Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies XXXIV

Yad Vashem Studies XXXIV - Table of Contents and Abstracts

Introduction

Volume 34 of Yad Vashem Studies highlights new, pathbreaking studies and thought-provoking contributions by an international array of both senior scholars and rising stars in the field. The articles and reviews in this volume address three broad themes: perpetrators, from Hitler to the bankers in the Generalgouvernement; attitudes of local populations toward Jews in pre-war Hungary, Soviet Belorussia, and wartime Poland; and postwar attitudes with regard to the Holocaust in Poland, West Germany, and one Ukrainian town. The themes of the articles and reviews overlap to a degree and complement one another. Indeed, complementary thematic interconnections in the contents are one of the noteworthy aspects of this volume.

The volume opens with Ian Kershaw’s analysis of the historical interpretations and the evidence regarding Hitler’s role in the “Final Solution.” Kershaw notes the dialectic in the development of anti-Jewish policy in the pre-war period, between the center of the regime and the grassroots. This dialectic helped create a radicalizing dynamic. He also suggests that Hitler’s “prophecy” of January 30, 1939, as it was repeated during the war, can provide insight into Hitler’s mentality and to the ways he provided “directions for action” in his role as the “unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.”

Béla Bodo and Arkady Zeltser look at pre-war attitudes toward Jews and how they impacted on attitudes during the war. Bodo finds that the Hungarian right-radical press played an important role in creating and disseminating new anti-Jewish stereotypes. This helped set the atmosphere in which Hungarian Jewry could be done away with during the Holocaust. Zeltser examines ethnic relations in pre-war Soviet Belorussia and finds that tensions were rife and Jews were widely disliked by certain sectors of the population. This was reflected in hitherto unexamined Soviet sources.

Still, these tensions were not so extreme in that they could have been a harbinger for widespread hostility during the war. Moreover, the tensions eased somewhat in the last pre-war years, as popular anger came to be directed largely at the regime. Yet these examinations of the inter-war period in Hungary and Soviet Belorussia seem to point to a direct connection between pre-war and wartime attitudes in these two countries. The more virulently hostile Hungarian press, however, contributed to creating a more adverse environment toward the Jews than in the less virulent and ideological case of Belorussia.

Klaus-Peter Friedrich, Ingo Loose, and Dariusz Libionka make important contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust in Poland. But whereas the Holocaust in Poland is their connecting thread, the specific people and periods discussed also connect these articles to those of other contributors to this volume. Friedrich examines the Polish underground press and the Holocaust during the period of 1942-1947. He argues that, in general, Jews were not considered part of the Polish national community that merited unconditional solidarity. The attitudes toward Jews expressed in the various political streams of the underground press in 1942 remained essentially unchanged in the immediate postwar years, until the new regime began to limit press freedom in early 1947. They were largely unaffected by the Holocaust and continued to see the Jews and their fate primarily in instrumental terms--what was good for Poland, as each political group understood it. Loose reveals the deep involvement of major German banks, through their local branches in the Generalgouvernement, in the rapid impoverishment of the Jews there, and in their murder. These banks had detailed knowledge of all aspects of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and their cooperation was an integral part of the destruction of the Jews’ economic existence in the Generalgouvernement and of their liquidation. Libionka uncovers previously unknown details regarding the life and death of Chaim Hirszman, one of two known survivors of the Bełżec extermination camp. Hirszman was assassinated in his home in Lublin in 1946, apparently by Polish right-wing nationalists, before he was able to record his personal story in the camp at the Jewish Historical Commission in the city. This has been the source of controversy to this day. Was he assassinated because he was Jewish, or because he was a member of the regime's secret police? Libionka makes an important contribution to untangling this web.

These three articles also touch on subjects addressed in other articles in this volume. Libionka’s examination of Hirszman’s fate can be linked to Friedrich’s analysis of the underground press in the same period. Friedrich shares a common theme with Bodo and Zeltser, as they all examine attitudes toward Jews, while Loose’s article connects to Kershaw’s in looking at Germans and the environment in which the “Final Solution” was implemented. Similarly, Laszlo Karsai’s review article, addressing the finds of Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach in their book Das Letzte Kapitel, on the Holocaust in Hungary, also examines the German and Hungarian perpetrators. In this regard, Kershaw, Loose, and Karsai represent one theme in this volume. Karsai takes Aly and Gerlach to task for what he sees as a reliance on inaccurate and misleading translations of Hungarian documents, research premises, and analyses that are not supported by the events.

Frank Buscher takes our postwar discussion to the West German Bundestag in 1965, and its debate on the German statute of limitations for murder. Its impending implementation at that time regarding suspected Nazi war criminals would have resulted in their immunity to prosecution. The arguments for and against amending the statute so as to allow for further investigation and prosecution of these people crossed party lines and reflected deep moral dilemmas in Germany in its effort to establish a just and moral society. The vast differences between the West German discourse on justice and Holocaust memory in 1965, and the Polish attitudes in the immediate postwar years is striking and worthy of further analysis.

We are pleased to include in our review section incisive analyses of important books that have been recently published, which all relate closely to the themes discussed above. Eberhard Jäckel examines Florent Brayard’s book, La “solution finale de la question juive”: La technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision, which addresses the development of the decision on the “Final Solution.” Brayard’s is the first book on this subject by a French historian in more than fifty years, and his approach can be analyzed comparatively with that of Christopher Browning in The Origins of the Final Solution, which is reviewed in this volume by Omer Bartov.

On rare occasions, when the impact of a book warrants it, Yad Vashem Studies will carry more than one review. This was the case with regard to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (volume 26) and Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler (volumes 30 and 33). In this volume Bartov’s review complements the one written by Richard Evans in volume 33, although it embarks on a different avenue of discussion than that taken by Evans. These three reviews--together with Susanne Heim’s review of the comprehensive annotated collection of SD reports on German popular opinion regarding Jews, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten, 1933-1945, edited by Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel--can be read together with the articles by Kershaw, Loose, and Karsai as one unit on perpetrators.

Finally, Tim Snyder reviews Shimon Redlich’s Together and Apart in Brzeżany and finds keen insights in the book into inter-ethnic relations in the area that was Eastern Galicia in pre-war Poland and is part of Western Ukraine today. Snyder’s discussion ties this book to both the issues discussed by Bodo and Zeltser regarding pre-war attitudes toward Jews and to those raised by Friedrich, Libionka, and Buscher regarding postwar attitudes and memory of the Holocaust. We trust that the interconnecting themes help lend this volume a special unity that will benefit the reader.

This volume also brings with it welcome new additions to the editorial board. Omer Bartov of Brown University joined the editorial board shortly before the contents of the previous volume were closed, and he has already contributed greatly to our work. Yfaat Weiss of Haifa University and Havi Ben-Sasson of Hebrew University joined the board during the last stages of the preparation of this volume. In order to function well, an editorial board needs to have experts who are willing to work hard, discuss freely, listen attentively, and propose constructive ideas. Yad Vashem Studies has been blessed with such an editorial board for many years, and I look forward to working with Omer, Yfaat, and Havi in the same serious and open spirit. With these additions to our editorial board, we look forward to meeting new challenges and broadening our scope in the scholarly world. We reaffirm our commitment to publishing new work of the highest standards by contributors from all over on the wide variety of subjects relating to the Holocaust. As with this volume, we will continue to provoke thought and grapple with the difficult issues that continue to be raised by the Holocaust.

David Silberklang