Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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an ideological foundation legitimating the slaughter of entire populations, killings by

these bands or by local police or collaborationist militias were often more extensive

than German shootings of Soviet Jews. Many Jewish communities victimized by the

local populace lost from a quarter to over half of their number in the space of a few

days – far more than the proportional losses German forces were inﬂicting at the

same time. On June 28–29, 1941, for example, Romanian (not German) police,

soldiers, and townspeople in the Moldavian capital of Ia¸si caused the deaths of more

than 10,000 of the city’s 34,000 Jewish residents. Around the same time Croatian

forces deported perhaps a third of the 11,000 Jews of Zagreb and almost all Jews

from Varaždin and other provincial towns and villages to specially constructed prison

camps, where about 35,000 Jews were shot on arrival. In some cases, all Jews in a

particular town who were unable to escape were killed by a portion of the town’s

non-Jewish residents, as at Jedwabne in north central Poland, where on July 10,

1941, a mob led by the local mayor and members of the town council herded at

least 400 Jews (by some accounts many more) into a barn that was then doused with

kerosene and burned.

Nevertheless, it was ultimately the central Nazi hierarchy, in all likelihood under

direct prodding from Hitler, that made the decision to turn mass killing from a local

practice into a program for the entire area under German domination. Research

indicates that a paramount factor in that decision was the progress of World War II.

On January 30, 1939 Hitler had told the Reichstag that “if the international Jewish

ﬁnanciers . . . should succeed in plunging the nations . . . into a world war, the

result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

It was Hitler

himself, of course, together with his regime, that was actually preparing for world

war at the time, and each stage in German preparations and execution brought with

it a concomitant radicalization of policy concerning Jews. The conquest of Poland

in September 1939 was accompanied by a move from a program of coerced emigra-

tion to one of mass deportations and incarceration; the June 1941 invasion of the

Soviet Union, which more than doubled the number of Jews living under Nazi rule,

was quickly followed by extensive mass killings of Soviet Jews, including Polish Jews

living in Soviet-occupied territory (about one half million between June and November

1941). Some Jews in other parts of eastern Europe (mainly Serbia and the western

Polish Warthegau region that had been incorporated directly into the Reich in 1939)

were also killed by German forces during fall 1941, and there is evidence that by

October of that year plans had been formulated for the liquidation of all Polish Jewry.

But documents uncovered since the mid-1990s point to Germany’s entry into the

war against the United States on December 11, 1941, which turned what had until

then been a clash of European powers into a truly global conﬂict, as the trigger for

extending the murder program systematically throughout Europe. The connection

is consistent with Hitler’s January 1939 statement.

Carrying out the liquidation of European Jewry on a continent-wide scale required

extensive construction and organization. In eastern Europe, murders had been carried

out by killing squads that moved from town to town, seizing local Jews, marching

them to a nearby secluded location, and shooting them one by one. However, that

method could not serve the needs of a more extensive program. Thus, when Reich

leaders focused their attention on Polish Jewry, they determined to replace the mobile

squads with centrally located killing centers, to which Jews would be transported

the holocaust 479

from a distance, generally by rail. Construction of the ﬁrst such center, Bełz

ec, in

southeastern Poland, began in October 1941; exhaust from a diesel engine was fed

into a sealed chamber, where all inside would be asphyxiated. The next month three

specially equipped vans whose exhaust could be channeled back into the cargo

area were sent to Chełmno in the Warthegau; in these vehicles Jews brought to the

site would take their ﬁnal ride. Construction of two additional centers similar to

Bełz

ec – Sobibór, northeast of Lublin, and Treblinka, between Warsaw and

Białystok – was begun in spring 1942 to assist in annihilating the Jews of Poland.

