Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies XXIX

Yad Vashem Studies XXIX - Table of Contents and Abstracts

Volume 29 of Yad Vashem Studies is dedicated to the memory of George L. Mosse. One of the twentieth century’s giants of the study of modern European history, Mosse devoted his long and distinguished career to the question of how the Holocaust could have happened. His conclusions regarding the normality of certain phenomena in European culture that enabled the Holocaust to take place had a profound and enduring impact on our understanding of modern European history. His was a seminal influence on the study of racism, fascism, and modern antisemitism, as well as other subjects. Innumerable students and colleagues the world over, and especially in the United States and Israel, where he held formal teaching positions, continue to build on the foundations that he laid. It is thus fitting that the current volume opens with a review essay by Jeffrey Herf on the work of George Mosse.

The research section of this volume includes articles by young and emerging scholars alongside those of world-renowned senior scholars. These articles fall into three groups: the Holocaust in the Soviet Union; religious groups and the Holocaust; and other research subjects. Five review articles on recently published books are also included.

One of the subjects concerning the Holocaust that has been rarely examined is the propaganda apparatus of the Wehrmacht, which disseminated the bulk of the propaganda seen by Germans and other peoples during the war. In the opening research article of this volume, Daniel Uziel examines written and visual documentation relating to the antisemitic propaganda materials disseminated by the Propaganda Department of the Wehrmacht during the war. If the Wehrmacht’s image of military “purity” has long since been shattered, Uziel shows the extent and virulence of the antisemitism promoted and guided from its upper echelons. This department was staffed largely by career officers who were not Nazi party members, and it worked closely with the Propaganda Ministry. The picture that emerges is one of a Nazified armed force infused with Nazi antisemitic ideology.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc a decade ago, Yad Vashem and other research institutes and archives have been examining and retrieving heretofore unknown archival material from the newly opened vast archives of these countries. Much has been written about the contents of these archives, and a number of recent books and articles have used this new material effectively. This volume’s modest contribution to this growing research lies in the section on the Soviet Union; the articles are based in part on this newly available documentation. Bella Guttermann, Yitzhak Arad, Tikva Fatal-Knaani, and Dov Levin all bring extensive new documentation and new research findings to the reader’s attention. The articles by Guttermann and Arad examine aspects of German policy, whereas those by Fatal-Knaani and Levin also shed new light on the variegated experiences of Jews during the Holocaust.

Guttermann looks at the strange case of 350 Jewish forced-laborers who were sent from Silesia to the northwestern USSR to do rail work for the Todt organization while wearing German uniforms. In what was apparently an experiment in labor utilization, this group laid several hundred kilometers of track by the spring of 1942. Yitzhak Arad examines the plunder of Jewish property in the USSR following the German invasion. Despite the fact that the Soviet regime had nationalized most private property and bank accounts, the pillaging by Germans and local people was widespread and the competition fierce. The result was that Jewish personal property and belongings worth at least hundreds of millions, if not billions, of Reichsmarks were seized officially or privately by a variety of Germans, or ended up in the hands of the local population. The breadth of the participation in the plunder also meant that many people had a vested interest in the Jews’ disappearance.

What can the former Soviet archives tell us about the Jews during the Holocaust? Tikva Fatal-Knaani employs documentation from the Pinsk municipality as a case study of the extent of new information and insight that can be obtained from such material. From the names and personal identification cards of thousands of Jews, to the evidence of the Judenrat’s struggle to navigate between Jewish needs and German demands, to the authorities’ intrusion into the most mundane aspects of the Jews’ daily lives, we get a picture of who the Jews of Pinsk were and what they and Jews elsewhere faced. The scope and depth of the exploitation and intrusion are thus both striking and instructive.

Dov Levin presents annotated excerpts of a remarkable document, the Kovno ghetto Jewish police’s manuscript about itself. The 253-page manuscript was written and buried during the war and discovered in 1964; however, it was kept secret until after the fall of the communist regime. We learn here about how the Jewish police was organized and functioned, crime levels in the ghetto, and more. We also get a glimpse of the self-perception of the Jewish police in general and with regard to its role in the large murder Aktion in October 1941.

From all the above articles it becomes abundantly clear that huge gaps remain in our understanding of the Holocaust. Much work is yet to be done in mining the archives of the former Soviet Union, and it will take many years until the job is done and our information about events there is more complete.

Three articles in this volume discuss a variety of religious groups and their reactions to the Holocaust: Randolph Braham on the churches in Hungary, Hava Eshkoli (Wagman) on the Mizrachi movement in mandatory Palestine, and Kimmy Caplan on Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel.

Braham’s sweep is broad in his penetrating comparative analysis of the attitudes of the Catholic, Reformed, and Evangelical churches in Hungary toward Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust. Based on a wide variety of sources in many languages, Braham tries to demonstrate the extent to which the leaders of the Christian churches laid the groundwork for the public acceptance in Hungary of ever-harsher measures against the Jews and fostered a climate of opinion that made the implementation of the “Final Solution” there possible.

Hava Eshkoli focuses on the Zionist aspect of religious-Zionist leaders’ reactions to the Holocaust. She finds that the blend of messianic religious belief and Zionist conviction contributed to the staunch belief among the members of the Mizrachi party in the unviability of the Diaspora. This, in turn, made them the most convinced advocates of a Jewish state. Thus, their wartime policy emphasis was Palestino-centric, as was their solution to the dilemmas of the Jewish people.

Kimmy Caplan’s work relates to the place of the Holocaust in the historical consciousness of Ashkenazi Haredi Jews in contemporary Israel. Caplan has succeeded in finding avenues and developing tools of research into this singular stratum of Israeli society, and his findings are revealing. The extent of historical consciousness and concern with the Holocaust among the Haredi community is far greater than scholars might have been previously imagined; however, this consciousness remains uniquely Haredi.

The final section of this volume includes five review articles on important recent books in English, Hebrew, and German. Raya Cohen and Richard Cohen look at two new and significant contributions on France and French Jewry―Vicki Caron’s Uneasy Asylum and Renée Poznanski’s To Be a Jew in France (Hebrew). In both books, governmental policies together with cultural attitudes and the mind-sets of individuals in society play an important role in our understanding of the historical account. The editor reviews Bogdan Musial’s new book on the German civilian government in the Lublin district of Poland, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement, and Christian Gerlach examines Karin Orth’s two new books on the concentration camps―Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager and Die Konzentrationslager-SS. Both authors look at the attitudes and roles of Germans in the field―civilian and SS―who came in contact with their victims and saw the results of their work. And finally, Michael Berenbaum reviews the poignant new book by Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears (Hebrew), on the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The personal, at times intimate, observations of the surviving Sonderkommando interviewed for this book plunge the reader into the heart of the darkness.

Thus, in many ways, George Mosse’s legacy is a defining thread connecting the articles and reviews in this volume. Most of the authors and most of the books look at the intersection of aspects of the Holocaust with everyday life and with popular culture. For most of the subjects addressed in this volume, it is not only the policy-making of government leaders or the negotiations of diplomats that are of concern, but also the ideas and actions of largely ordinary people. Whether it is Uziel’s writers and photographers, Guttermann’s businessmen and work foremen, Caplan’s teachers and preachers, Poznanski’s struggling French Jews, or Greif’s trapped Sonderkommando, we are dealing with the grass roots of society and the ideas and perceptions that motivate their actions. On this level, where most of us live, the articles in this volume present new research and raise penetrating questions about modern societies and the Holocaust that should give the reader food for thought.

David Silberklang