Vrba Memorial Lecture, hosted by the Holocaust Education Committee of the Department of History, UBC
Why did the Holocaust perpetrators what they did? What made them become mass murderers? How could they live with their deeds and misdeeds? Which kind of human beings were they actually? And how did their friends, their families, their judges, the media, and the academia deal with them? In this lecture, Thomas Kühne explores popular fantasies about and scholarly insights into the pathology and the ordinariness of Hitler’s mass murderers. He argues that the Holocaust can be explained only if we render account to the full diversity of the people that have committed it.
Thomas Kühne is the Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and holds the Strassler Chair in the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Trained in Germany, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Tübingen in 1992 and moved to the U.S.A. in 2003. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. He has authored and edited books on the political culture of pre-1914 Prussia, on the history of masculinity in Germany, on face-to-face killing in war and genocide, on male bonding and the ideal of comradeship among German soldiers in the twentieth century (2006). His most recent monograph Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (2010, Yale University Press) reveals how the longing for community turned a civilian society turned into a genocidal society. His awards include the German Bundestag Prize for Research and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton as well as from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
The Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture honours the memory of Dr. Rudolf Vrba, who was a distinguished medical researcher and professor of pharmacology at UBC for many decades before his death in 2006. Rudolf Vrba also played a critical role in the history of the Holocaust as one of only five Jewish prisoners who ever escaped from Auschwitz. The report written by Rudolf Vrba and his fellow-prisoner Alfred Wetzler following their escape in 1944 was the first eyewitness report about what was happening inside Auschwitz. It is considered a foundational document for understanding the facts about the Holocaust.