Jews from the rest of Europe were slated to be killed at Birkenau, a branch of the

Nazi prison and labor camp at Auschwitz, west of Kraków, where since September

1941 killing experiments using the fumes of evaporating prussic acid had been

conducted on Soviet war prisoners and inmates too ill to work. In fall 1942 diesel

exhaust gassing facilities were added to the labor camp at Majdanek near Lublin to

relieve pressure on the other installations. These were the six so-called extermination

camps, where the majority of Holocaust victims met their deaths (although for

Bełz

ec, Chełmno, Sobibór, and Treblinka the name “camp” is misleading, because

few victims remained there for more than the time required to unload them from

the trains that brought them, strip them of their property, shave their heads, and

herd them to the gas chambers). Contrary to a widespread belief, the concentration

camps in Germany proper, like Dachau or Buchenwald, were not employed for the

mass killing of Jews.

In order to make certain that the killing centers operated at maximum efﬁciency,

transports from across Europe had to be scheduled precisely. The work of synchro-

nization – clearing railroad tracks, allocating rolling stock, arranging with local police

and military authorities to round up the victims – was one of the tasks of a meeting

held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942. Summoned by Reinhard

Heydrich, head of the Reich’s internal intelligence and secret police services, who

earlier had been entrusted by top Nazi leaders Hermann Göring and Heinrich

Himmler with coordinating the many government and party agencies who would

play a role in what they called the “ﬁnal solution of the Jewish problem,” it brought

together bureaucrats from 13 different ofﬁces, who developed a plan for “comb[ing]

Europe from west to east,” with a mind to ensnaring at least 11 million Jews in the

killing mechanism.

In the end, somewhat more than half that number of Jews lost

their lives. Success rates varied widely by country: in Germany, Austria, Poland, and

the Baltic states some 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population perished; in

Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Luxembourg the killers reached only 2–20

percent of targeted Jewish victims. In Belgium, France, and Norway, death rates

reached 25–50 percent; in Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, Yugoslavia, and

Soviet Belorussia and Ukraine, 50–75 percent; in Czechoslovakia and Greece, 75–90

percent. There were various reasons for these differences, including the attitudes of

the occupied non-Jewish populations toward their Jewish neighbors, the degree to

which local ofﬁcials enjoyed freedom of action, and widely divergent political calcula-

tions by the rulers of Germany’s independent allies (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy,

Romania, Slovakia, and Vichy France) concerning the advisability of cooperating in

the German murder scheme. Variations in Jewish responses to the threat of death,

in contrast, appear to have affected the outcome of the killing program in different

countries only marginally.

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Fighting the Death Sentence

For several decades following World War II, common wisdom held that European

Jews had been largely oblivious to the Nazi threat and had not shown much inclina-

tion to resist once it became manifest. By the 1980s, though, most scholars came to

understand how immense the gap was between the resources Germans and Jews

could marshal for achieving their respective goals. Jewish responses were encumbered

especially by the fact that the Nazis never made their aims public. Jews had at all

times to infer Nazi intentions indirectly on the basis of clues that were often muddled

and inconsistent – sometimes deliberately so, as German occupation authorities fre-

quently went to considerable lengths to camouﬂage their plans, which changed as

the war progressed. Moreover, Jews could generally count on at most only limited

assistance from the surrounding non-Jewish population, while in the areas of densest

Jewish settlement signiﬁcant segments of that population displayed murderous hostil-

ity toward them. Finally, as one perceptive historian has explained, “The post-

Holocaust generation . . . already know[s] . . . that mass murder was possible; [Jews

and non-Jews] who lived at the time did not. For them it was a totally new reality

that was unfolding before their shocked eyes and paralyzed minds.”

The thought

that the government of a major European state with a long and distinguished cultural

tradition – a state that many east European Jews recalled from World War I as an

enlightened occupier who protected them from their neighbors’ enmity – would now

seek to kill each and every one of them, no matter what they thought or how they

acted, merely because they happened to have been born Jews, was beyond belief.

