The research and review articles in the present issue of Yad Vashem Studies address questions of motivations and reactions of the various types of actors in the Shoah. How can we understand the behaviors of the individuals and groups discussed in these articles? Scholars from eight countries grapple with these questions and provide a wide variety of answers and insights to the questions of motivation, participation, reactions, and remembrance. From small forced-labor camps and local Germans, to Dutch Nazis and nationalists, to East European collaborators, to visions of Grossdeutschland, Greater Germany, and the death marches near the end of the war, the motivations of the perpetrators and their partners were many and complex. Similarly, the motivations behind the postwar relations between non-Jewish rescuers of Jews and their erstwhile charges were often complex. The reactions of Jews to Nazi persecution have been examined extensively in the research literature on the Holocaust, yet here we present an article that portrays and analyzes heretofore unknown German Jewish responses to the Nazi regime’s policies from a fresh and surprising perspective. These and more are among the issues addressed in the research and review articles in volume 39, number 2 of Yad Vashem Studies.
Wolf Gruner casts his spotlight on the little known phenomenon of individual Jewish protest and resistance in Germany, especially in the 1930s, what many scholars might call amidah. Focusing on Berlin, he demonstrates that the repeated Nazi comments in internal memoranda regarding Jewish “impudent behavior” and disobedience were not merely an excuse or cover up for harsh measures against specific Jews, but rather often reflected reality. Many Jews in the Third Reich, even into the first part of the war, defied anti-Jewish measures and even protested against them in various ways. Within Gruner’s broad definition of defiance and resistance in the German case, his research clearly demonstrates that many individual Jews in Germany took great risks in order to express their protest against the regime’s anti-Jewish measures. Some paid very dearly for their courage. When considered together with the article in our previous issue by Christoph Kreutzmüller, Ingo Loose, and Benno Nietzel on the efforts of Jewish small businessmen in Germany to hang on economically, we gain a picture of an active German Jewry whose members initiated many clandestine and other ways to combat their country’s onslaught against them.
Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Kunzel examines Dutch participation in German colonization schemes for the Soviet Union within the framework of the planned “Germanization” of occupied Soviet territories. First, this research shows that not only Germans and Austrians were involved in this colonization and Germanization. Other “Germanic” groups also participated. Thousands of Dutch settlers moved to this region during the war in an effort both to restore some of Holland’s colonial grandeur and to solve what was seen as a structural agrarian problem in Holland. The colonization was also imbued with racial vision and practices. Although Dutch and German goals regarding the colonization differed, which at times complicated the Dutch settlers’ relations with Germans, the racist foundation of the colonization enterprise enabled the Dutch settlers to be part of the Nazis’ racial schemes, including anti-Jewish policy. The article provides a case study of the Vilna area, looking also at Dutch-Jewish relations within this colonization and racial picture.
Hermann Weiss presents a case study of Brande, a small forced labor camp in Silesia that was part of a much larger picture and whose story has implications for the study of small forced labor camps in general. Brande, like many camps in Silesia, operated outside the concentration camp system. It began as a Reichsautobahnlager camp in 1940 and was taken over by Organisation Schmelt in 1942, under which it first functioned as a transit camp and a sick camp and, from January 1943 to its closure in August of that year, solely as a Krankenlager. Brande had a complex history in terms of jurisdiction and responsibilities and became increasingly prominent, and notorious for its harsh conditions, among the Silesian forced labor camps. Little German documentation of the camp has survived, so the article relies on survivor testimonies and interviews, documents from the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, and numerous interviews with former German residents of the area. It is clear from the interviews that Brande and the other camps did not exist in isolation from the surrounding population. Local Germans also played a role in the story of forced labor.
With regard to Soviet reactions to the murder of the Jews, scholars have long understood that official policy, whether during the war or afterward, was to report events while hiding the Jewish identity of the victims behind universalistic Soviet slogans about the suffering of the “masses.” Mordechai Altshuler shows that this was not necessarily as clearly the case regarding Soviet press reporting of the Shoah after Barbarossa. The government did not forbid reporting about the Jews, but various newspaper editors and writers sought to tone down the Jewish presence in the stories that they reported out of fear that local antisemitism might harm overall morale. Similar to Western considerations, they feared making the war appear to be a war on behalf of the Jews. Altshuler shows that there were many articles on the persecution and murder of the Jews in a variety of local and regional papers, and that this reporting was similar to Western reporting. The articles were there and, to the discerning eye, the main victims of the murder described in the articles were the Jews.
