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In addition to a recap of the book’s trajectory chapter seven discusses both continuities and discontinuities in Jewish patterns of cinema-going and film reception in the post-war period. In regard to the former, the continuance of screenings of Jewish interest films, special one-off screenings as charity fundraisers and the use of cinemas for Jewish communal activities in new Jewish neighbourhoods are recorded. However, it is also affirmed that the post-war period took on a new singularity. In the aftermath of the holocaust Jewish life in Britain adopted an introverted character—an event registered at the level of film reception in the Jewish press’s response to both Jewish interest films and the exhibition of newsreel footage of the liberation of concentration camps.

The German decision to besiege rather than conquer Leningrad, and the Soviet decision to hold the city at any cost, resulted in one of the greatest human catastrophes of the Second World War, with one million civilians falling victim to starvation. Living conditions during the blockade have been compared to those in Nazi concentration camps. Not only the scale of death and deprivation, but also the sense of alienation, exposure and social and psychological disintegration justify the comparison. A major difference, however, lies in the fact that the experience in concentration camps was spatially separated from the habitual living spaces of inmates, while the siege brought life-changing experiences into public streets and private homes. For surviving Leningraders, site and event remained bound to each other, creating a concentration of traumatic memory. Yet the story that is told in Soviet and post-Soviet literature, historiography and collections of survivors’ memoirs is not of disintegration and trauma; it is a coherent story of a critical moment heroically mastered. Drawing on newly identified survivor testimony, this chapter argues that while the persistence of ‘old’ patterns might partly be due to a trusted habit, it also testifies to the conflicting needs of survivors—to break the officially imposed silence, to see their siege experience recognised by the state and society, to make sense of the past, and to protect themselves from threatening memories.

At the end of World War I, amid continuing paranoia about Germans in Australia, Officer of the Guard Lieutenant Edmond Samuels published an illustrated diary of his tour of duty to three German “concentration camps” in New South Wales (see Fig. 4.1) (Samuels 1919: 7, 31–32). Of the old walled gaol at Trial Bay that a former prison warder in the 1890s called a “half purgatory, half paradise” (in Ramsland 1996: 112–113) where elite Germanic civilian and military “prisoners of war” were interned from 1915 to 1918, Samuels (1919: 30–32) emphasized the “consideration and care” afforded at one of the “most comfortable” internment camps in the world in one of Australia’s “most picturesque spots.” Inside the prison walls POWs smoked, drank beer, played cards, and attended theatrical plays and orchestral concerts. Outside they frequented a beach cafe in the continental style and sporting facilities: surfing, fishing, and enjoying the finest tennis courts ever seen. In directing attention to the solicitous manner in which Australian authorities looked to internees’ welfare, Samuels was sending—for the Australian government—a “serious message” to Germany so that Australian POWs received the same treatment from their German captors (RSL 2015: 17). He also articulated one of the “national guiding fictions” (Pretes in White and Frew 2013: 2) that have shaped public consciousness of Trial Bay Gaol from its original construction as a showplace of penal architecture and reform in the colonial era through to its recent gazettal within a national park.

This chapter will explore how memory works in relation to history and representation in the aftermath of any catastrophe that disrupts the linearity of time and the integrity of a community; specifically, for the purpose of this study, the death of millions of Jewish people in concentration camps and ghettos during the Second World War. The Holocaust changed forever mentalities and the way in which humankind perceived and related to history, challenging the very possibility of representation itself as it ushered in an obligation to conceive of memory and the recollection of history differently.

This chapter explores the challenges and opportunities that the SS-Helferinnen and the Nachrichtenhelferinnen faced in their respective places of work. Although there were similarities in work undertaken, the distinct nature of the army and SS resulted in contrasting experiences for the women. For example, while most Nachrichtenhelferinnen had limited contact with Jews, SS-Helferinnen might be sent to provide administration in concentration camps. The chapter concludes with a rare example of a Nachrichtenhelferin who aligned herself with the resistance. Most women, Century shows, became Helferinnen because of the opportunities afforded to them; their contribution to the German war effort was an afterthought.

As the secretaries gained an increased awareness of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities, each was presented with an uncomfortable choice: to do nothing, to support the regime or to resist. Through individual case studies, this chapter assesses the actions that some of these women chose to take, and the consequences – or lack thereof – that faced them. Century demonstrates that while a tiny minority took limited action, others capitalised on the opportunity to rise through the ranks. Most women, however, chose to take no action and continued with their work with apparent indifference.

In the spring of 2013 the Dutch newspaper Het Parool published an article that had a significant impact. It reported that immediately after World War II, when Jewish citizens returned to Amsterdam from concentration camps or from hiding, the municipal authorities of the time had levied fines on them for ground lease fees that had remained unpaid during the war. The revelation that the civil administration had acted in this way sparked a debate on whether the treatment of returning Jewish citizens in Amsterdam had been just and morally acceptable. At the very start of the debate, the mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, stated that he would pay back every penny that could be considered unjustly levied. With this decision, a new chapter has been added to the policies of restitution in the Netherlands: it is the first time that a local government has accepted financial responsibility for the spoliation of the Dutch Jews.

The Diary of Diana Budisavljevic was published in Zagreb in 2004. Through diary entries made from 23 October 1941 to 13 August 1945, the Austrian Diana Budisavljevic, wife of a prominent Zagreb doctor, Julije Budisavljevic, describes her personal commitment and the involvement of her co-workers in organizing and providing assistance to Serbian Orthodox women and children detained in the Ustasa concentration camps in an operation called the “Action of Diana Budisavljevic”. The diary is a remarkable historical document of a short but brutal period in Croatian history, written from the perspective of a woman who found the strength and courage to think freely, act freely, and provide an active civil resistance to the fascist Ustasa regime in extremely difficult war conditions. Her resistance has all the characteristics of being heroic and progressive, and it should have a place in Croatia’s positive historical heritage.

In September 1944, the larger part of Belgium was liberated from what had been four years of German occupation. However, the end of the occupation did not immediately put an end to the tragedy of war. Shortly after the liberation, prisoners of war and political prisoners that had survived the concentration camps returned, revealing the true magnitude and full impact of National Socialism and the judeocide

We have already seen Morgen’s 1964 testimony about how he found his way to Auschwitz. Customs inspectors discovered clumps of gold that had been shipped from Auschwitz to a private address, and they suspected criminal activity.1 It was no secret that concentration camps harvested gold from the teeth of corpses and sent it to the Reichsbank, but so far as Morgen knew, the corpses were those of inmates who had died of natural causes or legal executions. Seeing the size of the confiscated nuggets, however, Morgen inferred that they must come from 50,000 to 100,000 corpses, which could only be the product of mass murder. So he traveled to Auschwitz—“this little-known Auschwitz, whose location I had to look up with some difficulty”—where he saw the gas chambers and crematoria.

Flicking through the weekly issue of Life magazine on 7 May 1945 — which appeared on the same day that Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, representing the ruined Third Reich, signed the initial military surrender that signalled the end of the Second World War in Europe — readers saw a photo spread many would never forget. Amid reports about baseball and ballet, and advertisements for underwear and perfume, there appeared a dozen explicit photos from recently liberated concentration camps: emaciated survivors in Buchenwald, mountains of decaying bodies in Bergen-Belsen, charred corpses in Gardelegen.1

The introduction provides an overview of the subsequent analysis and a tentative classification of different types of camps, and an identification of the contributions of various academic disciplines to an understanding of camps. It also offers an explanation of the methodology, which is primarily functionalist, focusing on the functions of encampment, but also historical and dialectical in the sense of looking throughout at functional equivalents of encampment. It also introduces the theoretical concept of heteronomy, drawn from Michel Foucault.

Camps play important roles in wars, one being detention of prisoners-of-war whose status is regulated in international humanitarian law. Insurgents and rebels also tend to establish training camps, typically in neighbouring countries. Camp-like facilities such as ‘strategic hamlets’ are also a central element in counter-insurgency warfare, intended to separate the guerrillas from the peasantry, but such arrangements may also be used for social engineering, for example, collectivisation and other attempts to ‘capture’ the ‘uncaptured peasantry’.

Upon entering the permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC, one is transported from the celebrated icons of American democracy to their antithesis. Exiting the elevators that lift the individual out of the present and into past, the visitor is confronted by the horrors of fascism, reflected in the now-infamous life-sized photographic images and film footage1 of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by the American army. Due to the proliferation and familiarity of Holocaust imagery in the present, it is difficult to recall the profound effect of these images when originally released.2 ‘Writers have tried to describe these things but words cannot describe them and, even if they could, there are details too filthy to be printed anywhere’, opined the New York Times Magazine on 6 May1945, articulating a trope of incomprehensibility vis-a-vis representing the Holocaust that would echo for decades to come.3 The shock was such that for many, including most famously Susan Sontag, the photographs became indicative of a turning point in the history of the West, an indication that a ‘limit had been reached’ and a ‘prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany’, experienced.4 An inverse ‘salvation history’ was created and a new epoch proclaimed. But what, exactly, was the content of this revelation? Who would make known its message and from where would the word go out? Such were the questions that, I argue, preoccupied those individuals charged with the development and building of what was to become the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).

