World War II Archives - Page 2 of 5

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

Good historians keep an open mind when doing archival research. Our reading of the relevant literature, not to mention the preliminary research we conduct, provides a general understanding of our topic, but we have to prepare ourselves for surprises. This is the most exciting part of research — examining documents no one has seen and making connections others have not made. Research has a funny way of bringing the unforeseeable into one’s life, though.

green_repository_at_the_national_archives

National Archives (via Wikimedia Commons).

There was little reason I should have anticipated coming across Hitler in my research. I am a historian of the United States and my dissertation examines the history of sexual orientation change therapies from the Second World War into the twenty-first century. A wide-range of stakeholders have practiced, sought out, been forced to undergo, and challenged the ethics of therapeutic practices aimed at changing a person’s homosexuality. Needless to say, researching this topic has brought me into contact with some disturbing history. This has included graphic descriptions of men and women being electrocuted or even lobotomized because of their sexual orientation. I expected to come across these accounts in the archives. They are an integral part of the history I want to tell. Hitler was a different story.

I first came across the infamous German dictator while conducting research in the Special Collections at the University of North Texas. I was going through an extensive LGBT collection and came to a folder devoted to Paul Cameron. In the 1980s, Cameron earned acclaim for being expelled from the American Psychological Association (APA). The reason? He falsified data in order to push an anti-gay agenda. After being expelled from the APA, Cameron doubled his efforts to discredit LGBT activists by continuing to conduct and disseminate research. This included a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.” Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

Envelope from a promotional Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality mailing (via UNT Digital Library).

In “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality,” ISIS included a section with the title “German History Repeats Itself in the U.S.” According to the pamphlet, “gays [in 1920s and 1930s Germany] were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).” The pamphlet continues: “Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe.”

(via Wikimedia Commons)

I had no clue what to think when I first read these sentences. Did I not pay attention in my world history courses? Were my teachers and professors woefully ignorant of the past? I sent pictures of the pamphlet to colleagues who know German history much better than I do. We were all confused. Despite this confusion, I knew that I would not be free from Hitler.

I was proven correct repeatedly as I conducted research at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville. In 1993, Cameron’s organization, now called the Family Research Institute, sent out a newsletter with an article that asked, “Was the Young Hitler a Homosexual Prostitute?” The authors pointed to Samuel Igra’s 1945 work, Germany’s National Vice, as evidence that Hitler was a homosexual artist before rising to power. Other publications, including Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams’ The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995), give the same warning: the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals who desired a fascistic takeover of their country. Importantly for my research, proponents of sexual orientation change therapies have referred to not only Cameron’s pamphlets but also the works of Igra and Lively and Abrams. If I truly want to understand the intellectual rationale for sexual orientation change therapies, I had to know how and why someone would want to believe that the Nazis were a bunch of homosexuals. But first, I needed to see if there was any historical basis for these accusations.

Nürnberg, Reichsparteitag 1933. Adolf Hitler und Stabschef Röhm.

Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Research into the history of Nazism brought me to Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA. Röhm, who had convinced Hitler of his political potential in 1919, was homosexual, a fact that Hitler knew about his political and military subordinate. Over the next fifteen years, Hitler and Röhm worked closely as they grew the Nazi Party. Although Röhm and a few other SA leaders were open about their homosexuality, their rise to power was not due to their sexual orientation. What’s more clear, however, is that the downfall of Röhm and the SA prefaced the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. In 1934, Hitler, with the help of other aides (like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler), orchestrated the arrest of Röhm and other SA leaders because the latter challenged Hitler’s authority. After Röhm was murdered in his prison cell (Hitler gave him the option of taking his own life, which he refused to do), homosexuals became a group targeted by the Nazis. A pink triangle, not a pink swastika, soon singled out (mostly) homosexual males in concentration camps.

Although I was not prepared to find Hitler in the archives, it is clear that people like Cameron had easy-to-discern motivations. They were able to use parts of the past, even if they took liberties with what had happened, to discredit LGBT activists and claims for equality. What better way to do this than compare them to the Nazis?