Still, once they became aware that entire Jewish communities were being destroyed

– a realization that dawned gradually in most places between late 1941 and mid-1942

– the great majority of Jewish leaders in the countries under direct German control

understood that their charges were in immediate mortal danger and put their minds

to the task of formulating an appropriate response to the new situation. They turned

from the palliative and morale-building activities that had characterized earlier phases

of Nazi rule to strategies for avoidance, escape, and direct resistance. To be sure,

only a few leaders appear to have been persuaded that the annihilation of all of Jewry

constituted a fundamental Nazi ideological goal from which the German regime

could not be deterred. Hence the most common organized Jewish response to the

Nazi murder campaign after 1941 involved efforts to convince German ofﬁcials that

it was in the Reich’s interest to keep at least some Jews alive. That effort underlay

the so-called “salvation through work” policies pursued by the Jewish leadership in

many ghettos in Poland, including Łódz

, Białystok, and Wilno: it was hoped that by

demonstrating that the industrial capacity and available Jewish workforce in those

cities offered a potential boon to the German war effort, German authorities would

respond by protecting the workers and giving them adequate food, clothing, housing,

and medical care. In the event, Jewish communities where such a program was

implemented generally held out longer than those where it was not. Nevertheless, in

the end the Germans would not be bargained with on such purely rational, economic

grounds. The notion that Jews could be of value to them as laborers was not consis-

tent with the fundamental Nazi representation of Jews as incorrigible parasites.

When the grounds for bargaining were not economic but diplomatic, in contrast,

the situation proved somewhat different, as evidenced by negotiations to ransom

the holocaust 481

large numbers of Jews in return for monetary payment, which took place in Slovakia

in 1942–3 and in Hungary in 1944. Such ransom offers did not contradict Nazi

stereotypes but actually built upon them, conﬁrming in the minds of some German

leaders that the highly successful Jewish parasites had succeeded in accumulating not

only large sums of money and sources of income but also, even more importantly,

powerful political inﬂuence outside the Nazi orbit. As it happened, Heinrich Himmler,

who by some accounts was growing increasingly pessimistic about Germany’s pros-

pects on the battleﬁeld, encouraged some of his subordinates to explore whether the

Jews’ supposed close contacts with British and American policy makers might perhaps

be exploited to gain diplomatic advantage for the Reich in eventual negotiations with

the Allies to end the war. Hence it appears that for a time, in 1943–4, Himmler

might have been willing to sell, as it were, large numbers of east European Jews to

a suitable buyer. From his perspective, though, the only suitable buyer was one or

more of the Allied governments, not the Jews themselves. Once it became clear that

the Allies were not interested in making a deal for Jewish lives, the possibility of

rescue through ransom vanished; there was nothing Jews could do to resurrect it.

Still, the Jewish–Nazi contacts that developed during ransom negotiations in Hungary

appear to have played a role in the survival of signiﬁcant portions of the Jewish popu-

lations of Budapest, Debrecen, Szeged, and several smaller Hungarian Jewish

communities.

Jews also continually sought ways to escape the Germans’ grasp, whether by

hiding, assuming a false identity as a non-Jew, or ﬂeeing to a place not under Nazi

occupation. Various Jewish organizations endeavored to help those who were able

to do so. In particular, the so-called Working Group in Bratislava joined from 1942

with the Budapest-based Aid and Rescue Committee and a coalition of Zionist youth

groups from the Zagłe˛bie region in Poland to smuggle some 8,000 Jews from

Slovakia, 4,000 from Germany, and 1,100 from Poland into Hungary, where until

March 1944, when German troops occupied the country, Jews were relatively safe.

Some 2,000 additional Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied areas managed to make

their way into Hungary on their own. Following the German occupation of Hungary

the Aid and Rescue Committee and Hungarian Zionist youth movements turned

their attention to moving Jews out of Hungary into unoccupied Romania. About

7,000 Jews were rescued in this fashion. In France, clandestine Jewish groups joined

with non-Jewish anti-Nazi underground organizations to smuggle several thousand

Jews into the neighboring neutral states, Switzerland and Spain. In contrast, the

largest single Jewish mass escape, which brought 7,200 Danish Jews and some 700

of their non-Jewish relatives to safety in neutral Sweden on the night of September

30, 1943, was organized almost entirely by the Danish underground, with Jews

providing partial ﬁnancial support.

