“Jim Crow and the Holocaust” Syllabus

The study travel trip that a colleague and I planned for Poland didn’t happen, for various reasons. However, one of the students who registered for the trip asked if I could do a directed study based on the Poland trip. I agreed to lead the directed study this summer, and I’ve been thinking, over the past few weeks, how to expand and make the most out of a summer long directed study. So, today, I want to share with you my first thoughts for a special topics class entitled “Jim Crow and the Holocaust.”

Course Overview

Herman Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction appeared in 1940, and his book details conversations had Adolf Hitler between 1933 and 1934 when Rauschning was briefly part of the Nazi Party. Rauschning relates that at a dinner party in 1933 Hitler told advisors who sought for him to get the United States on his side that the United States was in “the last disgusting death-rattle of a corrupt and outworn system” that has been on the decline since “the Southern states were conquered.” Hitler saw the South’s defeat during the Civil War as the first notch in the downfall of the United States. He said, “The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America that would not have been ruled by a corrupt class of tradesmen…