When it comes to framing places of terror and disappearance, Germany unfortunately has a wide range of cases to offer. In the intense discussion preceding and framing the building of the central German Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which was dedicated in 2005, an interesting comment came from Jewish historian Marianne Awerbuch. She wrote: ‘The whole country is a monument!’ (Assmann, 2011, p.222). The new monument for the murdered Europeans Jews was built in the centre of Berlin on neutral ground. With her statement Awerbuch wanted to prevent this new site somehow eclipsing, devaluing and displacing the authentic historical sites in the attention and memory of the Germans. A special paragraph concerning the obligation to preserve and care for the former concentration camps, that had been turned into historical sites of memory after the end of the war, had been inscribed into the treaty of unification of the two German states after 1990. This state of affairs, however, in no way demonstrated that ‘the whole country is a monument’. Hundreds and hundreds of less conspicuous sites had been made invisible after 1945, transforming them into nondescript places by deleting the traces of their history. If nobody intervenes, nature has a great capacity for de-historicizing places. ‘I am the grass, let me work’ is the tag line of a poem ‘Grass’ by Carl Sandburg (Sandburg, 2013) about the great battlefields of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In his book Barbed Wire: A Political History Razac (2000) argues that this simple, twisted iron object has been a pivotal invention for situations of war, the marking of territorial borders, and even the demarcation of spaces such as Nazi concentration camps. In Cyprus, this is a piece of metal that runs horizontally from East to West for about 180 kilometers and encloses the demilitarized buffer zone — also known as the Green Line — that has separated the northern and southern areas of the island since 1974. As the quintessential symbol of war, barbed wire looms large in the minds of Greek Cypriots as an icon of the island’s division. For Turkish Cypriots, however, it mostly represents a safety line, enforced by Turkish troops in 1974 in order to separate the two communities.

Several years ago I visited a farm in southern Australia, near my hometown of Hobart, Tasmania. When using the word ‘farm’ I suspect that the first image your brain might conjure up is one of animals roaming in green fields. However, while this farm was surrounded by green fields, the animals being raised there were not allowed the freedom to roam them. In fact, apart from the day when they would be forced into tightly packed crates to be trucked to slaughter, they would never even see daylight. This was a modern meat chicken farm, with the birds raised for one of Australia’s biggest poultry companies.

Some 140,000 Jewish refugees from war-devastated Europe arrived on American shores after the defeat of the Nazis. Generally between the ages of 15 and 35, they spent years in concentration camps, hiding in forests, passing as gentiles in Warsaw or Berlin, or exiled in Russia. Many were the sole survivors of their families, or nearly so (Dinnerstein, 1982). They spoke a variety of different languages—Russian, Polish, German, Greek, Yiddish, and more—and had as many different conceptions of what it meant to be a Jew. What they shared was the experience of destruction, of having their once-familiar worlds ripped apart, and the challenge of reconstituting their lives.

In this chapter, I provide readers with an argumentative, critical genealogical analysis of transatlantic debates that took place as arguers deliberated about the civilians who were moved into “refugee,” “burgher,” “concentration,” or “internment,” camps during the South African (or Anglo-Boer War) fought between 1900 and 1902.3 Somewhere between 42,000 and 50,000 people may have died in the Boer and African camps during this conflict4 and, as I note below, at various times, the Boer commandos in the field, the British commanders-in-chief (Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener), the pro-Boers, the Boer women, and the black Africans (”Kaffirs”)5 were all considered to be culpable parties whose actions led to the formation of the camps. In the same ways that Cuban revolutionaries and Spanish imperialists blamed each other for the horrors of “Weyler’s” camps, the participants in the Boer conflicts were equally convinced that their enemies needed to shoulder the responsibility for the loss of life in the South African camps.

Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939–1948, in which the author ostensibly gives an account of his traumatic experiences as a child in two different concentration camps, was first presented by Eva Koralnik, Wilkomirski’s agent, to the Judischer Verlag, an imprint of the reputable Suhrkamp publishing house. Not long before the book was about to be put on the market, Koralnik received a letter expressing doubts about the truth-value of Wilkomirski’s book. Koralnik immediately contacted Wilkomirski, including some of the latter’s close friends, his therapist and specialists in Holocaust history. After a thorough inquiry, Koralnik convinced herself and the editor of Suhrkamp that Wilkomirski was telling the truth. The book was released in 1995, winning immediate acclaim as a major testimony to the horrors of the Lager, both by Jewish communities and by critics all over the world, not least because it was at the time the only testimony from a child having survived an extermination camp.1 Wilkomirski received several prestigious awards, and was invited to address conferences about his book and his childhood experiences.

