At heart, the Holocaust—the mass murder of European Jews that took place in the course of World War II—was a political process originating in National Socialist Germany. It was essentially the result of political-ideological decisions made by the Nazi state leadership, who developed a practice of mass extermination that became increasingly radicalized. The murders were mostly carried out regionally or locally by the SS and the German-controlled police.
But the events of the Holocaust were also part of a social process. Raul Hilberg, the doyen of Holocaust studies, once formulated three basic categories that might apply to those involved, and these have attained wide usage: people might be ‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’ or ‘bystanders’. 1 These categories still have validity as rough differentiators—ultimately the Holocaust entailed one group of people murdering a larger group of ‘others’, while a majority of their contemporaries belonged neither to the first group nor the second. But if we seek to analyse how the persecution and murder of the European Jews became possible, we have to see developments as a social process, and here Hilberg’s three categories do not suffice. In societies where the political order expects citizens to endorse the exclusion of particular groups in the population, there cannot be any completely uninvolved bystanders. The persecution and murder of the European Jews would not have been possible without a multitude of people being somehow implicated.
In recent debates on the issue, the category of ‘bystander’ has, therefore, been shifting quite rapidly to the ‘perpetrator’ side. In Germany, for example, the term ‘perpetrator society’ is gaining ground (especially in the media) to describe the society of the Third Reich. We can observe a similar development in many other European countries, and an even more radical change of paradigms. In the earlier post-war decades, for example, the Dutch, the French and the Poles all chose to present their recent history by casting themselves as victims of German occupation, who, at the same time, put up a resistance to German rule—with a few exceptions dubbed collaborators. But in recent years this picture has changed. Now great numbers of the populations of these countries appear to have been co-perpetrators of the Holocaust, well-informed about the murderous practices that were going on.
However, there is a basic difference between acts of murder (or supportive actions directly leading to murder) and social behaviour that goes no further than contributing to social exclusion. The current de-differentiation of Hilberg’s categories is, therefore, not without its drawbacks. Does it yield a useful solution to our problem of dealing with the various forms of social behaviour that accompanied or contributed to the Holocaust?
Of course it would be possible to replace the term ‘bystander’ with dozens of more subtly differentiated categories, such as ‘beneficiaries’, ‘denouncers’, ‘opportunists’, ‘sympathizers with exclusionary practices’, ‘indifferent spectators’ and ‘helpers’, ‘supporters’ or ‘rescuers’. Undoubtedly these categories would enable us to take a more nuanced approach in the analysis of social behaviour. Yet a possible objection to their use is the static character of all these terms. Under the intense and ever-changing pressures of violence, war and occupation that prevailed in the Nazi era, people’s positions could change from moment to moment: they were seldom fixed. So it seems more appropriate to analyse the complex social processes that influenced their choices than to invent and define ever more static categories. Between 1933 and the immediate post-war years, Europeans were caught up in developments that led to the social exclusion, persecution and wholesale murder of the continent’s Jews. There is much to be said for an analytical perspective that defines those involved as social actors who acted and reacted to these developments in manifold and highly differentiated ways.
In the analysis of social processes, it is helpful to define ‘rule’ as various forms of social practice. This applies to societies under Nazi, fascist or authoritarian rule as much as to others, for even dictatorial regimes cannot simply be reduced to a dualism of rulers and the ruled, the dominators and the dominated. Hence, some decades ago, scholars in the history of everyday life urged that ‘rule’ should be conceptualized as a social process—a dynamic and amorphous field of forces in which various actors stand in relation to one another. 2 In this view of things, the population itself participates actively in the system of rule, and in multifaceted ways. As historians, if we accept rule as a social practice, we do not look for a clear and unambiguous attitude of a society towards its rulers. Rather, we search out and examine the multifarious forms of action and behaviour in the society we are investigating. Through that prism, a whole range of human reactions comes into sight—extending from enthusiastic acceptance, complicity, opportunism, adaptation, acquiescence to self-distancing and resistance. Across this spectrum, hybrid forms of behaviour are more the rule than the exception: compulsion does not exclude consent and pursuing personal interests. Conversely, cooperation can also go hand-in-hand with friction and difference. Moreover, depending on the temporal frame and juncture, one and the same social actor can behave in very different ways in similar situations. Social practice and social processes are especially relevant when we attempt to understand how the persecution of the Jews came about. The Nazis and those allied with them did not persecute the European Jews solely by means of political-administrative measures and the exercise of brutal state force. As well as using these means, they established new social norms, in particular their hierarchy of race, and social models such as the ethnically homogenous ideal of a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (‘national community’) which presupposed the exclusion of ‘undesirable’ minorities. Many of the persecuted Jews in Europe had grown up within a system of norms and values that conferred social status or merit on individuals according to their property, education and achievements. In the Nazi model of society, which gave ‘racial status’ a higher priority, these personal assets had only limited validity for the excluded. They could even be disadvantageous: respected dignitaries who had once belonged to the ruling social strata were often treated especially nastily if—hoping to be accorded some respect for their previous achievements in life—they referred to their former social status. Their world had been turned upside down.
The loss of social position that befell Jews opened up new and attractive opportunities for others, as the places the Jews had held in society were snapped up. Thus, when Jewish physicians and lawyers could no longer practise, non-Jews stepped in to inherit their patients and clients; and when Jewish businessmen were compelled to cease trading, non-Jews took over their companies and customer-bases, acquiring in this way a share in the market and a step upward in economic status. Many of those swept from the social periphery to the centre of power after 1933 savoured this inversion of the traditional social hierarchy with sadistic glee.
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The systematic social exclusion of the Jews in Europe began in Germany after the Nazi rise to power. The complicated process of social exclusion within the German Reich is analysed in the first chapters of this volume. In contrast to the pattern seen in many European countries later occupied by the German Wehrmacht, the isolation, exclusion and eventual persecution of Jews in Germany did not occur suddenly; rather these practices evolved in a gradual, inconsistent and sometimes highly contradictory train of developments extending over more than six years. Social relations between Jews and non-Jews were not immediately ruptured in 1933: many Germans continued to visit Jewish doctors, shop at Jewish stores and engage in economic relations with Jews. The chapters demonstrate what a real problem it was for Jews to interpret the ambivalent behaviour of the non-Jews in their neighbourhoods. This conflicted situation made it even more difficult for Jewish Germans to realize how the tide was moving and to orient themselves amid a changing reality. On occasion, there was even some public objection to the persecution of the Jews, and many German Jews later recalled in their memoirs that they kept up with non-Jewish friends throughout the first years of Nazi rule.
Anna Ullrich analyses such memoirs written by German-Jewish émigrés after they had gone to live in America, and finds in them a remarkable focus on positive encounters with non-Jewish Germans. She argues that the writers wanted to retain a feeling of connection with Germany and the Germans, and that they used the recollection of positive encounters as a strategy to make sense of the shift after 1933. Froukje Demant calls the new social situation Jews found themselves in during the earlier years of Nazi rule an ‘abnormal normality’, and she examines the everyday relations of Jews and non-Jews in the German-Dutch border region up to 1938. The social contacts non-Jews had with Jews there were gradually cut off, essentially because association with Jews could bring stigma, trouble and disadvantage to non-Jews. In many instances, Jews themselves were the ones who broke off contact so as to save their acquaintances difficulty or embarrassment and avoid personal disappointment at their own rejection. This vicious circle doubtless contributed to their gradual isolation. Little can be identified that countered this process and slowed it down.
Stefanie Fischer draws our attention to one counter-element in her analysis of the relations between Jewish cattle-dealers and non-Jewish farmers in the German countryside. These relations depended strongly on mutual economic trust, and neither political pressure nor anti-Semitic agitation could break them for quite a while. Many farmers needed the Jewish cattle-dealers out of economic self-interest. Nevertheless, these farmers could also exploit the situation for their own benefit, and this was one of the reasons why the Jewish cattle-dealers were finally pushed out of the market.
Besides the farmers, many Germans combined the pursuit of personal self-interest with adherence to the ideological goals of the Nazi regime. The ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property, in particular, opened up a range of possibilities through which citizens could enrich themselves. Both profiting from the spoils and falling in with the regime, Germans ‘learned’ in the span of a few short years that Jews did not belong to the national community, the so-called Volksgemeinschaft. Moreover, there was a close link between the gradual acceptance of anti-Jewish norms and the popularity of the Nazi regime—and of Hitler in particular—which peaked in the first years of World War II.
Those German Jews who failed to emigrate in time found it especially difficult to go into hiding and remain undiscovered in a Germany that would no longer tolerate their presence. For nationalist reasons, most Germans felt a basic solidarity with the Nazi regime, and assistance in hiding Jews was not, for them, an act implicitly targeted against a foreign occupier as elsewhere in Europe. Susanna Schrafstetter provides us with a rather more complex picture than we are used to, when she discusses ordinary Germans’ reactions to Jews’ attempts to hide from deportation. The terms ‘rescuer’ and (more effusively) ‘Righteous among the Nations’ imply that active helpers of Jews were always extraordinary, altruistic people. However, a detailed look at stories of survival and rescue very often reveals a complex interchange in which money and valuables might well play a central role in the motivation of helpers. In some extreme cases, the initial rescuer or helper could turn into a denouncer or even murderer when the financial funds of Jews in hiding became exhausted. As a rule, rescue attempts only took place if victimized Jews themselves asked others for help. When they did so, they were entering a chancy web of social processes and interactions.
