Battles of World War II: Resistance and the Holocaust

This module investigates the development of World War II into a ‘civil conflict’ during Europe’s occupation by Axis forces. We will engage with a broad range of primary sources to investigate individual and collective attitudes, taking into consideration political and religious beliefs, as well as Europe’s fraught relationship with the plight of its Jews. The module will elucidate the motifs for the conflicting memorialization of resistance and collaboration especially in France, Poland and the USSR.

The module starts with an investigation into the relationship between history and photojournalism, followed by film and propaganda in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and its subsequent deployment in the UK and the USA. We then explore the trajectories of these sources, as well as letters written by civilians about to be executed, in constructing the ‘foundational narrative’ of Gaullist France as a ‘nation of resisters’, eventually leading to its counter-image as a ‘nation of collaborators’, or what Rousso calls ‘Vichy Syndrome’. Next, we research Soviet sources made available after Khrushchev’s Thaw or during Glasnost, including Baltermants’ photographs and the testimonies of Soviet Jews collected by Grossman and Ehrenburg. The last segment of the module charts the Holocaust ‘boom’, and the subsequent focus on Jewish victimization, Gentile rescuers, survival and resistance. This segment uses Levi’s ‘grey zone’ to read testimonies, such as those in Lanzmann’s Shoah, which follows Hilberg’s division into ‘perpetrators, victims and bystanders’. The module deploys theoretical tools from collective memory, post-memory, bio-politics and cultural history.