1 Prof. Marion Kaplan Spring 2010 Office hours: Thursdays, 11 AM

Prof. Marion Kaplan
Spring 2010
Office hours: Thursdays, 11 AM, KJCC 110
Email: [email protected]
G78.2689
G57. 2689
Nazi Germany, the “Racial State” and the Persecution of Minorities
The destruction of European Jewry has been a central focus in studying Nazi
extermination policies. This course will examine Nazi policies towards the Jewish people
and how the “racial state” dealt with those it deemed “racially unfit” to belong to the
German Volk. It will look at the heritage of racial thought that came before 1933 and the
ways in which the Nazis sought to create a nation based on “blood and race,” although
these terms were mutable (including and excluding “asocials” and social outsiders by
plan or whim). It will investigate policies towards the so-called “enemies” of the Third
Reich, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, Afro-Germans, homosexuals, the physically and
mentally disabled, etc. as well as how these policies interacted with each other. The
readings will analyze measures that the government took to delegitimize, isolate, rob,
incarcerate, sterilize, and/or murder many of these minorities. Readings will also examine
measures intended to increase the numbers of the preferred “Aryan” population (another
term that remained slippery and changeable) and reduce the numbers of “Aryans” the
Nazis deemed inadequate. Where possible, we will also determine ways in which
individuals in these groups held out against or defied Nazi policies. Students will,
moreover, note the extent to which Germans not included in these groups opposed or
supported the persecution of “others” and the extent to which the government’s
“biomedical vision” succeeded in bringing a people who had been split by class, religion
and politics into a unified nation based on “blood and race.”
Course Requirements: serious and consistent class participation (including regularly
introducing the readings and leading class discussions), occasional written statements, and
term paper.
BOOKS:
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989)
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945
Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany
Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(Chapel Hill, 1995)
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Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., The War in the East: The German Military in
World War II, 1941-1944 (New York/Oxford, 2000)
Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (NY 1998)
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass. 2004)
Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany
May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schults, eds., Showing our Colors: AfroGerman Women Speak Out
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: life stories of lesbians during the Third
Reich (trans. Allison Brown) (NY, 1996)
Week 1:
Introduction
Week 2:
Excerpts from Race and Membership in American History: the Eugenics Movement
[blackboard]
and
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945
(chaps. Intro- 5)
Week 3:
Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (chaps. 1-2)
and
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (esp. chaps. 2 and 3 “Modernity,
Racism, Extermination”) (Ithaca, 1989)
Week 4:
Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (NY 1998)
Recommended: Judy Scales-Trent, “Racial Purity Laws in the US and Nazi
Germany” [on Project Muse]
Week 5: Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews,
1939-1945
Week 6: The Disabled
Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, pp. 136-66 (skim)
and
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Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(Chapel Hill, 1995)
and
Herwig Czech, “Medical Crimes, Eugenics, and the Limits of the ‘Racial State’ Paradigm
in the Third Reich” [conference paper on blackboard with the permission of the author]
Week 7: Sinti and Roma
USHMM symposium: “Roma and Sinti: Under-studied victims…” [blackboard]
and
M. Zimmermann, “The Nazi Solution of the ‘Gypsy Question’: Central Decisions, Local
Initiatives…” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, winter 2001 [blackboard]
and
Wolfgang Wippermann, “Christine Lehmann and Mazurka Rose; Two ‘Gypsies’ in the
Grip of German Bureaucracy, 1933-1960,” in Michael Burleigh, ed., Confronting the
Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History, pp. 112- 123 [on blackboard]
and
Ian Hancock, review of Guenther Lewy book, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies in
Journal of Genocide Research, 2001 [on blackboard: read pp. 120-127 only]
Recommended: Sybil Milton, “‘Gypsies’ as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany,” in
Gellately and Stolzfus (chap. 10)
Guenther Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (NY, 2000)
Week 8: Homosexual men and women
Burleigh and Wippermann, The Racial State, 182-97
and
Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: life stories of lesbians during the Third
Reich (trans. Allison Brown) (NY, 1996)
and
Stefan Micheler, “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring
Men under National Socialism,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 11, nos. 1-2
(Jan/April 2002) [available online: Project Muse]
and
Geoffrey Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” in
Gellately and Stoltzfus (chap. 11)
and
Erik Jensen, “The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians, and the
Memory of Nazi Persecution,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 11, nos. 1-2
(Jan/April 2002) [available online: Project Muse]
and
Recommended: Geoffrey Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same – Sex
Incidents in Himmler’s SS and Police,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality,
vol. 11, nos. 1-2 (Jan/April 2002) [available online: Project Muse]
Giles in USHMM pamphlet: “Why Bother about Homosexuals?” Homophobia
and Sexual Politics [online]
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Week 9: Afro-Germans
May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye and Dagmar Schults, eds., Showing our Colors: AfroGerman Women Speak Out [pp. 1-76]
and
Raffael Scheck, “’They are Just Savages’ German Executions of Black Soldiers from the
French Army,” Journal of Modern History, June 2005 [blackboard]
and
Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany
(recommended to read entire memoir, but you may stop with his decision to come to the
U.S.)
