Holocaust

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In one of innumerable chilling insights into the Nazi mindset, on show is the callous Juden Raus (Jews Out), promoted as a “thoroughly enjoyable party game”, whose goal was to round up Jews for deportation to Palestine.

Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone

JC] I think that's so powerful for students, and for teachers, to really start to think about in terms of yeah that pre-war Jewish life, and how you might use imagery to invoke that richness and diversity that you're talking about. As a second-generation inheritor of my family’s Holocaust legacy, I firmly believe that racism grows where racism is enabled. The enablers can be active, or by virtue of apathy and indifference, passively looking away. Human beings might never rid themselves entirely of prejudice, being of itself a distortion of our own nature, but Bulgin touches on something fundamental: never to take for granted that our common humanity can only be preserved by us all challenging the very tolerance of hatred, as well as facing down the hatred itself. It is a terrible reality, but just feet beneath forests, fields and beaches across eastern Europe are human bones. These acts of mass murder have little, if nothing, to do with the perception of the Holocaust as a product of systemised process. If anything, they are a more accurate reflection of its true, barbaric character.Jaya Carrier] So, one of the things that has come out of the focus group and the research that IWM have done is that teachers struggle to know what language to use in talking about this really complex and difficult history, and that's something that teachers are grappling with all the time. And I mean, I've been teaching for 11 years and it's something that I’m still really keen to make sure that I think really carefully about, and that I get right. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this with respect to teaching about the Holocaust. In an early display, Hitler and other Nazi leaders loom large in pre-1933 images: “We wanted to show them before the men they became,” Mr Bulgin explained. James Bulgin tells an important story that highlights how, to many people, the above placenames might sound unfamiliar, as Auschwitz fills Holocaust consciousness for the sheer scale of its horror ( Hitler didn’t build the path to the Holocaust alone – ordinary people were active participants, 27 January). But in truth, all sense of scale is lost when imagining the implications of the Nazis’ genocidal politics, while the human psyche is overwhelmed by the implication of such murderous intent to humanity itself. More importantly, he correctly emphasises that evil can, under particular circumstances, look very much like any one of us. This is, as Hannah Arendt describes, the sheer “banality of evil”.

BBC iPlayer - How the Holocaust Began

Rudi Bamber: "What had been an undercurrent before then became very much public. The streets were full of marching storm troopers who were triumphant because of the electoral victory and a boycott was started against the Jewish shops. Stormtroopers stood outside the shops and wrote slogans on the windows of the shops with Star of David. So it was a very difficult and unpleasant atmosphere and the reaction of my family and Jews in general was to withdraw and to keep out of the streets and the town as much as possible." Mr Bulgin reported that many survivors were consulted during the research. “If a survivor wants to talk to me, I will go anywhere,” he said. JB: "Hitler's head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels created a whole ream of propaganda to support the ideology of their regime and this was manifest in all different types of media: in radio broadcasts and cinema broadcasts people were encouraged to believe that Hitler was leading a massive Germanrevival which would lead to a massively improved way of life for everybody within the Reich and foreverybody who was allowed to be part of it. This propaganda is really really important here and to Goebbels of course in shaping the way that people consider what the Nazis can do for them." From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war effort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe.The process by which this happened demanded effort, thought and consideration. Moreover, it required huge numbers of people – not just thousands, or tens of thousands even, but hundreds of thousands. These people gave Hitler the practical means to achieve his ideological vision. Hundreds of thousands of men and women who cooperated, in various ways, with the mass murder of 6 million men, women and children. JB] Yeah I mean, I think one of the challenges with asking people to think about the Holocaust is that a lot of people now, and I think probably students too, you'd know a lot more about that than me, but I think, I think, my experience and sense of it is that a lot of students have certain ideas about the Holocaust, or this thing that we now call the Holocaust. And they tend to revolve around very specific notions of, kind of, you know, quote unquote ‘factories of death’ and systemization and murder and trains and, you know, maybe Anne Frank or some of these kind of well-known examples. And I think the challenge is actually really just saying, the whole thing is infinitely more complex than that, and these people, or these people and these things fit within a much broader narrative. So you know, one of the things which we've tried really hard for example to move beyond in the galleries is the idea that the Holocaust is somehow just about industrialized genocide. I think that's quite a dangerous idea actually, because it suggests that somehow it's a machine that killed people and not people. And one example of that is the Einsatzgruppen shootings in Central Eastern Europe after Operation Barbarossa. I think probably nowhere near as well known or well understood as things like Auschwitz, but really important and, you know, completely different version of the narrative. In the galleries we do that with a very small number of objects and a very small amount of sources because there aren't that many, but the idea is to try and open up, you know, a window of perception into a whole dimension of this narrative, so that people become aware of it, and I think you know that's really important. This is the ground the camps were figuratively built on. The fact that such a place – a mass grave of potentially tens of thousands – could exist, unmarked and unexplored in a modern European nation, is a profoundly disturbing thing. I believe, however, that it is something we need face up to. Personal stories are at the heart of the new The Holocaust Galleries, along with a breadth of objects and original material that help audiences consider the cause, course and consequences of this terrible period in world history. Individual stories from some of the six million Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust are told through over 2000 photos, books, artworks and letters, and personal objects ranging from jewellery and clothing to toys and musical instruments