More by Christopher Babits on Not Even Past:
Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy
Review of The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

An Apology for Propaganda

By David Rahimi

Writing in the middle of World War II, Freya Stark, a well-known British explorer and Arabist working for the Ministry of Information in the Middle East, penned an unpublished – and ultimately unfinished – twenty-five page essay, which she entitled Apology for Propaganda. When we think of government propaganda, we typically think of faceless bureaucrats churning out sensationalized banners, radio broadcasts, and reports about victories, the enemies’ lies, and various kinds of disinformation. Stark’s Apology, however, provides a unique glimpse into how propagandists justified and viewed their own work in a critically self-conscious manner. On a larger scale, the manuscript reflects on an intimate level the dynamics of British colonial thought, particularly a steadfast belief in the nobility of Britain’s colonial “civilizing mission.” Stark’s Apology not only reflects an available theory of propaganda discussed within the Ministry of Information, but also the persistent belief that, despite any shortcomings, imperialism was really benevolent for Arab colonial subjects.

Freya Stark (via Alchetron).

By her thirties, Freya Stark (1893-1993), an impulsive British explorer of the Near East, developed a romanticized and idealistic obsession with the Arab world and Persia in the same vein as T.E. Lawrence, whom she much admired. She traveled among the Druze, explored Luristan and the hideout of the fabled Assassins at Alamut, and wrote extensively about her travels in Baghdad, Yemen, Arabia, and other parts of the Middle East. When WWII began, Stark volunteered to serve in the British war effort and she was assigned to the Ministry of Information where her linguistic and literary talents were well-suited.

Stark likely wrote this piece sometime between October 1943 and May 1944, while traveling in America on an official diplomatic tour to clarify the British position on the Zionist question. Ultimately, it seems the decision was made not to publish the Apology because Stark’s boss, Stewart Perowne, thought it was too revealing about British intelligence efforts in Egypt and Iraq in the still ongoing war.

British WWII propaganda after Mussolini’s unsuccessful invasion of Egypt in 1942. The poster depicts captured Italian troops entering Cairo under British guard (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark begins the essay by arguing that propaganda fundamentally deals with the “originating and spreading of ideas.” However, propaganda has two distinct meanings: (1) the propagation of a “gospel” or firmly held set of beliefs, and (2) deceitful information. Both grew out of the Jesuit tradition, with the former being an innocent form of “persuasion,” while the latter took form as people associated the Jesuits with “unscrupulous subtlety.” Persuasion meant simply to truthfully present one’s beliefs in a dialogue (“two-way traffic”) with the target audience, making use of slogans and positive statements. Stark firmly believed the government should wholeheartedly embrace this kind of propaganda, since ideas “are as potent as drugs.” Indeed, there is a “duty” to firmly explain the British and Allied cause when they feel confident of the justice and necessity to prevent others from heading over a “precipice.” For Stark, this was connected to her firm belief that the “British desire to encourage freedom in the Arab world is perfectly sincere.” Justifiable propaganda could only be that which worked for the good of the audience, in this case the Arabs. On the other hand, Stark thought that bribing and trickery were repugnant as well as ineffective means of persuasion, and cooperation with Arabs was necessary, since the most persuasive formulations of secular democratic ideals could only be expressed in Arabic by other Arabs and not through translation.

North Africa and the Middle East in 1940 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark then moved from these ideas to show how she tried to implement them in her Ikhwan al-Hurriya (Brotherhood of Freedom), an anti-fascist group in Egypt and Iraq. Based on the organizational examples set by the Bolsheviks and Muslim Brotherhood, this project consisted of a diffused network of loose cells, where British and Arab members could discuss the democratic principles that they shared. She writes that, despite some initial difficulties, the British-inspired Brotherhood garnered about 40,000 members throughout the Middle East at its peak. The British authorities were highly appreciative of this effort, though despite Stark’s high hopes, the organization was officially outlawed in Egypt in 1952.

