Download Research Resources, Priorities and Opportunities for the Coming

Research Resources, Priorities and Opportunities for the Coming Decade
Paul A. Shapiro
Director, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Holocaust Era Assets Conference
Prague
June 26-30, 2009
The simple passage of time—65 years since the end of World War II—and
the dramatic political changes that took place in this part of the world some 20
years ago have created a situation in which the opportunities for important new
research regarding the Holocaust, far from diminishing, are greater than ever. The
critical importance of taking advantage of those opportunities, as we survey the
world around us, has also never been greater. For the Holocaust, which was the
defining event of the 20th century, while a particular tragedy for the Jewish people,
was also a tragedy for millions of others who were targeted by the Nazis and their
allies for racial, religious or related discriminatory reasons, affected the lives of
tens of millions of others, and remains of universal relevance today.
One need only read the newspapers during any week to see the manner in
which the long legacy of the Holocaust continues to have an impact on our lives.
The fact that representatives of nearly 50 countries are gathered here in Prague in
2009 to map out strategies to address Holocaust era assets issues illustrates this
point dramatically. This conference also serves as a potent reminder: We continue
to live in a world of genocide, and our children and grandchildren will have to
confront the consequences of our action or inaction in the face of genocide today.
What I would like to do in the few minutes available to me is discuss briefly
the avalanche of new research source material regarding the Holocaust that has
become available over the past two decades, and then suggest some opportunities
and priorities for new research. As an overall rationale and statement of purpose,
however, I would like to posit the following moral, political, social and intellectual
imperative: We have an obligation to pursue research that lays open for educators
and for our societies the full magnitude of the Holocaust—its full geographic
reach; the diversity of the Jewish communities destroyed and the significance of
the loss; the consequences of the Holocaust for those targeted by the perpetrators
1
and for the societies in which the victims lived and died; the postwar experiences
of the survivors; the relationship between anti-Semitism and murder, that is,
between word and deed; the particular problems posed by study of the so-called
“bystanders,” as well as collaborators, whether they be individuals, organizations,
or states; the ethical, social and political lessons posed by this mass murder and by
the manner in which the international community has addressed or failed to
address its consequences and the needs and concerns of its survivors; and the
multiple ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust remains relevant both within
national societies, in a united Europe, and in the global arena.
Archives
Twenty years ago, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, and then of
the Soviet Union itself, disappeared. One dramatic result was that archival
materials relating to the Holocaust, which had been largely inaccessible since the
end of the war, began to be searched for, identified, and in some cases microfilmed
or otherwise copied and made available for research. This body of material is
immense, including records created by Soviet authorities, the wartime governments
of East European states that collaborated with Nazi Germany, German occupation
authorities, as well as all kinds of captured records seized by the Red Army as it
advanced toward Germany, by the postwar Allied Control Commissions that
operated in several states, and the records of Jewish organizations that had been
seized by the Nazis only to be taken by the Soviets at war’s end. Our collections
of newly accessible records from the former countries of the Warsaw Pact at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum number millions of pages.
Simultaneously in the mid-1990s, an equally momentous change was taking
place in the archives of Western Europe and even in the United States. The
expiration of 50-year archival restrictions in many Western European states, the
commitment to open archives made by states that sought entry to the International
Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, and a
Congressionally-mandated Working Group on Nazi War Crimes Records in the
United States that required all Federal agencies to identify and declassify
Holocaust-related materials in their archives, produced a second avalanche of new
Holocaust-related research resources, enhancing our ability to understand what
happened, how, and why.
Special category archives also became more easily accessible: The records
of the World Jewish Congress, for example, collected from each of the major
2
offices this organization maintained in Europe and North America; and the records
of the International Tracing Service, about which more in a moment. Following
the special dispositions given by Pope John Paul II to open documents relating to
Germany and Jewish affairs during the first six years of Nazi rule in Germany,
courageously overcoming Vatican tradition to wait for all records of a papacy to be
ready before opening any segment of the collection, we have some reason to
believe today that similar positive action may be taken by the current Pope, His
Holiness Benedict XVI, regarding Holocaust-related sections of the Vatican
archives from the papacy of Pius XII. While progress toward such an outcome has
been painfully slow, it is positive that the Vatican has sent an observer to
International Task Force meetings and equally positive that a representative of the
Vatican Secret Archives is attending these meetings in Prague. The deliberations
at this conference make it clear that the actuarial table of Holocaust survivors
demands immediate action.
