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  3. (1)In September 1919, the year after the end of World War I, a German captai

(1)In September 1919, the year after the end of World War I, a German captai

游客2023-11-25  26
问题     (1)In September 1919, the year after the end of World War I, a German captain named Karl Mayr, who ran a propaganda unit in charge of educating demobilized soldiers in nationalism and scapegoating, received an inquiry from a soldier named Adolf Gemlich about the army’s position on "the Jewish question." Mayr asked a young subordinate named Adolf Hitler to answer. The resulting Gemlich letter, as it is known to historians, is believed to be the first record of Hitler’s anti-Semitic beliefs and has been an important document in Holocaust studies for decades.
    (2)This week, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, announced that the center has obtained the original, signed letter, which had never been publicly displayed. At the letter’s public unveiling in New York City, Hier explained its tortuous journey from Hitler’s own hand to its eventual home at the center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
    (3)In April 1945, an American GI named William Ziegler found the letter scattered among other documents in Nuremberg, Germany. Ziegler took the letter home and sold it to a private collector. In 1988, the Wiesenthal Center had the opportunity to buy the letter but was skeptical about whether Hitler could have afforded a typewriter. "He was a nobody; he couldn’t afford anything," Hier said at the letter’s unveiling. "A typewriter is like today having somebody who can’t afford his meals and he’s waving the latest Apple computer in front of you."
    (4)By the time the center could verify that Hitler had used a German army typewriter, the letter had been sold to another private collector. In 1990, handwriting expert Charles Hamilton Jr., who gained fame for exposing fake Hitler diaries in 1983, authenticated Hitler’s signature on the Gemlich letter.
    (5)When the Wiesenmal Center again had an opportunity to purchase the letter this year, it paid $150,000 to make the letter part of its collection. "We do not want to make a market for memorabilia(收藏品), but this document does not belong in private hands," Hier said. "It has too much to say to history. It belongs in public hands, and it has found its home at me Museum of Tolerance."
    (6)Few have questioned the importance of me Gemlich letter in understanding Hitler and the Holocaust. It not only provides a look into his beliefs, but reveals early ideas of how he would attempt the systematic extermination of the Jews. "Anti-Semitism—born of purely emotional grounds—will find an expression in the form of slaughter," Hitler wrote, according to a translation provided by the Wiesenthal Center. "The final goal must be the removal of the Jews. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable and never a government of national weakness." Hier highlighted these sentences as being the most important in the letter. Yet the purchase of such a document, especially at such a high price, has raised questions among historians. "This is not me Magna Carta," says Michael Marrus, the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. "I doubt very strongly that, given everything else we know, the Gemlich letter will change historians’ views about Hitler, or that it will be seen as pushing back Hitler’s genocidal ambitions to a very early date." Another concern with the purchase is that such transactions, not by private collectors but by a human-rights organization like the Wiesenthal Center, could have unintended consequences. "What you don’t want to happen is for mysteriousness to grow around these documents," Marrus says.
    (7)The letter will be on permanent display at the entrance to the Museum of Tolerance’s Holocaust section, where visitors can view translations and see Hitler’s signature on the document for themselves. "Five million people have visited the Museum of Tolerance," Hier said. "Ninety-five percent of the visitors are non-Jews. So we don’t only educate the Jewish community that knows about the Holocaust, but we educate the larger world. That’s where the document belongs." [br] Which of the following statements best summarizes the main idea of Paragraph Six?
选项 A、How the letter could be used to understand Hitler’s thoughts.
B、The letter will not change historians’ views about Hitler.
C、The importance of me letter and the doubts about the Center’s purchase.
D、The purchase of the letter will make it more mysterious.
答案 C
解析 第6段的前半部分阐述了Gemlich letter的重要作用和价值，后半部分则指出历史学家对Wiesenthal Center高价购买这封信的疑虑，故应选C。
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