Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe , livre ebook

MASS VIOLENCE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE
MASS VIOLENCE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE
Alex J. Kay and David Stahel
Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kay, Alex J., editor. | Stahel, David, editor.
Title: Mass violence in Nazi-occupied Europe / Alex J. Kay and David Stahel.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015120 (print) | LCCN 2018019404 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253036841 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253036803 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253036810 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities. | Violence—Europe—History—20th century. | Europe—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC D804.G4 (ebook) | LCC D804.G4 M354 2018 (print) | DDC 940.53/37—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015120
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Contents
Introduction: Understanding Nazi Mass Violence
Alex J. Kay and David Stahel
Part I. Holocaust
1 Hitler’s Generals in the East and the Holocaust
Johannes Hürter
2 Jews Sent into the Occupied Soviet Territories for Labor Deployment, 1942–1943
Martin Dean
3 Were the Jews of North Africa Included in the Practical Planning for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”?
Dan Michman
Part II. Sinti and Roma
4 “The Definitive Solution to the Gypsy Question”: The Pan-European Genocide of the European Roma
Wolfgang Wippermann
5 Deadly Odyssey: East Prussian Sinti in Białystok, Brest-Litovsk and Auschwitz-Birkenau
Martin Holler
Part III. “Useless Eaters”
6 Soviet Prisoners of War in SS Concentration Camps: Current Knowledge and Research Desiderata
Reinhard Otto and Rolf Keller
7 The Murder of Psychiatric Patients by the SS and the Wehrmacht in Poland and the Soviet Union, Especially in Mogilev, 1939–1945
Ulrike Winkler and Gerrit Hohendorf

Part IV. Wehrmacht
8 Reconceiving Criminality in the German Army on the Eastern Front, 1941–1942
Alex J. Kay and David Stahel
9 Bodily Conquest: Sexual Violence in the Nazi East
Waitman Wade Beorn
Part V. Memorialization
10 The Holocaust in the Occupied USSR and Its Memorialization in Contemporary Russia
Il’ya Al’tman
11 The Baltic Movement to Obfuscate the Holocaust
Dovid Katz
Part VI. History as Comparison
12 Comparing Soviet and Nazi Mass Crimes
Hans-Heinrich Nolte
Selected Bibliography
Index
MASS VIOLENCE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE
Introduction: Understanding Nazi Mass Violence
Alex J. Kay and David Stahel
A FTER MORE THAN seventy years since the collapse of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of World War II in Europe, debates continue to rage, both in scholarly and more popular forums, regarding the extent, scope, context, and uniqueness of Nazi mass violence. Important and innovative recent works have taken a closer look at the relationship between the German conduct of the war in the years 1939 to 1945 and the unleashing of extreme mass violence by the National Socialist regime during this period, especially the key role played by food policy, supply, and shortages. 1 However, research on the most systematic and comprehensive of the Nazi murder campaigns, the Holocaust, continues to be carried out in isolation from research on the other strands of Nazi mass killing. The genocide of European Jewry was indeed unique in many ways, but it was nonetheless one part of a larger whole in the context of the war. A comprehensive, integrative history of Nazi mass killing, addressing not only the Holocaust but also the murder of psychiatric patients, the elimination of the Polish intelligentsia, the starvation of captured Red Army soldiers and the Soviet urban population, the genocide of the Roma, and the brutal antipartisan operations, however, is yet to be written. 2 This volume is not designed to fill that gap, but rather to provide an impetus for future research.
A recent trend among scholars is the use of the concept of “mass violence,” rather than “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “mass crimes,” as an approach that is independent of legal or political implications. 3 The term “mass violence” also allows for the analytical inclusion of acts that extend beyond the actual killing of a single victim group. In line with this thinking, the present volume also encourages a broader and more inclusive approach to addressing Nazi atrocities by focusing on widespread phenomena such as sexual violence, food depravation, or forced labor alongside examples of direct mass killing. It presents new research and analysis by scholars from Germany, Russia, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. This research and analysis is broken down into four areas of mass violence in German-occupied Europe: the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of so-called “useless eaters,” and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Complementing these thematic units are two further segments focusing on the memorialization of the German occupation in Eastern Europe and on the usefulness of a comparative approach in analyzing Nazi mass killing, respectively.
Within this framework, individual chapters in the volume address not only instances of direct, mass killing but also widen the focus to include acts such as forced labor, deportations, imprisonment in camps, systematic plunder, or sexual enslavement, all of which constituted forms of mass violence in German-occupied Europe. The majority of the chapters focus on events in Eastern Europe, above all the occupied Soviet territories, because it was first and foremost here that German rule was saturated in violence, causing horrendous suffering on an unprecedented scale. 4 According to the American historian Peter Fritzsche, in the first six months of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces wiped out one in every five hundred people on the planet. 5 All components of the Nazi complex of mass violence were present in the occupied Soviet territories. Even away from the front line, in cities such as Minsk or Kiev, the everyday violence of German rule soon established itself around a daily routine—a normalization—in which almost nothing was questioned, even as Nazi policy descended into open genocide. 6
***
The last thirty years have seen the Holocaust—the topic of the first thematic unit of this volume, comprising three chapters—become established not only as a subject of research within scholarship on Nazi Germany but also within the wider field of genocide studies. 7 The sixteen-volume source edition Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945 (VEJ) and its English-language pendant The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (PMJ) is—incredibly for an enterprise aimed only at compilation and dissemination rather than analysis and (re)interpretation 8 —the largest single project in the humanities to be funded by the German Research Foundation ( Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft , or DFG), itself Europe’s largest research-sponsoring organization. Eleven of the German-language volumes have so far been published and the first three English-language volumes are in production. 9
Of course, even such large-scale source collections by no means constitute an end to the study of the Holocaust. Indeed, the provision of documents is ongoing and not yet complete. As recently as 2013, the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories between 1941 and 1944, was discovered in upstate New York, 10 while in August 2015, some 6,300 documents relating to the Holocaust in Hungary were found behind a wall in an apartment in Budapest. 11 The most important recent discovery, however, was Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary for the years 1938, 1943, and 1944. Unearthed in 2013 at the Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense in Podolsk, near Moscow, it contains over a thousand pages detailing Himmler’s daily movements, appointments, and even personal commentaries. 12 Nor was this the only recent discovery from the head of the Schutzstaffel (SS). A year later, a collection of Himmler’s private letters, along with personal documents and previously unknown photographs were acquired and authenticated from a private citizen and Holocaust survivor in Israel. 13
The continued discovery of important primary material allows us to enhance the already advanced study of the Holocaust and fill in some of the extant gaps in our knowledge. In light of how sophisticated and differentiated Holocaust research has become, it may come as a surprise that, in contrast to Poland, the Netherlands, or the United States, a professorship for the study of the Holocaust has only very recently been set up for the first time at a German university. The country’s first ever professorship for Holocaust studies was inaugurated at Frankfurt’s Goethe University in May 2017. While the country has multiple academic programs and researchers focusing on the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people, the new chair is the first long-term professorship with a specific focus on the repercussions that have followed the Holocaust through to the present day