MOUNT VERNON — Franklin Littell, a leading international scholar on the Holocaust and genocide studies, will speak Monday, April 14, at Cornell College on the Holocaust and the 1900s as a century of genocide.
His lecture is at 11 a.m. in Kimmel Theatre. Admission is free. The lecture title, ” ‘Who Remembers the Armenians?’ The Century of Genocide,” refers to Adolf Hitler’s comment about the world not caring if he proceeded with plans for genocidal slaughter.
Littell graduated from Cornell College in 1937, Union Theological Seminary and Yale University. He is emeritus professor of religion at Temple University, a former president of Iowa Wesleyan College and founding member of the board of directors of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., serving from 1979 until the museum’s opening in 1993.
He was the first Christian appointed by the Israel cabinet to the International Council of Yad Vashem, the international heroes’ and martyrs’ memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. He lives in Merion, Pa.
The 20th century as a century of genocide reached its low point with the murder of 6 million Jews during Hitler’s reign, notes Littell, but the beginning of this genocidal period can be traced to the murder of 1.2 million Christian Armenians in the dying throes of the Holy Muslim Empire, 1894-95 and 1915-16.
“The governments of the democracies were ineffective, if not totally passive, in the face of both genocides,” Littell says. “In the emergence of international cooperation since 1945 — in the United Nations, in the European Union and other regional alliances — there is hope that free peoples are learning to think and to act cooperatively and creatively before being backed up against the wall.”
The lecture is sponsored by Cornell’s Chaplain’s Office and the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium.