Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life

Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life
Author: Karl Binding
Publisher:
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2015-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781936830756

Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) was a two part treatise with contributions by German attorney Karl Binding and German doctor Alfred Hoche. Both men were academics. It was published in 1920. It provided the intellectual grounding for the Nazi T4 program, and through it, the Holocaust. How? The question is worth pondering. Neither Binding or Hoche were National Socialists. They were not radical racists. They were academics exploring an area of medical ethics in light of science and modern progress. They were merely rendering their sober opinion on a delicate matter. Perhaps that is the explanation. --

Life Unworthy Of Life

Life Unworthy Of Life
Author: James Glass
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1999-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780465098460

In this path-breaking work of intellectual and cultural history, James M. Glass provides a provocative new answer to the questions about the Holocaust that bedevil us to this day: How and why did so many ordinary Germans participate in the Final Solution? And how did they come to regard Jews as less than human and “deserving” of extermination?Glass argues that the answers lie in the rise of a particular ethos of public health and sanitation that emerged from the German medical establishment and filtered down to the common people. Building his argument on a trove of documentary evidence, including the records of the German medical community and of other professional groups, he traces the development in the years following World War I of theories of racial hygiene that singled out the Jews as an infectious disease, and that determined them as “life unworthy of life” in the words of Nazi propogandists and German scientists.Looked at from a broader perspective, Glass writes, the actions and beliefs of the German people show what today would be regarded as insane, became, for World War II German society, normal politics. Murdering millions of innocent people was not seen as a vicious criminal conspiracy, but as a therapy essential to the culture's well-being.

Citizen 865

Citizen 865
Author: Debbie Cenziper
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0316449660

**Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Book Award Finalist** The gripping story of a team of Nazi hunters at the U.S. Department of Justice as they raced against time to expose members of a brutal SS killing force who disappeared in America after World War Two. In 1990, in a drafty basement archive in Prague, two American historians made a startling discovery: a Nazi roster from 1945 that no Western investigator had ever seen. The long-forgotten document, containing more than 700 names, helped unravel the details behind the most lethal killing operation in World War Two. In the tiny Polish village of Trawniki, the SS set up a school for mass murder and then recruited a roving army of foot soldiers, 5,000 men strong, to help annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Poland. After the war, some of these men vanished, making their way to the U.S. and blending into communities across America. Though they participated in some of the most unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, "Trawniki Men" spent years hiding in plain sight, their terrible secrets intact. In a story spanning seven decades, Citizen 865 chronicles the harrowing wartime journeys of two Jewish orphans from occupied Poland who outran the men of Trawniki and settled in the United States, only to learn that some of their one-time captors had followed. A tenacious team of prosecutors and historians pursued these men and, up against the forces of time and political opposition, battled to the present day to remove them from U.S. soil. Through insider accounts and research in four countries, this urgent and powerful narrative provides a front row seat to the dramatic turn of events that allowed a small group of American Nazi hunters to hold murderous men accountable for their crimes decades after the war's end.

The Volunteer

The Volunteer
Author: Jack Fairweather
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 630
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062561421

COSTA BOOK AWARD WINNER: BOOK OF THE YEAR • #1 SUNDAY TIMES (UK) BESTSELLER “Superbly written and breathtakingly researched, The Volunteer smuggles us into Auschwitz and shows us—as if watching a movie—the story of a Polish agent who infiltrated the infamous camp, organized a rebellion, and then snuck back out. ... Fairweather has dug up a story of incalculable value and delivered it to us in the most compelling prose I have read in a long time.” —Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Tribe The incredible true story of a Polish resistance fighter’s infiltration of Auschwitz to sabotage the camp from within, and his death-defying attempt to warn the Allies about the Nazis’ plans for a “Final Solution” before it was too late. To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a thirty-nine-year-old Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the new camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside—where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz. Over the next two and half years, Pilecki forged an underground army within Auschwitz that sabotaged facilities, assassinated Nazi informants and officers, and gathered evidence of terrifying abuse and mass murder. But as he pieced together the horrifying truth that the camp was to become the epicenter of Nazi plans to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Pilecki realized he would have to risk his men, his life, and his family to warn the West before all was lost. To do so, meant attempting the impossible—an escape from Auschwitz itself. Completely erased from the historical record by Poland’s post-war Communist government, Pilecki remains almost unknown to the world. Now, with exclusive access to previously hidden diaries, family and camp survivor accounts, and recently declassified files, Jack Fairweather offers an unflinching portrayal of survival, revenge and betrayal in mankind’s darkest hour. And in uncovering the tragic outcome of Pilecki’s mission, he reveals that its ultimate defeat originated not in Auschwitz or Berlin, but in London and Washington.

