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Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 44; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0031322x.2010.527443

1461-7331

Dan Stone,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

ABSTRACT The end of the Cold war has seen an explosion in Holocaust history, and some significant changes in the main historiographical explanations. The ‘return of ideology’ that began displacing the ‘functionalist’ or ‘structuralist’ dominance of the 1980s remains strong. But it is being supplemented by very detailed regional and local studies, by analyses of different experiences of ghettoization in different places, and by a focus on the widespread plunder and corruption that accompanied the killing process. This enormous attention to detail reveals that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different places; but it also demonstrates the existence of an overall framework in which all the operations took place, what we might call an ‘antisemitic consensus’. Simultaneously, historians have broadened the discussion of the Holocaust, situating it into a transnational or world-historical context of imperialism and colonialism. Stone outlines in broad brush some of these themes, and asks what effects they have had and will continue to have on Europeans' self-understanding in an age in which the post-war anti-fascist consensus has been dismantled while Holocaust-consciousness is officially enshrined into European identity. Keywords: antisemitismcollaborationcolonialismempireEuropegenocidehistoriographyHolocaustideologymemoryplunder This article is adapted from an earlier version that appeared in History Today (July 2010). Its ideas are developed more fully in Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010). Notes 1 Lev Rozhetsky, ‘My life in a fascist prison’, in Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (eds), The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, trans. from the Russian by Christopher Morris and Joshua Rubenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008), 128. 2 Sara Gleykh, ‘The destruction of the Jews of Mariupol’, in ibid., 216. 3 Joshua Rubenstein, ‘The war and the Final Solution on the Russian front’, in ibid., 13. 4 Dalia Ofer, ‘Holocaust historiography: the return of antisemitism and ethnic stereotypes as major themes’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 4, 1999, 87–106. 5 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2006). 6 As noted by Alon Confino, ‘A world without Jews: interpreting the Holocaust’, German History, vol. 27, no. 4, 2009, 540–1. And see the essays in Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas and Richard Wetzell (eds), Beyond the Racial State (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press forthcoming 2011). 7 Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and visions of serial genocide’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), 241–63; Christopher R. Browning, ‘The Nazi empire’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 407–25. 8 Peter Hayes, ‘Auschwitz, capital of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2003, 330–50. 9 Jan Erik Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS. Oswald Pohl und das SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933–1945 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh 2001); Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2002); Jan Erik Schulte, ‘Zwangsarbeit für die SS: Juden in der Ostindustrie GmbH’, and Bernd C. Wagner, ‘Gerüchte, Wissen, Verdrängung: die IG Auschwitz und das Vernichtungslager Birkenau’, both in Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher and Bernd C. Wagner (eds), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: neue Studien zur national-sozialistischen Lagerpolitik (Munich: K. G. Saur 2000), 43–74 and 231–48. 10 Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, ‘Introduction’, in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008), 6. 11 Shmuel Krakowski, Das Todeslager Chelmno/Kulmhof: der Beginn der Endlösung (Göttingen: Wallstein 2007); Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1987); Bogdan Musial (ed.), ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre 2004). 12 See, for example, the descriptions in Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, trans. from the Dutch by Karin Dixon (Oxford: Berg 2007); Witold Chrostowski, Extermination Camp Treblinka (London: Vallentine Mitchell 2004); Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk, ‘Treblinka—ein Todeslager der “Aktion Reinhard”’, in Musial (ed.), ‘Aktion Reinhardt’; Michael Wildt, ‘Die Lager im Osten: kommentierende Bemerkungen’, in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann (eds), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager: Entwicklung und Struktur, 2 vols (Frankfurt on Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2002), i.508–20. 13 Dieter Pohl, ‘The Holocaust and the concentration camps’, in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London and New York: Routledge 2010), 149. 14 Omer Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the site of genocide’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 80, no. 3, 2008, 576; Frank Bajohr, ‘The “folk community” and the persecution of the Jews: German society under National Socialist dictatorship, 1933–45’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 2006, 195; Konrad Kwiet, ‘Perpetrators and the Final Solution’, in Stephanie McMahon-Kaye (ed.), The Memory of the Holocaust in the 21st Century: The Challenge for Education (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2001), 79. 15 On which the historiography is sparse. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown 1996), chs 13 and 14, and, especially, works by Daniel Blatman: ‘The death marches and the final phase of Nazi genocide’, in Caplan and Wachsmann (eds), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, 167–85, and The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, trans. from the Hebrew by Chaya Galai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2011). 16 Timothy Snyder, ‘Holocaust: the ignored reality’, New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009. 17 Timothy Snyder, ‘The life and death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921–1945’, in Brandon and Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine, 102. See also Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the site of genocide’; Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007); Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven: Yale University Press 2010). 18 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1997), ch. 3. For discussion, see Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (eds), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum 2010). 19 Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘The Nazi kleptocracy: reflections on avarice and the Holocaust’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 2006), 34. 20 Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2008). 21 Frank Bajohr, ‘Aryanization’ in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2002). 22 See the survey in Gerhard Paul, ‘Von Psychopathen, Technokraten und “ganz gewöhnlichen” Deutschen: die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.), Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Göttingen: Wallstein 2002), 13–90. 23 Frank Bajohr, ‘The Holocaust and corruption’, in Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel (eds), Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2005), 118–38. 