Objectives: • To educate students about the Holocaust through personal histories
• To inspire critical thought and personal growth
• To reflect upon the moral issues raised by the denial of rights to lawyers and their relevance today
• To individualize the history of the Holocaust and to preserve the memory of individuals
In order to understand the exhibit Lawyers without Rights and what happened to individual Jewish lawyers during the Holocaust, the student needs to place the exhibit in context. Any critical understanding of the issues must be based on the actual history. Studying the Holocaust exposes students to the tragedy of genocide, the loss of Jewish cultural and religious life in Europe, the importance of courage in the face of injustice as well as the value of individual actions of heroism and the need for high societal standards of human behavior. The exhibit focuses on lawyers, legal rights and responsibilities but the issue of the moral and ethical responsibility of the bystanders and collaborators who chose not to intervene in the persecution and murder of Jews and other victims as well as the implications of the genocide against the Jews by a state sponsored policy of killing millions of people are other topics which the teacher may want to explore at another time.
Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The number is impossible to comprehend. Through this exhibit we attempt to retrieve the individual from the nameless mass of six million, to personalize the history and to attempt to grasp the potential of what was lost. We need to understand that these people are not an anonymous faceless mass but that every person had a name; they had friends, a brother, a sister, a spouse, a son, a daughter. Their lives did not begin and end with the Holocaust. They had goals and dreams for the future. By looking at the lives of the individuals we can make the history more relevant to the lives of our students. It is only through understanding what happened to individuals that we can begin to see the enormity of what happened and what was lost. The Holocaust is not only about what happened to the Jews; it is also about what happened to the rest of humanity.
It is assumed that the student will have some background in European and German history and the events leading up to the election of Hitler in 1933. Some discussion about the events and ideas in European history that contributed to the Holocaust, such as the history of anti-Semitism, the development of race science in the 19th century, the rise of German nationalism, the defeat of Germany in WWI and the failure of the democratic Weimar Republic may be necessary.
A time line of events in Germany can be accessed on the Yad Vashem website,
or the Simon Wiesenthal website.
This lesson seeks to sensitize students and to make them aware that they must constantly be on guard against discriminatory legislation. The murder of six million Jews did not happen all at once but through gradual legislation that steadily deprived Jews of their rights. The focus in the exhibit is on anti-Semitic legislation in Germany between 1933 and 1941, and specifically on the legislation which deprived Jewish lawyers of their right to practice. Students will be made aware of the carefully legislated approach taken by the Nazis in order to make anti-Semitism more acceptable to German citizens, to make Jews cooperative and to avoid foreign reactions.
In 1933 Jews were banned from government service; Jewish lawyers were also banned from practicing. Exceptions were made for those lawyers who had fought at the front in WWI or who had lost a son in the war and those lawyers who were in practice before 1914. Jewish women were banned immediately in 1933 as women were not given the right to practice law until the 1920's. In 1938 all exemptions ceased and all Jewish lawyers were banned from practicing.
In discussing the denial of rights in Germany, the following questions should be considered.
1. What is the rule of law? How does this work in every day life? What safeguards are in place in Canada to guarantee that no one - elected officials, the armed forces, or ordinary individuals - does things that the law forbids and in the case of government officials laws are not passed that would be unconstitutional? Specifically, what can the average citizen do to influence the passing or defeat of a particular piece of legislation?
2. How did Hitler and the Nazis come to power?
3. How does a state degenerate from a parliamentary democracy into a totalitarian state? The processes by which the Nazis gained absolute control of the German government and how the Nazi government then controlled virtually all segments of German society need to be examined.
4. Could an avowed racist be elected Prime Minister of Canada? Why or why not?
A comparison of the foundation of democracy, the Canadian Articles of Confederation, the Charter of Rights and anti-hate laws can be made with the laws and legal structure of the Weimar Republic. In this way, students can develop an understanding of the weakness in the German system and the strengths which must be protected in the Canadian system to assure that all minorities have equal rights here in Canada.
Hitler did not come to power through a military coup but through a democratic process. Hitler and his Nazi party obtained more votes than any other party in the various elections held in 1932 and 1933. He was never elected by a clear-cut majority of the German electorate nor was he ever given a clear mandate to become the dictatorial ruler of Germany. Hitler attained power when President Hindenberg appointed him chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Once in power, Hitler and his accomplices lost no time in broadening their power base and dismantling the democratic constitution. The Enabling Act authorized the government to enact laws without recourse either to the parliament or the president.
The Nazi seizure of power was completed with the Law against the Establishment of New Parties of July 14, 1933. Consequently the Nazi party became the only legal political party in Germany. In 1933, racial legislation was enacted aimed at Jewish employees in the public services and the various professions, including medicine and law. On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed which ended Jewish emancipation in Germany and defined a Jew in racial terms.
Vocabulary to be defined: Holocaust From the Greek: "holos" (completely) and "kaustos" (burned sacrificial offering). When capitalized, the term usually refers to the Shoah, the killing of 6 million European Jews by the Nazi government during World War II. Six million Jews, two out of every three living at the time in Europe, were murdered as part of a systematic genocide.
Genocide The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar, in 1943, from the roots genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin- occidere or cideo - to massacre). The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
Nazism The ideology and policies of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party from 1921 - 1945. Nazism stressed the superiority of the Aryan race as the Master Race and a violent hatred of Jews who were blamed for all the problems of Germany. Extremely nationalistic. Centralization of decision making by and loyalty to a single leader.
Fascism A philosophy or system of government that advocates a dictatorship of the extreme right. Emphasizes the subordination of the individual to a totalitarian state. Intellectual roots can be traced to Artur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Holocaust
