LFU:online

Topic may vary from semester to semester. The course may be repeated for credit.

This course, which will link global and regional history, follows the principles of the Educational Philosophy of Yad Vashem and is based on the “Ten stages of Genocide” by Gregory H Stanton. It will allow students to get an insight into research done at the University of Innsbruck.

The course starts with Raphael Lemkin, his scientific and political work to coin the term genocide and include genocide in the International Humanitarian Law. During this step, the terms of “crimes against humanity,” “war crimes,” and “genocide” are explained and “Holocaust and other genocides” will be discussed. Students will learn the “Ten stages of Genocide” and apply them to the subject of the Holocaust.

During the next phase of the course students work on the categories of victims, bystanders and perpetrators. The historical perspective will include the time before, during and after the Holocaust. “Appropriate to teaching the Holocaust is to start with the Jewish victim because that’s the essence of the Holocaust story” (Yael Eaglestein-Benayoun, International School for Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem). An emphasis is on personal stories of Jewish victims from Austria and especially Tyrol, their lives before, during and after the Holocaust. A focus will be on the 1938 November pogroms: relative to its size of the Jewish population, Innsbruck was one of the bloodiest sites. Students will explore sites in Innsbruck related to this event and Jewish life of the city. Differences between the fate of Jewish and other victims of Nazi persecution will be discussed. Finally, Liberation and Displaced Persons will be topics in this course. Students will work with different materials and sources (photos, documents, pictures and scientific texts).

How did the Austrians and Germans react to National Socialism, exclusion of Jews and other people and war crimes they saw? Aspects of complicity but also resistance will be discussed here. As examples for resistance, the personal stories of Franz Weber and Blessed Jakob Gapp will be presented. Franz Weber came from a village near Innsbruck. As a member of the Wehrmacht he became a witness of Nazi atrocities in Poland. Caused by these atrocities he later deserted in Italy and became an Agent of the American OSS. Jakob Gapp was a young Catholic priest and son of a worker’s family from another village near Innsbruck. Already before the Anschluss in 1938, he was an opponent to National Socialism and criticized Anti-Semitism and Racism. One focus will be on a specific action in Tyrol in spring 1943 against a group of Jewish spouses of Aryans, which caused protests among parts of the local population. Again, students can work with different sources and visit sites of the life of Franz Weber or Jakob Gapp. Students will have the possibility to visit a museum about the hometown of Jakob Gapp in the last 100 years.
As a last group, the perpetrators are discussed and students will study the roots of Nazi ideology, the rise of the Nazi Party, and a short chronology of the Holocaust. A link to the regional history are the perpetrators of the 1938 November pogroms and the first commander of the Treblinka extermination camp Irmfried Eberl, a graduate of the University of Innsbruck. Again different media (pictures, films) will be used in class.

Finally, the students will explore memorialization of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution at the memorials at the Landhausplatz in the heart of Innsbruck. The field trip to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site is required for students in this course.

The University of New Orleans International Summer School program has a mandatory class attendance policy. All students are required to attend class for all morning classes and any required afternoon and/or weekend fields trips and lectures. No unexcused absences are allowed. However, LFU students who have to miss a UNO class due to LFU examinations in the first two weeks of our program, can receive one excused absence for this. Any further unexcused absences will result in an academic penalty. Each faculty member determines the penalty for missed classes. Most professors deduct a letter grade for each additional missed class day. For details, please refer to your course syllabi, which will be distributed on the first day of class. The listed ECTS credits are a recommendation by the University of New Orleans Innsbruck Summer School, based on contact hours, anticipated out-of-classroom requirements such as field trips, and projected workload for readings, assignments, and exam preparation. Mail: Center-New-Orleans@uibk.ac.at