Algunos héroes gitanos

El pueblo romaní reivindica referentes como el boxeador Johan Trollmann, el ilustrador Helios Gómez o el líder anarquista Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez

Algunos héroes gitanos

De izquierda a derecha, el líder de la CNT Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez, el cartelista Helios Gómez, y el boxeador Johan Trollmann.

Jóvenes gitanos plantan cara al antigitanismo
HELENA LÓPEZ / BARCELONA

Jueves, 8 de diciembre del 2016 - 17:18 CET

Johan Trollmann (1907-1944), conocido como Rukeli, fue campeón nacional de boxeo en la Alemania de 1933, año en el que Hitler ascendió al poder. No se hace raro, pues, que ocho días después, los nazis le retiraran el título alegando "falta de nivel". El Tercer Reich no podía aceptar encumbrar a un gitano. Un joven como Rukeli, en las antípodas del modelo ario que el nazismo pretendía imponer. No solo por su tez morena y su frondosa mata de pelo azabache, sino también por su característico estilo danzarín sobre el cuadrilátero, muy alejado del duro 'estilo alemán'. Saltitos ágiles y muy efectivos que, cuentan, sacaban de sus casillas a los nazis. Así que, no teniendo bastante con retirarle el título de campeón, le amenazaron con negarle también la licencia para seguir compitiendo a nivel profesional si no dejaba de 'bailar' mientras peleaba.

A la siguiente pelea a la que acudió tras serle arrebatado el título, Rukeli, desafiante, subió al ring con el cabello teñido de rubio y el rostro espolvoreado de blanco (algunas versiones dicen que con harina, otras, que con polvos de talco). Con la rebeldía propia de su condición gitana, Rukeli hizo caso y, por una vez, no bailó. Se quedó en el centro del ring rebozado en polvo blanco sin mover las piernas hasta que fue noqueado en el quinto asalto; todo dignidad. Allí terminó también su carrera, pero ese gesto de gallardía le convirtió en un héroe para el pueblo gitano. Un gesto sencillo pero estoico con el que ridiculizó a todo un régimen racista, que acabó encerrándolo en un campo de trabajo forzado.
Algunos héroes gitanos

ASOCIACIÓN CULTURAL HELIOS GÓMEZ

Los ángeles negros de la 'Capilla Gitana' de la Modelo, pintados por Helios Gómez en prisión.

Historias como la de Rukeli, aún referente, son las que los jóvenes gitanos no solo de aquí, sino de media Europa, reivindican, haciendo presión tanto a sus gobiernos locales como a través de las poderosas redes sociales para hacerles justicia.
ARTISTA INTERNACIONAL

En Barcelona también hay héroes gitanos con historias muy desconocidas, pese al impacto que dejan en quien las descubre (algo que se antoja difícil, ya que la historia del pueblo gitano no se estudia en los colegios). Es el caso de Helios Gómez (1905-1956), autor de la 'Capilla gitana' de La Modelo, aún tapada bajo una capa de cal en una habitación cerrada. Rebelde como Rukeli, Gómez fue anarquista, comunista y de nuevo anarquista, según encadenó desengaños. Preso en incontables ocasiones por su ideología, el ilustrador fue 'invitado' por el cura de la cárcel a que dibujara en una de las paredes de la celda un fresco de la Virgen de la Mercè. También al más estilo Rukeli, Gómez -quien tenía prohibido pintar entre rejas- accedió, pero lo hizo, cómo no, a su manera. Pintó una Virgen y un niño Jesús con rasgos inequívocamente gitanos, acompañados por unos angelitos negros de Machín que acabaron convirtiéndose en un alegato contra el régimen.

El hijo de Helios, Gabriel, lleva años trabajando desde la asociación cultural que lleva el nombre de su padre por restituir la memoria del ilustrador, cartelista y poeta y de "todos los que, como él, lucharon por la libertad".

Otra figura gitana muy reivindicada, también rebelde y anarquista, es Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez, 'Marianet'. Secretario Regional de Catalunya de la CNT entre noviembre de 1936 y junio de 1939, "desempeñó un papel decisivo en el devenir anarcosindicalista y la vida política y social de la guerra civil española", según la Wikipedia. Urge que las peticiones del colectivo de que se estudie y documente a fondo su historia sean escuchadas para poder ir más allá de la enciclopedia libre.

Source: El Periódico, Barcelona (Spain)
http://www.elperiodico.com/es/noticias/barcelona/algunos-heroes-gitanos-5674253

The “Final Solution in Riga”: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944

Slavic Review: Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution in Riga”: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Within the covers of this 500 page tome one finds two books: one short, one long. The long one is about the fate of 24,000 Central European Jews who were transported to Latvia in the fall of 1941 and thereafter. The shorter one is about the Holocaust in Riga and the Latvian role in it. The long study consists of eighteen chapters that include detailed documentation of transports from Central Europe to Riga, and their life and death in Latvia. While the study of the European Jews is exemplary, when authors write about the native Latvians, specifically in the chapter “From Pogroms to the Establishing the Ghetto,” they lose their empirical approach, rely on folklore, clichés, and glosses of Nazi propaganda. Without debating alternative evidence, the authors argue that the Latvians were ready to kill Jews before the German had occupied the country and before the Germans had given an order to kill them.

To bolster their conclusions the authors mostly rely on evidence that Nazi spokesmen and activists already declared at the time of the Holocaust. As a keystone of their argument they cite the observations of certain Hans Krauss, a member of the Einsatzgruppe, the killing unit in Latvia, who argues that since the Latvians considered Jews to be allies of Communists and had supported the deportation of Latvians to Siberia:…“horrendous acts of cruelty took place, for which the Latvians…made the remaining Jews responsible. This explains why Jews were arrested by Latvians…locked up and in part shot.” The authors seem to be unaware that the above viewpoint was part of Nazi propaganda that they began to push on the world and themselves even before the killing of Jews had began.

Are we doomed to continue to think like the Nazis?

I shall forgo to parse the reasons why the authors find the Nazi “authorities” so believable, only to say that no anti-Nazi sources or evidence were advanced to test the veracity of the Nazi ones. For example they could have reached for help to the German legal judgments in the Arajs case at Hamburg and ones in the Graul case at Hanoover. There are also hundreds of Soviet court records in Riga in which Angrick and Klein could have tested the truth of Nazi propaganda.

One of the untested premises in Angrick and Klein’s work is whether Latvian opinion of Jews in 1941 was identical to that of Nazi propaganda slogan, namely that Jews were Bolsheviks. The authors call it a cliché, as if that would be a good reason to believe it. They also call it traditional anti-Semitism. On both accounts the authors are wrong. Traditional anti-Semitism was more along the lines of Protocols of Zion, “blood libel”, or that the Jews had killed Jesus..To proclaim that Jews were Bolsheviks was the pillar of Nazi propaganda in 1941, the big lie, one that Nazis at the beginning of the war unleashed as a flood on Eastern Europe. Before that the slogan was known among royalists during the Russian Civil War. For Latvians in 1941 to believe, although some allowed to be persuaded by the Nazis, that Jews were Bolsheviks would have been counter factual: There were no Jews in Soviet Latvian government, very few in the NKVD, and a small number in the Party. And they had nothing to do with deportation of Latvians. For historians to push Nazi clichés on Latvians, even if done in ignorance, shows a lack of tact. The Latvian role in the Holocaust is thoroughly covered and if ever the authors will see a light at the end of a tunnel of clichés, they should at least attempt to temper their Nazi opinions with some Latvian ones.

The authors have not fully made up their mind whether the Holocaust was a crime of passion or of organization. The former they tend to assign to Latvians, the latter to Germans. Not that all German historians are cut of the same cloth but many of them have problem in discussing the role of those people in the Holocaust, whom the Nazis called “natives”.

While the German poets already in 1947 established GRUPPE 47 to purge Nazisms out of German language, the historians to date have been reluctant to carry out a similar self-cleansing. For example, the authors of this volume missed the opportunity to examine the meaning of the Nazi use of “pogrom”. Enough said. A book review is not the proper venue to deliver a tutorial on an arcane and complicated topic. In short, I must reject Angrick and Klein’s description of Riga in July 1941, as conceptually and factually faulty. Their version of the events and use of terminology would ask of me to make a major accommodation with shards of National Socialism. This problem perchance may not be as well understood in the centers of former and present empires, as it is in the former colonies, the objects of German domination.

Andrew Ezergailis, Ithaca Collegess Andrew Ezergailis is a retired Professor of History, author of The Holocaust in Latvia (1996), The Stockholm Documents: The German Occupation of Latvia (2002), and most recently The Nazi/Soviet Disinformation About the Holocaust in Latvia (2005).

Source: Holocaust Archive of Latvia Usa
http://haolusa.org/index.php?en/German/review-100-AngrickKlein_FinalSolution.wiki

German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945

Germany and the "Laissez-Faire" Imperialism of the United States

Linked to the rise in domestic industrial capacity and the ascent of an educated, commercially minded liberal political class desirous of expanded economic opportunities, Germany’s global penetration during the long nineteenth century was predicated on the conviction that overseas expansion would deliver both mercantile benefits and domestic political change. Over the past decade, this period of domestic change and international activity has been a fruitful field for researchers studying the historical development of Germany. Historians have variously framed this penetration through the superordinate concept of “globalization”; or alternatively, imperialism, which is one of globalization’s primary historical forms.

