Research Resources, Priorities and Opportunities for the Coming Decade
Paul A. Shapiro
Director, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Holocaust Era Assets Conference
Prague
June 26-30, 2009
The simple passage of time—65 years since the end of World War II—and the dramatic political changes that took place in this part of the world some 20 years ago have created a situation in which the opportunities for important new research regarding the Holocaust, far from diminishing, are greater than ever. The critical importance of taking advantage of those opportunities, as we survey the world around us, has also never been greater. For the Holocaust, which was the defining event of the 20th century, while a particular tragedy for the Jewish people, was also a tragedy for millions of others who were targeted by the Nazis and their allies for racial, religious or related discriminatory reasons, affected the lives of tens of millions of others, and remains of universal relevance today.
One need only read the newspapers during any week to see the manner in which the long legacy of the Holocaust continues to have an impact on our lives. The fact that representatives of nearly 50 countries are gathered here in Prague in 2009 to map out strategies to address Holocaust era assets issues illustrates this point dramatically. This conference also serves as a potent reminder: We continue to live in a world of genocide, and our children and grandchildren will have to confront the consequences of our action or inaction in the face of genocide today.
What I would like to do in the few minutes available to me is discuss briefly the avalanche of new research source material regarding the Holocaust that has become available over the past two decades, and then suggest some opportunities and priorities for new research. As an overall rationale and statement of purpose, however, I would like to posit the following moral, political, social and intellectual imperative: We have an obligation to pursue research that lays open for educators and for our societies the full magnitude of the Holocaust—its full geographic reach; the diversity of the Jewish communities destroyed and the significance of the loss; the consequences of the Holocaust for those targeted by the perpetrators and for the societies in which the victims lived and died; the postwar experiences of the survivors; the relationship between anti-Semitism and murder, that is, between word and deed; the particular problems posed by study of the so-called “bystanders,” as well as collaborators, whether they be individuals, organizations, or states; the ethical, social and political lessons posed by this mass murder and by the manner in which the international community has addressed or failed to address its consequences and the needs and concerns of its survivors; and the multiple ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust remains relevant both within national societies, in a united Europe, and in the global arena.
Archives
Twenty years ago, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, and then of the Soviet Union itself, disappeared. One dramatic result was that archival materials relating to the Holocaust, which had been largely inaccessible since the end of the war, began to be searched for, identified, and in some cases microfilmed or otherwise copied and made available for research. This body of material is immense, including records created by Soviet authorities, the wartime governments of East European states that collaborated with Nazi Germany, German occupation authorities, as well as all kinds of captured records seized by the Red Army as it advanced toward Germany, by the postwar Allied Control Commissions that operated in several states, and the records of Jewish organizations that had been seized by the Nazis only to be taken by the Soviets at war’s end. Our collections of newly accessible records from the former countries of the Warsaw Pact at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum number millions of pages.
Simultaneously in the mid-1990s, an equally momentous change was taking place in the archives of Western Europe and even in the United States. The expiration of 50-year archival restrictions in many Western European states, the commitment to open archives made by states that sought entry to the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, and a Congressionally-mandated Working Group on Nazi War Crimes Records in the United States that required all Federal agencies to identify and declassify Holocaust-related materials in their archives, produced a second avalanche of new Holocaust-related research resources, enhancing our ability to understand what happened, how, and why.
Special category archives also became more easily accessible: The records of the World Jewish Congress, for example, collected from each of the major offices this organization maintained in Europe and North America; and the records of the International Tracing Service, about which more in a moment. Following the special dispositions given by Pope John Paul II to open documents relating to Germany and Jewish affairs during the first six years of Nazi rule in Germany, courageously overcoming Vatican tradition to wait for all records of a papacy to be ready before opening any segment of the collection, we have some reason to believe today that similar positive action may be taken by the current Pope, His Holiness Benedict XVI, regarding Holocaust-related sections of the Vatican archives from the papacy of Pius XII. While progress toward such an outcome has been painfully slow, it is positive that the Vatican has sent an observer to International Task Force meetings and equally positive that a representative of the Vatican Secret Archives is attending these meetings in Prague. The deliberations at this conference make it clear that the actuarial table of Holocaust survivors demands immediate action.
