Latin School of Chicago

Latin Magazine Winter 2018

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Looking Back To meet these goals, students are asked to become acquainted with a variety of secondary and primary sources oering dierent perspective. Among the required reading for the course are Bruno Bettelheim, e Informed Heart, Arnost Lustig, Darkness Casts No Shadow, Milton Mayer, ey ought ey Were Free, and Nora Levin, e Holocaust. George Mosse's compilation of documents in Nazi Culture allows students to read and interpret rst-hand accounts of Nazi ideology and to assess what life was like under the Nazi regime. Selections from Mosse's e Crisis of German ldeology: Intellectual Origins of the ird Reich provide the necessary historical background to the document excerpts. Assigned readings are supplemented with outside readings, class lectures, and discussions. Students are also introduced to several documentary lms, including a four-part series on e Rise and Fall of the ird Reich, based on William Shirer's account; the Alain Resnais lm, Night and Fog, and Warsaw Ghetto, a documentary based on records of German photographers and narrated by one of the few survivors of the Ghetto. e topics covered in this type of course are diverse, the questions raised, varied. What were the factors which brought Adolf Hitler to power? How did the Nazis establish a totalitarian regime which collapsed only in the debacle of World War II? Where would the Nazi revolution have ended had it succeeded; or was it doomed from the beginning to failure? Why did the world remain relatively silent to the intense rhetoric of hate and world domination? How was an anti-Semitism endemic to Western civilization transformed into political ideology which ended in the Holocaust? Despite an ever growing accumulation of literature on the Nazi regime, the answers to these and other questions remain disturbingly incomplete and in need of constant reassessment. For what may be the most signicant question of all, who was responsible, and its corollary, could it happen again, denitive conclusions are even more dicult. For the students, one format for consideration of these problems is provided through a simulation and subsequent discussion of the Nuremberg Trials. Yet if the answers remain elusive, what then the purpose of the exploration? In a brief work, e Cunning of History, Richard Rubenstein noted that "the passing of time has made it increasingly evident that a hitherto unbreachable moral and political barrier in the history of Western Civilization was successfully overcome by the Nazis in World War II and that henceforth the systematic, bureaucratically administered extermination of millions of citizens or subject people will forever be one of the capacities and temptations of government." If Rubenstein's assessment is correct, even partially, the implications for the future are profound, our need to understand compelling. Despite the questions which remain, the explorations in "e Nazi Mind" should make the period more comprehensible. Perhaps it is even the questions themselves which form part of what Viktor Frankl has called "Man's Search for Meaning." Nazi Mind students participated in a Nuremberg Trial simulation at a Daley Center courtroom in 2004. For what may be the most significant question of all, who was responsible, and its corollary, could it happen again, definitive conclusions are even more difficult. For the students, one format for consideration of these problems is provided through a simulation and subsequent discussion of the Nuremberg Trials. L M ยป W

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