Whether viewed as imperial or globalizing endeavors, German attempts at overseas penetration during the nineteenth century did not take place in a historical vacuum, with numerous, preexisting European empires all but crowding Germany out of the ranks of the global empires. While the antiquated Iberian empires offered a counterexample to German liberals, the blue water empires of the British, the French, and the Dutch were perceived by German liberals as exemplars of successful European liberal imperialist ventures. With great verve and clarity, Jens-Uwe Guettel makes the case that missing from this picture is the key role of the United States, which he argues was central to German understandings of liberal empire and in some respects offered a template for German approaches to expansionism. Guettel traces Germany’s liberal imperialism, or as he terms it, “imperial liberalism,” from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, showing the numerous points of transatlantic overlap. Beginning with Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, and Christoph Meiners’ respective meditations on slavery, which derived their content from Anglo-American models, he illustrates how the tension between the negative experience of the condition of slavery for the slave and the utility of slavery as an institution enabling further European economic development was resolved in favor of the latter. From here, Guettel’s account moves on to a refutation of the notion of any special German affinity or empathy for the plight of Native Americans. He does this by demonstrating the favorable reception in Germany of American narratives of the “vanishing” Amerindians, which presented the extraordinary excess death rates associated with imperial expansion as either inexplicable “natural” occurrences or, quite often, a process in line with world-historical developments which dictated that “higher” forms of life must displace “lower” ones. Astutely, Guettel points out that this racializing discourse was multidirectional, with Friedrich Ratzel not merely transmitting current U.S. thought on indigenous policy, but also contributing to the renewal of liberal imperialist thought in the United States, influencing figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner. At this point it might have been interesting to see Guettel go even further and try to assess the impact and agency of ordinary German settlers in the United States on this transcontinental exchange. An admittedly difficult task, it might nonetheless have been possible by utilizing the material uncovered by Stefan von Senger und Etterlin in his 1991 work Neu-Deutschland in Nordamerika: Massenauswanderung, nationale Gruppenansiedlungen und liberale Kolonialbewegung, 1815 – 1860.

One of the main elements of U.S. imperialism that Guettel sees as translating well to the German context was the emphasis on what he terms the American-style laissez-faire approach to empire, which he argues particularly informed the views of not only Ratzel but also the left-liberal colonial secretary Bernhard Dernburg. Central to this American model were political liberty, economic self-reliance, a decentralized approach to settlement patterns, and a localized, “rational” approach to issues of colonial racial hierarchy. While the first three were certainly laissez-faire, the decentralized aspects of U.S. racial policy that Germany adopted were, at least in the late imperial period, not always apparent, as Guettel admits. A tension between localizing and centralizing impulses was apparent, pronouncedly so under the left-liberal colonial secretary Wilhelm Solf, who in 1912 moved from a reliance on colony-specific ordinances forbidding miscegenation and mixed marriages towards a demand that such measures be enacted from Berlin and enshrined in national legislation. With Solf’s call for a law against mixed marriages defeated by the combined forces of the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrats in the Reichstag, Guettel explains how Solf once again turned to the example of the United States; this time to study how the segregationist Jim Crow laws of some states coexisted with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which seemed to contradict them at the federal level.

Guettel quite correctly reveals just how much changed for Germany after World War One. Germany lost a significant portion of its territory, including all of its overseas colonies, while also enduring a period of partial occupation, including occupation by African troops brought in under French auspices. This inversion of the hitherto-prevailing colonial socio-racial order was decried in the German press. In addition, as a result of the American entry into the war, Germany’s relationship with the United States suffered greatly, to the extent that favorable allusions to U.S. racial conditions in post-1918 German debates fell off markedly. Even more obvious, Guettel reveals, was the Nazi Party’s disdain for the state of racial law in the United States. Rejecting the prewar enthusiasm for a decentralized approach to racial law, the Nazis instead argued that the United States was in fact a racially degenerating counterexample which should follow the new, highly centralized German approach. “Unlike in 1912,” Guettel argues, “in 1935 America was not allowed to be exemplary” (p. 200). The previously admired liberal mode of U.S. imperialism was necessarily criticized on the same grounds--it lacked centralization and was too heavily bound up in notions such as individualism and political liberty which, the Nazis claimed, they had superseded. In this way, Guettel convincingly disrupts accounts of Nazi imperialism that stress its continuity with prewar forms of liberal imperialism, suggesting instead that “the pre-1914 imperialism and post-1918 visions of living space in the East existed as perceived opposites within a framework of dialectical tension” (p. 223).

A natural field of further inquiry for both the author and other future researchers is the liberal depictions of Central Europe in nineteenth-century Germany. Raised briefly in the first chapter, it is one area that might profit from further analysis. Perhaps in deference to Woodruff Smith’s seminal Lebensraum/Weltpolitik distinction, Guettel seems to stress the distinction between overseas empire and contiguous European empire in liberal circles.[1] While he correctly points out the marked differences between liberal imperialism and Nazi imperialism in terms of political modality, racial policy, and manner of execution, it is worth remembering that German liberals such as Friedrich List, Friedrich Naumann, and Max Weber also had their own sense of a German-dominated Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) that complemented liberal demands for an overseas empire, as Guettel acknowledges (p. 63). The partial overlap in the imperial topography of liberal Germans and Nazi Germans does not mean that there were uniquely German structural or political continuities that determined the shift from liberal to Nazi imperialism. Given too that U.S. liberal imperialism largely (but not exclusively) took the shape of contiguous territorial expansion, Guettel might profitably assess how Central Europe looked to not just the Nazis but also nineteenth-century liberal Germans familiar with U.S. expansionism. This could potentially strengthen his already detailed and convincing refutation of overarching and idiosyncratic lines of political and imperial continuity in German history.

Guettel’s book is admirable for a number of reasons. It expertly dissects the twin myths that U.S. expansionism was uniquely devoid of violent, imperialist characteristics, and that the history of German imperialism is somehow reducible to proto-Nazi violence. Citing the myriad statements of violent intent against indigenous people made by U.S. liberals and noting the transferal of these statements to German public discourse, Guettel lays out precisely how strategies for imperial consolidation were not contained to individual nation-states but were translocated. The book also successfully contextualizes prewar German imperialism within a liberal milieu which shared a set of assumptions with its American counterpart regarding the correct forms of imperial penetration and the requisite means for dealing with recalcitrant indigenous populations unwilling or unable to submit to the rigors of European politico-military dominance and work discipline. As Guettel shows, imperialism and the forms of socio-racial knowledge it engendered were an integral part of liberalism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Note

[1]. Woodruff D. Smith The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Jens-Uwe Guettel. German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 292 S. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-02469-4.

Reviewed by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick (Flinders University)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2013)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

Source: H-Net
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38209

Erich von Manstein and the War of Annihilation

Operational Genius and Master Myth-Maker: Erich von Manstein and the War of Annihilation

On May 7, 1953, the Swabian village of Allmendingen prepared for a festival. The mayor had roused the village inhabitants early in the morning, school was cancelled, the town was festively decorated and, according to a member of the media who was present, nearly every child wore a bouquet of flowers. A brass band provided musical accompaniment. The few villagers initially unaware of the reason for the unusual events were quickly informed: Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the most celebrated of Hitler's military commanders and most controversial of the postwar military internees, had been released from captivity and was coming to the village. When Manstein addressed the crowd, he thanked them for their support and exclaimed, "We no longer want to think about the difficulties of the past, but only of the future" (p. 260). Following his brief remarks, children approached Manstein and his wife, presented them with lilacs, and burst into song. The illustrated paper, Das Neue Blatt, described the scene to its readers in an issue adorned with two photos: one of Manstein as a decorated soldier and the other of him shaking the hands of children presenting him with flowers. The message was clear: Hitler's "most brilliant strategist" was ready to enter West German society.

In this timely, impressively researched study, Oliver von Wrochem describes this "idyllic Heimat" occasion as "simultaneously a historical/political signal and a memory/cultural event" (p. 260). Manstein's release symbolized the rehabilitation of the men who had served in Hitler's Wehrmacht, though this rehabilitation was primarily due to the efforts of high-ranking officers to produce their own version of the war, a process in which the former Field Marshal was intimately involved. Wrochem also details the complicity of western governments, particularly the British, in covering up the unsavory aspects of Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union to ensure West German support for remilitarization. The truism that the exigencies of the Cold War superseded the quest for postwar justice is starkly illustrated in his account. Finally, Wrochem examines the evolution of German public opinion (both East and West) regarding the fate of Manstein and other Wehrmacht commanders in Allied and West German trials and the influence of veteran organizations in guiding popular memories and understanding of the war.

