From the WNIN Public Media Center in Downtown Evansville.

I'm David James and this is Two Main Street.

History of course can be a great teacher learning not to repeat mistakes made in the past.

There's power in that.

And knowing what others endured should ensure a better future.

A speaker series at the University of Southern Indiana focuses on a human tragedy in the not too distant past.

The degradation, persecution and eventual extermination of millions of European Jews.

The Shoah, the Hebrew name for the Holocaust, the horrors of the Holocaust, remain a stain on humanity.

And we still ask, how did it happen?

And fear of something so terrible could happen again.

There's power in knowing the past, but the fact is, the powerless continue to face an uncertain future.

The late Irene Rechnic established the Edward De and Regina Rechnic Holocaust Speaker series at USI to honor her parents who survived the Holocaust, where in the end, the camp de Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where nearly a million Jews were murdered during World War Two.

As a child, Irene spent five years in hiding, survived the Holocaust, reunited with her parents.

Eventually, the family moved to Evansville.

It's quite a story, and we'll talk about it later.

But now let's introduce my guests on Two Main Street.

Doctor Wolf Gruner, a native of Germany, is the latest speaker in the returning lecture series.

Doctor Gruner is an internationally acclaimed Holocaust scholar and is the chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California, and is the director of the USC center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Doctor Gunnar's latest publication is ‘Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany’ and that's the headline of the latest speaker series.

Joining the conversation is Dr.

Todd Schroer, associate professor of sociology and chair of the Criminal Justice Department at the University of Southern Indiana with specialization in social movements, extremist groups, the Holocaust and genocide.

So, gentlemen, after that long intro, welcome to Two Main Street and Doctor Gruner, of course, welcome to Evansville.

Now, before we talk about the Jewish resistance, both of you can tackle this question.

Can you both give us an idea of why the Jews were targeted after World War One?

How did that happen?

Doctor Gruner?

Yeah.

So, it's a big question.

It's a big question.

And the story is actually goes long, goes into the 19th century because Jews were, kind of underprivileged in, Germany before 1871 when they got equal rights.

So this was very late in the game, and it meant that David discriminated against before and all kinds of, let's say, all spheres of the society.

And only after 1871 they slowly could kind of, be, for example, in areas of which they had no normally no access to, like universities, for example.

And then, at the same time and just happened, small kind of groups, started to kind of, mushroom who developed these anti-Semitic, kind of feelings towards the Jews because of their success, because of the integration and, these, groups later, after the First World War, became, let's say more, widespread, but also in the beginning, they had targeted students, and these students were now leaders in, kind of postwar Germany.

And so this, kind of anti-Semitic ideology, in a way, got more, kind of footholds in, certain parts of the society, of the German society.

I think it's interesting, though, so many, German Jews fought for Germany and were War one.

Yeah, yeah.

There's one.

Oh, yeah.

And they were recognized for their valor.

And the the issue is that they end up becoming persecuted.

But, it was like layers, right?

They were some of the latest ones that were being targeted.

So the earlier laws there was like, exceptions that existed for certain individuals that had served in the war had been, part of the military for before a certain year.

Was it?

Wolf?

So there was yeah, there's a variety of ways that were being treated, and it may I was going to understand why they were targeted.

The idea was that they were too powerful and, kind of the German society ended because they had success in certain areas like, the economy, also in some areas in universities, which were kind of the innovative parts because they were excluded from the traditional parts of the university.

So the kind of attacks were on that they were too powerful or become become too powerful, and that they want to take over the German society or have already taken over.

And so these were accusations, and there was this contradiction that in reality they were very small and tiny margin of the German society.

I think in your one of your publications, you talked about the population of Berlin in 1933.

The city was huge, a large population, and the Jewish population was like 160,000, I think you found out.

So it was a minority.

But, so I guess a small minority within.

Yeah.

I mean, it was a minority.

But, as I said, it was perceived as much more prominent okay, than it was because of the economic, success.

They were also present in certain parts of, let's say, politics.

And, they were attacked from the right wing.

Kind of circles, especially then the upcoming Nazi Party.

Why?

Because they were more present in, let's say, central kind of parties.

And also the more in the leftist they were prominent in, like journalism, like also art.

And, this all had an influence and how they became attacked.

Now Doctor Gruner, you're a native of Berlin.

What's your family history in World War Two?

Oh, okay.

Good question.

So my, family is not from Berlin originally, as most families, they are all immigrants in some way at some generation.

So my, father and my mother, they came from the southern parts of East Germany section and region between six Sonia entering year.

My, one of my grandfathers was, kind of a teacher, actually, both of my grandfathers were good teachers.

So they, well, became, members of the National Socialist Teachers Union, which was, one of the strategies of the Nazi Party to kind of, in a way, establish strongholds in all different spheres of society by creating specific Nazi organizations.

So you had, kind of in the judicial, system, you had a Nazi organization, as you had also in education.

