U S Er G U I D E I Nsi De T H E Nazi Stat E
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INSIDE THE NAZI STATE EDUCATOR’S EDITION U S E R G U I D E C O N T E N T S 4. Introduction 4. Unique features of the series 6. A Scholar’s Perspective As the generation that by Robert Jan van Pelt 11. Getting started directly experienced the 11. Target audience Holocaust gets smaller and 11. Curriculum planning 12. Computer specifications the world becomes more 12. Installation instructions 12. Connecting your computer to an lcd complex and interconnected, 13. Finding what you want it becomes particularly 14. DVD interface 16. By episode critical to examine the 17. Index of video segments historical record and what it 18. By essential question 19. By unit tells us about power, politics, 20. By resource personal responsibility, 21. Printing from the disk violence, racism, prejudice, 22. Frequently asked questions 23. For further information and diversity. 25. Funders ) 25. Credits BBC (© 1939 Photo (left): Nazis occupying Poland, Poland, occupying Photo Nazis (left): 2 INTRODUCTION of meetings, testimony from people who were in the meetings, and memoirs from such individuals as camp commandant 27 1945 7,600 On January , , the Red Army liberated the survivors Rudolf Höss). All dramatizations were extensively reviewed by remaining at Auschwitz. Of the more than one million people project scholars for their accuracy. They were filmed in German who had been sent there in the previous four years, most had and have English captioning. been killed. At the time of the liberation, little was known about the COMPUTER RECONSTRUCTIONS site or about people’s experiences there. Since the fall of Com- 1990 munism in the former Soviet Union, significant primary sources During the s the entire set of building plans relating to have become available to scholars that reveal a detailed four-year Auschwitz at all of its various stages was uncovered in Russian 3-d history of this Nazi institution. Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, a archives, enabling the series to use sophisticated technology six-hour public television series that premiered in January 2005 to to create a visual representation of the very places the Nazis never commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, wanted anybody to see. is the result of a three-year collaboration between the British VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS Broadcasting Corporation and KCET/Hollywood to bring this In addition to interviews with survivors, the series contains story to audiences nationwide. extraordinary interviews with Nazi perpetrators. Now in their The Educator’s EditionDVD , developed by KCET/Hollywood, eighties, these testimonies provide insight into these people’s takes the documentary series one step further by selecting brief worldviews, motivations, and belief systems. segments (1–11 minutes) from the original six hours that correlate SCHOLAR INTERVIEWS particularly well with secondary and postsecondary curricula and courses. This multimedia teaching tool supports both short- and The closing segment of each episode is hosted by journalist Linda long-term study by amassing a series of related teaching resources Ellerbee and features interviews with American scholars and stu- for each video segment—250 resources in all, including discussion dents who discuss the major issues of each program from their ideas, maps & charts, photographs, background readings, primary unique points of view and provide insight into how different people sources, and literature—and presenting these resources in a DVD- ) can examine the same situations and come to diverse conclusions. ROM format that is ideal for both personal study and classroom BBC All of these unique approaches are seen in the selected video segments (© presentations using an LCD projector. on the DVD-ROM 1944 . UNIQUE FEATURES OF THE SERIES DRAMATIZATIONS The series includes dramatizations of key decision-making moments that visualize important transitions in policy. The dramatizations are based on primary source documents (minutes Hungarian prisoners at Auschwitz, 4 5 A SCHOLAR’S PERSPECTIVE key decisions concerning the purpose of the camp and the direction of the Holocaust, and a few stunning interviews with BY ROBERT JAN VAN PELT surviving SS personnel to show the twisted worldview that allowed these men and women to participate in the killing machine with good conscience. CAUTIONS CONSIDERED The prospect of my involvement was both attractive and daunt- ing. It attracted me because I very much admired Rees’s earlier work. I consider his The Nazis: A Warning from History, to be the very best documentary series on the history of Nazism and the Second World War ever made. But I was also uneasy. Would the attempt to represent in the relative populist medium of television 2003 bbc In early the well-known filmmaker Laurence Rees the very complex and at times seemingly contradictory