What History Teaches: Nazi Laws, From Democracy to Dictatorship to Genocide
About the Event
In this installment of “What History Teaches,” Professor Mansfield will discuss the Nazi Party’s rise to power in Germany in the years preceding the Holocaust. She will investigate the legislative means by which the party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, took the country from the democratic Weimar Republic to the dictatorship it became, the anti-Jewish Nazi laws of the time, and the Nazi court system.
About the Speakers
Cathy Lesser Mansfield
Cathy Lesser Mansfield is a Professor of Law. She has served on the faculties of Drake University Law School, Georgetown Law School, Case Western Reserve University, and Washburn University. Professor Mansfield’s areas of expertise are consumer and commercial law, as well as the Holocaust and the Law. Professor Mansfield was a Silberman Fellow at the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, and is a Distinguished Fellow at The Consortium for the Research and Study of Holocaust and the Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for National Security and Human Rights Law. She is the composer and librettist of an opera, entitled “The Sparks Fly Upward,” that follows three German families in Berlin, two Jewish and one Christian, through the Holocaust. She is also the founder and was the Executive Director of The Sparks Fly Upward Foundation, a non-profit organization that operated until 2024 and was dedicated to educating people about the Holocaust, genocide, and tolerance through presentations of Sparks, and ancillary activities. Professor Mansfield is a frequent presenter about the Holocaust.