History of the Holocaust Question of armed resistance People who thought that the Jewish council we re making a fatal mistake sharper course of resistance that should take place Many people felt the Jewish council was collaborating with Nazi s they were hated Extract from the diary of Chaim A Kaplan Call to arms in an underground newspaper in the Warsaw Ghetto March 1942 new course of action needs to be taken Problems of armed resistance Jewish communities in all of theses ghettos are in places that are tightly controlled The entire population is concentrated in one area The number of able bodied people physically fit who might be capable of doing armed resistance is constantly changing the reason being the conditions in the ghetto disease and hunger is rampant people are always being chosen to join work squads and are taken to labor camps at any point especially in 1942 the Germans could decide to deport some percentage of the people in the ghetto to death camps Consider the people in the countryside the non Jewish population vast majority are anti Semitic and some just don t have energy and interest left so they agree with Nazi Any attempt or uprising in the Ghetto the outside people will not be willing to help Made it confusing for men and women in the ghettos to plan They were always changing orders Collective Reprisal responsibility engaging in any resistance will result not only in your own death but will also involve the killing of a number of people family strangers An example of this is the scene from the pianist The people who are most active in creating resistance are active in things like the underground newspaper They are particularly politically active youth Most people really wanted to see a stable situation Resistance they figured would only make a very chaotic situation even more chaotic Example if a family member is taken to a work camp is there any way to get information about the person Getting information getting enough to eat Cultural resistance in the face of a force that wants to target an entire group of people and eliminate them the first response is to preserve their culture Example in Warsaw ghetto a cultural organization ran by Emmanuel Ringelblum a trained historian attempts to create a historical archive They tried to collect documents and other information they then hid these documents in milk cans and buried them this is where a lot of what we have today is from Shift to physical resistance Until about 1941 most forms of resistance in the ghettos are focused on boiling Nazi decrees or guaranteeing survival organizing schools getting work permits Rumors involving specific places and stories about killing of Jews by the fall of 1941 if you were politically active you had some reasonably reliable information about what was going on on the eastern front The question is what you do with that info People don t want to believe these rumors Denial Idea that this is simply not possible The Nazi occupation has this whole vocabulary of labor camps and they all knew these camps meant something It was difficult to believe these words have no meaning Example when they say deportation to the east the Nazi s are really saying that as a cover People could not see the logic in this they thought if they continues If any kind of resistance is undertaken that the response by Germans will be overwhelming Was resistance irresponsible those who were known to be in armed resistance were essentially signing up for the death of their family Resistance is ultimately hopeless any resistance movement will not be able to have enough weapons to make a difference The most wide spread resistance movement killed 16 000 German soldiers Idea behind resistance to make a statement for later generations Vilna capital city of Lithuania Was a major center of jewish learning Germans invade and establish ghettos Establish jewish police is man named Vessler Set up ghettos and then transitioned took parts of population out and took them to a massacre sight a mobile killing unit Part of SU invasion of 1941 Jacob Genes Head of the Judenrat in the Vilna ghetto believed in idea that majority of the community will survive if people continue to work More active partisan war going on in this area because you are closer to front lines and you are in an area where red army is able to offer support Desire for some people to escape Vilna and go to forest to possibly hook up with partisans Struggle between young people and the men of the Jewish council Told to get a percentage of people to be deported if he doesn t his wife would be Adam Czerniakow killed He committed suicide Deportation trains went from Warsaw First meeting of the Jewish fighting Organization trying to determine what moment people should be encouraged to resist How long do you wait before situation becomes clearer Jewish ghetto fighters featured men and women Warsaw Ghetto uprising 7 000 jewish residents killed 6 00 burnt alive 50 000 sent to death camps most to Treblinka Lasted for about a month Germans lost 16 000 and 8 000 wounded Symbolic value spread example of some kind of marker that is being set for history Warsaw ghetto became a symbol a monument was put up in 1947 Concentration and death camps similarities and differences In the years since 1945 there have been two ways to think about these camps that were set up the way you think about them really shape the way you think the holocaust is Some people said that concentration camps i e Dachau and death camps i e Auschwitz are part of the same system there is a spectrum of camps and they are all part of the same spectrum concentration universe common element is there is places where people are deprived of ever human right and in extreme cases the right to human life There are those who see a fundamental difference concentration camps existed to punish variety of groups and people i e political prisoners Slavs poles Russians asocial prostitutes criminals etc death camps are killing centers that only exist for one reason to eliminate and kill i e Treblinka History of concentration camps Germans did not invent concentration camps different kinds of camps have been used throughout modern period 19th century into present day i e Japanese internment etc The first concentration camps come about of result of Boer War British fought to crush rebellion of white South Africans who were rebelling British Rule 1900 02 begin by sending in small units and Africans rebel them then they send in