25 Wolfgang Seibel, ‘A market for mass crime? Inter-institutional competition and the initiation of the Holocaust in France, 1940–1942’, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, vol. 5, no. 3–4, 2002, 236. 24 On the ‘antisemitic consensus’, see Mark Roseman, ‘Ideas, contexts, and the pursuit of genocide’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin, vol. 25, no. 1, 2003, 83; Michael Wildt, ‘Gewalt als Partizipation: der Nationalsozialismus als Ermächtigungsregime’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein 2008), 236–8; Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen: die deutsche Bevölkerung, die NS-Führung und der Holocaust (Frankfurt on Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2008), 10. 26 As is explained in, for example, Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2003), 450; Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2000), 169. 27 Davide Rodogno, ‘Italiani brava gente? Fascist Italy's policy towards the Jews in the Balkans, April 1941–July 1943’, European History Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, 2005, 213–40; Guri Schwarz, ‘On myth making and nation building: the genesis of the “myth of the good Italian”, 1943–1947’, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, 111–43; MacGregor Knox, ‘Die faschistische Italien und die “Endlösung” 1942/43’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 55, no. 1, 2007, 53–92. 28 Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. from the French by Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 2001); Ahlrich Meyer, Täter im Verhör: die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ in Frankreich 1940–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 2005). 29 Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, 7 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2009- ); Guy Miron (ed.), The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, 2 vols (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem 2009). 30 Sara Bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II and the Holocaust, trans. from the Hebrew by Yaffa Murciano (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 2009), 293. 31 Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust, trans. from the Hebrew by Lenn J. Schramm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011). 32 Christopher R. Browning, ‘Before the “final solution”: Nazi ghettoization policy in Poland (1940–1941)’, in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Ghettos 1939–1945: New Research and Perspectives on Definition, Daily Life and Survival, Symposium Presentations (Washington, D.C.: USHMM 2005), 1–13. 33 Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee 2000); Jean Ancel, ‘The German-Romanian relationship and the Final Solution’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2005, 252–75; Dennis Deletant, Hitler's Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006); Mihail E. Ionescu and Liviu Rotman (eds), The Holocaust and Romania: History and Contemporary Significance (Bucharest: Institute for Political Studies of Defense and Military History 2003). 34 Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994). 35 See Donald Bloxham, ‘Europe, the Final Solution and the dynamics of intent’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 44, no. 4, 2010, 317–35; and Donald Bloxham, ‘The Holocaust and European history’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books forthcoming 2011). 36 Wendy Lower, ‘“Anticipatory obedience” and the Nazi implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: a case study of central and peripheral for ces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2002, 1–22; Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Controlled escalation: Himmler's men in the summer of 1941 and the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet territories’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2007, 218–42; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: Biographie (Munich: Siedler 2008). 37 See Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2000). 38 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1944); Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds), The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (London: Routledge 2009). On genocide studies as a discipline, see Bloxham and Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies; Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2008). 39 A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds), Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge 2007); Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Kolonialer Genozid? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer historischen Kategorie für eine Globalgeschichte’, in Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz:Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT 2009), 131–50. 40 John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: from racial theory to racist practice’, Central European History, vol. 32, no. 1, 1999, 1–33. 41 Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2006). 42 Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz; A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2008). 43 Feldman and Seibel (eds), Networks of Nazi Persecution. 44 Christopher Kobrak and Andrea H. Schneider, ‘Big business and the Third Reich: an appraisal of the historical arguments’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004), 141–72; Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (eds), Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2004); Martin Dean, Constantin Goeschler and Philipp Ther (eds), Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2007). 45 Adam Krzeminski, ‘As many wars as nations: the myths and truths of World War II’, trans. from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, signandsight.com (online), 6 April 2005, available at www.signandsight.com/features/96.html (viewed 9 September 2010). 46 Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe (London: Routledge 2010). 47 Gregory Carleton, ‘Victory in death: annihilation narratives in Russia today’, History & Memory, vol. 22, no. 1, 2010, 135–68; Thomas C. Wolfe, ‘Past as present, myth, or history? Discourses of time and the Great Fatherland War’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006), 249–83. 48 James Mark, ‘Containing fascism: history in post-Communist Baltic occupation and genocide museums’, in Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (eds), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press 2008), 335–69. 49 Maria Mälksoo, ‘The memory politics of becoming European: the East European subalterns and the collective memory of Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 15, no. 4, 2009, 653–80. See also Claus Leggewie, ‘A tour of the battleground: the seven circles of pan-European memory’, Social Research, vol. 75, no. 1, 2008, 217–34; Robert Bideleux, ‘Rethinking the eastward extension of the EU civil order and the nature of Europe's new east–west divide’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, vol. 10, no. 1, 2009, 118–6. 50 For more detail, see my ‘Memory wars in the “new Europe”’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press forthcoming 2011). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDan Stone Dan Stoneis Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent book is Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2010)