“Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler”

Terrence Petty, Journalist, UVM Class of 1974

Retired Associated Press journalist and UVM alumnus Terrence Petty will discuss his new book, Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. He will also reflect on his long career in journalism and on how his youth in Vermont and education as a history major at UVM prepared him for it.

Terrence Petty was an Associated Press journalist for nearly 35 years, including a decade as a Germany-based foreign correspondent. A seventh-generation Vermonter, he was born and raised in the southern Champlain Valley. After graduating from UVM in 1974 with a BA in History, he got his start in journalism with the Addison Independent in Middlebury. He then worked at newspapers in Syracuse and Albany before taking a job with the AP in 1982. From 1987 to 1997 Petty was based in Bonn, Germany, where he reported on the last years of the Cold War. He traveled into the East bloc, writing about pro-democracy movements, the geopolitical ramifications of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the neo-Nazi violence that flared after the two German states merged and continues to this day. He reported on the solemn commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1995, and in 1995/96 reported from Bosnia on the discovery of mass graves and on NATO's efforts to enforce a peace agreement among the warring sides. From 1997 to his retirement in 2017, Petty worked for the AP in Rhode Island and Portland, Oregon. Petty's book, Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler, was published in May 2019. It is the culmination of about 15 years of research, which included trips to Munich and elsewhere in Germany to search for and read documents and other archival material. Petty and his wife Christina, also a native Vermonter, reside in Portland, Oregon. Petty continues to conduct research on German topics.

Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture

“Impudent Jews: Forgotten Stories of Individual Jewish Resistance in Hitler’s Germany”

Wolf Gruner, University of Southern California

Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still understood mostly in terms of rare cases of armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan warfare. Based on a new approach and new sources, such as police and court materials from various German cities and video testimonies of survivors, the talk will demonstrate how Jewish women and men performed countless acts of resistance in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, from destroying Nazi symbols, to writing petitions, to public protest, and tp physical self-defense. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations and professions defied Nazi measures and protested in public obliterates the common view of passivity on the part of the persecuted. Thus, this research gives agency back to ordinary Jews in extraordinary circumstances. Their courageous acts still need to be incorporated into the narrative of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust more generally.

Wolf Gruner has taught since 2008 at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where he is Professor of History, holder of the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, and (since 2014) Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Previously he had received his PhD in History in 1994 as well as his Habilitation in 2006 from the Technical University Berlin. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, and the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. He was also the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness at Webster University in St. Louis. Gruner is the author of ten books, among them “Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims.” He has also published “Parias de la Patria“: El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890,” in Spanish with Plural Editores 2015. His most recent book is “The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia. Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses,” the original German version of which was awarded the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize of the German Studies Association, among other recognitions. Gruner has edited four additional volumes, most recently “Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust” and “New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison.” Gruner is an appointed member of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the executive committee of the Consortium of Higher Education Centers of Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies, the International Academic Advisory Board of the Center for the Research on the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem, and the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research. He has recently completed the manuscript for a book about forgotten acts of individual resistance by German and Austrian Jews during the Holocaust, which will form the basis for his lecture at UVM.

The Annual Raul Hilberg Memorial Lecture is supported by Jerold D. Jacobson, Esquire, of New York City, UVM Class of 1962, and his wife Gertraude Holle-Suppa.

“Jewish Art in Nazi Germany: The Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria”

Dana Smith, Keene State College

The Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria developed in 1934 as one of Nazi Germany’s largest Jewish cultural organizations. Autonomous at first, it was integrated into the Berlin-led national Jewish Cultural League in late 1935. During its existence, the Bavarian League performed at least 292 cultural events – ranging from orchestral concerts to marionette performances – in a total of ten Bavarian cities and towns. By the late 1930s, approximately 30 percent of the local Jewish population held a Cultural League membership card. Through its programming, internal debates, and discussions in the Jewish press, the Bavarian Cultural League sought to address the myriad ways Bavarian Jews used art to represent aspects of their trifold German-Bavarian-Jewish identity until 1938.

Dana Smith is an assistant professor in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies department at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. She completed her doctorate at Queen Mary College, University of London after having previously taken her master’s degree in the UVM Department of History. Her first book, Jewish Art in Nazi Germany, is in publication with Routledge. The book uses the example of the arts, created or performed through the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria during the Nazi period, to explore issues related to gender, regionalism, and identity. Her next research project will look at Shakespeare in Nazi Germany. Prior to the outbreak of war with Britain, the Nazi regime committed a not-insignificant amount of effort toward “Aryanizing” Shakespeare, whose plays counted among the most frequently performed works on both “German” and “Jewish” stages. At Keene, Smith teaches introductory- and upper-level courses on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, a course on Women and the Holocaust, a newly designed course on Art and the Holocaust, as well as an introductory course on Jewish history and a forthcoming new course on German Jewish history.