Einspruch Lecture: "The Holocaust as a European Project"

Dr. Jan Grabowski, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa and leading historian of the Holocaust in Poland and Polish–Jewish relations under German occupation, will present this year's Einspruch Lectures on the Holocaust. Lecture Abstract: The Holocaust is too often remembered as a German crime that swept across a passive continent. This lecture challenges that comforting narrative. Drawing on the historical record, it argues that the destruction of the European Jews was not merely tolerated but actively enabled — and in many cases enthusiastically embraced — by administrations, institutions, and ordinary citizens across occupied and unoccupied Europe alike. From collaborationist bureaucracies to local populations who denounced, plundered, and killed on their own initiative, the machinery of destruction depended on a continent-wide participation that far exceeds what German capacity alone could have achieved. The lecture then turns to the present, tracing a direct line between this uncomfortable history and today's escalating attacks on Holocaust memory and commemoration. It argues that much of this backlash is not simply ignorance or the passage of time, but something more pointed: a refusal to acknowledge one’s own national, or group, complicity. Where societies have never fully reckoned with their own roles — as perpetrators, collaborators, or beneficiaries — the memory of the Holocaust remains an unabsorbed wound, one that resurfaces as resentment, denial, and active efforts to rewrite or diminish the past. To understand why the fight over Holocaust memory is intensifying now, we must understand it as unfinished business — a reckoning many nations have deferred but not escaped. Sunday's lecture will be followed by a public reception. Dr. Grabowski will present a second lecture the following day in a lunch-and-learn format. To learn more, visit the Einspruch Lectures on the Holocaust page. Click here to register online; registration is required. Parking instructions and updates will be emailed to registered guests.