Murder Of Jews Research Articles

„Wyimaginowane twory”? Obóz Pracy w Łambinowicach według Janusza Rudnickiego

The article concerns Janusz Rudnicki’s work (short story) dedicated to the labor camp in Łambinowice (1945–1946). Its original version was published in 1998 under the title Polska hańba (Polish Disgrace), and its latest edition was included in the book Chodźcie, idziemy (Come On, Let’s Go), published by Rudnicki in 2007. Here it is entitled Dwa (Oboz) (Two [Camp]). The genesis, structure, functions and reception of this work are considered. It is presented in both historical (post-war expulsions of Germans from Poland, Polish camps for Germans) and literary context. Rudnicki’s work is important for several reasons. It is a significant “intervention” in Polish historical memory, bringing out the repressed persecution of Germans (who were imprisoned, tormented and killed in the Łambinowice camp). Therefore, it fits into the trend of literature questioning the “paradigm of Polish innocence” (which is dominated by works about the murder of Jews in Jedwabne). Moreover, it is a drastic work in terms of style (saturated with vulgarisms) and the presented world. The horror convention that characterizes it is as provocative and shocking as it is artistically and intellectually justified. By arousing strong emotions in the reader, it encourages them to confront the evoked situations and events with what historians have established so far. What is special about Rudnicki’s work, as a manifestation of Polish concentration camp literature, is that its lyrical subject is a torturer and not, as it is most often the case, a victim. Moreover, the torturer is a Pole. Rudnicki’s work also proves that Polish concentration camp literature is not limited, as was believed for years, only to lagers (German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres) and gulags (Soviet camps, especially forced labor camps). It also includes Polish camps.

The unwanted citizens: The ‘Legality’ of Jewish destruction in Croatia and Romania during World War II

This article examines the establishment of the legal framework that led to the destruction and elimination of Jewish communities in Croatia and Romania during World War II. It argues that both regimes, supported by domestic fascist ideologies, evolving antisemitism, and inspired by the Nazi regime, promulgated anti-Jewish legal norms to present and establish new political, ideological, and social values and categories to their citizens. This article employs the theoretical framework of norms developed by Paul Morrow, whereby norms are seen as practical prescriptions, permissions or prohibitions. We argue that these destructive norms served as guidelines for individuals within the fascist new worldview and new reality. As such, these norms received state authorisation and implementation, serving as the ‘legal’ basis for the institutional destruction of unwanted citizens. This gave local and state actors a ‘legal’ pretext for the persecution and murder of Jews, who were stripped of their rights, assets, properties and right to life. The article concludes that the two legal frameworks enacted the process by which Jewish communities in Croatia and Romania faced a devastation of unseen proportions, which testifies to the importance and impact of legal norms on individuals, be they victims, bystanders or perpetrators.

On the Distortion of the Truth of Polish Participation in the Persecution and Murder of Jews in German-occupied Poland

On the Distortion of the Truth of Polish Participation in the Persecution and Murder of Jews in German-occupied Poland

The Jewish Historical Institute and the 1968 antisemitic campaign in Poland

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relentless attacks on the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny; ŻIH) in Warsaw in 1967–1968 against the background of two narratives. The first narrative, focusing on the murder of Jews during the German occupation by Polish antisemites, was utilized by German revisionists connected with the Göttinger Arbeitskreis in order to assuage German guilt for the Holocaust. It operated in a manipulative manner, selectively choosing and distorting Jewish testimony and combining this with elements of Cold War-style anti-Communism. The second narrative was embraced by the nationalist faction of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and offered the myth of the Polish nation as heroic saviors of the Jews. It, too, was based on selectively chosen Jewish testimony, with the goal of whitewashing Poles of involvement in antisemitic violence. ŻIH was caught in the middle, forced to defend itself against attacks coming from proponents of both narratives.

Misled by Evgenii Khaldei: “Budapest Ghetto” Photos Staged outside the Ghetto and Their False Narratives

ABSTRACT World War II Soviet photojournalist Evgenii Khaldei gained fame in the West when his photographs of war victims were exhibited there in the 1990s. Among his Holocaust-related images are two iconic photos that he claimed were taken upon the January 18, 1945 liberation of the Budapest ghetto. One represents the wanton murder of Jews, the other their survival. Exhibited or published, these photos were accompanied by Khaldei’s brief stories about their subjects. The following examination proves that they were not taken in the ghetto, that they were staged, and that the stories Khaldei attached to them were false.

