The Nazi equation of Jewish partisans with ‘bandits’ and its consequences1

This article deals with the history of Jewish partisans during the Second World War, with the general aim of encouraging further research into the subject. Despite the facts that partisan activity was a significant part of the war experience for Jews, and an important dimension of the conduct of the war against the Third Reich and its accomplices, the history of Jewish partisans occupies only a minute portion of Holocaust and World War II historiography. This article analyses the treatment of Jewish partisans from the perspective of the Nazi perpetrators, while also seeking to shed light on the evolving self-perceptions of the partisans themselves. The focus is the Nazi categorization of the Jewish partisans as ’criminals’, equating them with ‘bandits’ and ‘plunderers’. In large part, this accusation shaped Nazi actions and simultaneously played a critical role in the partisans' imagination of, and construction of their own identity as ‘Jewish fighters’.     

‘We are the new Jews!’ and ‘The Jewish Lobby’ – antisemitism and the construction of a national identity by the Austrian Freedom Party

In this article I will analyse the role of antisemitism for the construction of a national identity and an exclusive national in‐group in the discourse of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). The analysis will show that this discourse of the FPÖ, one of the most successful extreme right‐wing parties in Europe, utilises various forms of Holocaust inversion and victim perpetrator reversal in order to delegitimise political opponents. The analysis of these incidents and of the legitimising strategies used by the FPÖ when criticised involves discussing the increasing abstraction of the codes characteristic of latent antisemitism and forms of post‐Nazi antisemitism. I will focus on how the FPÖ's use of the term Holocaust and other terms referring to Nazi atrocities against the Jews corresponds to a universalisation of the term Holocaust in social constellations that are permeated by the culture industry.     

SUCCESS,TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY‐FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY1

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer's exceptionally successful comprehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White's philosophy of history. Friedländer's The Years of Extermination has been celebrated as the first synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victims to a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear notions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, he has invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims' point of view. Friedländer's innovation has particularly radical consequences for the construction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues that anti‐Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand, his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of data that escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer chooses this radically self‐reflexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution. To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical response to the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination reveals that the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed by White, who shares Friedländer's appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of Extermination is the first modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary figuration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”     

Walking a Fine Scientific Line: The Extraordinary Deeds of Dutch Neuroscientist C. U. Ariëns Kappers Before and During World War II

Dutch neuroscientist Cornelius Ubbo Ariëns Kappers is famous for pioneering neuroembryological work and for establishing the Amsterdam Central Institute for Brain Research. Less well known is his anthropological work, which ultimately played a role in saving Dutch Jews from deportation to their deaths during the Holocaust. Ariëns Kappers extensively campaigned against anti-Semitism and Nazi persecution during the 1930s. During World War II, he utilized his credentials to help create anthropological reports “proving” full-Jews were “actually” partial- or non-Jews to evade Nazi criteria, and at least 300 Jews were thus saved by Ariëns Kappers and colleagues. His earlier work demonstrating differences between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jewish skull indices became the focus of an attempt to save hundreds of Dutch Portuguese Jews collectively from deportation. Ariëns Kappers and colleagues brilliantly understood how anthropology and neuroscience could be utilized to make a difference and to save lives during a tragic era.     

THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

The Anglican Understanding of Nazism 1933-1945: Placing the Church of England's Response to the Holocaust in Context

This article seeks to revise the understanding of the Churchof England's response to the Holocaust by placing it in thecontext of the Anglican understanding of the Nazi state as awhole. Exploring these perceptions from 1933, it is argued thatthe Anglican community consistently understood Nazism as primarilyan anti-Christian force, which in turn prevented the churchfrom understanding the import of Nazi anti-semitism. In doingso, this article illuminates both the understanding of Europeanpolitics within the Church of England up to and including theSecond World War and, as a contribution to the study of bystandersto the Holocaust, further explains British reactions to themurder of the European Jews.     