A chief reason for this was the contradiction within the Brotherhood about politics. Stark envisioned it as an apolitical group and so had to turn several “good men” away in Iraq because of their interest in politics. However, an organization that was ostensibly meant to promote democratic principles could not help but be political in a colonial environment. Stark was happy that there were young Arab men who were receptive to the British message, but she seemed to think that this could be conducted on British terms without raising political questions about Britain’s decidedly undemocratic role. Stark easily mistakes the friendships she formed and admiration for democratic ideas she found with an overall positive disposition to British colonialism. Furthermore, there is no mention of the popularity of Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-British efforts or how Ambassador Miles Lampson’s use of tanks on February 4, 1942 to compel King Farouk to accept the Egyptian nationalist Wafd Party into the government led to the discrediting of the king, the Wafd, and parliamentary democracy as mere British tools. The enormous popularity of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist and authoritarian government beginning in the 1950s also belies Stark’s overly enthusiastic tone in the manuscript. Unlike T.E. Lawrence, who had seen Britain renege on its promises at Versailles after WWI, Stark believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the British imperial project and whatever did not fit in with this image she discounted as an aberration or simple mistake.

Nasser and the Free Officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, marking the decline of British influence in Egypt (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark’s unpublished Apology shows us how some British propagandists in the Middle East theater of WWII conceived of their roles as good-natured persuaders. They were not oblivious to accusations of cynical propaganda and Stark’s essay shows a conscious effort to articulate a morally acceptable form of propaganda that could serve British and Arab interests, in that order. Stark reflects a strain of British colonial thought that, while sympathetic to Arabs, still thought that British dominance was a guiding hand that benevolently, yet condescendingly, treated colonial subjects as paternalistic clients.

Freya Stark’s “Apology for Propaganda,” can be found in handwritten and typescript drafts, Container 1.3. Freya Stark Collection 1893-1993 (bulk 1920-1976). Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin.

Additional sources:
William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East (2009)
Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (1999).
Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller, “Freya Stark in America: Orientalism, Antisemitism and Political Propaganda,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, 3 (July, 2004): 315-332
Temple Wilcox, “Towards a Ministry of Information,” History 69, 227 (1984): 398-414

More by David Rahimi on Not Even Past:
Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)

You may also like:
Emily Whalen recommends A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, by John E. Mack (1976).
Ogechukwu Ezekwem reviews The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, by Frederick John Dealtry Lugard (1965).

Great Books on Women’s History: Crossing Borders

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books on women and gender for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month.

A number of people suggested books about crossing borders: about people traveling or emigrating to countries foreign to them or about people creating new hybrid identities in the places they lived. Since they don’t fit into our usual geographical categories –and raise interesting questions about those categories — we are lumping them together here in Crossing Borders.

Madeline Hsu recommends:

Emma Teng, Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong (2013)

Teng traces mixed race Chinese-white families in a number of societies and political and social circumstances to complicate presumptions about racial hierarchies and the porosity of racial border-keeping in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By tracking mobilities through north America, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Teng demonstrates that intermarriages occurred at higher rates than previously acknowledged, and that intermarriage with Chinese could be vehicles for upward, and not just downward, mobility depending on local circumstances.

Sam Vong recommends:

Lynn Fujiwara, Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (2008)

Fujiwara’s study uncovers the detrimental effects that welfare reform in the 1990s had on immigrant women, particularly President Clinton’s authorization of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 that aimed to end welfare programs. This book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways welfare reform policies redefined immigrants as outsiders and how immigrant women resisted these attempts at denying their claims to U.S. citizenship and belonging.

Michael Stoff recommends:

Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation

I’ve used this book in classes and like it a great deal. Here’s a blurb from Cornell University Press:

“In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the “New Womanhood.” She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers’ unions.”

Jeremi Suri recommends:

Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (2014).

This deeply researched book artfully examines the interaction of race, sex, and gender in the conduct of American soldiers stationed in France and their interactions with French civilians during World War II.

