Lesson video

Hello, Year 9.

It's good to have you with us again for this history lesson.

This is the first of four history lessons looking at the question, how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? How did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? As you can tell from the question, this is a subject that is a very sensitive one to study, and it's a subject that some people might feel uncomfortable studying.

So if at any point in any of our four lessons together you do feel uncomfortable, then feel free to pause the lesson and come back to it when you're feeling ready.

The subject of the Holocaust is not an easy one to study.

That period during the Second World War where the Nazis murdered six million Jewish men, women, and children.

And during that period that we call the Holocaust, there were Jewish people who resisted.

But even before the Holocaust, there were Jewish men and women who resisted.

Now, we're going to be looking at it in more detail today and over our four lessons.

But before we do, can you make sure that you have a pen and a piece of paper to write on, also that you're in a quiet place with no distractions, phone turned off.

And if you need a moment to do that, then pause the lesson and then come back when you're ready.

See you in a moment.

So welcome back, Year 9.

When we think about the idea of resistance to the Nazi state, historians have quite a lot of evidence of different types of resistance.

Some of the resistance to the Nazi state was quite small and was very localised.

So it only took place in a small area, maybe in one village or one town.

But then sometimes the resistance was much bigger, much more obvious, and on a national scale.

This example here of the film "Sophie Scholl" is about some university students at the University of Munich who printed anti-Nazi leaflets.

They resisted the Nazis in their university in Munich by explaining to other people why the Nazis were wrong.

In the end, Sophie Scholl and her brother were captured by the Nazis.

Now, I'm not going to tell you how this example of resistance ended.

If you want to watch the film, it's definitely worth seeing.

You might also want to look at a previous unit, the unit on how people were controlled in totalitarian states.

That looks at an example of how the Nazis in their totalitarian state that lasted from 1933 to 1945, how it controlled the German people.

We're looking specifically though at the idea of resistance.

Well, what does it mean to resist? Well, it depends what it is that you're talking about.

Resistance could be something very small, like in your own home where nobody else can hear you telling an anti-Nazi joke or an anti-Nazi story.

Then if you look at the scale of resistance that historians have found in Germany when the Nazis were in power, it goes all the way up to very big, very dramatic, violent uprisings.

Well, the reason why resistance to the Nazis was not more successful is because people resisted the Nazis, but in very, very different ways.

People had to think how they resisted the Nazis because resistance was difficult.

The way that the Nazis organised their state meant that if people chose to resist, they were taking a huge risk.

There was no opposition to the Nazis that was legal, that was allowed.

And so if anyone opposed the Nazis or resisted, they were doing it knowing the risks involved.

Here are four examples that explain why resistance to the Nazis was difficult.

The Nazis had built a police state.

That meant that anyone who resisted the Nazis could be arrested by the police, and the police supported the Nazis.

And if they were put on trial, the judge also supported the Nazis.

So there was no way that anyone arrested for resistance would get a fair trial.

And then you can see the secret police called the Gestapo.

They were different from the regular police.

The Gestapo could arrest you, torture you, imprison you, and even kill you without even taking you to court.

But also the fear of the Gestapo meant that resistance was difficult.

And also fear that your neighbour, the third category, the fear that your neighbour might report you to the Gestapo.

And so you looked as if you were doing what you should be doing for fear of what your neighbour might report to someone.

And finally, the Nazis tried to encourage people not to resist by giving rewards for loyalty.

And so there was peer pressure to stay quiet, to do the right thing, to obey, to do the right thing in terms of what the Nazis believed was the right thing.

But when people did resist the Nazis, they resisted for different reasons and resisted in different ways.

Think of Sophie Scholl, the university student at the University of Munich.

You could say that she was resisting the Nazis for political reasons.

She disagreed with what the Nazis believed.

And there were lots of people on the left and the right wing of politics who disagreed with the Nazis.

But then that first category, some people resisted for moral or religious reasons.

Think of examples of Catholic priests who hid Jews in their churches or their monasteries, or preached sermons against the Nazis murdering people.

They were resisting for religious reasons.

As you get into the Second World War, you find examples of military resistance to the Nazis where Germans in the army, German officers often, opposed some of the bad military decisions that were being made.

That's a very different reason for resisting the Nazis from moral and religious reasons or political reasons.

And then finally the cultural reasons.

Some teenagers in Germany didn't want to join the Hitler Youth and wear the brown uniform.