NOTES ON CAMPS,OR, COUNTERFACTUAL FÜHRERS AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE JOKE

In this review essay I explore the dynamics of “normalization” in historical and fictional depictions of the National Socialist past, examining both the “organic” normalization of catastrophic events through the passage of time, and efforts to normalize the Nazi past through aesthetics. Focusing on Gavriel Rosenfeld's Hi, Hitler: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, I argue against many dimensions of Rosenfeld's account of normalization, particularly his claim that aesthetic normalization can undermine our moral judgments regarding the Holocaust. Drawing on Sigmund Freud on jokes, and Susan Sontag on Camp aesthetics, I argue that every effort to normalize the Holocaust, especially ones that work through humor and jokes (a major topic of Rosenfeld's book), actually maintain the Holocaust's status as a series of historical events resistant to “normalization.” If “normalization” is a process through which extraordinary, or morally charged, historical events lose their moral charge, then aesthetic efforts to normalize the Holocaust actually reinscribe the special moral status that Rosenfeld believes they erase.     

Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany

This article discusses Der gelbe Stern by Gerhard Schoenberner,a book of Holocaust photodocumentation appearing in West Germanyin 1960, and analyses its reception in the contemporary WestGerman press. Both the work and its public discussion are placedin context of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit (‘comingto terms with the past’) and of what historian Habbo Knochhas termed ‘the return of the pictures’, in otherwords, atrocity pictures of the kind that the Allies forcedGermans to see right after the war, that Germans tended to shunthereafter, but that came back into public view in the late1950s. The reception of Schoenberner's book included reviewsfrom a wide range of West German newspapers and magazines. Thesereviews were overwhelmingly favourable and in considerable agreementon the book's importance. There was consensus that its pictureswould stir viewers emotionally and lead them to ‘the truth’about the Third Reich and its crime against the Jews. In addition,there were moral, historical and political reflections, includinga discussion of German ‘guilt’ concerned not onlywith specific crimes but with the general acquiescence of Germansociety in persecution of Jews in the 1930s. There was alsoappreciation of the role of pictures in conveying historicalunderstanding and, it was hoped, in educating West German youth.In addition, some reviewers considered Der gelbe Stern to bea prod to greater public discussion and thus to an enlargementof democratic culture. There was a marked reticence in the reviewsto indicate that awareness generated by this book would contributeto public outcry against the employment of men with a Nazi pastas high officials of the Federal Republic, or to defend Schoenberneragainst the charge that was sure to come from the Right: sincesome of his photos were from Communist Eastern Europe they wereof dubious origin and no doubt part of a plot to distract theWest from the fight against Communism. It is suggested thatsilence on either issue would have had the effect of keepingreaders focused on the pictures and their moral, historicaland democratic implications.     

Deadly medicine

This article discusses the methods the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to make an exhibition on the complex history of Nazi eugenics accessible to the museum's mass public and at the same time, provocative for special audiences consisting of professionals and students from the biomedical fields. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race showed how both eugenics and related "euthanasia" programs in Nazi Germany helped pave the road to the Holocaust. The exhibition implicitly evoked the present-day appeal of biological explanations for human behavior and of new visions of human perfection. Educational programs used the exhibition as a springboard for discussions of bioethics and medical ethics.     

Turkey's Modernization: Refugees From Nazism and Ataturk's Vision

In an era when Turkey is known more for its mediocre recordon human rights and freedom of speech, Arnold Reisman's Turkey'sModernization brings light to a lesser known phase of Turkishhistory, where Turkey, as a young republic, had opened its doorsto Jewish scholars escaping Nazi Europe. In fact, the storyof Jewish scholars taking refuge in the newly established TurkishRepublic has been a long neglected topic, a subject matter discussedmore as "popular knowledge" than "scholarly analysis." In thatregard, Reisman's book is an important contribution becauseit fills that gap with its rich visual     

PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth.     