When one adds to these paper resources the thousands of recorded
testimonies that have been added to repositories like our Museum, the Shoah
Foundation Video Archive in Los Angeles, and most recently the Yahad in Unum
Association in France, it is clear that after decades in which the majority of
Holocaust research was based on captured German documents microfilmed by the
Allied Powers after the war, and thus focused principally on the perpetrators and
their “machinery of destruction,” it is now possible to investigate and understand
with a degree of clarity not possible earlier the Holocaust from Normandy to the
depths of the Soviet Union; sensitive issues of collaboration and complicity that
require authentic documentation to explore; the responses of those who found
themselves under assault; and a more nuanced understanding of the role played by
those whom we have called “bystanders,” by those who defined themselves as
“neutral,” and those who accepted the benefits of genocide even if not ever
confronted directly with the brutality of the deportations and killing.
Let me turn now to some research priorities. I will not address the need for
additional research on assets issues. In the context of this conference, that need is
self-evident.
The International Tracing Service
As you perhaps know, the archives of the International Tracing Service, or
ITS, contain more than 50 million pages of original documentation relating to the
fates of 17.5 million people who were victimized by the Nazis or otherwise
3
displaced as a result of World War II. Until the end of 2007, ITS was the largest
collection of inaccessible records anywhere that shed light on the fates of people
from across Europe—Jews of course, and members of virtually every other
nationality as well—who were arrested, deported, sent to concentration camps, and
murdered by the Nazis; who were put to forced and slave labor under inhuman
conditions, calculated in many places to result in death; who were displaced from
their homes and families, and unable to return home at war’s end; and who tried to
reunite with missing family members or, at least, learn the fates of lost loved ones
after the Holocaust ended. These were documents that Allied forces collected as
they liberated camps and forced labor sites in the last months of the war, and
during their postwar occupation and administration of Germany and Austria. They
include also the records of displaced persons (DP) camps run by the allies and
additional thousands of collections that continued to be deposited at ITS right up
until 2006. Sometimes archival collections were placed there precisely because
governments knew that if the documents were at Bad Arolsen, no one would ever
see them.
The archives contain five major categories of documentation. First,
approximately 13.5 million concentration camp documents, transport and
deportation lists, Gestapo arrest records, and prison records. Second,
approximately 10 million pages of forced and slave labor documentation, revealing
thousands of government, military, corporate and other users of forced labor, how
the system worked on the ground, and the consequences of treating human beings
merely as assets to be used up and discarded. Third, a postwar section that
includes over 3.2 million original displaced persons ID cards and approximately
500,000 displaced persons case files—often family files—from DP camps in
Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom…and also
resettlement and emigration records on many thousands of DPs and their families.
The total document count in this section in terms of digital images reaches nearly
30 million. Fourth, there is also a small, million-page set of collections that did not
fit neatly into the other categories—Gestapo order files, cemetery records for
deceased prisoners and forced laborers, analytical studies, as well as testimonies
taken by American and other liberating forces from concentration camp prisoners
who were asked, immediately after liberation, to describe what had happened to
them in the camp, and who had committed crimes. The final category includes
over 2.5 million postwar inquiry and correspondence files, the so-called T/D files,
which are extremely rich sources of both historical and genealogical information.
In 2007, the 11 governments on the International Commission of the ITS and
the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had kept the documents
4
sealed for decades, agreed to open the archives to survivors and researchers,
following a long campaign spearheaded by our Museum. Since then, we have
given priority to assisting Holocaust survivors find information in these massive
collections that relates to their own families and to their own experiences. But
there should be no doubt that scholarly exploration of these miles of archives have
the potential to enhance our understanding of the Holocaust, its consequences, and
its relevance.
In order to stimulate this exploration, our Museum and ITS agreed to jointly
sponsor a two two-week research workshops for scholars in Bad Arolsen in 2008.
A second two-week workshop will take place in Washington this year. Here are
some of the research topics and projects suggested by the participants in last year’s
workshop, based on the two weeks they spent in the six buildings that house the
ITS archives.
The group that worked in the Incarceration collections emphasized the
significance of the fact that the collections covered the entire period from the
spring of 1933 to the spring of 1945, that is, the entire period of Nazi rule. The
records were astonishing in their detail regarding individual prisoners, relations
among different groups of prisoners, prisoner functionaries and the “gray zone.”
The researchers felt the material would allow the creation of social histories of
some of the camps and open new understanding of prisoner categorization
practices and the use of categorization as a control technique. One member of the
group suggested a study on violence in the camps over time, and specifically, when
the perpetrators followed orders and when violence was used or not used contrary
to existing orders.
The group that explored the forced labor records produced a list of over 25
categories of forced laborers and suggested fluidity in the system, as laborers
moved or were moved from one category to another, with fewer or greater
privileges or risks, according to a variety of factors. The Holocaust has often been
described as a dynamic process. This applied to the forced labor system as well.
