Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania by David s> Gaunt Paul A. Levine Laura Palosuo (review)

Abstract

364 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 already provided are often repeated. A strong central guiding editorial hand would have avoided that by reducingthe number of contributionsbut which, by being more comprehensive,would have avoided unnecessaryrepetition. A subsequentvolume of documents was due to be published at the end of 2005. London JOHN P. Fox Gaunt, David, Levine, Paul A. and Palosuo, Laura (eds). Collaboration and Resistance DuringtheHolocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Peter Lang, Frankfurtam Main, Bern, New York and Oxford, 2005. 5I9 PP. Map. Tables. Notes. Index. $79.95:?46.9o (paperback). THISbook representsthe harvest of nineteen papers in English and German presentedby scholarsfrom ten differentcountriesat an April 2002 conference in Sweden on aspects of the Holocaust in the Nazi-occupied area known as ReichskommissariatOstland. The purpose of the conference was to reexamine the collaborationof the local populationsin the Nazi extermination policy and the effect of localJewish resistance. The conference participants addressedthis issue with a variety of methodologies and approaches. The nature and extent of Jewish resistance in Belarus and Lithuania is discussed in five illuminating contributions. Evgenij Rozenblat (Belarus) featuresthe dual role of the _Judenrate. Although collaboratorswith their Nazi persecutorsfor collectiveor personalsurvival,they also functionedas agentsof resistancein some Belarusghettos where contact with the local underground and partisanscould be established. He found that more than 6,ooo Belarus Jews had been membersof Red Armypartisangroups.Joachim Braun(Israel) identifies songs of protest and other music Jews composed in ghettoes as a form of resistance. For Anika Walke (Germany)the mere act of survival throughhiding, lying and cheating constitutesresistanceby theJewish women she interviewed. In Minsk, according to Barbara Epstein (USA), where the Jewish population was sociallyintegratedinto the urban community, contacts with the non-Jewish underground and partisans in nearby forests enabled the Jewish ghetto to engage in active resistance through smuggling of food, clothes, weapons and children in and out of the ghetto. Among Lithuania's 3,910 Soviet partisans,SarunasLiekis(Lithuania)counted 676Jews. Three papers cast new light on the role of Ostland civil officials in the Holocaust. In contrast to the post-war legend of their 'clean' German administration,Uwe Danker (Germany)exposes the appallingextent of their complicity in the mass killingsof localJews. Sebastian Lehmann (Germany) identifies a number of these officials as Nazis from Schleswig-Holstein,the home state of Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse, who followed the lure of advancement and enrichment.The Cold War enabled them to deny involvement in the Holocaust and get away with minor sentences.Jorg Hackmann (Germany)shows that WernerHasselblatt,a well-knownGerman-Balticjudge and defender of ethnic minority rights in the pre-war Estonian parliament, articulatedan apartheid-likeprogrammeduring 1939-43 thatanticipatedNazi exterminationpolicies. REVIEWS 365 Of the papers re-examining aspects of local collaboration, the work by Saulius Suziedelis (USA) stands out as the most insightful.Not only does he acknowledge growing anti-Semitism in pre-war Lithuanian society and the anti-Semitic stance of the LAF emigres which 'needed little prodding from "foreigninfluences"'(p. 339). He also notes both local Jews welcoming the Soviet occupation and Lithuanianirritationover the largeJewish presence in the Communist Party as part of the backgroundfor the genocidal mood of 194I. Suziedelisleaves no doubt that many levels of 'the local administration contributed,at timeswith zeal, to the destructionof LithuanianJewry'(p. 348) and that the majority of the personnel involved in the killing process were drawn from native sources. Lithuanian collaboration ranged from limited political cooperation to outright identificationwith Nazi genocidal practices and was 'a significanthelp in facilitatingall phases of the genocidal program' (P- 346). This conclusion is shared by Arunas Bubnys (Lithuania),Aya Ben-Naftali (Israel),Martin Dean (USA), and Anton Weiss-Wendt(USA).The Ninth Fort massacre in Kovno of IO,OOOJews in one day became possible, according to Ben-Naftali, because of the abundant availabilityof 'eager, well-trained, and highlymotivatedLithuanians'(p. 37I). In some Lithuaniantowns, Bubnys notes, the Jews were killed without the participationof German officials.In Belarus,Dean found local police in charge of much of the killing.Their collaborationwas both voluntaryand essentialsince the Germans did not know the country or the language. Among the motives for collaboration, besides anti-Semitism,these researchersidentify personal ambition, appropriationof Jewish property, and collective brutalization.In Estonia, Weiss-Wendt indicates active local collaborationby documenting...