Ehret, Ulrike. Church, Nation, and Race: Catholics and Antisemitism in Germany and England. 1918-1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.
In chapter five, Ehret argues that the failure on part of the Catholic Church to speak out against Jewish persecution is due to its strong stance against communism as well as fear of persecution by the Nazi movement. The idea of the hatred of communism is explained to be centered on Atheism therefore it was considered to be a lesser evil compared to Fascism. Ehret also explains how the Church saw communism as a Jewish led ideology which seems to say that the Church thought that Jews were not helping themselves in the time of their persecution. The second major theme argued by Ehret was how the Catholic Church was preoccupied with protecting its own status in the hostile European environment, therefore it did not have the time nor the energy to reach out to Jews. However, Ehret argued of Catholic backlash toward dome of the Nazi racial policy which the Catholic Church viewed as a Pagan belief system. This is seen when the Church protests the racial ideas presented in Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century. Rosenberg argued that race needed to replace religious institutions such as Christianity and Judaism. Some of the response included Joseph Teusch’s Katechimuswahrheiten which was a pamphlet that tried to warn Catholics of the Nazis’ racial ideas. Ehret comments that this strong backlash to the idea of race over religion according to some historians was in a way which Catholics were standing up for the Jews. The next chapter focuses more of on the persecution of the Jewish people in the late 1930s.
Ehret’s assessment of the strong Catholic backlash shows how some ...
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... antisemitism. Coppa also introduces the questioning brought up by the volumes of why wasn’t the encyclical published. He says that the volumes show how Ledchowski, a strong anti-communist Jesuit was against having the encyclical published because it would have attacked Nazi antisemitism. Ledchowski’s refusal to allow the encyclical to be published fits in with the common theory that little action was taken due to the fear of communism. From this, Coppa introduces Peter Kent who interpreted Pope Pius XI to have been “dominated more by an intense hatred of Nazism than of communism.”
Lang, Ariella. “The Politics and Poetics of Vatican Holocaust Discourse.” Judaism 52, (2003), Accessed February 23, 2014.
Coppa, Frank J. “Between Morality and Diplomacy: The Vatican’s ‘Silence’ during the Holocaust.” Journal of Church and State 50, (2008), Accessed February 23, 2014.
Dawidowicz, Lucy S.. The war against the Jews, 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
“The Holocaust: 36 Questions & Answers About the Holocaust.” 36 Questions & Answers About the Holocaust. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Feb. 2014
In March 11, 1900 in a German town called Konitz the severed body parts of a human were discovered. Almost immediately, the blame fell on the Jewish. As Smith points out, anti-Semitism had been on a steady decline, and the anti-Semitics were looking for ways to revitalize the movement. The murder was an opportunity for anti-Semitics revive their movement. After the identity of the body was discovered to be Ernst Winter, the Staatsburgerzeitung, an anti-Semitic newspaper, printed several articles focusing on Konitz. Using unverified accounts from people in the town, it claimed that the murder was a ritual murder that had been carried out by the Jewish. The use of fear mongering was affective because the paper was a Berlin based paper so distribution was wide, and news of the murder traveled far. A crucial facet of the rise of anti-Semitism was due to anti-Semitic newspapers taking stories such as the Ernst Winter murder and using them to promote their cause. One of Smith’s sources, the Preuβische Jahrbṻcher, had a printed article written by Heinrich von Treitschke who was an historian; in which one of his quotes was “The Jews are our misfortune.” His article was what later spurred the German population’s turn from liberalism a...
