2011 Workshop
The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: Race, Gender, and Property - The Experience of Nazi Occupation at the Local Level
Friday, APRIL 1, 2011, 1:00-8:00 pm
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Institute for Arts & Humanities • Hyde Hall
Aims and Agenda
As the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union approaches, it is appropriate to reexamine some of the most devastating consequences of that event, including the murder of 1.5 million Jews alongside the implementation of other lethal policies to realize the Nazi dream of German Lebensraum in the East. Since the collapse of Communism in 1989-90, six major scholarly developments have enhanced our understanding of the Holocaust. First, key regional studies based on newly-opened archives have exponentially expanded our knowledge of Nazi occupation policies and the destruction of the Jews in hitherto little-studied parts of Eastern Europe. The works of Wendy Lower (the Zhytomyr region of the Ukraine), Dieter Pohl and Thomas Sandkühler (Eastern Galicia), Christian Gerlach (Belarus), Anton Weiss-Wendt (Estonia), Andrew Erzergailis (Latvia), and Christoph Dieckmann (Lithuania) are key scholarly contributions in this regard. Second, key institutions for implementing Nazi policies (the Wehrmacht, the Order Police, native auxiliary police, the civil service, economic experts) have received intensified study that has vastly expanded our understanding of the complex network of perpetrators beyond the traditional focus on the SS and Einsatzgruppen. Third, the wave of restitution cases in the late 1990s has increased our awareness of the pervasive scope and corrupting impact of property confiscation, theft, and redistribution as hitherto understudied aspects of the Holocaust. Fourth, the Holocaust in Eastern Europe is increasingly seen in a broader framework than a simple German assault on Soviet Jews that began in June 1941. The complex background of multi-ethnic relations under the impact of state-building in the interwar period and Soviet “revolution from above” in 1940-41 in the “zone of fracture” conceded to Stalin by Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 has deepened our understanding of the extremely “combustible” situation to which the Nazi invasion “lit the match” in 1941. Jan Gross’ study of Jedwabne and Simon Redlich’s of Brezanzy have demonstrated the importance of working at the local level and understanding the tragic events of 1941-44 within both the complex multi-ethnic and pre-1941 contexts. Fifth, scholars have increasingly understood the Nazi attempt to murder the Jews of Europe not only as a priority program in its own right but also as the first step in realizing the much wider vision of a total demographic revolution of such extraordinary magnitude (as outlined in the Generalplan Ost) that under the conditions of German victory would have claimed the lives of 30-40 million additional victims. Sixth, the study of the perpetrators has gained both breadth and depth. This involves categories of Germans that extend from the core of Nazi faithful (Michael Wildt’s “unbound generation) to the conscripted rank-and-file--“ordinary men”--of army and reserve police units and to newly-implicated professions (beyond the already implicated doctors and lawyers, now also engineers, accountants, welfare workers, and various academics—including some historians). It also involves non-German participants, not only outright collaborators but also many people previously seen as “bystanders” who are now better understood as complicit and parasitical beneficiaries in subtle ways.
The advance in Holocaust studies in the past two decades has been substantial, indeed noteworthy, but there is still important work to be done. While pioneering regional studies of the German occupation have filled in what were formerly vast blank spots, scholars are just now beginning the transition from the regional to the local, from policy decision-making and implementation to the human experience of the consequences and the human faces of the perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. The interplay of the German occupiers with local populations, the participation of women in the German occupation, and the insidious effects of property redistribution are topics that promise to illuminate the practice and experience of the German occupation in important ways. The keynote speech of Dr. Wendy Lower and the papers of the three presenters all promise to broaden and challenge our understanding of the day-to-day experience of occupation and the Holocaust in the territories of Eastern Europe seized by Nazi Germany in 1941.
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2011
1:00 pm“Extraordinary Women: Nazi Colonizers and Holocaust Perpetrators in the East”
Today when we speak of the crimes of the Third Reich, we are mostly referring to the “ordinary men” who committed them. Drawing from wartime documents, postwar trials, private letters, diaries and interviews, this lecture focuses on outstanding cases of women who participated in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Some worked alongside male colleagues in ghetto liquidations and mass shootings of Polish and Ukrainian Jews. Others committed brutal acts on their own. In the colonial outposts of the Nazi East, German women were an integral part of the society of perpetrators. They enjoyed privileges as members of the new ruling elite, and they possessed extreme power over the lives of Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. What some of these women chose to do with this new found power during the war and how they were judged in courts after the war are the main themes of this presentation.
