Gain insight into the devastating poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness experienced by Germans during the Great Depression.
Gain insight into the devastating poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness experienced by Germans during the Great Depression.
Explore the role that secrecy and fear play in mob violence with W. E. B. Du Bois’ analysis of the Ku Klux Klan’s power.
Learn about the non-aggression pact forged by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, the pact’s secret clauses, and the role of propaganda.
John H. D. Rabe’s story presents a paradox. He is remembered as a great humanitarian despite remaining a loyal member of the Nazi Party. Born in 1882 in Hamburg, Germany, Rabe first came to Shanghai in 1908. He began working for the Chinese branch of the Siemens Company in 1911 and 20 years later in 1931 transferred to Nanjing and served as director of the Siemens branch office with his wife and two children. Siemens was largely responsible for building the Nanjing telephone lines and supplying turbines for the electrical plant and equipment for the city’s hospitals.
Author Lori Duron writes about how her young son C.J.’s identity defies the expectations others have of him because of his gender.
Consider how nations around the world responded to the Jewish refugee crisis created by Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria.
Learn about the memo that urged President Roosevelt to step up US efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazis, and led him to establish the War Refugee Board.
James Lusk, a white man from Alabama, abandoned the Republican Party in 1874. He gave this explanation to a former political associate, noting that "no white man can live in the South in the future and act with any other than the Democratic party unless he is willing and prepared to live a life of social isolation and remain in political oblivion...the die is cast."
Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz', a German diplomat stationed in the capital of Copenhagen, alerted both the Jewish community and the Danish underground of the coming roundup. As a result, most of the Danish Jews went into hiding and were transported to Sweden, where they were cared for thanks to Duckwitz’s diplomacy.
Between 1940 and 1941, American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, stationed in Marseille, France, helped as many as 2,500 Jews escape Nazi persecution by defying United States policies and issuing hundreds of immigration papers.
Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat stationed in the Lithuanian prewar capital of Kaunas (Kovno) in the summer of 1940. In defiance of his superiors, Sugihara decided to provide transit visas to thousands of Jews who had escaped German persecution in Poland. Many of them used this opportunity to flee Europe into safety.
Turkish ambassador to Rhodes, Selahattin Ülkümen used a tenuous alliance, knowledge of Turkish law, and his skill at negotiating to protect and ultimately rescue some of the Jews on this small island.