The Sense of History: On the Political Implications of Karl Löwith's Concept of Secularization

Written during the period of his emigration to the United States, during and just after World War II, the originality of Karl Löwith's book Meaning in History lies in its resolute critique of all forms of philosophy of history. This critique is based on the now famous idea that modern philosophies of history have only extended and deepened an illusion fabricated by a long tradition of Christian historical reflection: the illusion that history itself has an intrinsic goal. This modern extension and deepening of the chimera propagated by Christian historical reflection is what Löwith terms "secularization." Drawing on the arguments in Meaning in History as well as those proposed in other contemporaneous and earlier writings, including Löwith's heretofore unpublished correspondence with Leo Strauss, this article attempts to set in relief the frequently neglected, yet eminently political implications of Löwith"s idea of secularization. Among the problems implicitly considered in relation to the theory of secularization in Meaning in History is a theme frequently addressed in earlier writings: the motives that led German intellectuals like Friedrich Gogarten, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt to adhere to the Nazi movement.     

The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

Iran espouses the most radical anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist position in the Muslim Middle East, calling for the elimination of Israel. Drawing on anti-Jewish traditions in Shi^ci Islam, Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, maintained that Zionism is the culmination of the Jewish-Christian conspiracy against Islam and undermines its historical mission. Fusing together Islamic and European anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist ideologies, Iran became a disseminator of Holocaust denial in the Middle East and a sponsor of Western Holocaust deniers. Iran's Holocaust denial, which aims at demolishing the legitimacy of the Jewish state, denies Jewish history and deprives the Jews of their human dignity by presenting their worst tragedy as a scam.     

On the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist Jewish policy in the Italian-occupied territories: The case of south-eastern France,November 1942–July 1943

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist policy towards Jews in 1940–1943. By exposing the gap between the Nazi perception of and the reality of the Fascist policy towards Jews in Italian-occupied south-eastern France, the article demonstrates that Rome’s refusal to hand over Jews for deportation did not contradict the fundamental anti-Semitic nature of its Jewish policy in that context. Thus, the article highlights the risks for historians to read Fascist Jewish policy through Nazi lenses and thereby fall prey to stereotypical characterizations of the Italians as insubordinate, scheming and driven by what an S.S. official disparagingly labelled a ‘Jewish-friendly attitude’. At the same time, the article shows that, when combined with Fascist sources, Nazi sources can help shed light on the conceptual divide that underpinned the Axis partners’ disagreement over the means by which the ‘Jewish problem’ should be ‘solved’, thereby exposing the analytical limitations of the current prevailing understanding of the Fascist refusal to hand over the Jews as purely the outcome of ‘pragmatic’ opportunistic considerations.     

“Lwów Saved Us”: Roma Survival in Lemberg 1941–44

The ritualized memory of genocide has been a cornerstone of Roma political mobilization during at least the last three decades. A uniqueness paradigm has been developing for some time, applying a memorial discourse inspired by the Jewish Holocaust model. While paralleling each other in time, the mass murders of Jews and Roma during the Second World War differed on several points. In the General Government of the Occupied Polish Territories and the territories occupied by Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa, the persecution of Roma took place largely in local initiatives. Consequently, the Nazi policies varied considerably, leading to territories in which Roma were annihilated and those in which about half of the Roma population survived. Considerable differences could also appear within the same administrative unit. In Distrikt Galizien, the southeastern-most district of the General Government, Roma were persecuted violently in the countryside, while the district capital of Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv) saw a different course of events. The picture that appears from the available documents also diverges from survivor testimonies and general accounts of the persecution of Roma as being similar and parallel to that of Jews. Roma were present in Lemberg throughout the Nazi occupation and the authorities were aware of their whereabouts. Roma were not confined to the ghetto, but many, along with Poles and Ukrainians, remained within the territory of the ghetto, parts of which had constituted areas of Roma settlement in Lemberg since the mid nineteenth century. Several Roma also lived in wagons in various locations in 1942–43, as well as in quarters close to the town’s centre. Altogether, several hundred Roma lived in Lemberg, and their treatment by the local courts was different from that of Jews, bearing more similarity to the way in which Polish and Ukrainian cases were handled.     