Haris Pasovic´ asserts that the cultural production in Sarajevo ‘was not some unique feature of Sarajevans and that it would have happened in other places since this is a human reaction to dehumanized circumstances. Primarily, it is an anthropological dimension rather than a special trait of our people’ (quoted in Diklic´, Teatar u ratnom Sarajevu, p. 205). He points out common traits in the cultural activity of Sarajevo during the war with the recent history of other cities including the Leningrad siege and the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. One might also add the Theresienstadt concentration camp where inmates, most of them highly educated, were given some resources and a certain degree of freedom enabling a form of urban life and activity to flourish under extreme circumstances, until most of the inhabitants got deported to the death-camps. Although the comparison between Nazi concentration camps and the Sarajevo siege is, as Pasovic´ himself admits, limited and problematic for a number of reasons, it is relevant to our attempt to grasp how theatre, performance and overall cultural activity in the besieged city shaped the meaning of being a citizen.

Jean Amery’s autobiographical account of torture at the hands of the Gestapo provides the most striking, if also the most harrowing, example of how the body resurfaces in conscious awareness due to pain and how such experiences often reveal an ambiguity in one’s embodied identity. Amery was an Austrian-born Jew who spent the early years of the Second World War working for the Belgian Resistance. After his arrest in July 1943 he was taken to the Fort Breendonk ‘reception camp’ and tortured before being shipped to a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz.1 The Gestapo shackled his hands behind his back and then raised him by a chain until he was suspended by his hands a metre above the floor. Amery describes in detail his desperate but ultimately futile attempt to prevent the inevitable: the shattering dislocation of his arms from his shoulder joints. His arms were torn from behind and were twisted back over his head. As he remarks dryly, ‘Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist’ (ibid.: 32). As if this were not enough, during all of this the Gestapo officer present horsewhipped him with incredible brutality.

The assassination attempt on Hitler and planned coup of 20 July 1944 was the greatest act of treason accomplished in Nazi Germany. Consequently, alongside the deteriorating war situation, it was the catalyst for the widest implementation of Sippenhaft and has rightly come to symbolize the distinct radicalization of German-on-German terror within the Third Reich. As noted earlier, the 20 July incident had significant ramifications for the infliction of Sippenhaft against other forms of resistance, such as the NKFD and BDO, as well as within the German military in general. Certainly, the arrests of the relatives connected to the plot were initially driven by Himmler and the Gestapo and, with few exceptions, there was little distinction between various families. Senior and junior members of the military, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, wives, adolescent children, infants, uncles, aunts and cousins were all taken into custody due to their relationship to an identified conspirator. The range of victims was matched by the punishments, including imprisonment in police and military prisons, concentration camps, and labour camps,1 to many male relatives being reassigned to penal and punishment battalions.2

As questions of their guilt are very limited, the arrest of children probably best exemplifies the use of Sippenhaft. The concentration and collection of the children associated with 20 July 1944, which will be examined in this chapter, was a unique event in the Third Reich. The arrests of children in the 1933/4 period — keeping in mind the earlier examples that have been uncovered — appear to have been exceptions rather than the rule. More likely, if both parents had been arrested, placement with relatives was the preferred option. However, the radicalization of Sippenhaft saw the children of people with communist or leftist links being murdered or thrown into concentration camps. We have seen examples of this occurring after 1943. This proliferation of terror reached a high point under the aegis of the 20 July 1944 investigation with the creation of the Sippenhaft ‘children’s camp’. As shown in the previous chapter, during early August 1944 the mass arrests of families connected to the conspiracy were still being mercilessly carried out and, as the above quote by Himmler suggests, the children of these conspirators had not been forgotten. More so, they would serve as an especially fearsome instrument of terror.

Among the many side-effects of World War II were changes in the representation of childhood in British literature. During the period between 1945 and the mid-1970s, this was reflected both in children’s literature itself and in the portrayal of pre-adolescent children in books anticipating an adult readership. As more information came out of continental Europe about the horrors of the concentration camps, and relief agencies sought to alleviate the hardship resulting from the devastation of so many cities, there was a universal resolve that carnage like this, which had claimed so many innocent victims, especially young children, must never happen again. Although Britain had not suffered the horrors of enemy occupation, the bomb damage, loss of life, and revelations about atrocities, led politicians, humanitarians, and ordinary people to a consciousness of the depth and scale of human suffering and the potential for disaster that faced the human race, particularly in the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Coupled with stringent post-war austerity (which led people to feel that the war was not yet properly over) and increased tension in Europe between Russia and the West, these factors meant that there was also in some quarters a nostalgia for more care-free times, a feature also reflected in some children’s literature.

