SEMO professor to study Holocaust at D.C. museum

Southeast Missouri State University political science professor Dr. Mitchel Gerber created a class on the Holocaust six years ago. Today, he's still teaching the class, trying to convey the horrors of the Nazi regime and explore why so many people turned a blind eye to the atrocities.

"I have a passion for teaching the Holocaust," said Gerber, one of 20 college professors from across the nation who will attend a weeklong seminar next month at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The participants are from a number of academic disciplines. Gerber is the only political science professor in the group.

The seminar starts Jan. 5.

Gerber said there's a lot to learn from studying the Holocaust, the Nazis' systematic persecution and extermination of 6 million Jews.

"I think a course in the Holocaust teaches ethical, moral and political issues," he said Tuesday.

It's also important to study the Holocaust in an effort to prevent future genocide across the globe, he said.

The upcoming seminar will be conducted by two leading professors on the history of the Holocaust in France, an issue that intrigues Gerber. The seminar, he said, will focus partly on the Vichy government in France that cooperated with the Nazis.

"On one hand, France has a very liberal, progressive, revolutionary past," he said. But the nation has a conservative past too which at times has translated into anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant views.

"It has kind of this intellectual civil war," said Gerber, who recently was named member of the year for 2004 by the National Social Science Association.

Ironically, France rounded up many German and Austrian Jews at the start of World War II. "They thought they would be spies for Nazi Germany," Gerber said.

Gerber has long studied the testimony of Holocaust survivors and said such accounts give hard evidence of the deadly actions as well as allow people to come to grips with the mind-numbing statistics.

"You have to put it in humanistic, personal terms," he said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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