Members of this group suggested unique opportunities for micro-studies of forced
labor in particular towns or regions, and described case files in which forced
laborer complaints about users of forced labor—a valuable and increasingly scarce
asset—resulted in detailed SS investigations not of the laborers, but of the users.
The group that worked in the displaced persons material was
“overwhelmed” by the research possibilities. They found records on 2,500 camps
for survivors, including camps that operated for a time in what became the Soviet
5
zone of Germany, and massive information about the stages through which DPs
passed on the path from prisoner to a future, from “inhumanity to rehabilitation.”
The records went far beyond the Holocaust, they asserted, to the broadest
European and global impact of the waves of people who moved through the camps
and on to somewhere else—not just Holocaust survivors, but forced laborers,
perpetrators and collaborators, as well as people fleeing the Soviet advance or
seeking to escape some aspect of their prewar and wartime lives. This group
suggested that ITS archival materials could serve as the basis for a new field called
“aftermath studies,” to explore the long-term consequences of genocide and mass
displacement. Studies of postwar allied behavior; of the abuse of the system by
war criminals and those who found little objectionable in what the perpetrators had
done and therefore helped them; and of the impact the post-World War II
experience had on later humanitarian efforts—All of these were possibilities
opened up by this one archival section.
The group that worked in the postwar inquiry files stressed the potential in
that material for refugee compensation studies and for study of the institutional
history of ITS as a case study of the management of the needs of survivors of
genocide and mass displacement. They proposed studies of post-Holocaust
emigration and resettlement patterns, that is, a post-Holocaust geography of
displaced humanity and of memory.
In summing up, the groups identified many opportunities for comparative
study. They also called for longitudinal studies—studies over time—and in
particular study of behaviors in the “chronological gray zone” or “fluid temporal
space” from late 1943 to 1948, from the time when Axis defeat grew more likely to
the advent of the Cold War, when perpetrators, survivors, forced and slave
laborers, labor users, bystanders, DPs, Allied authorities and the populations of the
defeated Axis states all lived in a situation of rapidly changing prospects and
perspectives, and great uncertainty.
After 60 years when the massive collections held at the International Tracing
Service were closed to researchers and educators, mobilizing them for scholarly
purposes and for use in Holocaust education should be a research priority.
Holocaust in the USSR
I made reference earlier to massive documentation that has become available
from the countries of the former Soviet Union, from the Baltic States in the north
to Moldova in the south, from Ukraine in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. We
have also witnessed the extraordinary effort and remarkable impact on public
6
consciousness already made by the French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois,
who for the past several years has been making his way from village to village in
Ukraine to locate unmarked mass graves of Jews who were murdered there by
shooting and other “non-industrial” methods from 1941 through the conclusion of
German occupation of Soviet territory. Father Desbois has taken video testimony
from hundreds of eyewitnesses to these killings and is assembling that material to
be opened to researchers in the fall. His book, The Holocaust by Bullets (Palgrave,
2008), recently won the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews from a number that would grow quickly to
over 1.5 million were murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies and local
collaborators in the towns and villages of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and other
republics of the USSR. They were not transported in cattle cars to secluded sites
far from their homes. These victims—mostly women, children and the elderly—
were taken from their homes, on foot or by cart or truck, to locations just outside
the towns and villages where they lived, if even that far, and were murdered,
usually by shooting, and often in the presence of local residents, the victims’ nonJewish neighbors, even friends. The names of the locations where they died fail to
resonate with most students of the Shoah. This, of course, was just as the Nazis
and their collaborators had wanted. Their goal was to make it as if their innocent
victims had never existed.
We have an opportunity today, through the use of documentation from
former Soviet archives, testimonies such as those being gathered by Father Desbois
and others, and in partnership with an increasingly talented and interested group of
young scholars from the countries of the former Soviet Union, to undertake new
research on this understudied part of the Holocaust. Intellectually this is a research
area that we must pursue. Morally, we owe at least that much to the victims.
Politically, this is a subject area where East and West will find much common
interest.
The Sephardic World and North Africa
More work is also needed on the fate of Sephardic Jewry during the Shoah
and on the experience of Jews in Arab lands that fell under control of the Nazis and
their allies. I cannot review here the agony of the culturally rich communities of
the Sephardic world during the Holocaust. But I need to at least speak the names
of some of them, because we often fail to give them sufficient attention. Their
agony included both deportations to death camps and mass murders at the local
level by German forces and their collaborators.
7
The Jews of Northern Greece, and in particular the Jews of Salonika—a
community of 56,000 before the war and the Jerusalem of the Sephardic world—
were deported to Auschwitz between March and August 1943. Few survived.
