In memory of Tomasz Blatt (1927–2015)

Samuel Willenberg in memoriam

Imre Kertész in memoriam

This article analyzes the language used by Jürgen Stroop in his report Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr! (English title: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!). Comparing the report on the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto with Friedrich Katzmann’s report from the District of Galicia and the reports prepared by Einsatzgruppen, the author juxtaposes the semantic manipulations in the text, which are characteristic of the language in the Third Reich, with the rhetorical structures typical of combat (war) descriptions. Seen from this perspective, Stroop’s report appears to be torn between an execution of the classic report model, which, in its content and form, continues the tradition of Nazi reports about killing, and a military report, which enables Stroop to talk about killing openly, as befits the war convention. The author analyzes both the report’s semantic layer and the photographic material. The context for the analysis is the comparison of Stroop’s language with that of German reports on the uprising of 1944 as well as an overview of the departure from the military model in talking about the uprising in Jewish historiography.

In several last years there have been many publications concerning the knowledge and attitudes of Germans in relation to the Holocaust. The author deals with the issue what the civilian population and the military troops stationed at that time in Warsaw knew about the Holocaust. The occupants quickly learned about the massacres of Jews. Precise information spread at a rapid pace, and consequently each of the occupants was well informed of the Holocaust. Very few Germans stationing in Warsaw condemned crimes committed against the Jews. There was consensus on the need of extermination of Jews, some reservations aroused only form in which the genocide was carrying on. Open violence intertwined with its general acceptance, which led to a progressive callousness.

The Sonderdienst (Special Service) was an enforcement agency developed by German SS and Police authorities, specifically in the Lublin District of the so called Government General (central and southeastern German-occupied Poland) to assist in enforcing German occupation ordinances in the cities and particularly in the countryside, where lack of police personnel, ignorance of local conditions, and perceived fear of partisan attack discouraged a direct German police presence. After February 1941, the SS and Police relinquished control over the Sonderdienst to the German civilian occupation authorities. Under civilian authority, the Sonderdienst was deployed at the Kreis level, under command of the so-called German Stadt- and Kreishauptmänner in detachments of approximately 30 men to carry out administrative enforcement activities when the civilian authorities were unable to count or SS and police support. This article examines how the Sonderdienst highlights the dependence of German administration in the Government General on locally recruited auxiliaries, particularly in the countryside. The Sonderdienst was conceived, developed, expanded, and deployed within the context of a bitter battle between German civilian authorities and the SS/police apparatus over control of local executive police power. This is hardly new; yet the Government General is unusual in that the German civilian authorities were able to fight the SS to a draw on this issue. Since its formation followed the recruitment of the “ethnic” and ideological “cream” of the ethnic German population of occupied Poland into agencies such as the Selbstschutz, and the Waffen SS, the Sonderdienst represents an early effort of the National Socialist authorities to fashion an ethnically conscious and ideologically committed corps from young men of questionable, even dubious, German ancestry and heritage. Finally, this study reveals not only the complicity of the civilian authorities in Nazi crimes, but the link in German-occupied Poland between “routine” administrative duties, such as collecting fines for ordinance violations, and the brutal persecution and annihilation of groups targeted as enemies of the German Reich, such as the Polish Jews. Civilian administrators and SS and police authorities shared the “National Socialist consensus” in occupied Poland. They wanted to annihilate the Jews and the Polish intelligentsia, to exploit the labor potential of the Polish masses, and to turn the Government General into a region of German settlement. As a part of this vision, the Sonderdienst was to serve not only as a police executive, but as a political and cultural steppingstone to full acceptance into the German “racial community.” There is no question that, even in “routine” duties, the Sonderdienst participated, more or less willingly, in the implementation of the most evil racist policies of the National Socialist regime.

An article refers to the ghettoization of Budapest, which plans was created just after when German troops invaded Hungary on 19 March 1944. Paper presents particular stages of the Jews’ fate in Budapest. Which were: duty of wearing the yellow-stars, establishment of the ‘Yellow-star Houses’ and ‘Protected Houses’, moreover a movement to ghetto, which was established on 5 December 1944. An article contains an analyse of ghettoization theme with an example of the ‘large ghetto’, ‘international ghetto’ and also refers to the people’s fates which rescued Jews (‘Righteous among the Nations’).

