Introduction Guide for Teachers

Guide for Teachers Nazism and the Holocaust Hitler’s Road to Power and Anti-Semitism page 2 From Discrimination to Holocaust page 2 Resistance and Rescue page 3 The End of the War and a Future for Survivors page 4 The Warsaw Ghetto page 5 Additional Readings and Films page 7 Propaganda Nazi Propaganda page 8 American War-Era Propaganda page 10 Additional Readings and Films page 11 The Film page 12 Introduction Whether asking about the roots of genocide or the motivation behind heroic individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice, a key concept for students learning about the Holocaust is empathy. Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished is an especially powerful classroom resource because of Hersonski’s multi-faceted approach to empathy. We are asked to empathize with the innocent people trapped on screen and the reactions of Ghetto survivors reliving their pasts while watching the film. We see Hersonski probe testimony by the Nazi cameraman responsible for the footage, questioning his failure to empathize with his unwilling subjects. Finally, we are asked to reevaluate our sometimes-numbing relationship to Holocaust documentary footage and acknowledge the essential humanity of each person on screen – either through a freeze-frame of a telling look into the lens or by the devastating reminder that each body sliding into a mass grave is a fellow human being, someone’s mother, father, sibling, or child. The film offers many different layers of possible analysis and classroom discussion; it could be used as a jumping-off point for a broader lesson about the Holocaust, or it could promote further discussion at the end of a Holocaust curriculum. Teachers are invited to use this study guide as a resource for lessons about the Holocaust and A Film Unfinished, with the understanding that it reflects only a small sample of topics for discussion and available resources about the Holocaust. 1 Historical Background: Nazism and the Holocaust Hitler’s Road to Power and Nazi Anti- feared alienating the powerful ruler of a Semitism rising Germany. The most famous, After World War I (1914-1918) and the comprehensive, and restrictive group of punitive Treaty of Versailles left Germany these laws were the Nuremberg Laws of in a state of economic ruin and social 1935, which effectively stripped German upheaval, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party Jews of their citizenship. Religious were able to rise to prominence in the observance or ethnic identity did not matter 1920’s and power in the 1930’s through a to the Nazis, whose racial/genetic mix of rabid nationalism and brutally understanding of Judaism led them to decide effective scapegoating. They used that anyone with three Jewish grandparents fashionable pseudo-science on race and would be considered a Jew under the law, genetics to claim that pure “Aryan” even if the individual or his/her grandparents Germans with fair skin, blond hair, and blue had converted to Christianity. In 1941, all eyes were “super men,” destined to rule the Jewish people in Nazi-occupied territory world. Other races, especially European were required to identify themselves with a Jews and Roma (formerly known as yellow Star of David sewn to their clothes. Gypsies), were inferior, destined for By fostering an atmosphere of hate and enslavement or elimination. Average isolation, then stripping Jews of their roles German gentiles, suffering in the aftermath and rights within German society, Hitler and of war and economic collapse, found the Nazis were able to create an themselves all too susceptible to the flattery environment in which the status of Jewish and deception of Nazi ideology. citizens and recognition of their essential humanity was gradually eroded until the Hitler put his anti-Semitism at the forefront German and other gentile populations were of his involvement with the Nazi party from largely indifferent to the eventual mass the very beginning. While imprisoned murder of Europe’s Jews. following an attempted coup in 1924, Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), From Discrimination to Holocaust which clearly outlined his governing As Hitler invaded Austria and philosophy, theories about racial superiority, Czechoslovakia in 1938, then Poland in and hatred for Jews. The book became the 1939 and France in 1940, the Nazis’ anti- ideological foundation for the Nazi party as Semitic policies followed their conquering their popularity rose and they claimed armies. Local populations were quickly increasing numbers of seats in the Reichstag subjugated, Jewish citizens were identified (parliament) with each consecutive election. (often with the help of local collaborators), When Hitler assumed the role of Chancellor and then they were deported to ghettoes or with his first parliamentary majority in concentration camps. Often starting with 1933, he quickly consolidated his power into neighborhoods that had a large, homogenous a single-party state while passing laws that Jewish population, the Nazis walled off the gradually stripped Jewish citizens of their area like a prison and moved Jews from civil rights – to hold public or academic nearby towns and cities into the increasingly jobs, to marry, to attend public school, to dense ghetto. Millions of Jewish people died own a business, and so on. These laws were of starvation, disease, or random violence met with limited resistance in Germany, inside the ghettoes, and the few who which the Nazis quickly crushed, and few survived were ultimately deported a second denunciations overseas, as Western leaders time to death camps. Homosexuals, Roma, struggled with the effects of the Great and political dissidents were also targeted Depression in their own countries and many for persecution and death. 