Claudia Koonz - "How the Nazis Made Anti-Semitism Respectable"

Claudia Koonz, a professor of History at Duke University, is well known for her scholarship on Nazi Germany, on the history of German women during the Nazi period, and on the Holocaust. She is the author of two well-known and highly influential books, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, and The Nazi Conscience. In her talk at OSU, Professor Koonz examines with the question, "How did it happen that Germany, the nation celebrated as the home of 'philosophers and poets,' became the site of an unprecedented drive to exterminate every Jew in Europe?" She investigates the moral transformation that prepared most Germans to participate in crimes against Jews with impunity. Using images from films, humor magazines, racial science textbooks, and mass market print media, she will examine the sophisticated persuasive techniques that prepared ordinary Germans to ostracize, blackmail, rob, and expel fellow citizens with Jewish ancestors. At Oregon State University, we have observed Holocaust Memorial Week every year since 1987. The breadth and the duration of our effort are unmatched in the Pacific Northwest. This program grows from the belief that educational institutions can do much to combat prejudice of all kinds, and to foster respect for the diversity that is America, by promoting an awareness of the Holocaust, perhaps the most horrific historical indicator of the high cost of prejudice. It is particularly important to teach young people about the Holocaust, so that coming generations will not forget the lessons that a preceding one learned at such cost. This emphasis recalls the motto of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness." To learn more about the Holocaust Memorial Program at Oregon State University, please visit http://oregonstate.edu/holocaust/