DOCSLIB.ORG

Negotiating German Victimhood in the American Misery Memoir

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Negotiating German Victimhood in the American Misery Memoir View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository NEGOTIATING GERMAN VICTIMHOOD IN THE AMERICAN MISERY MEMOIR by DIETLINDE SCHMUCKER A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY College of Arts and Law Department of Modern Languages German Studies University of Birmingham December 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs written by women from various backgrounds who emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early post-war years and whose texts were published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011: Irmgard Powell, Don’t Let Them See You Cry: Overcoming a Nazi Childhood (2008); Irmgard A. Hunt, On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood (2005); Maria Ritter, Return to Dresden (2004); Sabina de Werth Neu, A Long Silence: Memories of a German Refugee Child 1941-1958 (2011). The memoirs chosen for this study were written by women who were born in Germany between 1932 and 1941. These memoirs address an American readership and entered the American public sphere via the popularity of the contemporary misery memoir. I demonstrate how the trope of the innocent child, articulations of citizenship and confessions to guilt and shame construct the necessary framework of German culpability for the Nazi past to enable a testimony to the victimhood of the protagonists, their families and, in part, the wider German population. The memoirs of childhood are, therefore, expressions of personal, collective and transnational memory. This study contributes not only to memory and literary studies but also to a historiography of National Socialism that includes diverse individual stories from the bottom up, of women belonging to the Kriegskinder generation who now live in the United States. ii In memory of my parents Rita and Herbert Stoerzer iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Joanne Sayner, for her excellent guidance, constructive criticism and patient support throughout the various stages of my thesis. Many thanks also go to Dr. Nicholas Martin for his advice, support and encouragement in the last stages as well. Last but not least, I thank my brother, Karl, and my friends who have cheered me on from the beginning and believed in me. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1.0 Eyewitnesses within German and American Discourse 1 1.1 Crossing Borders: The Framework of Transnational and 4 Transcultural Memory 1.2 The Memory Boom and the Misery Memoir in an American Context 6 1.3 The Transnational Figure of the Child and the Witness 9 1.4 Confession, Testimony and the Therapeutic American Culture 10 1.5 German Kriegskinder as Witnesses and a “culture of victimhood” 13 1.6 Gender and the Stories of Others 17 1.7 Contemporary German Discourse on Suffering and Victimhood 19 1.8 A “universal victim narrative” and Narrative Empathy 23 1.9 The Rhetorical Function of the Epistolary, Photographs and Paratexts 26 1.10 Conclusion: Chapter Overviews 30 Chapter Two: A Quest for Self-Rehabilitation 2.0 Introduction 34 2.1 The Initial Paratextual Construction of the Naïve Child 35 2.2 “The trap of Hitler’s hateful ideology”: Ambiguous Family Identities 38 2.2.1 “Oma” and Midwives: Nanna Conti and Narrative Silence 38 2.2.2 “Two Men”?: The Narrative Construction of Leonardo Conti 43 2.2.3 The Trope of “politics”: The Dubious Identity of Elfriede Conti 48 2.3 The Unknowing Child and the “Conti girl”: Identity Constructions 53 of the Child and Young Protagonist 2.4 “Nightmares”: Stories of Bombings 61 2.5 Representations of the Enemy Other: ‘The Slavs’ and the Conti 64 Household 2.6 “We would never be a family again”: Suicide and the Epistolary, 1945 65 2.7 “No future in Germany”: The Construction of the Protagonist as an 71 American and Lack of an Echo from American Readers 2.8 Conclusion: A Cathartic Ending? 74 Chapter Three: Guilt and “Ordinary Citizens” 3.0 Introduction 77 3.1 Politics and Paratexts: The Protagonist as a “true little Nazi child” 80 3.2 German Stories and the American Audience: A “mixed bag” 84 and the Theme of Powerlessness 3.3 The First World War, Weimar and Family History: Early Victimhood 88 3.4 A Family’s Dissonant Ideological Identities 92 3.4.1 A Staunch Supporter and Reluctant Soldier: The Protagonist’s 92 Father 3.4.2 “An average German woman”: Nazi Ideology and a Mother’s 94 Transitions 3.5 “We, Hitler’s Children”: Early Beginnings of Ideological Socialization 103 3.5.1 The Influence of “Nazi Fanatics” 105 3.5.2 From Early Anti-Semitism and Racist Conditioning to New Perspectives 110 v 3.5.3 An Indecisive Young Protagonist and the Influence of Non-Supporters 114 3.6 Children, Refugees, Russians and Rape: Stories of Suffering 118 3.7 Conclusion: “Hitler’s war” and Powerless Germans? 121 Chapter Four: The War Child as “Survivor-Perpetrator” 4.0 Introduction 129 4.1 Dresden and the Paratextual Construction of the Traumatized Child 133 4.2 Layers of Silence: The Silenced Child and Silent Adult 136 4.3 “Survivor Perpetrators,” Survivor Victims” and the Mitzvah: 141 Framework of Culpability 4.4 Dissonant Communities: German-American and German Personal 143 Memory 4.5 The Church, Anti-Semitism and Vaterlandsliebe: Ambiguous 148 Constructions of a Family 4.5.1 Hitler and God’s Punishment: Construction of Paternal Grandfather 148 4.5.2 “A Man of the Cross” and “Hitler’s Soldier”: The Conflicting Narrative 150 Identities of the Protagonist’s Father 4.5.3 “The central person”: The Protagonist’s Mother 155 4.6 The Innocent Child?: The Anti-Semitic Protagonist 159 4.7 The Victors, German Suffering and Punishment 161 4.7.1 A Critique of the Allies 161 4.7.2 Americans and the “good war”? 