UCLA professor's research takes holistic look at Holocaust
By Harold Lee
Daily Bruin (U. California-Los Angeles)
04/29/2003

(U-WIRE) LOS ANGELES — While many people set Tuesday aside to remember the victims of the Holocaust, researchers from University of California-Los Angeles, the community and the University of California system are piecing together the genocide and researching how the human tragedy still affects people today.

Professor Saul Friedlander — a noted Holocaust historian and survivor — is currently working on "Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination," a treatise which documents the Holocaust from 1939 to 1945.

"The Years of Extermination," which will be published two years from now, is the second of a two-part narrative of the Holocaust.

The first volume, "Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution" was published in 1997 and explores the events that led to the Holocaust from 1933 to 1939.

"What I'm trying to do is integrate different levels of historical understanding of the events into one single narration," Friedlander said. "It has never been done before."

The second volume will encompass various aspects of the Holocaust and will not only examine German policy, but European and American policies during World War II, Friedlander said.

"I'm trying to bring together the political, social and ideological analysis with the experience of everyday life as expressed by victims," he said.

"The Years of Extermination" will draw from new sources that were previously locked up in Soviet archives prior to the fall of the Soviet Union as well as diaries kept by the Jewish population, Friedlander said.

Friedlander said there are approximately 400 diaries kept by Jewish victims, written in a variety of languages.

Research has also been done concerning teaching of Holocaust history in the German school system since 1945.

Harold Marcuse, a University of California-Santa Barbara professor of modern German history, has studied how German teenagers and adults have come to know the Holocaust.

"We study German history textbooks and talk to past students and adults and ask how they learned about the Holocaust and what they remember from the places they visited, the books they read, and the films they saw," said Marcuse. "It's called 'reception history.'"

Marcuse has also done research comparing American and German education of the Holocaust.

He has gathered undergraduate history students to interview local high school students to gauge their Holocaust knowledge.

In comparison to how American students learn about the Holocaust, German students have a "more intense education" of the genocide, Marcuse said.

"They certainly learn more about the Nazi period and read more graphic works than kids in the U.S.," he said. "There is a certain curriculum that teachers are mandated to teach."

Different aspects of the Holocaust are emphasized in German schools which are not as highlighted in American schools.

According to Marcuse, German teaching of the subject focuses more on the political history and the rise of Nazism, though students do have a chance to visit concentration camps.

"German education about the Holocaust tends to include fewer individual accounts than treatments in U.S. schools. It is more analytical and less emotional," said Marcuse.

Some academics pursue research of the Holocaust for activist purposes.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles does research to track down Nazi war criminals involved in the mass murder of civilians, and also to combat Holocaust revisionists, who downplay or deny the Holocaust.

Currently, the Wiesenthal Center is working on Operation Last Chance, a program that seeks to track down fascists and Nazi sympathizers from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia who aided the Nazis when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Wiesenthal Center.

Cooper said the Nazi sympathizers helped kill Jewish citizens and Communist officials. For their help, some were made into Nazi death camp guards.

Many immigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia under their real names and were not punished because they fought against Communists, Cooper added.

When the Wiesenthal Center finds sufficient evidence, it turns over its findings to foreign governments who can punish war criminals.

"[War criminals] can have citizenship stripped if they were involved in the murder of innocent civilians," Cooper said.

The Wiesenthal Center has had volunteers from UCLA work as Internet researchers, said Cooper.

Copyright ©2003 Daily Bruin via UWire

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