And so they became, members of the, the, teacher and National Socialist Teachers, Association, not members of the Nazi Party.

And then they both went to the war, but pretty late because teachers were a little bit kind of like, the, drafting was postponed.

So they, entered the war 42, 43... and, one, was just in Germany, kind of, and the other one was in Italy.

And the occupying force.

Both survived?

Both survived.

That's good.

Now, you're not Jewish, so why study the Holocaust and the genocide, Doctor Gruner?

So it's kind of, A personal story because I grew up in East Germany.

That means behind the Iron Curtain.

And, what, in East Germany, I experienced, quite a lot of, let's say, racist attitudes among the East German population.

Also xenophobic attitudes and, I started being interested at the time, I was having, kind of this was even before I studied, kind of history as an undergraduate.

I was a poet at the time.

And it was interesting how people feel, what they think.

And so I started to read about racism, and the only explanation I got at this time was there needs to be a state sponsored ideology.

And this was modeled a little bit from, kind of, by the Holocaust history.

Right?

That, the Nazi state was persecuting the Jews.

But the problem was in East Germany, the state actually operated very differently.

They, kind of proclaimed that everybody is equal.

Workers of the whole world unite.

There needs to be solidarity with Asia and Latin America and Africa.

And so you have the policy, which is anti-racist, and then you have people on the ground behaving racist.

How do we explain this?

And this is why I decided to leave poetry and go into history.

Okay.

All right.

Now, Doctor Schroer, you're not Jewish either.

So why did you study the Holocaust?

I ended up following a very circuitous route, kind of like Wolf did assorted, social movement, deviant social movements.

And I studied a lot of the white power white supremacist organizations for a very long time.

Teach a class on hate groups, and there's a section on there and Holocaust denial.

And I realized my students couldn't argue against the denial arguments.

They couldn't respond to them because they didn't have enough information or just, schooling about the Holocaust.

So I started to seek out how to teach the classes and then started to kind of go down the Holocaust wormhole before I am trying to kind of switch now to genocide.

More recently, the Holocaust denial.

I cannot believe that's still around.

A lot of it's more administration or trying to, you know, diminish the impacts.

So they'd say like, oh, it wasn't 6 million, it was 3 million.

Or they'd make other comparisons like, well, there's the firebombing of Dresden that occurred.

There's atrocities by all groups of people.

The very few people any more say it didn't happen at all.

So it's much more diminishing the, the impact or the, the what happened.

But we still have neo-Nazi groups don’t we?

Oh, yes, definitely.

But they are, permutations from what goal Nazis are.

So some examples of this is, you see, in the US there are people that are Polish or that are Slavs, that are neo Nazis, and Hitler would have slaughtered them.

They were thought to be subhuman.

And so it's very interesting that people are taking on these ideologies that.

They would have not been happy with in the past.

All right.

So, the Rechnic Speaker series, how did that come about, Doctor Shaw?

As you said earlier, Irene Rechnic, I wanted to honor her parents.

They had survived, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the death marches afterward as well.

And she had a very, you know, unique story of being a child in hiding.

And what's phenomenal is that they actually were reunited afterwards.

And so she just wanted to some way to, send that message forward, to keep it alive.

What happened to them and the atrocities that occurred?

I think it's interesting that I done some research on that myself.

And, her, her her father, I think, was the manager of a coal mine or something like that.

And he managed to get one of his coworkers, who was it was a Catholic to take her, Irene, in as their child to to shelter her.

So that's part of her hiding.

That's it.

So she has, you know, a new identity, the so called hidden children, right, Doctor Gruner?

Yeah.

And this is also not so, unique.

It was more widespread than we actually thought.

There are new studies in, kind of, in Germany about.

So what makes people actually help, right.

And rescue and, interesting is that, on the one hand, what we can assume it's personal relationships.

If you know somebody, right, then they are more likely to help.

But then, interestingly, they found out that when you are directly confronted with somebody who seeks help, so somebody knocks on your door, you don't know the, the person, and they ask for help, then you are more likely to help.

That's interesting.

The direct, kind of, situation.

So, I think there's, there are more studies now on, people who helped.

And we often underestimate, also the amount of, let's say, of people who actually help.

So for one person hiding, in this case, it is one family because it's a child.

But if it is adults, it's much more difficult to hide them.

So there are studies, ten, 20 years ago in Germany, that up between 1 and 23 people are necessary to help somebody survive with in Germany because they had to survive for several years.

Right.

When the deportation happens.

This was like in 1942, 1943.

So until the war ended, there were two and a half years to go and they could not stay of them in one place.

So they had to to switch to, to move to other places.

So more people were involved actually in help.

It's kind of a similar to the Underground Railroad here in the United States.

Now, Doctor Gruner, in a previous work, you researched the groundwork for the Holocaust with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933, series of laws designed to strip Jews of their wealth, status and power.