The article talks about Kindertransports – the major rescue action organized by British-Jewish organizations, and run from the territory of Great Britain between 1938 and 1939. The Kindertransports aimed at gathering and sending to Great Britain Jewish children under the age of seventeen, in order to prevent them from witnessing, or being victims of the acts of violence in Nazi controlled Europe. Once in Great Britain, the children were supposed to spend several weeks with British families willing to give them shelter and support. Those for whom foster parents would not be found, were to be sent to boarding schools or temporary shelters. In the action’s planning phase the institutions involved considered the Kindertransports to be a temporary solution. As the situation of the Jewish population in Nazi controlled Europe worsened, it became clear that the character of the action needed to be revised, and the families were expected to guest the children for a longer and unspecified time. In the end approximately 10.000 Jewish children, who travelled to the Isles, were allowed to stay throughout the times of war. In 1945 it became clear that vast majority of them had no place or family to get back to. They stayed in Great Britain becoming an important and vital part of the British society, with British citizenships granted shortly after the end of the war. The article discusses the organization of the Kindertransport and talks about other solutions taken under consideration both by the program organizers, and the British government. It elaborates on the experiences the children shared, that is being separated from their families, feeling homesick, or finding oneself in the new environment. It explains the question of the lost identity of the participants of the program and speaks on how the subjects dealt with it. It also shows how the British legislature and laws connected to the Enemy Alien status together with the Defence Regulation 18B influenced lives of the underage survivors. The article ends with an attempt of estimation of what happened to the Kindertransport children after the war. How many of them remained in Great Britain and considered themselves British, how many shown high level of mobility and spend their lives changing their place of residence. In the end how many of them kept their self-identification as Jews, and how many converted.

During the Holocaust, an undetermined number of Roman Catholic male and fe- male religious belonging to various Orders, Congregations and Societies helped Jews. Some were involved in hiding Jewish men, women, and children by placing them in their cloisters, guesthouses, nurseries, retirement homes and parishes assigned to them or arranged their placement in private homes or in other com- munities’ institutions.  Some assisted Jews by providing false identiϐication or food ration cards, or assisted them in illegally crossing the border. Their lifestyle had an inϐluence on how assistance was conducted. Male and female religious lived and worked within a socio-economic communal system according to the norms of the particular community characterized by a life of prayer, work and living within some form of communal structure. This article presents different types of communities vis-à-vis the hiding Jews by religious in France, the issues of superiors, and the variant internal organizational procedures as to how assis- tance was organized, while taking into consideration that religious who helped Jews were members of communal and social entities and who often utilized their community’s resources in the assistance offered.

The article deals with one exceptionally violent German perpetrator who was part of the occupation force in Warsaw during the Second World War. Inside the Ghetto he maltreated and killed a large number of women, children and men for his own personal pleasure. He did this to such an extensive degree that the population perceived him as monstrous being that was given the nickname „Frankenstein”. The article is mainly based on statements in juridical investigations, from the victim as well as from the perpetrator perspective, supplemented with some selected additional sources. Firstly the source corpus will be evaluated, to work out how these historical sources can be used to shed light on „Frankenstein”. This will be followed by an analysis of the actual identity of this perpetrator. It will be shown that he was, contrary to common belief, not necessarily the SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche but more likely a member of the German Police Battalion 61. In the end the question will be also raised of how it was possible – despite all rules and regulations – that ghetto guards like him behaved like a marauding soldiery.

This texts talks about three single, uneducated Polish women living alone (a dressmaker, servant, and kitchen worker), who during the war sheltered Jews in their apartments in Warsaw and Drohobych. All three of them helped the Jews for money, but – as far as we know – none of them resorted to financial blackmail or any other major abuse of a financial character. Nevertheless, the war circumstances became an opportunity for them to fulfill their emotional needs, otherwise impossible to satisfy. They derived pleasure from having power and control over another person and their actions towards the Jews they sheltered also bore traces of a class revenge. The authors analyze the relations between the helpers and helps mostly on the basis of Jerzy Feliks Urman’s diary and memoirs of Karol Rotgeber and Calek Perechodnik. Aside from the sociological theory of exchange systems, another useful tool facilitating comprehension of the Polish women’s behavior and their interactions with the Jews in hiding, which are described in those texts, is Erich Fromm’s concept of human cruelty as a highly complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to openly violent actions.

The municipal authorities in Bochnia created in 1941 workshops in the town, in order to employ Jews and produce the goods on request of the German authorities. The manager and chief organizer was Solomon Greiwer. The article is focused on the functioning of workshops, and on their impact on the fate of Jews from the Bochnia ghetto.

