Yad Vashem Studies XXXV

• Yad Vashem Studies XXXV

• Yad Vashem Studies XXXIV

• Yad Vashem Studies XXXIII

• Yad Vashem Studies XXXII

• Yad Vashem Studies XXXI

• Yad Vashem Studies XXX

• Yad Vashem Studies XXIX

• Yad Vashem Studies XXVIII

• Yad Vashem Studies XXVII

• Yad Vashem Studies XXVI

• Yad Vashem Studies XXV

Yad Vashem Studies XXXV - Table of Contents and Abstracts

Introduction

With volume 35 of Yad Vashem Studies, we are introducing two important changes in our format. Beginning with this volume, we will be publishing two editions annually, in the spring and in the fall. Each issue will contain approximately half the number of articles we previously included in the annual volumes. We hope in this way to make our contributors’ work available to our readers more readily and, where possible, to expose more of the outstanding new research submitted to Yad Vashem Studies to scholars, teachers, students, and other interested readers. We are also adapting the journal’s dimensions and interior layout in order to make it more user-friendly.

Of course, the high standards of our rigorously peer-reviewed journal remain unchanged. We trust that our readers will find our new frequency and format helpful in obtaining the latest important research on the Holocaust.

More than half of this volume is dedicated to aspects of the Holocaust in Poland. There are three research articles, by Alina Skibińska and Jakub Petelewicz, Jan Grabowski, and Tomasz Kranz, and one review article by Klaus-Peter Friedrich. Skibińska and Petelewicz have undertaken a necessary pioneering, fascinating yet disturbing study of the attitudes of rural Poles toward Jews during the Holocaust. Beginning with the question of whether the attitudes displayed toward Jews in the now well-known case of Jedwabne were unique or symptomatic in rural Poland, the authors examined the rural area in the Świętokrzyski region, in the Kielce province of central Poland. Using the rich resources of postwar trial records, interviews with eyewitnesses, and additional material, Skibińska and Petelewicz find extensive hostile activity against Jews in this region. Their analysis leads to a suggestion for a typology of the acts committed, the perpetrators, the accomplices, and the eyewitnesses.

Jan Grabowski’s path-breaking examination of the German and Polish courts in the Warsaw region of the Generalgouvernement and their treatment of cases dealing with Jews sheds light on questions hitherto rarely examined. Contrary to what we might have thought regarding occupied Poland, the Polish courts continued to operate and adjudicate cases that the Germans did not see as affecting their security.

These included civil cases affecting Jewish defendants. Whereas the German courts dealt with “criminal” cases, sentencing thousands of Jews and providing legal and judicial support for the increasingly brutal treatment of the Jews, the Polish courts adjudicated civil cases and contributed greatly to the German-led massive expropriation of Jewish property and capital.

Tomasz Kranz attempts to fill an important lacuna in our knowledge about the Majdanek camp — how many people were killed there, and what sources are available for this research. Kranz guides the reader through a labyrinth of sources, including the incomplete yet fairly extensive death records at Majdanek, together with other sources, in order to lay out for the reader the available source record for research. Setting aside earlier exaggerated estimates of the numbers of people murdered at the camp — estimates that were based either on ideology and politics, or on errors and misreadings of sources — Kranz comes to a surprising but well-founded estimate that is far below previously accepted numbers. And contrary to previous estimates, his data show that a large majority of the people murdered at the camp were Jews.

Articles by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers and by Kinga Frojimovics round out the research section of this issue. Mallmann and Cüppers tell the hitherto undocumented story of the Nazi plans to murder the Jews of Palestine in 1941–1942. As Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced across North Africa and began planning the invasion of Palestine and the Middle East, SS-Obersturmbannführer

Walter Rauff began organizing the Einsatzkommando that would follow Rommel’s troops and murder all the Jews there. Mallmann and Cüppers analyze the planning and the reasoning behind the murder operation, as well as the Nazis’ assumptions regarding Arab society in Palestine and the Middle East and the extensive collaboration from which the Nazis hoped to benefit there. The authors’ findings will certainly be a source of discussion.

Kinga Frojimovics analyzes the religious and socio-economic makeup of the Jewish communities of Hungary on the eve of their destruction in 1944. She follows a basic research approach that seeks to identify the victims as they saw themselves as a way toward better understanding the events. Frojimovics uses the detailed records of the Jewish communities of Hungary that were compiled in April 1944. From within this data, she uncovers a number of surprises — such as the fact that a majority of Hungarian Jews identified themselves as Orthodox. At the same time, she provides a rare, detailed glimpse of the socio-economic profile of a Jewish community.

Three review articles complete this issue. Frank Bajohr analyzes and critiques Götz Aly’s Hitlers Volksstaat, a book that has attracted much attention since its publication in 2005. Whereas most reviewers have concentrated on the book’s interpretation of Nazi rule as a “consensual dictatorship,” Bajohr focuses on Aly’s analysis of the persecution and murder of the Jews as a mass murder based on practical political and economic motives. On this central point, Bajohr disagrees with Aly and offers a more ideology-based analysis of events.

Klaus-Peter Friedrich reviews Jochen Böhler’s book, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg, which examines Wehrmacht brutality in the war against Poland in September 1939. Was the brutality evident in September 1939 a harbinger for the more extreme brutality in the summer of 1941 in the USSR? On this Friedrich and Böhler disagree.

Finally, Michael Miller reviews Livia Rothkirchen’s The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust published in The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust Project of Yad Vashem and University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Miller praises this work as the first synthetic work in English on this subject, shedding light on many aspects of the Holocaust in this area, but, at the same time, finds important gaps that will require further research.

The current issue could not have been completed and produced without the extensive extra effort put in by our dedicated Associate Editor Dr. Nathan Cohen and Assistant Editor Daniella Zaidman-Mauer, who took upon themselves the responsibility for the production of volume 35, number 1, while I have been on a teaching sabbatical. Their extensive efforts, together with those of our Hebrew language editor and Assistant Editor Adina Drechsler, in addition to the support extended by the members of the editorial board to Dr. Cohen and the staff in my absence, have been invaluable.

David Silberklang