Chapter 11: Catastrophe, Recovery, and Triumph
Study Questions
1) What was new and unprecedented about the “ghettoes” erected by the Nazis in occupied Poland, and what, if anything, was old or familiar?
2) What is known about the timing and decision-making process which led to the Nazi regime’s decision to exterminate the Jews?
3) What do historians mean when they refer to the opposing “functionalist” and “intentionalist” interpretations of the Final Solution?
4) What were the functions and responsibilities of the Jewish councils (Judenräte) which the Nazis ordered the Jews to establish? Why does their role remain controversial to this day?
5) In what ways did the Nazis strive to hide the fact that the Jews were bound for extermination? Where were most of the death camps located?
6) Gartner quotes Churchill at the beginning of the chapter as saying that the Holocaust was “’the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.’” Churchill made this observation decades before the Pol Pot regime killed millions in Cambodia and the Hutus slaughtered countless Tutsis in Rwanda. Does the Holocaust remain unique? Why or why not?
7) What countries tended to resist German pressures to kill or expel their Jewish citizens during the War? What, if anything, did these countries have in common?
8) Was the French Vichy regime under Marshall Petain a mere Nazi puppet government or did it have genuine backing among the French? Explain.
9) What were some of the immediate steps which Jewish “Displaced Persons” and their Jewish benefactors took to organize relief and resettlement?
10) Why did David Ben-Gurion shift Zionist efforts to gain support for a Jewish national state from Great Britain to the United States beginning in the early 1940s?
11) What new shift in Vatican policy towards a Jewish state in the holy land did Pope Pius XII instigate and what purportedly were his motives?
12) Gartner states that the “scroll of independence” which declared
Israel an independent state in 1948 contained the “Zionist understanding
of Jewish history.” What was this “understanding”? Could Israel
have been founded on any other premise?