Information About the Holocaust in Hungary Before the German Occupation, Revisited

ABSTRACT The question of what was known in Hungary about the Holocaust has been a mainstay of research on that chapter since the time of the Kasztner libel trial in the mid-1950s. New studies on various aspects of the subject and new sources that have become available make it worthwhile to revisit it. It is now clear that news about the Nazi persecution of Jews reached Hungary soon after it began and continued to arrive in the period preceding the German occupation in spring 1944. This included information about the massacre of Hungarian Jews at Kam'yanets-Podilskyy in 1941 and Jews in Novi Sad in the Hungarian occupation zone in Serbia in 1942. From the second half of 1941 through the occupation, Hungarian soldiers and Hungarian Jewish labor servicemen learned about mass murder of Jews and brought news back to Hungary. The destruction of Jews was discussed in the Hungarian Jewish press. The activists of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, led by Kasztner and Otto Komoly, were also a conduit for information. Very specific information, including about Auschwitz, reached Hungary in January 1944 when the Hashomer Hatsair leader from Będzin, Chajka Klinger, who had escaped to Hungary, gave her testimony. Around that time, Zionist youth movement emissaries were sent from Budapest to the provinces and, after encountering Klinger's message, passed it on. Despite the availability of much information, as Yehuda Bauer explained many years ago in an article, there is a gap between information and knowledge. To a large extent this gap regarding the events of the Holocaust, which a great many Hungarian Jews did not bridge, derived from the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust.

Violence and Movement: Conflict, Genocide and the Darker Side of ‘Travel’

Abstract: Travel is often thought to be an adventure, an exploration, a way of knowing self and world, a break from the stresses of everyday life, a vacation. But there can be a dark side to travel, as in voyages that are part of invasion, conflict and enforced transport. Here, I wish to concentrate on conflict, domination, murder and genocide and do so, at various moments, by referring to the Norse sagas, including the encounter with the Skrælings in the New World and, more briefly, Columbus’ and the Spaniards’ violent treatment of the Natives in the New World and the German transport, torture and murder of Jews in the Shoah, or Holocaust.

THE VERDICT IN KARLSRUHE: "LIFE IMPRISONMENT FOR THE BUTCHER FROM MINSK!»

The trial against Karlsruhe criminal police Secretary Adolf Rube, held in 1949, was the first trial in Germany, during which Nazi atrocities committed on the territory of Belarus were considered. By the example of this process, the paper attempts to identify the specifics of West Germany courts’ consideration of criminal cases related to the commission of Holocaust crimes in Eastern Europe. German law excluded the possibility of punishing Nazi criminals for genocide, crimes against peace and humanity. Guided by the norms of the German Criminal Code of 1871, German justice considered each case of murder of Jews during the years of national socialism as a separate crime, caused by personal motives. Based on this, A. Rube was punished not for participating in the state-organized, bureaucratically planned genocide of the Jewish people, but for committing separate, unrelated murders. The defendant, who was accused of killing 436 Jews in the Minsk ghetto, was found guilty of unlawfully depriving 27 people of their lives and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, in 1962 he was amnestied and was released. By presenting the Holocaust as a mosaic of individual, unrelated criminal acts, German justice maintained the illusion that "normal" Germans "knew nothing" about the mass extermination of Jews, that the Holocaust was solely the product of the Hitler’s actions, his fanatical entourage, and individual "pathological sadists," "sex maniacs," and "upstarts" such as A. Rube, who sought to assert themselves at the expense of Jewish victims.