Ordinary Jews

Ordinary Jews
Author: Evgeny Finkel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2017-02-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400884926

How Jewish responses during the Holocaust shed new light on the dynamics of genocide and political violence Focusing on the choices and actions of Jews during the Holocaust, Ordinary Jews examines the different patterns of behavior of civilians targeted by mass violence. Relying on rich archival material and hundreds of survivors' testimonies, Evgeny Finkel presents a new framework for understanding the survival strategies in which Jews engaged: cooperation and collaboration, coping and compliance, evasion, and resistance. Finkel compares Jews' behavior in three Jewish ghettos—Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok—and shows that Jews' responses to Nazi genocide varied based on their experiences with prewar policies that either promoted or discouraged their integration into non-Jewish society. Finkel demonstrates that while possible survival strategies were the same for everyone, individuals' choices varied across and within communities. In more cohesive and robust Jewish communities, coping—confronting the danger and trying to survive without leaving—was more organized and successful, while collaboration with the Nazis and attempts to escape the ghetto were minimal. In more heterogeneous Jewish communities, collaboration with the Nazis was more pervasive, while coping was disorganized. In localities with a history of peaceful interethnic relations, evasion was more widespread than in places where interethnic relations were hostile. State repression before WWII, to which local communities were subject, determined the viability of anti-Nazi Jewish resistance. Exploring the critical influences shaping the decisions made by Jews in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe, Ordinary Jews sheds new light on the dynamics of collective violence and genocide.

Nurses in Nazi Germany

Nurses in Nazi Germany
Author: Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0691221405

This book tells the story of German nurses who, directly or indirectly, participated in the Nazis' "euthanasia" measures against patients with mental and physical disabilities, measures that claimed well over 100,000 victims from 1939 to 1945. How could men and women who were trained to care for their patients come to kill or assist in murder or mistreatment? This is the central question pursued by Bronwyn McFarland-Icke as she details the lives of nurses from the beginning of the Weimar Republic through the years of National Socialist rule. Rather than examine what the Party did or did not order, she looks into the hearts and minds of people whose complicity in murder is not easily explained with reference to ideological enthusiasm. Her book is a micro-history in which many of the most important ethical, social, and cultural issues at the core of Nazi genocide can be addressed from a fresh perspective. McFarland-Icke offers gripping descriptions of the conditions and practices associated with psychiatric nursing during these years by mining such sources as nursing guides, personnel records, and postwar trial testimony. Nurses were expected to be conscientious and friendly caretakers despite job stress, low morale, and Nazi propaganda about patients' having "lives unworthy of living." While some managed to cope with this situation, others became abusive. Asylum administrators meanwhile encouraged nurses to perform with as little disruption and personal commentary as possible. So how did nurses react when ordered to participate in, or tolerate, the murder of their patients? Records suggest that some had no conflicts of conscience; others did as they were told with regret; and a few refused. The remarkable accounts of these nurses enable the author to re-create the drama taking place while sharpening her argument concerning the ability and the willingness to choose.

Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death"

Mengele: Unmasking the
Author: David G. Marwell
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393609545

A "gripping…sober and meticulous" (David Margolick, Wall Street Journal) biography of the infamous Nazi doctor, from a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate. Perhaps the most notorious war criminal of all time, Josef Mengele was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. Aided by the role he has assumed in works of popular culture, Mengele has come to symbolize the Holocaust itself as well as the failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether as the demonic doctor who directed mass killings or the elusive fugitive who escaped capture, Mengele has loomed so large that even with conclusive proof, many refused to believe that he had died. As chief of investigative research at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, David G. Marwell worked on the Mengele case, interviewing his victims, visiting the scenes of his crimes, and ultimately holding his bones in his hands. Drawing on his own experience as well as new scholarship and sources, Marwell examines in scrupulous detail Mengele’s life and career. He chronicles Mengele’s university studies, which led to two PhDs and a promising career as a scientist; his wartime service both in frontline combat and at Auschwitz, where his “selections” sent innumerable innocents to their deaths and his “scientific” pursuits—including his studies of twins and eye color—traumatized or killed countless more; and his postwar flight from Europe and refuge in South America. Mengele describes the international search for the Nazi doctor in 1985 that ended in a cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died—but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead. This is the riveting story of science without limits, escape without freedom, and resolution without justice.

Unworthy

Unworthy
Author: Anneli Rufus
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-05-15
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1101616296

“Self-loathing is a dark land studded with booby traps. Fumbling through its dark underbrush, we cannot see what our trouble actually is: that we are mistaken about ourselves. That we were told lies long ago that we, in love and loyalty and fear, believed. Will we believe ourselves to death?” —from Unworthy As someone who has struggled with low self-esteem her entire life, Anneli Rufus knows only too well how the world looks through the eyes of those who are not comfortable in their own skin. In Unworthy, Rufus boldly explores how a lack of faith in ourselves can turn us into our own worst enemies. Drawing on extensive research, enlightening interviews, and her own poignant experiences, Rufus considers the question: What personal, societal, biological, and historical factors coalesced to spark this secret epidemic, and what can be done to put a stop to it? She reveals the underlying sources of low self-esteem and leads us through strategies for positive change.

The SS Officer's Armchair

The SS Officer's Armchair
Author: Daniel Lee
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781784706654

The gripping account of one historian's hunt for answers as he delves into the surprising life of an ordinary Nazi officer. 'Totally exhilarating' Philippe Sands It began with an armchair. It began with the surprise discovery of a stash of personal documents covered in swastikas sewn into its cushion. The SS Officer's Armchair is the story of what happened next, as Daniel Lee follows the trail of cold calls, documents, coincidences and family secrets, to uncover the life of one Dr Robert Griesinger from Stuttgart. As Lee delves deeper, Griesinger emerges as at once an ordinary man with a family and ambitions, and an active participant in the Nazi machinery of terror whose choices continue to reverberate today. 'Gripping, it unfolds like a detective story as an obscured past emerges into the light' Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass 'An absorbing work of historical detection... Riveting' Evening Standard

Andrew Carnegie Speaks to the 1%

Andrew Carnegie Speaks to the 1%
Author: Andrew Carnegie
Publisher: Gray Rabbit Publishing
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781515400387

Before the 99% occupied Wall Street... Before the concept of social justice had impinged on the social conscience... Before the social safety net had even been conceived... By the turn of the 20th Century, the era of the robber barons, Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) had already accumulated a staggeringly large fortune; he was one of the wealthiest people on the globe. He guaranteed his position as one of the wealthiest men ever when he sold his steel business to create the United States Steel Corporation. Following that sale, he spent his last 18 years, he gave away nearly 90% of his fortune to charities, foundations, and universities. His charitable efforts actually started far earlier. At the age of 33, he wrote a memo to himself, noting ..".The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money." In 1881, he gave a library to his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. In 1889, he spelled out his belief that the rich should use their wealth to help enrich society, in an article called "The Gospel of Wealth" this book. Carnegie writes that the best way of dealing with wealth inequality is for the wealthy to redistribute their surplus means in a responsible and thoughtful manner, arguing that surplus wealth produces the greatest net benefit to society when it is administered carefully by the wealthy. He also argues against extravagance, irresponsible spending, or self-indulgence, instead promoting the administration of capital during one's lifetime toward the cause of reducing the stratification between the rich and poor. Though written more than a century ago, Carnegie's words still ring true today, urging a better, more equitable world through greater social consciousness.