📜holocaust histiography

Question 1

Lucy Dawidowicz

Answer 1

“The War Against the Jews”:
“Without Hitler, the charismatic political leader, who believed he had a mission to annihalate the Jews, the Final Solution would not have occurred” + Mein Kampf

Question 2

Richard Breitman

Answer 2

“The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution”:
A remarkable amount of paperwork was produced by Himmler, where “the idea of executing Jews was an essential element from the beginning”… but “a comprehensive program” came later. Himmler, after all, often reflected Hitler.

Question 3

Gotz Aly

Answer 3

“’Final Solution’: Nazi population policy and the murder of the European Jew”:
“As amoral and racist as the anti Jewish politics already were in 1933, the most important prerequisites to the Holocaust did not emerge until the war began”

Question 4

Christian Gerlach

Answer 4

“The Extermination of the European Jews”
“The peak of destruction of Jewry coincided with a giant mobilization of labor, primarily of Soviet and Polish civilians who created a reservoir large enough for Germany to be able to do without badly weakened Soviet POWs and Jews.”

Question 5

Martin Broszat

Answer 5

“The Hitler State”: The Nazi regime was marked by a lack of clear, centralized control, leading to a series of ad hoc decisions that escalated into the Final Solution

Question 6

Ian Kershaw

Answer 6

The aim of killing Jews was there from the beginning but not in specifics or scale - only after the invasion of the USSR meant that deporation wouldn’t work, the “proto-genocidal” notions turned into genocidal notions.

Question 7

Daniel Goldhagen - Perpetrators

Answer 7

A moral reckoning: the role of the Catholic church in the holocaust

Question 8

Raul Hilberg - non interpretation

Answer 8

Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe

Question 8

Martin Gilbert: bystanders

Answer 8

Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler’s Mass Murder

Despite the fact that, the same year, Churchill himself had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but eventually passed the buck to the Americans, who also did nothing. Why?

Question 9

Richard Breitman: bystanders

Answer 9

Official Secrets: What the Nazis planned, what the British and Americans knew (1998)

The allies knew about the Holocaust but deliberately ignored it.

Question 10

William D Rubenstein: bystanders

Answer 10

The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis