Dr. Stephen Fritz began what is going to be a continuing program at ETSU by giving his last lecture in the Culp Center auditorium Tuesday.
Professors are told to imagine that they are about to give their last lecture at ETSU and even in their career. They then have to decide exactly information they would want to include in their last lecture.
“This is the first lecture in what we hope to continue in what we call the Last Lecture Series,” said Patrick Dunkin, general member of University Productions.
Fritz began the series by giving a lecture on the Holocaust as part of the Field of Flags memorial.
“I was reluctant initially because the Holocaust is such an enormous subject, and I feel myself inadequate to cover the suffering of the victims,” said Fritz.
He decided to go ahead with the lecture because he felt there were at least five points that people really weren’t aware of.
The first point Fritz felt was important that the Holocaust is not something that just happened.
“The Holocaust does not come out of the blue. There is a long cultural background to it,” he said.
“The second point is the policy evolved incrementally over time,” Fritz said.
According to Fritz, the first violence policy was actually again non-Jewish German women who were considered inferior and unfit.
Fritz’s third point was that people tend to see the Holocaust as a sanitized mass murder. In all actuality, the Holocaust was simply people killing people.
“Don’t see it as some impersonal, cold, objective kind of action,” Fritz said.
The fourth point was the fact that the Holocaust was a very short, very intense spasm of murder. In mid-March 1942, 75 percent to 80 percent of all the Holocaust victims were still alive in German-occupied Europe. By mid-March 1943, those statistics were reversed.
“Seemingly today, nothing bothers Americans more than the fact that we didn’t do anything to stop the Holocaust,” Fritz said.
According to him, however, there was nothing we could have done.
“We didn’t have the power to do anything. There was nothing any outside force could do,” he said.
The fifth point dealt with the Holocaust on a political level. It was responsible partially because of the existence of totalitarian systems.
“It was not based merely on terror or lack of political freedom,” Fritz said.
War is one of the main reasons the Holocaust happened, according to Fritz.
“The ultimate most radical measures could not have happened without the cover of war,” he said.
Fritz had two points that he wanted his audience to really take away from his lecture.
“Don’t see people as collectively guilty. Judge people as people,” he said.
His final bottomline, however, was to prevent war from breaking out. This would prevent genocide and cleansing. “We see the Holocaust as uniquely German, something that couldn’t happen to us. But if we look at it as a human event and judge behavior in western culture, the Holocaust is something that could happen any place, any time,” he said.

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