The author divides his study into four sections. The first deals with Manstein's life through the end of the Second World War, with special emphasis on his participation in the Vernichtungskrieg against the Soviet Union. One of Wrochem's primary themes is Manstein's relationship with Hitler and the Nazi regime. In a manner similar to that of many of his peers reared during the Kaiserreich, Manstein welcomed the new regime and its commitment to mobilizing German society in support of restoring a greater German Reich. This dedication, however, did not lead to an unqualified support for the NSDAP; according to Wrochem, Manstein maintained a distance from the upper echelon of the political leadership, one that eventually provoked blatant hostility from powerful party figures such as Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler. While Manstein's maintenance of a traditional Prussian military ethos kept him from completely identifying with Nazi ideological precepts and goals (unlike, as Wrochem notes, Ferdinand Schörner, the rabidly Nazi Field Marshal of the later stages of the war), his focus on military professionalism was paradoxically a major influence on his role as accomplice in the war of annihilation directed against both Soviet citizens and Jews.

Wrochem analyzes the occupation policies of Manstein's Eleventh Army, which operated in the Crimea from late 1941 through mid-1942. Those seeking for a comprehensive examination of Eleventh Army's occupation practices will want to look elsewhere; the author is more concerned with examining several wartime events in detail and then following them throughout the series of postwar trials. This approach allows for a much more precise reconstruction of these events and Wrochem makes good use of it. He examines the responsibility and actions of various levels of Eleventh Army, focusing on the lower levels of occupation: the Secret Field Police, the Field Gendarmerie sections, the Ortskommandanten, and the commandants of the rear Army areas. In agreement with the prevailing historical consensus, Wrochem concludes that the Army worked very closely with the SS Einsatzgruppen in liquidating "enemies" both real and perceived. Here, the division of labor initially identified by Dieter Pohl certainly functioned smoothly. And, as Wrochem notes, "no level of authority stood against the murder, but in contrast frequently drove it forward" (p. 70).

While the lower levels frequently carried out the shootings, the Eleventh Army leadership also acted as the driving force behind at least one episode of mass execution. The strained supply system that plagued the entire Eastern Army also affected troops in the Crimea. In order to avoid starvation-driven revolts, Eleventh Army began directing the machinery of murder towards population groups whose annihilation was already foreseen. The 13,000 Jews in Simferopol constituted the first pool of victims. Contacted by Eleventh Army's quartermaster to initiate the killing, Einsatzgruppe D had to decline due to lack of manpower and capacity. The quartermaster then offered troops to cordon off the area and guard the Jews during transport, trucks for the transport itself, and munitions to the SS unit. By the time the first phase of the action ended in late December, some 9,500 Jews had been murdered. Wrochem states that no order signed by Manstein authorizing the action exists; he also makes clear that it is nearly inconceivable that such an action could have been initiated by the army staff without his approval.

The remaining three sections of the study focus on how Manstein and other high-ranking members of the Wehrmacht defended themselves against war crimes charges while simultaneously sanitizing their version of the war in the East and thereby generating an acceptable narrative of the war for West Germans. Three separate strands formed the basis of this re-writing of the war. First, many former high-ranking officers, including Manstein, formed an advisory committee to "coordinate witness statements" regarding the initial charges against the German General Staff (p. 111). Coordination included destroying the credibility of officers whose statements diverged from the accepted story. This initial grouping of officers expanded into much larger networks of former soldiers and their supporters who worked tirelessly to provide German defendants with resources for a proper defense. By the time Manstein himself was put on trial in August 1949, this network had also made large inroads into the media, providing him with a pool of public support.

This reservoir of public support, both in West Germany and Great Britain, was steadily increasing due to the growing tensions of the Cold War. Manstein and other former officers exploited fear of communism in two ways. First, Manstein struck up a correspondence with the British military commentator, B. H. Liddell Hart. Liddell Hart had long opposed proceedings against members of the Wehrmacht and became the most powerful advocate for Manstein and his peers in Great Britain. He portrayed Hitler's generals as cool professionals who fought as clean a war as possible against the Soviet Union and omitted the Wehrmacht's enormous crimes from his presentation of the Second World War.

The pro-German propaganda espoused by Liddell Hart and others of his political persuasion was complemented by the ways in which Manstein explained the war in the East. Here, the vocabulary utilized by the Nazis (though shorn of its overt racism) was employed to legitimate the German-Soviet war. Manstein spoke of the "European mission" behind the war, a reference to the rescue of western Christendom from "Asiatic" Bolsheviks (p. 131). Such notions carried special weight during the early days of the Cold War. The offensive launched by Manstein and his peers and their supporters effectively minimized the Army's crimes in the East, as it appeared self-evident that if any of the combatants had committed atrocities during the war, it was the "barbaric" East, not the "civilized" West. By referring to the war as essentially defensive, Manstein pointed to the absurdity of prosecuting him for a war that the West was preparing to fight all over again.

While these two strategies played well in the court of public opinion, within the actual court of law, Manstein and his peers developed a different strategy to absolve themselves of responsibility for their conduct. They tried to separate the war against the Soviet Union into two different campaigns: a military one, in which they exercised authority, and an ideological effort, which they had no power to influence. This dual strategy most concretely manifested itself in the Army's attempts to disassociate itself from the Einsatzgruppen. While preparing for the General Staff's defense during the initial Nuremberg Trial, Manstein wrote, "the thought that military leaders were connected with the measures of the S.D. in certain areas constitutes a completely unjustified burden on the military leadership" (p. 110). This question became one of the central issues of Manstein's own trial, and as Wrochem persuasively argues, the names Manstein and Otto Ohlendorf (the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D) assumed powerful symbolic weight both within and outside of the courtroom, with the former standing for the "clean" Wehrmacht and the latter for the criminal SS.

As Wrochem makes clear, the strategies employed by Manstein and his peers found a wide-ranging resonance in West German public opinion and during the 1940s and 1950s, support for the interned Wehrmacht elite remained strong. Adenauer himself recognized the groundswell of support reserved particularly for Manstein and was able to link his discharge to the inclusion of a re-militarized West Germany in the Western Alliance. Wrochem tirelessly reconstructs the negotiations between Bonn and London concerning Manstein's release as an aspect of the re-admittance of West Germany to western society. He also convincingly argues that Manstein's release in the Federal Republic carried hefty symbolic weight, as it signaled the welcome of all former Wehrmacht soldiers into the new state. The past was now forgotten or sanitized and re-worked to such an extent that it bore little relation to the reality of the war of annihilation.

Wrochem has provided an extremely important and detailed study of how the German Vernichtungskrieg in the East was waged and then how a neutered version of this conflict was transmitted to West German society. He has effectively tied together several very important issues into one generally readable work. At times, his detail becomes a bit overpowering and Manstein himself periodically disappears from the book, but these minor caveats fail to detract seriously from a major contribution to field.

Reviewed by Jeff Rutherford (Department of History, Wheeling Jesuit University)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)

Oliver von Wrochem. Erich von Manstein: Vernichtungskrieg und Geschichtspolitik. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2006. 431 S. EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-72977-4.

Source: H-Net
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14445

David Cesarani, British Historian of Holocaust and Anglo Jewry, Dies at 58

Liam HoareOctober 25, 2015

David Cesarani, the great British historian of the Holocaust and Anglo Jewry, has died at the age of 58, London’s Jewish Chronicle reports. The London Times columnist David Aaronovitch described him as “a man of luminous intelligence and splendid academic achievement.”

Cesarani — as a research professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London and director of the school’s Holocaust Research Center — made significant interventions in the field of Holocaust studies, winning the National Jewish Book Award for History in 2006 for “Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a Desk Murderer.”

Using archival material hitherto unavailable to historians, Cesarani dismantled the notion, constructed by Hannah Arendt, that Eichmann was essentially a banal bureaucrat — a paper pusher responsible for the deaths of millions due to circumstance, time, and place. Dismissing Arendt as an unreliable witness, Cesarani showed that Eichmann’s anti-Semitism and belief in Nazism, as well as the denigration of European Jewry to subhuman status and the willingness of others to collaborate in Nazi crimes, made his participation in the Holocaust possible.

“It is thoroughly researched, densely factual; there may never be need for another biography of the man,” Barry Gewen wrote in a review for The New York Times.

Invested in Holocaust education and remembrance, in 2005 Cesarani was awarded an OBE for his work towards the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in the United Kingdom. He was a trustee of the HMD Trust and a consultant to the Holocaust Educational Trust. His public support for a Holocaust museum in London in the 1990s culminated in the opening of the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum in 2000. Cesarani served on the advisory board working with the team that created the exhibit.

“David was an outstanding historian of the Holocaust, who recognised that the Holocaust was more than simply an event to be studied — it was unprecedented challenge to civilization,” Olivia Marks-Woldman, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said. “David helped ensure that everybody in society was challenged by the difficult lessons that the Holocaust presents.”

Cesarani was also an important voice in Anglo-Jewish affairs. He wrote a history of The Jewish Chronicle — the British Jewish paper of record — that its current editor, Stephen Pollard, described as “gripping, enlightening, and judicious.” Writing for The Guardian and New Statesman, Cesarani in turns dispelled the myth of Jewish unity, assailed the journalist Peter Oborne for his insinuations about the power of the pro-Israel lobby, and argued that a “suspicion of Jews is ingrained in certain quarters of Britain’s ruling class.”