The opening of the Nuremberg Trial was widely reported in Finland, as in other countries examined here. Like the reportage from the liberated concentration camps, the Finnish press was not represented on the spot although it had a quota for one journalist. However, the trial was a much-awaited event in Finland. The Belsen Trial (the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others), which had ended on 17 November 1945, was duly reported in Finland, and in part indicated that the interest in Nazi criminality was running high.1

Following the liberation of Western concentration camps, especially Buchenwald (11 April) and Bergen-Belsen (15 April), newspapers in Europe reported a story of cruelty that seemed to surpass every other atrocity story they had told before. This chapter will examine how the liberation news was published in the mainstream British papers. It is now well known that the liberation of the camps hardly helped the British public to comprehend the true nature of the Nazi genocide.1 However, what concerns us here is to go beyond the argument according to which the dominant liberal discourse in Britain was principally responsible for influencing British understanding of the Holocaust. Instead, this chapter will show why it is important to consider not only liberalism, but also nationalism as the key tenet in shaping the press’s attitude to the liberation discourse. Essentially, to what extent the responses to the tragedy were shaped by national experiences of the war in general and different countries’ relationship to Germany in particular will be probed here, as well as in the following two chapters.2 The posing of this question may sound obvious, but because of the strength of the liberal imagination as the dominant explanatory frame, other pressing issues have received less attention.

In his essay The Idea of Europe (2004), originally delivered as a lecture at the Nexus Institute in the Netherlands, George Steiner offers five axioms to define Europe: the coffee house; the landscape on a traversable and human scale; the streets and squares named after statesmen, scientists, artists and writers of the past; our twofold descent from Athens and Jerusalem; and, lastly, that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset, which shadowed the idea and substance of Europe even in its noon hours. This chapter will explore that sense of an ‘epilogue’, which, according to Steiner, was poignantly substantiated by the horror of the concentration camps, and which has proved crucial to a distinctively European self- understanding in the sense that we can no longer believe in the dream of reason that animated the spirit of the Aufklarung.

Ever since the news of the liberated concentration camps had filled the pages of British newspapers, the majority attitude of the press was that Nazi criminality, including the Final Solution, had to be recorded and remembered. Throughout the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies were wrestling with the question of how the unbelievable scenes, exposed by advancing Allied armies who liberated concentration camps, and the criminality of the Nazi regime that had made them possible, should be investigated.

Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Introduction PART I: THE FIRST RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST: THE LIBERATION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS The British Press Responds to the Liberation of the Concentration Camps The Swedish Press and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps The Finnish Press and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps PART II: THE NUREMBERG TRIAL 1945-46 AND THE HOLOCAUST THROUGH PRESS DISCOURSES IN BRITAIN, SWEDEN AND FINLAND Responding to the Nazi Crimes: The British Press and the Nuremberg Trial Victors, Vanquished and Neutrals: The Swedish Press and the Nuremberg Trial The Nuremberg Trial in the Finnish Press Discourse PART III: FROM SUFFERING TO SILENCE: THE PRESS AND HOLOCAUST DISCOURSES, 1946-1950 The Problem of Displaced Jews and the Holocaust The Holocaust, the Founding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli War in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press Forgetting to Remember. The Press Discourse, the Cold War and Conjunctures of Remembrance Conclusions Appendices Notes Bibliography Index

Among the many controversial problems in the history of Yugoslavia during World War Two few issues seem to agitate the minds in Serbia and Croatia as much as the Jasenovac camp, the largest of the concentration camps run by the Ustasa regime in the so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The disagreements concern both the size and the character of the camp: was it primarily an extermination camp, where people were brought in order to be killed, like Auschwitz, or was it rather a labour camp comparable with the Soviet gulag, where the prisoners were set to work and died of exhaustion, malnutrition, and the guards’ generally cruel treatment? Those who adhere to the former view, unsurprisingly, tend to operate with very high death numbers, running from several hundred thousand up to more than a million. The labour camp thesis normally leads to much lower estimates, down to 30–40,000 deaths. A few Croatian extremists have claimed that not more than a few thousand died in Jasenovac.1 The official list of victims published by the Jasenovac memorial centre today includes the names of 72,193 persons, of whom 40,251 are identified as Serbs, 14,750 as Roma, 11,723 as Jews, and 3,583 as Croats.2

After the shock of the ghastly revelations from the liberated concentration camps began to wane in late spring 1945, there was little written on the Nazi genocide in the Swedish press until autumn 1945. As elsewhere, the attention and energies of the newspaper media were directed to covering other tumultuous events of the world. For example, the Swedish press followed closely the developments in its neighbouring countries — not least Finland, which seemed to be on the verge of a Soviet-instigated coup, and therefore caused a lot of anxiety and discussion in the Swedish press. In line with the concept of Nordic Brotherhood, as discussed in Chapter 3, the Swedish press functioned as a channel of publicity for the liberal Finnish press, which was increasingly restricted as to what it could print and say about its mighty neighbour.1

