‘Reflections with Memories’:

Abstract

This article uses as data for cultural criminology an album of photographs taken by German soldiers and policemen involved in the Holocaust. The author labels these actions ‘genocidal tourism’. He then asks what impact they have on the exclusionary tactics at work in mainstream criminology that, typically, define genocidal killings as outside the scope of the criminological enterprise. Many of the photographs discussed played an important part in the debate occasioned by the work of Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning. Goldhagen advanced a ‘cultural’ argument for the Holocaust (eliminationist anti-Semitism), pointing out the ‘readiness’ of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to participate in the atrocities. In Goldhagen’s hands the Holocaust cannot provide material for criminology, as it is a unique historical event that belongs entirely to an interaction between ‘ordinary Germans’ and Jews. This article argues that this can be partly explained by differences in the rhetoric of Goldhagen and Browning’s texts and their respective use of photography. By comparing photography from the case of the genocidal massacres in the Rape of Nanking, the author counters Goldhagen’s argument and points to the possibility of the development of a situational criminology.