166 4.7.3 The Russian Other and the Suffering of Refugees 168 4.8 Germany’s Victims and German Victims as a Group of Survivors 170 4.9 Conclusion: A Blurring of Boundaries 172 Chapter Five: A Universal Victim Narrative 5.0 Introduction 176 5.1 The Paratextual Construction of the Silent German and Thankful American 178 5.2 The Trope of the Artichoke: Silence and Identity Problems 183 5.3 The Protagonist as Hitler’s Victim 189 5.4 The Refugee Trek: Parallel Stories of Suffering 191 5.4.1 A Personal Story of Rape and the Russian Other 197 5.5 Benevolent American Soldiers as “children of Uncle Marshall” 203 5.6 Denazification as a Turning Point 205 5.7 A Courageous Fighter: The Protagonist’s Mother 207 5.8 Male Figures of (No) Authority: The Casanova, the Freidenker, 209 the un-German and Gay Uncles 5.9 Conclusion: “In war all are victims” 213 Chapter Six: Conclusion 217 Endnotes 240 Bibliography 246 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.0 Eyewitnesses within German and American Discourse This study brings together for the first time four non-canonical memoirs published in English in the United States between 2004 and 2011 by women who experienced the Second World War in Germany as children and later emigrated to the United States. The memoirs were published for an American readership in the midst of what Andreas Huyssen has called “a memory boom of unprecedented proportions” in the United States (1995, p. 5). They have also been published during a concurrent memory boom in Germany in which the testimonies of the last eyewitnesses to the Second World War have been published in recent years responding to a pressing need to record them for posterity (Stargardt, 2006; Bode, 2011; Assmann, 2016; Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel, 2016). Francis Russell Hart defines memoir as “the personal act of repossessing a public world, historical, institution, collective […] The memoirs are of a person, but they are ‘really’ of an event, an era” (Hart cited in Buss, 2002, p. xi, emphasis in original). In today’s “era of the witness” individual stories of the Second World War and Nazism such as the memoirs in this study are valued for their contribution to a more comprehensive historiography of those years (Müller, Pinfold and Wölfel 2016, p. 418). Scholarship in history, memory and literary studies has dealt extensively with German working through the past and the relatively recent re-emergence of discourses of wartime suffering (Niven, 2004; Cohen-Pfister, 2005; Assmann, 2006b, 2006c, 2016; Stargardt, 2006, 2007; Schmitz, 2007a, 2007b). Research on Germans who experienced the Nazi regime and subsequently emigrated to the United States is, however, rare and has only been done in oral 1 history projects (Freund, 2002, 2008).1 Therefore, it has largely gone unnoticed in the extensive scholarship on the diverse roles of Germans during the Hitler regime that the children of the former enemy and members of a “‘symbolic’ nation of perpetrators” who emigrated to the United States are also seeking to inscribe their stories into the historiography of the Second World War (Cohen-Pfister and Wienroeder-Skinner, 2006, p.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • RECONSIDERING the CRIMINALISATION of RAPE in the INTERNATIONAL LAW of ARMED CONFLICT Rape in Berlin JANET HALLEY *
    RAPE IN BERLIN: RECONSIDERING THE CRIMINALISATION OF RAPE IN THE INTERNATIONAL LAW OF ARMED CONFLICT Rape in Berlin JANET HALLEY * [The specific criminalisation of sexual violence in war has made immense strides in recent years, as feminists engaged with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Rome Statute processes have proposed — and often won — a wide range of new legal rules and prosecutorial practices. This essay briefly describes some of these feminist achievements, in particular the reframing of rape and other sexual violations as a freestanding basis for charging serious humanitarian crimes and as the sole predicate act in particular prosecutions; and the demotion of a consent-based defence to charges of rape. The essay then turns to an anonymously published account of one woman’s experiences during the fall of Berlin to the Soviet Army in 1945, published in English as A Woman in Berlin: A Diary. By analysing the Diary’s ideologically saturated reception in Germany and by analysing the text itself, the essay proposes that rape in war is not merely either ignored and condoned or prosecuted and punished, but intrinsically problematically related to our evaluations of the badness of rape and the badness of war. The essay derives from its reading of A Woman in Berlin a war–rape antinomy: the literary achievement of the Diary, the author argues, is that it keeps the badness of war and the badness of rape in mutual suspension; and the pathos of its typical reception is that this antinomy collapses in ways that ratify some of the most problematic ideological investments linking rape to war.