Rescue through ﬂight across international boundaries within Europe could encom-

pass only relatively small numbers of Jews, because it had to be accomplished without

the knowledge of troops and ofﬁcials guarding the borders. (In Denmark the large

majority of Copenhagen’s Jews could be spirited across the Øresund on a single night

thanks largely to the uncommon reluctance of key ﬁgures within the German admin-

istration to carry out the mass deportations scheduled for the following day and their

consequent willingness to look the other way.) It was also a realistic option only for

Jews living in areas close to unoccupied territory. In contrast, for the large majority

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of Jews, whose geographical situation was less favorable, the only ways to avoid falling

into Nazi hands were to hide or to live openly under false identity as a so-called

Aryan. Both strategies entailed severe risks that deterred most Jews from attempting

them: a study published in 2002 estimated that about 28,000 of the approximately

450,000 Jews who resided in Warsaw in 1941 tried either course. Of these, 11,500

remained alive at liberation.

Perhaps another 3,000–4,000 Jews survived in hiding

or in disguise in other parts of Poland. A joint Polish–Jewish underground organiza-

tion called the Council for Aid to Jews, founded in December 1942 and known by

the code name Z

egota, endeavored to locate safe shelter and provide sustenance for

concealed Jews and to prepare false identity documents and secure employment for

Jews seeking to pass as Poles; about 4,000 Jews beneﬁted from its assistance. Little

is known to date about Jews in other countries who attempted similar survival

strategies.

Armed resistance was an option available only in certain areas and to certain age

groups. Beginning in 1942, Jewish armed resistance units were organized in over

100 ghettos in Poland and the occupied Soviet territories. Some of these engaged

German forces in battle, others conducted sabotage operations. The most notable

armed engagement was the revolt in the Warsaw ghetto from April 19 to May 8,

1943, in which at most 1,250 poorly equipped young Jews held off double their

number of German soldiers armed with tanks and artillery. The activities of such units

were never conceived, however, as a means to dissuade the Germans from continuing

the murder campaign or to save large numbers of Jewish lives; their members sought

rather what they regarded as an honorable form of death. The leader of an under-

ground Jewish ﬁghting organization in the Kraków ghetto declared that his group

was “ﬁghting for three lines in history,” so that Jews would be remembered not as

pitiful, passive victims but as proud defenders of their integrity in the face of obliv-

ion.

Prisoners in several killing centers and labor camps staged revolts in the hope

of escape, but only a few dozen survived, most of whom joined partisan units in

nearby forests. As many as 30,000 Jews served with the partisans in Poland and the

USSR, which included several dozen groups organized by Jews who identiﬁed them-

selves speciﬁcally as such. About 1,500–2,000 Slovakian Jews joined partisan forces

in that country; another 4,500 fought with the Tito movement in Yugoslavia. In

addition, Jews were highly visible in the general resistance movements in Italy, France,

Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece; for example, three of the six founders of the

French resistance organization Libération were Jews.

Survival rates among those who engaged in armed resistance were low, especially

in eastern Europe. In all likelihood, the number of Jews who survived the war thanks

to the organized efforts of other Jews to reduce the dimensions of the German

murder campaign did not amount to more than 5–6 percent of the total number of

potential victims in the countries within the Nazi orbit. Once the Nazi regime

decided to seek the death of all Jews within its reach, there was little the intended

targets could do to save themselves.

