Simon Wiesenthal Lecture: Wolf Gruner: Hans Oppenheimer And Other “Impudent Jews”. Forgotten Stories Of Individual Resistance In Nazi Germany

Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is still understood mostly in terms of rare armed group activities in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe, 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 the forgotten stories of 17-year-old Hans Oppenheimer and other resistors, which 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 and physical attacks. The fact that so many German Jewish women and men of all ages, educations and professions defied the Nazis obliterates the widespread assumption of the alleged passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust. Their courageous acts, however, still need to be incorporated into the general narrative of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and the Holocaust in general.

Wolf Gruner is the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles since 2008, and Founding Director of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014. He is an appointed member of the Academic Committee at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. His new book about the forgotten stories of individual Jewish resistance in Hitler’s Germany is forthcoming with Yale University Press in 2023.

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