On 6 September 1939, Nazi troops moved into the town of Tomaschow Mazowiecki,1 located within the area of Radom, Poland. The Nazi occupation of the town and surrounding area began with a wave of unprecedented terror. Implemented by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), many Poles, Jews and members of the intelligentsia were either imprisoned, sent to concentration camps, deployed as forced labourers or were simply shot. During the next two years, Nazi racial policy was put into full force with the creation of a ghetto for the Jews of Tomaschow and its neighbouring villages. The last few months of 1942 saw the ghetto ‘cleared’, with surviving Jews being transported to the Nazi death camp of Treblinka. Initially, the Nazis faced fierce resistance from the Polish population, but within a year the ruthless counter-tactics of the Nazis had paid off. However, Polish resistance had not been completely eradicated and soon ‘secret societies were springing up all over the place, like mushrooms after the rain’.2 The Nazis’ genocidal policy had ensured that opposition grew on an unprecedented scale. The Gestapo responded by adopting a ‘hands-on-approach’ to policing in Nazi-occupied Poland by proactively recruiting Polish citizens as paid informers, known as Vertrauensleute (people of confidence). Through its network of paid spies, the Gestapo was able to eliminate partisan groups, but those groups soon mimicked the methods of the Nazi occupiers.

Even a cursory look at memorials dedicated to the same historical event reveals that they reflect the needs and goals of their makers far more than the events to which they are dedicated. This observation has several important implications. First, it is crucial to look carefully at the individuals and groups who initiate memorial projects, as well as at those who see them through to completion, and perhaps even at those who then use them for commemorative purposes. Second, there is a dialectical relationship between the political and cultural context in which a given memorial is created, and the memorial itself. While all memorials reflect the context of their establishment in some ways, most memorials are also designed to affect that context. This suggests, third, that it will be revealing to examine all those memorials in a given political entity, such as West Germany, that were established to commemorate a similar event, such as the persecution and murder of Jews in concentration camps. Such an analysis can reveal much about how West German understandings of the Jewish genocide developed over time and what purposes its commemoration was intended to serve. This chapter examines West German memorials to Jews murdered in concentration camps as reflections of evolving understandings of the Holocaust on the one hand, and as instruments to change commemoration on the other. It begins with a survey of the isolated initiatives to preserve memories of Jewish persecution in the first years after the Second World War, then moves to the emergence of West German nationwide practices of commemoration of Jewish life and death in Nazi Germany in the 1950s and 1960s.

Even before the end of World War II and the liberation of all of the Nazi concentration camps, the camp at Majdanek, Poland, was turned into something of a ‘museum,’ intended to document what had happened there, honor the victims who had perished and stand as a grim reminder to the world of the atrocities that human beings are capable of (Young 1993). Though the Holocaust did not yet have a name, its memory was already invoked in the name of what would become the Holocaust’s greatest mantra: ‘never again.’ In another world region, the city government of Hiroshima, Japan, decided to create a set of memorials to victims of the atomic bomb that was dropped on 6 August 1945. These memorials would serve as ‘reminders of the past and contributions to a future of lasting peace.’1

The Holocaust is the name for a complex of events, actions and experiences that had a global impact historically and an emphatically transnational character. Due to its radical anti-human ideology, geographic scope and bureaucratic ‘perfection’, today it stands out as the paradigmatic genocide in world consciousness. From its very beginning, the social exclusion, contraction and extermination of European Jews was associated with spatial movements. Acts such as expulsion, flight and migration into exile, as well as deportation, the concentration of victims in transit camps and their transfer to sites of exploitation and extinction, implied crossings of many national borders. The Nazi administration was also eager to ‘outsource’ their crimes and to hide them in far-off places. The many languages in the concentration camps, as Primo Levi noted, rendered these places into a ‘perpetual Babel’ (Levi 1996, 38); people from many nations were drawn into the lethal orbit of the Holocaust, which was planned and organized by the Germans and enforced and supported by many other countries. Given the transnational nature of the crime, one that not only pulled together and concentrated millions of victims in the bureaucratic machinery of death, but also unleashed a centrifugal effect of scattering the families of victims across five continents, it is to be expected that this mega-event should find its resonance in transnational memory.

After World War II, the role of the victim in criminal proceedings became an object of interest for academics.1 In the 1960s the importance of providing protection for crime victims was highlighted. Gradually victim support programmes started to emerge. Between 1965 and 1975, during the first wave of the victims’ movements,2 special services for categories of victims such as battered children and survivors of concentration camps were established.

The autumn of 1938 was stormy and violent. All over the world, there was an air of anticipation, an atmosphere also filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Commentators in East and West divined change, disruption and upheaval. In Europe, many people desperately clung on to the hope of ‘peace in our time’ as Nazi Germany had enforced a political union with Austria (Anschluss) and now threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. In November, hundreds of synagogues and the shops and homes of thousands of Jewish people in Germany were burnt to the ground in murderous riots orchestrated by the Nazi regime. In the same year, the concentration camps Mauthausen and Neuengamme were opened. In late September, the notorious ‘Long Island Express’ hurricane struck Connecticut, New York, Long Island and Massachusetts. It damaged or destroyed 57,000 homes and buildings, knocked down 3 billion trees and left a path of devastation in which nearly 700 people lost their lives.