2 The Nazis were deliberate and methodical in day at Auschwitz-Birkenau, up to 6,000 their planning for a conquered world without people were murdered this way. Their Jews. At first, European Jews were starved, possessions, clothing, hair, and even the worked to death, or executed by firing squad gold fillings in their teeth were collected and in ghettoes and concentration camps. Nazis reused by the Nazi war machine as if they massacred tens of thousands of people over were industrial byproducts. mass graves in forests, like the ones at Babi Yar, outside Kiev, and Ponar, on the Resistance and Rescue outskirts of Vilna. They used sealed trucks, In spite of the terrible circumstances, a few disguised as ambulances, to suffocate a exceptional gentiles acted heroically to aid dozen people at a time with carbon their Jewish neighbors. Yad Vashem, monoxide. However, the Nazis considered Israel’s Holocaust memorial institute, these methods expensive and inefficient, maintains a comprehensive database to especially when faced with Poland’s vast honor ordinary Europeans who risked population of three million Jewish people certain death to defy Nazi terror. For (about a third of Europe’s total Jewish example, Jean Phillipe was appointed chief population). Thus, a group of high-ranking of police in Toulouse, France by the Nazi- Nazis – among them, the infamous Adolf allied government and used his position to Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich – met and provide Jews in hiding with false identity conceived a series of death factories, where papers that would allow them to escape to modern industrial technology was put in neutral Switzerland. When asked to hand service of mass murder on an unimaginable over a list of Jews living in his precinct, scale. Phillipe refused. He resigned his post and worked in hiding for the underground French Resistance. Phillipe was eventually captured and executed in 1944 by the Gestapo, the Nazis’ fearsome state police and intelligence agency. Many exceptional Jews also committed acts of resistance against the Nazis. For some, this meant survival in hiding like Anne Frank and her family. For others, it meant escape to Allied nations with valuable intelligence that exposed Nazi vulnerabilities. In October of 1944, Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau staged a Each day, Nazis brought trainloads of dramatic revolt, blowing up two of the people by the thousands to places deep in crematoria and killing several guards. The the countryside with names like Auschwitz- revolt was quickly contained, and the Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibor. The prisoners responsible were executed. In the moment they stepped off the train, a camp area that is now Belarus and Lithuania, commandant would decide who among the Tuvia Bielski and his brothers gathered group would be sent to slave labor and who Byelorussian Jews into a forest community would die immediately. Those selected for where they provided for anyone who could death were told to prepare for a disinfectant escape the ghettoes, young and elderly alike, shower, but were instead led into chambers while staging resistance attacks against Nazi that filled with a toxic gas called Zyklon-B, troops and their local collaborators. By the specially engineered by Nazi chemists for end of the war, 1,200 Jews survived in the this purpose. Bodies of murdered Jews were forest with the Bielskis. Other Jewish then incinerated in crematoria. In a single partisan groups appeared throughout 3 occupied Europe, often organizing in the reality: most of their homes were completely ghettoes before escaping to the forests, destroyed or given to gentiles who now had where they could stage attacks on Nazi no intent of leaving. Few survivors had any interests. family or friends left alive, and even fewer desired to return to the places where their The End of the War and a Future for neighbors welcomed their exile and murder. Survivors Jewish survivors were often confined to Until the bitter end of the war in 1945, the displaced persons camps, set up inside the systematic murder of European Jews same concentration camps where they had remained a high priority for the Nazi been imprisoned, now administered with leadership.

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