Yad Vashem Studies, volume 40, number 2, features six research articles on a variety of subjects relating to Romania, Germany, Britain, Latvia, DP camps, and Israeli society, and four review articles of recent important books covering Germany and survivor testimony. Some of the themes running through the articles are prewar and wartime attitudes and policies toward Jews (Ion Popa, Stephen Tyas, and Christine Schoenmakers); postwar confrontations with the Holocaust (Ella Florsheim, Richards Plavnieks, Yechiam Weitz, Simone Gigliotti’s review article); and Germany and German Jewry (Schoenmakers and the review articles by Alan Steinweis, Moshe Zimmermann, and Shlomo Shafir).
The volume opens with Ion Popa’s analysis of the significant influence of Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Miron Cristea, during his year as prime minister of Romania (1938–1939), on attitudes toward Jews and on the ultimate fate of Romanian Jewry. Popa demonstrates that Cristea, the first Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church (1925–1939), was influential in shaping government policies and society’s outlook toward the Jewish community. Cristea was an outspoken antisemite before becoming prime minister, and his policies and statements regarding Jews while in that office were extreme. He saw the Jews as decadent, parasitic invaders who posed an existential threat to the Romanian people. This article presents the first thoroughgoing analysis of Cristea’s ecclesiastical career, policies, and influence. During his thirteen-month tenure in office, Cristea oversaw implementation of the law that stripped more than 200,000 Jews of their citizenship and outlined the steps for the process of “Romanianization” of society and the economy, measures that greatly influenced the fate of Romanian Jewry.
Christine Schoenmakers exposes the significant role of the German Gold Discount Bank, the Dego, in expropriating Jewish assets and property during the Third Reich. Schoenmakers shows that the Dego, originally founded in 1924 as a body designed to promote and facilitate German exports, played a very important role in the confiscation of Jewish capital from the beginning of the Nazi regime onward. The Dego served as the trade center for cash, stocks, and real property, arranging their registration, transfer, and utilization by the Nazi economy. Jewish capital was expropriated primarily in the contexts of emigration and/or “Aryanization.” Working with the German government to prevent Jewish emigrants from transferring their assets outside the Reich, the Dego exchanged frozen emigrant assets (cash and stocks) into Reichsmarks at a great loss to their Jewish owners. In addition, in its role as custodian of exports, the Dego closely monitored Jewish companies deemed important for Germany’s foreign trade and largely controlled the flow of information between the state institutions involved in Aryanization and the company to be Aryanized.
Stephen Tyas examines the little that the British intelligence community did to obtain information about the mass murders in the USSR after capturing an Einsatzgruppe D perpetrator, Robert Barth, in October 1943 in Italy. Moreover, as Tyas shows, much of the Barth file remains classified nearly seventy years later. Barth, an Austrian Gestapo man who had served in Sonderkommando 10b of Einsatzgruppe D for two years, primarily as an interrogator, was the first Holocaust perpetrator to fall into Western Allied hands. He provided his British interrogators with a detailed description of the murder of the Jews in the USSR, but once he was transferred to a facility in Britain in late 1943, his interrogators focused primarily on other issues. It seems, argues Tyas, that British intelligence showed little interest in getting more information on German policy and treatment concerning the Jews. Barth became viewed as an intelligence asset for the names, ranks, and uniforms of Nazi military and police officers, but apparently not for information on the murder of the Jews.
Richards Plavnieks reveals the story of the pursuit, prosecution, and punishment in West Germany of the Latvian war criminal Viktors Arājs, whose infamous eponymous “Arājs Kommando” was involved in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews in Latvia and Belarus. Arājs escaped justice for decades, although West German investigators knew in the 1960s of his murderous activities. Arājs himself was arrested only in 1975 and convicted in 1979. The German police ignored information from a Latvian émigré regarding Arājs’s location and alias in the 1960s, and later, whereas a Latvian had tipped off the police regarding his identity, other, similarly implicated Latvians attempted to defend Arājs during the court proceedings. This in-group Latvian solidarity was apparently accompanied by the sense among many Latvian émigrés that Arājs was an embarrassment best forgotten. Plavnieks argues that the Arājs case sheds light on both the successes and the shortcomings of West Germany’s legal efforts to come to grips with the Nazi past, as well as on the attitudes of Latvian émigrés in West Germany toward the Holocaust in their country and in which their countrymen took part.
Ella Florsheim reveals a little-known and perhaps unexpected aspect of Jewish life in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany after the war — the varied, widespread, and vital Yiddish theater activity there. This theater activity played an important cultural role for the survivors, as well as answering some of their emotional needs. As Florsheim notes, the urge to engage in theater activity evidenced itself very early in the postwar period, and it was very popular. As public interest grew, so too did the theater companies, becoming more mature and sophisticated, at both the amateur and professional levels. Culturally, this Yiddish theater helped revitalize many survivors’ prewar culture. At the same time, it helped them work through the horrors of the Holocaust by tackling these themes on stage, and responded to some extent to the survivors’ postwar anguish, helping many of them to alleviate their loneliness of many of them and to create new companionship and new communities. Zami Feder was a leading figure in this theater activity, and the article analyzes his seminal contribution to the development of Yiddish theater and its success in all the above-mentioned areas.
Yechiam Weitz examines the place of the Eichmann Trial in the development of Israeli society’s changing views on the Shoah. Rather than being a radical break with prior Israeli discourse on the subject, the trial, according to Weitz, was more a major milestone in a societal shift that began in the 1950s with discussions surrounding the content and meaning of the nascent Yom Hashoah. This discussion was reflected in the long legislative process that culminated in the Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day Law in 1959. This shift and discussion marked by the passing of this law and by the Eichmann Trial, continued in Israeli society well after the trial as well.
Alan Steinweis reviews the English edition of the collection of secret Nazi reports concerning German popular responses to the persecution and murder of the Jews, edited by Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel. Steinweis sees it as a model of documentary editing that will be an important resource for all students of the Holocaust. Moshe Zimmermann praises Beate Meyer’s book on the Reichsvereinigung as an important contribution that succeeds in telling the tragic and difficult story of this Jewish leadership institution. Meyer illuminates and probes the state of mind and motivations of the Jewish leadership in Nazi Germany without losing focus on the murderous context of the Nazi perpetrators. Shlomo Shafir relates the little known, fascinating story of the Quandt industrial family and their close relationship with the Nazi elite in his review of Joachim Scholtyseck’s book on this industrial dynasty. Shafir cites the book’s importance in its contribution to understanding the Nazification of the German economy. And finally, Simone Gigliotti praises Alan Rosen’s analysis of David Boder’s 1946 survivor interview project, the first to capture survivors’ voices telling their stories on early wire recorders, as a significant contribution to the history of early postwar Holocaust survivor testimony.
These articles and reviews cover a broad thematic, geographic, and chronological spectrum, intersecting and complementing each other at various junctures. They provide new insight into subjects and questions that have hardly been addressed before in scholarship, as well as into subjects that have been the topic of earlier discussions. They make for illuminating reading on important aspects of the Holocaust.
