German Perpetrators Research Articles

Crossing the Threshold of Sexual Violence: Sexual Humiliation and the Practice of Performative Masculinity

ABSTRACT This article examines acts of sexual humiliation by German perpetrators against women and men during the Holocaust. It argues that such acts of humiliation not only proved the easiest line to cross for the perpetrators, but often created a context in which additional acts of sexual violence became normalized. Sexual humiliation served as a critical first step in the dehumanization of the victims and included forced disrobement under the perpetrators’ gaze, often accompanied by crude and salacious comments concerning the bodies and features of those being abused. Furthermore, such acts were a ‘threshold activity’ and often moved beyond the salacious gaze and lewd comments of the perpetrators into acts of physical violation, whether through touching, beating of genitalia, body cavity searches, or rape. This article uses memoirs and testimonies to examine the various ways in which acts of sexual humiliation were an expression of ideas about militarized and performative masculinity among the perpetrators. It also focuses on the ways in which this abuse was perceived by the victims, both male and female as well as interrogating the interpretation of these acts by witnesses.

La Shoah en bas de chez soi

This paper is based on the doctoral studies of the author on the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the Polish town of Tarnów between 1918 and 1956. It shows the value of studying the microhistory of the Shoah by presenting a “thick description,” as termed by Clifford Geertz, of the first Aussiedlungsaktion in Tarnów, which took place between June 11 and 18, 1942. A total of 1.8 million Jews were deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec during the Aktion Reinhardt. They were rounded up from their homes during so-called resettlement actions and “transported away.” This paper aims to depict what it truly meant to be deported to these far-flung extermination camps.During the first Aussiedlungsaktion that took place in Tarnów, 12,000 of the city’s 30,000 Jews were killed in one week. Eight thousand of these individuals were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp, while 4,000 were murdered on the spot. Still, the sheer numbers cannot capture the horror of what happened within the town. Through the lens of a “thick description,” we can delve deeper into the true meaning of “resettlement” and what this euphemism really meant for the local occupied society. What choices did the local population have? How did Jews react to the brutal radicalization of German extermination practices ? How did the non-Jewish locals behave, or in what ways did they participate in the events?The article references a variety of sources, primarily from Jewish survivors, as well as from the non-Jewish population that witnessed the massacres and various groups of German perpetrators (e.g. the Gestapo, SS, and civil administration) during the week. This tapestry of sources will create what Saul Friedländer called an integrated history of the Shoah—in other words, a stage for a wide variety of voices. This approach clearly shows that Tarnów’s first Aussiedlungsaktion was a public massacre that occurred in the town’s center and that all the non-Jewish citizens saw and heard the event. The article focuses on Jewish agency and survival strategies. It also describes how the city’s Jews were caught off guard by the German’s invaders disinformation policies and quick radicalization. The concept of “cumulative radicalization” (Hans Mommsen) is an important explanatory lens within German perpetrator research (Täterforschung). Through this paper, the author’s goal is to show in concrete terms what “cumulative radicalization” meant for the Jewish population. Finally, the article also explores how non-Jewish locals were implicated in the massacre and in part profited from it. Consequently, it argues that the term “bystander” cannot be applied to these locals in the proximity of such violence.

The logic of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in three cultural shifts

ABSTRACT Although the annual report by the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) stated that 1 per cent of antisemitic incidents in 2021 were characterized as Islamic/Islamist, public accusations of antisemitism are increasingly directed at two groups: (1) designated Others (Muslims and other racialized minorities who seldom engage in anti-Jewish hate crimes) and (2) public intellectuals who are for the most part white ethnic Germans (including Jews and Christians) who demonstrate solidarity with these minorities. Dekel and Özyürek describe the logic that drives this growth in accusations of antisemitism and argue that it can be explained by three shifts in the discourse of Holocaust memory: first, from Holocaust memory to antisemitism; second, from antisemitism’s German perpetrators to designated Others; and third, from guilt and responsibility to shame.