The great liquidation campaign in the Warsaw ghetto began on 22 July 1942. Throughout its course, more than 250,000 ghetto residents were deported to the death center in Treblinka. A day before, in order to inspire an atmosphere of terror and resignation, the Germans organized a liquidation of well-known representatives of the ghetto intelligentsia. The murder of a Jewish antiquarian in an apartment on Chłodna Street and Professor Franciszek Raszeja, a famous Polish doctor, called from the ‘Aryan’ side, echoed far and wide on both sides of the wall. In survivor testimonies and post-war memories as well as in studies produced on their basis it was assumed that the murdered antiquarian was Abe Gutnajer, the most famous pre-war Warsaw art dealer and the owner of the prestigious ‘Salon Sztuki’ antique art store on Mazowiecka Street. Aside from Gutnajer and Raszeja, the Germans purportedly murdered Abe’s entire family and people who accompanied Raszeja during the surgery. Nawojka Cieślińska- Lobkowicz, who had studied the history of the occupation-period art market for years, argues that the victim of that crime, committed probably in the morning of 22 July 1942, was not Abe Gutnajer but his elder brother Bernard, who before the war owned an antique store on Wierzbowa Street. He was killed along with Albert Schulberg, an antiquarian from Lvov, whose activity in the Warsaw ghetto consisted in, for instance, purchasing works of art and antiques for Zofia Leśniewska’s occupation-period antique art store, which he did with the Germans’ permission. Bernard Gutnajer was the one who called Professor Raszeja for a consultation to his apartment on Chłodna Street.

Sonia Wajselfisz (1911–1999) in 1943 was deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; thanks to the so-called Palestinian certificate obtained through the Hotel Polski, people managed to survive the war. Many people in the hotel at Długa 29 Street bought documents issued by South American countries, were not so lucky; on 21 October 1943, 17 May, and 23 May 1944 they were transported to Auschwitz and died there. After the war, Sonia wrote down the names she could recall; the list, found after many years, is a unique document, so one can identify at least part of more than two hundred people from these transports. The article presents a biography of Sonia, and an analysis of the document she drew up.

Drawing on the example of the deportations of the Jews of Prużany to Auschwitz in January 1943, the article examines the efforts on part of the Bielefeld district court to establish that the organization of the transport of Jews from Bezirk Bialystok was a decentralized undertaking for which German local and regional occupation authorities were responsible. The regional departments of the German national railway system (Deutsche Reichsbahn) were in charge of the administrative coordination of the Sonderzüge. The article analyzes the examinations of two former employees of the special train unit of department 33 of the Reichsverkehrsdirektion Minsk under German occupation. During the so-called Białystok Trial (1966-1967) the Bielefeld jury court examined former Reichsbahn officials Hermann Kayser and Hans Wieck as witnesses. Having received an order by the KdS in Białystok they drew up the timetable and railway telegrams for the deportations of Jews from the train station of Oranczyce to Auschwitz. They were not brought to justice for their participation in the Holocaust.

A number of questions about the hiding and extraction of the documents collected by the Oneg Shabbat group have arisen since the discovery of the first part of the Ringelblum Archive at Nowolipki Street 68. Using the documents stored in the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH), this article answers some of those questions by reconstructing the course of the hiding and the post-war search for the Oneg Shabbat archive, conducted by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, CKŻP) and the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna). This reconstruction also facilitates formulation of a new hypothesis concerning the ‘third part’ of the Archive, purportedly hidden in April 1943 on the premises of the ‘brushmakers’ workshop’.

On 16 February 1943 Heinrich Himmler gave the order to demolish the Warsaw ghetto and deport its remaining Jewish population, all this in an attempt to complete the process of the destruction of Jews. The liquidated ghetto territory was to be turned into a park, half the size of New York’s Central Park. The invoice for the demolition and cultivation of rubber root (one of Himmler’s ‘exotic projects’) was made out to the Ministry of Finance by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office despite the failure of those two enterprises. It remains unknown whether the enormous amount due (150 million RM, that is, the equivalent of a minimum 500–600 million in today’s dollars) was paid in full out or what happened with the valuables and other material salvaged during the demolition. The text discusses the course of the demolition and deportation ordered by Himmler and the history of the invoice.

The author deconstructs Mirosław Tryczyk’s monograph entitled Miasta śmierci. Sąsiedzkie pogromy Żydów [Towns of death. Pogroms of Jews organized by their neighbors]. This book on the anti-Jewish violence inflicted by Poles in the Białystok region in 1941 was received as revealing and innovative. It gained prominence in the media and a favorable reception in the intellectual milieus, and eminent scholars opined it as excellent. Eventually, however, it proved a cognitively reproductive work lacking professional research methodology and formulating theses unable to withstand scholarly criticism. Using the case of Tryczyk’s book’s popularity, Persak inquires about the condition of scholarly criticism and the quality of the public debate in Poland.