history invited me to join an ambitious project to produce a six-part of Auschwitz lead to oversimplification? In books and articles it documentary on Auschwitz and the Holocaust. Rees wanted to is possible to include a “but yet” or “even so” to signal a scholar’s create a series that would both examine Auschwitz as a particular caution. Television has little place for such side notes. place with a unique history shaped by specific circumstances, My concerns came from 15 years of study about Auschwitz. and connect Auschwitz to the larger genocide of more than Since the late 1980s I had researched, with my colleague Debórah 11 million people all over Europe. This larger Holocaust went far Dwork, the camp’s history. The opening of archives in eastern beyond Auschwitz and involved many more killing technologies Europe had provided much new evidence, especially about the than gas chambers and crematoria. Rees wanted to examine, for incremental physical development of the camp and its parts— example, the killings of Jews by Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing a development that in two years allowed an “ordinary” concen- squads) in occupied Russia as well as to show the involvement of tration camp built to imprison Polish resistors (1940) to evolve non-German officials with the deportations from Western Europe. into a slave-labor camp for Soviet prisoners of war (1941), and In other words, he wanted to both intensely focus on the from there into an extermination camp for Jews (1942). Studying singularity of Auschwitz and, at the same time, use the camp as the history of the construction of the camp within the context a prism to consider the Holocaust in general. of other German construction in the East also generated new A UNIQUE APPROACH insight in the important link between the Holocaust and the German crusade against communism and the simultaneous Among the unique features Rees planned to use in the series were project to rebuild eastern Europe as a German agrarian utopia. ambitious computer-generated reconstructions of the camp, We found that in the case of Auschwitz and in the case of the war dramatic reenactments of meetings in which the Germans made in the East destruction and construction went hand in hand. 6 7 E D U C AT I O N A L VA L U E “My confrontation with Holocaust Talking to teachers about the use of the series as a way to teach deniers, who twisted every aspect not only the history of the Holocaust, but also to explore its lessons for our understanding about responsibility in a multi- of the camp’s horrible history to find cultural society, I realized that the long-term effect of the series evidence to support their delusions, was to be even greater than we had assumed when we worked so DVD had made me weary about any attempt hard to get everything “right.” The -ROM includes not only video segments from the series, and background material such as to brush over the obvious problems primary sources, maps, and photographs, but also sample discus- in the historiography of the camp.” sion questions, to ensure that, indeed, this huge achievement will continue to have an impact on students’ lives. SIGNING ON Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt is one of the world’s leading experts on Auschwitz and was a Senior Consultant on Auschwitz: Inside the Rees quickly proved that he was fully committed to represent Nazi State, working both to ensure the accuracy of the series content the paradoxical aspects of the camp’s history that Dwork and I and to help introduce the series to teachers. He co-authored, with Dr. 1270 1996 had documented. And so I accepted Rees’s offer to join Sir Ian Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz: to the Present ( ), which Kershaw, David Cesarani, and Christopher Browning, all very established his reputation as an expert on the history of the largest and prominent historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust as a most lethal of German death camps. Senior Consultant to the series. Thus began an eighteen-month In addition, he served as an “expert witness” on the historical record of Auschwitz in the notorious 2000 London trial in which collaboration, in which, at times, I had to respond to two or three David Irving accused Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt of libel for queries per day, and watch different versions of reconstructions calling him a Holocaust denier in one of her books. Irving claimed of the crematoria or dramatic sequences for hours and hours, there was no proof homicidal gas chambers had been at Auschwitz, sending them back with comments like: “Close, but not close and hence that there had been no Holocaust at all. Van Pelt proved enough, and so here some suggestions for improvement…” to the satisfaction of the court that there was overwhelming evidence —undoubtedly driving the members of Rees’s team to occasional that not only had homicidal gas chambers been in operation between despair.