Beginning with the economic level of analysis, Smith points out how accusations regarding the Jews concerning the murder of Ernst Winter generally had a common trait in that several of the accusers had either “worked for the Jews they accused or had been in close business relationships with them” (Smith 2002, 139). Smith goes on to note that these accusers often came from low-class or low-middle class citizens and consisted of “unskilled workers, day laborers, masons and a civil servant, a prison guard and a night watchman, a poor farmer and his family, a handful of apprentices, and a large number of servant girls” (Smith 2002, 139). Unsurprisingly, Smith explains that the result of such noticeable differences in the possession of wealth between Konitz citizens led to poorer Christians seeking to place blame on Jews of middle-class status; thereby creating a “rudimentary form of economic or class protest” (Smith 2002, 140). However, Helmut Walser Smith is quick to indicate that this form of analysis cannot solely provide an answer to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in Imperial Germany. This explanation, Smith says, is rather simple; although it is true that Christians were perhaps motivated to falsely accuse their Jewish neighbors due to their social and economic trials, not all Konitz-residing Christians were disadvantaged and not all Konitz Jews
Goldhagen's book however, has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist anti-Semitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Anti-Semitism plays a primary factor in the argument from Goldhagen, as it is within his belief that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany . Goldhagen stated that a
Gilbert, Martin. "Churchill and the Holocaust: The Possible and Impossible." The Churchill Centre. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Feb. 2014.
For many reasons, the translation of the cat-and-mouse metaphor from America to Nazi Germany succeeds brilliantly. As Spiegelman’s research incontrovertibly bears out, in many instances Nazi propagandists represented Jews as mice or rats, claiming thereby that the Jewish presence in Europe was an infestation of vermin that needed to be wiped out. And there are various grotesque ironies that Spiegelman noted in the course of his research; for instance, Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers, was first developed as a pesticide.
Did the Jews of Germany do enough to prevent their wholesale massacre by the Nazis? Should they have resisted earlier and to a greater degree? Should the Jews in Western countries acted even when Jews within Germany did not? In 1933, there were several different responses to Germany's increasingly anti-Jewish tendencies. Then, on the eve of destruction, before the Nazis had fully planned for their extermination, the German Jews had a chance to affect Germany and their own lives. I have chosen a few of the German Jewish responses to examine in this essay.
"History1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/tp/holocaust.htm - Similar Sites and Reviews | Xmarks." Xmarks | Bookmark Sync and Search. Web. 07 Dec. 2011. .
...the time of the Holocaust, as described by Breitman, Feingold, and the other authors. The articles, essays, and chapters included in the book went into detail about how FDR could have and should have responded differently to the Holocaust. The book is a series of essays based on the original conference, and because they were written to inform and not entertain, it left the book dry and confusing. As a student who is studying this time period in history, I found it difficult to understand what the different sources were referring to. I believe that this book would be great as a reference, source for differing opinions, and provision of new information of FDR and the Holocaust for an academic scholar. For me, the scholarly reading level that the book was written in was at times overwhelming and I would not recommend it to the average reader interested in the topic.
The Holocaust took place during World War II, when Adolf Hitler became the dictator of Germany in 1933. Would your identity change, if you were put through an epidemic. In the first section of the book, Eliezer Wiesel is a twelve year old boy who studies Judaism, but he wants to study Kabbalah, Wiesel described himself as faithful religious man. However, throughout Night, the evolution of Wiesel’s religious beliefs, symbolizes the struggle of the Holocaust.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
In the book by Elie Wiesel, the young Elie Wiesel describes his life in the concentration camps. The injustice he faces was anti semitism, on the extreme side. Many of the sighet jews who “not only refused to believe his tales, they
“The modern German anti-Semitism was based on racial ideology which stated that the Jews were subhuman while the “Aryan” race was ultimately superior,” ("Nazi Propaganda"): (Goebbels)“I beg you and particularly those of you who carry the cross throughout the land to become somewhat more serious when I speak of the enemy of the German people, namely, the Jew, ("Nazi Propaganda"). “Streicher declared: "You must realize that the Jew wants our people to perish. That is why you must join us and leave those who have brought you nothing but war, inflation, and discord",” ("Nazi Propaganda"). “We know that Germany will be free when the Jew has been excluded from the life of the German people,” ("Ministry Of Public Enlightenment"). After Goebbels 's started to target the Jew’s with mean propaganda: It made blaming Jews a lot easier for Germany’s
Bard, Mitchell G., ed. The Holocaust. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2001. Print. Turning Points in World History.