Murder Of Jews Research Articles

Czernowitz 1941/1942 – der Einsatz des deutschen Konsuls Fritz Schellhorn für die Juden / Czernowitz 1941/42 – the Efforts of the German Consul Fritz Schellhorn for the Jews

Abstract This 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.

The Catholic Bishops of Europe and the Nazi Persecutions of Catholics and Jews by Vincent A. Lapomarda, S.J. (review)

The Catholic Bishops of Europe and the Nazi Persecutions of Catholics and Jews. By Vincent A. Lapomarda, S.J. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. 2012. Pp. x, 310. $149.95. ISBN 978-0-7734-2932-1.)In The Catholic Bishops of Europe and the Nazi Persecutions of Catholics and Jews, Vincent A. Lapomarda, associate professor of history at the College of the Holy Cross, seeks to understand the various responses of European Catholic bishops to National Socialism and particularly the latter's systematic persecution and murder of Jews. His goal is to be comprehensive in scope by covering the episcopacy in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Such a task is daunting indeed, perhaps even requiring multi-volumes, and would, in theory, surpass in scope previous serious studies by John Morley ( Vatican Diplomacy and the during the Holocaust 1939-1943 [New York, 1980]) and Michael Phayer (The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 [Bloomington, IN, 2000]). By contrast, Lapomarda's in this regard is exceedingly superficial and, at best, serves as a conduit of basic information on clergy who, at times, chose to resist Nazism. In reality, the reads like Catholic apologetic literature of old.In his foreword to the book, Ronald J. Rychlak, professor of law at the University of Mississippi, describes Lapomarda's previous research as precise and demanding and insists, There are no shortcuts in Fr. Lapomarda's work (p. i). Unfortunately, such praise cannot be given to the current study. Repeated historical inaccuracies and analysis mire the book. For example, in his chapter on Germany, Lapomarda falsely and, it could be argued, misleadingly portrays Conrad Grober, archbishop of Freiburg, as critical of the April 1,1933, national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. He incorrectly reports that in 1937 state officials arrested 141 priests of the Wurzburg diocese for allegedly supporting Jews (p. 88). Later, in his Retrospect concluding chapter, Lapomarda perpetuates the myth that Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich and Freising, defended in his 1933 Advent sermons. Through his secretary, Faulhaber personally rejected such an interpretation of his sermons. Likewise, in his chapter on Austria, Lapomarda acclaims Father Georg Bichlmair's assistance to Jews, but completely ignores the Jesuit's repeated antisemitic utterances that John Connelly uncovered so clearly in his recent study, From Enemy to Brother (Cambridge, MA, 2012). …

Not Only in Jedwabne: Accounts of the Annihilation of the Jewish Shtetlach in North-eastern Poland in the Summer of 1941

The summer of 1941, the start of Operation Barbarossa, witnessed the mass murder of Jews in two provinces in north-eastern Poland (Łomza and Grajewo), murders in which local Poles played a significant role, on their own initiative. The murder of the Jews of one of the communities in the region, Jedwabne, was the subject of Jan Gross’s Neighbors, yet thorough research indicates Jedwabne was not the only such case. This essay, based on numerous accounts by both Poles and Jews, seeks to examine the part played by Poles in Jews’ murders in nine additional communities in the area, prior to events in Jedwabne. In order to draw a full picture of events, the essay describes relations between Jews and Poles in the region during the inter-war period, as well as under Soviet rule (1939–41). At the same time it describes the emergence, in both provinces, of the idea of settling the score with the Jews in an attempt to get rid of them once and for all. Since these events were unprecedented and unique in Poland at that period, the essay also addresses the issue of why the murders were committed in this specific region.