The Holocaust and the Modern Condition

In the end, the Holocaust’s dimensions depended largely upon the action of

bystanders – local non-Jewish populations, their institutions and leaders, and the

the holocaust 483

governments of states beyond the Nazis’ circle of inﬂuence. If they wished, local

populations could choose to conceal the presence of Jews in their midst and otherwise

encumber the German killers. Underground movements could organize escape

mechanisms, supply arms to Jewish resistance groups, sabotage deportation trans-

ports, convey information about mass killing, and exhort the people in whose name

they fought actively to oppose the German murder scheme. Churches, too, could

play an exhortatory role and offer refuge to Jews in hiding. Allied and neutral gov-

ernments could provide a haven for Jews who escaped the area of Nazi control and

offer diplomatic protection to those who remained. Countries at war with Germany

could also warn Germans that the murder of Jews would be punished after the war;

they could conduct reprisals, bomb rail lines leading to the killing centers, and offer

ransom or return of interned German civilians or war prisoners in exchange for Jews

slated for death. On the other hand, all of the various bystanders could choose not

to do some or all of these things even when opportunities presented themselves.

Some could even take actions that directly aided the Germans in carrying out their

murderous plans.

Broadly speaking, the bystanders demonstrated the full gamut of possible responses,

and the course taken by any particular bystander or group of bystanders in any given

situation depended upon the complex interaction of an extensive number of variables.

Among these variables, however, a central (though hardly exclusive) role appears to

have been played by the place Jews occupied within the bystander’s universe of obli-

gation, deﬁned by sociologist Helen Fein as “that circle of persons toward whom

obligations are owed, to whom the rules apply, and whose injuries call for expiation

by the community.”

Where bystanders believed themselves unequivocally bound to

assist threatened Jews, they tended actively to seek ways to do so; where they per-

ceived their responsibilities toward those Jews as less than absolute, considerations

of self-interest and historical memory played a greater role in their choices.

In twentieth-century Europe, universes of obligation were constructed primarily

on the twin bases of citizenship and ethnicity. Between 1789 and 1917 Jews had

become citizens of every European state, and they depended upon the legal

protections that fact afforded to guarantee their physical security. That dependence

was rendered problematic after World War I, however, by the principle, implicit in

the postwar settlements for central and eastern Europe, that states might be obligated

to foster the needs and interests of a particular ethnic or national group among its

citizens more than those of its citizenry as a whole. The Nazi regime instituted that

principle upon coming to power, effectively relegating Jews beyond the compass of

those whose welfare the German state was bound to consider. In other countries,

including Poland, Hungary, and Romania, that principle had been effectively in force

during the interwar years, so that under Nazi impact (whether, like Poland, as an

occupied country or, like Hungary and Romania, as Germany’s allies) their

governments (and in Poland’s case its underground leadership as well) asked ﬁrst

how action on matters of Jewish concern might affect the ethnic communities to

which they saw themselves as primarily responsible. Those ethnic communities, in

turn, tended to view their own situation vis-à-vis the Nazis separately from that of

their Jewish neighbors, even though they shared a common citizenship. In contrast,

local populations and leaderships in states like Bulgaria, Denmark, and Italy, where

tendencies toward ethnocracy were less pronounced, were inclined to a greater degree

484 david engel

to view German attacks upon the Jews of their countries as violations of their own

communities.

The protections of citizenship were also attenuated for Jews by the modern dogma

of non-interference by one sovereign state (or the international community) in the

internal affairs of another. As a result, when German Jews were stripped of their citi-

zenship and its attendant guarantees of life, liberty, and property, no other state or

international body was obligated or even permitted to intervene on their behalf.

Similarly, the states ﬁghting Germany could not be moved on any grounds other

than moral ones to extricate Jews who were not their citizens from mortal danger.

Doing so was the sole responsibility of the governments of the threatened Jews’

countries of citizenship; if those governments chose not to fulﬁll their duty, their

refusal was no other state’s legal concern.