Discussion2:45 pm: Coffee Break
PANEL: Race, Gender, and Property - The Experience of Nazi Occupation at the Local Level
3:00 pm“Sex behind the Lines: Relationships between the Occupiers and Occupied in the Soviet Union, 1941-1944”
In May 1960, a former German soldier who had been stationed in Belarus was interrogated regarding his participation in the murder of 10,000 Jews in the town of Slonim. During his testimony, he stated, “in the course of the morning [of the Aktion], I went into the town and to see about my Jewish girlfriend, Ida, because I was afraid she had been caught up in the Aktion. This was, however, not the case.” Unfortunately, the police did not follow up on this statement and so the details of this relationship remain unclear. The relationships between Jews, Belarussians, and Germans in occupied Belarus were incredibly complicated and reflected a myriad of fault lines based on gender, nationality, and organization. Occupying soldiers and administrators did not adhere to the strict racial divisions mandated by Nazi policy but instead engaged in a variety of different relationships with the local population (and with each other). How, for example, did an Army captain charged with executing the Jewish population maintain a Jewish “girlfriend”? Why did a sergeant refuse to save his “girlfriend” from an impending execution? What was the position of German women working in administrative positions in the East? These are a few of the issues that this paper seeks to explore. Relying on post-war interrogations, survivor testimony, and military documents, I hope to examine some of the key elements of relationships between Wehrmacht, SS, German administrators, and local Jewish and non-Jewish women in an attempt to better understand the dynamics of these understudied relationships.
Comment and Moderation: Claudia Koonz (Duke University)4:00 pm: Coffee Break
4:15 pm“’I always aspired to deploy to the East’: Women, SS, ‘Volksdeutsche’ Policy, and the Holocaust in Ukraine, 1941-1944”
In fall 1941, Sonderkommando R, a special detachment of the SS-run Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, fielded dozens of German women to Romanian-occupied southern Ukraine. After Sonderkommando R recruited local “Volksdeutsche” employees, women accounted for perhaps a quarter of the unit’s strength. Performing a spectrum of tasks that ranged from providing domestic services to administering key programs aimed at mobilizing the region’s 130,000 “Volksdeutsche” for the National Socialist cause, both German and indigenous women assisted the Nazi project in southern Ukraine. During the winter of 1941-1942, the SS responded to Romanian-orchestrated Jewish deportations to the region by expanding Sonderkommando R’s duties to include mass murder. Sonderkommando R’s female staff members facilitated the unit’s evolution into a death squad by assuming an array of new duties that ranged from racially classifying the local population, to overseeing the distribution of stolen Jewish property, to assisting their male accomplices in mass shooting operations. Far from simply witnessing the Holocaust, Sonderkommando R’s female employees played a pivotal role in its new murderous mission. Using wartime documents and postwar investigative records generated by West German and Soviet authorities, this paper recovers the participation of Sonderkommando R’s female subordinates in the Holocaust in southern Ukraine and analyzes how their actions not only contributed to, but also shaped genocide in the region.
Comment and Moderation: Karl Schleunes (UNC Greensboro)5:15 pm: Coffee Break
5:30 pm“Cashing In: The Inventory and Sale of Stolen Jewish Property in German-Occupied Vitebsk”
Vitebsk, located in the eastern Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, fell to the Wehrmacht on 11 July 1941. The city lay within the zone of military authority once the occupied regions of the Soviet Union were determined. By the end of 1941, Einsatzgruppen execution squads had murdered most of Vitebsk’s Jews. The Germans also had set up a municipal government staffed largely by Belorussian collaborators. In early 1942, municipal officials in Vitebsk prepared detailed inventories of stolen Jewish property, which included small items such as dishes and furniture along with houses. Individual buyers bought many of the goods. The sale extended well into 1943. This paper is based on hundreds of pages of captured property inventories and local occupation documents housed at the Belarusian State Archives branch in Vitebsk. My analysis of these records seeks to answer the following questions: Who participated in the inventory process in Vitebsk? How was the German military authority involved? Was any of the stolen Jewish property seized and shipped back to Germany, so often the case in German-occupied Europe? Who bought the items locally? What happened to the proceeds from the sales? How does the process in Vitebsk compare with similar Jewish property inventories in Mogilev (also under German military authority) and Latvia? This research is drawn from my dissertation project, “Born in the Borderlands: Jewish Youth and Their Response to Oppression and Genocide, 1933–1948,” which compares and analyzes how Jewish youth in Soviet Vitebsk and Polish Grodno understood contemporary events unfolding at home and across Europe, and how that interpretation influenced their response to oppression and genocide.
Comment and Moderation: Jürgen Matthäus (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)6:30 pm: Coffee Break
6:45 pmFINAL ROUNDTABLE: Old Questions - New Trends in the Research on the Holocaust
7:45 pm
Reception
Co-conveners:
Main organizer and contact:
Workshop Flyer as PDF • Bios of the Presenters
Organized by the 2010/11 Steering Committee of the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series.