When we speak of Nazi concentration camps we think of mass annihilation, terror, and starvation.1 The image of piles of corpses in Bergen-Belsen and the crematories of Auschwitz has burned itself into our collective memory.2 In the final years of the existence of the vast concentration-camp system in the ‘Third Reich’, the Nazis installed a system of brothels which only prisoners were allowed to attend. It is not surprising that the establishment of such prisoner brothels has for many years been almost completely ignored by historians. Books and movies have referred to brothels for SS guards in which Jewish women were raped,3 but the notion of brothel barracks created for prisoners seems completely absurd. Since the 1990s, various scholars have begun to discover the so-called Sonderbauten (special constructions), which was the SS euphemism for these brothels.4

For a long time in studies of women under National Socialism guards in concentration camps received little attention. At best they were mentioned in separate studies of various concentration camps and satellite camps.1 Recent years have seen a change in this respect, both in research and in the culture of memorials. Today there is an increasing volume of publication on the active involvement of women in National Socialism.2 In this context individual biographies of guards are repeatedly an object of scrutiny,3 although prominence continues to be given to descriptions of particularly spectacular examples, which on the whole prevents an objective examination of the deeds of the guards. The reconstruction of biographies of female guards is nevertheless indispensable, although the focus ought to be placed more on those women who constituted most of the guards and thus had a crucial influence on the prisoners’ lives or their survival.

With these words the German Minister for Development and Economic Cooperation, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, officially apologized on 14 August 2004 in Omahakari, Namibia for the atrocities committed a century earlier by German imperial troops. Hundred years after the genocidal warfare conducted by the Schutztruppe in German South West Africa, in which the German colonial army deliberately killed thousands of Herero and Nama men, women and children; let even more die of thirst in the Omaheke desert; and murdered thousands more by deliberate neglect in concentration camps, the German government officially acknowledged these crimes. To my knowledge it is the first and only apology by a high-ranking member of the government of a former colonial power referring to genocide for colonial crimes. This acknowledgement of historical guilt and the application of the term genocide3 not only changed the landscape of memory in Germany but can also be considered a landmark event in dealing with genocides in the colonial context.4

On 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland started the Second World War. Six years later, an estimated 55 million people had lost their lives on the battlefields, in air raids and concentration camps, and they died of injuries, starvation and epidemics.

Two years ago, as we were planning this book, a story made the headlines. It was featured in all the major newspapers in Western Europe. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and billionaire media magnate, had begun his term as president of the European parliament in Strasbourg with an ill-judged and highly offensive remark. He had rounded accusingly on the German MEP, Martin Schulz, with the suggestion that he should take a part as a guard in a film about Nazi concentration camps. Most of those present were appalled, though Berlusconi beamed broadly after delivering his insult. Berlusconi is renowned for possessing the gift of the gaffe, but this was a comic blunder of enormous proportions. He was widely condemned for his crude national stereotyping and crass moral insensitivity, but he then managed to slip further into the mire by claiming that in his own country, Holocaust jokes have been ‘doing the rounds’ for years because Italians knew how to laugh about ‘that kind of tragedy’. His attempt at damage limitation only succeeded in causing offence further afield, among Italy’s Jewish community and Jewish people around the world. Even in his own country, the newspaper La Stampa pronounced Berlusconi’s remark poisonous, and said: ‘A joke can ruin everything.’

On 26 June 1945, after weeks of silence, Alexander wrote a long and impassioned letter to his wife in which he outlined his views on Nazi medicine and policy. Written the day before he was leaving for Paris to brief the American prosecution about medical war crimes, the letter conveys a sense of finite condemnation about the state of affairs of German medical research and practice: German medical science presented a grim spectacle. Grim for many reasons. First, because it remained essentially static and became comparatively incompetent, and second, because it was drawn into the maelstrom of depravity of which this country reeks — the smell of the concentration camps, the smell of violent death, torture and sufferings of muted victims will not rot of one’s nostrils. Their really depraved pseudoscientific curiosity went so far as to carry out vivisection and similar experiments involving extreme suffering, mutilation and death in human beings, large numbers of human beings, in concentration camps. The evidence is clear cut and admitted; and although one suspected the worst, the reality, as revealed, still surpasses the worst expectations.1