Lina del Castillo recommends:

Magical sites: Women Travelers in 19th century Latin America, edited by Marjorie Agonsin and Julie Levison

This collection brings together several travel narratives written by women brave enough (and wealthy and educated enough) to travel through different parts of Latin America. Some of these writers, like Mary Caldecott Graham and Flora Tristan, found a measure of liberation from a feminine imperial mindset that justified their prescriptions for reform of the societies they encountered. Others, like Nancy Gardner Prince (a free born African American woman who traveled to Jamaica and Russia) tell their experiences from very different perspectives. The narratives these women wrote about the places they moved through show them as women who both threw off the chains of domesticity and convention and nevertheless, were in many ways still bound by them.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family. Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg. And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving. Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends:

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War. Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18. The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict. It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism. I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends:

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back. Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

Photographing the German Air War, 1939-1945

During World War II, thousands of German “Propaganda Company” (PK) photographers took at least three and a half million pictures of every front on which the Germans were fighting. Hundreds of these photographs were published in mass circulation illustrated magazines and newspapers and seen by millions of readers. These images helped in significant ways to shape the way that Germans and Europeans saw the war between 1939 and 1945 and also to affect the visual memory of World War II up to the present day.

Benno Wundshammer (1913-1987) was one of these PK photographers. During World War II he was attached to the German Luftwaffe. He took photographs on almost all of the fronts—Poland, France, the Balkans, Russia, North Africa, Italy—where the German army fought. After 1945, he acknowledged that his images had often been used in the service of Nazi propaganda but dcnied that this had anything to do with their innate qualities. Wundshammer depicted himself as a craftsman intent only upon taking “good” pictures of the air-war. Yet it was this same self-image as a skilled practitioner of his craft, relentlessly searching for the “best” pictures of the war, that made Wundshammer so valuable to the Nazi regime. His pride in his work prevented him from ever questioning the job he was being asked to do. Nor were any of the photographs that Wundshammer submitted for publication seriously at odds with the visual needs of the Nazi regime.

Benno Wundshammer’s photograph of the pilot sitting in the cockpit of a Messerschmidt ME 110, May,1940 (Scherl Bilderdienst 4515)

Wundshammer was well-placed to take photographs of one of the central components and key emblems of Hitler’s new devastating Blitzkrieg—German warplanes, especially the Stuka dive bomber. He quickly discovered, however, that considerable difficulties confronted any photographer who wanted to take “good” pictures of the most dangerous moments of combat in the air. The central dilemma confronting the photographer was that the most dramatic moments of combat in the air which would have produced the best pictures were also the most dangerous. During combat in the air, the photographer had to man his machine gun because every single weapon on board had to be fired at the enemy. Sheer luck, as well as the photographer’s ability and experience, would determine whether he would be able to take any photographs while also shooting at the enemy. Confronted with the formidable difficulties of taking “good” pictures from a fast-moving plane, Wundshammer came to the conclusion that photographs alone could not show what he had experienced during an air battle; he would also have to write about it afterwards. In 1941, Wundshammer published Flyers-Knights-Heroes.With the Shark Squadron in France and other Reports of Combat. The book was produced by Verlag G. Bertelsmann in Gütersloh, a firm that made a great deal of money under the Nazis publishing very popular “war books.”

Wundshammer’s experience reminds us that what we remember visually as war depends not only upon what we can see in war photographs but also upon what these photographs do not, cannot, or will not show us.

Student Showcase – From the Ashes: MacArthur’s Responsibility for Rebuilding Japan

Jake Manlove
Rockport-Fulton Middle School
Junior Division
Individual Performance

Read Jake’s Process Paper

General Douglas MacArthur was a giant of the 20th-century world. After successfully leading Allied troops to victory in the Pacific, he oversaw the post-war occupation of Japan, a time of astonishing political, economic and social change across the country. But what kind of man was he? For Texas History Day, Jake Manlove researched the life and work of General MacArthur. But he also wanted to understand how this iconic American dressed and acted in daily life. Read about the work Jake did for his performance project:

Douglas MacArthur, 1945 (U.S. National Archives)

I wanted to do a performance because I have done performances for the past two years and liked working with props and costumes. l decided to portray General Douglas MacArthur, since he was Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) and was the center of reforms undertaken in post-war Japan. I wanted my props to be historically accurate. My research on MacArthur’s uniform led to reenactment pieces purchased on EBay including an accurate hat and pipe. I was inspired to use a slide projector after l found unpublished photos taken in Japan by MacArthur’s personal driver at the Texas Tech University Library. I feel that the photos represent key points of the rebuilding and provide a unique perspective to my performance.