They didn't want to march.

They didn't want to go camping with the other Hitler Youth.

They just wanted to hang out with each other and wear the latest British fashions or listen to the latest American or British music.

And all of these things were frowned on by the Nazis.

It was one of the reasons, I suppose, why some teenagers felt that it was rebellious to do these things.

That's a very different type of resistance from what Sophie Scholl was doing.

So you have different people resisting the Nazis for different reasons and in different ways.

But then the specific focus of these lessons is Jewish resistance.

What does it mean for Jewish people to resist? Well, in fact, just like historians have found examples of all sorts of people resisting in different ways and for different reasons, they've also found examples of Jewish people resisting.

Now our question, our big question for these four lessons is how did Jewish people resist during the Holocaust? But the Holocaust is a period of a few years where the Nazis tried to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child living in Europe.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews in the end.

But if you look at what happened before the Holocaust, if you look at what happened when the Nazis came to power in 1933, there were already Jewish people resisting.

For example, take the first bullet point.

Jewish children were ejected from German schools when the Nazis came to power.

And so what did Jewish people do to resist? They set up their own schools with their own teachers to educate their own children.

We'll look at the third bullet point.

Jewish doctors were forbidden from treating non-Jewish German patients by the Nazis, which meant that there were certain jobs that the Nazis said Jews were forbidden from doing.

A doctor was one of them, teachers, working in the government.

And so Jewish doctors set up their own surgeries for Jewish patients because also Jewish patients were forbidden from going to see a doctor who wasn't Jewish.

So there's a list of bullet points of things that Jewish people set up to resist, to stand up against the Nazis.

And so when the Holocaust begins in 1941, wouldn't you expect Jewish people to continue resisting just as they had done from the very beginning of the Nazi regime? And that's exactly what we do find.

So when the question asks what does it mean for Jewish people to resist the Holocaust, we need to look a little bit deeper at the fact that Jewish people were resisting all the way through the Nazi regime.

They didn't start resisting during the Holocaust, and they didn't stop resisting during the Holocaust.

Various historians have found evidence of Jewish resistance throughout the time that the Nazis were in power.

For instance, Martin Gilbert, Julian Jackson, and Yehuda Bauer all agree that there are examples of Jewish resistance from the very start.

But then they disagree slightly on what they mean by Jewish resistance.

Take for example the historian Julian Jackson.

Julian Jackson concentrates on what was happening in France.

When the Germans invaded France in the Second World War, Jewish French people were resisting the Nazis along with non-Jewish French people.

And so Julian Jackson says this is not Jewish resistance, this is Jews involved in resistance because Jews weren't the only ones in France trying to resist the Nazis.

They were Jews involved in resistance.

If we talk about Jewish resistance, Julian Jackson says, then we're talking about very specific examples where Jews themselves organised the Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

But the historian that we're going to focus on is Yehuda Bauer.

Yehuda Bauer says that Jewish resistance is any example at all that gives the Jewish people dignity and humanity, any example where the Jewish people are resisting what the Nazis are trying to do.

This is Yehuda Bauer.

He's an historian and he lives in Israel today.

Yehuda Bauer says that too often when people have studied the Holocaust, they read it in a certain way.

Bauer argues that when people study the Holocaust, they tend to focus on the perpetrators, on the people doing the Holocaust, organising the Holocaust, carrying out the Holocaust.

That is, they focus on the Nazis.

And that means, in the second bullet point, that the Jews end up being portrayed as the people having the Holocaust done to them, that they're portrayed only as victims of this great and terrible organisation, the Nazi state.

That means, says the historian Bauer, that often when you see examples of Jews surviving the Holocaust, the stories tend to focus on the non-Jews who helped them survive, the non-Jews who saved them.

Again, this reinforces this idea, Bauer says, that Jews are victims that need helping.

He says bit by bit, these first three bullet points dehumanise the Jewish people.

They take away from the Jewish people what it is to be human, to be a thinking person, to be a caring person, to be a powerful person, a person who has thoughts.

Let's give this example that the historian Yehuda Bauer gives.

This is a typical photograph that you might see of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

They're about to be loaded onto a train, and they're going to be deported to a camp where they will be murdered.

Yehuda Bauer argues that photographs like this, if this is the way that Jewish people are portrayed during the Holocaust, then you always end up with the impression that Jewish people are weak, that they lack any strength, that they're passive, meaning that they're just accepting what is being done to them, and there is no fighting back.