The author suggests that the depictions of the Holocaust in Polish literature of 1918–2014 should be categorized as horror. From the chronological perspective, Czapliński divides those thirty years into three shorter periods: 1) the initial period (from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Jan Błoński’s essay “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” to Wilhelm Dichter’s and Michał Głowiński’s memoirs) was dominated by white horror, which presented Jews as ghosts demanding a place in the Polish memory; 2) during the second period (from Marek Bieńczyk’s Tworki and Jan Tomasz Gross’ Neighbors until the end of the 2010s) the horror poetics was used to reveal those principles of pre-war and occupation-period normality which helped the Germans conduct the Holocaust and which conditioned the exclusion of Jews from the Polish circle of ‘normal humanity’; 3) during the third period (from Gross’s Golden Harvest until now) Jews return as the undead, violating the rules of distance and obliging Poles to physically touch the disgusting topic of the Holocaust. The contact with the Holocaust as something abhorring becomes a condition for self-knowledge, purging, and establishment of a new imaginary community.

The author analyzes depictions of the Righteous in several Polish popular novels and the accompanying discourse on rescuing. She proves that in popular fiction such depictions dominate over the reckoning discourse, connected with the Polish shared responsibility for the Holocaust. Tomczok analyzes the reasons for that dominance, referring to the Philo-Semitic violence category described by Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski. She devotes special attention to Maja Wolny’s novel Czarne liście and the controversy over the presentation of the pogrom in Kielce, and, first and foremost, this book’s dependence on the scholarly achievements of the scholars affiliated with the Center for Holocaust Research.

 This article talks about Eleazar Grünbaum, a son of Izaak Grünbaum – an MP, journalist, and famous Zionist activist. In 1929 Eleazar was arrested as a young communist, but thanks to his father’s connections he received a lenient prison sentence and he was released in 1931. He then went on to study in France. During the Spanish Civil War, he fought on the Republic’s side. After the outbreak of the war he joined General Sikorski’s Polish army and then became a communist underground activist. In 1941 he was arrested and then deported to Auschwitz. He became a kapo in the camp and after the war was tried for torturing his fellow inmates. Thanks to his father’s endeavors he managed to avoid punishment and immigrated to Palestine. He died in combat against the Arabs in 1948. There is still controversy in Israel as to whether he was a cruel camp tormentor or whether he simply tried to survive. According to the author, the years Grünbaum spent in camps can be regarded as a masterpiece of survival.

The percentage of victimization of Dutch Jewry during the Shoah is the highest of Western, Central and Southern Europe (except, perhaps of Greece), and close to the Polish one: 75%, more than 104.000 souls. The question of disproportion between the apparent favorable status of the Jews in society – they had acquired emancipation in 1796 - and the disastrous outcome of the Nazi occupation as compared to other countries in general and Western European in particular has haunted Dutch historiography of the Shoah. Who should be blamed for that outcome: the perpetrators, i.e. the Germans, the bystanders, i.e. the Dutch or the victims, i.e. the Dutch Jews? The article first surveys the answers given to this question since the beginnings of Dutch Holocaust historiography in the immediate post-war period until the debates of today and the factors that influenced the shaping of some basic perceptions on “Dutch society and the Jews”. It then proceeds to detailing several facts from the Holocaust period that are essential for an evaluation of gentile attitudes. The article concludes with the observation that – in spite of ongoing debates – the overall picture which has accumulated after decades of research will not essentially being altered. Although the Holocaust was initiated, planned and carried out from Berlin, and although a considerable number of Dutchmen helped and hid Jews and the majority definitely despised the Germans, considerable parts of Dutch society contributed to the disastrous outcome of the Jewish lot in the Netherlands – through a high amount of servility towards the German authorities, through indifference when Jewish fellow-citizens were persecuted, through economically benefiting from the persecution and from the disappearance of Jewish neighbors, and through actual collaboration (stemming from a variety of reasons). Consequently, the picture of the Holocaust in the Netherlands is multi-dimensional, but altogether puzzling and not favorable.

The author presents his reflections on Franz Neumann’s Behemoth. He appreciates the extensiveness of Neumann’s analysis of the phenomenon of German fascism during the war, combined with the presentation of the intellectual genesis of many fascist views and the similarities between Nazism and various contemporary currents of European and American thought. The article inquires about the similarities between fascism and communism. Referring to the current state of knowledge and direct experiences, the author discusses the following similarities: the use to terror, expansiveness, the emphasis on economic growth, the great role of the party, which subordinated the public institutions to itself, the ideological and propaganda legitimization of actions, the offering of social advancement to various groups, etc. Nevertheless, Kula does not fail to point out the different placement of emphases in these two systems.