Homo Holocaustus, or Autobiographical Female Experience of the Holocaust

The aim of this paper is to present the motif of the Shoah in female autobiographcial prose after the year 2000. The paper shows that, in recent years, more and more female authors in the second and third post-Holocaust generations have been recording their traumatic experience, and that the reason for it lies in the social stigmatization of Jewish people. It is stressed here that the issues of the Holocaust are part and parcel of a cultural taboo and – similarly to female written prose – they are frequently ignored or evaluated negatively. The Holocaust issues are tackled by contemporary young writers of Jewish descent who – contrary to the previous generation authors – have not experienced the mass murder of Jews; nevertheless, they feel its effects today. This paper proves that the research into trauma studies is not really conducted in Poland, and paying attention to a female viewpoint is very rare. The examples referred to in the paper of the autobiographical novels by Ewa Kuryluk, Agata Tuszyńska, Roma Ligocka and Magdalena Tulli demonstrate that this kind of writing is becoming more and more important within the literature focused on the Shoah. Compared to the autobiographical fiction by Marek Bieńczyk, Jan Tomasz Gross and Michał Głowiński, female Holocaust stories are distinguished by their authenticity, emotionality, intimacy and honesty of narration. The stories are devoid of any pathos, and they highlight the figure of a mother. Moreover, their confessions are based on the physical feeling of the legacy which has remained in their hearts and minds after the trauma that their loved ones had to experience. An attempt to describe prose post-Holocaust prose is made in comparison to Jewish literature in Poland, drawing the reader’s attention to the characteristic features of these issues compared to the autobiographical works by men.

Memorialising the (Un)Dead Jewish Other in Poland: Spectrality, Embodiment and Polish Holocaust Horror in Władysław Pasikowski’s Aftermath (2012)

This article analyses the function and symbolic currency of Poland’s recent literary and artistic motif of the returning Jew, which brings the nation’s Jewish Holocaust victims back to their homes as ghosts, spectres and reanimated corpses. It explores the ability of this trope—the defining feature of what I call ‘Polish Holocaust horror’—to cultivate the memory of complicitous and collaborative Polish behaviour during the Holocaust years, and to promote renewed Polish-Jewish relations based upon a working-through of this difficult history. In the article I explore Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 film Aftermath as a self-reflexive product of this experimental genre, which has been considered ethically ambiguous for its necropolitical treatment of Jews and politically controversial for its depiction of Poles as perpetrators. My analysis examines haunting as central to these popular cultural constructions of Holocaust memory—a device that has been used within the genre to mourn but also expel guilt for the previously forgotten or supressed dispossession and murder of Jews by some of their Polish neighbours.

“Millions of Jews Died in That War… It Was a Bad Time”: The Holocaust in Adventures in Odyssey’s Escape to the Hiding Place

In 2012, the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family published Escape to the Hiding Place, the ninth book in Adventures in Odyssey’s Imagination Station book series. This short children’s book is a creative reimagining of Corrie ten Boom’s Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie was a Christian who lived in Haarlem during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Corrie and her family helped hide Jews and non-Jews from arrest and deportation at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Corrie’s story has played a significant role in the evangelical Christian encounter with the Holocaust. Like every Imagination Station story, Escape to the Hiding Place features two cousins, Patrick and Beth, from the fictional town of Odyssey. They travel back in time to help Jews escape the Nazis, all so they can learn a lesson about their ability to aid others in need. A harrowing adventure ensues. This paper does not criticize the valuable rescue work undertaken by Christians during the Holocaust, nor does it criticize the contemporary evangelical desire to draw meaning from Christian rescue work. Rather, the fictional narrative under consideration skews toward an overly simplistic representation of the Christian response to the murder of Jews during World War Two, contains a flat reading of Dutch society during the war, and fails to address antisemitism or racism. This paper situates Escape to the Hiding Place within a wider evangelical popular culture that has struggled with the history of the Holocaust apart from redemptive Christian biographies.

15. La Wehrmacht, le corps des généraux et la Shoah

For a long time, the participation of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust was denied, ignored or underestimated in Germany. Only more recent research has clearly shown that the deprivation of rights, deportation and murder of Jews in the occupied territories which were managed by the Wehrmacht would hardly have been possible without the active participation of military departments. This applies to France, Belgium, Serbia and Greece, but especially to the occupied Soviet territories, in which the indiscriminate genocide was initiated in 1941. Over half a million Jews were murdered in the military operation area in the East alone, with the indulgence as well as administrative and logistical support of the Wehrmacht. On the military side, the main responsibility for these precedentsetting mass crimes was borne by the generals, who consciously engaged in Hitler’s intended racial ideological war of extermination and, in this context, accepted the Holocaust themselves.

