Discussion Post: World War II
Watch the PBS Video: "Memory of the Camps" online
Read the Article: "A People's War?" from A People's History
Watch the PBS Video: "On Our Watch" online
Prompt: Fifty one years ago camera crews with the British and American armies entered the Nazi death camps and filmed the horror they found there. For decades that film was stored in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London. The documentary was unfinished with missing sound tracks. But the directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, had developed a script to go with the pictures. Frontline presented that film unedited, as close as possible to what the producers intended over a halfcentury ago. They made it as a document to serve our collective memory. After viewing "Memory of the Camps," how has your understanding of World War II changed? What are your thoughts surrounding this genocide that claimed the lives of nearly 12 million "undesirables" (including not only Jews, but also, Africans, Asians, the physically and mentally challenged, homosexuals, gypsies, and on and on the list could go of all the groups singled out by Hitler and the Third Reich) from throughout the European continent? By the end of the war, as stated in the film, "the dead [had] been buried. It remains for us to care for these, the living. It remains for us to hope that Germans may help mend what they have broken, and cleanse what they have befouled. Thousands of German people were made to see for them- selves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims. This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933. Twelve years? No, in terms of barbarity and brutality they had traveled backwards for 12,000 years. Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God's grace, we who live will learn." The world vowed "never again" after the genocide in World War II, and again in Rwanda and the atrocities in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Then came Darfur. Over the past four years, at least 200,000 people have been killed, 2.5 million driven from their homes, and mass rapes have been used as a weapon in a brutal campaign - supported by the Sudanese government - against civilians in Darfur. Have we learned?
The response must include a reference list. Using Times New Roman 12 pnt font, double-space, one-inch margins, and APA style of writing and citations.