyed in a massive pogrom to force Jewish people to leave. 1939 – Invasion of Poland and creation of Jewish ghettos. 1941 – ‘Final Solution’ implemented. Large scale murder of Jews in camps begins. Some camps are specifically designed for this purpose and are known as extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Belzek, Treblinka). 1942 – Extermination camps begin using gas chambers utilizing Carbon Monoxide or Zyklon-B gas. 1944 – Anne Frank sent to Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. 1945 – Camps liberated by Allied forces.
- While the number of people that were murdered by the Nazis is staggering, to the point that it is almost impossible to conceive of the scope of human suffering, we can’t let the Holocaust be a story of numbers. Every one of these numbers represents a person. They were a mother, a father, a son or daughter. There are untold works of art that were never created to enrich the world. There were scientists and engineers that were never able to research a cure for cancer or build new technology. They are people who were loved and loved back. Many suffered greatly, but many others persevered through superhuman levels of determination and will. Have students number off from 1-10. Have another student pick a random number from one to ten. Have all the other numbers sit down. That is the ratio of Polish Jews that were killed by the Third Reich. Ask how many of them are under 15 years old. Let them know that upon arrival to the extermination camps, they and the elderly were often taken directly to the gas chambers to be killed.
- Not all Germans supported the ‘Final Solution’. Some ignored the Holocaust while others willfully stood by and watched. Some Germans actively resisted the Nazi regime and were imprisoned or executed for their anti-government stance. Many Germans went along because they agreed with the Nazis and Hitler while others were just trying to avoid being targeted themselves or because of peer pressure. The power of needing to ‘belong’ can be very powerful as can the ‘us vs. them’ mentality. The dehumanization of ‘racially-inferior’ peoples makes it easier to oppress and eventually eliminate them.
- While the Holocaust was the extermination of all European Jews, the Nazis did not stop with just them. They also targeted many other groups. Socialists/communists, criminals, Masons, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, Ethnic Poles and Slavs, and the Roma. Red – Political prisoners, communists, Freemasons Green – Professional criminals Blue – Immigrants Purple – Jehovah's Witnesses Pink – Homosexuals Black – Work-shy, anti-socials, Roma women, mentally ill, and pacifists Brown – Roma men Yellow – Jews (combined with another color if it applied or another yellow if they were there just because they were Jewish. Made the Star of David. A bar was used for repeat offenders (or another crime) and the black dot signified that they were tasked with hard labor, while the red dot signified that they were suspected of having tried to escape. The Nazi killing machine first started against the handicapped. The poster on the right is telling Germans that supporting the disabled and handicapped cost over 60,000 Reichsmark over their lives and they were ‘polluting’ the Aryan race. At first they would kill children by lethal injection and then moved on to adults and when the numbers became too large they developed the gas chamber and mobile gas vehicles. These would later develop into the gas chambers used at the extermination camps.
- President Reagan was one of the first Americans to see footage from Army journalist during the liberation of the camps. He even kept a copy of one film in case anyone later tried to say that the Holocaust never happened. He knew, and regularly spoke about, the responsibility of every person to fight for the rights of people being repressed and murdered.
- Renee Firestone: Renée Firestone, née Weinfeld, was born on April 13, 1924, in Užhorod in Eastern Czechoslovakia [now Ukraine] to a Jewish family. Following annexation of this region by Hungary in 1938, she had her first encounter with repression of the Jewish population at the hands of the Hungarian regime. She was no longer permitted to attend a state school. When the systematic extermination of Hungarian Jews began after Hitler’s invasion of Hungary, she, her parents, and her sister were confined in the Užhorod ghetto on April 29, 1944; and on May 26 of that year, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She was exposed to Dr. Josef Mengele’s dreaded selections on a daily basis and encountered him face-to-face on several occasions. In the autumn of 1944, she was sent to Liebau [now Lubawka] female forced labor camp in Silesia, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen concentration camp. She was liberated by the Russian army on May 8, 1945. Her mother was gassed, while her sister Klara was shot after having been the subject of experiments carried out by Dr. Hans Münch. Her father died shortly after he was liberated from the concentration camp. Only her brother Frank survived. After the war, Renée Firestone lived in Prague before immigrating to the United States with her family in 1948. She worked as a fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. In 1998, she told her story in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary The Last Days. She regularly speaks about the Holocaust to young people in schools, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Renée Firestone lives in California. Hermine Liska: Hermine Liska, née Obweger, was born on April 12, 1930, on her parents’ farm in St. Walburgen in Carinthia, Austria. As a child of Bible Students, as Jehovah’s Witnesses were then known, she was raised in accordance with the principles of the Bible. She refused to join the Hitler Youth and use the greeting “Heil Hitler!” Because her father did not sign the order issued by the Nazi juvenile court that obliged him to bring Hermine up in the Nazi ideology, her parents’ right to raise their children was revoked. In February 1941, Hermine Liska was taken away from her parents by the Nazis and put into “reeducation centers.” She was sent to the Waiern home for juveniles in Carinthia and the Adelgunden institute in Munich. Hermine Liska remained true to her principles, and after completing the mandatory year of community service for girls at an inn with a small farm in Carinthia, she was able to return home on May 8, 1945. After the war, she married, had three children, and became a housewife. Since 1999, she has visited schools all over Austria as a witness of history and every year tells as many as thirteen thousand students her story. Since 2002 she has been an official Holocaust Teacher on behalf of the Austrian Ministry for Education. In 2009, she was invited by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC to relate her story. Hermine Liska lives near Graz in Styria, Austria.
- Poll Title: What question would you like to ask the speakers? https://www.polleverywhere.com/free_text_polls/3qf7ruTWripb4cq