A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d'hiv 1942: Review Essay: Novels, Films, Memoirs, Interviews

A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d'hiv 1942:Review Essay: Novels, Films, Memoirs, Interviews Norman Simms (bio) Les Gens très bien (The Nice People), by Alexandre Jardin. Paris: Grasset, 2010. Elle s'appelait Sarah (She Was Called Sarah), directed by Gilles Pequet-Brenner, 2011. Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007. La Rafle (The Round-Up), directed by Rose Bosch, 2011. "L'espace du mythe maréchaliste à Vichy 1940-1944" (The Space of the Marshall Myth in Vichy 1940-1944) by Robert Liris, Mentalities/Mentalités, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2009): 33-39. Recreating and Recollecting an Historical Event What happened in August 1942 to Jews in the Vel d'hiv (Vélodrome d'hiver or Winter Cycling Stadium) in one sense is not in controversy; the event does not raise the voices of deniers as does the Holocaust itself; and no one tries to [End Page 123] trivialize the arrest, deportation, and execution of more than thirteen thousand French men, women, and children.1 Though until very recently, no one in France liked to talk about it because this rafle or round-up involved ordinary Parisian gendarmes, bus drivers, and other civic officials of the collaborationist government under Nazi occupation, along with those French bureaucrats working for the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain to the south. It was known to have happened. But the exact details were apparently lost: lost because the Germans unusually for them did not keep accurate records, including photographs and other plans. Lost because what material evidence (realia) that lasted was later destroyed or interfered with after the war, such as the velodrome itself, which was torn down, and the holding camps outside of Paris, bulldozed away or transformed into something seemingly innocuous; and it is charged that even General Charles de Gaulle, when he later came to power, had the few remaining photographs airbrushed so that French police officers were removed and the round-up presented as an all-German operation. Lost too because virtually all Jews who passed through the action did not survive, and those few Jews who did were mostly so young at the time they could not present substantial reports. Rose Bosch, the director of the film La Rafle, says the number of returnees was only 25.2 Ordinary non-Jewish citizens of France pretended they could not remember, claimed not to know anyone who did recall, and resisted attempts to help them recollect. Anyone who did collaborate with the Nazis in this affair must have been a monster, the feeling went, and therefore the individuals who collaborated and did not seem like monsters could neither have known nor participated in the business. A vicious circle. Gendarmes, neighbors, passersby on the street, no one could bring to mind such an event happening, though they did not deny that it must have happened; it is not something nice to talk about. In time, of course, most French people did really forget, and the teachers and school textbooks forgot to remind them. Perhaps, as Rose Bosch told Simon Round in an interview for the British Jewish Chronicle, "France was the only country in Europe which sent thousands [End Page 124] of unaccompanied children on trains to the death camps," adding that "[w]hen they arrived at Auschwitz they were either marched to the gas chambers or machine-gunned to death."3 Not only that, most French people do not realize either that there were over two hundred internment camps on their national territory or that Marshal Petain's embarrassingly naive and almost comical government took an active part in the deportation and murder of Jews, often without any demands coming from the Germans."4 To accept as a judicial memory and a moral fact these aspects of French history is, of course, difficult, even for those not directly culpable, particularly children and grandchildren of those who were participants in the crimes or passive witnesses, because such matters are immensely shameful and depressing. Those who deliberately suppress the memories, keeping it from their families and the general public, may do so for malicious reasons: to protect themselves from answering to...

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (review)

Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, by Peter Longerich, edited by Jeremy Noakes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 625 pp. $34.95. This wide-ranging, comprehensive analysis of the Holocaust from origins to consequences promises to set a new standard for Holocaust studies. Director of a research center at the Royal Holloway College of London University, Peter Longerich also has written a pace-setting biography of Heinrich Himmler, universally recognized books on Hitler's role in devising the to the Jewish Question, and a sharp analysis of German amnesia about the Holocaust (Davon haben wir nichts gewust). Readers will also remember him as giving the decisive testimony in the David Irving v. Penguin/Lipstadt trial. The current book is a rewritten English edition of the German original work which made an immediate and strongly favorable impression on the world of Holocaust studies back in 1998 (Die Politik der Vernichtung). Bringing the scholarship up to date for the past 12 years is one of the outstanding achievements of this work, and the fine tuning and editing of Jeremy Noakes has saved the English reader from many germanisms such as prolix, convoluted sentences and ponderous arguments, although a few have slipped through the screen. The scholarship is impeccable (nearly a third of the book consists of notes) and the writing is clear and persuasive. The general reader will have no difficult passages to negotiate and will appreciate the frequent summaries at the end of sections and chapters. Captions and titles break up the text perhaps too much at times, but nonetheless encourage previews of sections and chapters, thus giving perspective and logical connections. While scholars like Omer Bartov have called for a renewed focus on the victims of the Holocaust, using recollections and interviews like those conducted by David Boder right after the war, Peter Longerich unabashedly writes perpetrators' history with an emphasis on the decision-making process. This does not mean that the author is dispassionate or indifferent to the suffering of those individuals who are about to die at the hands of unbelievably brutish and evil killers. Every page is suffused with the sounds of death and dying even if surrounded by place names, police unit names, names of the leaders of killing squads, and endless statistics of the dead in small localities and larger regional areas. Running through the entire text like a red thread is the German word Judenpolitik, which is untranslatable, since it suggests both politics and policy, two quite separate ideas in English. Judenpolitik is the core of national socialism, according to Longerich. It drives the Nazi machinery of political action and bureaucratic function throughout the peacetime Reich and the War. It in turn is driven by a furious fire of racial hubris - and hence is at the center of the Holocaust and in all of its variegated manifestations. Longerich identifies three points where the antisemitic campaign, the decision-making process for the to the Jewish Question, was escalated: The period from 1939 to 1941, the initial phase, was one during which the Nazi regime already contemplated genocidal murder of the European Jews, following from the racially motivated mass murder of Poles and the congenitally ill. In this new view which rejects a single decision by a single authority like Hider, 1933 to 1939 was a preparatory period during which the political institutions and instruments were developed that were then put to use when the war began. The second consequence of taking the final solution to be a complex process is that Longerich and those who agree with him (Gerlach and AIy, for instance) now take into consideration new thematic approaches to the analysis of the persecution of the Jews, [so] it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of Europe. …

For an overcoat, a suitcase and an apple. Crimes against Jews hiding in the villages of Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice in ...

The article contains a discussion and an attempt at analysis of the post-war investigation and trial materials regarding three different cases of murder or denunciation of hiding Jews by the local Polish population. The crimes discussed in the article took place in three villages, which during the occupation were located in the Cracow district: Falkowa, Wieniec and Janowice. After the war the perpetrators were indicted on the basis of the Decree of 31 August 1944, i.e. the so-called “August Decree”. According to the testimonies of the witnesses and the defendants, the main motive behind the murder of Jews or their denunciation to the occupier was the desire for quick material gain, and, secondly, the fear of the consequences if the information that the Jews were hiding in the village reached the authorities. Another important element of the incidents was the active or passive participation of numerous village dwellers in the crimes

“I Wish to Add that I was not Aware and Carried out the Task as a Soldier of the Home Army”. On the Murder of Jews Hiding near Racławice by a Company of the Miechów Home Army

In late November 1943, in Rędziny-Borek near Miechów, a group of armed men, barged into the house of a local peasant, and from a hidden chamber dragged out six Jews hiding there. Then, having searched them thoroughly, and having taken away their valuables and cash, the victims were lined up against the wall and – one by one—shot in the back of the head. The crime, however, was not perpetrated by bandits of some unidentified “forest people”, but a carefully planned ( and authorized by the District command) military operation of the Miechów Home Army structures

MICHAEL BERKOWITZ. The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2007. Pp. xxix, 321. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95

Michael Berkowitz takes us a step beyond delineations of Nazi antisemitism to answer an important question: what motivated law-abiding Germans to accept and participate in the social isolation, persecution, deportation, and murder of Jews? Was racist propaganda sufficient to reassure them that their actions were appropriate? The answer Berkowitz proposes is that Nazi antisemitism propagandized against Jews not simply as foreign and dangerous but as criminals deserving punishment, thus transforming Nazi crimes against Jews into due and proper deterrence, restraint, and punishment, as well as protection of Germans from Jewish crime. Historians of the Third Reich will be grateful to Berkowitz for amassing a treasure of data, both archival and published, describing the “criminalization” of Jews in Nazi antisemitic propaganda and its afterlife in the immediate postwar years. Going further, he demonstrates the ways that propaganda was implemented in the Nazi treatment of Jews. His book ranges widely through records from concentration camps, memoirs, and court documents, as well as propaganda texts and images.