During the same period Bulgarian authorities delivered to the Germans the Jews of
Thrace, Macedonia, and a small piece of Eastern Serbia that Bulgaria had
occupied—their destination, Treblinka. In 1944, German forces deported most of
the Jews who had survived in the Italian occupation zone of Greece to Auschwitz.
Approximately 87 percent of Greek Jewry was murdered during the Shoah.
The important Sephardi community of Belgrade, Yugoslavia—some 10,000
to 11,000 people—was robbed, degraded, and sent to forced labor and detention
camps. By 1942 Wehrmacht and SS forces had murdered the men in labor units.
Sajmiste camp, near Zemun saw the killing by gas-van of the women, children and
elderly. In Croatia, it was the Ustasha-led Croatians who murdered both hundreds
of thousands of Serbs and also the 9,000-strong Sephardic community of Sarajevo.
7,000 to 10,000 Jews from Yugoslavia, including Sephardim, were turned over to
German authorities by the Ustasha regime in Croatia and sent to Nazi
extermination camps as well.
The Sephardic community of Bulgaria proper—50,000 strong—survived
the Shoah, but just barely. Its property was stolen. It was subjected to antiSemitic legislation that included the wearing of the yellow star. It was subjected to
forced labor under extremely harsh conditions. And the large Jewish community
of Sofia was forced to leave the city and live scattered across the country in the
homes of local Jews. At war’s end, the majority of the community chose to
emigrate.
In short, the Sephardic heartland in Southeastern Europe was destroyed.
This history requires further study. Many archives in the region are open, and even
in Turkey, where progress has been slow, there are signs of progress.
Our understanding of the lands of North Africa during the Holocaust is even
less satisfactory. Important archival materials remain to be surveyed and made
accessible, more scholars with appropriate language skills need to be encouraged
to research and write, and productive dialogue and eventual cooperation between
researchers and educators from Europe, North America, Israel and the countries of
North Africa are just beginning to develop. In July, the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum will host a two-week workshop composed of scholars from
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, France, Germany, Israel and the United States, who
will debate and discuss research resources and our current state of knowledge
8
about “North Africa and its Jews during the Second World War.” More such
endeavors are necessary.
Jewish Source Materials--Archives
A final focus of research that I want to address is study of the responses of
Jews to the assault they were under. Seeking to study and understand the ways in
which Jewish organizations, communities and individuals responded to the threat
they faced, mobilizing whatever resources they had at their disposal to combat the
fate the perpetrators planned for them, can be a way to return their humanity to
these people—the humanity the perpetrators sought to take from them. This work
will require greater access to Jewish source materials—organizational records,
communal records, personal papers, etc.—that have been scattered across the
world through emigration from Europe and that have come to rest in local or
municipal or regional archival repositories in many localities in which there are no
longer any Jews, and where no one has sought to use these records for a very long
time. In many repositories, both east and west, these archival collections are
literally rotting and will soon be lost entirely.
I have heard at this conference a number of appeals to the governments in
attendance to systematically identify all archival collections in their respective
countries that relate to the spoliation (theft) of Jewish property during the
Holocaust. If we are going to rescue for future generations the cultural and
institutional heritage of the Jews of Europe and the rich civilization they
represented, then it is equally urgent for every country represented at this forum to
undertake an immediate effort to identify all collections of Jewish cultural assets
(Jewish source archives, libraries, etc.) that have come to rest in governmental or
other institutional repositories, and to make public within two years national
catalogs of all such Jewish cultural heritage collections, with a report on their state
of preservation or decay, and addressing whether the individual collections have
been catalogued, microfilmed, digitized, or otherwise content-preserved.
This effort would be in keeping with the language of the Terezin Declaration
regarding archives, and would be well within the capability of every state
represented at this conference. It would enable us to prioritize urgent conservation
and/or microfilming or digitization activities based on a full understanding of the
archival record of European Jewry that survived the Holocaust, even if the
communities that created the records did not. It would allow the planning of
important research and educational activities to enhance our understanding and
future understanding of the immensity of what was lost in the Holocaust.
9
Final Thoughts
Other areas also offer rich opportunities for research and require attention.
Deepening our understanding of anti-Semitism must command our attention, at a
moment when we are witnessing a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, in the
Islamic world, and in North America that should frighten us all. Anti-Semitic hate
speech has moved increasingly from the margins of our societies to the
mainstream, with anti-Semitic expression gaining increasing acceptance as
legitimate expression in public discourse. The history of the Holocaust provides
ample proof that while anti-Semitism starts with persecution of the Jews, it rarely
ends with the Jews. It is extremely dangerous for everyone else as well.
Research resources, priorities, opportunities? They are many, varied, urgent,
and awaiting our attention.
Thank you.
10