And I think they began with the Nuremberg Laws.

Is that correct?

Let's say this was the most influential force, but it's also misunderstood because people take it for that.

It's took, German Jews of their, citizenship, which it actually didn't do it, but it did, strip them of their political influence because the Nazis created, kind of a two tier system, which were right.

Citizens found the Aryans could be raised citizens, and they had all kind of, let's say, political possibilities.

That means they could vote, they could be voted on, and Jews in the second tier, who were the old citizens, so to speak, they could not vote and they could not have political influence.

So this was very influential.

But it was not the beginning.

The beginning was actually much earlier.

It was started right in 1933.

And what I think is really important to underline, it was not always, coming only from Hitler.

A lot of my studies, which I did earlier, actually on the local level.

So municipalities were, the first ones introducing anti-Jewish legislation.

So to speak, like by city council, decrees.

And they started with cutting business ties to Jews, let's say, who kind of provided, services for the municipality.

They dismissed, city employees as the first ones, like, employees and also workers.

So these were this was there was no law, but let's say by the German government or the Nazi government.

So this is a process, which, goes, over to the next years, and, interestingly, I called it a mutual mutual dynamic between local initiatives and central kind of laws and often we see that, Hitler actually, picked a local initiatives and then transformed it into laws.

So for example, segregation in hospitals, started on the local level and then was introduced in 1938.

So five years after Nazi started to come to power.

So there is this kind of it's really we have to think in a different way.

It was not like this top down dictatorship where everything happens from the top.

There's a lot of kind of anticipation.

There's a lot of, initiatives on the local level, which actually, helped to establish this kind of not only the dictatorship, itself, but also especially the persecution of, let's say, perceived enemies and the Jews were one of them.

Is that helped streamline the persecution.

Definitely.

You know, you talked about the boycott days, curfews, limited store hours, licenses, revoked, taxes and fees and post access denied to public buildings.

And, of course, the wearing of the yellow stars.

And you even had a law forbidding Berlin Jews from owning pets.

Yeah.

That's true.

Yeah.

And it was actually, one of the- It's not really well investigated yet, but there was a law in 1942 or a decree, that, Jews were not allowed to have pets anymore.

So they had to give up their pets.

And one of my questions was always, so what happened to sure.

And there's not really good investigation, but I did some, a study which was not on Germany, but on, the former Czechoslovakia, on the Czech, part of former Czechoslovakia, the so-called protectorate, Bohemia, Moravia.

And they I found out what happened to the pets because they introduced the same at the same time there.

So they were given to kind of, pet shelters, like animal shelters.

And they then sold them to Aryans.

So because at first we also thought maybe they were killed also.

No, they just sold them and make it a made a profit off.

Okay.

All right.

Now, Doctor Schroer, today social media has become a tool to spread conspiracy theories.

Falsehoods.

How did the Nazis spread their propaganda?

I know Doctor Goebbels was, the key to that, wasn't he?

Yeah.

I mean, they actually had a ministry of propaganda.

I mean, they were playing with it.

And you have to realize how much innovation was occurring at this time period that gerbils brought about.

You have, you know, of course, blockbuster movies that, you know, right.

All right.

Had been creating like triumph of the Wills and things that were cinematic things, but they also controlled the radio, and they had special, very inexpensive radios that they passed out to people in society.

So they would get directly Hitler's messages or other, ranking officials.

They also would create like albums.

But then a lot of the information is coming through, like newspapers or pamphlets.

And so some of them, like there's a rumor, is a very anti-Semitic newspaper, but that would be widely accepted or seen because they would have big glass, cabinets for people to go, like at a bus station, I guess.

Yeah.

True.

And things.

So kids, anyone to be able to read it without having to pay for it.

And they like that will throw the further they start to take over everything.

So all of to be a journalist, you had to be part of the union.

So they got rid of all the existing unions and they made Nazi unions or organizations.

Same thing they did with children, like got rid of Boy Scouts and, and Hitler Youth and things like that.

So they had complete control and you had to say tow the Nazi line or you would lose your job or that newspaper would be taken.

So there was no free press then.

Oh, I mean, it's, interesting that you ask this because for a long time there was, still kind of, there were still newspapers which were not Nazi newspapers.

But the problem was that they often, kind of in anticipation, kind of in a way obeyed to the Nazi propaganda and, or didn't challenge it.

And so, people in diaries, you can sometimes read or in letters or in also kind of postwar memoirs that the people would still read in local newspapers, which were not Nazi newspapers, but they would transport a lot of increasingly a lot of the messages, what the government wanted or didn't challenge.

And that's I think the main problem is when you have independent newspapers, if they don't challenge government, propaganda, then they are complicit and actually support, but what's happening?

And also another, method was when you would go to the cinema because there was no TV at the time, before the actual movie.

And it could be a really nonpolitical movie.

You would have newsreels, right?