How Post-war Britain Reflected on the Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder of Europe's Jews: A Reassessment of Early Responses

During the 1990s historians began paying attention to how societies in the postwar era reflected on the destruction of Europe's Jews between 1933 and 1945 and soon a consensus evolved that there had been a brief burst of media coverage and outrage related to the liberation of the concentration camps and war crimes trials in 1945–46 which soon faded. However, from 1999 a number of historians looking at the USA and other countries went beyond the identification of a postwar ‘silence’. They argued that it was broken by a deliberate effort of Jewish organisations, mainly in America, for the purpose of creating sympathy for Israel and the Jews more generally. This contribution re-assesses recent trends in the scholarship concerning post-war responses in Britain to the Jewish catastrophe of 1933–45. It argues that we are mistaken if we look in the past for representations of what we recognise today as ‘the Holocaust’ or if we treat the apparent marginalisation of the Jewish experience as a sign of malevolence or indifference. It concludes by suggesting that if during the 1950s there was a dropping off of publications about the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews, this may have been because the market was satiated.

Dla płaszcza, walizki i jabłka. Zbrodnie na Żydach ukrywających się we wsiach Falkowa, Wieniec i Janowice w świetle powojennych dokumentów procesowych

W artykule znajduje się omówienie i próba analizy powojennych materiałów śledczych i procesowych dotyczących trzech różnych przypadków mordowania lub wydawania ukrywających się Żydów w ręce władz niemieckich przez miejscową ludność polską. Omawiane w artykule zbrodnie miały miejsce w trzech wsiach, które w czasie okupacji leżały na terenie dystryktu krakowskiego: Falkowej, Wieńcu i Janowicach. Sprawcy zostali po wojnie postawieni w stan oskarżenia na podstawie Dekretu z dnia 31.08.1944, czyli tzw. dekretu sierpniowego. Z zeznań świadków i oskarżonych wynika, że głównym motywem mordowania Żydów lub wydawania ich w ręce okupanta była chęć szybkiego zysku i w drugiej kolejności strach przed konsekwencjami, gdyby informacja o ukrywających się we wsi Żydach dotarła do władz. Istotnym elementem zajść był aktywny lub bierny współudział licznych mieszkańców wsi w popełnionych zbrodniach.

The Hidden and Forbidden History of Latvia under Soviet and Nazi Occupations 1940-1991: Selected Research of the Commission of the Historians of Latvia by V. Nollendorfs E. Oberl�nder (review)