This failure of the modern institutions of citizenship and state sovereignty has been

identiﬁed by some as but one way in which modernity as a whole is implicated in

the Holocaust. In fact, it has been suggested that, far from constituting an atavistic

outburst of barbarism that repudiated the civilizing values of the modern west, the

Holocaust was actually a logical implementation of those values whose course and

outcome were rooted in modernity’s very premises. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman

has located the connection between the Holocaust and modern civilization in two

of modernity’s most essential characteristics: faith in the capacity of empirically based

science to engineer a perfect society and the habit of assigning responsibility for

implementing the engineers’ blueprint to a bureaucracy trained to act according “to

solely instrumental-rational criteria . . . dissociated from moral evaluation of the

ends.” In his view, such a quintessentially modern bureaucracy lacks an effective

mechanism for preventing a situation in which “an ideologically obsessed power elite”

committed to “a bold design of a better, more reasonable and rational social

order . . . [such as] a racially uniform or a classless society” charges it with imple-

menting that design in the most efﬁcient way possible, even if that way is strewn with

the corpses of those deviant human beings to whom the new rational order assigns

no place. He has suggested that only by restoring the social system that modernity

ostensibly destroyed, characterized by small, intimate communities whose members

are bound to one another in “personal face-to-face relationships,” can a future

Holocaust be avoided.

Bauman’s characterization of the Holocaust as the product of deliberate social

engineering implemented by a faceless, detached bureaucracy might well apply to

that part of the Holocaust organized at Wannsee in January 1942. However, some

43 percent of the Jews who perished between 1941 and 1945 as a result of hostile

actions by Germans or others died close to home, with little modern technology or

administrative sophistication required to end their lives. Most of these were killed by

shooting in encounters where they saw their killers face to face. Those who fell victim

to the violence of local non-German populations often actually knew their killers

personally; they had grown up with them in precisely the sort of premodern com-

munities often supposed to be less amenable to murderous mass violence.

In the end, it may be that the diverse roads by which two-thirds of European

Jewry met its death during World War II cast doubt upon whether it is possible to

speak of a single “Holocaust” at all. Perhaps the fate of European Jewry during that

period is better conceived as a composite of many small-scale, local “holocausts,”

the holocaust 485

complete or aborted, each demanding its own particular narrative and not easily

congruent with a single hegemonic representation. Modernity may be implicated in

some of these holocausts, but not in all.

NOTES

1 On the evolution of the term see,

inter alia, Gerd Korman, “The Holocaust and American

Historical Writing,” Societas 1 (1972): 251–70; Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word

HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings,” Journal of

Genocide Research 2 (2000): 31–63.

2 Quoted in Deborah E. Lipstadt,

Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the

Holocaust 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 255.

3 Barbara W. Tuchman, “Introduction,” in Gideon Hausner,

Justice in Jerusalem, 4th edn

(New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. xv.

4 See, for example, Isaiah 47:11: “and desolation [

sho’ah] shall come upon thee suddenly,

which thou shalt not know.” The accent properly falls on the latter syllable (sho’AH).

5 Raphael Lemkin,

Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government

Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

1944), p. 79.

6 Steven T. Katz,

The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1994), p. 3.

7 For a fuller explication of this theory, see Eberhard Jaeckel,

Hitler’s World View: A

Blueprint for Power (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 47–66,

102–7.

8 Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds,

Documents on the Holocaust:

Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the

Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1981), p. 127.

9 Some of this research has been collected and presented concisely in Ulrich Hebert,

ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and

Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).

10 For a detailed description of this incident, see Jan T. Gross,

Neighbors: The Destruction

of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,

2001).

11 Arad, Gutman, and Margaliot,

Documents, pp. 144–5.

12 The text of the conference protocol is reproduced in Arad, Gutman, and Margaliot,

Documents, pp. 253ff. The ﬁgure of 11 million included Jews in European countries

beyond the Nazi orbit – Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, (European)

Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

13 Yehuda Bauer,

The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 1978), p. 7.

14 For details of these and other negotiations, see Yehuda Bauer,

Jews for Sale? Nazi–Jewish

Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

15 See Gunnar S. Paulsson,

Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 (New Haven

CT: Yale University Press, 2002).