MacArthur signs the Japanese surrender document aboard the USS Missouri (National Archives and Records Administration)

MacArthur’s responsibility for rebuilding Japan fits the theme of Rights and Responsibilities in several aspects. President Truman accepted responsibility for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. General MacArthur thought that violated the rights of Japanese women and children who were not soldiers, which addresses actions that are issues of morality. MacArthur also accepted responsibility for reconstructing Japan and created the new Japanese Constitution to guarantee the democratic rights of Japanese citizens after the occupation ended. MacArthur taking responsibility for Truman’s destruction of Japan helped them not only recover but prosper over the years.

Catch up on more remarkable THD projects:

A performance on the Orwellian reign of Joseph Stalin

A website on the global influence of one man’s non-violent philosophy

The story of “America’s Dirty Little Secret”

Student Showcase – Individual Rights vs. Medical Responsibility: Human Experimentation in the Name of Science

Jonathan Celaya
Alpine High School
Senior Division
Historical Paper

Read Jonathan’s Paper

Today we take vaccinations for destructive illnesses like Yellow Fever and Smallpox for granted. But what many of us don’t realize is the human toll that accompanied the discovery of these miracle drugs.

Jonathan Celaya of Alpine High School wrote a research paper for Texas History Day examining the delicate balance between the private rights of patients and the public responsibilities of physicians and scientists in the history of medicine and disease control. He argues that all too often one must come at the expense of the other:

Components of a modern smallpox vaccination kit including the diluent, a vial of Dryvax vaccinia vaccine, and a bifurcated needle (CDC)

From the earliest medicinal discoveries and treatments, the physician has had ultimate authority on what to administer to a patient. It was not until the technological revolution in the mid-1960s when medical experiments were conducted to discover new treatments and technologies to potentially benefit patients. These experiments and their results soon raised ethical issues. Often the subjects of the experimentation and the recipients of newly discovered treatments were unwilling participants. In some cases, these patients died after being forced to undergo such experimental procedures. There were no guidelines in the Oath on these matters, so a new principle had to be established. This principle became known as “informed consent,”meaning that the potential subject or patient was entitled to all information about his situation in order to decide what was best for him or herself.

An 1802 cartoon of the early controversy surrounding Edward Jenner’s vaccination theory, showing using his cowpox-derived smallpox vaccine causing cattle to emerge from patients (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-3147)

Therefore, the responsibility of the medical profession to act in the best interests of their patients dictated a new solution was needed. Edward Jenner discovered it by forcibly injecting the son of one of his servants with cowpox, a disease similar to smallpox, but found only in cows, to see if he would become immune to smallpox. Although the procedure provided excellent protection to the few private parties and physicians who utilized it was at first widely ignored. As other people began to try the procedure at Jenner’s urging, however, they found the results of the vaccination were far better than those of inoculation. Thomas Jefferson was among these skeptics and experimented with the new vaccination upon his slaves before accepting vaccination on his family. By today’s standards, the vaccination experiments conducted by Jenner as a scientist and Jefferson and other civilians were immoral due to the lack of subjects’ informed consent, although no such principle existed at the time. Either way, they provided the world a gift of limitless value.

Catch up on the latest Texas History Day projects:

A website on the benefits and perils associated with off-shore drilling

A documentary on the draft’s long, controversial history in America

And a story of WWII internment you probably haven’t heard

Student Showcase – Better Safe Than Sorry? Internment of Rights in World War II

Helen Hartman
Rockport Fulton Middle School
Junior Division
Historical Paper

Read Helen’s Paper Here

The internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States during World War II is a familiar story. But did you know that Japanese, German, and Italian families from around Latin America were also deported to the U.S. and held in INS camps? Like the internment of Japanese-Americans, these deportations were intended to secure the Western Hemisphere from potential enemy sympathizers and create leverage for prisoner swaps. Many of these camps were right here in Texas.