    [Show full text]
  • Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany
    Downloaded by [New York University] at 03:18 04 October 2016 Nurses and Midwives in Nazi Germany This book is about the ethics of nursing and midwifery, and how these were abrogated during the Nazi era. Nurses and midwives actively killed their patients, many of whom were disabled children and infants and patients with mental (and other) illnesses or intellectual disabilities. The book gives the facts as well as theoretical perspectives as a lens through which these crimes can be viewed. It also provides a way to teach this history to nursing and midwifery students, and, for the first time, explains the role of one of the world’s most historically prominent midwifery leaders in the Nazi crimes. Downloaded by [New York University] at 03:18 04 October 2016 Susan Benedict is Professor of Nursing, Director of Global Health, and Co- Director of the Campus-Wide Ethics Program at the University of Texas Health Science Center School of Nursing in Houston. Linda Shields is Professor of Nursing—Tropical Health at James Cook Uni- versity, Townsville, Queensland, and Honorary Professor, School of Medi- cine, The University of Queensland. Routledge Studies in Modern European History 1 Facing Fascism 9 The Russian Revolution of 1905 The Conservative Party and the Centenary Perspectives European dictators 1935–1940 Edited by Anthony Heywood and Nick Crowson Jonathan D. Smele 2 French Foreign and Defence 10 Weimar Cities Policy, 1918–1940 The Challenge of Urban The Decline and Fall of a Great Modernity in Germany Power John Bingham Edited by Robert Boyce 11 The Nazi Party and the German 3 Britain and the Problem of Foreign Office International Disarmament Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Arthur 1919–1934 L.
    [Show full text]
  • Politics of History and Memory: the Russian Rape of Germany in Berlin
    POLITICS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY 225 POLITICS OF HISTORY AND MEMORY: THE RUSSIAN RAPE OF GERMANY IN BERLIN, 1945 major hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000; one physician estimated that out of 100,000 women raped in Berlin alone, 1 Krishna Ignalaga Thomas 10,000 died as a result, with a large majority committing suicide. With the sheer velocity of women raped by Soviet troops, it is The marching of the Russian Red Army into eastern Germany in incredible to discover its neglect by earlier seminal works, such the spring of 1945, at the close of World War II, was full of as that by John Erickson, who wrote Road to Berlin, and even promise and hope, a promise of a new era of peace in Europe William L. Shirer of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. At the same and an end to political isolation and economic deprivation at time, the opening of the Russian State Military Archives and the home. In 1994, almost half a century later, the return of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, a whole array of Soviet troops to the motherland signaled the surprising collapse primary source material and other information media are now of the Soviet Union and ultimately, the end of Soviet occupation open for scholars to understand this contest of brutality from and a reunified Germany. At the same time, however, the first, the German soldiers and then the repatriating Soviet Russians also left behind them a legacy of resentment and anger. troops. Much academic scholarship has focused on the years of Soviet Natalya Gesse, a Soviet war correspondent, gave a first‐hand occupation, 1945‐49, as being the most brutal on the Germans in estimation of Red Army’s activities, and stated that “The Russian the Eastern Zone than their counterparts in the West.
