FORMER WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY INTERN RETURNS AS TEACHER

Yehudis Benhamou first came to the Wolfsonian Library as a Master’s candidate at Florida International University, earning academic credit with an internship in our library. She returned yesterday morning leading a class of Hillel Community High School students studying the Second World War and the Holocaust. This was the last of a large number of school visits this month by teachers and students studying the subject. The Wolfsonian’s unparalleled collection of propaganda from this period has made us a popular field trip site for teachers.

The students at Hillel, like the Shenandoah Middle School students who visited earlier in the month, had the privilege of seeing a wealth of primary source materials laid out on the main reading room table. In trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, the Hillel students received a first-hand glimpse of the propaganda Hitler and the Nazis created to sow hatred and distrust of Jews in Germany and later in the territories occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

In addition to fostering a German “master race” myth with images of beautiful and handsome Aryan-types, National Socialist propagandists also worked to create a counter-image aimed at uniting the country against a common enemy: the Jew. Ironically, before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, one might have thought Germany the least likely European country to initiate an all-out war against the Jews. In the pre-Third Reich era, Jews had been emancipated, and the Jewish population had largely assimilated into German society, with high rates of Jewish-German intermarriage. Following Hitler’s rise to power, however, the National Socialist dictatorship began to foster and create stereotypes and unflattering images of Jews and other “degenerate” races to promote fear, distrust, and hatred of the supposed “enemies” of the Third Reich.

The Nazi campaign for “cleansing” the fatherland of foreign and “degenerate” cultural influences that began with the banning and burning of books and the publication of anti-Semitic propaganda, soon escalated into government-sanctioned harassment of Jews, the passage of racist legislation prohibiting intermarriage, the forced segregation of Jews into ghettos, and ultimately, deportation to so-called “work camps” during the Second World War.

The Wolfsonian has just this month received another donation to the collection of a pamphlet with a photomontage illustration by John Heartfield. Born in Berlin in 1891, Helmut Herzfeld became an ardent Communist, Anglicized his name to disassociate himself from the Nazis, and moved to neighboring Czechoslovakia following Hitler’s rise to power where he continued to satirize Fascism and Nazism. Rightly fearing a Nazi take-over, in 1938 he fled to England, ultimately returning to (East) Berlin after the war. Even as Heartfield used his artwork to counter Nazism and racial hatred in the 1930s, the Wolfsonian’s rich collection of political propaganda from this period will enable us to continue to educate present and future generations of students and to ensure that the world will not forget.

GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA &

CLARA HELENA PALACIO-DE LUCA

VISITS BY SHENANDOAH MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

Throughout the month of May, more than two hundred Shenandoah Middle School students studying the Second World War and the Holocaust have come to the Wolfsonian library to see a presentation of primary source materials from the collection. Before coming to the Wolfsonian, the students participating in the museum education program had the chance to hear a talk by a Holocaust survivor and to read Anne Frank’s famous Diary of a Young Girl, chronicling her life in Amsterdam hiding during the Nazi occupation.

At the museum, each visiting class was split up into two groups of twenty to thirty students. Wolfsonian Manager of Youth & School Programs Coordinator, Claudia Caro Sullivan took half of them on a guided tour of the museum galleries, and some of them also participated in an art project involving the creation of a book of self-portraits. The other group was ushered up to the library for a talk about the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, and a discussion of the history of racial discrimination in the United States and Germany. The students learned that although the United States was still struggling with segregation, horrific lynchings and KKK terror, Jim Crow laws, and other discriminatory practices, some progress towards civil rights began to be made during the Roosevelt Administration. Ironically, at the same time, Germany’s rather tolerant record as regards Jewish emancipation and assimilation and Jewish-German mixed marriages made an immediate about face as the Nazi regime promoted anti-Semitism and goose-stepped the nation down the path of a racist regime. After the discussions, the students in my group joined Claudia, and those in her group came up to the library.

One of the questions we tried to address during the back-to-back discussions in the library was how Hitler and the National Socialists were able to seize power, exercise dictatorial control, and to perpetrate such a monstrous program as the liquidation of six million Jews and another six million Gypsies, Russians, homosexuals, disabled persons, and a host of political dissidents. The materials laid out on the table suggested that Hitler and his gang recognized the importance of propaganda, for even a dictator needed to maintain at least the appearance of popular support.

Garnering the support of talented graphic artists, photographers, and filmmakers Hitler and his Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) staged rallies and parades and a paper campaign designed to forge a positive image for himself and his party that belied the hideous program he had in store. Promising work in a time of global depression, a revival of German fortunes after the humiliations of defeat in the catastrophic First World War, Hitler appealed to German patriotism and provided them with a scapegoat aimed at uniting the nation against a common enemy. During the war, the Nazis forced Jews to wear badges to single them out and employed heavy doses of anti-Semitic propaganda to dissuade persons in the occupied territories from sheltering the “enemies” of the Third Reich (like Anne Frank and her family) and to encourage them to turn them in to the Gestapo for deportation to “work camps.”

The bachelor führer was also savvy enough to recognize the importance of posing with youngsters. He also provided propaganda books for the schools and established the Hitler Jugend as a means of brainwashing an entire generation of impressionable youths.

The visiting middle school students, however, were not so easily manipulated by the propaganda. Many perceptively noted the discrepancies between Hitler’s racist rhetoric and reality. As one French caricature from the period made clear, (and as Charlie Chaplin had hilariously pointed out in his brilliant and pointed satire, The Great Dictator), the browned-eyed, brunette leader of the blonde race did not match the Aryan ideals he promoted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJOuoyoMhj8

It became obvious from our discussions that it was not possible to determine a person’s race by appearances, and that the horrible stereotypes of Jews the Nazis created as a prelude to the Holocaust were caricatures as absurd as the idea of an Aryan “master race.” If it were so easy to identify Jews, some concluded, why had it have been necessary for the Nazis to force persons of Jewish ancestry to wear badges identifying themselves as such?