Staging Encounters with Estranged Pasts: Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017) and the Cinematic Face of Public Memory of the Holocaust in Present-Day Romania

This article provides a close analysis of Radu Jude’s The Dead Nation (2017), a documentary essay that brings together authentic archival sources documenting the persecution and murder of Jews in World War II. The sources include a little-known diary of Emil Dorian, a Jewish medical doctor and writer from Bucharest, a collection of photographs depicting scenes from Romanian daily life in the 1930s and 1940s, and recordings of political speeches and propaganda songs of a Fascist nature. Through a careful framing of this film in relation to Romanian public memory of World War II, and in connection to the popular new wave cinema, I will contend that Jude’s work acts, perhaps unwittingly, to intervene in public memory and invites the Romanian public to face up to and acknowledge the nation’s perpetrator past. This filmic intervention further offers an important platform for public debate on Romania’s Holocaust memory and is of significance for European public memory, as it proposes the film happening as a distinct and innovative practice of public engagement with history.

The botulinum toxin legend of Reinhard Heydrich's death: The end of "Himmler's brain".

The high-ranking German Nazi Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) was one of the main organizers of the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War. He died on June 4, 1942, in Prague after having been wounded in Operation Anthropoid planned by the British intelligence services. Since the 1970s and 1980s, Heydrich's death has been frequently presented in British, American, and French literature as the consequence of a bacteriologic attack. Botulinum toxin would have been used in the grenades or ammunition. We discuss the botulinum toxin hypothesis using the now declassified British archives of Operation Anthropoid and of the chemical and bacteriologic warfare centers to assess this hypothesis.

REZENSIONEN

AbstractThis essay treats actions of Fritz Gebhard Schellhorn (1888-1982), physician, member of the German diplomatic service since 1920, German consul in Cernăuţi / Czernowitz (Romania) 1934-1944, resident in Jassy in the period 1940/41. It describes his efforts and resulting successes in preventing the continuation of the murder of Jews by a SS-„Sonderkommando“ in Cernăuţi in July 1941 and stopping the deportation of Jews from Cernăuţi saving up to 20 000 human beings in October 1941. In addition, the essay questions the prevailing interpretation of the role of Traian Popovici, lord mayor of Cernăuţi and presents some thoughts on the motivation of Schellhorn and the reception of this incidents.

Obedience in perspective: Psychology and the Holocaust

Stanley Milgram’s explanation of the Holocaust in terms of the mechanism of obedience is too narrow. While obedience was one mechanism which contributed to the outcome, the murder of Jews and others was the work of people from a broad swath of German society, from economists who planned mass starvation to ordinary soldiers in the Wehrmacht, often acting without duress or apparent pressures to conform. Psychologists should not ask “why?” the Holocaust occurred, but “how?” Much behavior of perpetrators, bystanders, victims, and instigators can be understood as the consequence of normal mechanisms of perception, learning, socialization, and development. What made genocide possible was not the transitory conditions created in a lab in a few hours but a complex of mechanisms that are the product of generations of human experience and of elaborate rational, emotional, and logical justifications. This requires a more complex future psychology than the narrow focus on situationist obedience.

Beorn, Waitman Wade. Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus (review)

