Special Issue: Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-Evaluation

Edited by: David Cesarani and Paul A Levine

• Introduction by David Cesarani and Paul A Levine
  Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Toward a Taxonomy of Resources in a 'Bystander' Country – Britain 1933-45 by David Cesarani
  • In recent years, a variety of studies have began to discuss those people who attempted to rescue Jews from the Nazis and their accomplices, focusing on the activity of rescuers in Nazi Germany and wartime Europe. Comparatively little notice has been taken of rescuers who operated from so-called 'bystander' countries, geographically removed from the Third Reich. This article considers the difficulties and dilemmas of rescue work carried out in a liberal democracy. It examines 12 leading, non-Jewish refugee activists working in Britain between 1933 and 1945, and attempts to explain their awareness of the Jewish emergency and their motives for acting in response to it. This article concludes, by creating a taxonomy of rescuers, that the only experiences uniting the sample of 12 are their cosmopolitanism and sense of personal responsibility.
  'Pissing in the Wind'? The Search for Nuance in the Study of Holocaust 'Bystanders' by Tony Kushner
  • After an initial silence which lasted until the 1960s, subsequent historiography on the subject of the liberal democracies/western Allies and the Holocaust has tended to be deeply polarised between apologetic and accusatory camps. This article teases out the ideological and cultural underpinnings of the divided literature and makes a plea for more wide-ranging, contextualised and ultimately more nuanced research on this emotive but important aspect of Holocaust bystander studies.
  Constructing Allied Humanitarian Policy by Meredith Hindley
  • The article explores the question of whether humanitarian intervention was compatible with Allied strategy during the Second World War by comparing the response of the Allies to the Holocaust and the European hunger crisis. Intervening in both crises required the Allies to take action in Nazi-occupied territories and to aid civilians by either sponsoring or permitting others to operate rescue and relief programmes. This article reconstructs Allied humanitarian policy by examining the conditions that generated Allied policies, their effects, and the ability of public opinion to change policymakers' minds. A comparison of the two crises reveals a fundamental contridiction between strategies developed to pursue victory, specifically economic warfare, and the imperative of humanitarian intervention.
  Switzerland, National Socialist Policy, and the Legacy of History by Jacques Picard
  • This article addresses, on the one hand, the relationship between National Socialism's foreign and economic policies, and on the other; Swiss models of behaviour in dealing with Nazi Germany. It also examines post-war explanations of this period in Swiss memory and historiography. The first part of the article recapitulates some aspects of National Socialist policy and economic ideology, in particular the project of a 'Germanised' Europe and a racial 'Greater Germany'. Antisemitism is an important factor in this context. The second part of the article then considers three features of the Swiss state of affairs in terms of how the National Socialist ideology of Lebensraum was perceived: military matters, economic issues and attitudes towards refugees. What emerges is that the state of knowledge concerning these three features varies greatly. Furthermore, after the war, the bearers of responsibility in Switzerland found themselves confronted by the Swiss relationship to National Socialist cimes, the nature of which was a question not only of politics, but also of such values as human rights.
  The Lost Honour of the Bystanders? The Case of Jewish Emissaries in Switzerland by Raya Cohen
  • The prevailing emphasis placed on the historiography of the bystanders to the Holocaust on the cognitive aspect of internalizing an unprecedented truth, and the exclusive emphasis placed on the rescue of life, tends to reflect the point of view of the heirs of both victors and survivors, but not necessarily the point of view of those who were 'drowned'. Through the example of Jewish emissaries stationed in Switzerland I would like to suggest a different view of bystanders, one modelled by those who have engaged themselves to help the Jews of Europe during the war at a time when most of the European Jewry was still alive. Those bystanders, many of whom worked against the orders of their superiors, represent a different model of bystander, rooted in both, the model link then existing between morals and politics and the desperate cries of the victims whom they were willing to hear.