Helen Hartman of Rockport Fulton Middle School wrote a research paper for Texas History Day outlining this often forgotten history of extralegal deportment and detention. You can read the full paper by clicking the link above and see an excerpt below:

Rohwer, Arkansas Relocation Camp for Japanese-American detainees

America’s founding fathers defined the rights guaranteed to American citizens in the Bill of Rights, and for over 200 years America has symbolized the “land of the free” both at home and abroad. However, during World War II, the U.S. government established internment camps that usurped the rights of both American citizens and non-citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent in the name of national security. Historians have largely documented the loss of Japanese Americans’ rights in War Relocation Authority Camps, which held people of Japanese ancestry who were removed from the West Coast. However, lesser-known camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), like those in Texas, violated the rights of citizens from both America and Latin America. Groups like the Japanese, with resources and political support, have been able to hold the American government responsible for their loss of rights and have received apologies and compensation. German American and German/Italian Latin American internees, however, have not yet received a formal acknowledgement of their internment or redress from the governments that rescinded their individual rights for the sake of national security.

April 1, 1942 New York Times article describing the American government’s search for enemy alien spies and sympathizers

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor plunged America into World War II and united Americans against their Axis enemies, both at home and abroad. Amid the crisis, the United States government implemented a better safe than sorry policy, interning Japanese, Italian, and German Americans and Latin Americans in the name of wartime responsibility. The American press and most American citizens condoned the process, preferring to intern anyone considered a potential threat to America to omit any possibility that they might assist the enemy. However, this government policy not only violated the Constitutional rights guaranteed to American citizens but also violated international human rights by bringing Latin American citizens into America to barter them in prisoner exchanges.

More great Texas History Day projects:

The story behind a seminal moment in America’s Civil Rights movement

And a look back on one of the most turbulent periods in U.S. history

David’s Mighty Stone: How One Slave Laborer Restored Survivors’ Rights

Kacey Manlove
Rockport Fulton High School
Senior Division
Historical Paper

Read Kacey’s Paper Here

Nazi Germany was not only responsible for death and violence across Europe. The Third Reich also enslaved millions in their factories. In particular, the German industrial giant I.G. Farben, which produced the Zyklon B that murdered so many during the holocaust, enslaved thousands in order to make its deadly products. But after the war’s conclusion, Norbert Wollheim, formerly an enslaved laborer for I.G. Farben, demanded reparations–both financial and moral–for his country’s use of slavery.

Kacey Manlove, a student at Rockport Fulton High School, wrote a research paper for Texas History Day that tells Wollheim’s remarkable story. You can read two excerpts below and open the full paper above.

IG Farben factory near Auschwitz, 1941 (German Federal Archive)

By the time World War II began on September 1, 1939, Hitler had already annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and his army then rapidly advanced through Europe, implementing Anti-Semitic laws and creating pools of available laborers. Farben followed the German army to lay claim to chemical industries in annexed or conquered countries, increasing its holdings and profits five-fold to become the largest chemical company in the world. Hitler’s Reich exclusively utilized Farben’s fuel for armament, its chemicals for medical experiments, and its Zyklon B pesticide for executing prisoners incapable of work. By November 1940, Farben’s quota for synthetic rubber (buna) exceeded what its plants could produce. To satisfy the Reich’s needs, Farben agreed to quickly build two new plants, one an extension of their current plant in Ludwigshaften, Germany, the other in Auschwitz, Poland, home of the Nazi’s largest concentration camp system (appendix D). Farben officials specifically selected the Auschwitz location to use raw materials from the nearby Furstengrube coal mines for energy and existing railways for easy shipping. The Auschwitz camp system also provided access to prisoners whom Farben utilized for slave labor in exchange for a nominal payment to the Schutzstaffel [SS]. Slave laborers built Buna/Monowitz, the first industry-based concentration camp, to accommodate Farben’s needs (appendix E), and by 1945, Farben utilized more than 100,000 slave laborers in its various plants. Nazi Labor General Fritz Sauckel authorized Farben’s employees to exploit prisoners “to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.” After the war, this policy would become the core principle in Norbert Wollheim’s suit against Farben for redress.

