Total War

Introduction: Few moments in European history are as tragic or as controversial as the Holocaust.  Over the next few weeks we will examine the history of the Holocaust from several different angles, in an attempt to come to grips with the many disturbing questions that this chapter in European history raises.

As we discussed in class on Monday, your first assignment is to examine one important document, the protocol of the Wannsee Conference of January 1942.  It was at Wannsee that many of the most important decisions about the destruction of the Jews were made, so when you read through this document, be sure to be alert for the kinds of things we discussed in class.  What evidence do you see for either the "intentionalist" or the "functionalist" interpretations of the Holocaust?  What attitudes do the officials betray toward their tasks?  Do you see any hint of dissent?

Your second assignment, as we discussed in class today, is to do some "research by poking around."  You will remember that I said that historians often confront a particular historical problem with many questions that cannot be answered by the secondary literature (works written by other historians) and so they have to go to the archives to find the answers they seek.  Often they are not sure exactly what those archives contain, so they have to do some poking around before they even know if they can answer their questions in a particular archival collection.   Your task for Wednesday is to do just that...visit either (or both) of the two archives listed in the links below and poke around for some answers to the questions you have about the Holocaust.  Be sure to keep notes about such things as what your questions are and what answers you found in these archives.  Your search process is what we will be discussing in class on Wednesday.

For Friday you need to move on to the question of guilt in the "crimes against humanity" portion of the Holocaust.  I have provided you with two useful links: one to a summary site that describes the Nuremberg Tribunal and the other which includes most of the transcripts of the Tribunal hearings.  Your task is to visit the first of these sites to get a sense for what happened at the Tribunal, and then to visit the second one to find answers in the actual primary sources for questions you have about the guilt of Germans (and others) involved in the Holocaust.