Explaining History Podcast

Holocaust Day at Pencoed Comprehensive School

Explaining History Podcast

Holocaust Day at Pencoed Comprehensive School

Reading time:

1–2 minutes

Here is a roundup of what I was talking about yesterday at Pencoed Comprehensive.

Morality

Hoess

Here is a link to a podcast I recorded on Rudolf Hoess some time ago, it explains the moral problems surrounding his testimony and the book Commandant of Auschwitz)

(Below is Hoess’s house as seen from Auschwitz One).

Eichmann and Arendt

Here is another recording on the Wannsee Conference

Here is an article by the historian Tony Judt on Hannah Arendt and the ‘problem of evil’

Bystanders

A great place to start reading about the role of bystanders during the Holocaust is in the chapter German Moralities in Richard J Evans Third Reich At War.

And here is a narration of the book The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi

5915

One final thing: Here a resources page for my website containing lots of materials on Nazi Germany (you need to scroll down a bit!).

Here too is an essay I wrote recently on new thinking in the Holocaust

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Explaining History Podcast

For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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One response to “Holocaust Day at Pencoed Comprehensive School”

flanders1914

June 15, 2016

i attended Kent School, Hostert, a British school in BAOR(British Zone Germany) in the late 1960s. During WWII the buildings of Kent School were a German Euthanisia Centre for “bad” children.. Our Wood work room was the mortuary-we had concret work tables. Here the Germans disected the bodies of the children they killed. The bodies were buried under where the school bus park was. As a child at the school i knew at least one German who alledgedy was involved in the killing. It was also easy to spot ex SS in the towns. They used a funny sort of half wave half salute greeting. on Hitlers birthday they would attend a ceremony at the local War Memorial. All open and above board. They got away with murder and other atrocities because we needed them. They were our first line of defence if the Warsaw PactWarsaw Pact Full Description
The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance, signed in Warsaw in May 1955 by the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European states (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania). Officially a mutual defence pact, the Warsaw Pact was in practice a mechanism for Soviet military dominance over Eastern Europe. Its forces were used to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, and it was dissolved in 1991 following the collapse of communist governments.
Critical Perspective
The Warsaw Pact was less a military alliance than a juridical fiction that legalised Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Unlike NATO, which maintained at least the formal equality of its members, the Warsaw Pact gave the Soviet Union the legal basis to intervene militarily in any member state that appeared to be departing from socialist orthodoxy — the “Brezhnev Doctrine.” Its existence demonstrated that the Eastern European communist states were not sovereign nations but Soviet dependencies. ever invaded. That was when they were going to die.

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