• Why does Taylor argue that passing laws is not enough? What part does enforcement play in creating laws? Find examples in American history or your own experience that shows how enforcement helps to create laws.

• How did the individuals charged at this new trial differ from those charged at the earlier Nuremberg trial? As the power of Nazi officials diminishes does their guilt also diminish?

• According to the superior order principle, a person who commits a crime is not automatically excused by the fact that he obeyed a law, a decree, or an order from a superior. He is only excused if he did not have a moral choice to act differently. The Nuremberg judges did not define moral choice as requiring that one obey a criminal order at the cost of one’s own life. Review Christopher Browning’s description of the Einsatzgruppen in Chapter 7, Reading 3. How were the officers and their men initiated into violence? Did Ohlendorf have a moral choice? What about the other officers? The soldiers?

• Review Hannah Arendt’s comments on thinking in the overview to this chapter. How often does Hoess use some form of the word think? What is the relationship between thoughtlessness and evil-doing?

• What does the word vindictive mean? Was the Treaty of Versailles vindictive? The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk?

• Before the war ended, Woodrow Wilson said, “I am convinced that if this peace is not made on the highest principles of justice, it will be swept away Germany in the 1920s 121 by the peoples of the world in less than a generation.” What is a “just peace”? Why is it difficult to hold on to? What aspects of society work against peace? Why was it so hard to make peace in 1919? To keep the peace? What would it take to achieve a lasting peace today?

• In small groups, evaluate the Treaty of Versailles. What criteria did your group use to make its evaluation? What criteria did the victors use? The Germans? What similarities do you notice? What differences seem most striking?

• Reading 3 described how Erzberger and the other signers of the armistice agreement came to be characterized as the “November criminals” who “stabbed Germany in the back.” How do you think the terms of the treaty affected that view? How does a nation experience shame?

• A democratic leader once said that it is impossible to lead if no one is following. What do you think he was saying about leadership in a democracy? Suppose leaders had put aside their political differences and worked out a treaty based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Would their people have accepted such a treaty?

• Woodrow Wilson believed that the war was caused by “frustrated nationalism.” He maintained that the best way to reduce the chances of another war was through “self-determination.” Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, feared “self-determination” would have the opposite effect. In a letter to Wilson, he asked, “Will it not breed discontent, disorder and rebellion? The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!” What is frustrated nationalism? Self-determination? Was the former the cause of the World War I? Was the latter a way to prevent another war? Support your opinion with evidence from current events.

• Study a map of Europe before and after World War I. List the differences between the two maps. How do you account for differences? To what extent is self-determination reflected in your list of differences?

• The fighting in the Balkans in 1992 prompted columnist A. M. Rosenthal to write, “Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Macedonians, Muslim or Christian, come out of a world where for centuries loyalties were built on the importance of separateness. The separate clan, tribe, family and village gave protection. The histories and fantasies of the individual group gave meaning and texture to life. The separateness created fear of others, which was intensified when the outsider was too close, a neighbor. Leaders used the fears to build their own power – feudal dukes once, now onetime Communist bosses like President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia are building new power on old separations.”9 Are his comments true of world leaders after World War I? Are they true of other leaders in today’s world? What is he suggesting is the proper role of a leader? Do you agree?

• Professor Henry Friedlander argues that the Germans were more disturbed about losing the war than they were about the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. This argument is developed in his videotaped lecture, “The Rise of Nazism,” available from the Facing History Resource Center and summarized in Elements of Time, page 341.

• How important is peer pressure to the way we see ourselves and others? How did Eve Shalen’s need to belong shape her identity? How did it affect the way she responded when another girl was mocked? Why does her response still trouble her? How do you like to think you would have responded to the incident?

• Shalen concludes, “Often being accepted by others is more satisfying than being accepted by oneself, even though the satisfaction does not last.” What does she mean? How is her story like that of the Bear in the bear that wasn’t? How is it different?

• “Hatred begins in the heart and not in the head. In so many instances we do not hate people because of a particular deed, but rather we find that deed ugly because we hate them.”² How do Shalen’s experiences support the statement? What experiences might call the statement into question?

• In Japan, students labeled as “itanshi” – odd or different – are often subject to bullying by classmates. In 1992, the Japanese reported at least thirteen bullying-related murders at junior and senior high schools. “Children bully other children everywhere, of course,” said Masatoshi Fukuda, head of the All-Japan Bullying Prevention Council. “But in Japan it is worse because the system itself seems to encourage the punishment of anyone who does not conform to social norms.” A fifteen-year-old girl, for example, was beaten to death in Toyonaka City after months of enduring insults for wearing hand-me-down public school uniforms. Her assailant told police, “She was an irritation in our faces… she dressed poorly when all other students have new uniforms every year.”³

• What does the girl’s assailant mean when he says “She was an irritation in our faces?” Who is most likely to be a victim of bulling in our society?

• A high-school student who was born in Cambodia wrote the following stanza in a poem called “You Have to Live in Somebody Else’s Country to Understand.” Compare it with the views expressed in this reading.

What is it like to be an outsider?
What is it like to sit in the class where everyone has blond hair and you have black hair?
What is it like when the teacher says, “Whoever wasn’t born here raise your hand.”
And you are the only one.
Then, when you raise your hand, everybody looks at you and makes fun of you.
You have to live in somebody else’s country to understand.⁴

• The animated film, Up Is Down, looks at the world from the vantage point of a boy who walks on his head. It describes the attempts of the adults to make the boy conform to their point of view. The video is available from the Facing History Resource Center. Also available is another animated video, Is It Always Right to Be Right? It explores what happens to a society when various groups claim be “right.” Eve Shalen appears in the video, A Discussion with Elie Wiesel: Facing History Students Confront Hatred and Violence.

• What choices were open to the townspeople when the Hangman arrived? By the time he had finished his work in the town? Was there a way to stop the Hangman? If so, how? If not, why not?

• How does the poem relate to Germany in the 1930s? To society today?

• In 1933, Martin Niemoeller, a leader of the Confessing Church, voted for the Nazi party. By 1938, he was in a concentration camp. After the war, he is believed to have said, “In Germany, the Nazis came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.” How is the point Niemoeller makes similar to the one Maurice Ogden makes in “The Hangman?”

• What is the meaning of the Hangman’s riddle: “’ He who serves me best,’ said he, ‘shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree’”?

• ”The Hangman” is also available on video from the Facing History Resource Center. Teachers who have used the film have indicated a need to show it several times to allow their students time to identify the various symbols and reflect on their meaning. After seeing it, think about why the filmmaker turned the animated people into paper dolls. Why did the shadow grow on the courthouse wall? Why did the gallows-tree take root?

• A student who watched the film wrote, “The Hangman was to me strange. The ‘hidden message’ of this is harder to find than any other movie or section we have seen so far. I understand, now that instead of standing as a bystander all the time, I should voice my opinion before it is worthless.” Another noted, “I guess most people would be like the man who stood by and watched the townspeople being hung. I mean who would really have the guts to stand up and say “stop”… especially if you got no support from the crowd. I don’t think I could.” Which opinion is closest to your own?