    [Show full text]
  • Wendy Lower, Ph.D
    Wendy Lower, Ph.D. Acting Director, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2016- ) Director, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights John K. Roth Professor of History George R. Roberts Fellow Claremont McKenna College 850 Columbia Ave Claremont, CA 91711 [email protected] (909) 607 4688 Research Fields • Holocaust Studies • Comparative Genocide Studies • Human Rights • Modern Germany, Modern Ukraine • Women’s History Brief Biography • 2016-2018, Acting Director, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. USA • 2014- 2017, Director, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College • 2012-present, Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College • 2011-2012, Associate Professor, Affiliated Faculty, Department of History, Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, Worcester, Mass, USA • 2010-2012 Project Director (Germany), German Witnesses to War and its Aftermath, Oral History Department, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. USA • 2010-2012, Visiting Professor, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy • 2007-2012 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, LMU • 2004-2009 Assistant Professor (tenure track), Department of History, Towson University USA (on leave, research fellowship 2007-2009) • 2000-2004, Director, Visiting Scholars Program, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. • 1999-2000 Assistant Professor, Adjunct Faculty, Center for German and Contemporary European Studies, Georgetown University, USA 1 • 1999-2000 Assistant Professor, Adjunct Faculty, Department of History, American University, USA • 1999 Ph.D., European History, American University, Washington D.C. • 1996-1998 Project Coordinator, Oral History Collection of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Center for the Study of Intelligence, and Georgetown University • 1994 Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute, Ukrainian Studies Program • 1993 M.A.
    [Show full text]
  • Karl Brandt, Philipp Bouhler, Viktor Brack, and Leonardo Conti
    Western Illinois Historical Review © 2015 Vol. VII, Spring 2015 ISSN 2153-1714 The Administration of Death: Karl Brandt, Philipp Bouhler, Viktor Brack, and Leonardo Conti Zacharey Crawford Abstract This essay provides a new perspective on the administrative structures of the Nazi euthanasia programs of 1939-1942. The focus is on the four key individuals involved in the planning and execution of the program: Dr. Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Philipp Bouhler, and Dr. Leonardo Conti. The most lethal phase of the Holocaust commenced with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Beginning in December of that year, scores of victims were systematically gassed in Nazi extermination camps, but the methods used in the destruction of the European Jews had been developed and tested much earlier. The euthanasia program (Operation T4) that had been carried out by the Nazis between late 1938 and August 1941 laid the ground for the killing methods used in the Holocaust.1 It was the Nazis’ goal to create a racially defined Volksgemeinschaft or people’s community that excluded all individuals and 1 The most important studies on this topic are Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 59 groups who did not fit Nazi criteria of racial purity and superiority.2 While Jews were the Nazis’ main target, other groups were also excluded, for instance Sinti and Roma and so-called “aliens to the community.”3 Children and adults with physical and mental disabilities that were deemed to be “unworthy of life” became victims of the euthanasia program.
    [Show full text]
  • The Romani Holocaust Ian Hancock
    | 1 Zagreb May 2013 O Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust Ian Hancock To understand why Hitler sought to eradicate the Romanies, a people who presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically, one must interpret the underlying rationale of the holocaust as being his attempt to create a superior Germanic population, a Master Race, by eliminating what he viewed as genetic pollutants in the Nordic gene pool, and why he believed that Romanies constituted such contamination. The holocaust itself was the implementation of his Final Solution, the genocidal program intended to accomplish this vision of ethnic cleansing. Just two “racial” populations defined by what they were born were thus targeted: the Jews and the Romanies1. The very inventor of the term, Raphael Lemkin, referred to the genocide of the “gypsies” even before the Second World War was over2. It is also essential to place the holocaust of the Romanies3 in its historical context. For perhaps most Romanies today it lacks the special place it holds for Jews, being seen as just one more hate-motivated crisis— albeit an overwhelmingly terrible one—in their overall European experience. Others refuse to speak about it because of its association with death and misfortune, or to testify or accept reparation for the same reason. The first German anti-Romani law was issued in 1416 when they were accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and traitors to Christendom; In 1500 Maximilian I ordered all to be out of Germany by Easter; Ferdinand I enforced expulsion
    [Show full text]
  • European Academic Research
    EUROPEAN ACADEMIC RESEARCH Vol. VII, Issue 4/ July 2019 Impact Factor: 3.4546 (UIF) ISSN 2286-4822 DRJI Value: 5.9 (B+) www.euacademic.org Life-Writing: The Diary A Woman In Berlin VIKTORIJA BITKEVIČIENĖ MA degree, Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, Lithuania Abstract The following article analyses a wartime diary A Woman in Berlin. The diary documents seven weeks in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. Since the women were a majority of the population as the German men were captured or killed in a war, they became an easy target for the foreign troops marching through the city. Due to the sensitive topics disclosed in the diary, the author called herself “Anonymous”. The journal was published straight after the war, however, the ones who survived the atrocities of the war did not want to be reminded of the war horrors again. Hence, the diary remained forgotten until 2003 when it was republished to audience acclaim. Despite the public opinion that the author’s identity should remain anonymous, in 2003 the author’s identity was revealed as Marta Hillers. This article depicts three main topics: the author’s self-identity as revealed in her diary, the reflection of the enemy through humour and irony, and the diary as a means of survival. The theoretical part discusses the concepts of life writing and diary. In order to grasp a full understanding of the historical circumstances of the German women life writing, a brief historical background is provided. Key words: life writing, diary, Second World War, A Woman in Berlin, humour, irony.
