The Holocaust and Eastern Europe

Professor Jody Russell Manning
Year: 2019
Students: 11 (Graduate and Undergraduate) 
Accompanying Faculty: Stephen Hague
Countries Visited: Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria

Covering four countries as well as numerous cities and sights of the Holocaust, this Study Abroad Program aims to provide a foundation for more specialized seminars and lecture courses in the field of genocide. Throughout our time, we will investigate and explore one of the greatest atrocities western civilization both permitted and endured. Complex and complicated, the Holocaust was not a natural disaster, nor is history predetermined. To be sure, the Holocaust was not inevitable. People – individual people and people acting within the context of organizations, community, and institutions – took decisions that, step by step, brought European society to genocidal mass murder. Others resisted. Most, however, stood by and chose to do nothing while victims were consumed by the machinery of death. Looking at a range of people (individual and collective), ideologies, places, memoirs, documents, primary and secondary sources as well as voices and views on various social levels, we will examine the choices victims, bystanders, and perpetrators confronted and the actions they took.