Lessons and Legacies XIIexplores new directions in research and teaching in the field of Holocaust studies. The essays in this volume present the most cutting-edge methods and topics shaping ...Holocaust studies today, from a variety of disciplines: forensics, environmental history, cultural studies, religious studies, labor history, film studies, history of medicine, sociology, pedagogy, and public history. This rich compendium reveals how far Holocaust studies have reached into cultural studies, perpetrator history, and comparative genocide history. Scholars, laypersons, teachers, and the myriad organizations devoted to Holocaust memorialization and education will find these essays useful and illuminating.
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds ...genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”
In this essay, the author presents new research, as well as surveys existing interpretations, of the history of pogroms in Ukraine during the Holocaust. Focusing on western Ukraine during summer ...1941, the author determines that across the region Jews were the primary targets of attacks, but the politics and dynamic of the mob violence and among the occupation forces varied from place to place. Besides the powerful, antisemitic charge of Judeo-Bolshevism, the author explores other political, social, psychological and ideological causes of the violence. She stresses the cross section of society represented among the pogromists, and the role of nationalist insurgents and German occupation officials. The author traces the relationship between the German-led mass shootings and the pogroms, and argues that distinctions made between mob violence and genocide usually fail to account for the changing interaction of the two phenomena. The overlapping, escalating history of the two is especially evident in western Volhynia where, unlike in neighbouring Galicia, the number of Jews killed in mass shootings exceeded those killed in pogroms. Thus by the end of September 1941, in the eastern capital of Kiev, there was no large pogrom comparable to the 'Petliura Days', in L'viv, instead there was Babi Yar.
In 1945 Margaret Bourke-White, a pioneer female war correspondent andLifemagazine photographer, trudged through the wasteland of the Third Reich, conducting interviews and snapping photos. Among her ...photographs is the image of Buchenwald concentration camp survivors with gaunt, ghostly faces and striped garb, standing behind the barbed wire looking more puzzled than jubilant about their liberation. Actually, most of Bourke-White’s photos of Nazi Germany were not of victims, but portraits of ordinary and famous Nazis. The daughter of an orthodox Jew, Bourke-White did not whitewash with her lens, especially when she photographed and interviewed Nazi women such as Hildegarde
In his survey of at least thirty-five different papers, Friedrich found that the "Jewish question" was a recurring topic in Polish discourse across the political spectrum, from the left to the right, ...from city to countryside, among Catholic, communist, and peasant parties, and supporters of the Home Army and Government-in-Exile. Prior to Friedrich's book, which is actually part of a larger doctoral thesis (available on line at: http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/volltexte/2003/ 952), the few scholars who used Polish newspapers to assess popular and official opinions relied almost exclusively on the most widely distributed periodical, "Biuletyn Informacyjny," (see the works of Gezegoez Mazur, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski among others), hi doing so, they distorted the diverse, dynamic reality of Polish responses publicized in Warsaw and London, which Friedrich masterfully reconstructs here for the period 1942-1944. The liberal and social democratic press took a sympathetic position toward the Jews and warned Poles that collaboration would only increase the power of Nazi occupiers who also aimed to eradicate Poles from Poland (by highlighting Nazi persecution of Poles in Zamosc).
Bringing to bear newly available secret police, court, and other documents from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), this study analyzes two lesser-known trials of Nazi perpetrators of the ...Holocaust in Galicia. One case features a typical German gendarme convicted but released from prison in the 1950s; the other features a married couple who shot Jews and others on an SS agricultural estate. Both cases highlight East German investigation methods and prosecutors' use of evidence, while the second affords an opportunity to consider gendered aspects of wartime crimes and postwar trials. On the basis of these cases the author examines how evolving political considerations in the 1950s and 1960s shaped investigations, judicial processes, and sentences.
