Study Guide: What Were We Fighting? — Fascist Atrocities and the Logic of Mass Killing

Part I: Topic Overview & Fill in the Blanks

Lecture 2 confronts the systematic atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — not as unfortunate byproducts of war, but as deliberate state policy. The Holocaust unfolded in stages: legal persecution and economic exclusion in the 1930s, ghetto confinement and deliberate starvation after 1939, mobile mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen beginning in 1941, and finally industrial extermination at purpose-built killing centers like Auschwitz-Birkenau. Japanese imperial violence — at Nanking, through Unit 731, and across occupied Asia — was comparable in scale but has been largely absent from American historical memory, a gap shaped by postwar political decisions rather than historical evidence. The lecture closes with Hannah Arendt's disturbing argument that neither Nazi nor Japanese atrocities required exceptional monsters — they required institutions that normalized the abnormal, and ordinary people who chose not to think about what those institutions were doing.

Fill in the Blanks

Complete each statement using the lecture deck. Terms in bold appear in Part II.

1. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jewish Germans of   and criminalized marriage between Jews and non-Jews — race was not metaphor, it was  .
2. Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) was presented as a spontaneous popular uprising, but it was in fact a   — over 30,000 Jewish men were arrested in a single night.
3. The Warsaw Ghetto confined 400,000 people to 1.3 square miles; food allocations were calculated deliberately below  , making starvation a policy, not an accident.
4. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS killing squads that followed the German army into the Soviet Union in 1941; their method was to assemble communities, march them to pre-dug pits, and   them.
5. The Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942) lasted only   minutes; it did not decide to kill European Jews — that was already underway — it   the logistics.
6. At Auschwitz, arriving prisoners underwent "selection on the platform" — those fit for labor were spared temporarily, while all others were sent directly to  .
7. Adolf Eichmann, head of Section IV B4 (Jewish Affairs), took pride not in hatred but in his  ; at trial he spoke in bureaucratic clichés and insisted he merely followed  .
8. Josef Mengele held doctorates in both medicine and  ; his experiments were written up as scientific reports and presented at medical conferences — ideology wearing a  .
9. Unit 731, Japan's biological warfare program, referred to its victims as maruta — meaning " " — and the United States granted immunity to its scientists after the war in exchange for their  .
10. Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" argues that great crimes can emerge not from exceptional hatred but from the systematic   of moral thinking.

Part II: Essential Terms & Concepts

After reviewing the deck and clicking all popup terms, write your own definition in the space provided.

Part III: Pause & Reflect

These questions appear in the lecture deck. Write a substantive response to each — at least 3–4 sentences.

Part IV: Study Checklist

Check each box when you can do it without looking at your notes.

• I can explain the three-phase escalation of Nazi persecution from legal exclusion (1933) through ghettos (1939–1941) to industrial extermination (1942–1945). (Section II — Nazi Atrocities as Policy)
• I can distinguish extermination camps from concentration camps and explain what made Auschwitz-Birkenau the endpoint of an escalating system. (Section II — Nazi Atrocities as Policy)
• I can explain why the Wannsee Protocol is significant — what it reveals about how genocide was administered, and what it does and does not prove about Nazi decision-making. (Section II — Nazi Atrocities as Policy)
• I can compare Eichmann and Mengele as two distinct models of perpetration and explain what each reveals about how ordinary institutions produce extraordinary atrocity. (Section III — The Perpetrators)
• I can explain why Japanese imperial violence is comparable in scale to the Holocaust but largely absent from American historical memory — and identify the postwar political decisions that shaped that asymmetry. (Section IV — Japanese Atrocities)
• I can describe what Unit 731 was, what its scientists did, and explain why the United States granted them immunity — and what that decision cost in terms of historical accountability. (Section IV — Japanese Atrocities)
• I can explain Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" and apply it to the evidence from this lecture — including the Stangneth counterargument about Eichmann's ideological commitment. (Section V — Arendt & Making Sense of It)
• I can explain why the lecture argues that neither Nazi nor Japanese atrocities required monsters — and what institutions must do differently to prevent the normalization of the abnormal. (Section V — Two Models of Perpetration)
• I can identify John Rabe's role at Nanking, explain the moral paradox his case presents, and connect it to the lecture's larger argument about how nations construct historical memory. (Section IV — Japanese Atrocities)