‘Appeasement Gone Mad’: The Riga Ghetto Case and the Politics of British War Crimes Trials

This article examines the British Foreign Office decision to abandon a British-run war crimes trial after the Second World War against suspected perpetrators of the Holocaust in Latvia and the efforts of a Holocaust survivors’ organization to seek justice. Faced with repeated inquiries from The Association of Baltic Jews in Great Britain and their parliamentary allies, the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin repeated a lie told to him by his subordinates that Holocaust victims were imprecise in their testimony, making them unreliable witnesses and justifying the release of several suspected war criminals. Although very few German and Latvian perpetrators saw the inside of the courtroom, survivor advocacy countered the prevailing silence about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

The Life and Death of the Shtetl

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the contributions and limitations of Yehuda Bauer's 2009 book The Death of the Shtetl. It argues that the book heralded a new trend in Holocaust historiography by focusing on the eastern borderlands and closely observing the response of a limited number Jewish communities there to the German occupation, especially as concerns “amidah,” or unarmed resistance. But the article also points out that Bauer's limited use of available sources obscured the degree of Jewish collaboration with the Germans; the fluidity between Jewish policemen and resisters; the reliance of Jewish resistance on local Christian assistance or underground organizations; the impact on events of long-term relations between the different groups in a highly interethnic region; and the intimacy of the mass murder of the Jews, which was carried out by German perpetrators who had gotten to know their victims over months of occupation and by neighbors who had lived side by side with them for their entire lives. The article argues that a more focused and nuanced local history of the Holocaust in a single location can shed light on aspects of the “final solution” often obscured by top-down histories or even “quasi-regional” histories such as Bauer's.

7. Un « châtiment inéluctable » ?

This article describes and analyses the structural measures introduced by the Soviet State to support the investigations of West German judicial authorities against German Nazi and war criminals in the 1960s. In contrast to the publicly postulated absolute Soviet interest in bringing all perpetrators to justice, it becomes apparent that the Soviet Union was late in cooperating with the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations, the central West German investigative authority —especially in comparison with the People’s Republic of Poland. What can explain this is the fact that the Soviet Union had drawn a line under the prosecution of German perpetrators in 1955 and was not prepared for the unexpected phenomenon of West German re-entry into the prosecution of Nazi and war criminals, which was to meant to complete the Allied/European and German trials of the first decade after 1945. The instructions to the KGB, which conducted the collection of evidence, reveal an economy of Soviet investigations. Consequently, this article addresses the issue of the political value of judicial cooperation and the resources made available by the Soviet authorities.

Imperfect Humans and Perfect Beasts: Changing Perceptions of German and Jewish Persecutors in Holocaust Ghetto Diaries

