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Research Guides

History 83A/183A: Enlightenment and Genocide (Winter 2022)

By: Simon Ertz

Welcome!

In this guide, you'll find information on how to access our collections related to the course's topic. 

For Stanford students in this class: please see the tab on the left "Accessing Collections" on Aeon registration and requesting items.

NOTE: Once you've created an Aeon account, please fill out this form to reserve a seat in the reading room. 

Sources for the Class Visit

Archival Collections:

Hidayet Dağdeviren collection: includes correspondence, memoranda, reports, proclamations, speeches, clippings, newspaper issues, maps, posters, and photographs, relating to political and social conditions in Turkey during the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic, Turkish military activities during World War I, Turkish foreign relations, and ethnic minorities in Turkey.

  • Box/Folder 3 : 3-6 - D19. Greco-Turkish War of 1897, clippings, maps and posters circa 1897

  • Box/Folder 3 : 9-12 - D24. Jewish authors, clippings 1909-1913

  • Box/Folder 6 : 3-8 - D39. Occupation of Istanbul during truce, clippings, newspapers, pamphlets, and maps 1919-1923

  • Box/Folder 6 : 9-13 - D41. Occupation of Izmir and Bursa during truce, newspapers, clippings, pamphlets, and notes 1921-1922, 1938

  • Box/Folder 18 : 1-4 - D140. D142. Armenian question, clippings, pamphlets, letters, and reports 1797-1925

  • Box 26 - AII.3b 1914-1919 - Türk varliği, nos. 24, 25, and 27, lithographed prisoners of war journal, Cairo 1336 (1919)

  • Box 26 - AII.4 1919-1920 - Sultan Vahdettin speech, Yirminci Asir August 1919

  • Box 26 - B.I.1 1914-1923 - Death sentence against Atatürk by the Istanbul government, Ikdam, article 13 May 1920

  • Box 27 - C.I.2-7 1797-1914 

Petition presented by the Delegation of the gouvernment [!] of the white Ruthenian Democratic Republic [to] the Peace Conference, Paris, May, 1919

Hoover Library items on display which we did discuss:

USSR/Industrialization: USSR in Construction (1930-1940, 1949) – Large-format illustrated monthly with photographs, many by noted Soviet photographers, each number devoted to one specific theme/project related to Soviet industrialization and economic development. Under a separate SearchWorks entry, you can also order some issues in French. This one-volume Russian-language publication, available at Green Library, contains reproductions of a (small) part of the visuals from different numbers.

USSR/1930s Famine: Laubenheimer, Alfred. Die Sowjetunion am Abgrund! (1933) [The Soviet Union on the Precipice!] – report on famine in Soviet Union/Ukraine by German engineer and eyewitness, in German but captions to photographs in German, English, and French.

USSR/Forced Labor (GULAG): Maksim Gorkii et al. Belomorsko-baltĭiskiĭ kanal imeni Stalina; istorii͡a stroitel'stva (1934) [The White Sea-Baltic Canal in the name of Stalin: the History of its Construction] – original edition of the (in)famous, collectively authored propaganda volume on the superiority of the Soviet system of “corrective labor” on the example of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. Multiple photographs. Also available: English-language edition with, however, partially changed and shortened text and far fewer photographs.

USSR/Forced Labor (GULAG): Greife, Hermann. Zwangsarbeit in der Sowjetunion (1936) [Forced Labor in the Soviet Union] – brochure on forced labor in Stalinist camps. Uses pictures from Gorkii et al., Belomorsko-baltiiskii... (cf. volume above), and embeds them in fiercely anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic narrative. Appeared in series of anti-Bolshevik publications published by “Institute on the Scholarly Research on the Soviet Union” in Berlin. In German.

Germany/National Socialism: Ideology: Der Völkische Sprechabend (The Volkish Soirée) -- Subscription-based series of programmatic essays on major themes of the ideas and programmatic principles of the "Nazi Movement," started 1924. Issues on "Racial Question," "The War Guilt Lie," "The Jewish Question," "Bolshevism," etc. In German.

Archival Collection:

USSR/Forced Labor (GULAG): Thomas Sgovio papers - Contain memoir relating to imprisonment in Soviet forced labor camps; photocopies of Soviet arrest records and summaries of judicial proceedings, and of United States Federal Bureau of Investigation reports on interviews after repatriation; and 44 original paintings and drawings depicting living and working conditions in Soviet forced labor camps at Kolyma (Far East). Box 2 contains color photographs of oil paintings, box 1 contains original drawings and can be shown under supervision.