16 Quoted in Y. Margolin (Peled),

Krakov haYehudit 1939–1943 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

Hameuchad, 1993), p. 163.

17 Helen Fein,

Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during

the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 33.

18 Zygmunt Bauman,

Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,

1989), pp. 85–116 passim.

486 david engel

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000). A highly original analysis placing the Holocaust within the context

of modern warfare and mass violence.

Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

Empirical studies and essays summarizing four decades of research by an architect of the

ﬁeld of Holocaust studies.

Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution

in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). Pathbreaking study of German soldiers who

perpetrated mass shooting operations.

Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy,

September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). Comprehensive

analysis and evaluation of the latest research concerning the decision to begin systematic

mass killing (with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus).

Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Thought-provoking reﬂections of an anthropologist confronting research and memoir lit-

erature on perpetrators and victims.

David Engel, The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews (Harlow: Longman, 2000). Short,

concise introduction to Holocaust history, including 28 key documents.

Barbara Engelking, Holocaust and Memory (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

Incisive study by a Polish social psychologist of how Jewish survivors still living in Poland

lived through the war and came to grips with their experience afterwards.

Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Detailed, well-documented discus-

sion of the connections between Nazi killings of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and the disabled.

Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New

York: Harper Collins, 1997). First of a planned two volumes synthesizing the experiences

of Germans and Jews during the Nazi years through a highly original narrative style.

François Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New

York: Schocken Books, 1989). Fifteen articles by leading scholars; still unsurpassed for its

comprehensive scope and the fundamental issues it treats.

Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1982). The standard history of the fate of Europe’s largest Jewish com-

munity under Nazi rule.

Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd edn (New Haven CT: Yale University

Press, 2003). Originally published in 1961, still the standard work detailing how the Nazi

state organized the systematic mass killing of Jews.

Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover NH: University Press of New England,

1987). Survey of the development of historical thinking about the Holocaust to the

mid-1980s.

Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (London: Valentine Mitchell,

2003). Stimulating essays critically examining the fundamental vocabulary of Holocaust

research, emphasizing the experiences of Jewish victims.

Chapter Thirty-One

Memories of World War II and

the Holocaust in Europe

Harold Marcuse

Since the late 1980s the study of “memory,” of individual and group ideas about

past events, has been a rapidly growing subﬁeld of history. While the literature on

memory is large and studies of speciﬁc events abound, there is still no common ter-

minology or methods.

This essay thus begins by deﬁning key concepts, and then

reviews developments across Europe that illustrate key principles of the workings of

memory.

“World War II,” “the Holocaust,” and “memory” may seem to be relatively clear

concepts, but closer examination reveals a broad range of different meanings. Although

September 1, 1939 is the ofﬁcial starting date of the war, in retrospect – especially

for the affected populations – the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the German

occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, or of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 might

all be remembered as part of the war. Similarly, we must ask when “the war” ended

in countries that either collaborated or were quickly conquered and then allied them-

selves with the conquerors, such as Vichy France, Norway, and Hungary. Do oppos-

ing groups within such countries, such as collaborators and persecutees, experience

different terminal dates of war? Also, to what extent can memories of World War II

include events during the global dates of the war, but before or after the cessation

of military hostilities in a given place? For example, do US memories of the war

include events before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and do European memories

of the war include events between VE-Day in May 1945 and the Japanese surrender

in August? Such questions show that memories of an event, especially of a complex

event, depend to a large extent on who is doing the remembering. This insight applies

not only to individuals but also to national and regional communities, and to differ-

ent groups within those communities. Civilians, soldiers, collaborators, labor con-

scripts, prisoners of war, deserters, victims of persecution, and members of resistance

organizations will all have different referents for their memories of “the war.”

Since an analysis of memories of wartime requires a deﬁnition of “war” that goes

beyond open military conﬂict, we should include the vast numbers of non-military

persecutees and deaths, both intentional and unintentional. As David Engel’s essay

in this collection shows (chapter 30), the term “Holocaust” emerged during the