Imperfect Humans and Perfect Beasts:Changing Perceptions of German and Jewish Persecutors in Holocaust Ghetto Diaries Amy Simon (bio) Daily existence for ghetto inhabitants during the Holocaust consisted of a continual struggle for life against hunger, disease, trauma, hard labor, and, not insignificantly, other people. Jewish diarists writing in the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos during World War II regularly described a life that consisted of a constant barrage of harmful decrees to which they had to either adapt or die. Along with these decrees came those people whose job—or sometimes choice—it was to enforce the decrees. Each day, as diarists described the painful regulations, they also depicted and presented evaluations of the people involved in making those regulations law, and others who took advantage of the ghetto situation for their own benefit. The overall image the reader gets of life in the ghettos from these diaries is one of perpetration from all sides. Until recently, Holocaust scholars have primarily viewed perpetration through a hierarchical lens of power and ethnicity, placing Germans only in the role of perpetrators. In his seminal work on this topic, Raul Hilberg categorized Germans as perpetrators, Jews as victims, and all others as bystanders. He suggested that individuals in the victim and bystander categories could take part in perpetration, thereby becoming collaborators but never perpetrators. Hilberg was first and foremost interested in German perpetrators, their actions and motivations. In the past twenty-five years, Hilberg's triptych has been complicated by the addition of a category of "collaborators," as well as a discussion of the "gray zone" whereby Jewish behavior in the ghettos and camps has come under scrutiny. Some of this scholarship has focused on interpretations of historians and thinkers who did not experience ghetto/concentration camp life, while some has relied on wartime sources and postwar witness testimony.1 Much attention has been given to the role of the Jewish councils and Jewish police as collaborators, or at least complicit actors, in the Nazi program of annihilation. Some scholars interpret the Jewish leadership's behavior during the Holocaust as reprehensible, while others fall on the other side of the debate, preferring to think of Jews' decisions during the Holocaust as "choiceless choices."2 [End Page 85] The discussions surrounding the involvement of Jewish actors in the Holocaust have primarily been situated in a postwar historiography that still tries to describe the behavior of the persecutors (here Jewish) rather than their victims. Scholars examine the actions of Jewish policemen and council members (the "privileged") in the ghettos to determine their motivations, the results of their activities, and the moral dilemmas they faced.3 Even studies that use Holocaust diaries and other wartime sources to illuminate these issues focus primarily on the persecutors.4 A few books have even examined Jewish policemen's explanations for their own actions, both positive and negative, providing important perspectives on how Jews made impossible moral decisions and the repercussions of those choices.5 Contrary to that dominant trend, this study examines references to perpetrators in contemporaneous sources (diaries) to investigate the world of the non-privileged victims themselves. Instead of focusing on how diarists explained perpetrator motivations, this study interprets shifts in their perceptions of these perpetrators to understand changing notions of self and community. It asks what an analysis of the ways in which victims wrote about their persecutors can elucidate about their experiences in the ghettos. I argue that the relatively rigid victim, perpetrator, bystander, and collaborator categories currently used do not allow us to see the way people grappled with a constantly changing world and identity within the ghettos. This paradigm erases the sense of chaos and uncertainty Jews faced as they tried to understand the behaviors of people acting in the radically new circumstance of the Holocaust. People did not adhere to static categories in the midst of ever-evolving Nazi policy, fluctuating treatment of different groups of Jews, and daily rumors and new information. In the ghettos, Jews had both enough restriction and enough freedom to begin to understand the seriousness of their situation and to contemplate and analyze it. Unlike later life in the concentration camps (for many of these Jews), Jews...

The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer

Reviewed by: The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich by Elizabeth R. Baer Kristin Semmens The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich. By Elizabeth R. Baer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 179. Paper $32.99. ISBN 978-0814343852. A book has clearly done much to provoke thought when a reader wishes it were double or triple in length so that its author might further explore a number of relevant themes. Elizabeth R. Baer's The Genocidal Gaze: From Southwest Africa to the Third Reich is one such book. It raises many tantalizing, important questions, but leaves many more unaddressed and unasked. The book is part of a growing academic literature linking German colonialism in Southwest Africa, and more specifically, the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples, to the Nazi Holocaust. Baer connects the two atrocities through the shared "genocidal gaze" of the German perpetrators, defined as a set of "racist attitudes" to racial others that were "passed from generation to generation," giving "license to exterminate" from 1904 to 1908 and again between 1939 and 1945 (3). To examine this gaze, Baer investigates literary and artistic works rather than archival sources. The texts she has chosen were created during the German colonial occupation of Southwest Africa in the early twentieth century or decades after the Holocaust; all either embody the genocidal gaze or challenge and critique it. Chapter 1 focuses on the incredibly rich archive of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama revolutionary. Witbooi resisted the dehumanizing gaze of the German colonial authorities in his personal papers and correspondence with them just as he defied them militarily. [End Page 381] Baer's decision to "recover" a voice of the "gazed-upon" is commendable (13, 17). In a book spanning "German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich," one might expect to listen to the voices of Jews who likewise resisted the genocidal gaze at the time of their persecution, but Witbooi's words stand alone for the victims. Chapter 2 turns to Gustav Frenssen's novel Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest (1908), which Baer suggests was a crucial "instrument for transmitting" the German colonizers' racist attitude to Africans (61). This fictionalized biography of a soldier celebrates the efforts and heroism of the German troops in their brutal exploitation and suppression of the indigenous peoples. Frenssen actually mentions the Herero and Nama themselves "very little," Baer admits, but the Nazis found much to admire in it nonetheless (52). They reprinted the novel several times between 1933 and 1944. Here, then, is solid evidence of a link between imperial and Nazi attitudes toward others, be they Africans or Jews. Again, one might expect a parallel treatment of a text that narrates or fictionalizes Germans' experiences in the East during the Holocaust, which likewise would have transmitted the genocidal gaze from the periphery to the metropole. Baer's commentary on soldiers' letters and photographs from the eastern front or the correspondence of women sent to "Germanize" the occupied lands would have been most welcome. The book leaps across the years 1918–1945 entirely and next examines post-Holocaust texts and art. Chapter 3 focuses on two novels by Uwe Timm. Morenga (1978) centers on Gottschalk, a German military veterinarian, who witnesses the Herero uprising. Timm foreshadows the later Nazi genocide by referencing "a key Nazi henchman," death camps, and eugenics at various points (90). Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Timm's fictionalized memoir of his brother's time on the eastern front as a member of the Waffen SS, is a scathing indictment, Baer argues, of the genocidal gaze. Yet how is Timm, writing not as a victim resisting that gaze but as a German, decades after the Holocaust, suddenly able to critique it? The transmission from generation to generation has obviously been halted or interrupted. How? Where did the genocidal gaze "go" after 1945? Was it so utterly discredited by unconditional surrender, Allied occupation, and forced denazification that it disappeared after decades of presence? One wishes Baer had addressed this subject. Chapter 4 examines "Black Box," a complex and fascinating 2005 art installation by William Kentridge that "interrogates German guilt" by way of...

