The winds of war swept across Europe in the 1930s. The National Socialist Party gradually seized power in Germany with a little-known Austrian-born man who became the German dictator and led his country into World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939.
In the early 1930s, Adolph Hitler, who had moved to Germany in 1913 and served in World War I with the German army, and the Nazis developed an anti-Jewish policy in Germany with the intent to eradicate the specific race of people from within the borders.
The Nazis opened a concentration camp in 1933 near Munich, and Dachau eventually became a model for other camps to intern enemies of the state, including communists, socialists and specifically the targeted Jews, whom the German wanted to leave the country.
Two years later on Sept. 15, 1935, the Nazis enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which announced the Germans to be a superior “Aryan” race, and the Jews were not part of that race. The Nazis believed the Jews were a threat to the rest of the population. With the start of the war on the European continent, the Germans rounded up Jews and other people they considered a threat to the country and began their systematic murder in established concentration camps.
The Nazis killed approximately six million Jews and another five million Soviet prisoners, gypsies and mentally disabled people.
A 1,100-square-foot traveling exhibit, which debuted in July at the Northwest Reno Library and will close on Aug. 18, offers a detailed look into the Holocaust and how the world reacted during and after World War II. The Reno library is one of 50 sites in the country selected to display the touring exhibition supported by the American Library Association and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This exhibit is based on one that opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2018.
In addition to separate presentations on the Holocaust offered by various speakers from the Reno area, the exhibit gives visitors a glimpse of the atrocities committed against humanity during the 1930s and 1940s and how Americans reacted to the horrific events occurring across Europe. The exhibit asks visitors the question, “What would I have done?” but also, “What will I do?”
A perfect storm
Jeff Scott, director of the Washoe County Library System, acknowledged the support of the national Holocaust museum and American Library Association for their support of the exhibit as well as the Nevada Center for Humanities.
“This is a very important exhibit to have now,” he said. “The events happened 80 years ago and whether Americans knew about it or if they did anything about it … look at the parallels today.”
The timing for a dictator to emerge in Germany was ripe. A battered and demoralized Germany agreed to an armistice to end World War I in 1918 and less than a decade later, the Great Depression ravaged Europe as it did across the United States and the rest of the world.
“A dictator came out during the depression,” Scott said of Hitler’s obscured rise. “It’s a reflection of time and what they knew of the time period and what Americans knew.”
Dr. James McSpadden, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, has extensively studied the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust. He told the story of Alice Urbach and her stolen cookbook. Urbach’s abusive and hard-drinking husband spent most of the family’s money on gambling. After her husband died in 1920, which was soon followed by her father’s death, Urbach accepted boarders and also baked pastries for them.
Prior to that time and when she lived in Vienna, Austria, with her family, McSpadden said Urbach had learned something from the chef who tended to her wealthy family.
The lessons learned from her time in Vienna carried over in her young life.
“Alice had two young boys,” McSpadden said. “She knew something about cooking. She was going to teach in a cooking school. She opened a cooking school and decided this is what she wanted to do.”
McSpadden said Urbach also opened the first catering business.
In 1925 Urbach began writing a cookbook, and it was printed by a German press a decade later. McSpadden said her cookbook, “So kocht man in Wien,” was a good resource for Venetian dishes and pastries. Life changed not only for Urbach but also for her fellow Austrians. The Nazis crossed the border and annexed Austria. Urbach lost her cooking school, and McSpadden said she looked at moving to another country.
“She finds a way out and goes to England. She goes as a maid or domestic servant,” McSpadden said. “Before she left, the publisher asked her to sign a release (on the cookbook).”
After the war in 1949, Urbach returned to Vienna, and while walking on one of the city’s streets, she passed a bookstore that had her cookbook on display. Consequently, when the publisher re-released the book, Urbach’s name was replaced by a chef, a Nazi sympathizer. McSpadden said the process was incredulous because the publisher didn’t change any words or remove pictures.
Urbach wrote to the publisher, yet McSpadden said it wasn’t until 2020 — 37 years after her death — when the copyright was restored.
Six million stories
Judith Schumer, former chair of the Governor’s Commission on the Holocaust, provided a personal glimpse into her background. She occasionally hears people question the continual need to remember the Holocaust since its history.
“There are six million stories. We haven’t heard the testimony of every survivor,” she replied.
Schumer said once Holocaust deniers are silenced, then perhaps the Jews can move on.
“My parents and sister were fortunate to have the strength to move to Lithuania from Nazi-occupied Poland,” Schumer said.
From Lithuania, her family received a special visa and eventually moved to Japan and then to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, China, where she was born in October 1945, two months after the Japanese surrendered. In 1948, her family received visas to the U.S. where her family’s life started anew.
April 20 of this year marked the 75th anniversary when her family arrived in San Francisco. She had another memory as a young child growing up in America.
“When I was 10 years old, my father took me to an exhibit on the Holocaust at a museum in New York City to see the photos. He bought me a small pin … In Hebrew, it says ‘Remember,’” Schumer recalled.
My father told me to look at the pin, and then he offered advice: “If you don’t remember what happened to the Jews and the many members of our family who were murdered by the Nazis, and if you don’t tell others, then the world will forget.”
Schumer said it’s important to remember the atrocities from the Holocaust and to counter the Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites. She said the Holocaust teaches people about the crimes committed against humanity “time after time again.” She said other areas have experienced human cleansing, such as Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and many other places.
Schumer turned her attention to the Holocaust in Europe that claimed the lives of six million Jews, homosexuals, persons with handicaps, dissenters and Jehovah’s Witnesses. She said Americans during the war were slow in their response against the Holocaust and allowing it to happen.