Library items on display which we didn't get to discuss but might be interesting to look at:

USSR/Forced Labor (GULAG): American Federation of Labor, Free Trade Union Committee. Slave Labor in the Soviet World (1951?) – includes historical overview, reproductions and partial translations of original documents smuggled out of Soviet Union, map showing the dislocation of camps, and references to contemporary literature and testimonies.

Nazi Germany/Persecution of Jews 1933-35: The Yellow spot: the outlawing of half a million human beings: a collection of facts and documents relating to three years' persecution of German Jews: derived chiefly from National Socialist sources, very carefully assembled by a group of investigators. Comprehensive documentation of persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany in the years 1933-late 1935 (i.e., post Nuremberg Decrees, but before November 1938 pogrom). Trying to cover all aspects: includes photographs and reproductions of posters, announcements, newspaper articles, etc. The title on the cover page included the word "extermination." Also in our collection: German edition, published in Paris 1936, with foreword by Lion Feuchtwanger, German-Jewish novelist in French exile.

Nazi Germany/Youth Organization (Boys): Pimpf im Dienst: ein Handbuch für das deutsche Jungvolk in der HJ ("Boy in Service: A Handbook for the Younger Cohorts in the Hitler Youth"), 1934. Includes instructions for physical activities: gymnastics, throwing cudgels (or hand grenades?), games, track & field, swimming… but also: marching, discipline, orientation in terrain, camouflaging, shooting air rifles, camping. In German, but with illustrations.

Nazi Germany/Youth Organization (Girls): BDM in Bamberg (BDM=Bund Deutscher Mädel=League of German Girls/Maiden) 1936. Photographic documentation of a trip of a delegation of the BDM to the Nazi Party Congress (open-air mass festival) in Nuremberg in 1936. In German, but with photographs.

Nazi Germany/Propaganda for Welfare State: Der Aufbau der nationalsozialistischen Volkswohlfahrt: Leistungsbericht zur Zehnjahresfeier des Gaues Moselland (1941?) Coffee table book  celebrating the work of the State Welfare Organization in one German region. Photographs show offices set up to help mothers and housewives lead their households; a resort for mothers to recover with their children, etc. Welfare presented as a gift of the party state that cares for the well-being and health of the German people; traditional gender roles, encouraging childbearing and stay-at-home mothers. In German, but with photographs.

Nazi Germany/Illustrated Propaganda volume on Race (1942): Der Untermensch (The Subhuman), published by SS Headquarters [our copy=photocopies of the original, but original size]. Was not widely used for population but intended for instruction of SS personnel. Major theme: unbridgeable gap between "higher" and "lower" races, East and West. Fertile lands of the East: neglected b/c of lack of culture of Eastern “subhumans.” Not "subhuman:" Germans, but also people of Germany's war allies (Italy, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria). People in the East/Soviet Union: "subhumans," but simultaneously also victims of dreadful crimes committed by Soviet system which is ruled by ultimate "subhuman:" "The Jew." Text in German. Small digital images of all pages, with (imperfect) translations into English, can be found here.

Nazi Germany/WW2/Extermination of Polish Jews, album of pictures (1945). Annotated photo album on the Holocaust in Poland, published by Central Jewish Historical Committee in Łódź (Lodz). The Polish Jewish Historical Committee began to collect documentation on the Holocaust already in late 1944, trying to gather all evidence it could get hold of, including photographs. Presentation follows sequence of events of Holocaust as later identified by Raul Hilberg: Definition / Expropriation / Concentration / Annihilation. Pictures show rounding up, expropriation, public humiliation, torture, massacres, death by bullets, death by gas, corpses. Includes disturbing pictures. All pictures with captions/identification. In five languages: Polish, Russian, French, English, Hebrew.

 

Posters (just some examples out of thousands...):

RU/SU 2283 - ... Desiat' zapovedei proletaria. Tovarishch-rabochii! Ne dai Kolchaku, Denikinu, Mannergeimu zadushit' tvoei vlasti ... Pushche glaza beregi vintovku...Bud' kazhduiu minutu na cheku...

RU/SU 531- Bezgramotnye ... Gramotnye...

RU/SU 1317 - Negramotnyi tot zhe slepoi vsiudu ego zhdut neudachi i neschast'ia.

GE 1695 - ... Wer rettet uns vor Hitler und seinen Parteibuchbeamten? Nur Hindenburg!