Like you had and you went in the United States, and these newsreels were highly kind of, kind of, orchestrated and, to convey the message of the government.

Well, I've seen some, some clips of the eternal ju that film, which is very, very explicit.

Yeah.

He's in use and has a warning on there when they, I think they slaughter an animal or something like that.

They show the Jews doing that.

And so they, they link at them what I said that will in terms of that, they're linking them to like rodents and vermin, like going back for the another big way that they were spreading messages was huge rallies.

That they were widely.

Yeah, very orchestrated.

Very well done.

And like Hitler himself and he practiced speaking.

I mean, you can find footage of him figuring out how he's going to hold his hands, what he's going to do and emphasize things.

It was something that he very much, found important.

And he wrote about that in my column for me.

He laid out an over a dozen very important things.

He thought about you.

Propaganda, like, has to be simple.

A picture is better than words because people can get it.

And, so that was very effective in many ways.

But I would add, why it propaganda was really important.

One should not isolate us because, it also needs to be accompanied by certain policies which are kind of, have a social impact.

So what I think is often underestimated is how many opportunities the new regime actually provided for, especially young people.

So, one has to kind of remember that there was a big unemployment, because of the economic crisis.

So, the kind of we talked earlier about the changing of institutions, this also meant creating new positions for especially young people.

And so just to give you one example, the, municipalities, we are usually represented by different organizations, you know, all over Germany, smaller communities, like municipalities, they had their own organizations.

In May 1933, like, few months after Hitler took power, they created one, organization which was called the German Council of Municipalities, which kind of, in a way, unified them by force.

And then the head of this, organization, became, 29 year old, like loyal follower of Hitler who had not big expertise hidden, in this kind of area, municipal policies.

And he was, in this young age, he was leading not only, kind of an institution in Berlin, which was kind of the headquarter with 200 employees, 200 employees, with no mandatory, experience, and then all the branches all over Germany.

So thousands of people were kind of under his, management.

And he was young.

So you can imagine policies like this, in a way, make people extremely loyal.

Yeah.

Even if they may disagree in some parts with some of the policies.

If you get these opportunities, you are always thankful.

Right.

And I think this we should not forget, this is across the board over time from the truck driver in Austria who kind of, became working in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he got like triple the income, but he had as a truck driver.

I mean, these are across the board opportunities.

Yeah.

All right.

My guests are Doctor Wolff Gruner, a native of Germany and a Holocaust scholar at the University of Southern California.

Doctor Gruner is the 2025 Rechnic Holocaust speaker at the University of Southern Indiana.

Joining the conversation is Doctor Todd Schroer, chair of the Criminal Justice Department at USI.

Now, there is an advanced center for genocide research at USI.

So, Doctor Gruner, tell us about that.

How did it start and what goes on there?

So, when I hear kind of started to think about, the Holocaust, I often wonder how is this comparable?

Because there are there are ideas that the Holocaust was a very unique, historical event.

I was always seeing also parallels that, for example, in other, historical mass atrocities that, people start in similar ways to discriminate against people, which, in the end results in like mass atrocities.

So, I had the idea to fund a kind of, center or found a center where, one is enabled to do this compared book.

And, in the beginning, it was an agreement with the Shoah Foundation, which, is it went in 2006 to USI, to show foundation houses.

Now today, 60,000 video testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust, but also of other, genocides like the Guatemalan genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Armenian genocide.

And so, I was the center was supposed to do kind of the academic work for the show foundation and to enable research, especially with the, video testimonies, because they hadn't been at the time really used for by scholars for research.

They were mostly used, for, let's say, high school education.

So, long story short, new kind of leadership in the initial foundation had other priorities, which led to, kind of a separation between my center and to show foundation, and, today I'm my center as an independent institute at the University of Southern California.

But, practically, we do the same work as, we did before, which is twofold.

One is to promote the video testimony of monies as a incredible, important resource, which changes our view, in many regards.

And I can illustrate this later, how we see why are people kind of committing crimes and how these crimes impact, populations.

The other thing is, from the very beginning, I was, lucky that, I, the center received some donations for fellowships.

So my center is, I think the only international center which has fellowships, researching, comparatively, let's say genocide, including the Holocaust.

So we bring in every year 6 to 8 fellows from, PhD students to senior scholars who work with the testimonies on very different topics.

And, we enable and support this research.

We mentor these, especially the young scholars.

This is but also it's really rewarding for me as a kind of a scholar and mentor.

And then we have a similar OG like, kind of speaker series where all our fellows have to present.

And, this is, kind of, these are since Covid hybrid events.

So we now have an international audience from which reaches, interestingly, from South Korea via Dubai to Italy mean.

So it's interesting people are interested in these topics and, we can really learn a lot from these comparable kind of compare, comparable views, on, these different events of mass atrocities.

Now, Doctor Schroer, how do we define genocide?

Well, there's a convention from the UN, that was accepted by pretty much every state in the world, or even nation in the world.