O „topografii pustki” w krajobrazie kulturowym. Miejsca niepamięci i nie-miejsca pamięci w kontekście mordów dokonanych na Żydach w Polsce w pierwszych miesiącach po drugiej wojnie światowej

Wieńcząca drugą wojnę światową klęska hitlerowskich Niemiec nie oznaczała kresu dramatu Żydów na ziemiach polskich. Jeszcze przed zakończeniem największego w dziejach świata konfliktu na terenach opuszczonych przez okupacyjne wojska niemieckie wielu ocalałych z Holokaustu, często bezdomnych, osamotnionych i wylęknionych, nadal doznawało przemocy. Upamiętnienia w przestrzeni doczekały się tylko niektóre spośród wielu ofiar (i aktów) powojennego terroru antyżydowskiego. Podobnie zresztą w nikłym stopniu formą publicznej komemoracji objęte zostały wcześniejsze, wojenne przypadki kolektywnych mordów dokonanych na Żydach przez polskich chrześcijan. Gdy jednak już doszło do topograficznego oznaczenia informacji o aktach rozgrywającego się w cieniu Holokaustu dramatu, nie przywracano na ogół pełnej prawdy o sprawcach (ich proweniencji etnicznej czy osadzeniu terytorialnym) oraz przebiegu tych wydarzeń.

Kerstin von Lingen. Allen Dulles, the OSS, and Nazi War Criminals: The Dynamics of Selective Prosecution.

The six months between January 1945 and the German surrender in early May was a confusing and complicated time in the history of World War II. Not only were Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt jockeying for power in the postwar world, they were also trying to balance the moral demands that German wartime atrocities placed on them. High-ranking German perpetrators were doing their own maneuvering, especially to avoid the retribution that was promised to their victims by the Allies in the Moscow Declaration of November 1, 1943. For example, one survivor of the war was Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and, as some would argue, the “second [highest] man in the SS” (2), who successfully managed to avoid Allied prosecution in the years following the German surrender. Why and how it was possible for one of Germany’s highest-ranking SS officers to avoid justice is at the heart of Kerstin von Lingen’s latest book about German war criminals who operated in the Italian theater during the war.

The cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance impacts police-civilian interaction.

This research examines how the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance-a person's (in)tolerance for uncertain or unknown situations-impacts communication alignment in crisis negotiations. We hypothesized that perpetrators high on uncertainty avoidance would respond better to negotiators who use formal language and legitimize their position with reference to law, procedures, and moral codes. Data were transcriptions of 53 negotiations from a Dutch-German police training initiative, where police negotiators interacted with a high (German) and low (Dutch) uncertainty-avoidant mock perpetrator. Consistent with accounts of cross-cultural interaction, negotiators tended to achieve more alignment in within-culture interactions compared to cross-cultural interactions. Moreover, German negotiators, who scored higher on uncertainty avoidance than the Dutch negotiators, were found to use more legitimizing messages and more formal language than their Dutch counterparts. Critically, irrespective of the negotiators cultural background, the use of these behaviors was a significant moderator of the degree to which negotiator and perpetrator aligned their communicative frames: Using legitimizing and formal language helped with German perpetrators but had no effect on Dutch perpetrators. Our findings show the effects of cultural background on communication alignment and demonstrate the benefits of using more formal language and messages that emphasize law and regulations when interacting with perpetrators high on uncertainty avoidance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Three New Perspectives on the Holocaust

