Category Archives: HIST107-Archive

The UN Genocide Charter and Auschwitz

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The two readings we had assigned this evening, The UN Charter on Genocide and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz both discuss genocide, but approach the topic in very different ways. One can safely assume that those who wrote up the charter did not experience the atrocities of a concentration camp, and are outsiders looking in. Levi, on the other hand, speaks with the voice of a survivor. He knows what it means to survive Auschwitz, and thus, mass genocide.

The charter uses very sweeping terms when describing what genocide is. They do not go into the minute details, but stay general such as in Article II: “(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…”. This may be because they wish to capture all possible forms of genocide, but at the same time, this method gives a lot of leeway for certain activities to pass.

Levi, however, gives very specific examples as to how they were discriminated against. To be at Auschwitz was to be at the very bottom, everything was taken away from you, “…nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand.” (27) Even if a person survived the concentration camp, they still were made to become something less than human, like cattle, and this process will undoubtedly affect the rest of their life. Levi even mentions how certain portions of the experience still linger in his dreams.

When genocide is committed, it not only destroys a group of individuals, but an entire culture, and both sources indicate this. Even if an individual survives, their culture may have died, making the existence of the survivor very lonely, and their account of events, less believable.

Surviving Auschwitz

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In “Survival in Auschwitz,” Primo Levi spoke to his experiences in an Auschwitz concentration camp for ten months.  As the title suggests, Levi spoke to how he managed to survive in such awful conditions.  Early on during his time in Auschwitz, Levi spoke to a time in which he was thirsty and opened the window, hoping to snatch an icicle.  However, a guard on duty quickly took the icicle away from Levi. When he asked the guard why, the guard responded, and said, “there is no why here,” (29). From this experience, Levi learned, “in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.  If one wants to live on must learn quickly and well,” (29).  With this, it became clear that one way method of survival in Auschwitz was to never question guards, for questioning was a sign of disrespect.

Another example that Primo Levi gave in his account is that “everything is useful,” (33) and “the value of food,” (33).  Levi argued that in order to survive, a prisoner must understand that “everything is useful” because prisoners were not given much and it was imperative to hold onto the things you did have.  Furthermore, Levi argued that prisoners must be aware of their surroundings and hold onto their possessions, for “everything can be stolen,” (33).  This was especially important for prisoners, for they were not given much and if you had something stolen from you, that could mean the end for your survival.  In regards to “the value of food,” Levi argued that food was crucial because food was hard to come by.  With food being so hard to come by, Levi argued that prisoners must “scrape the bottom of the bowl,” (33) for that food had to sustain you for a day’s work.  Lastly, Primo Levi spoke against the idea of hygiene.  The reason?  Levi believed that taking the time to wash yourself simply was not worth it, for you were wasting your energy when you could have been resting.  Ultimately, Primo Levi and his account provide tremendous insight on what life was like in Auschwitz and how best to survive such terrible conditions.

Prevention of Genocide and Surviving Auschwitz

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The United Nations is a organization of worldly governments established to promote co-operation amongst various groups. Created in 1945, following the Second World War, its main purpose was to prevent another one from happening. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The various articles in the document serve to established guidelines for governments to follow, ensuring that these mass destructions won’t happen, or are stopped in the right amount of time. The language presented in the document surround strict rules, for a person or persons that disobey the agreed upon guidelines. The documents audience directed and applicable to the general public, with intent to provide information to the public surrounding issues of potential genocide. The general message serves to inform the public with guidelines to how situations of genocide can be handled and prevented.

The second reading Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, discusses his survival of eleven months in confinement and horrible conditions in Auschwitz. As a twenty-four year old, anti-fascist, Italian Jew, Levi was always willing to put up a fight either with Resistance movements or with opinion, but when in Auschwitz his opinion was silenced. “I give up asking questions and soon slip into a bitter and tense sleep. But it is not rest: I feel myself threatened, besieged, at every moment I am ready to draw myself into a spasm of defence” (38). To some extent Levi presents conditions in Auschwitz as an “every man for himself ordeal”, as “there is a vast category of prisoners, not initially favoured by fate, who fight merely with their own strength to survive” (92). With skilled tactics, Levi and others were able so survive the unpleasant and horrible conditions using skill, smuggling tactics, and good fortune; ultimately and having a bright mindset and willingness to survive and be free.

