Yad Vashem Studies, volume 38, number 2, features five research articles and three review articles by an international array of scholars. Four of the research articles (Eliezer Schwartz, Stefan Lehnstaedt, Albert Kaganovitch, Jan Láníček) look at the interactions between the periphery and the center in addressing policy toward Jews during the Holocaust, whether among the Germans, or among authorities in the Allied countries. Issues of the respective roles of, and mutual influences between, actors at the periphery and in the center of a country’s activities have been among the core questions concerning scholars for years. What emerges from these four articles in this issue is the extent of the impact of the concerns and interests of local officials on the actions of their governments in relation to the Jews. Whether it was local German officials in occupied Poland, local officials in the USSR, or the local populations influencing the Czechoslovak governmentin-exile, local attitudes affected the implementation of policy and in many cases the fate of the Jews. Alongside these questions, the very nature of how to approach this history and understand it in the larger context is the subject of the fifth research article (Guy Miron) as well as the review articles, to a great degree (Yehuda Bauer, Ingo Loose, Andrew Apostolou).
Two articles address the interplay among German economic interests, war aims, and ideology, and the resultant effects on the fate of the Jews. Eliezer Schwartz reviews in depth the impact of IG Farben’s construction of the Buna industrial complex on the development and operation of Birkenau, and Stefan Lehnstaedt examines German exploitation of Jewish labor in the provincial ghettos in the Warthegau region of occupied Poland. What emerges from these articles is vast opportunism on both the personal and industrial levels, operating within an ideological framework that had set the parameters for the destruction of the Jews.
Eliezer Schwartz examines IG Farben’s role in the construction of the Birkenau extermination camp. IG Farben failed to complete the construction of its Buna factory near Auschwitz, despite the enormous investment in money, equipment, and construction materials and the death of some 30,000 prisoners, most of them Jews, who had been put to work in building the plant. Schwartz’s engineering expertise as well as his painstaking historical research brings new insights to his review of the lack of proper planning, unsound engineering, and mismanagement of the massive building project that reveals major failures from conception to construction. The company’s blunders on all fronts and at the highest levels necessitated the allocation of additional prisoner manpower, which clearly led to the substantial expansion of Auschwitz and the development of Birkenau’s dual role as both a center for the extermination of Jews from all over Europe and as a central reserve of Jewish labor for the Reich war industry.
Stephan Lehnstaedt’s findings show that both the German authorities’ extensive exploitation of Jewish labor from the smaller ghettos dotted around Warthegau and the accelerated destruction of these communities ensued from the administrators’ opportunism and Nazi ideology — both closely intertwined with German financial problems in the Lodz ghetto. German officials solicited minimal wages for Jews working for relocated German firms during the first years of the war, and then proceeded to levy heavy deductions on these wages in order to cover the costs of maintaining the ghettos and for personal enrichment. The result was extremely harsh working conditions, yet the increased food rations for Jewish laborers in late 1940 led Jews to volunteer their labor. Lehnstaedt finds that no overall plans were ever developed for the Jewish labor deployed from the ghettos to workshops and outside factories. The local economy in these places was too small for the Jews’ labor to make any appreciable contribution to the war economy, and the local officials were unwilling to invest the necessary expenditure to change this. Many regional and local German officials, realizing that the Jews’ presence in the Warthegau would be short-lived, decided that making a quick profit was a higher priority than long-term labor productivity. It followed that when annihilation of the Jews became official policy, low productivity made these working Jews expendable.
Albert Kaganovitch looks at the interplay between national policies and local authorities during the Holocaust in a completely different context — in the USSR, where Soviet authorities controlled the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. Three types of Jewish refugees in the USSR are examined: Soviet citizens; new Soviet citizens from the territories annexed by the USSR in 1939 and 1940; and foreign citizens, primarily from German-occupied Poland. The Soviet authorities encountered serious difficulties in their efforts to resettle these shifting waves of people, and shortages of housing, jobs, food, and other necessary supplies and services adversely affected the refugees’ daily lives. The refugees suffered from hunger, illness, and high mortality, as well as from a broad lack of coordination and agreement between the central government and local officials, which affected the Jews in particular. For example, whereas the central government tried to ensure the supply of industrial occupation and basic resources, the local authorities saw the refugees, many unsuited to hard labor, as primarily unwanted aliens who were an added burden amid many other wartime problems. Moreover, whereas lower-ranking local officials were often the source of antisemitism, the central officials tried to clamp down on such manifestations.
Jan Láníček looks at the interplay between center and periphery in a different context in his analysis of the treatment of Jewish issues aired in the wartime Czechoslovak government broadcasts to occupied Europe over the BBC. These broadcasts were aimed primarily at the homeland — then divided between the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia. The programming content reflected multiple influences on and considerations of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. The wartime political climate played a considerable role in shaping the broadcasts that referred to the plight of the Jews. The broadcasts were not devoid of humanitarian concern, but the Czechoslovak government generally sought to promote its political objectives and to maintain its democratic and liberal image. The government determined not to present Jewish issues too prominently out of concern for the possible negative reaction of the people at home. Mentions of Jewish suffering came in connection to references to Nazi plans for the future treatment of other peoples. Calls for Czechs and Slovaks to aid Jews were cautious, as were condemnations of local collaborators, especially Slovaks, out of consideration for postwar diplomatic interests in reuniting the two parts of the country.
Guy Miron concludes the research section of this issue with a penetrating analysis of Holocaust scholarship and general Jewish history, and the respective places of each in the other field of inquiry. David Engel’s recent book Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust is Miron’s springboard for this discussion in which he begins with an analysis of efforts to incorporate the Holocaust into the broader study of Jewish history. The first such efforts began during the Nazi period itself. The article goes on to address the flipside of this subject as well — the place of modern Jewish history in the study of the Holocaust. Miron discusses the origins and implications of this divide and seeks ways to bridge the gap. He suggests two possible avenues for merging the two separate historical entities: through the growing research on she’erith ha-pletah (the survivors after the war), and through the cultural historians’ theoretical perspective of the “cultural turn” in recent years.
Three review articles — on Soviet partisans, the theft of Jewish property, and Greek Jews — round out this issue: Yehuda Bauer on Bogdan Musial’s Sowjetische Partisanen: Mythos und Wirklichkeit; Ingo Loose on Martin Dean’s Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945; and Andrew Apostolou on Katherine Fleming’s Greece: A Jewish History. Each review delves into the essence of the book, wrestles with the author’s methodology and conclusions, and sometimes uncovers unexpected findings.
The articles in this issue do not always fully answer all the questions they pose, of course. Still, the importance of local interests in determining aspects of day-to-day affairs, and sometimes even of policy, is highlighted. These articles provide food for thought on this subject, and add valuable perceptions to the study of the Holcoaust in its various contexts.