    [Show full text]
  • Chemical Weapons Research on Soldiers and Concentration Camp Inmates in Nazi Germany
    Chemical Weapons Research on Soldiers and Concentration Camp Inmates in Nazi Germany Florian Schmaltz Abstract In 1944 and 1945 scientists and physicians in the Allied military intelligence gathered evidence on the criminal human experiments with chemical weapons con- ducted on inmates of the Nazi concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and Neuengamme during World War II. Some of the experiments were judged during the Nuremberg Medical Trial (Case I) and French military tribunals at Metz and Lyon after liberation. Based on this evidence and on further archival sources, this paper will examine the preconditions and settings of these experiments, the perpetrators involved, and what is known about their purpose and outcome. Furthermore, the paper will raise the question if and how the experiments in the concentration camps were linked to other experiments conducted in Nazi Germany for the Wehrmacht at military research establishments such as the Gas Protection Laboratory (Heeresgasschutzlaboratorium) in Spandau, the Militärärztliche Akademie, the Heeresversuchsstelle Raubkammer, or by universities. The paper will focus on experiments with chemical agents in German concentration camps and analyze how rivalry and division of labor between the military and the SS in human experimentation with chemical agents went hand in hand. 1 Organizational Structures of Chemical Warfare Research in Germany Chemical warfare research in military and academic contexts is generally an issue of secrecy. It encompasses screening, identification of potential chemical agents suitable for use as weapons, means and methods for their large-scale industrial production, storage and deployment, as well as defensive research in toxicology on animals and humans. It also includes possible medical prophylaxis and treatments, as well as measures and technologies for detecting chemical agents and protecting soldiers and civilians against the severe injuries and health risks involved.
    [Show full text]
  • Bibliography
    Bibliography Acheson, Dean, Present at the Creation, New York, 1969 ​ ​ Adair, Paul, Hitler’s Greatest Defeat – The Collapse of Army Group Centre, June ​ 1944, London, 1994 ​ Addison, Paul, and Calder, Angus (eds.), Time to Kill, The Soldier’s Experience of ​ War 1939-1945, London, 1997 ​ Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy, [eds], Listening to Britain, London, 2010 ​ ​ Alanbrooke, Field Marshal Lord, War Diaries 1939-1945, London, 2001 ​ ​ Altman, I., [ed.], Sokhrani moi pisma, [Keep My Letters], Moscow, 2007 ​ ​ Altner, Helmut, Totentanz Berlin: Tagebuchblätter eines Achtzenjährigen, Offenbach- ​ ​ am-Main, 1946 Aly, Götz, Hitler’s Beneficiaries – How the Nazis Bought the German People, New ​ ​ York, 2006 [Hitlers Volksstaat, Frankfurt, 2005] ​ ​ Aly, Götz, & Heim, Susanne, Architects of Annihilation – Auschwitz and the Logic of ​ Destruction, London, 2002 ​ Ambrose, Stephen, Eisenhower and Berlin, The Decision to Halt at the Elbe, 1967 ​ ​ Amouroux, Henri, La Grande Histoire des Français sous l’Occupation, Joies et ​ douleurs du peuple libéré, vol. viii, Paris, 1988 ​ Andrew, Christopher and Gordievsky, Oleg, KGB, The Inside Story of its Foreign ​ Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, London, 1990 ​ Andreyev, Catherine, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement, Soviet Reality ​ and Emigré Theories, Cambridge, 1987 ​ Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, London, 2005 ​ ​ Antonov, Vitaly, ‘Ot party do obeliska’, [From School Desk to the Obelisk], in Nasha ​ voina [Our War], Moscow, 2005 ​ Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, London, 2003 ​ ​ Aron, Robert, Histoire de la Libération de la France, juin 1944-mai 1945, Paris, 1959 ​ ​ Atkinson, Rick, An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, New York, ​ ​ 2003 ------, The Day of Battle, The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-1944, New York, 2007 ​ ​ Auden, W.H.