From the political left, Cesarani critiqued the growing movement on Britain’s university campuses to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. “It is possible to support the Palestinian struggle against the occupation and for a viable state without endorsing the murder of innocents or conspiracy theories about Jews,” he wrote. “British universities are a meeting place of different nationalities and ethnic and faith groups. The boycott campaign, anti-Israel motions, double standards and violent rhetoric poison this precious environment.”

All in all, Cesarani was the author and editor of over fifteen books, including a biography of Arthur Koestler, “The Homeless Mind,” and “Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948.” His final work, “Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949,” is due for publication in January 2016.

At an event in March for London’s Jewish Book Week, Cesarani indicated that “Final Solution” demonstrate the surprising lack of inevitability in the events that culminated in the Holocaust. “Auschwitz is tremendously important,” Cesarani said then, but “it has created the sense that the Holocaust started in 1933 and inevitably led to Auschwitz.” Instead, Cesarani will stress the haphazard evolution of anti-Jewish policy in the 1930s and argue that the Holocaust was a consequence of both German and Allied military failures.

“So much knowledge has gone from the world with David Cesarani’s passing,” Stephen Pollard concluded.

Source: Forward
http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/323295/david-cesarani-british-historian-of-holocaust-and-anglo-jewry-dies-at-58/?attribution=home-breaking-news-headline-1

Top Holocaust Scholar Blasts 'Holocaust-abuse' by U.S., Israeli Politicians

Deborah Lipstadt lambasts 'unhealthy and embarrassing' pandering of Republican presidential candidates; says U.S. envoy Gutman’s comments on Muslim anti-Semitism were 'stupid.'
Chemi Shalev Dec 16, 2011 1:03 PM

Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, Jan 11, 2000.AP

Full Interview with Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt
Hilary Swank to star as Deborah Lipstadt in biopic about Holocaust denier's trial

Renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt says that American and Israeli politicians who invoke the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes are engaging in “Holocaust abuse”, which is similar to “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust.

“I think it is dangerous, just plain dangerous. It’s a distortion of what Israel is all about, what Zionism is all about,” said Lipstadt, who has just published a retrospective book “The Eichmann Trial” on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the infamous Nazi criminal.

“When you take these terrible moments in our history, and you use it for contemporary purposes, in order to fulfill your political objectives, you mangle history, you trample on it,” she said.

In a hard-hitting interview with Haaretz, Lipstadt also lashed out at the "over-the-top pandering" of Republican presidential candidates, describing their fawning support for Israel as "embarrassing" and "unhealthy." Of last week’s appearance of the top Republican candidates at a Washington forum organized by the Republican Jewish Committee, she said: “It was unbelievable. It made me cringe. I couldn’t watch it.”

“You listen to Newt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an ‘invented people’ – it’s out-Aipacking AIPAC, it’s out-Israeling Israel,” she said. .”There’s something about it that’s so discomforting. It’s not healthy. It’s a distortion,” she said.

She also used the word “despicable” to describe settlers who use the term “Nazi” against IDF soldiers. “And it’s so inaccurate. And it’s such an abuse of history. The people who started it know it’s not true, but the kids, the yeshiva kids, and the high school kids – they don’t know it’s not true. And so when real Nazism comes around - no one will recognize it.”

Lipstadt, who is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Atlanta’s Emory University, became a hero of American Jewry after she singlehandedly inflicted a devastating blow on Holocaust-denial in the West in her famous London courtroom victory in 2000 over master-denier David Irving, who had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. The London Times said of Lipstadt's victory: "History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory."

Lipstadt described US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman’s controversial comments about the causal connection between the Arab-Israeli conflict and Muslim anti-Semitism as “stupid”, adding that “he sounded as if he was rationalizing anti-Semitism.” But, she said, the reaction to his statements had also been “over the top."

Lipstadt decried the “hysteria” and “neuroses” of many Jews and Israelis who compare the current situation in Europe and in the Middle East to the Holocaust era. “People go nuts here, they go nuts. There’s no nuance, there’s no middle ground, it’s taking any shade of grey and stomping on it. There are no voices of calm, there are no voices of reason, not in this country, not in Israel. "

“This is the kind of thing that scares me,” she said. “Jews have always been neurotic – I mean everyone’s neurotic, we just recognize it more – but we’ve raised our neuroses to a level that’s not healthy. We should eschew hysteria, but we don’t. Hysteria is never useful."

The New York-born Lipstadt said that President Barack Obama’s “flatfooted” handling of Israel at the beginning of his term “gave an opening to Republicans in America and to ‘Republicans’ in Israel.” She said that “more and more Jews are scared and here’s someone [the Republicans, CS] who is going to protect them. It’s so over-the-top irrational.”

Lipstadt rebuffed suggestions that what she describes as the “unhealthy neuroses” of the Jews in 2011 is a direct outgrowth of the legacy of the Eichmann trial. “The Eichmann trial was a pivotal moment in the history of Israel, in the history of Zionism. It personalized the Shoah, and it was the beginning of change in the Israeli attitude toward Shoah survivors.”

One of the more controversial chapters in Lipstadt’s new book deals with Hannah Arendt, whose own book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was immensely popular in the West in the years following the trial but was roundly condemned by Jews and Israelis. Though Lipstadt demolishes Arendt’s main theses that Eichmann was but a bureaucratic cog in the Nazi machine and denounces here criticism of the Judenrats in Nazi-occupied Europe - she does find some positive points in Arendt’s coverage of the trial, including her observation that “for the first time since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people."

Arendt, says Lipstadt, “was mean and cruel, but she captured something very essential about the trial.”

Read the full transcript of the interview here.

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Chemi Shalev
Haaretz Correspondent

Source: Haaretz (Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/top-holocaust-scholar-blasts-holocaust-abuse-by-u-s-israeli-politicians-1.401821

East Germany's Handling of the Holocaust

In the decade after 1989, the German Democratic Republic's (self-)image as the "better Germany"--the negation of fascist Germany and the embodiment of the antifascist resistance--was vigorously contested. Scholars, politicians, intellectuals, and publicists critically scrutinized the GDR's handling of the National Socialist past.[1] Deficiencies and blind spots in its treatment of victims of the Holocaust were exposed, as was its pragmatic integration of former Nazis. A new consensus held that, in contrast with its self-depiction, the GDR was by no means "better" than the Federal Republic of Germany, which it had mercilessly attacked as the barely tamed continuation of fascist interests. Instead, the many shortcomings of West Germany's efforts to "come to terms" with the Nazi past now appeared as unfortunate bumps on the road to an honest, self-critical approach to German responsibility for Nazi genocide, while the GDR's mendacious antifascism, having amounted to little more than an instrument for regime legitimation, met its deserved end in 1989-90.[2]

By the turn of the millennium at the latest, researchers interested in more complex accounts identified deficiencies in the prevailing understanding. These included its primary focus on the 1940s and 1950s, its overwhelming focus on the communist regime, and its treatment of the GDR in isolation from (or at best in isolated comparison with) the Federal Republic.[3] Numerous questions remained: to what extent did the regime control and manipulate efforts to address (or ignore) the past? Were such efforts merely "instrumentalized" for political ends, or was there a genuine interest in facing up to (aspects of) Nazism and if so, where? Is it possible to speak of East German antifascisms beyond the official doctrine (which might conceivably have persisted after 1989)? To what extent did change occur over the decades? And what was the nature of the interaction of the two Germanys in this area--their Beziehungsgeschichte? A further question that is worth posing at the end of the second decade after 1989 concerns the possibility of moving beyond the predominantly judgmental post-Wende discourse to write the history of East German handling of the Nazi past, indeed the history of postwar Germany in general, without the highly normative and evaluative approach that dominated the scholarship of the 1990s. In addressing diverse dimensions of East Germany's handling of the legacies of Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews, the three books under discussion suggest ambiguous and complex answers to these questions.

The ostensible focus of Christian Dirks's well-written work is an examination of the East German counterpart to the famous and much-studied Frankfurt am Main "Auschwitz trial" of 1963-65.[4] Dirks treats the "GDR's Auschwitz trial" not only as a component of East German judicial history, but also as an aspect of East Germany's and West Germany's Beziehungsgeschichte. Yet these are not Dirks's only aims. He also seeks to contribute to research into Nazi perpetrators by examining the roles of SS doctors at Auschwitz, in particular that of the trial's defendant Horst Fischer, who served there from late 1942 and from 1943 as deputy chief SS doctor. Accordingly, the actual trial is addressed only in the final of three sections, which, although it spans about 140 pages, almost seems brief after nearly 200 pages of what might otherwise constitute background information, were it not for Dirks's ambitions with regard to perpetrator research.

