Search results for " holocaust"

From Nazi holocaust to nuclear holocaust: a lesson to learn?

1986

In a 1986 address to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a German physician describes his profession's embrace of National Socialism. The nationalistic sentiments of German scientists led them to identify with the goals of the Third Reich and to participate in its programs. He gives examples of physician involvement in the Nazi Party, discrimination against "non-Aryan" doctors, "eugenic" mass murder, and lethal experiments with human subjects. The few who protested were regarded as traitors by the profession as a whole, and post-war apologists argue that physicians' organizations had no choice but to collaborate with the Nazis. Hanauske-Abel rejects this reasonin…

How to Teach about the Holocaust? Psychological Obstacles in Historical Education in Poland and Germany

2017

Holocaust education in many countries faces severe obstacles, and the effects of such education are far from desirable. Research on German students found that education about the National Socialist period in Germany did not improve intergroup attitudes. Similarly, a study performed on Polish students in Warsaw showed that the extent of Holocaust education did not affect intergroup attitudes and led to more biased vision of the Holocaust. In both countries current Holocaust education seems to convey simplified entitative information about groups—such that all members of perpetrator group are presented as evil, and all bystanders as righteous. Based on psychological research on moral emotions…

Return Visits: The European Background of Transcultural Life Writing

2013

In this article I read autobiographies by East Europeans who immigrated to Canada in connection with the Second World War as examples of transcultural life writing. My focus on the representation of return visits of these loyal Canadian citizens to their country of origin after 1989 reveals the underlying intention of relating the experience of life in a multicultural democratic society to the emergence of a new political consciousness in Eastern Europe. In my analysis I distinguish four types of concerns which try to bridge the past of their childhood experiences with the formation of a transcultural life in the 21st century: 1. Anna Porter’s return visit to Hungary for family reunion and …

Finland and the Holocaust: A Reassessment

2009

A reconsideration of Finland’s relationship with the Holocaust is needed for two reasons. First, the country has recently witnessed a debate over its role in the Holocaust, stimulating new academic research. Second, the standard reference work on the subject, an article published in this journal in 1995 and subsequently condensed in Walter Laqueur and Judith Baumel’s Holocaust Encyclopedia , is outdated. By shedding light on a well-known episode in which Finland transferred eight foreign Jews to German control, the following article reframes the question of whether Finland was victim, bystander, or perpetrator during the Nazis’ genocide.

The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Yosef Gorny (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers…

2013

‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950

2020

This study examines how the Swedish press responded to and portrayed the Holocaust immediately after the war. The liberation of the camps, the role and guilt of ordinary Germans, the Nuremberg trials and the ongoing problem of Jewish DPs in Europe were the most important issues on the basis of which the Swedish press had shaped the early post-war view of the Holocaust. Moreover, the fate of the Jews under Nazi Germany formed an important element of such reporting. The author argues that, contrary to the dominant Anglo-American historiography, which holds that the first post-war decades were marked by silence surrounding the German genocide, the Swedish press wrote about the Holocaust often …

The Problem of Displaced Jews and the Holocaust

2011

So far we have discussed how the Holocaust was portrayed as part of the discourse on the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trial. The last part of this book takes on a theme that runs parallel to, sometimes converging with, the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’. As Suomen Kuvalehti pointed out in 1945: ‘The Nazi war of extermination against the Jews did not resolve the Jewish question. On the contrary, the persecution has made the agenda more complicated than ever before.’1 Therefore, an examination of the press discourse on Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs), the creation of Israel and the emergence of the Cold War is necessary. However, it makes sense to deal with these topics separately in ord…

Mortal threat: Latvian Jews at the dawn of Nazi occupation

2018

In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia's Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual ag…

Israel State, Genocide and Thana-Capitalism

2019

The term “genocide” was originally coined by Lemkin just after the horrendous crimes committed against innocent civilians in Nazi Germany. At that moment, the SS officials disposed of a systemic rationalized system of death which was oriented to domesticate and eradicate the “inferior” or the undesired “Other”. The concentration camps were space of torture, violence, death and mourning that marked the state of Israel forever. Today things have changed a lot, and the state of Israel is accused of violating the human rights in Palestine. While we review the discussion of senior lecturers such as Slavoj Žižek, Richard Bernstein, Norman Finkelstein and Yakov Rabkin, we reconstruct the philosoph…

El caso de los tiradores del Muro de Berlín. A vueltas con algunos debates clásicos de la Filosofía del Derecho del siglo XX

2011

RESUMEN Es artículo analiza el caso de los centinelas del muro de Berlín que disparaban y mataron a algunas personas –que querían pasar la frontera-, amparados por una interpretación del Derecho de la RDA. Algunos años después de la unificación alemana, el Tribunal Constitucional condenó  aquellos soldados por asesinato con el argumento que se trataba de Derecho “extremadamente injusto”. Esta es una forma particular  de aplicación de la fórmula de Radburch. El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar el caso de los centinelas del Muro de Berlín bajo la perspectiva del la Filosofía del Derecho, particularmente en la controversia entre positivismo y iusnaturalismo. En este sentido, se comparan l…