Newswise — As people all over the world reflect on the Nazi invasion of Poland 70 years ago this year, Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro are preparing to welcome esteemed historian Dr. Gerhard L. Weinberg to the college’s 2009 International Holocaust Studies Conference on Oct. 22-24.
Weinberg, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of many books on World War II, is perhaps best known for his discovery of a second book penned by Adolf Hitler, published in German in 1961 and in English in 2003 as "Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf."
Despite something of a clamor in the Polish press during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit in September 2009 for an apology for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Putin has been steadfast in his refusal to blame the secret agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union for the war. Weinberg said an apology would be a significant indication that future generations of Russians would have a chance to understand the truth. “What’s important to them (eastern Europeans) is a sense of ‘Have these other people—their children, their grandchildren, the current generation—changed?’” Weinberg said. “Do they realize what awful things were done in the name of their country and by people from their country?” He opined that unless eastern Europeans find a path to reconciliation, tensions similar to those in east Asia could result. Weinberg said Japanese tourists do not dare speak their native language when visiting the Philippines or South Korea for fear of being physically attacked.
“Those attitudes are not going to change in eastern Europe until and unless there is a perception of willingness on the part of leadership and the public in Russia to face up to some of the terrible things they did to others,” he said.
“Nobody can undo them. Nobody can expect anybody to come back to life. But the whole current and future relationship(s) of peoples to each other are very much affected, I would suggest, by a willingness or unwillingness to recognize that in the past something was done that was very, very bad.” Ironically, the perils of forgotten history, revisionist history or intentional disregard for history were etched into history in June 2009 when a gunman walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and opened fire, killing a security guard. The suspect in custody is an unrepentant white supremacist and anti-Semite. “Nobody is born with an inoculation against hate,” Weinberg cautioned. “That terrible choice is always there, and, unfortunately, inherent in that choice, the choice to hate, is always the possibility, not the certainty, but the possibility of moving from hate to violent action, including murder.”
That is the fear of some Americans who recoil at the depiction of President Barack Obama as Hitler on placards displayed at town hall meetings and protest rallies, as well as verbal comparisons between Obama and Nazis. Weinberg says this occurs because some people sense something so odious in the Obama agenda that they feel they have to defend themselves against it.
“That makes it easier, then, for people today to cross over … the line from disagreeing with somebody into a kind of hatred that very quickly, then, leads to the next step—that is to say, violence,” Weinberg warned “We tend to forget too easily, I suggest, that climbing a staircase is always harder than going down a staircase. But just as to every step up there are further advances that might be made, every step down makes the next step down easier, and that’s potentially a very dangerous thing.”
For more information on the Holocaust conference and its guest speakers, including Holocaust survivors and liberators, please access http://frank.mtsu.edu/~proffice/misc09/holocaust_conf.htm
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