A conspiracy to murder: explaining the dynamics of Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria

This article offers a comprehensive interpretation of the Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria in 1941–44. This region in southwestern Ukraine witnessed both a monstrous number of Jewish victims, usually estimated as no fewer than 350,000 and possibly more, and an unusually high survival rate by the standards of the occupied Soviet territory. The article argues that what is sometimes referred to as ‘inconsistency’ in Romanian policy can be best explained within the framework of the structuralist/functionalist approach to the history of the Holocaust that was first developed on German material. The article argues that Romanian leaders never adopted the policy of complete annihilation of Jews; rather, their aim was to expel them from Romania’s national territory. However, they were not opposed to murdering Jews en masse when they believed it was ‘necessary’ from a military point of view or advisable for any other reason. Given the scarcity of resources in the region and the fear of epidemics, murdering interned Jews in the areas of their greatest concentration appeared to be the way to ‘solve’ a number of problems. At the same time, the absence of a fanatical paramilitary force such as the SS in Nazi Germany and Romanian leaders’ unwillingness to leave a paper trail of their criminal orders complicated the logistics of mass murder. Mass murder required either the ready participation of the gendarmerie and police, which was not always forthcoming, or the mobilization of the ethnic German militia, which was not available everywhere. In the absence of pressure from the authorities to kill, some officers and individual gendarmes, cognizant of the criminal nature of such actions, hesitated or even avoided participation in mass murder.     

Holocaust scholarship: towards a post-uniqueness era

This article examines the contemporary theoretical approaches that combine Holocaust studies and genocide studies, and the historiography of the Holocaust with the German occupation of eastern Europe. It analyses the sources of the idea, long dominant in Israeli historiography and among Jewish historians in the United States, that the Holocaust was an event of unique historical significance, as well as the crisis that has beset this perspective since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The place of the national-martyrological view of the Holocaust has been taken by new ideas that seek to incorporate the Holocaust into a broader history of the twentieth century. The article's premise is that the current trend of writing about the Holocaust as part of genocide studies offers only a partial answer to the need to write an integrated history of the Holocaust. It must be supplemented by the development of an approach that incorporates Holocaust studies into the broader national context of the countries and societies in which it took place, particularly eastern Europe, where European Jews were murdered alongside millions of members of the other nations that lived in the region.     

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

This article argues that the ideological and emotional meanings of the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ have obstructed their use as analytical concepts in Holocaust scholarship. It claims, specifically, that they frame the persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II as unique, placing these events and processes apart from essential historical and political contexts. The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building—in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority—generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews. Focusing on the multi-ethnic borderland of Subcarpathian Rus’ before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 illuminates the links in the state's multi-layered attack against the region's society and sheds new light on the particular victimization of Jews, also after March 1944. Almost all the scholarship on the Holocaust in Hungary has addressed the period after the German invasion, dealing with ghettoization and deportation to Auschwitz. This perspective has provided important insight, but it has also overshadowed significant dimensions in the history of wartime Hungary. The histories of the state's borderlands, which have received limited attention, challenge this account of ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary. This article uncovers how anxieties about disloyalty and foreignness played crucial roles in the exclusionary campaign against Jews, Roma and Carpatho-Ruthenians in Subcarpathian Rus’. The Hungarian authorities planned and carried out discriminatory and violent measures against them and, whenever national and international opportunities permitted, mass deportations. The examination of these related processes of mass violence lays bare the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ in a specific political context, highlighting connections between anti-Jewish policies and the persecution of other groups. Viewing this violence as it unfolded, rather than backward from the ‘final solution’ and Auschwitz, opens new paths to rethink ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary.     

1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.