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Misconceptions about the Holocaust

A Mini-Course Offered by the NU Emeriti Organization and EPL

Despite being thoroughly documented, discussions about the Holocaust are plagued by poor logic and misleading metaphors--no surprise considering the mind-bending scale of this horror.

The Holocaust is one of the best documented events in human history. But the subject is also surrounded by numerous misconceptions. Some of these are tempting but doubly false logical propositions: for example, killing six million people was an expensive, complicated, and self-destructive operation that must have detracted from the German war effort. Others are caused by familiar metaphors that obscure more than they reveal, such as “factories of death” or “industrial murder.” Professor Hayes will delve into these and other persistent notions that get in the way of understanding how the Nazi onslaught nearly achieved its goal of eradicating European Jewry.

Your instructor, Peter Hayes, is Emeritus Professor of History and German at Northwestern University as well as Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust Studies Emeritus. He specializes in the histories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and, in particular, in the conduct of the nation’s largest corporations during the Third Reich. He taught at Northwestern for thirty-six years, from 1980 to 2016, in the process winning numerous teaching awards, including the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the University’s highest honor for teaching. His alma mater, Bowdoin College, has also honored him with its Distinguished Bowdoin Educator Award. Author or editor of fourteen books and recipient of numerous research fellowships, Prof. Hayes also has served on the academic boards of multiple professional societies and Holocaust memorial sites, including as Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from May 2014 to May 2019. Peter has been featured in many documentary films, including most recently the Ken Burns/PBS production, “The United States and the Holocaust.”

This is a two-session mini-course. Register here to enroll in both sessions of this mini-course: Thursdays, April 18 and May 2. Registration guarantees you will receive all course updates, handouts, and post-event information and summaries. Note that the date for the second session has been moved from April 25 to May 2.

"Misconceptions about the Holocaust" is the 14th mini-course of a five-year (and counting) collaboration between Evanston Public Library and the Northwestern Emeriti Organization (NEO).

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