What were the postwar relations between survivors and their Polish rescuers? Did the rescuers receive recognition and material assistance if needed from Jewish organizations? Did survivors express their gratitude? During the course of the 1960s and afterward, a myth grew in Poland regarding the “ungrateful” Jews who were rescued by Poles and then allegedly forgot their rescuers. Through an examination of a fascinating collection of postwar correspondence and other documentation, Joanna Michlic demonstrates that the myth rested on prejudice rather than reality. In fact, many survivors intervened on their rescuers’ behalf to obtain assistance for them, while others found that their rescuers felt endangered by their neighbors who saw them as “Jew lovers,” and hence asked that contact with the survivors whom they had rescued be discontinued. Michlic also analyzes complex cases where survivors had been mistreated by their rescuers, or where their rescuers had even killed the survivor’s family. In other cases, survivors’ efforts to organize assistance for their rescuers failed. The postwar correspondence and other documentation reveal a complex picture of selfless rescue alongside greed and betrayal, expressing gratitude alongside the rescuers’ postwar isolation in their own society.
This issue also features six review articles on recent and important books, most of which have generated extensive discussion. David Cesarani reviews Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide and finds it to be thoroughly and meticulously researched and compelling, yet flawed. The book is both distressing and absorbing, according to Cesarani, who finds Blatman’s analysis for the murder of Jews in the death marches — motivated not by antisemitism but by a broader genocidal wave — to be unpersuasive.
Christoph Dieckmann reviews Tim Snyder’s much discussed Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, finding it thought-provoking, challenging, flawed, and at the same time a milestone in a much needed process in the development of research and analysis of the fates of the various peoples in the regions that Snyder examines.
Erich Haberer reviews Anton Weiss-Wendt’s Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust finding it to be comprehensive and cogent regarding Nazi occupation policies and motivations for collaboration. At the same time, he is critical of Weiss-Wendt’s thesis that Estonians murdered Jews without antisemitic motivations, but rather out of their own sense of victimization by the Soviets combined with their nationalism as encouraged by the Nazis.
Konrad Kwiet reviews the book edited by Wolf Gruner and Jörg Osterloh, Das “Großdeutsche Reich” und die Juden: Nationalsozialistische Verfolgung in den “angegliederten” Gebieten, a twelve-essay anthology on the Holocaust in the largely under-researched territories annexed to the Third Reich as part of the “Great[er] German Empire.” He finds the book informative, illuminating, well-edited, and an important contribution to scholarship.
Jochen Böhler reviews the first three published volumes in the planned sixteen-volume German documents series being coordinated by Susanne Heim, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945. The three volumes reviewed here are: Volume 1, Deutsches Reich 1933– 1937, compiled by Wolf Gruner; Volume 2, Deutsches Reich 1938– August 1939, compiled by Susanne Heim; and Volume 4, Polen September 1939–Juli 1941, compiled by Klaus-Peter Friedrich with the collaboration of Andrea Löw. Böhler calls the project “truly monumental,” and based on these first three volumes, he believes it will become one of the most important source editions on the Holocaust. The scholarly introductions, document selection, and annotation by the editors reflect the combination of ideological and other factors that led to the murder of the Jews.
This section of volume 39:2 concludes with Yechiam Weitz’s review of Tuvia Friling’s Hebrew book Who Are You, Léon Berger? The Story of a Kapo in Auschwitz — History, Memory, and Politics. Berger was the alias of Eliezer Gruenbaum, the son of the prominent Zionist leader and Israel’s first Minister of the Interior, Yitzhak Gruenbaum. Friling relates the story of this complex personality — a communist cum Kapo and later fallen fighter in Israel’s War of Independence — with empathy and objectivity, according to Weitz.
The issue concludes with a letter to the editor by Reuven Geva in reaction to the article in our previous issue by Artur Szyndler on an attempt to organize the emigration of thousands of Jews from the Katowice District of Poland early in the war. Szyndler’s response is included as well.
The articles in this volume cover much of Europe, from the USSR and Estonia, across Poland, through Germany, and into the parts of Western Europe that were annexed by Germany. In examining root questions regarding the Holocaust across such a varied and vast geographic space, the contents of this issue grapple with the heart of the Holocaust and, in many of the articles, with how it is remembered and why as well. It is our hope that these articles will provide our readers with much food for thought on these core issues of motivations, participation, reactions, and remembrance.