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The studies that come next in this book deal with developments in countries of Eastern and Central Europe beyond the borders of Germany. In a number of these countries, the social isolation of the Jews had begun before the German occupations and was not initiated under direct German influence. In the wake of the global economic crisis, there was a strong political shift to the right in Europe, and in many states, governments came to power, seeking—like the Nazis—to promote ethnically homogeneous national communities. As a consequence, in these states, the social status of Jews was subjected to certain limitations through special laws and decrees. So a process of anti-Jewish social exclusion had commenced even before the Holocaust. The anti-Jewish laws in Romania and the racial laws in Italy are striking examples of such legislation. It was characteristic of the anti-Jewish climate spreading through Europe that, in early 1939, the Polish government negotiated with the French government, sounding out the possibility of settling Polish Jews in French colonial Madagascar—an idea the Nazi regime itself adopted for a short time, later on.
However, the fundamental conditions for the full-blown persecution of the Jews in Europe were created by German occupation, as German troops took over one country after another. The occupation regimes put in place varied a great deal according to the states involved. Yet there were almost always specific forms of violence and the imposition of anti-Jewish norms to which the population of each occupied country had to adapt and conform. In a number of countries, there were anti-Jewish pogroms in the initial period of occupation, as for example in the Baltic states, in eastern Poland and in Ukraine. These pogroms had their roots in anti-Jewish hatred among the indigenous populations, which had been massively stoked by local perceptions of the preceding Soviet regime of occupation. The German occupiers consciously exploited this anti-Semitic mood in their own plans of action. Thus, in the spring of 1941, the Nazi party’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, wrote in his guidelines for German propaganda in the East that the ‘Jewish Question [could] to a significant degree be solved by giving the population a free hand some time after occupying the country’. 3 Especially in Ukraine, Rosenberg maintained, the ‘Jewish Question’ would ‘move on to extensive pogroms against Jews and killings of communist functionaries’. All the Germans would then have to do would be to mop up, ‘to take care of the remaining oppressors’, by which he meant murdering the remaining Jews and communists.
What was the real situation? Once the war was over, the official line in many European countries was selective recall of a straight dualism existing in the time of enemy occupation. This was a dualism between the occupiers and a stoically resistant population—only spoilt by a few ‘collaborators’ who were branded national traitors. But the reality was far more complex than this. Actual social practice was marked by diverse and multifaceted forms of cooperation between occupiers and the occupied. To apply the concept of ‘collaboration’ to these various forms is problematic, because that term does not cover all forms of cooperation and is imbued with the stigma of treason. People’s motivations for cooperation with the occupiers often sprang from the exact opposite ground: a desire to protect the interests of the population or to safeguard personal and family interests under existing, near-impossible conditions.
The exclusion and persecution of the Jews presupposed that the population in the occupied countries would cooperate, because in many instances the German occupiers did not know who was Jewish and who was not. They depended on the assistance of the locals and these locals’ readiness to distance themselves from the Jewish minority and accept the anti-Jewish norms imposed.
In her article on Belarus, Olga Baranova demonstrates that cooperation between the German occupier and the occupied could take many forms. Though there were few spontaneous pogroms and many Belarusians refused to engage in the murder of Jews, there was often a readiness to participate in different forms of persecution or to provide the Nazis with indirect forms of support. The reasons the author gives are a mixture of traditional anti-Semitism, jealousy, personal grudges, greed, opportunism, a desire for material advantages and a certain anxiety to show loyalty to the occupier.
As we have seen, ideas of an ethnically homogenous nation state had spread in Central and Eastern Europe long before the Holocaust and had contributed to the social isolation of the Jewish minorities who depended on a multi-ethnic social environment. However, not all states and allies of Nazi Germany intended to get rid of their Jewish citizens or join in the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’. Bulgaria was one of the states that opted out: the authorities refused to let Bulgarian Jews be killed. At the same time the idea of a homogenous nation state was one dear to Bulgarians and strongly influenced their attitude towards Jews in the territories their troops had occupied. The Jews living there fell victim to the Holocaust, as is shown in Nadège Ragaru’s article on Macedonia under Bulgarian occupation. In this multi-ethnic region, Jews were thought to be pro-Serb, pro-Greek or pro-Albanian—but not pro-Bulgarian. They were thus regarded as ‘foreign’ to a nation trying to elevate itself in a time of war and mass violence.
Alexander Korb uses the example of Croatia to explain the connection between genocide and civil war...