Discussion Question:

Article 7: “Genocide and the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition.” What if genocide is committed towards a specific political ideology or political party? In relation to Auschwitz, people were transported by the truckload from various parts, how does this specific article compare to the situation?

How does one survive in Auschwitz?

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In Survival in Auschwitz, the author Primo Levi captures the reader into the harsh reality of life in the infamous Nazi concentration and extermination camp. Primo Levi is a young Jewish-Italian man who, in 1943 at the age of 24, was captured by the Nazi fascists while hiding in the woods and stripped of everything that belonged to him including his name.

Auschwitz is probably the most well known out of all the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Primo Levi spends almost an entire year, what to him seemed like an eternity, being starved, badly beaten and worked until he could no longer breathe. The camp presented extremely unsanitary conditions and prisoners were fed little to nothing, as they were given soup with scraps of potato and cabbage. During this time, Primo struggled to maintain a sense of humanity and never saw an end to his suffering. After spending almost an entire year in these devastating conditions the Nazi’s abandoned these camps with the threat of the invading Soviet Union and after surviving on their own they were eventually rescued.

To answer the topic question, “How does one survive Auschwitz?”, Primo presents severals cases and points. For one to survive Auschwitz you must be extremely lucky, know German, never give up hope, maintain good health as best you can and most importantly have compassion. Compassion is something Primo learns when he meets the ever so kind Lorenzo, who isn’t a prisoner but yet a civilian worker, who constantly provides food secretly to Primo and talks with him. Primo says, “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me of his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside of our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, not extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (121) Compassion in Auschwitz means having a community of people who look out for each other and share their resources to maximize the entire groups chances of survival. This sense of community helped maintain sanity for Primo and through his inspiration that he found from Lorenzo that he was able to survive Auschwitz.

 

Survival in Auschwitz

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In Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, Levi argued that one survived in Auschwitz by maintaining his humanity. In Auschwitz, everything possible was done to strip people of their humanity: upon arriving, people were robbed of their clothes, belongings, and money. They were then shaved and tattooed with numbers that replaced their names. People in Auschwitz lived without food or proper medical treatment; most were separated from their families. Everyone was forced to do back-breaking labor day after day with little to look forward to or hope for.

At the end of Chapter 9, Levi described how four particular people survived Auschwitz. In each of the stories, these people survived by maintaining elements of their personality within the de-humanizing walls. They found little things to cling to:  keeping clean, singing songs, or stealing to remember who they were. Levi explained that those “not initially favoured by fate” could survive if they had the will power “to battle everyday and every hour” (Levi 92).

There was also an emphasis on the methodical daily existence within Auschwitz. Everyday there were numerous pointless rules, rituals, and ceremonies designed to wear down the human psych. Simply finding a way to break the monotony of such a harsh structure was very important to surviving Auschwitz. Prisoners did this by partaking in the Exchange Market, or helping each other out in exchange for food.

Essentially, surviving in Auschwitz consisted of clinging to the little things. People had to find the small  things that helped them forge meaning into a system that attempted to make their lives meaningless.

Levi, Primo, and Stuart Woolf. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.

Quiet Survival

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In the afterword to Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi stated: “As for survival…I insist there was no general rule, except entering the camp in good health and knowing German. Barring this, luck dominated” (180). Levi did enter the Lager in relatively good health and quickly learned some German, and he did encounter more luck than many of the Häftling, especially in the case of meeting Lorenzo, who provided Levi with both the physical sustenance of soup as well as the less tangible reminder of the world outside, where goodness still existed. Despite Levi’s statement that luck was the most important factor in survival, throughout his book, Levi mentioned other factors that likely contributed to his ability to survive despite the horrendous trials he and his fellow prisoners faced.

Levi’s ability to retain or at least remember his humanity was one of the most important factors to his survival. As mentioned previously, Lorenzo offered Levi a reminder of humanity in addition to the soup he gave him. Levi could see this element of Lorenzo’s offering, where other people might only see the soup. The fact that Levi could find the deeper meaning to such a simple gesture enabled him to never become the animal that the Germans saw him as. Before Levi met Lorenzo, a man named Steinlauf explained to him the importance of not becoming a “beast” (41). Levi carried this idea on with him thenceforth.