They appear helpless, unable to do anything for themselves.

They appear to be simply victims and incapable of doing anything to resist.

And Bauer argues that any stories where Jewish people survive or are rescued often focus on someone who isn't Jewish.

Now, there are lots of stories during the Holocaust where Jewish people were saved, were rescued by non-Jewish people.

Take this example.

This is a Catholic priest called Maximilian Kolbe.

Maximilian Kolbe, the priest, sheltered Jewish families, as many Catholic priests did, in his church or in the monastery.

Well, the Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe was sent to one of the death camps, and he was then about to be sent to be murdered.

Well, the reason why he was murdered is because he stepped in.

He volunteered to take a Jewish man's place.

The Nazis didn't select Maximilian Kolbe for murder.

They selected a Jewish man who had a family.

And so Father Maximilian Kolbe volunteered to be killed instead of the man with the family.

Yehuda Bauer would say that of course Maximilian Kolbe is a good person, a brave person, a selfless person for having volunteered.

But isn't it interesting that we now remember his name and not the Jewish family that Maximilian Kolbe saved? Yehuda Bauer says if you find Jewish examples of resistance all the way through the Nazis' time in power, wouldn't you expect to find examples of Jewish resistance when the Holocaust begins? Why would Jewish people suddenly stop resisting when they had resisted from 1933 onwards? And that's a very good question.

As dark as the Holocaust is with the things that happened to Jewish people, with the way that the Nazis organised a deliberate murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children, you would expect to find examples of resistance.

And Yehuda Bauer says that is what you find, but he says more importantly than that, we need to find examples of resistance.

We need to do something that he calls re-humanizing the Jewish people.

We need to stop seeing them only as victims, stop focusing just on the perpetrators, the Nazis, and stop taking away from the Jewish people their humanity, the fact that they did resist, they did think, they did organise, and they did stand up to the Nazis.

So I have a task for you.

On your piece of paper, in your own words, could you explain why this historian Yehuda Bauer thinks that the study of the Holocaust sometimes dehumanised the Jewish people? What does he mean by that? They dehumanised the Jewish people.

They didn't mean to, they didn't intend to, but often the way the Holocaust is studied dehumanises the Jewish people.

You might want to go back a couple of slides.

And then in your answer, can you give some examples of what Bauer means when he says that without realising it, people, when they study the Holocaust, have dehumanised the Jewish people.

Now, maybe those examples are tiny little things, tiny little things where we look at an image, and subtly Jewish people are dehumanised.

Or maybe they're bigger examples of where the Jewish people are dehumanised when the Holocaust is studied.

So if you pause the video, go back a few slides, write down the answers in your own words, and then resume the video when you're ready.

So how did you get on? Well, I hope you said something about Professor Bauer saying that often the Holocaust focuses too much on the perpetrators.

It focuses too much on the Nazis as the people in power doing things to the Jewish people.

Perhaps you talked about the Jewish people being seen only as victims, as the people having the Holocaust done to them.

Perhaps you talked about Jewish people were dehumanised by removing them from the parts of the story of the Holocaust that are active, where they're only seen as going along with it and not doing anything.

In your examples, you might have talked about the photographs, the way that Jews are portrayed as weak and helpless.

Well, maybe you talked about some of the survival stories where they focus on a non-Jewish person like Maximilian Kolbe, the Catholic priest who saved a Jewish family, rather than focusing on the Jewish people in the story.

Well, let's move on.

The historian Yehuda Bauer uses a special word to describe Jewish resistance.

Just like there was a scale of resistance to the Nazis in Germany from the very beginning, tiny little examples and very big dramatic examples, likewise, Bauer says, there are Jewish examples of resistance, a scale of resistance.

And he says we need to look at every single example where the Jewish people stand up against the Nazis, where they resist the Nazis.

And he uses a Jewish word to describe this.

In the Hebrew language, there's a word called amidah.

Amidah means to stand up against.

Bauer says let's look for examples where Jewish people show amidah, where they stand up against.

So if you can find any examples of Jewish people keeping their songs, continuing to sing their songs to give them strength and courage, he would say that's an example of amidah.