Three New Perspectives on the Holocaust Peter Hayes David Cesarani. Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-49. London: Macmillan, 2016; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016. Pp. xl + 1016. Tim Cole. Holocaust Landscapes. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016. Pp. 262. Nikolaus Wachsmann. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. Pp. xi + 865. Because the Holocaust remains a deeply unsettling subject, it continues to attract a great deal of scholarly energy. One indication of how much is the collective length of the three new studies under review here: almost 2,200 pages. Yet the extant literature is already so extensive that each new entrant comes with a heavy obligation to justify itself. The late David Cesarani's sweeping new narrative history faces up to this challenge squarely at the outset, and his response has much to recommend it. First, he identifies a genuine problem: the "yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject" (p. xxv). Second, he sets out to remedy this by correcting a number of persistent myths about the Holocaust long discredited by research, namely, that anti-Semitism played a decisive role in bringing Hitler to power, that murdering the Jews was the Hitler's and/or the Nazi regime's plan from day one, that the machinery of deportation and death was well oiled and technologically sophisticated, and that slaughtering the Jews detracted from the German war effort. Each of these assertions, Cesarani rightly contends, is not merely wrong but rather the opposite of the truth. Nor are these the only salutary contributions that Cesarani makes. He bravely challenges prevailing piety about survivor testimony and the taboos it upholds, many related to humiliating, often sexual situations [End Page 569] (pp. xvi–xvii). He correctly reminds us that "the current narrative is lopsided" in favor of events in Western Europe, as opposed to those in the East where most Jews died (p. xxvi). And he is—again appropriately in my view—adamant that the Holocaust was primarily about Jews because only they "were characterized as an implacable, powerful, global enemy that had to be fought at every turn and finally eliminated" (p. xxxix). Finally, in particularly strong passages, he vividly recreates the excruciating dilemmas of the Jewish Councils and the ultimate futility of any reaction they chose; shows how Nazi pressures shattered Jews' solidarity and often their moral standards; makes clear that most German perpetrators were both aware of what they were doing and convinced of its rightness; and exposes the extensive collaboration provided by numerous Poles in identifying, attacking, and helping to kill Jews. But key interpretations strike me as overdone. The general argument that developments in the war dictated the fate of the Jews is true with regard to the growing reluctance of the Reich's allies to surrender their Jews to Himmler as the tide turned against Germany. The point also holds with regard to the Jews of France, who might have died if the invasion and breakout from Normandy had been delayed. Conversely, of course, the duration of the war—the time it took the Allies to win—extended the massacre. But the claim (p. 294) that the "pause" in the euthanasia action in August 1941 was not a consequence of protests by German clerics—but rather of Germany's slower than expected advance into the USSR, mounting air raids, and increased shortages at home—is not substantiated by any information in the three secondary sources cited. With regard to the onset of the Final Solution, Cesarani makes two other war-related arguments that I find unconvincing. First, he contends that the murder of the Polish intelligentsia (Operation Tannenberg) was a more important "bridge" to the Final Solution than the massacre of the mentally and physically handicapped in German institutions (Aktion T4; p. 286). But I can see no reason to choose between them: Tannenberg was a harbinger of mass shooting by the Einsatzgruppen, but T4 heralded (and supplied the personnel for) the mass gassing of Jews. Second, Cesarani asserts that the decision for the Final Solution occurred at the end of 1941 as "the result of...

Hating Soviets—Killing Jews: How Antisemitic Were Local Perpetrators in Southern Ukraine, 1941–42?