The first section provides an overview of prosecutions of Nazi criminals by Soviet tribunals and East German courts between 1945 and 1955. It also discusses East Germany's propaganda campaigns against the Federal Republic in the 1950s and 1960s over its unmastered Nazi past and the compromised pasts of its elites. Drawing on extensive secondary literature, this section, like the whole book, is systematic and thorough. At times it seems excessively so, although some points that initially seem superfluous (such as somewhat confused references to Soviet internment camps) do fall into place eventually. Dirks might have taken a little more care with his use of contested terms such as "collective guilt" (p. 35), but he convincingly draws out the early and enduring "instrumentalization of prosecutions of Nazi crimes for the political-propagandistic goals of the rulers" in the Soviet Occupied Zone (SBZ) (p. 37), including their timing in conjunction with trials of similar crimes in the western zones, the absence of systematic prosecutions, and a preference for a small number of highly publicized trials. The discussion also suggests, more implicitly, the relative absence of prosecutions of crimes directly associated with the Holocaust. In discussing the SED's propaganda campaigns against the Federal Republic, Dirks stresses the basic accuracy of many of East Berlin's charges against Bonn, due to the fact that the denazified old "elites in the state, the economy, the academy, and the military were almost completely reinstated" in the 1950s (p. 55), in contrast to which the GDR claimed to have expunged fascism, root and branch.

Yet, as Dirks argues in his conclusion, "the only thing systematic about the criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes in the GDR was the consistent oversight of its own deficits in this area" (p. 330). As is well known, many former Nazis integrated themselves into East German society, with or without undergoing denazification. Fischer (1912-66) is an example. Dirks's second section addresses Fischer's path from petit bourgeois origins and early orphanhood in Dresden, via a medical degree at Berlin University and membership in the SS since late 1933, to Auschwitz. It also presents his avoidance of detection at war's end and his 1946 move to Spreenhagen in provincial Brandenburg, where he practiced as the local physician until his arrest in 1965. This section is perhaps the book's strongest; it provides a gripping account of one individual's path to becoming a professional killer, as well as a detailed examination of doctors' roles within the SS machinery of exploitation and extermination. That Dirks's account is so rich is due not least to extensive statements Fischer made in custody, Dirks's examination of which--combined with his utilization of existing literature, including that produced by prisoner-functionaries such as Hermann Langbein, who worked alongside Fischer--constitutes a significant contribution to the literature. Fischer's various activities and responsibilities at Auschwitz included combating typhus epidemics (among SS personnel and prisoners); undertaking "selections" on the ramp at Birkenau and in the hospital at the Monowitz satellite camp run by the SS for IG Farben; conducting experiments on patients; supervising mass murder in the gas chambers; and overseeing the death march following the camp's evacuation. This section offers valuable insights into the power struggles both within the SS and between the SS and IG Farben at Auschwitz, as well as into the selection processes from the perspective of an SS doctor. Dirks also discusses Auschwitz's SS doctors' social and family life. While Fischer was clearly not one of the most brutal SS doctors or officers, he made no serious attempt to be transferred away from Auschwitz. Dirks's attribution to him of "a pronounced sense of injustice" while there (p. 186) comes somewhat as a surprise, partly because we never really get inside Fischer's head, despite his extensive subsequent testimony. Dirks's plausible final assessment is that Fischer was "no small cog within the National Socialist machinery of extermination, of which he became a part through a fatal mix of antisemitism, indifference, careerism, and enrichment" (p. 168).

Although several of his colleagues had faced trial, by the late 1940s Fischer believed he had evaded responsibility for his actions. Dirks stresses that such optimism was not unjustified, because Fischer's whereabouts were unknown to the authorities outside the GDR that were investigating him. Indeed, only Fischer's negative attitude toward the GDR and frequent visits to West Berlin attracted the attention of the district Stasi office in the early 1960s. In 1965, he was identified as the SS doctor about whom Stasi headquarters had, coincidentally, only recently registered incriminating material. His arrest was announced after a delay of several months, just as the second Frankfurt Auschwitz trial began. Such timing reflected East Berlin's desire to gain influence over and pursue a counter-trial to the proceedings in Frankfurt. After plans to transform the first Frankfurt trial into a "tribunal against IG Farben" and its successor companies failed (p. 224), Fischer's arrest offered the East German authorities a welcome opportunity to highlight the company's role at Monowitz and more broadly in the development of Nazi policies of exploitation and extermination. In the context of West German and international debates about statutes of limitations for Nazi crimes, the GDR also sought to position itself as the only German state that was pursuing a rigorous course of justice against those responsible. Dirks highlights the Stasi's extensive planning for the trial, including instructions to the press about appropriate interpretations, selection of audience members, the development of an accompanying exhibit, and the instruction to execute Fischer. Dirks also discusses the role Fischer played in the Frankfurt trials, including the significance of his admissions in securing a verdict in the second trial. This section testifies to the importance of Beziehungsgeschichte for understanding both East and West German developments.

Dirks's discussion of Fischer's trial stresses that the indictment, expert witness testimony, and judgment were all directed against IG Farben as much as against Fischer, who was held responsible for the murder of seventy thousand people (almost one hundred a day, as the verdict observed). Dirks repeatedly notes that, propaganda aside, their descriptions of the history of Auschwitz in general and the role of IG Farben in particular largely accord with current historiography. The prosecution and prominent East German witnesses also sought to condemn the Federal Republic, which was even blamed for the embarrassing fact that such a major criminal had lived undetected in the GDR for two decades. Meanwhile, Fischer's defense, led by Wolfgang Vogel, had a difficult task in light of the overwhelming evidence and Fischer's extensive confession. The High Court of Justice accepted the prosecution's case--with the exception of the charge that Fischer had ordered the use of Zyklon B gas--and sentenced him to death. Dirks gives brief accounts of East and West German press coverage of the verdict, of the mainly sympathetic and occasionally antisemitic responses of the local Spreenhagen population, of discussions of the trial within various East German institutions, and of Fischer's own remarkably contrite letters to his wife after his sentencing. Some of these subsections are rather descriptive, with chunks of reported speech, but they help to support Dirks's insistence that efforts to understand such trials must go beyond analyzing judgments and demonstrate the value of in-depth examinations of individual trials.

Dirks's discussion of the trial's conformity to the principles of the rule of law and its "show trial" character is less satisfying. On the one hand, his assessment that the trial formally conformed to rule-of-law principles--despite the predetermined verdict--is disconcerting. On the other hand, his claim that it had all the hallmarks of a show trial is unsatisfying. Three points--raised not least by Dirks's quotation of Stasi boss Erich Mielke to the effect that Fischer had to be brought to "feel required to give the world the opportunity to see the crimes of the fascists in their entire barbarity, heinousness, and hypocrisy" (p. 211)--warrant further consideration. First, Mielke's statement and Dirks's reference to Fischer's "preparation" by the Stasi (p. 333) suggest that Fischer's confession may have been extracted under duress, a point that does not otherwise feature in Dirks's account. Second, as Andreas Hilger has argued, such trials were less "show trials" than "demonstration trials," because the crimes (of Fischer and IG Farben) did not have to be invented.[5] Finally, despite the undeniably dominant role played by the regime's political aims, Mielke's statement suggests that Fischer's trial also served a more legitimate desire to expose Nazi crimes, which, to be sure, was only acted upon when opportune. Despite not fully addressing these points, Dirks's book is an important addition not only to the literature on the GDR's handling of the Nazi past and East-West German Beziehungsgeschichte in this area, but also to the study of Auschwitz and of doctors' roles in the Holocaust.

In contrast with Dirks's substantial investigation, Harald Schmid provides a single citation for the actual history of Reichskristallnacht. Schmid's study is an expanded version of a part of his dissertation on the pogrom's commemoration in the Federal Republic.[6] With laudable brevity, he presents the changing contexts, actors, and interpretations of the pogrom, from the KPD's immediate sympathetic response in 1938--with which Erich Honecker still sought to legitimize the GDR in the 1980s--through a commemorative demonstration of New Forum supporters in Leipzig on the night the Berlin Wall fell. With the exception of a single archival record, Schmid's sources are contemporary publications, from Neues Deutschland to Jewish community periodicals. Otherwise, he draws on already considerable literature on the situation of Jews and the handling of the Holocaust in the GDR, including some brief, older studies on his very topic. Schmid's study makes an exemplary effort at analyzing his subject within the changing contexts of the East-West conflict, the GDR's philosophy of history, its confrontation and competition with the Federal Republic, its policy toward Israel, and the state of its Jewish community. Indeed, Schmid synthesizes recent research on antifascism, highlighting its functions for the regime but also acknowledging that it cannot be reduced to these. He strikes a similarly nuanced note on the GDR's handling of the Holocaust, arguing that even if the latter was not taboo in the GDR, the fact that no specific sense of obligation towards its Jewish victims arose itself constituted "a damning indictment" of official antifascism (p. 17).

After two introductory chapters, the study proceeds chronologically. While the Nazis' Jewish victims were included, but received no special place in, Soviet zone commemorations of the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism, commemoration on and around November 9 was devoted primarily to celebrating the 1917 Russian and 1918 German revolutions, behind which the 1938 pogrom would remain secondary for decades. Nevertheless, Jewish communities commemorated the pogrom, initially in league with, but soon as second fiddle to the Association of the Nazi Regime's Persecuted (VVN). Postwar antisemitism and the prewar responsibility of bystanders were openly discussed in 1947 and 1948, even if only exceptional figures like Paul Merker placed antisemitism at the center of their understanding of fascism. Despite the Stalinization of the SED and the development of Soviet bloc anti-Zionism, Schmid shows that, in contrast to previous claims, the pogrom continued to be commemorated by Jewish communities and the VVN between 1949 and 1953, but that depictions of Jews' past persecution became increasingly "anonymous" (p. 36), while contemporary anti-Zionism and "anti-cosmopolitanism" led to the emigration of a third of the GDR's small Jewish community. By 1953, critical discussion of the roles of bystanders had disappeared, while newspaper coverage paid more attention to West Germany's alleged crypto-fascism than to the events of 1938. Attacks on the West (for which the anniversary often simply provided an occasion) increased in subsequent years, but the pogrom's twentieth anniversary signaled to GDR authorities that they were falling behind the Federal Republic, where prominent state representatives participated in commemoration, in contrast with the low-level CDU representatives who participated in the GDR.