It lays out some very specific, centers that have to be met.

And it primarily is revolving around, the destruction of peoples.

It can be cultural.

It can be, things like taking away the children of individuals.

There's a lot of that.

One of the issues that you run into is, it becomes kind of not important because we're still talking about mass atrocities, mass killings, and whether it's actual genocide or not, the numbers might be much higher, in this time period than if it's actually technically a genocide.

So in some ways it's kind of a diverts people's view or away from what's really occurring.

But, are the results internationally see any peoples right now?

Threatened with genocide, any groups right now?

I mean, unfortunately they're always on.

So I mean, all over the world.

And I think, a problem in public but also but it's it among scholarship is that we have, very let's say, to be harsh, ethnocentric views.

So we care more about what happens in Europe than what happens in Africa or in Latin America.

That's unfortunate.

And this is why, often, let's say, these, kind of unfolding events of mass atrocities are overlooked.

So, for example, today we think about what happens in Sudan, what happens in Congo, what happens in Myanmar, what happens in China, right.

What happens in Gaza?

So there are, kind of multiple events where we think, these are systematic, events of systematic mass atrocities against the people.

And I think the problem with the genocide definition is, the threshold.

First of all, it's a legal definition.

It's not a this is different from what we as scholars operate on, because for us, it's an kind of vehicle for analysis.

But, in legal terms, you have to prove a certain certain conditions.

And one of the hurdles is that, intent needs to be proven.

However, when you think about the Nazis, even the Nazis, there is no documented side by Hitler.

The, I will, exterminate the Jews.

All the ones we have are different documents which kind of give us the idea that this is planned and this is happening.

So in a way, it diverts really like it would be, in a way, the attention which we need to pay, that people are attacked on a massive scale in their human rights, and their livelihoods.

And I think that's this is what we should care about.

Of course, the United Nations Commission on Genocide, that was in 1948.

The UN recently has gone on record claiming there's been genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

That continues to be debated.

And we talked about other groups that are targets of genocide.

So let's go back to Hitler's Germany now, 1933 to 1945; Doctor Gruner, You talk about five areas of Jewish resistance.

What are those five areas?

So, yeah, first, it's interesting.

We have to, to, talk about what is Jewish resistance.

And our traditional view was, first of all, there was not much and, this was because we focused on resistance only as, groups organized events and then, the, mostly supposed to be out.

And this was then referring to, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, Partizan activities in the occupied East.

But, since I mean, we now know that there was also way more Partizan activities than we ever thought.

But this kind of in a way reduced our views.

And what I try to do in my research is, first of all, shift the focus from the occupied east, from Poland and the occupied Soviet Union to Nazi Germany proper.

And then to, kind of broaden the definition, and say, every kind of act, which is kind of in a way challenging the regime.

So, we have to take as a, kind of act of resistance.

And I do this because all my sources are sources that, the Nazis punished these people for their acts, which shows that they were perceived as a threat.

Right.

And when they were perceived as a threat by the Nazis, we should call this general, resistance.

Right.

So what I, when I started with this premise, which really changed to my perspective also as a scholar, then I suddenly, I mean, I found hundreds and hundreds of different acts of resistance.

And to make sense of them, I came up with these five, categories.

One is, challenging Nazi propaganda.

We talked earlier about Nazi propaganda.

So, for example, I found, evidence that Jews ripped down Nazi flags, that they destroyed Nazi anti-Jewish posters.

They smeared these displays of the anti-Semitic newspapers.

Right.

So this is one category.

The second category, which was the most widespread, was actually public protest.

And this was surprising because we saw nobody spoke out, in Nazi Germany, especially among the Jews.

And then we see that hundreds of Jews were actually arrested and put on trial for criticizing the Nazi government, individual kind of laws, like you mentioned, the new black race laws they've criticized by people in public violence, like, Kristallnacht.

They were people spoke out in restaurants, on the streets, in their neighborhoods, in, offices.

And, many were punished for this if they had known and enunciated.

Third one is written protest.

So, for example, which, writing letters against the persecution petitions, but also anonymous leaflets or anonymous postcards with kind of, calling Hitler names, all done by Jews.

And then the last two are also, the one is, let's say, very widespread because it is disobeying Nazi laws and decrees.

And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the, the, the, decrees which impact the Jews were done on the local level.

So it is also challenging dots, not just the, the, the not the, the laws of the Nazi government.

So it is practically from, reaching from sabotaging forced labor, which they had to, which they recruited for or not wearing the yellow star.

You mentioned this, as a, which we thought is a kind of an, kind of not a really important thing, but no, they were actually punished with a jail sentence if they did not.

Where to start?

And then the last one, which is the most surprising one, was actually physical self-defense.

So, from teenagers who defended themselves physically against, like, verbal insults or physical attacks in school, in their neighborhoods against Hitler Youth or neighborhood kids till like, men who, beat up stormtroopers like, because they harassed like a neighbor and so on.

