Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue JHS 16 1-2

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THE HOLOCAUST AND LOCAL HISTORY

• Thomas Kühne & Tom Lawson, Introduction
• Stefanie Fischer, Clashing Gears: Jewish Cattle Traders, Farmers, and Nazis in Conflict 1926–1935.
  • This article seeks to explore how the Nazi policy of excluding Jews from the German economy was challenged in the German countryside by small towns, farmers and Jewish traders. This phenomenon becomes very obvious when we study the cattle dealing business, a predominantly Jewish domain. The essay argues that the antisemitic Nazi policies were threatened in some rural areas by the existing strong business ties between farmers and their Jewish cattle traders. Further, it demonstrates how small towns promoted their cattle markets and how Nazi agitators endangered them with violent attacks against Jewish cattle traders from the late 1920s on.
• Stefan Ionescu, Implementing the Romanization of Employment in 1941 Bucharest: Bureaucratic and Economic Sabotage of the ‘Aryanisation’ of the Romanian Economy
  • In order to create an ideal society based on ethno-nationalism, the Antonescu regime pursued ‘Romanisation’ – a policy of excluding ‘foreigners’, especially Jewish Romanians, from the economic sphere through property seizure and exclusion from employment. In particular, the Romanisation of employment proved to be extremely difficult to implement. The different perspectives on Romanisation and the practical problems it faced created significant tensions and triggered multiple, and often contradictory, responses from various groups of Bucuresteni involved in the process. Despite their different interests and diverging perspectives, one important feature characterised the behaviour of many Bucuresteni involved in the process: the sabotage of Romanisation. This article investigates the history and the motivations for this sabotage, and in doing so complicates the history of economic exclusion which often preceded or accompanied the genocide of the Jews in Eastern Europe.
• Eric C. Steinhart, Family, Fascists, and “Volksdeutsche”: The Bogdanovka Collective Farm and the Holocaust in Southern Ukraine, December 1941
  • This essay contributes to existing research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union by reconstructing the initial crimes of an 18-man ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) militia (Selbstschutz) unit in Transnistria in southern Ukraine. Contextualising Volksdeutsche involvement in the Holocaust within the conflicting genocidal policies of the region’s Romanian and German administrators, it argues that the SS ordered local ethnic Germans to murder Jews because it lacked other manpower. The essay analyses an array of causal explanations for area ethnic German involvement in the Holocaust, including antisemitism and social-psychological factors, and concludes that the specific contours of local German policy provided the SS with exceptional leverage over area Volksdeutsche to pressure them to participate in the Holocaust.
• Waitman Beorn, Genocide in a Small Place: Wehrmacht Complicity in Killing the Jews of Krupki, 1941
  • In the autumn of 1941, German Army units assisted and participated in the mass killings of Jewish men, women, and children throughout modern day Belarus (and other areas of the occupied Soviet Union). Recently, this area of the Holocaust has received increasing attention from historians investigating the roles of antisemitism, organisational culture, group bonding, and the anti-partisan war in the complicity of the German army and in the behaviour of perpetrators. Building upon this more global research, this article seeks to describe the Wehrmacht’s participation in one such killing. What does complicity actually look like on the ground? The Krupki killing offers us the opportunity to explore in detail the actions, decisions, and motivations of one German Army unit as it navigated its participation in the Holocaust collectively and individually. The various influences of antisemitism, decision-making, unit culture, and the anti-partisan war will be evaluated in an attempt to explain Wehrmacht complicity. Finally, this article will situate the events in the small town of Krupki in the larger context of the Nazi genocidal project in the East.
• Raz Segal, Becoming Bystanders: Carpatho-Ruthenians, Jews, and the Politics of Narcissism in Subcarpathian Rus’
  • This article addresses the deterioration of relations in Subcarpathian Rus’ between Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians (the majority population in the region) in the interwar period and during the Holocaust. It analyses a range of archival material and survivors’ accounts through psychological and social psychological theories, mainly the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, in order to understand why and how Carpatho-Ruthenians assumed the role of indifferent bystanders as their Jewish neighbours fell victim to discrimination, persecution, and genocide between 1938 and 1944. The specific nature of collective bystander behaviour is illuminated, highlighting damaged self-image, indifference, envy, and war-related hardness. The analysis recasts terms previously considered self-explanatory such as ‘national awakening’ and ‘antisemitism’, and the specific contexts which shaped the emotions, positions, and relations at the core of group behaviour in Subcarpathian Rus’ are probed.
• Sarah Rosen, Surviving in the Murafa Ghetto: A Case Study of One Ghetto in Transnistria
  • This study examines the case of the Murafa Ghetto in Transnistria, with a focus on the social processes evolving in the ghetto. It distinguishes between deportees from different places in Romania, who came from different backgrounds and cultures, and the local indigenous Jews who lived all their lives in the ghetto, and their different struggles to survive. The central research question concerns the development of social processes among the different populations in Murafa and the influence of the disparity between these populations on the way of life in the ghetto and on the ability of its residents to endure and survive the harsh living conditions. In connection with this issue, the article deals with the role played by the ghetto leadership and the ghetto management style, which were crucial for the survival of the Jewish population in general.
• Joanna Sliwa, Coping with distorted reality – children in the Kraków ghetto
  • This article focuses on one aspect of Jewish children’s lives in the Kraków ghetto in Poland: their responses to Nazi persecution, especially their ways of coping in the ghetto. It argues that children became agents as they devised mechanisms, such as daily routines, friendships, play, participation in secular education, and religious activities that provided them with some semblance of normality. A fine-grained study, it raises issues relevant to the discipline of Holocaust and genocide studies, including Jewish life under Nazi occupation, and what constitutes childhood in times of rampant violence.
• Michaela Soyer, Beyond Warsaw and Lodz: The importance of social ties for coping with Nazi oppression in three smaller Polish ghettos: Piotrkow, Tranow and Lachwa
  • This essay develops a narrative of survival and resistance in three smaller Polish ghettos, Pitrokow, Tarnow and Lachwa. Drawing from archival sources and new interviews, it asserts that residents of the Jewish ghettos were obliged to marshal a full range of creative responses. Survival depended on success as an economic, political and social actor. Evidence for this adaptability supports Yehuda Bauer’s emphasis on ‘amidah’ and confirms his assertion that Holocaust victims did not meet their fate passively. As the survivors from Tarnow and Piotrokow attest, ghetto residents formed strong dyadic social bonds that functioned to guarantee physical and emotional survival. By extending this initial analysis through comparison with Lachwa, one of the few ghettos that saw collective resistance, we can observe how individual survival mechanisms interacted with leadership and community variables. The Jews of Lachwa pursued strategies similar to those seen in Tarnow and Piotrokow. The unique variable at Lachwa which led to broad-based resistance was the structural advantage of a small, easily manageable village which facilitated the transition from individual survival strategies to collective action at a crucial moment.
• Jody R. Manning, The Palimpsest of Memory: Auschwitz and Oswiecim
  • Too often Holocaust memory studies focus on national collective narratives and ignore experiences and processes that shape perceptions at the local level. Through examination of perspectives concerning Auschwitz, this article uses the concept of the palimpsest of memory to present a panoptic view of memory by revealing and returning an often marginalised yet crucial group – those who continually negotiate with the dead in the city of Oswiecim. This theoretical approach provides a constructive framework to understand memory and place that speaks to the larger history of Holocaust memorialisation and the continual effects of genocide upon contemporary society.