Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies XXVI

Yad Vashem Studies XXVI - Table of Contents and Abstracts

Volume 26 of Yad Vashem Studies marks a milestone in many ways, while at the same time representing continuity. It is the fortieth anniversary since the first edition of YVS appeared as a pioneer in serial academic publications on the Holocaust.

This volume includes articles both by established senior researchers and by young scholars. Their findings and insights shed light on a variety of aspects of the Holocaust and open new avenues for future research. The articles can be divided roughly into five sections: postwar, Jewish responses to the Holocaust, perpetrators, the Goldhagen debate, and book reviews. Michael Marrus and David Engel address two aspects of the immediate postwar years and how the Holocaust was understood at that time. Marrus asks new questions of well known material -- the records of the International Military Tribunal. Consciousness of the Holocaust in postwar legal and political thinking seems at one and the same time to have been both prominent and subdued. On the postwar violence against the Jews in Poland much has been said and written, but only little detailed research has yet been done. Engel's careful examination of these events, together with his statistical analysis, challenges certain prior assumptions while supporting others.

Esther Farbstein and Yfaat Weiss examine aspects of Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Farbstein's comparative analysis of two documents by the same author, a diary written during the war and a memoir written immediately after the war, reflects both on Jewish coping and on how survivors remember their experiences. The importance of Jewish documentation in understanding the Holocaust is underscored by her analysis. Weiss examines as yet unexplored questions regarding attitudes of Jews in Germany and Poland to the attempts to create an anti-Nazi economic boycott in the 1930s. Whereas it is known that Jews did not all agree on how to respond to the threat posed by the Nazis, the Polish-German interaction on this question is a new avenue of research.

The articles by Frank Bajohr, Andrej Angrick, Dieter Pohl, and Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel address the perpetrators. From the perspective of economic history, Bajohr asks the apparently simple question of who benefited from the "Aryanization" of Jewish property in Germany. His case study of Hamburg provides much food for thought on this subject. Angrick, utilizing newly available archival material from the former Soviet Union, provides new insights into Rumanian-German relations and their respective policies regarding the Jews in 1941, while Pohl's case study of one local murder commander is a close look at an aspect of the Holocaust still requiring much additional examination by historians. The murderers in the field is also the subject of Levin's and Uziel's path-breaking article, which argues persuasively for the integration of visual documentation in historical research. Photographs from the Holocaust are a familiar item, but the authors demonstrate that much can be learned from paying close attention to the contents of the photographs and to their import.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust and the debate it engendered are discussed in articles and review essays by Yisrael Gutman, Avraham Barkai, Goetz Aly, and Raul Hilberg. Five additional books, in English, Hebrew, Polish, and German are examined in review essays by Shmuel Krakowski, Matitiahu Minc, Theodore Friedgut, Henry L. Feingold, and Leni Yahil. Beginning with this issue, review essays closely analyzing recent and important books will be a regular section in Yad Vashem Studies.

Fifty-two years since the end of World War II and forty years since the appearance of the first volume of Yad Vashem Studies, the Holocaust troubles decent human beings everywhere and exercises scholars' attention around the world seemingly more than ever before. So much has been written, so much has been said, so much has been learned, and yet so much is still so unclear, unknown, and seemingly inaccessible to human understanding. As the articles in this volume indicate, together with the many serious publications on the Holocaust that have appeared in recent years, we have much left to examine and to learn. The Holocaust will attract attention and continue to be researched intensively for many years to come, and Yad Vashem Studies will seek to remain at the forefront of that endeavor.