In addition to the importance of humanity, Levi also emphasized the importance of looking forward to small things. “Hope” may be too strong a word for this act, but any motivating factor could have given the prisoners the ability to stay alive, even if only one day at a time. During his first winter in the Lager, Levi explained that the prisoners’ “only purpose [was] to reach the spring” (71). Even though they would still be hungry and miserable in the spring, they would not be as cold, and this was something the prisoners could look forward too, small as it might seem to us. Another small light in Levi’s life was the menaschka, or pot, that he and Alberto obtained to transport Lorenzo’s soup. The tiniest of act of defiance, having such a pot boosted their social standing and gave them something other than hunger and misery to think about.

Throughout Levi’s book, it is small acts of humanity and small changes to daily life that seemed to have sustained him during his time in Auschwitz. In his book, survival is not a grand, heroic triumph but rather a quiet sustaining of the things that make us human, even in the face of dehumanizing forces.

Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. S. J. Woolf. Ed. Philip Roth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print

Fascism and the Inevitability of War & Stalin’s Master Plan

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Fascism and the Inevitability of War & Stalin’s Master Plan

 

When representatives from Germany and the USSR established the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, it is difficult to tell whether the Soviets actually believed in the treaty lasting. The fact that the war resulted in a victory for the Allies and the USSR probably allowed the Soviets to see the war differently than the Axis powers, certainly with a different bias. In Joseph Stalin’s 1946 speech, he seemed to think that because the Germans were fascist with the Nazi Party at the helm, war was inevitable. He pinpointed this circumstance on an ideological belief inherent in fascist politics – the need to acquire more foreign territory and attain world domination. He cited that the only reason the Soviets were willing to work alongside capitalist powers like the U.S. and Britain was via a common enemy, the fascists. All three of those parties disliked that the fascists eliminated the sovereignty of small, developing nations; it was likely for different reasons though. The U.S. and Britain likely wanted to see the small nation develop into a trading partner, or at least a suitable ally or buffer country, while the Soviets likely hope to establish a Communist movement there. In short, all three parties understood the fascists to be a threat to the freedom of lots of peoples and, for Stalin and the Soviets, an inevitable source of conflict.

If Stalin believes that the fascists would inevitably create conflict, then why would he sign a treaty with Nazi Germany? In short, there are a few potential answers to this question. Firstly, Stalin could be lying through his teeth and merely just trying to cover himself in this speech; it is, after all, an “election.” Maybe Stalin honestly thought the Germans would honor their agreement. There is also the possibility that Stalin merely wished to delay the inevitable, giving him more time to prepare for a Soviet attack. Without this agreement, Hitler may have jumped straight from Poland and Austria, to the USSR. Stalin also must have known that Hitler’s hatred of Marxists and Communists would have to ground itself somehow.

However, the last possibility is perhaps the most striking, and the boldest out of the three ideas presented here. (In short, bear with me on this one.) Stalin may have known that Hitler would try to stab him in the back and break an agreement; he has had to deal with lots of political enemies himself. Therefore, perhaps Stalin wanted the pact signed, almost as if to goad in or tempt the Nazis, to convince them that the Soviets were in a false sense of security. If a nation, like the USSR, can anticipate and prepare ahead of time for a backstabbing, then it can catch its opponent off guard immensely. Since a backstabbing relies heavily on the element of surprise, if one were to reverse that element, the backstabber would be caught in a near impossible situation. When the Nazis do finally attack the USSR in one of the largest military offenses in history, it initially resulted in heavy losses for the Soviets.[1] However, they were able to absorb the damage, get back on their feet pretty quickly, and retaliate with great strength, as Stalin described in his speech. The Soviets from that point onward made the offensive a war of attrition, using their home territory to their advantage. In short, they took out the German army quite skillfully. Lastly, Stalin continuously mentioned during his speech what a victory it was not just for the USSR as a whole, but for the Soviet social system, the Soviet state system, and for the Red Army. Stalin wanted to prove critics wrong, and Nazi Germany during WWII provided the perfect venue to demonstrate the USSR’s advancements. The U.S. did it during the Spanish-American War, and von Bismarck was well known for starting wars to help get Germany going; is it not unlikely that Stalin wanted WWII to happen and that he wanted Nazi Germany to invade?

 

[1] “Operation Barbarossa.” Wikipedia. Accessed April 8, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa.

Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin’s Speech

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The Nazi-Soviet pact was a non-aggression pact signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939. It stated that neither country would attack the other, and that neither would ally with an enemy country of the other. In addition it divided Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland into Soviet and German “spheres of influence” through a secret protocol.