Only beginning in 1963 did the pogrom's anniversary even begin to approach the significance of the GDR's major commemorative dates. Moreover, its commemoration now assumed certain characteristics that would remain largely intact until 1988: first and foremost, a pact between the regime and the leadership of the East German Jewish communities to exchange official attention from the former for political subordination and declarations of loyalty from the latter, but also the increasing activism of the Protestant churches. An anomaly occurred in 1967 with a unique attempt at joint commemoration of the 1918 revolution and the 1938 pogrom. Otherwise, a degree of ritualization set in, as did a quantitative increase in commemorative events (to twenty-two events in fifteen East German cities in 1968 compared with seventy-five events in forty-four cities in the West). Schmid stresses that unlike the diverse civil society initiatives and coalitions responsible in the West, most events in the East were organized by Jewish communities, with state representatives as invited guests. Moreover, they had an affirmative rather than critical character, except where the Federal Republic was concerned. Difficult questions about past or present antisemitism, about bystanders or compensation, were absent. These characteristics persisted into the 1970s, threatened primarily by the dwindling Jewish population, which meant that only Berlin and Leipzig held ceremonies every year. The 1970s saw the beginning of a Jewish-Christian rapprochement, with representatives of the two religions participating in each other's ceremonies, and Protestant leaders reviving discussion of the complicity of the churches and the general population.

As Schmid argues, "the wall preventing deepened understanding of the system of the 'Third Reich' stood throughout the entire existence of the GDR, but increasing cracks emerged in the last decade and a half" (p. 78), a development he views in parallel with the broader differentiation of East German society and the SED's gradual loss of control. He interprets 1978 as a twofold turning point in the anniversary's commemoration, when a new record of forty-four events marked the pogrom's fortieth anniversary. On the one hand, for the first time Neues Deutschland granted the pogrom an identity separate from and comparable with, if still secondary to that of the 1918 revolution. Such prominence pointed to the careful planning by the state secretariat for churches, the SED Central Committee and the Stasi, not least with a view to direct competition with the West. On the other hand, Schmid demonstrates that alternative forms emerged, such as seminars and silent marches, organized by new actors: thirty events were explicitly church-run, heralding the emergence of a "commemorative dissidence" (p. 100).

In part to maintain the impression of leadership and control, efforts at state planning and manipulation increased through to 1988, when more than 140 commemorative events took place in over sixty cities and towns, including a special sitting of the Volkskammer. Schmid concludes: "[a]ll in all a massively forced commemoration without parallel" (p. 115). New features in the late 1980s were more dialogue and competition across the German-German border, and the regime's increased interest in promoting its activities to the English-speaking world. Inevitably, increased official attention to the victims of Nazi persecution gave East German dissidents occasion to criticize contemporary problems such as xenophobia and neo-Nazism as well as the regime's own repressive character. In 1989, state actors were preoccupied with trying to cling to power, so the few commemorative activities were church-led or independent. The opening of the border on the evening of November 9 meant the end of commemorating the 1938 pogrom in the GDR.

Schmid's book provides a compact account of that history, which he conceives as part of a wider Beziehungsgeschichte with the Federal Republic over the legacy of the Nazi past. He rejects simplistic and deterministic interpretations, insisting, for example, that the inflationary commemoration in 1988 not be seen merely as instrumentalization. Like Dirks, Schmid acknowledges the correct content of much SED propaganda against the West. He also notes the biological or personal legitimacy of many East German leaders' antifascist positions. Yet, a "specifically East German" commemoration of Reichskristallnacht remains elusive (p. 133). Moreover, despite asking "what remains" (p. 135), Schmid does not look beyond 1989. These limitations can perhaps be attributed to his study's (undefined) focus on November 9 as a "political" day of commemoration. Although he mentions the treatment of the Holocaust by individual East German historians and in GDR literature in general, he does not seek to provide a broader cultural history of the pogrom's reception in the GDR. For instance, he refers to a 1968 commemorative event featuring prominent East German authors, but instead of delving into their approaches, he merely recounts how Neues Deutschland reported the event. Indeed, we learn little of the content of alternative activities, which virtually disappear in Schmid's final analysis and comparison with the West: "In retrospect, commemoration in the SED dictatorship, which was always functionalized and directed by the state and allowed only limited room for maneuver for autonomous social memory, stands against the relatively autonomous, genuinely democratic West German development" (p. 135).

While Schmid's book does not look beyond 1989 and most of his East-West comparisons refer readers to his separate study of western commemoration of Reichskristallnacht, Jan Philipp Spannuth's dissertation on restitution of "Aryanized" property attempts a more comprehensive approach. By way of background, Spannuth provides a concise history of "Aryanization" between 1933 and 1945, differentiating three phases: first, 1933 to 1937, a period of seemingly "voluntary" sales resulting from anti-Jewish boycotts and the general political climate; second, 1937-1938 as a period of radicalization, at the end of which "Aryanization" by private parties was all but complete; finally, from 1939, a period in which the German Reich acquired the remaining property of Jews by virtue of their imposed denaturalization through emigration or deportation.

The core of Spannuth's study begins in its third chapter, with a reconstruction of the vigorous discussion about restitution in the SBZ, which was prompted in 1946 by a bill from British-occupied Hamburg. Spannuth demonstrates some support for restitution within the SED, but that property confiscated from "Nazi activists and war criminals," indeed all state property, was always to be excluded. In early 1948 the SED Central Secretariat accepted a bill prepared by Merker and Helmut Lehmann that granted restitution to victims residing in Germany whose property had not been nationalized after 1945. Yet opposition--particularly from the Central Secretariat's legal department--defeated not only the more radical demands of SBZ Jewish communities, but also this modest proposal. Spannuth argues that such opposition was due less to budgetary concerns and the desire to integrate former Nazis than to anti-capitalist ideology tinged with antisemitism. He suggests, plausibly, that it constituted the logical continuation of tendencies apparent in the earlier debate about recognizing Jews as "victims of fascism," where the intention to exclude them because "they did not fight" (p. 64) had been modified for tactical reasons. Those reasons were no longer compelling in 1949, while objections to restoring private property were all the stronger during the accelerating construction of socialism. At times Spannuth seems torn between interpreting the invocation of anti-capitalist ideology as a mere fig-leaf and seeing it as a genuine objection to the restitution of private property. Either way, a 1949 Regulation for the Recognition, Provision and Compensation of the Nazis' Persecuted did not encompass restitution. Indeed, as Spannuth demonstrates, it was based not on a "bourgeois" notion of compensation for individual losses, but on a socialist understanding of welfare entitlements grounded in the generic fact of persecution.

Beyond these debates within the SED, several initiatives occurred elsewhere, particularly at the level of the Länder, most of which went nowhere. Spannuth shows the marginality of the Soviet authorities, whose sole achievement in this area was the restitution to Jewish communities of at least 122 communal properties--synagogues, cemeteries, schools, etc.--under its 1948 Order No. 82, which "returned" properties confiscated under the Nazis to political parties, mass organizations, and religious organizations in the SBZ. This was the only official restitution measure for "Aryanized" property in the SBZ/GDR (with the exception of Thuringia, addressed below).

East German authorities nevertheless faced claims for the restitution of individual property, particularly that acquired by the German Reich and now in the hands of the GDR. According to Spannuth, local authorities occasionally acted on a sense of natural justice and re-entered returning Jewish owners' names in title registers. Such actions prompted Justice Minister Max Fechner to intervene with the aim of securing formerly Jewish property for the GDR. Against the opposition of some officials, properties seized by the Third Reich were prevented from being returned to their rightful Jewish owners, even where the latter were still on the title register. Some sporadic postwar restitutions were even reversed, with ownership passing, again, to the state. Only occasionally did the authorities ameliorate this scandalous situation by granting the rightful owners "privileges" such as occupancy. The victims' only avenue for redress--and only if they lived in the SBZ/GDR--was civil action, which produced mixed results in the few cases in the 1940s and early 50s. Meanwhile, private "Aryanizers" who were not expropriated after 1945 benefited just as the state did. Only a small number were criminally prosecuted, and postwar expropriations of "Nazi activists and war criminals" did not target "Aryanizers."