Jews in the United States
Dr. Jacob Dorman, a professor of core humanities and history at the University of Nevada, Reno, said anti-Semitism in the American colonies could be traced to Spain in 1492 and through a Dutch-to-Brazil connection.
Their arrival in the late 16th century resulted in more Jews moving into the Caribbean. He said the Jewish population integrated into the American colonial society, yet the young country’s leaders vowed not to discriminate against the Jews or other races.
According to Dorman, an attempted revolution in Europe resulted in more Jews to emigrate to the U.S.
“They started as merchants because (the colonies) didn’t have much more rural areas in the South, Midwest and Northeast. Jews were associated with the market and capitalism,” Dorman explained. “The Jews symbolized the newness of this new system called capitalism.”
Over time more than two million Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia arrived in the U.S. and lived along the eastern seaboard in Boston and New York City and in South Carolina. Dorman said many Jews were poor and tried to work themselves up the social ladder. He said Jews, most of them whites who were accepted in the South, did not become involved with the slave trade, yet, an obscure —and ironic — bit of history reveals a Jew had a prominent role with the confederacy.
“A Jew was vice president of the Confederacy,” Dorman said to the surprised look of most of the attendees.
Judah Philip Benjamin was first the attorney general of the Confederacy before his selection as second-in-command.
Dorman said the Jews became associated with the market and capitalism, but people who felt they didn’t experience “a good deal” then accused the Jews of cheating them.
Additionally, Dorman said at the end of the 19th century and extending to the beginning of the 20th, a wave of anti-immigration and then anti-Semitism with the arrival of the Jews swept over the nation. He said the immigrants were not Anglo-Saxons but Irish, German, Italian, Slavs and Catholics.
Americans didn’t think the Germans could be assimilated into the population. Dorman said the political view at the time was that the immigrants were bringing new, radical ideas and ideologies that were anti-American and destabilizing. In fact, Dorman said a Slavic immigrant assassinated President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901.
“The eugenics argument,” Dorman said, “stated the genetic stock was degraded by races inferior to white Anglo-Saxon protestants.”
Automobile baron Henry Ford published anti-Semitic articles, and Hitler was a big fan of the American industrialist; yet, the falsehoods followed the Jews. Dorman said people blamed the Jews for the death of Jesus, and there was support in the U.S. for the Germans and Nazi Party in the 1930s. He explained Germany recovered from the Great Depression faster than the U.S.
From the end of World War I to the present, anti-Semitic views persisted. At Easter, these views reappeared with the Jews being called Christ killers, and the internet in today’s society presents a myriad of sites and comments attacking the Jews in this country and others spread out around the globe.
What did you know and when?
Daniel Greene, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University north of Chicago, is familiar with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s outreach. Greene curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened at the museum to commemorate its 25th anniversary. He addressed the latest attacks on democracy.
“Libraries are on the front line in the same ways of an assault against democracy,” Greene said, referencing the latest attacks on the publications. “Libraries are about freedom of information, creating space for ideas, a deep commitment for truth. Democracy depends on strong institutions.”
Greene said learning about the Holocaust is just as important as obtaining new information from a library. He said the national Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. opened in 1993, and although the Holocaust occurred in Europe and not on American soil, there are still stories emitting from the U.S.
Furthermore, Greene said the exhibition in Reno and the other 49 exhibits are presenting myths and misconceptions and the response of Americans toward the threat of Nazism in the 1930s and ‘40s.
“We want people to learn,” he said, “(by) asking what Americans knew and when they knew it. What more could’ve been done and what wasn’t done.”
Greene said he hopes the younger generations ask questions in history about the Holocaust and learn stories of individuals and events such as those in November 1938 when a nationwide terrorist attack against the Germans and Austrians was sponsored by the German government.
In 1931, Greene said journalist Dorothy Thompson, syndicated in more than 100 publications, interviewed Hitler, who was touted as Germany’s future leader. Within seconds, Thompson thought otherwise.
“Anti-Semitism is the heart and soul of the Nazi movement,” she wrote, adding how she discussed the dangers associated with Hitler’s leadership.
Thompson said the U.S. needed to change policy to admit more refugees from Nazi Germany. Because of her writing, however, the German government expelled her from the country.
Greene said a Gallup poll from that era asked respondents in the U.S. if they approved of the Nazis, and 94% said they disapproved of them. On the other hand, though, 70% of respondents said the U.S. should not allow exiles to enter the country.
Central to the exhibit, though, are four questions included alongside it: What did Americans know? Did Americans help Jews or refugees? Why did Americans go to war? And How did Americans respond to the Holocaust?
This exhibit and the one at the U.S. Holocaust Museum may not offer the answers, but Greene said they present more question marks.
“We want people to learn more,” Greene encouraged.
Correction: A statement attributed to Dr. Dorman was removed from this article because due to it being a misquote.
NEED TO KNOW
Northwest Reno Library
2325 Robb Drive, Reno
Monday-Tuesday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Wednesday: 10 a.m.-7 p.m.
Thursday-Friday: 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Saturday-Sunday: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Americans and the Holocaust Book Talk
Saturday, Aug. 5
1 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
PBS The U.S. and the Holocaust Excerpt Viewing
Sunday, Aug. 6
2 p.m. – 3 p.m.
Northwest Reno Library
Registration is required for this event.
Jewish Mathematicians
Wednesday, Aug. 9
5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Northwest Reno Library
Registration is required for this event.
Families During World War II Story Time and Activity
Tuesday, Aug. 15
4 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Northwest Reno Library
Registration is required for this event.
To register, go to https://www.washoecountylibrary.us/holocaustexhibit/index.php
