Today we covered a lot of history. We looked at WWI and the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, basically a lot of background information. A lot I knew, a lot was a refresher, and a lot I had never heard before or thought about in the way it was presented.
So a few things that interested me today:
- Francis Galton is the father of modern eugenics. He was Charles Darwin’s cousin. The idea of social Darwinism came from this guy.
- The handicapped were seen as inferior; women were second class citizens and thought to belong in the home; child labor was legal, nationalism was virulent; religon was cause for violence. All those things describe the United States in the 1930′s.
- Virginia was big into eugenics and forced sterilization in the 1930′s.
- The T4 program was kind of the dress rehearsal for the Nazis and helped them become efficient at killing large numbers of people in a short amount of time.
One big discussion started when America in the 1930′s was described, especially since the eugenics and sterilization so closely paralled what was going on in Germany. Our lecturer asked: America got as far as concentration (internment) camps and sterilization of the handicapped-what kept them from moving past that like the Nazis did? So there was a pretty lengthy discussion. I can only remember a couple of the theories offered, but they were the US didn’t have a Hitler, and the US had already committed their genocide with the Native Americans. (So the US wasn’t allowed to commit anymore genocides? One and done?)
Tomorrow is our longest day of class. We start at 8:30am, and finish up at 8pm. Around 5:15 we have a dinner with several Holocaust survivors, followed by a question and answer panel beginning at 6. There should be five survivors. A couple of them survived by pretending to be Christian; a few others survived concentration camps. I’ve got a list of questions (thank you Facebook friends) and will hopefully get some of them answered. It’s a pretty big class-at least 30-and I know everyone will have many questions, so I figure if I can get one or two answered I’m lucky. I have no recording equipment, but I’ll take the best notes I can for future reference. I have heard one survivor speak before, although that was just last November at the National Council for Social Studies Conference in Atlanta. I know I was lucky to hear her speak, so to have the opportunity to hear five survivors is very fortunate.
I actually thought about putting this class off until next year. I had applied for a few summer trips, and didn’t know if I would get accepted to any of them, so I thought I might hold off until next summer, when I may actually stay home. (Although if something really good comes up, I know I won’t be able to resist.) What made me go ahead and register was knowing that there was a survivor panel, and knowing that the survivors may not be around much longer and I should take advantage of the opportunity to hear them speak. Besides that, I’m glad I enrolled this summer because a lot of what we have discussed I just learned about (and in some cases saw) a couple of weeks ago while we were in Germany. I’ve actually gone through my photos from the trip to find something the speaker is talking about because I was just there and that is a pretty cool thing. (No, I don’t tell the speaker that, nor have I told
very many people that I was just in Germany and learned about these things, or that I’ve even visited concentration camps. But just for me personally it’s cool to hear the speaker talk about the depiction of Synagogue in medieval art and pull up my photos from the church in Bamberg and compare what I saw to what he’s showing us.)
My only complaint is the awful bed and the poor excuse for a pillow. I don’t know how anyone sleeps on this thing for an entire school year. Maybe when you’re young and in college it doesn’t matter and you can sleep anywhere. I on the other hand, can’t wait to sleep in my own bed again, with my two fluffy pillows.