Anne Frank died in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, a victim, in all probability, of the typhus epidemic that was sweeping the camp at that time. In recent years, a number of texts, notably Jon Blair’s documentary Anne Frank Remembered and biographies by Melissa Muller, Mirjam Pressler, and Carol Ann Lee have served as a reminder that Frank’s story continued, and concluded, after the end of her diary. However, The Diary of a Young Girl still occupies a paradoxical position; the exemplary text of the Holocaust, it portrays a life secluded from those events. This is not to deny that the Franks’ situation was an aspect, albeit an unusual one, of what constituted experience of the Holocaust.1 Rather, it is interesting that a text that, as Alvin H. Rosenfeld notes, has become a ‘metonymy’ (p. 243) for the Holocaust necessarily looks at those events awry. As I have suggested, notions of witnessing become complicated when the witness in question is placed in what would appear to be a peripheral situation. In the case of Frank’s diary, the apparent non-inclusion of the more familiarly harrowing aspects of the Holocaust is part of what has contributed to its iconic status. Karein K. Goertz suggests that the diary has functioned as ‘a bearable, collective screen memory’, masking ‘the more widespread experiences of children in ghettos and concentration camps’ (‘Writing’, p. 655), but believes that the continuations of Frank’s story that I have mentioned have served as a corrective to this.

The Kristallnacht pogrom on 9–10 November 1938 struck a savage blow at Jews throughout the Reich. It began with the personal revenge of Herschel Grynspan, whose parents were among the deportees to Zbaszyn, who shot dead Ernst vom Rath, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Paris. This served as a pretext for a state-sponsored orgy of violence against Jews and their property, culminating in a wave of widespread terror and destruction of Jewish property, institutions and places of worship. More disturbing, 91 Jews were killed and more than 30,000 were arrested and sent to concentration camps. On 12 November Goering issued the ‘Regulation for the Elimination of Jews from Economic Life in Germany’ and the ‘Regulation for the Payment of an Expiation Fine by Jews who are German Subjects’, of one billion German marks. The declared goal of Germany’s Jewish policy was now the complete prohibition of any kind of economic activity by Jews, in order to force them into emigrating more quickly.1 German Jews were ordered to register their property and the regulations preventing emigrants from taking anything but a fraction of their possessions became more stringent. Previously, many refugees had managed to finance their own emigration; the great bulk were now practically penniless.2

The nazis are usually presumed to have hindered the development of science by limiting its freedom:1by throwing Jewish and leftist scholars out of their jobs, by imposing ideological dogmas (like the ‘arische Physik’ or the ‘deutsche Mathematik’) and indirectly by causing the isolation of German scholars from the international scientific community. The Minister of Education was considered incompetent and science policy seemed to have fallen into a polycratic chaos.2 The Nazi regime in general was seen as hostile towards science and its politicians as anti-intellectual. From this perspective the majority of German scientists suffered from Nazi policy without playing any active role, so they survived the Swastika without being compromised. According to a widespread (self) image, they retreated into an ivory tower or into non-politicized marginal spheres of science, doing their serious research while only a very few, who mostly did bad or pseudo-science, were involved in Nazi policy. The participation of scientists in crimes such as euthanasia and medical experiments on prisoners in concentration camps is considered a brutal or even perverse exception. What is considered to be problematic is science being involved with politics and being utilized or ‘abused’ by the Nazi politicians. Science in general, however, remained comparatively intact: The major part of science seems to have been apolitical, far away from practice, politics and crimes and therefore easily transferable into another political system.

At the end of this terrible Century, we are still haunted by images of continuing inhumane atrocities committed in many parts of our world. However, in spite of the ubiquity of CNN, the most enduring visual images of our Century remain those of the Holocaust, the attempted Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe and others deemed ‘life unworthy of life’. Robert Abzug has written eloquently about the initial American reactions to the first pictures of the liberated camps in his Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, and some of his conclusions remain unsettling, even today. He writes, in his final chapters, that ‘the image that news makes of reality is ephemeral; the reality itself remains. Piles of dead, sticks staring at the camera, the deep vacant eyes and emaciated body of the survivor multiplied hundreds of thousands of times — there were the fixed images that stunned Americans, and the realities from which they shrank.’

When one talks about physicians and ethical problems in the Nazi concentration camps, the subject usually refers to the violation by the SS doctors of the Hippocratic oath they had taken at the end of their medical studies, their cruel treatment of prisoners, the infamous pseudo-scientific experiments they subjected them to, and the ruthless way they selected millions of innocent people and sent them to their deaths. Indeed, at the Nuremberg medical trial which took place from December 1946 to July 1947,1 twenty Nazi physicians were judged, seven of whom were sentenced to death for their crimes. The trial resulted in what has become known as the Nuremberg Code which outlines certain ethical principles to be respected by the medical profession and which has been termed ‘the most important document in the history of ethics of medical research’.2