So, interestingly, these instances were never really looked at and show a very different picture.

If you take it all together of, that, of that, we actually can say that many Jews did not take this, like passively.

There was no passivity among, the Jewish population in Germany.

And what I found really important also to highlight is, it was not just men.

It was actually a lot of women actually rebelled against, the persecution.

You have one, I think, example of a of a lady, sitting on a bench that was marked only for arrogance, a simple act of defiance.

I'm curious about the, the feedback.

Feedback from your students learning about all of this.

Doctor Schroer, what's the reaction from t generation?

Nearly 100 years after the Holocaust?

Are they shocked or are they amazed, or did they know about this?

Well, sadly, they know very little about it.

Really, that some states do have, you know, mandatory.

They have like one lecture a year or some, some place is actually a little bit more than that.

It's become farther and farther away from anything that's related to their worlds.

And so that's kind of something difficult to overcome.

So, I mean, this is a problem, but I try to Americanize it a little bit when I talk about the Holocaust and talk about eugenics in the US as well as eugenics and, you know, there or the miscegenation laws that exist in the US at that time that the Nazis kind of modeled, or at least some of their laws on, but, really, to be honest, there's not that much interest.

Sometimes I try to teach my Holocaust class, and I can't even get ten students to sign up for it.

So, that's one of the reasons a series.

Well, that's.

Yeah, exactly.

That's what I'm hoping.

That's what we're doing.

It bring more interest.

Doctor Gruner, who were the Michelin?

Oh.

So, did the Nazis, in a way, try to come up with the race definition of Jews.

And they had a hard problem because they could not actually come up with some, like, they tried to measure.

They tried to all kinds of things to do a kind of a whole scientific, research on this.

But they couldn't.

And so in the end, they resorted to the religion, as the markup, which, so they introduced with the new, after the Nuremberg based laws, the idea that, you are, Jewish when you're, like, three out of four grandparents are Jewish.

So if two of your grandparents were Jewish or just one, then you became a so-called Michelin, which is a kind of a hybrid.

Yep.

And, there was one problem for them.

There were attempts among the, let's say, the SS to include them in the kind of kind of fully into the, persecution.

But since they had non-Jewish relatives, the Nazi state was aware that this might create problems.

And so they, were not fully included in the beginning and the persecution only, during the war, more and more measures were taken against them.

So interesting fact is that these Michelin who did actually to serve in the German Army still until 1940.

So they invaded Poland, they helped to invade Poland because, so it is a very difficult decision.

History in but in the end ended also up in forced labor camps, for example, in 1944.

So right before the end of the war.

So although they had German or non-Jewish relatives.

So this whole obsession with blood purity.

And so I thought that was very interesting.

The Nazis were so obsessed with that.

Well, and of course, things were bad and getting worse for German Jews in the 30s.

And then when Germany finally went to war and the Jews seemed doomed, didn't they?

Yeah, but this is not so clear cut and not like a very, kind of, a clear path is, I think a series of failed kind of, policy attempts.

So because first, the Nazis really tried to drive out the Jews with, by any means, first with, like, there was violence against them, boycotts, as you mentioned, very early on in 1933, then with laws like the Nuremberg race laws, but let's say in 1938, they realized, all these measures are not like really expelling the Jews because they are clinging to their homeland.

They have built something they contributed to Germany.

So many didn't want to go.

And so that's actually where then, Kristallnacht comes and where this was a kind of a, massive violent attack onto the whole Jewish population within Germany.

And we often and this is my next, my next book, actually, we often thought this was an attack on synagogues and shops.

That's how it's known, how the public understands this.

But my new research shows that the core of the Kristallnacht was actually a massive attack on Jewish homes.

And if your home is attack destroyed, then you, kind of lose any rest of his security because many Jews kind of resorted to their home as the last refuge.

So this then kind of increased the emigration after Kristallnacht tremendously.

But still many Jews could not leave because they didn't have the money.

Many countries closed their doors, so they got stuck in Germany.

And so 1 a.m.

to the Nazis started to think, how can we get rid of these Jews if they are, if they got stuck with us?

So the first plan was to deport them to Poland.

But then in Poland, there were even more Jews when they invaded Poland.

So they created more and more problems with every occupation.

And this is when and more and more kind of ghettos kind of came about.

And then in the end, it led to mass murder.

Yeah.

The ghettos.

That's where the rednecks, they were from Poland.

And they end up in the, in the ghetto there.

Now, tell us about the Final Solution.

What was that?

What was that decided?

So the final solution, is the Nazi term for the, kind of, extermination.

Invasion of the Jewish population of Europe.

It, it is difficult.

There are scholarly debates when this was decided.

So there are on the one extreme, people say, oh, Hitler always wanted this.

The counter argument is why would then he kind of try to drive the Jews out of Germany?

