Yad Vashem Studies

Yad Vashem Studies XXVII

Yad Vashem Studies XXVII - Table of Contents and Abstracts

Ten years ago, as those who were present will undoubtedly attest, the late Professor Jacob Katz riveted an audience of scholars in Yad Vashem’s auditorium. In his lecture he intricately wove penetrating historical insights regarding the impact of World War I on the history of European Jewry with personal memories of his youth and Bar Mitzvah in Hungary in 1917. As always, the perspicacity of this towering figure of slight frame, who had devoted his energies through much of this century to analyzing the puzzle of modern Jewish history, was remarkable.

Volume 27 of Yad Vashem Studies is dedicated to the memory of Professor Katz. Professor Katz, one of the most important Jewish historians in the twentieth century, passed away in May 1998, shortly after completing the transcript of his last book. This volume opens with his heretofore unpublished lecture, which was the introductory paper at the Yad Vashem conference that began on March 6, 1989.

The eleven articles and five review essays in this volume are divided into three parts: German Jewry under Nazi rule; the reactions of neutral countries to Nazi policies toward the Jews; and new research and thought on a variety of topics.

What was the German-Jewish experience under the Nazis? What were the Jews’ daily lives like? What were their concerns, needs, troubles? Questions such as these are basic to an understanding of the Holocaust, and the current volume includes several contributions relating to German Jewry. There is a growing interest among scholars, including a number of brilliant young German historians, in the dilemmas the Jews faced under Nazi rule and how they attempted to cope with their plight. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum and Wolf Gruner look at the issue of Jews and social welfare in Nazi Germany. Schüler-Springorum has examined the welfare records of the Berlin Jewish community; while Gruner analyzes a variety of social-welfare issues across the Third Reich. The systematic and progressive denial of the basic needs of life for German Jews by local German officials is remarkable for its relentless malice and viciousness. Welfare payments were repeatedly slashed for impoverished families whose breadwinners were incarcerated in concentration camps; milk rations were drastically reduced for Jewish children (lest they grow?); working Jewish mothers returned to their children’s day care centers at the end of a long, hard day of work only to find that their children had been whisked away to the East. These articles may make for very depressing reading, yet shed important new light on hitherto superficially examined aspects of the Holocaust--social welfare and the local communities in Germany.

Four review essays on recently published significant studies round out the discussion of German Jewry under Nazi rule: Daniel Fraenkel’s insightful examination of Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews; Guy Miron’s analysis of Marion Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair; Richard I. Cohen’s observations on Otto Dov Kulka’s annotated book of Reichsvertretung documents, Deutsches Judentum; and Oded Heilbronner’s critical analysis of the Germany volume of Yad Vashem’s History of the Holocaust series.

This volume also brings to light little known aspects of neutral powers’ reactions to the Holocaust. The four articles in this section use newly-available documentation to address the laundering of stolen Nazi gold by Portugal (António Louçã and Ansgar Schäfer); the contrasting attitudes of the Portuguese (Avraham Milgram) and Argentine foreign services (Daniel Feierstein and Miguel Galante) toward the Nazis and the Jews; and the cantonal policies toward Jewish refugees in Switzerland (Shaul Ferrero). Louçã and Schäfer demonstrate that Portugal was second only to Switzerland in illicit or barely licit gold laundering for the Nazis--and most of this gold was never returned. Whereas many Argentine diplomats in Europe identified to a degree with the reigning antisemitic atmosphere in Germany and were largely unmoved by the actions taken against the Jews, Portuguese diplomats emerge, by contrast, as more humane and less driven by antipathy for Jews. Interestingly, in his close analysis of the documentation regarding the now-famous rescue activities of Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Milgram at one and the same time reduces the numbers Mendes is believed to have rescued, while actually enhancing his heroic stature as a dauntless humanitarian (though fascist-leaning) and a courageous figure. Ferrero finds that cantonal policies toward refugees were not always identical to Swiss federal policies. Still, in the Basel canton, the evidence from 1938-1939 is painful to read. As the documents accompanying Ferrero’s article illustrate, Jews attempting to flee to safety from Nazi Germany were routinely turned back by Swiss border police, mainly because they were Jews. The troubling picture that emerges from these articles, save for the Portuguese diplomats, is one of widespread antisemitism coupled with greed and varying degrees of identification with the Nazis.

A third section of this volume of YVS continues our tradition of publishing scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects. In addition to Katz, this section includes four articles and an extensive review essay. Nahum Bogner’s analysis of the “The Convent Children,” the Polish-Jewish children who were hidden in convents during the Holocaust, fills an important lacuna in the growing research on children in the Holocaust, uncovering the trials and tribulations of both the children and their rescuers. Yaacov Lozowick’s research takes “banality of evil” to task in demonstrating the active malice and antisemitism of the officials in Eichmann’s Jewish department. Livia Rothkirchen examines the almost pathetic figure of Alois Eliaš and his Czech government under Nazi rule in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Benny Morris analyzes the Palestinian Jewish press’s reporting of the Nazis’ rise to power and initial acts. In his review essay, Robert Rozett provides telling observations on the treatment of the Holocaust in recently published historical atlases. In the final analysis, argues Rozett, scholars still await a useful historical atlas of the Holocaust; students and educators must make do with atlases that address the Holocaust and the Jews in European history only tangentially, or else relate to the Holocaust extensively, but often inaccurately.

We hope our readers will find volume 27 of Yad Vashem Studies illuminating both in its variety and in its foci.

Many people contributed significantly to the development and production of this volume. The members of the editorial board gave tireless and careful attention both to the articles and to issues of editorial policy and offered sage advice at all stages. Such an editorial board is a blessing. I would also like to thank the team without whom this issue could not have been produced--Associate Editor Nathan Cohen and Assistant Editors Daniella Zaidman-Mauer and Adina Drechsler, who devoted long hours and were very attentive to details and to the broader picture alike. The contributions of our language editors, Leah Aharonov for the English volume and Rachel Leket for the Hebrew volume, and of our translators was invaluable. Navigating through nine languages and intricate footnotes was no mean task. It is a privilege to work with so devoted a team.

This volume is being published several months before the end of a tumultuous century. The turn of a century and the end of the Christian millenium are a time that inspires reflection. Certainly the articles in this volume, along with many of the books and articles on the Holocaust published recently around the world, provide much food for thought. At the same time, these articles might also inspire a certain sense of humility--how little we still know; how much we have yet to learn. Perhaps such humility can help guide researchers and thinkers as they approach their work on the Holocaust in the twenty-first century.

David Silberklang