Labels taken from canisters of Zyklon B from the Dachau gas chambers (USHMM, courtesy of National Archives)

Norbert Wollheim’s suit and subsequent agreement with German industrial giant I. G. Farben not only reclaimed rights for survivors in Buna/Monowitz but also set a precedent for toppling other German industry giants that had used slave laborers to support Nazi Germany. Governments of both America and the Federal Republic of Germany played critical roles in concluding the reparations process that the Wollheim Agreement had begun. All German firms stipulated that their settlements represented a moral obligation, not an admission of any legal responsibility, but to former slave laborers, the monetary redress they received provided a sense of closure, exemplifying the justice they had been denied at Nuremberg. Against great odds, Wollheim’s civil suit had cast the first stone, defeating an industrial giant. The ripple effect caused by that defeat paved the way for additional settlements that have compensated over 1.6 million former slave laborers for their loss of rights during one of the greatest human rights violations in the twentieth century.

Check out the latest Texas History Day projects at Not Even Past:

O Henry Middle School student Maura Goetzel’s paper on liberty and security in early America

And a group of Westwood High School students’s website on America’s most dangerous moment

Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American

by Madeline Hsu

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today. The author, Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, wrote the cookbook at the urging of fellow faculty wives in New Haven, in particular Agnes Hocking, wife if the idealist philosopher William Hocking. Trained as a physician, Dr. Chao reassured American housewives that she could teach them the complex and exotic art of Chinese cooking because she had learned as an adult herself while a student in Japan.

In addition to providing straightforward and simple directions together with suggestions for obtaining ingredients and alternatives, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese presents its guidance with wit and whimsy provided by Dr. Chao’s husband and translator, the famous linguist Dr. Yuen Ren Chao, who created terms now in common usage such as “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Footnotes add humorous asides that explain family disputes over translations and descriptions for Chinese cultural practices. For example, in the introduction, the language specialist Yuen Ren Chao cannot resist adding a footnote to the otherwise commonplace, “Really, you should not have put yourself to so much trouble!” to explain that this translation is inaccurate because Chinese lacks the “subjunctive perfect.”

Dr. Buwei Yang Chao’s cookbook was so successful that the well-known author, Pearl Buck, who wrote one of its prefaces from the point of view of an American housewife, urged Chao to pen the story of her life. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman appeared in 1947. With great charm, Chao made a persuasive case for the educated, cosmopolitan Chinese family to be accepted as American. The success of Dr. Buwei Chao’s publications bridging Chinese and American peoples underscores the intrinsic relationship between popularizing ethnic food and the assimilation of ethnic and racial minority groups. As Donna Gabaccia wrote in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, after World War II, ethnic foods such as Chinese and Italian, would win broader appreciation as part of a more general expansion of the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society.

User-friendly ethnic cookbooks such as How to Cook and Eat in Chinese brought once alien cultures and foodways directly into the kitchens and homes of Euro Americans. According to Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren, family meal preparation was not only a commonplace form of domestic labor, but one that provides keen insights into broader historical trends. During the Cold War and the Civil Rights era, these shifts emerged in part through the growing popularity of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Dr. Buwei Chao was an early forerunner of the trends that by the late 1960s and early 1970s mobilized leading figures in the food publishing business, such as Judith Jones, Julia Childs’ editor at Knopfand Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, to recruit cooks with ethnic food expertise, personality, and writing ability to introduce general audiences to their cultures.

Jones’ discoveries, sometimes promoted in conjunction with Claiborne, included southern chef, Edna Lewis of Café Nicholson who authored The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) and The Taste of Country Cooking (1976); scholar Claudia Roden and A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968); the late Marcella Hazan and The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973); and restaurant owner Irene Kuo with The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). Claiborne’s entry into the Chinese cookbook field was The Chinese Cookbook (1972) which he co-authored with Virginia Lee. Both Hazan and Lee attracted Jones and Claiborne’s attention when they began offering cooking lessons out of their homes.

America’s immigrant population and the broad acceptance of ethnic cultures and communities have boomed along with the popularity of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, cooking shows, and personalities. For an understanding of the early roots of this business and cultural phenomenon, revisit Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

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