Makes no sense.

And the other extreme is it was kind of a decision last minute.

And I think, the war was, a decisive, decisive factor here.

And one of the reasoning, for the beginning, mass murder, is not so well known because we think about the mass murder only in terms of Auschwitz, mass murder in extermination camps.

But the mass murder actually started on a large scale in the occupied Soviet Union as kind of massacres on gunpoint.

And the argument was that the Jews are behind Bolshevism and, they, to kind of secure the hinterland of the German Army when they invaded the Soviet Union.

We need to get rid of all the kind of dangerous elements.

And the Jews were perceived as one of the most dangerous elements.

And from first massacring the men, then the idea was all the, the woman support the men.

The children be, will become future men and partizans and will seek revenge.

The Soviets seek revenge, so we will kill them all.

And this is how actually the, the Holocaust really started.

And then later, these extermination sites were established.

Okay, now, Doctor Schroer, of course, you're head of the Criminal Justice Department at USI.

Talk about a crime.

This is the crime of humanity.

Mass murder.

So it should be viewed, I guess, as a crime.

Oh, definitely.

I mean, it's one of the issues you have as well brought up is that there's legal terms for all of these.

And, and some of them are, made up, like ethnic cleansing and things, but, this is murder.

Oh, definitely.

And premeditated murder.

Oh, definitely.

And in terms of coming at it from criminal justice, you're passing laws because, I mean, almost everything that the Nazis did, they had laws or decrees that allowed them to do that.

You have judges that are interpreting the laws.

You have law enforcement that is basically enforcing the laws, rounding people up all across many nations.

And then you have the correctional system, which is anything from, you know, concentration camps, death camps to a variety of other kinds of, regular existing kinds of prisons and things.

So it very much overlaps with the criminal justice system, which is how kind of one of the reasons I and if there but it definitely is a horrendous crime and they had special courts I understand set up just for these, the people that were to violate the, these laws, the Jews.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I have to correct you a little bit, if I may.

Sure.

So the special courts were established as a tool by, the Nazis to go after their political enemies because they was especially enforcing a law of 1934 against so-called treacherous attacks against the Nazi state and the Nazi party.

We always thought this was actually aiming at communists and Social Democrats.

And we should not forget that these were communists, and Social Democrats were the first victims of the Nazis.

They ended up first in concentration camps.

So we always thought the special courts would kind of bring in these communists and social Democrats.

And my research showed that because Jews also spoke up and criticized the regime, they equally ended up in these courts.

So these are not regular courts.

They, and so we understood that they were the prosecutors were often, Nazis.

They were often also highly Semitic, but they were still part of the legal system.

And we should not underestimate that.

The Germans inside Germany, this is different in Poland, but inside Germany still clung, to this kind of idea of a legal system.

And so judges would kind of judge in the terms of the law, they apply it.

And, so interestingly, sometimes people ask me, so when people, Jews spoke up, they were thrown into a concentration camp.

No they didn't, they ended up, kind of being arrested, put on trial, and then whatever the outcome of the trial was, they ended up in prison or independent entry, but not directly in a concentration where the juries involved and know that the system is a little bit different in Germany.

So they are not unlike in the U.S.

system, people juries, they are judges.

And, so you have a prosecutor, you have judges, and that's how they decide.

Doctor Schroer, you chair of the Criminal Justice Department at USI, these laws imposed on the German Jews from 1933 to 1945, it made them, made the citizens criminals.

And we talked about those special courts.

So would you say the outcomes were predictable?

No, we talked about these two.

There were some that got in many ways, I mean, Hitler and the Third Reich, they're pushing the envelope continually, and kind of waiting and see what they can get away with.

And so the pushing very far and, you have to realize in terms of the laws being passed in the system within roughly three months, Hitler has complete legislative power.

And so he anything he says becomes actual law in the society.

So it was very easy for him to engage in these things.

So, now Germans course kept extensive records.

Now you were able to find German police reports of incidents according to research.

What was that like going through all those files?

Doctor Gruner?

Tedious.

Yeah, I think you know, in some way, innovation comes from hard work.

So you need to go through thousands of files, and this enables me, to sometimes come up with lots of challenging views.

And, just to add to the last, part is, it is not that when Hitler has power, that immediate judicial system and the courts totally change because the judges are from often from pre 1933, that's one second of all, there are differences between local courts like regional courts.

And then like federal courts, and the local courts, for quite some time in the 1930s often.

So not often, but in some instances actually, have verdicts in favor of Jews and Jews, for example.

Filed for that.

They were dismissed from work, with no reason.

And so they had success, but then often in the higher level.

So, it was kind of, thrown out, and then, in my research for example, I found that even in the 1940s, during the war, there were experience of Jews.

So, Jews who spoke up against the regime, were actually acquitted.

So which we never could imagine because we thought, oh, this whole system is against the Jews and everybody works against it.