  'The War is Over – Now You Can Go Home!' Jewish Refugees and the Swedish Labour Market in the Shadow of the Holocaust by Sven Nordlund
  • How many Jewish refugees entered Sweden in the late 1930s and what happened to them? What were their experiences of the Swedish labour market? What kind of reactions did the refugees encounter and provoke in Sweden? How did the Swedish economy and authorities react to the process of 'aryanism'? These are some of the questions addressed in this article, which also considers why the Swedes have taken so long to begin discussing their bystander role, behaviour and attitudes towards the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the beginning of the Second World War.
  A Study of Antisemitic Attitudes Within Sweden's Wartime Utlänningsbyrån by Karin Kvist
  • This article examines antisemitic attitudes within Sweden's wartime Utlänningsbyrån (Foreigners' Bureau). The Bureau was important in determining Sweden's response to Jews seeking refuge, and a closer examination of attitudes prevailing within the Utlänningsbyrån therefore helps to address the significance of antisemitic attitudes in determining the nation's response to Nazi German policy. In common with all other countries, Sweden's response passed through several phases and, as analysed elsewhere, Sweden's general response to the plight of the Jews changed only in the autumn of 1942, when the 'Final Solution' reached Norway. The Utlänningsbyrån's response during these years was influenced by a doubt that, throughout the 1930s, antisemitic attitudes informed the decisions of some officials.
  Attitudes and Action: Comparing the Responses of Mid-level Bureaucrats to the Holocaust by Paul A Levine
  • This article explores the 'bystander' in Holocaust history by comparing the response to the genocide of the Jews from three countries ordinarily grouped together in that category of Holocaust historiography: the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden. The first two were of course warring belligerents while Sweden was de jure, if not de facto, neutral during the Second World War. The article compares not the top leadership of the three nations, but rather sub-Cabinet level officials serving in the respective foreign ministries. This emphasis is justified, as is the comparative point of departure, because existing scholarship demonstrates that in these countries much of the response to Germany's perspection and extermination of European Jewry was formulated at that level, and then implemented. Emphasis is placed on detailing Sweden's response because its case is far less well known than that of the other two. Among the questions explored is how, when and why a policy response so similar in those countries through many of the Nazi years then diverged. Both the practical and moral importance of conscious choices made by the officials involved, from what is generally thought to be the 'bystander' position, is also explored.
  Folke Bernadotte and the White Buses by Sune Persson
  • The Swedish Red Cross expedition to the German concentration camps in March-April 1945 was the largest rescue effort inside Germany during World War II. By a conservative estimate, over 17,000 prisoners were transported via Denmark to Sweden up until 4 May 1945. This expedition, though formally a Red Cross detachment led by Count Folke Bernadotte af Wisborg, Vise-President of the Swedish Red Cross, was in reality a Swedish Army detachment whose costs were covered by the Swedish Government. All vehicles were painted white so that they should be easily distinguishable from German vehicles, especially from the air, and so are known as 'the White Buses'. Count Bernadotte arrived in Berlin on 16 February 1945, for political negotiations that included four meetings with Neinrich Himmler. Bernadotte's original instructions had been to intervene for Scandinavian prisoners in Germany, and one controversy about his mission has been his relations to the Jews. But on 26 March, Bernadotte received new instructions from the Swedish Foreign Office, extending his mandate to non-Scandinavians and to 'the transfer to Sweden of a number of Jews'. On 21 April, Himmler also gave his consent to the Swedish Red Cross to transport women of all nationalities out of Ravensbrück camp. Some 3,000 women were brought out from Ravensbrück by the white buses, and, with an entire German train made available, some 4,000 more female prisoners were transported from Ravensbrück to Denmark and onwards to Sweden. The accusations against Bernadotte to the effect that he refused to save Jews from the concentration camps are obvious lies. Roughly half of the 7,000 women saved from Ravensbrück seem to have been Jewish. Hillel Storch, the World Jewish Congress representative in Stockholm, estimated that the Swedish Red Cross saved at least 5,000 Jews before the end of the war.
  Conclusion by David Cesarani and Paul A Levine
  Book Reviews
  Index to Volume 9