This article intends to contribute to the scholarly debates on the role of popular antisemitism in the annihilation of East European Jewry. It focuses on the situation in part of southern Ukraine that in 1941-44 was occupied by the Romanians, who during that time were responsible for the death, either by killing or as result of starvation and disease, of between 104,000 and 120,000 Jews. (1) The study of perpetrators of crimes against humanity who were local residents of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and Eurasia has made substantial progress in the past two decades. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus and methodology developed by scholars of German perpetrators and benefiting from the availability of previously classified Soviet-era archival documents, scholars have successfully mapped out new subfield of genocide and Holocaust research as well as of violence in modern Europe in general. (2) The fundamental issues in this subfield appear to be similar to those in the study of German perpetrators: how ordinary were the perpetrators; how representative were they of the local population; were the determinants of their extraordinary cruelty mostly sociocultural or psychiatric; what drove them to participate in the blood-curdling mass murder of apparently harmless civilians? The palette of responses to this last question includes vengefulness (that is, the desire to avenge those who suffered at the hands of the Soviets), careerism/conformism, attempts to expiate service to the Soviets by exaggerated loyalty to the new masters, ideological antisemitism, sadism, and lust for power. (3) Scholars have usually found that a combination of several of these motivations played role within each individual. (4) Still, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the most hotly debated question, and probably the most consequential, both methodologically and culturally/politically, is that of antisemitic ideology as determinant of local perpetrators' behavior. Although hardly anybody denies that antisemitism was one of the factors conditioning the violence, there exists considerable disagreement among scholars as to what kind of antisemitism it was: was it rooted in the unfathomable recesses of European culture, imbued with crazy medieval visions of satanic Christ-killers bleeding babies to death to cook matzoh on the eve of Passover, or was it less obviously paranoid belief system, stemming from the more recent experience of communist rule in which many local Jews supposedly participated willingly and in which they purportedly served as key propagandists, policemen, and executioners? While these varieties of antisemitism are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in practice scholars often favor one over the other. Depending on their choice, they may arrive at vastly different conclusions. Perhaps most famously, Jan Gross dismissed references to the traumatic experience of Soviet occupation and the Jews' purported role in the communist apparatus of repression in eastern Poland as lacking solid evidence. Instead, the age-old antisemitic imagination and traditions of sporadic popular violence against Jews legitimated by Romantic nationalism had incomparably greater heuristic value for Gross's investigation of how Poles turned against their Jewish neighbors in the wake of German occupation. (5) In contrast, Bogdan Musial sees the trauma and shock of Soviet occupation-era atrocities, with some Jews serving as the most trusted agents of the authorities, as an impulse for antisemitic pogroms perpetrated by local Christians with the connivance and support of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1941, even in the absence (at this early stage) of genocidal order from the German High Command. (6) On the other hand, one renowned historian has recently suggested in well-publicized but controversial book that antisemitism was not an issue in this story at all, arguing instead that local helpers of Nazis were motivated by the need for survival and an all too human tendency to conform to superiors' orders. …

Armed Ukrainians in L’viv: Ukrainian Militia, Ukrainian Police, 1941 to 1942

Who were the Ukrainians who participated in the exterminatory violence that swept eastern Galicia following the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941? Records show that they represented diverse political and demographic strata. Those most distant from nationalist roots, however, demonstrated the highest lethality and greatest willingness to serve as disciplined agents of Nazi genocide. The cycles of violence in German-occupied Galicia were far from uniform in character. The victims and German perpetrators alike rarely differentiated among the Ukrainians doing the violence. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “task groups” first entered Galicia to establish Ukranian nationalist authority and in Lemberg participated in a few days of blood-letting until disbanded by the SS. A new, better controlled Ukrainian militia likewise proved unreliable except in self-actuated violence, and was disbanded. Finally, in late July 1941 a standing Ukrainian Auxiliary Police force – different in structure, membership, subordination, and motivation – came into being. It participated centrally in the rendering of Lemberg as Judenfrei, as security and civil authorities orchestrated the murder of Lemberg’s 150,000 Jews over the following two years.