The pact gave the Soviet Union safety from the Nazis, which was important because the Soviets were neither militarily nor economically prepared for war. It gave Germany access to Poland, which they invaded on September 1, 1939. The pact was broken when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Stalin’s speech addressed the industrial advancements the Soviet Union saw during the mid 1900s, and the challenges it faced during WWII. Stalin explained that the advancements were due to the communal hard work of the Soviet people during the five-year plans, and described WWII as an obstacle that was overcome through coordination and strength.

Nazi-Soviet Pact/Stalin’s Speech

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The first of Wednesday’s readings, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, was a document that created a mutually beneficial, albeit brief, truce between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Although both countries had fundamentally different political systems and ambitions, Russia favored entering into a non-aggression pact because it knew that Germany was a highly industrialized, blossoming state that posed them a significant threat. Stalin knew that if Hitler chose to strike Russia, they would not be adequately prepared to defend themselves. At first the truce benefitted Germany because once they decided to engage most of Europe, they knew that they would not be required to fight a two-front war as they had to do in the past during WWI. Hitler saw fit to violate this pact, which it appears to have been his intention all along, because it was part of his political ideology to remove the Jewish problem in the east in order to make room for the Lebensraum to house the burgeoning German population. He believed that Russia could be easily taken, allowing Germans to reclaim the territory that is rightfully theirs, from the Bolshevik/Jewish “menace.”

The second of Wednesday’s readings, Stalin’s speech form 1946, was the speech that highlighted his re-election campaign. In this speech he attributed Russia’s victory to the effectiveness of the country’s Soviet system. Stalin adamantly professed the efficacy of the system when he stated, “The issue now is no longer the viability of the Soviet state system, because there can be no doubt about its viability…” While it is true that Russia was much more effective fending off Germany in WWII than WWI, Stalin asserted that no other system could have achieved such positive results. While arguing for the efficacy of his Five Year plans, he compared Russia’s output in 1941 to that of 1913. He used suspect reasoning while justifying his argument with these statistics because Russia was in such a dismal state of affairs in 1913 that the gains experienced during this interval of time could in fact be considered, “the simple and ordinary development of a country from backwardness to progress.” Once Germany violated their Non-Aggression pact, Russia was put on the defensive and nearly taken over by Germany. For a nation as large and populous as Russia, the industrialization achieved by 1941 was still relatively lackluster. When Stalin stated in his speech that “it does not resemble the picture of the way our army was supplied during the First World War, when the front suffered chronic shortages of artillery and shells, when the army fought without tanks and aircraft, and when one rifle was issue for every three men,” he is partially incorrect because that was the Red Army’s state of affairs for much of the first half of the war. During the battle of Stalingrad troops were sent into battle rifleless, similarly to WWI. Also, Stalin was forced to pass order #227, which stated that any man who made an attempt to retreat was to be gunned down by his own troops who were stationed in the rear of the lines.[1] He failed to take into consideration the fact that any population facing the brink of total annihilation will do anything in their power to survive by focusing the entire nation’s efforts and resources towards the war effort, regardless of what system is in place. Stalin used the Russian victory as a springboard to launch his reelection campaign. He only highlighted the positive aspects of the war, which obviously cumulated with a Soviet victory against their antagonistic, Nazi-German enemy. What he chose to exclude from his speech was the 21 to 28 million deaths that the Soviet Union experienced during the war – far more than any other participating nation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227

Nazi-Soviet Pact

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It’s not surprising that Nazi would make compromission with Soviet Union, their so-called biggest enem because that non-invasion pact let those two nations both benefited.

For Germany, the pact released it from the threaten to face two long battle lines in West and East and temporarily avioded the formation of a larger anti-Germany alliance which included Soviet Union, England and France. In fact in 1939 Soviet Union, England and France had an negotiation in Moscow as well. With this pact and the appeasement policies of France and England, Germany further expand it’s sphere of influence and divided Poland with Soviet Union which made it more prepared for the invasion to the whole Europe.

For Soviet Union, this pact let it had time to recover it’s millitary force which had been deeply damaged in counter-revolutionary elimination because too many experienced generals been persecuted. In the Soviet-Finnish War in 1939, the weakness of Soviet army been exposed. When Germany invaded Soviet Union, it’s army had reorganized and showed considerable strength. Moreover, by annexing other countries in east Europe, Soviet Union expanded it’s depth in defense and made the invasion became more hard.