364 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 Nollendorfs, V. and Oberlander, E. (eds). TheHiddenandForbidden Historyof Latviaunder Soviet andNazi Occupations I940-I99I: Selected Research of the Commission of theHistorians of Latvia.Institute of the History of Latvia, Riga, 2005. 38I PP. Maps. Figures.Tables. Notes. Index. Price unknown. THE book originatesin the work of the Symposiumof the Commission of the Historians of Latvia. Central to it is the contention that the Holocaust was initiated and administeredby Germans, who 'tried to make it appear as a local enterprise'(p. I3). This impressionwas zealouslyfosteredby the former USSR, which in rationalizingits occupation of the Baltic countries systematically exaggerated the nature and extent to which the Baltic peoples cooperated with the Nazis between 194I and I944. The book confronts this distortion, although fully acknowledgingthe involvement of Latvians in the murder ofJews. Alfred Senn's helpful introductory essay argues that the relatively favourabletreatmentofJews under the firstSoviet occupation, taken in conjunction with the oppression and deportation of Latvians,was the 'strongest factor in the explosion of violence against the Jews in the Baltic' (p. 26). Implicitly or explicitly, most of his fellow authors in the first part of this volume arejust as willing to put the old Soviet Union firmlyback in the dock. However, Irene Sneidere'stelling indictment of the Soviet occupation attacks the 'myth'ofJews being happierthan Latviansat the arrivalof the Red Army and remindsus of the high proportionofJews also deported on 14June 194I. Rudite Viksne draws on newer material available in Latvia from the end of the I990S to supportthe case that the Soviet deportationsof 1941'correspond to the characteristics of genocide stated in article 2 of the 9 December 1949 United Nations Organization "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide"' (p. 74). This conviction colours the second part of the book on the German occupation between I94I and 1944. Thus Inesis Feldmanis highlights the first Soviet entry as the major cause of the behaviour of Latvians thereafter, while at the same time stating that the German occupiers bear 'full responsibility for crimes against civilians on Latvian territory' (p. 77). The historiography of the Holocaust including the debate as to whether or not there was an 'interregnum ' between the two occupations and, if so, whether there were 'spontaneous ' local actions againstJews -features in several of the chapters. By and large this approach skirts the issue of personal responsibility on the part of Holocaust perpetrators, now so central to studies of the Third Reich. Several contributors are concerned to distance the Latvian Legion, formed from 1943 onwards, from the killings of 1941. That was true in the case of many, but hardly all Latvians involved in the Legion a thought arising from Karlis Kangeris's revelations about the difficulty of getting reliable figures on police battalions from 1941. Rightly, the book sets the involvement of Latvians with German forces from 1943 in the broader European context, where many non-Germanic peoples were enlisted in Waffen-SS units and where the major motivation was to free territory of the detested Soviet presence. Still, the distinction drawn between general co-operation (collaboration) and collaborationism (treasonous REVIEWS 365 cooperation) (pp. II3-14) escapes this reviewer. Antonijs Zunda's deft survey of the historiography of resistance against the Nazi occupation of Latvia rounds off this part and is followed by a series of chapters on the Holocaust itselfin occupied Latvia.Aivars Strangadescribesthe course of events in telling detail, not excluding those who rescuedJews and who 'lived on another planet from that of the murderers'(p. I68). In chartingthe massacreofJews in Kruspils,on the easternbank of the Daugava, DzintarsErglispresentschilling pen sketchesof Latviankillersas well as touching detailson the victims. Other noteworthychaptersdraw on Soviet court filesto throwlight on the notorious ArajsCommando. The fact that part of the commando was incorporatedinto the Latvian Legion furtherundermines the distinctionnoted earlierbetween the events of I94i and I943. The last partsof the book coveringthe Soviet occupation I944-9I offerless cause for contention. Heinrihs Strods has a useful overview of the process of sovietisationin Latviaand also tacklesthe questionof Latvianresistanceto the USSR in a second chapter. Other subjects touched on include the Soviet impact on Latvian historiography and Soviet repressions against Latvian farmers.Ultimately readersmay well put the...

Words, Words, Words

Arguably there is a direct link between centuries of Christian supersessionist teaching and the Shoah, and Christian culpability in the nearly total destruction of European Jewry cannot be denied. Nazi Germany lived in the shadow of religious fratricidal teaching and applied this hatred to the murder of Jews. In light of Auschwitz, however, the Roman Catholic Church confronted and fully rejected Christian imperialism, for example, the deification and crucifixion of Jesus Christ validate and intensify anti-Semitism, through the advocacy of reconciliation and fraternity with the Jewish People. Yet a number of Jewish organizations (religious and secular) were "perplexed and angered at the way the Vatican is crafting its memory and symbols of the nadir of modern Jewish-Christian relations—the Shoah." By examining linguistically, philosophically and scripturally the power of words in the much publicized Auschwitz Convent controversy, I will attempt to correct a major fault in self-identity and vision of the other. A necessary front in Holocaust education today: teaching and correcting the usage of words in order to prevent disputation in erstwhile Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

Alexander B. Rossino. Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. xv, 343 pp.

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).

