Almost all my reading on Chamberlain has been either about his role at Fredricksburg or Gettysburg.
My youngest daughter is interested in the Holocaust, she reads all she can and is having a hard time grasping how it could have happened, she doesn't understand how come there was so little resisitance.
S. Giora Shoham has written a book called Valhalla, Calvary, and Auschwitz... a book that I highly recommend to your daughter.
Here's a brief analysis (just skimming the surface actually) of why there was so little resistance. It is the summary of one chapter of Shoham's book that I did for the class.
Shoham explores the reaction of both the Jews and the world to the Holocaust. Shoham frames the Jewish reaction against the reaction of the world. This provides the proper context. Looking at the Jewish reaction, without knowing the world’s reaction, would cause a warped perception of why the Jews seemed to go so willingly to the slaughter. Shoham explains that the Jews had a “time-honored Jewish tradition of placating their persecutors in Europe, [which] induced them to believe that the Nazis would also ‘settle down’ and leave them alone, provided they did what they were expected to do; work hard, be indispensable, comply with order, and God forbid, not be trouble-makers.”
The above sentence is not as simplistic as it reads. There was a reason why the Jews learned to placate their persecutors throughout their history. They had learned a very hard lesson. In times of great tribulation, they stood alone. No one came to their aid. Not governments, not the judicial system, not their neighbors, and, at times, not even each other. The Nazi era was no different. The Jews cried out to the world for help, and the world ignored them. The Palestinian Jews went to the British Government and pleaded for the British to disregard immigration quotas in Palestine and allow the Jews to immigrate. The British weighed the lives of the Jews against the wealth of their Arab colonies and the importance of the Suez Canal and sided with the Arabs and their own pocketbooks. They even returned escaping Jews to Germany. Europe and the United States were complicit in the murder of the Jews. They refused to perform even the smallest of tasks like bombing the railways to the East to stop the murders.
What is interesting is that this is the one motivation Shoham doesn’t attempt to explain. He exonerates the few governments that rescued their Jews. He commends the few people who hid Jews at great risk. But he indicts the world for their failure to act in even the simplest way. He leaves the indictment echoing through the rest of the chapter. Against this indictment, he explains what it was like to be a Jew in the hands of the Nazis.
Fear and betrayal were the twin companions of the Jews during this dark period. Not only were they betrayed by their Gentile neighbors, they were also betrayed by each other. Shoham notes, “Most of the Jews, the Judenrats, fought the Jewish rebels and were even instrumental in revealing them to the Nazis, because they were convinced that rebellious Jews exposed them to the vengeance of the Nazis.” Jews who escaped and found refuge with the partisans were betrayed by their fellow soldiers. The Sonderkommandos, who met the trains at the death camps, played their rôles well convincing the new arrivals that everything was going to be okay even as they led them to the delousing showers to be gassed.
The Nazis were cruel in their punishment. Shoham writes, “The collectivity of the punishment was meant to deter, to prevent organization for resistance, and to exploit the participant guilt the Jews felt at the knowledge that their innocent brethren were suffering because of them, to deter them from incurring the wrath of the Nazis.”
I like the way Shoham ends his book. He uses the last page to detail the resistance of the Jews. Not all went quietly into that dark night. Many did fight back. There were armed resistences in the ghettos in Poland. There were organized escapes from the death camps. Many Jews served as soldiers in the Allied army. Shoham says that many who fought were Zionists.
I don’t believe that Shoham mentioned Zionists out of the blue. He actually gives the reader the end result of the Holocaust. The birth of the State of Israel was a literal drawing of the line in the sand. “Here,” the Jews said, “In these borders, we will be responsible for our own defense. We will no longer go meekly into the ovens. Instead of the yellow star, it is the blue star of our air force, our navy, and our army.”
At the end of the assignment, I came to have a deeper understanding of the two distinct cultures that lived within Germany. Even though it sounds absurd, Shoham makes his case that the Nazi culture felt itself to be the victim of a Jewish conspiracy that kept it from reaching its destiny and conquering the world. The Nazis believed that they could only fulfill that destiny once the Jew within and without were dead. Even though I never blamed the Jews for not resisting what was happening, Shoham allowed me to see that throughout the centuries, the Jewish culture in Europe had struggled to maintain equilibrium in a sea of hate that would crash down around it when a national scapegoat was needed to explain away social or political disasters or shortcomings. The Jews had learned through the years to keep their heads down and wait out the current storm. Like Shoham, I would still leave the world indicted. There really is no explanation for why the Allies would not help once they found out what the Germans were doing. There really is no excuse for Great Britain not to throw open the gates of Palestine and allow the Jews to flee. I’m sure that some would argue geopolitical considerations, but when gazing at the victims of the death camps, geopolitical considerations seem to be inconsequential.