One of the strengths of Spannuth's book lies in his use of case studies that highlight the complexity of the subject matter and bring to life what might otherwise be a dry, legal topic. The first chapter presents the case of a Jewish hotelier on the island of Rügen who was able to re-acquire two of his "Aryanized" properties but could only administer, rather than re-acquire, his largest hotel because it had been sequestered by the Soviets. Having resumed his business, he was arrested in 1953 as part of "Aktion Rose," which expropriated private gastronomic and other businesses on the Baltic coast. In his trial--which ended with a ten-year sentence for him--his persecution under the Nazis won him no sympathy; indeed, Spannuth shows how his postwar efforts to regain his property were held against him as indicating his failure to learn the lesson of fascism. His entire property was nationalized. After 1990, the Treuhandanstalt sold the various properties to private investors, with the proceeds divided among his descendants and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (JCC).

In chapter 5, Spannuth presents two regional case studies that add further nuance and depth to his analysis. The first is the case of a 1945 restitution law in Thuringia, the first of its kind in Germany and the only example in the SBZ/GDR. Under the law, an Office for Compensation began an active search for "Aryanized" property and a Special Commissioner for the Administration of Formerly Jewish Property confiscated realty and firms, placed them under stewardship, and made changes to title registers. The law had numerous flaws, not least that the property of estates without heirs would fall to the Thuringian state, but some problems were resolved in favor of the victims. Spannuth estimates that most cases of "Aryanization" in Thuringia were registered and that approximately 60 percent ended in restitution. Approximately 300 properties (of 770 registered claims) were restored to their former owners, who mostly resided abroad. The situation with businesses was less positive, as postwar sequestrations could not be reversed. Yet even successful claimants faced problems if they were not GDR citizens, especially beginning in 1951, when the property of non-citizens was placed under state administration. As early as 1948, the SED indicated its interest not only in a quick end to the Thuringian arrangements, but also in acquiring the property seized under their aegis, and the law was repealed in 1952. Despite its demise and the fact that only those few victims who returned to the SBZ/GDR ultimately benefited, Spannuth rightly stresses that Thuringia provides a singular example of a serious German, rather than occupation-authority, initiative towards restitution, which shows, moreover, that the Soviet occupation authorities were not opposed to restitution.

The second regional case study is that of East Berlin. In 1946 the Allies established an office in Berlin to secure "Aryanized" Jewish property expropriated by the German Reich with a view to restitution. Following the city's division, the Soviet commandant created a similar office for the eastern sector, expanding its responsibilities to private property. Confiscations ended in August 1949 and confiscated property eventually fell under the control of the Berlin People's Housing Administration. By 1955, the city administration was confronted with claims from former owners, mainly "Aryanizers," and proposed to accede to them. According to the proposal, the original Jewish owners were either adequately compensated as Victims of Fascism if GDR citizens, or were undeserving "Israelite capitalists" if abroad (p. 141). The administration was satisfied that if the "Aryanizers" had been "active Nazis or war criminals," they would have been expropriated after the war. Despite concerns about a revival of the restitution question, in 1957 the GDR Finance Ministry approved the move, thus bowing indirectly to "popular" pressure, or rather, pressure from the "Aryanizers." The previous Jewish owners were not informed and the decision was not publicized. According to Spannuth, most of the properties were heavily burdened by debt, and it is unclear how many claims were made. Overall, he suggests, serious preparations were undertaken in Berlin in the 1940s for later restitution, but ultimately the East German state simply acquired a large amount of property, an outcome reinforced by the fact that the state automatically acquired property belonging to anyone who fled the country.

In chapter 6 Spannuth turns to the familiar history of the GDR's evasion, through to 1989, of international pressure to compensate the victims of Nazism living abroad. Spannuth argues that insistence on the need to await a final peace treaty was both hypocritical (because the SED intended largely to uphold its refusal even then) and naive. Spannuth highlights the anti-Zionism and antisemitism behind official positions on this question. Here, and throughout, he largely confirms the findings of Jeffrey Herf, Angelika Timm, and others, finding a fluid border between anti-Zionism and antisemitism even in the Office for the Legal Protection of the Property of the GDR, which administered much formerly Jewish property. However, Spannuth's account also indicates that suggestions that East German overtures to the JCC in the 1970s and 1980s were based merely on antisemitic assumptions about the power of the Jewish lobby in the United States overlook that both U.S. and JCC officials drew explicit connections between compensation and most-favored-nation status in the United States.

Ultimately, Spannuth suggests, a combination of "Marxist dogmatism," "material covetousness," and antisemitism explains the SED's refusal to meet the basic demands of the victims through to 1989 (p. 164). However, he rightly insists that some elements in various sections of the bureaucracy and the judiciary, at the Länder and local level and even in the upper echelons of the SED, favored a more sympathetic approach. Given such welcome differentiation, Spannuth's occasional references to a unitary "GDR" position or "GDR-rhetoric," rather than to the GDR government or the SED, are remarkably undifferentiated. His location of the end of the GDR in 1989 rather than 1990 is simply inaccurate.

In contrast with the GDR's commemorative culture(s), which, Schmid suggests, simply evaporated in 1990, the unfinished business of restitution became a major issue in that year. In chapter 8, Spannuth analyzes the positions of the governments led by Hans Modrow and de Mazière and the issue's treatment during and after the unification process. Although the expressions of responsibility for the Nazi past by representatives of the new governments and the Volkskammer were new in tone and content, firm commitments were not forthcoming. Early negotiations over unification raised fears that property nationalized after 1945 might be privatized or restored without reference to its previous "Aryanization." Thanks largely to prompting by the JCC and the U.S. government; both East and West German authorities ensured that this did not occur. As is well known, the West German government's preference for restitution won out against the East German government's preference for compensation. Nevertheless, the GDR's only freely elected parliament and government adhered to the Treaty of Unification, including the appendaged property law that recognized property losses under the Third Reich as a basis for restitution claims. Spannuth goes on to discuss the details of restitution regulations and the practice of restitution in selected eastern states (again with useful examples), concluding that responsible offices conscientiously sought to do justice to difficult problems and to cast light on often dark and dubious expropriations. He also attempts a preliminary stock-taking based on data up to 1999 (which reflects the period of data collection for his dissertation, but seems old for a book published in 2007). In total, Spannuth estimates that the JCC and individuals made approximately 130,000 claims on a total value of approximately 10.5 billion Euros. The success rate, he estimates with considerable caution, approximated 19 percent for the JCC and 60 percent for private claims.

Spannuth's concluding diachronic comparison of post-GDR restitution with earlier efforts in the West is the least satisfying part of the book, for several reasons. First, he does not assess the quantitative "success" of western restitution relative to the regional Jewish population as he does elsewhere in the book, but merely points to the high total sums paid under Allied statutes and the Federal Restitution Law, which he does not subject to a comparative analysis with the figures for the eastern states after 1990. Second, his overall characterization of western restitution is dominated by the total sums of restitution and compensation achieved over the decades and by progressive judgments of the 1950s, and not by qualitative considerations, such as the significant social, bureaucratic, and judicial resistance to restitution in the 1940s and 1950s, which he dubs "silent sabotage" (p. 227). Third, the comparison mutates into a search for lessons learned by the 1990s from the earlier experiences and the broader history of facing up to the Nazi past in the West. Here, Spannuth notes qualitative improvements in the 1990s, which he attributes to the influence of those western experiences before 1990 and of western bureaucrats and judges thereafter. Certainly, western bureaucrats were primarily responsible for the Treaty of Unification and its accompanying legislation, but Spannuth effectively concedes that his own suggestion that those responsible for the subsequent development of restitution policy and practice were westerners is mere supposition. He overlooks support for restitution within the GDR (particularly in 1990) as well as the possibility that easterners might also have learned certain lessons, or that they simply applied and upheld the restitution law of the reunified country after 1990. Moreover, the claim that the Federal Republic had learned the lessons of its earlier restitution experience is weakened by the fact that the judgments Spannuth cites as evidence were not made until 1998 or 1999, which suggests that the lessons had not been well learned by 1990 and that a new set of experiences was required to tease them out. These shortcomings in the final chapter, attributable in part to the fact that Spannuth could not draw on the first monograph on western restitution, do not detract substantially from what is otherwise a systematic and nuanced study and a significant contribution to the literature on the handling of the Nazi past in the SBZ/GDR and reunified Germany. Like the other books under discussion, it will likely be the standard work on its topic for some time.

What do these books say about the current state of research in light of the deficiencies and questions outlined at the beginning? First, they indicate that research has certainly moved beyond the 1940s and 1950s, with the books discussed here addressing the 1960s, the decades through 1989, or even the end of the first post-unification decade. Secondly, they confirm the strength of the SED regime's desire for a monopoly on, and the extent of its efforts to control, the interpretation of policies toward the past. They also provide much support for the view that the GDR failed to address the legacies of Nazism and especially the persecution of the Jews. Indeed, they identify not only the regime's pragmatic failure to punish major and minor Nazi criminals, to provide restitution to Jewish victims, and to reflect critically on the Nazi past, but also its own antisemitism and desire to hold on to "Aryanized" property. They offer substantial support to the damning interpretation outlined at the outset. However, third, all three books also suggest, if less emphatically, that a monolithic regime-centered interpretation is insufficient. To varying degrees, they indicate the existence of alternative, dissenting discourses or of internal nuances within the regime. Nevertheless, these remain marginal to the authors' overall interpretations. Such alternative views, like those from below, could be given more weight, as could their development after 1989. Fourth, in small ways, the three books also point to the substantive accuracy or the personal legitimacy of certain aspects even of official approaches to the past or its legacy, such as accounts of IG Farben's role at Auschwitz or the tainted pasts of Federal Republican elites, which are often overlooked in critiques of the regime's "instrumentalization" of the past. Fifth, although the authors make some effort to understand GDR policies and practices on their own terms, they still view the GDR from outside, from the perspective of the Federal Republic, which features not only as the most obvious and necessary point of comparison, but often also as the authorial locus, as indicated by Schmid's references to "here" (meaning the FRG) and "there" (meaning the GDR). Sixth, they indicate that the challenge of Beziehungsgeschichte is being taken up, albeit unevenly. Considerable attention is paid to the impact of western developments on the East, but considerably less to influences in the other direction. Moreover, it is noteworthy that separate monographs have recently been published, in one case even by the same author, on the comparable subject in the West; synthetic studies of East and West are the exception. Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject matter, moral and normative preoccupations remain and, although the books are by no means uncritical of developments there, the Federal Republic (of the late 1980s or later) still features as the interpretative and evaluative norm. In short, progress has been made, but we are still some way from historicization.

