UAB | AHEC Kristallnacht Commemorative Lecture

Hans Oppenheimer and Other “Impudent Jews.”
Forgotten Stories of Individual Resistance in Nazi Germany.

Facilitator: Dr. Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History, USC | Founding Director, USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still understood mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in the Nazi occupied East, for example ghetto uprisings or partisan activities. Based on a new approach and new sources, including police and court materials from various German cities and video testimonies of survivors, the talk will introduce Hans Oppenheimer and other resistors, who the Nazis called “Impudent Jews.” The talk will show how between 1933 and 1945 Jewish women and men performed countless acts of resistance in Nazi Germany proper, by destroying Nazi symbols, publicly protesting against the persecution, disobeying Nazi laws and local restrictions, and defending themselves from verbal insults as well as physical attacks. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations and professions defied the Nazis obliterates the common view of passivity on the part of the persecuted. Their courageous acts, however, still need to be incorporated into the general narrative of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in general.