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 580 Voionmaa was not quite expecting an exploitation of the full trip, however, in the confusion of the Kalotti and Northern Russia in 1918 he published two tracts advising his fellow-countrymen to look carefully at the Northern shores, its islands and its seas. Most curiously, this stalwart Social Democrat asked Mannerheim in one of the tracts to forget the victory parades of the civil war and to get up North and seize a piece of the Varanger Fjord so as to bolster the position of Finland in these hitherto neglected lands. Was he before his time? University of Turku George Maude Beorn, Waitman Wade. Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2014. iii + 314 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Graphs. Notes. Index. $39.95: £29.95: €35.95. Eastern Europe was where Nazi Germany went from persecuting Jews to killing them, first by mass shootings, then by industrialized mass murder in gas chambers. While Hitler’s ideological soldiers in the SS were the foremost perpetrators of the mass shootings, many regular army men also became accomplices. Waitman Wade Beorn’s book deepens our knowledge of this phenomenon by studying how German Wehrmacht soldiers became active participants in the mass murder of Jews in occupied Belarus. Wehrmacht collaboration in Nazi crimes has long been documented, but Beorn’s well-written book is among the first to explore its concrete manifestations on the ground. Based on German sources, mostly soldiers’ post-war testimony and wartime military documents, the book takes a micro-historical approach, concentrating on a handful of individual Wehrmacht units and their evolving entanglement with Nazi genocidal policy. Beorn makes three principal arguments. First, unit culture and leadership largely decided who became a perpetrator. Second, the identification of Jews with partisans and Bolsheviks justified Wehrmacht participation in the murder of Jews. Finally, such participation in itself had a radicalizing effect and led to ever deeper complicity in the Holocaust. How do the main contentions in the book hold up? Let us begin with Beorn’s third, chronological argument, which structures the main chapters of the book. In the beginning, Beorn finds, complicity was improvised and mostly limited to guard duties rather than direct participation in the killings. Many men were reluctant and hesitant to participate. Yet most did what was ordered or expected of them when push came to shove. They pulled victims from their homes and stood guard around killing sites. During the next stage, complicity became less complicated: ‘in less than a month, army units in Belarus had gone from somewhat hesitant collaborators to clumsy but brutal killers’ (p. 134). Next, REVIEWS 581 genocide became ‘routine’. Soldiers now participated extensively in large-scale killing operations, including plunder and sexual exploitation, which reflected a deepening and more routinized form of collaboration. Finally, by the end of 1941, ‘most soldiers and units appear to have internalized the necessity of their role in assisting in the murder of Jews’ (p. 183). Beorn refers to a particular Wehrmacht unit which engaged, on its own initiative, in sadistic ‘Jew hunts’ toward the end of 1941 and into 1942. While the detailed narrative is well-crafted and valuable in its own right, the argument that Wehrmacht complicity evolved in stages leaves something to be desired. To prove it, one would have to demonstrate that most Wehrmacht units involved in the Holocaust followed this same path over time. Beorn, however, looks at different units at different points in time. Since we do not get to follow the units from beginning to end (and into the second and third year of the war), we do not know whether they became more or less radical in the longer run. The book’s second main argument — that the conflation of Jews with partisans and Bolsheviks justified Wehrmacht participation in genocide — is well backed up by the evidence. Beorn concentrates in particular on the Mogilev Conference, convened in late September 1941, where Wehrmacht personnel met with chief SS killers, ostensibly to discuss experiences relating to anti-partisan warfare. Beorn convincingly argues that the conference served to ‘more fully incorporate the army in killings of Jews...

Is Seeing Believing? Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust

During World War II, the first media outlets to publish photographs of the Nazi mass murder of Jews and others were Soviet newspapers and magazines. The problem with Soviet photographs was that the Soviet media were considered unreliable from a Western standpoint, because unlike in the West, which perceived a clear ideological differentiation of art from photojournalism, Soviet photography blurred that distinction. According to Western standards of evidence, Soviet photography could never be taken seriously as photojournalism, precisely because the photographer was always metaphorically present. Since Soviet photojournalism failed the test of the documentary imperative, it rarely convinced people of the truth of its subject matter. In this epistemological context when photographs might fail to convince, the act of physically bearing witness, of seeing with one's own eyes, became the most important way of proving to a disbelieving public the veracity of Nazi atrocities.

"He spoke Yiddish like a Jew": Neighbors' Contribution to the Mass Killing of Jews in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia, July 1941

The mass murder of Jews by the local population during Operation Barbarossa was as common in Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia as in eastern Poland, Lithuania, or Galicia. Residents in many localities in these areas seized the “window of opportunity” between the flight of the Soviet administration and the arrival of Romanian or German forces to murder Jews on their own initiative. Plundering was a key component of the pogroms that took place everywhere. The following illustrates the need for further consideration of the chronology and contexts of pogroms at the beginning of the war in the East.

‘The history of an incorrect term’: Agamben, etymology and the medieval history of the holocaust

In his discussion of the word ‘holocaust’ in Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben identifies the twelfth-century English historian Richard of Devizes as the first to connect the term ‘holocaust’ to the murder of Jews, concluding with an indictment of its use: ‘it … contains a heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic.’ This essay will take as its starting point twelfth-century usage of the term ‘holocaust,’ alongside the two key Latin terms flagged up by Agamben – immolare [‘to burn’] and sanguisuga [‘bloodsucker’]. Ultimately, the essay will suggest that, contrary to Agamben’s understanding of this moment, Richard of Devizes was not intending to portray the death of Jews as a sacrifice pleasing to God, but rather that he was demonstrating an alert awareness of the extent to which Christian culture and Jewish culture are deeply imbricated. The essay concludes by considering the implications of its own methodology.