World War Two was one of the most important events in world history. It was enormously destructive, claiming the lives of up to 80 million people and leaving much of Europe in ruins. The great bulk of this destruction took place in Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, parts of which(Ukraine, for example) had already been devastated by Stalin in the 1930s. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the prolonged and bitter fighting on the Eastern Front which did not end until May 1945 when the Red Army conquered Berlin cost the Soviet Union almost 27 million of its citizens, two-thirds of whom were civilians. The German Wehrmacht lost almost 5 million men in World War Two, most of them on the Eastern Front. Poland and the occupied Soviet Union became killing fields where the German death squads and extermination centers murdered millions of Jews, Sinti and Roma, Soviet POWs and other “racial enemies” of the Reich, The amazingly brutal “anti-partisan” campaign conducted by the Germans in the Soviet Union turned some regions, Belarus for example, into “dead zones” by eradicating thousands of villages and murdering their inhabitants. World War Two was,indeed, the first modern war which killed more civilians than soldiers in uniform and most of these civilian as well as military deaths were concentrated on the Eastern Front. One of the primary aims of this course will be to explain this unprecedented destruction, mass violence and genocide, by placing World War Two in a longer-term historical context that takes us back to World War One paying particular attention to the less well-known Eastern Front in that war. A second major aim of this course will be to show how the German war in the East was a “racial war of annihilation,” fueled by Nazi racial delusions which saw the “ war against the Jews” as an integral component of the war as a whole. Racial delusions also enabled other murderous policies which did not baulk at the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens (civilians as well as POWs). Murder was indeed a prime instrument of German occupation policy in the East.
The war in the West was much less destructive and it will be a third goal of this course to show the reasons for and consequences of this important difference. It will be important to show that Europeans experienced (and then subsequently remembered) World War Two in quite different ways, even in the West, but that one huge gap separated Eastern from Western European experience(s).
Finally, we want to trace the afterlife of World War Two in post-war Europe.In 1945, the continent was in ruins. In Western Europe at least, the physical landscapes had been rebuilt by the 1960s at the latest. Physical reconstruction took much longer in post-war European. But in both West and East, mental landscapes continued to be scarred by the war, the genocide and their aftermaths for years to come, some would say until the very present. It will be important to explore the ways in which the mental and emotional afterlife of World War Two and the Holocaust have continued to affect post-war Europe and the significant differences between East and West, as well as within individual nations or regions.
This course introduces students to the most important recent research on and debates about World War Two and the Holocaust in Europe. Readings for this course will include:
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I
Timothy Snyder, Blood Lands.Europe between Hitler and Stalin
Nicholas Stargardt, The German War. A Nation under Arms,1939-1945
Richard Overy, Russia’s War.A History of the Soviet Effort,1941-1945
Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War. Life and Death in the Red Army
Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews,1939-1945.The Years of Extermination
Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews.Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland
Jan T. Gross, Neighbors.The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne
Anthony Polonsky, ed., The Neighbors Respond. The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland
Christopher Browning, Remembering Survival:Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp
Wendy Lower, ed., The Shoah in Ukraine.History, Testimony, Memorialization
Dietmar Süß, Death from the Skies. How the British and Germans Survived Bombing during World War II
Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945
Assignments:
Participation 30%
Visual Analysis 10%
Document Analysis 10%
Book Review 10%
End of Term Research Paper 40%