Thy Brother’s Keeper? The Relationship between Social Distance and Intensity of Dehumanization during Genocide

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that the degree of social distance between perpetrator and victim groups prior to the outbreak of genocide is inversely related to the degree of severity of dehumanization employed by the perpetrator group during genocide. Derived from psychological theory, this hypothesis is illustrated by using a primarily literature-based method of analysis combined with a vignette-designed severity of dehumanization scale. Three genocides are compared: the Rwandan Genocide, the Holocaust as it occurred in Western Europe, and the Holocaust as it occurred in Eastern Europe. The findings for Rwanda and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe show a negative correlation between the two variables, confirming the hypothesis. The results for Western Europe, however, present somewhat of an anomaly; variations in the extermination policies of the German perpetrators in Eastern and Western Europe correspond to this difference and can, in this case, provide a possible explanation for the incongruity.

Nazi-Looted Jewish Archives in Moscow: A Guide to Jewish Historical and Cultural Collections in the Russian State Military Archive, David E. Fishman, Mark Kupovetsky, and Vladimir Kuzelenkov, eds. (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press [dist. University of Chicago Press] in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2011), xiv + 291 pp., cloth $30.00

The end of the Cold War brought about a major turning point in the historiography of the Holocaust. Drawing on documents from newly-opened archives in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, scholars have expanded their research on many fronts. But while numerous studies over the last twenty years focus primarily on the German perpetrators and their collaborators, historians have realized the dangers of objectifying the victims (as the Nazis did) and increasingly have turned to Jewish history and culture in order to understand better the victims' responses. Therefore, “it is no longer acceptable for general histories of the Holocaust to overlook the fact that the victims were real people with emotions and varying responses to persecution,” as Dan Stone asserts in his recent historiography.1 The holdings of the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) described by David Fishman, Mark Kupovetsky (professors of Jewish studies), and Vladimir Kuzelenkov (director of the RGVA) attest to the diversity and richness of European Jewish culture before it was nearly destroyed by the Germans in World War II, and may aid researchers restore the proper balance between the perspectives of perpetrators and their victims.

Enter Ghost: Haunted Courts and Haunting Judgments in Transitional Justice

How can we account for trials in which the judgment speaks not only to and about the defendants and their deeds, but also about injustices from a more distant past? Building on approaches to ghosts and haunting by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, I propose to examine a set of the German post-1990 trials for human rights violations committed in the former East Germany as instances of haunted justice. Here, the courts not only adjudicated the present cases, but also tried to ‘go back and make whole what has been smashed’ (Benjamin 1969) by their own lack of judgment in the failed trials of the Nazi perpetrators. In this instance, the ‘time is out of joint’, and we see the ghosts of the failed trials of Nazi perpetrators standing next to the inheritance of impunity fostered in West German courts, and next to the now present East German perpetrators. What can justice mean in such a complex constellation of injustices? I argue that the ghostly dimension of these cases point to a need for a kind of justice and engagement that can ultimately not be found in courts—yet the courts’ engagement with this ghostly matter is nevertheless important.

‘Ordinary Communicators’: A Demonstration Proposal for Synthesising the Browning and Goldhagen Theses

In a previous article the author deconstructed the social science of the Goldhagen Thesis according to its chosen analytical frameworks of cognitive anthropology and symbolic interactionism. By the standards of those disciplines Goldhagen’s controversial conclusion – that German perpetrators enacted an ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ unique to their national culture – is called into question by his lack of discourse analysis. The criticism, however, is unfair if the cognitive-cultural models of past societies cannot be recovered. The present article proposes one solution by arguing that ‘ordinary German’ autobiographies – a genre that has emerged only in recent years – constitute analysable natural discourse. Then after examining four such autobiographies and suggesting they share indications of a key underlying cultural model, the author demonstrates how such a datum might be interpreted through the framework of communication theory to link perpetrator cognition to behaviour.

Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans

Destined to become the classic study of terror in the Nazi dictatorship, and the benchmark for the next generation of Nazi and Holocaust scholarship. Nazi Terror tackles the central aspect of the Nazi dictatorship head on by focusing on the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work. Based on years of research in Gestapo archives, on more than 1,100 Gestapo and special court case files, and on surveys and interviews with German perpetrators, Jewish victims and ordinary Germans who experienced the Third Reich firsthand, Johnson's book settles many nagging questions about who, exactly, was responsible for what, who knew what, and when they knew it. Nazi Terror is the most fine-grained portrait we may ever have of the mechanism of terror in a dictatorship.