Holocaust Studies without the Holocaust: Review Essay

Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in Representation of by Lea Wernick Fridman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 177 pp. $49.50 (c); $16.95 (p).Writing Writing Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 208 pp. $39.95 (c); $17.95 (p).Holocaust Representation: Art within Limits of History and Ethics, by Berel Lang. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 175 pp. $38.00.The may be defined as attempted extermination not only of Jews but also of Judaism, inasmuch as meaning of each is tied to other. With proliferation of scholarship on the representation of Holocaust, however, itself -- that is to say, attempted extermination of Jews and Judaism -- has become more and more obscure. Focused on representation and not on scholars are far more interested in theory and aesthetics than in Jews and Judaism. result has been general erasure of Jews from studies. Yes, Jews are usually mentioned somewhere in these theoretical, analytical, and philosophical investigations. But in their examination of representations of Holocaust scholars seldom address what Jews represent as a people. While they often proceed from a well-intentioned, ethical concern, they seldom consider ethical grounding that comes to world through Jewish teachings and traditions. All sorts of texts are invoked and examined in these studies, except texts that most profoundly define who Jews are and what was therefore under assault in murder of Jews. Thus we have studies without Holocaust.Three recent publications illustrate this point, albeit it to varying degrees. In Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in Representation of for example, Lea Wernick Fridman explores existential connection between experience of trauma and its utterance in poetic and literary form (p. 3). In History, Fantasy, and Horror, first of her six chapters, she contrasts Edgar Allen Poe's psychological with Joseph Conrad's historical horror to show, quite rightly, that in Heart of Darkness Conrad opens a realm of previously unrepresented in literature. In her analysis of Conrad's novel, however, she mistakenly views Kurtz's famous dying words, The horror, as an into human capacity for and complicity with (p. 28). What Fridman fails to understand -- and what feeds forces that led to -- is this: that Kurtz collides with lies not in an insight into evil but in realization that is no evil, no good, no meaning. There is simply what is there, neutral and void of any value except value we impose through our will. It is of what Emmanuel Levinas describes as there is, from which emerges nothing but anonymous rumble of silent emptiness.(1)In her second chapter, The Silence of Historical Traumatic Experience, Fridman offers an excellent observation on function of silence in Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939, noting that the words have died...the way Jews of Badenheim will die (p. 39). In tearing of word from meaning indeed parallels tearing of soul from Jew, divine spark from human being, before murdering him. But Fridman does not explain this connection between assault on word and assault on human being. Similarly, she cites Dr. Pappenheim's comment in novel on Jews' need to return to their origins (p. 42), but she addresses neither Jewish origins nor Jewish identity. And here lies much of of Badenheim: Jews here had lost their Jewish souls long before they were murdered for being Jewish. For in a tragic effort to fit into world that murdered them, they had lost their identities as adherents of Torah that forbids murder. …

The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future (review)

Reviewed by: The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future Zev Garber The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future, edited by Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Stein; consulting editor: Yehuda Bauer. New York: Continuum, 2000. 278 pp. $49.95. Although historians agree that the Endlösung, proclaimed at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, was the goal of the mass extermination of European Jewry and was [End Page 121] linked to the attempts by the Nazi German state to destroy Europeans during World War II, they differ in how to interpret the event. “Functionalists” credit major responsibility in the murder of Jews and other innocents to the structure of the Nazi Party and the regime’s search for policy in meeting events as they unfolded. “Intentionalists” argue that Hitler’s personal contribution to suffering, tragedy, and genocide was not con ditioned by factors beyond his control; the near-successful extermination of European Jewry was set within the chain of command that began and ended in he phrase, Es ist des Führers Wunsch—“It is the Fuhrer’s wish.” A serious lacuna in both schools of thought, however, is a meaningful discussion of the role played by certain core New Testament beliefs and Church teachings in contributing to Nazi ideology and tolerating state-sponsored, technologically administrated mass death.1 For example, “Third Reich” is used to denote the Nazi regime in Germany. It comes from the idea that the medieval German Empire was the First Empire and the united German Empire of 1871–1918 was the Second. The Third Reich was established by the Nazis and lasted from 1933 to 1945. Religiously, however, Drittes Reich means “Third Kingdom” and is rooted in German Trinitarian pietism: “Kingdoms of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” Shortly after his election as Reichkanzler in 1933, Hitler with a worn-copy of the New Testament of Martin Luther in hand proclaimed before a group of Methodist deaconesses that he received his power “from God’s word.”2 Arguably, the twin meanings of Third Reich (Empire and Kingdom) became one: Hitler regarded himself as sent by Providence to establish the German Reich for “a thousand years,” and his divine mandate was to disenfranchise, ghettoize, expel, and ultimately murder the Jews. How to explain and learn the lessons from this banality of evil in the heartland of Christianity is the focus of this book. [End Page 122] In the spirit of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s God-struggle,3 German Protestant theologian Dorothee Sölle painfully bares her Christian soul and asks where was I when Jewish children were humiliated in school classes, deported, and finally gassed, and observes that God had no friends in Germany. Her words in the Foreword are meant to grapple with the horns of a Christian dilemma and set the mood for the chapters that follow: Hitler’s war against the Jews was made possible in part by nearly two millennia of mean-spirited theology against the Jews and Judaism, and though the contemporary Christian is frightened by the results of that hatred, s/he is spiritually bankrupt because of it. Structurally, The Holocaust and the Christian World is divided into nine parts: confronting the Holocaust; chronology, 1932–1998; antisemitism; the churches and Nazi persecution; the reaction of the churches in Nazi-occupied Europe; the Vatican, the Pope, and the persecution of the Jews; the challenge of the exception; after the Holocaust: how have Christians responded; and afterword. From maps, tables, biographical sketches, select documents and videography to moderately sized articles on Christian accountability and responsibility, Vatican policy during World War II, Christian rescuers, and so on, most pieces contain a mixture of known and less- understood facts. For example, a number of Christian divines, who spoke unreasonably about Judaism, denounced the persecution of the Jews and insisted that prayer and preaching should be the militia of Christian witness (St. Bernard of Clairvaux) or recanted completely (the later Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller). Combined with objective information gathering, side-pieces of reflective thought and further reading, the result is a semi-popular guide to what we can...

