The revitalization of the abandoned industrial complex in the middle of Brněnec (Brünlitz) village. Spaces of the area could become a lively centre not only of the community, but also of our national contemporary history in one place, the place with a powerful story of more than 1100 saved human lives from the Holocaust in the Schindler`s factory – the sub-camp of the concentration camp Gross-Rosen.

This thesis is a historiographical study of the eugenics and euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany. It traces there development from the end of World War One to the fall of Hitler's Third Reich. There are three stages in this study. First, I examine eugenics after World War One and the effect the era had on society. Then I study the Nazi transition from eugenics measures to "euthanasia", and last I analyze the transferring of the killing methods from the "euthanasia" centers to the concentration camps. The questions of how did the idea for eugenics develop in Germany society, what role did World War One play in its development, why did the Nazis move from eugenics to "euthanasia", was the children's euthanasia program and Aktion T-4 the same or different programs, did doctors willingly participate in the programs, was there a resistance to "euthanasia", and what role did the T-4 program play in the "Final Solution" are examined. This study uses a wide range of secondary sources. It examines the authors of those sources arguments and if their work plays a role in out better understanding of the event. Many of these authors are the leading scholars in their field. This study concludes that these sources have lead to our better understand the Holocaust, and the argument as to wither or not the mass murder of European Jewry was a well planned event or a trial and error process that lead to mass murder.

This research studies two memorials to the Holocaust victims in Minsk, Belarus with the aim to identify how these spaces of commemoration were formed. The study builds upon the analysis of three spheres: the physical space of the chosen memorials, decision-making process regarding their installation, and social practices that have happened around. Additionally, this thesis analyses the correlations of these areas. The methods for the research are qualitative and explorative case study analysis. An extensive review of documents and media is done. Additionally, direct observations of the urban memorials were conducted.

My intention in conducting this research endeavor is to satisfy the requirements of earning a Master of Art degree in the Department of History at the University of Central Florida. My research aim has been to examine literature written from the 1930's through 2006 which chronicles the lives of Jewish and Gentile German men, women, and children living under Nazism during the years 1933-1945. I was particularly interested and hopeful in discovering the various ways in which young German females were affected by the introduction and spread of Nazi ideology. My main goal was to sort through the features of everyday life to extricate the often subtle ways Germans rebuffed conformity to Nazism. And as the research commenced, it became increasingly necessary to acknowledge and distinguish the ongoing historical debate about what aspects of non-conformity are acceptably considered "resistance" among contemporary historians also analyzing this period. The original research questions I hoped to address and discuss were firstly these; Upon the arrival of Nazism on the heels of the Weimar Republic, how was Nazism received by German citizens; secondly, once Nazism gathered a contingent of strong support, what avenues existed for those opposed to Nazism?; and thirdly, in what ways did opposition, resistance, and non-conformance to Nazism manifest itself? This examination focused singly on efforts and motivations of German citizens within Germany, to illuminate reactions and actions of women and children; whether Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic because I feel their stories are often over-looked as being insignificant. This study further recognizes the contributions and great courage which manifest when faced with Hitler's totalitarian regime.

This dissertation examines the ethical systems created in response to the crisis of the Holocaust by Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein. Prior to the Holocaust, European Jewish philosophers grounded ethics in traditional metaphysics. Unlike their predecessors, Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein all make ethics "first philosophy" by grounding ethics in the temporal experience of suffering rather than ontology or theology, deliberately rejecting ethical views rooted in traditional metaphysical claims. With varying degrees of success, they all employ Jewish texts and traditions to do so. Their applications of Jewish sources are both orthodox and innovative, and show how philosophical approaches to ethics can benefit from religion. Suffering becomes not only the first priority of ethics, but an experience that simultaneously necessitates and activates ethical response. According to this view, human beings are not blank slates whose values are informed exclusively by culture and moral instruction alone; nor is human consciousness awakened or even primarily constituted by reason, as argued by deontologists. Rather, consciousness is characterized by affectivity and sensibility as interconnected faculties working in concert to create ethical response. This dissertation argues that if what makes ethical response possible is located in human consciousness rather than in metaphysics or culture, a re-orientation of philosophy toward the investigation of human affectivity and its role in ethical response is in order. All three thinkers examined actively resist categorization and repudiate claims that a single philosophical system can be successfully applied to all aspects of life, and this dissertation does not choose one of the three projects examined here as the most persuasive or significant. Instead, it explores how the work of Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein might be combined, built upon and expanded to form an ethics that is deeply informed by human experience and makes human and non-human suffering our greatest priorities.

This thesis analyses the texts and audio-files of the exhibitions of the Dutch memorial museums about the Second World War to understand how perpetrators have been represented. In a social constructionist approach on cultural memory and heritage it can be argued that memorial museums are institutions which partake in the processes of cultural memory and heritage during which a reconstruction of the past is developed which can be connected to the values of the current society. Cultural memory and heritage provide a shared past for the community and a connection between the past, present, and future. The aim is to find out who is represented, how they are represented, and how their narrative relates to Dutch memory culture. This has been done through an analysis of the texts of the exhibition using Fairclough’s three dimensional model for Critical Discourse Analysis.It can be concluded that the narrative of the perpetrators in the Netherlands has hardly changed since the exhibitions still represent the stereotypical German, high-ranking, and/or violent perpetrators. However, the exhibitions do focus on local perpetrators rather than the elite in Germany, they include women as perpetrators, and present the perpetrators as ordinary people who became perpetrators due to a variety of social, cultural, and mental factors. Additionally, the exhibitions indicate that individuals, including perpetrators, cannot be either ‘good’ or ‘evil’ but should be analysed individually to understand the positive and negative consequences of their choices and actions. Nonetheless, more Dutch perpetrators, lower-ranking individuals, and guards who tried to help the prisoners need to be represented to provide a more complete image of the perpetrators and to represent a more nuanced narrative where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Additionally, the variety of reasons that turned regular people into perpetrators could be better explored through a more diverse group of perpetrators. Finally, within the context of moral consciousness, active citizenship, and reflection, the portrayal of the different choices made by the different perpetrators and the effect these had would be valuable cases of reflection for the visitor.

Like many before, this thesis uses the tragedy of the Holocaust as a historical comparison to an event occurring today, mainly in the Xinjiang region of the People’s Republic of China. Many historians have argued that comparisons to the Holocaust should be academically or intellectually prohibited. Many have stated that such an effort could minimize the perceived severity of or unintentionally raise other events to the level of the Jewish genocide. However, such comparisons should be permitted and are necessary to help prevent a similar atrocity from ever occurring again. There is much to be learned from Nazi policy and ideology that may be used to aid genocide prevention. Thus, this paper will discuss how policies or actions within two cases may be similar or different via comparative analysis. Such a discussion will be approached by examining basic principles of Nazi ideology and directly comparing them to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. The secondary portion of this research will evaluate a direct comparison of the policies of Nazi Germany and the People’s Republic of China regarding the respective minorities in question. Furthermore, this piece's preliminary assumption is that the two cases will be vastly different. Like many complex cases throughout history, few show literal parallels- especially those birthing from different cultures and spanning separate eras. This thesis fundamentally tackles the uncertainty of dissimilarity between the two cases aforementioned.

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