    [Show full text]
  • A Historiographic Study of the Eugenics and Euthanasia Movements in Nazi Germany
    East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 5-2010 Compulsory Death: A Historiographic Study of the Eugenics and Euthanasia Movements in Nazi Germany. Michael Creed Hawkins East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the Cultural History Commons Recommended Citation Hawkins, Michael Creed, "Compulsory Death: A Historiographic Study of the Eugenics and Euthanasia Movements in Nazi Germany." (2010). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1707. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/1707 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Compulsory Death: A Historiographic Study of the Eugenics and Euthanasia Movements in Nazi Germany _____________________ A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of History East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Arts in History _____________________ by Michael Hawkins May 2010 _____________________ Dr. Stephen G. Fritz, Chair, Chair Dr. Melvin E. Page Dr. Brian J. Maxson Dr. Emmett M. Essin Keywords: Eugenics, Euthanasia, Nazi Germany, Holocaust, Historiographic ABSTRACT Compulsory Death: A Historiographic Study of the Eugenics and Euthanasia Movements in Nazi Germany by Michael Hawkins This thesis is a historiographical study of the eugenics and euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany. It traces there development from the end of World War One to the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.
    [Show full text]
  • Smoking and Death. Public Health Measures Were Taken More Than 40
    LETTERS and death indicated strong risks-similar in magnitude to 1 Peto R. Smoking and death: the past 40 years and the next 40. Smoking those found by later studies-whatever control BMJ 1994;309:937-9. (8 October.) 2 Proctor RN. Racial hygiene. Medicne under the Nazis. Cam- Public health measures were taken more group was used (table); these risks were not bridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. than 40 years ago explicable in terms of changes in smoking 3 Reiter H. Ansprache bei der Er6ffnung des 1. Wissenschaft- behaviour induced by illness. Schoninger's study lichen Instituts zur Erforschung der Tabakgefahren an EDrroR,-Richard Peto discusses the failure of cost 173.30 of the 100000 Reichsmark given by der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitit Jena am 5 April 1941. public health with regard to smoking over the past Adolf Hitler from his personal funds to the Jena ManchenerMedizinische Wochenschnift 1941;88:697-9. 4 Berlin: stimulants endanger public health. JAMA 1939;12: 40 years,' but his account could have extended Institute. 2339-40. back further. He considers that the Medical 5 Lickint F. Tabak und Organismus. Stuttgart: Hippokrates- Research Council was, in 1957, "the first national Verlag, 1939. institution in the world to accept formally the 6 Davey Smith G, Strobele SA, Egger M. Smoking and health promotion in Nazi Germany. I Epidemiol Community Health evidence that tobacco is a major cause of death." 1994;48:220-3. The formal recognition of this fact, however, was 7 Schairer E, Schoniger E. Lungenkrebs und Tabakverbrauch. explicitly made by many important national insti- ZeitschriftftilrKrebsforschung 1943;54:261-9.
    [Show full text]
  • Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: a Case Study
    Jewish History Volume 11, No. 2 ~ Fall 1997 Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany: A Case Study Henry Friedlander During the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, mobile units of the Security Police and SS Security Service, the so-called SS Einsatzgruppen, supported by units of the German uniformed police and SS auxiliaries recruited from the native populations, systematically murdered all Jews, Gypsies, and the institutionalized handicapped. 1 They did so without formality, merely rounding up the victims, marching them to preselected places of execution, and shooting them. Similarly, the SS just rounded up their victims during the liquidation of the Polish ghettos.2 This simple method of mass murder, no different from the methods employed during antiquity or the middle ages, could only be used in areas where neither economic needs nor public opinion restrained the killers. For a variety of reasons, such methods could not be used in Germany and in the occupied countries of the West. First, public opinion would not condone such public barbarism. In Germany and the West the killings were accepted only when they took place far away and out of sight. Second, while in the East the Germans did not care whether their sweep gathered individuals not scheduled for execution, in Germany and the West they needed to make distinctions between those destined for extermination and those temporarily protected. The Germans issued a vast number of laws and decrees to regulate who could be included into the killing operations, but in the East they did not pay attention to those regulations.
    [Show full text]