A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during "Einsatz Reinhardt" 1942

A recently discovered document sheds new light on Einsatz Reinhardt, murder of Jews in General Government. For first time detailed statistics on 1942 killings in extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and in Concentration Camp Lublin-Majdanek, as compiled by Nazi officials, are available. The reliability of numbers appears confirmed by a consideration of related research of other historians. The authors analyze document in its wider historical context, raising issues that call for further research. The Background A recently discovered document on Einsatz Reinhardt, murder of Jews in General Government, is of fundamental importance for any discussion of numbers of Jewish victims in Poland. For first time we have detailed figures, as compiled by Nazi officials, for 1942 killings in extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and Concentration Camp Lublm-Majdanek. Some deaths at Majdanek are here included as part of Einsatz Reinliardt The sum total given in this document equals total number in so-called Korherr Report, written by Himmler's statisbcian Richard Korherr and later (in all probability) presented by Himmler to Hitler This document adds to our understanding of Einsatz Reinhardt extennination camps in Poland, and of channels of information about Final Solution of Jewish Question leading up to highest levels, including the Fiihrer himself. This document was uncovered among recently declassified material at Pubhe Record Office in Kew, England, and comprises two partially intercepted state secret radio messages from Lublin, General Government Both are dated January 11, 1943, second following within five minutes of first One was addressed to SS Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann at Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Berlin, and other to SS Lieutenant Colonel Heim, deputy commander of Security Police and SD for General Government in Cracow. It was sent by SS Major Hofle, staff member of SS and Police Leader (SSPF) in Lublin. Due to receiving problems,

Inside the Nuremberg Trial: a prosecutor's comprehensive account

Inside the Nuremberg Trial is a two volume set that provides the most comprehensive and accessible representation of the trial of the major German war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany following World War II. The author discusses the evidence, the arguments of counsel for both the Prosecution and the Defense, and the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. He covers each stage of the trial from early preparation to the judgment, and concludes with a summary of the legacy of the trial in recent history. Separate parts of the book deal with the presentation of the American, British, French, and Soviet delegations of the Prosecution, and separate chapters discuss the defense of each of the twenty-two defendants and each of the seven accused organizations. In addition, the author deals with the evidence of the persecution of the Jews before World War II through the evidence of the persecution and murder of Jews, Gypsies and others during the war. Separate chapters focus on the murders by the Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Force Group) and the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.

Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (review)