Notes

[1]. For a more recent rehearsal of the standard critique, see Manfred Agethen, Eckhard Jesse, and Ehrhardt Neubert, eds., Der missbrauchte Antifaschismus: DDR-Staatsdoktrin und Lebenslüge der deutschen Linken (Freiburg: Herder, 2002). For a critical discussion of post-Wende debate about East German antifascism, see Robert Erlinghagen, Die Diskussion um den Begriff des Antifaschismus seit 1989/90 (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1997). For a discussion of the handling of antifascism and related matters by federal politicians and their allied scholars in the context of "working through" the East German past, see Andrew H. Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 161-193.

[2]. For a more sophisticated version of this narrative, see Jeffrey Herf, "Legacies of Divided Memory and the Berlin Republic," in Germany at Fifty-Five: Berlin ist nicht Bonn?, ed. James Sperling (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 83-111.

[3]. See Jürgen Danyel, "DDR-Antifaschismus: Rückblick auf zehn Jahre Diskussion, offene Fragen und Forschungsperspektiven," in Vielstimmiges Schweigen: Neue Studien zum DDR-Antifaschismus, eds. Annette Leo and Peter Reif-Spirek (Berlin: Metropol, 2001), 7-19.

[4]. See Alan Steinweis, "Review of Pendas, Devin O., The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963-1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law," H-German, H-Net Reviews. December, 2006. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12646 .

[5]. Andreas Hilger, "'Die Gerechtigkeit nehme ihren Lauf'? Die Bestrafung deutsche Kriegs- und Gewaltverbrecher in der Sowjetunion und der SBZ/DDR," in Transnationale Vergangenheitspolitik: Der Umgang mit deutschen Kriegsverbrechern in Europa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 180-246, here p. 215.

[6]. Harald Schmid, Erinnern an den "Tag der Schuld": Das Novemberpogrom von 1938 in der deutschen Geschichtspolitik (Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz, 2001).

[7]. Jürgen Lillteicher, Raub, Recht und Restitution: Die Rückerstattung jüdischen Eigentums in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007). See Berthold Unfried, "Review of Lillteicher, Jürgen, Raub, Recht und Restitution: Die Rückerstattung jüdischen Eigentums in der frühen Bundesrepublik and Spannuth, Jan Philipp, Rückerstattung Ost: Der Umgang der DDR mit dem 'arisierten' und enteigneten Eigentum der Juden und die Gestaltung der Rückerstattung im wiedervereinigten Deutschland," H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22008 .

Books:

Christian Dirks. "Die Verbrechen der anderen": Auschwitz und der Auschwitz-Prozess der DDR. Das Verfahren gegen den KZ-Arzt Dr. Horst Fischer. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2005. 408 pp. EUR 42.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-71363-6.

Harald Schmid. Antifaschismus und Judenverfolgung: Die "Reichskristallnacht" als politischer Gedenktag in der DDR. Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung Berichte und Studien. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2004. 153 pp. EUR 16.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89971-146-2.

Jan Philipp Spannuth. Rückerstattung Ost: Der Umgang der DDR mit dem "arisierten" und enteigneten Eigentum der Juden und die Gestaltung der Rückerstattung im wiedervereinigten Deutschland. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2007. 255 pp. EUR 27.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-656-0.

Reviewed by Andrew Beattie (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales [Sydney])
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Source: H-Net
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24456

"Les Soviétiques face à la Shoah": une exposition sans précédent

Le Mémorial de la Shoah présente actuellement une exposition qui devrait faire date. En effet, sous l'impulsion de plusieurs historiens, dont Alexandre Sumpf, membre junior de l'IUF et spécialiste de l'histoire de la Russie (et de l'URSS, ainsi que de l'Europe centrale et orientale) et du cinéma soviétique, il nous est donné cette année la possibilité de repenser notre représentation de la Solution finale dans ses diverses modalités.

(Rappelons que le Mémorial de la Shoah est un endroit exceptionnel, atypique. Né pendant la guerre dans la clandestinité afin d'établir un premier fonds d'archives, s'étant toujours tenu à bonne et prudente distance de l'Etat et des instances religieuses, au risque de faire de sa singularité une solitude, détenteur de documents sur le rôle du régime de Vichy dans l'extermination des Juifs qu'il ne pouvait dévoiler sans risque tant que la France ne reconnaissait pas publiquement sa responsabilité nationale et étatique dans le génocide, il est devenu un lieu plus qu'actif après la montée du révisionnisme et du négationnisme dans les années 90. Et l'exposition qui l'habite cette année est un événement.)

Intitulé "Filmer la guerre - Les Soviétiques face à la Shoah (1941-1946)" et se tenant depuis janvier jusqu'au dimanche 27 septembre 2015, ce parcours filmique et réflexif permet d'aller au-delà des images, fixes ou animées, qui nous permettent, dans le noir et le blanc d'une abomination censée lointaine, d'appréhender l'ampleur du génocide dans son quotidien. L'horreur a été filmée, par les bourreaux, mais aussi par ceux qui les ont vaincus. Et chacun eut, lors de cet acte "documentaire", des motivations politiques et historiques qu'il convient d'interroger. Les Soviétiques ont beaucoup filmé la grande guerre, et beaucoup filmé aussi les camps, qu'ils ont "libérés" – intervenant parfois au en pleine opération 1005 (opération nazie visant à effacer les traces de la solution finale). Ce qu'ils ont filmé, ils l'ont montré au monde, et très tôt. Au temps pour le fort peu cocasse "nous ne savions pas"…

Certaines séquences sont connues, d'autres moins, quelques-unes montrées au Mémorial sont inédites, et insoutenables, écartées des montages finaux mais sauvegardées dans diverses archives. Et c'est là tout le travail de Sumpf et de son équipe: trier, expliquer, commenter, mettre en perspective. Que voit-on de la Shoah? Qu'a-t-on montré? A qui? Quand? Qui a vu? Qui a vu quoi? Dans quel but? Qui savait? Qu'est-ce qui a été filmé et montré? Filmé et écarté ? Pourquoi? Comment? Quels étaient les opérateurs? Qui montait ces films? Qu'en disait la presse, l'opinion internationale? Ecrans, panneaux et ouvrages forment ici un triptyque rigoureux pour dire comment la Shoah fut présentée au monde – les Soviétiques étant les seuls à vouloir filmer le procès de Nuremberg, un procès qui motiva souvent le tournage des images de charniers, de fosses, de camps – images montées au point d'en faire de véritables films et pas seulement des séquences d'actualités, images capturées et sauvées par des cinéastes comme Roman Karmen, pendant que la France régalait son innocent public avec Ils étaient neuf célibataires de Guitry.

Quand les images sont insoutenables, il est plus que jamais urgent d'apprendre à en déchiffrer les complexes vibrations. Ce qui est filmé l'est pour certaines raisons. L'extermination des Juifs, gravée dans la chair brutale d'une guerre mondiale, fut amplement documentée par les Soviétiques qui n'étaient pourtant pas hermétique à l'antisémitisme. Mais contrairement aux Américains et aux Occidentaux, et quoi qu'on pense de leur génie de la propagande, leur traitement de ces images effroyables se révéla plus frontal, sans doute sur l'impulsion du vertovisme, et malgré le double discours de Molotov. Une salle est par ailleurs consacrée à la délicate question de la judéité des victimes, et à son traitement par l'image. Autant dire que cette exposition approche et affronte tous les points sensibles de l'holocauste.

Je résume. Il fait beau, les terrasses sont pleines, les vacances approchent, on vit apparemment dans un pays en paix. L'année a néanmoins commencé dans le sang. Raison de plus pour passer deux bonnes heures au Mémorial de la Shoah.
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Mémorial de la Shoah
17 rue Geoffroy l’Asnier
75004 Paris

Filmer la guerre - Les Soviétiques face à la Shoah (1941-1946) - Du vendredi 9 janvier 2015 au dimanche 27 septembre 2015

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Source: Memorial de la Shoah/Blog Twardgrace
http://towardgrace.blogspot.com/2015/06/les-sovietiques-face-la-shoah-une.html