History 353: The Holocaust situates the Holocaust in the colonial frame, traces the parallels between the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in German colonies and the Holocaust, and looks at the intersections of the Holocaust and the Nakba. The course contextualizes the euthanasia program, explores Nazi colonial visions of race and space in Eastern Europe, and examines links between ghettoization, Nazi resettlement policies, and genocide. The course offers insight into factors, structure, and agency behind the genocide and a bottom-up perspective on the victims, perpetrators, and collaborators. It applies an intersectional lens to understand Jewish victims’ experience of the Nazi oppressive power structures while carefully unpacking mutually constitutive categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The course concludes by looking at how the settler colonial mindset infiltrates the Holocaust histories and pedagogies and examines the benefits of approaching the Holocaust memory as multidirectional rather than competing.
Outline
HIST 353 is divided into fourteen units, each of which examines a specific topic of the Holocaust:
Unit 1: Definition of Genocide—Situating the Holocaust in the Colonial Context
Unit 2: From the “German Catechism” Debate to the Holocaust and Nakba
Unit 3: Victims of a Racial State—from Imperial Germany to the Third Reich
Unit 4: Antisemitism—Origins, Paradigms, and Problems of Definitions
Unit 5: Jewish Victims’ Agency within the Power Structure of the Nazi Regime—Intersectional Approach
Unit 6: State Destruction and Double Occupation—Structural Factors behind the Genocide
Unit 7: Colonization, Resettlement, and Expulsion—Nazis as Demographers
Unit 8: Ghettoization and the Failure of Nazi Resettlement Policies
Unit 9: Nazi-Soviet War—Radicalization and the Final Solution
Unit 10: From Auschwitz to Lety—Dehumanization and Desexualization in L’Univers Concentrationnaire
Unit 11: Taboo and Agency—Sexuality, Sexual Violence, and Sexual Barter
Unit 12: Perpetrators—Ordinary Men or Willing Executioners?
Unit 13: Collaboration and Collaborationism in History and Memory
Unit 14: The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century—Anxious Histories, Multidirectional Memory, and Settler Colonial Forgetting
Learning outcomes
After completing HIST 353, you should be able to
situate the Holocaust in a broader historical and global context;
acquire critical understanding of human agency, causation and complexity, and change and continuity of the targeted historical era;
investigate the ways in which knowledge about the Holocaust is created, deployed, enforced, and reinforced, as well as how it is resisted;
employ and contextualize a wide variety of Holocaust-related historical sources to make sense of complex, richly textured, diverse, and sometimes disparate materials and to identify biases, ambiguities, and uncertainties in primary and secondary historical sources;
conduct research on the Holocaust that is accurate, critically analytical, comprehensible, and thorough; and
communicate research results cogently, clearly, and logically in written form that corresponds to professional standards of doing history.
Evaluation
To receive credit for HIST 353, you must complete all reflection assignments and essay assignments and participate in discussions. You must achieve a minimum grade of D (50 percent) on both essay assignments and an overall grade of D (50 percent) for the entire course to pass. All work must be submitted or completed by the end of your course contract date.
Activity
Weight
Reflection A
10%
Reflection B
15%
Historiographical Essay 1
25%
Historiographical Essay 2
25%
Reflection C
10%
Discussions
15%
Total
100%
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. (Print)
Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015. (Print)
Athabasca University reserves the right to amend course outlines occasionally and without notice. Courses offered by other delivery methods may vary from their individualized study counterparts.