Book Reviews 133 family tragedy provides important insight into Soviet history and makes the book especially fascinating and worthwhile reading for all audiences. Edward R. Drachman Department of Political Science State University ofNew York at Geneseo Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, by Michael C. Steinlauf. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. 189 pp. $16.95 (p). Poland holds a unique place in Jewish history. In the sixteenth century Rabbi Isserles ofKrakow interpreted the Hebrew Polin to mean resting place or refuge: "here" (poh) there is "rest" (lin). In the twentieth century Nazi Germany transformed Poland into a final resting place, the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. The son ofHolocaust survivors, Michael Steinlaufrnakes clear at the outset that the Holocaust "did not directly involve Poles." The murderous encounter was one between Germans and Jews. But as witnesses to murder on such a vast scale and at such close range, the Poles were subjected to a mass psychic and moral trauma unprecedented in history, and Steinlauf set out to examine and analyze how Poles have dealt with that trauma. The task was no easy one. Nearly every issue explored here is controversial-not only postwar responses to the Holocaust but Polish Jewish relations before and during the war. Steinlaufpresents not only the facts but their differing interpretations. Fluent in both Yiddish and Polish, he has a clear command of the literature and obviously spent long hours conversing with scholars in the field, Polish as well as Jewish. In attempting to report perceptions from all sides, he allows the complexity of the issues to speak for themselves. Steinlauf views Poland's situation as far more difficult and complex than Germany's. In Germany, once a small portion ofthe guilty were punished, society could attempt to move on. The crime was symbolically expiated. As witnesses, the Poles had committed no crime. There was nothing to expiate. But [they had witnessed the unprecedented, virtually total annihilation of neighbors most Of them did not like. And then they inherited the property ofthose neighbors. "The resulting self-accusation is all the more powerful for being unrelated to any actual transgression." The result, to use the phrase and analysis ofhistorian-psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, is a "bondage" to the dead. The introductory chapters on Poles and Jews before and during the war, though least original, are alone worth the price of the book. With a brevity born of erudition, they summarize an immense amount of literature with an eye to virtually every 134 SHOFAR Summer 1998 Vol. 16, No.4 important detail. Steinlauf leaves no doubt but that the death camps were built in Poland, not only because there were more Jews there, but also because the Poles would be the next to go. The Nazis intended the Poles to provide slave labor for the Reich, but it did not need twenty million slaves. While Steinlaufemphasizes the difference between the fate ofPoland's Jews (three million murdered) and that of the Poles (two million), he points out that nowhere else did the murder ofJews unfold amid such slaughter ofthe coterritorial people. Collective punishment and the death penalty for minor transgressions were regular occurrences. A single act of real or imagined resistance could occasion the death of scores or even hundreds of innocent people-certainly, as the Poles knew well, an act like hiding Jews. Poles point out that only in Poland did helping Jews mean an automatic death penalty, that the Dutch family who hid Al1l}.e Frank and her family were not executed for it. They point out that in Jerusalem more than any those of any other nationality, Polish names are honored among the Righteous who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. But Polish rescuers were often afraid ofunsympathetic neighbors who might well tum them in for hiding Jews. Steinlaufgives attention to the overt Nazi policy of demoralizing the Poles, orchestrating pogroms by Polish "hoodlums" in the early occupation and fostering extortion and blackmail. There was money to be made by blackmailing and informing on Jews hiding out on the "Aryan side," but these, Steinlaufwrites, were "activities that involved relatively few Poles." Considerably more numerous were the...

Against the Indifference Hypothesis: The Holocaust and the Enthusiasts for Murder

This essay takes issue with what is known as the “indifference” hypothesis regarding the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. The Germans' fear of typhus, their perception of the Jew as poisonous, biological matter, “life unworthy of life,” created a group state of mind in which many individual Germans, particularly those in the professions, enthusiastically participated in the logistics, machinery, ideology and legitimation of mass murder.

Gypsies and the Holocaust

ON 18 MAY 1940, 2,800 German Romani and Sinti Gypsies were deported from seven assembly centers, located in the Old Reich, to Lublin, located in the General Government (Nazi occupied Poland)'. One and a half years later, from 5 to 9 November 1941, five transports (each consisting of 1,000 Austrian Gypsies) arrived in the Lodz ghetto. Less than two months later, in December 1941 and January 1942, these Gypsies were taken from Lodz to Kulmhof (Chelmno), where they were among the first to be killed in mobile gas vans.2 Although material about these events has been readily available for several decades, these facts are seldom included in most studies about the Holocaust. The exclusivity of emphasis on Judeocide in most Holocaust literature has generally excluded Gypsies (as well as blacks and the handicapped) from equal consideration.3 Adherents of this general school of interpretation do not deny that Nazi mass murder was directed not only at Jews but also at the handicapped and the Gypsies. However, they posit a qualitative difference between the murder of Jews and that of Gypsies and the handicapped without providing any convincing documentary evidence. Yehuda Bauer's assertion that Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them, is only the most extreme example of such arguments.4