Week 10: Disciplining the “Aryan Population” and (including Intermarriages between
“Aryans” and Jews)
Burleigh and Wippermann, “Asocials,” pp. 167-82 and
and
Nikolaus Wachsmann, “‘Habitual Criminals’ in the Third Reich,” in Gellately and
Stoltzfus (chap. 8)
and
Burleigh and Wippermann, Youth, Women and Men, chaps. 7 - 9
and
Jill Stephenson, “Women, Motherhood and the Family in the Third Reich” in Michael
Burleigh, ed., Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History, pp.
167-182 [on blackboard]
and
Nathan Stoltzfus, “The Limits of Policy: Social Protection of Intermarried German Jews
in Nazi Germany” in Gellately and Stoltzfus (chap. 6)
Recommended: N.Wachsmann “Annihilation thru Labor: the killing of state
prisoners in the Third Reich,” Journal of Modern History (JSTOR)
Week 11: Sexuality
Dagmar Herzog, ed., Sexuality and German Fascism, special issue of The Journal of the
History of Sexuality vol. 11, nos. ½ (Jan/April 2002) [available online and also
republished by Berghahn Books, 2004] [including essays on the intersections of
sexuality, racism, fascism, prostitution, “race defilement,” etc. We will have read the
articles on homosexuality during Week 8.]
Week 12: Foreign Workers and Soviets
Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds., The War in the East: The German Military in
World War II, 1941-1944 (New York/Oxford, 2000) esp. ch. 4 “Soviet Prisoners of War
in the Hands of the Wehrmacht,” by Christian Streit; ch. 5 “The Logic of the War of
Extermination: The Wehrmacht and the Anti-Partisan War,” by Hannes Heer; ch. 10 “On
the Way to Stalingrad: The 6th Army in 1941-42,” by Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian; ch.
13 “ [all articles on blackboard]
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Robert Gellately, “Police Justice, Popular Justice, and Social Outsiders in Nazi
Germany,” in Gellately and Stolzfus, pp. 256-72
And
B. Kundrus, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and
Foreigners, 1939-45,” in Journal of the History of Sexuality-vol. 11, No. 1 and 2,
Jan/April 2002, pp. 201-222 [available online: Project Muse]
Week 13. How and Why?
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass. 2004)
and
Christopher Browning, “Holocaust Perpetrators: Ideologues, Managers, Ordinary Men,”
(March 6, 2002 lecture at US Holocaust Memorial Museum [available online
http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/analysis/details/2002-03-06/browning.pdf ]
and
“When good people do evil: the Milgram experiments revisited,” Yale Alumni Magazine,
Jan/Feb. 2007 [blackboard-Milgram]; Benedict Carey, “Decades Later, Still Asking:
Would I Pull That Switch?” NY Times, July 1, 2008 [find online and view slides as well]
and
“Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil,” New York Times, April 3,
2007 [blackboard-Zimbardo]
Week 14: Student Paper Presentations
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