Dr. March's Reading List
Here it is, as requested. To review, "Dr. March," as I call him here, isa professor of human rights and history who takes a group of students on a tour of the Nazi death camps in Poland over every Christmas break. He is urging me to take the trip in 2006 and has provided me with the reading list to prepare. (Any notes with the titles are his. And they are not in alpha order, but in the order I think he thinks they should be read.)
The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution by Henry Friedlander.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Goldhagen.
Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany by Horst Biesold.
The Nazi Doctors by Robert Jay Lifton.
Psychiatrists--the Men Behind Hitler by Dr. Thomas Roder Volker Kubillus and Anthony Burwell.
Doctors Under Hitler by Michael Kater.
Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis by Robert Proctor .
Life Unworthy of Life by James M. Glass.
Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene by Gotz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross.
Biologists Under Hitler by Ute Deichmann .
By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich by Hugh Gregory Gallagher.
The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann.
Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945 by Michael Burleigh.
Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany and the United States by Lanny Lapon.
Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choices in History by Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke.
When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust by Arthus L. Caplan.
The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation
by Jeorge J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin.
Czech, Danuta. Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945 (this is an 864-page record of daily events at the camp... it is available at Half Price Books).
Paskuly, Steven, ed. Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss.
Sereny, Gitta. Into That Darkness (An Examination of Conscience) (this work is "based on extensive interviews, an unprecedented portrait of Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka--the largest of the 5 Nazi extermination camps").
Arad, Yitzhak. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps.
Rashke, Richard. Escape From Sobibor.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Sereny, Gitta. The Healing Wound: Experiences and Reflections, Germany, 1938-2001.
posted by writer @ 12:33 PM
8 Comments:
That's a lot of reading.
I guess I better get started.
I leave for Poland in May to take part in the international March of Remembrance and Hope, a one-week program for college kids.
If anyone's interested, I'll probably start a blog to keep track of my reactions to the reading and to the experience.
Thank you for the list.
I am going to read these while undergoing heavy-duty counseling.
I am so ashamed that members of my species are so evil.
Could I also recommend Albert Speer's autobiography, "Inside the Third Reich", particularly in combination with Sereny's bio of him?
We are headed in the same direction again. Don't forget, Hitler was democratically elected. If more people had turned out to the election, history might have been drastically different.
It is also what happens when ultra right wing types seize power and start consolidating power.
Never forget, lest we repeat.
There's nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God.
Wow, that is a big list. While I don't have the time or resources for such a trip, it would definitely be something I would like to see. In the meantime, the books will have to take me there. It never ceases to cause awe in me that humans can be so evil to their fellow humans. And like a commenter pointed out, we could very easily be headed that way again. How easy we forget. Clearly, we do need the reminders, and we need brave people to denounce those monsters before it is too late.
I've always wanted to read more about Dietrich Bonhoffer, myself. For those who don't know, he was the Lutheran minister who tried to kill Hitler.
To the commenter who was ashamed that members of his or her species were so evil-- this is your heritage, too, the ability to do or ignore evil. To deny that you're capable of it is itself evil. All it really takes is the ability to demonize, to dehumanize, the people least like you.
Missing a crucial piece of literature: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. The author, who was immortalized as "Beta, the Disapointed Lover" in Czeslaw Milosz's classic The Captive Mind, was an author and Auschwitz surivor who committed suicide in Stalinist Poland after the war. It's an important book, and a wonderful piece to teach as well.
Incidentally, I hope you keep in mind that Poland is not all death camps (too many people who go there only for the camp experience and forget this obvious fact), and the bad guys here were the Germans, not the Poles.
Visiting Auschwitz was an amazing experience for me, I you have the opportunity to do something similar with Dr. March.
I remembered this list after I finished reading a graphic novel. I hope I can recommend this graphic novel to add to this reading list. The work is:
Kubert, Joe. _Yossel April 19, 1943_ isbn 1-59687-826-6
This is a story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The drawings are simply amazing, done in pencil. It's not just for graphic novel readers, but I think anyone reading on these topics should definitely take a look at this one. And I found it buried on a shelf at my public library branch.
Post a Comment
<< Home