Now, the big dramatic examples at the top, attacking someone, being violent, organising an uprising, we will see some examples of those over the next few lessons, but we'll also see lots of examples of those smaller things at the bottom, for instance, hiding things so the Nazis can't discover them, making things, creating things, and then concealing them, hiding them so the Nazis do discover them, all examples of amidah, standing up against the Nazis, no matter how small or how big.

So your second task.

Could you explain in your own words what the historian Bauer means by amidah? And can you give some examples of what he means by amidah? You might want to go back to the previous slide, looking at examples of Jewish resistance.

See if you can find some examples that are tiny little things that probably would have gone unnoticed by the Nazis, but then much bigger examples that definitely would've been noticed by the Nazis.

So if you pause the lesson, and then come back to it when you're ready.

So we've almost reached the end of the lesson.

I have some questions for you.

Question one.

What were some different reasons why some people resisted the Nazi regime? Now, we're not just thinking Jewish people.

We're thinking at the start of the lesson, we were looking at resistance to the Nazis was happening all over the place.

Different people resisted for different reasons.

So what were some of the reasons why some people resisted? Second question.

What were some reasons to explain why it was difficult to resist the Nazi regime? Third question.

In what ways have Jewish people been dehumanised in the study of the Holocaust, as the historian Yehuda Bauer says? In what ways have they been treated as less than human? Question four.

When you look at images of Jewish people during the Holocaust, what do most of the images seem to suggest about Jewish people? And this is one of the problems that Yehuda Bauer has with the dehumanising of Jewish people in the study of the Holocaust.

Fifth question.

Bauer argues for the re-humanizing of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

What does he mean by re-humanizing the Jewish people when studying the Holocaust? So if you pause the video here, and come back to it when you're ready.

Don't forget, I am hoping that you will share some of your work with me at Oak National Academy.

So what are the answers that you've written down? Well, the different reasons why some people resisted the Nazi regime, you could have said they resisted for moral or religious reasons, and given some examples.

You could've said that some resisted for political reasons, because they disagreed with what the Nazis believed.

You could say that some resisted for military reasons when the Nazis started making decisions in the war and the army began to resist.

Or fourthly, some resisted for cultural reasons.

You might have talked about teenagers who wanted to do their own thing and not what they were told to do by the Nazis.

The second question, how did you get on with that? Some of the reasons why it was difficult to resist.

Well, we discussed four at the start of the lesson.

The Nazis controlled the police and the courts.

You also had the secret police, the Gestapo.

And then you had the fear of what your neighbour might do if you were seen to be doing the wrong thing.

And then lastly, the Nazis rewarded people who conformed, who did what they were told, who stayed quiet.

Third question.

In what ways have Jewish people been dehumanised in the study of the Holocaust? Well, according to the historian Bauer, Jewish people have often been seen as simply victims. He also says that Jewish people have been brushed to one side, and the Holocaust often focuses on the Nazis and what the Nazis did to the Jews.

And so the focus becomes the perpetrator and not the Jewish people.

He also talked about any stories where Jewish people survive tend to on the person who rescued them and not on the Jewish people themselves.

That fourth question, what was it about images of Jewish people that Bauer was saying seemed to suggest something.

Well, he was saying that those images that I showed you seem to suggest that the Jewish people were passive, that they were just going along with the Holocaust, that they were victims, that they were helpless, that they were unable to do anything to resist.

And that was his problem with many of the images that we see of the Holocaust.

And then finally, the last question.

When Bauer argues for the re-humanizing of the Jewish people, what does he mean by that? Well, what he means by that is by portraying the Jews in a more human way, showing Jews as people who think, who make decisions, who make choices, and more importantly, who stand up against the Nazis, who resist the Nazis.

And Bauer listed various ways in which Jewish people resisted the Nazis.

And he said if you look at those examples as well, then you are re-humanizing the Jewish people.

They didn't suddenly stop resisting the Nazis when the Holocaust started.

They continued to resist in different ways.

Now, you've probably worked out that in our next few lessons, we're going to be looking at specific examples of how the Jewish people resisted the Nazis.

Well, very well done, Year 9.

You've worked hard today.

Well done again.

If you would like to share your work with me, I would be very interested to see what you did today.

And as you know, Oak has various ways that you can share that with me.

I look forward to seeing you in our second lesson where we're going to look at a specific type of resistance that Jewish people showed during the Holocaust, and that is nonviolent resistance.

So I look forward to seeing you in our second lesson.