Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Roy Boulting’s Pastor Hall (1940), the British documentary Mein Kampf: My Crimes (1940), as well as the postwar German and Austrian feature films Seven Journeys (1947) and Third Reich, The Trial (1948).
The Millersville University Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide traditionally holds the Aristides de Sousa Mendes Lecture in the memory of one of the Righteous among the Nations, who saved the lives of thousands of people. During World War II Aristides de Sousa Mendes was the Portuguese consul-general in the French city of Bordeaux. He issued visas to Portugal and passports for thousands of refugees (many of whom were Jews) in Nazi-occupied France. This was against the circulars of the Portuguese dictator Antonio de Salazar, who sympathized with the Nazi regime and banned Jews, Russians and other refugees entrance to the country. Susa Mendes was punished for issuing Portuguese visas for refugees: he was suspended from his position for “disobeying higher orders during service." Joël Santoni’s feature film Disobedience: The Sousa Mendes Story (2009) was shown during the conference opening night.
Professor Lawrence Douglas delivered the second keynote speech at the conference, which was based on his recently published book The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press, 2016). In 2009 Lawrence Douglas was sent to Munich by Harper's Magazine to cover the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. In 1975 American investigators received evidence alleging that Demjanjuk, who was a naturalized US citizen, participated in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. He was mistakenly identified as "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland. The Israeli court verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that cast doubt over the identity of "Ivan the Terrible." Demjanjuk was convicted again in 2011 in Germany: he was found guilty in participation in the murder of 28,060 Jews in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland, where he served as a guard. The Demjanjuk trial was the last major Holocaust trial in history.
There were 14 sessions of the conference on Nuremberg and other Holocaust and genocide trials in different countries, on the representation of the Holocaust in literature, television and film, about Holocaust memory and education. Special sessions were devoted to the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor (death by famine) in Ukraine in 1932 -1933 and the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. Many Millersville University students and community members attended the conference. The conference made a valuable contribution to Holocaust and Genocide scholarship and emphasized the importance of humanism, tolerance and justice to the entire audience. The proceedings of the conference will be published next year. For further information about the Millersville University Conferences on the Holocaust and Genocide and the previous conference proceedings please see the conference web site: http://www.millersville.edu/holocon/
Lawrence Baron, San Diego State University, presenting keynote speech 'Kristallnacht on Film: From Reportage to Reenactments, 1938-1948'