But judges had certain DUI within the law.

And if the witnesses were not reliable or there was a good defense or they were, they were in some way sympathetic, the outcome could be different.

Right.

But, talking about the sources, this is really, on the one hand, the hard work, but also the joy because you discover these, things.

And the whole beginning of this work on Jewish resistance was, coincidence.

I was, in, just before I came to the United States.

I was sitting in the Berlin archives because I wanted to look at one source, which I knew existed.

I had worked with it before, but I had never had time to really go through all of the materials.

And these were police logbooks, from 30 police precincts in Berlin between 1933 and 1945.

So this means the diaries where the policemen writes, I arrested a drunk driver, or there was a bicycle stolen.

And I had worked with this for a tiny, portion of 1943.

So I wanted to go through all of them before I moved to the U.S.

I knew I need to do this because I won't have the time, but I'm living here.

So I went through this and there was this one.

I mean, there were thousands of handwritten notes about exhibition is about, as I say, damaged tool kind of, property.

And then there was this one note arrest of a Jew for public protest called Political Incidents.

And I thought this is strange.

I worked for a long time on, let's say, all different aspects of the persecution of the German Jews.

And I was not aware that this actually happened.

And this kind of intrigued me to a great degree.

Also, it kind of in a way resonated with me personally because as I said, I grew up in East Germany.

I grew up in a dictatorship.

So I know how much courage it, takes to speak up publicly against the regime.

So the Jews would do this?

Well, kind of, in a way, a kind of discriminated against as regular citizens and as Jews.

In a way, really struck me.

And this is the beginning of a long journey of like ten years of research and ended up in this book.

I thought this was very interesting to you.

Of course, you've worked with, the U.S.

Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC and, the Police Order of 1939 for German Jews to identify themselves either as Sarah or Israel.

Yeah, tell me about that.

So, usually we know that, the Nazis obliged the Jews to, carry these, additional kind of middle names to identify them because you talked earlier about, like, how the Nazis tried to kind of come up with the racial profile and they couldn't, so they could not identify Jews right in public, for example.

And so that they had to adopt these, these middle names was a vehicle to identify them.

Interestingly, I assumed as many scholars the Nazis obliged them the Jews would do this, and that's it.

However, the Nazi, not the Nazi, the German law, about names, requests that you then you want to change a name, you have to apply for it.

So when the Nazis came up with this, all that just was not automatic.

Every individual Jew, man or woman had to go to the police station, file a form, or fill out a form piece three race mark to kind of trigger the change of their names.

By law.

And interestingly, many Jews just didn't do it, which I was also not aware of before.

And here it comes some interesting in usually we think about resistance as done by young people.

Most of those who rejected, kind of the request to change the law and their names were actually elderly people.

It makes also sense because their whole life was connected to their names.

So to get a discriminating, a discriminating name, kind of, to carry was much harder for them than for an 18 year old.

Sure.

So, yeah, many of the, there's much evidence that they, resisted.

And then when they were detected, identified, they rejected this.

They had to, they were also put on trial, and they actually received prison sentences for this.

Another form of resistance has been talked about.

Okay.

This slogan, never forget reminding the world about the Holocaust so that it should never happen again to anyone else.

I'm sure that's a slogan that is repeated often.

Maybe at your center and at these conferences.

I think interesting is when, since you worked so much with the video testimonies of survivors, it really, what struck me is that many of the interviews I have watched, that at the end, the, the protocol I would say is, do, the interviewer has to ask, do you have any message for the bird?

And, in many instances, the message of these Holocaust survivors is it should never happen again to anybody.

Not just us.

Is that the message that you try to, pass on to your students to not commit genocide?

Well, yes.

I mean, I mean that the thing that, that we have to we have to keep repeating that message for sure.

Oh, definitely.

And like I said sadly, is something that they have very little experience with, but, sadly as well, there are genocides occurring all across the world right now.

So that it doesn't seem if it's never again, it seems like it's again and again.

So what's going to be your message?

To the folks that, to us to Speaker Susie series about, well, it could happen again.

Maybe, I think, but, often it's, kind of brought forward is, as the Germans did after 1945, we couldn't do anything right against what happened.

And also today, in many, let's say, countries, people saying, oh, if there's some authoritarian government involving, we can't really challenged them.

We have no power to do this.

And I think the story of these Jews in Nazi Germany, how they resisted, is actually showing us everybody can do it at any, in any circumstance, at any time, if they are capable to do it under these, the most obstructive regime in modern history, then anybody can do it.

And this creates a certain also responsibility that you should do it, that you should speak out, you should challenge authoritarian kind of developments.

I think that's what I would say as a message.

Gentlemen, thanks so much for this conversation.

I've been very enlightening.

My guests have been Doctor Wolf Gruner and Doctor Schroer.

Sure.

Thanks for being my guest on Two Main Street.

Thanks for having us.

So thanks for having.