Operation Barbarossa, barbarization of warfare, and the emergence of *the* Final Solution
Seminar questions:
What happened on December 12, 1941?
Why does the "dating game" matter? Why do we need to know when the Final decision was taken?
How did ordinary men become murderers?
If the murderers are "ordinary men", and almost anyone could do the same, do people still carry the responsibility?
Discuss the 'Holocaust by bullets' and its place in Holocaust historiography.
Core readings:
Christian Gerlach, 鈥淭he Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews,鈥� Journal of Modern History 70,4 (1998): 759-812.
C.
Extended readings:
Waitman Beorn, Marching into darkness : the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Hannes Heer and Michael Naumann, eds., War of extermination : the German Military in World War II, 1941-1944 (New York: Berghahn, 2000).
Konrad Jarausch, ed., Reluctant Accomplice : A Wehrmacht Soldier's Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Regina M眉hlh盲user, "Re Journal of the History of Sexuality, 26,3 (2017), pp. 366-401.
S枚nke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, Soldaten: On fighting, killing, and dying : the Secret World War II tapes of German POWs (London: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht : history, myth, reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Peter Witte, "Two Decisions Concerning the 鈥淔inal Solution to the Jewish Question鈥�: Deportations to Lodz and Mass Murder in Chelmno," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9,3, (Winter 1995), pp. 318–345.