When one adds to these paper resources the thousands of recorded testimonies that have been added to repositories like our Museum, the Shoah Foundation Video Archive in Los Angeles, and most recently the Yahad in Unum Association in France, it is clear that after decades in which the majority of Holocaust research was based on captured German documents microfilmed by the Allied Powers after the war, and thus focused principally on the perpetrators and their “machinery of destruction,” it is now possible to investigate and understand with a degree of clarity not possible earlier the Holocaust from Normandy to the depths of the Soviet Union; sensitive issues of collaboration and complicity that require authentic documentation to explore; the responses of those who found themselves under assault; and a more nuanced understanding of the role played by those whom we have called “bystanders,” by those who defined themselves as “neutral,” and those who accepted the benefits of genocide even if not ever confronted directly with the brutality of the deportations and killing.
Let me turn now to some research priorities. I will not address the need for additional research on assets issues. In the context of this conference, that need is self-evident.
The International Tracing Service
As you perhaps know, the archives of the International Tracing Service, or ITS, contain more than 50 million pages of original documentation relating to the fates of 17.5 million people who were victimized by the Nazis or otherwise displaced as a result of World War II. Until the end of 2007, ITS was the largest collection of inaccessible records anywhere that shed light on the fates of people from across Europe—Jews of course, and members of virtually every other nationality as well—who were arrested, deported, sent to concentration camps, and murdered by the Nazis; who were put to forced and slave labor under inhuman conditions, calculated in many places to result in death; who were displaced from their homes and families, and unable to return home at war’s end; and who tried to reunite with missing family members or, at least, learn the fates of lost loved ones after the Holocaust ended. These were documents that Allied forces collected as they liberated camps and forced labor sites in the last months of the war, and during their postwar occupation and administration of Germany and Austria. They include also the records of displaced persons (DP) camps run by the allies and additional thousands of collections that continued to be deposited at ITS right up until 2006. Sometimes archival collections were placed there precisely because governments knew that if the documents were at Bad Arolsen, no one would ever see them.
The archives contain five major categories of documentation. First, approximately 13.5 million concentration camp documents, transport and deportation lists, Gestapo arrest records, and prison records. Second, approximately 10 million pages of forced and slave labor documentation, revealing thousands of government, military, corporate and other users of forced labor, how the system worked on the ground, and the consequences of treating human beings merely as assets to be used up and discarded. Third, a postwar section that includes over 3.2 million original displaced persons ID cards and approximately 500,000 displaced persons case files—often family files—from DP camps in Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom…and also resettlement and emigration records on many thousands of DPs and their families. The total document count in this section in terms of digital images reaches nearly 30 million. Fourth, there is also a small, million-page set of collections that did not fit neatly into the other categories—Gestapo order files, cemetery records for deceased prisoners and forced laborers, analytical studies, as well as testimonies taken by American and other liberating forces from concentration camp prisoners who were asked, immediately after liberation, to describe what had happened to them in the camp, and who had committed crimes. The final category includes over 2.5 million postwar inquiry and correspondence files, the so-called T/D files, which are extremely rich sources of both historical and genealogical information.
In 2007, the 11 governments on the International Commission of the ITS and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had kept the documents sealed for decades, agreed to open the archives to survivors and researchers, following a long campaign spearheaded by our Museum. Since then, we have given priority to assisting Holocaust survivors find information in these massive collections that relates to their own families and to their own experiences. But there should be no doubt that scholarly exploration of these miles of archives have the potential to enhance our understanding of the Holocaust, its consequences, and its relevance.
In order to stimulate this exploration, our Museum and ITS agreed to jointly sponsor a two two-week research workshops for scholars in Bad Arolsen in 2008. A second two-week workshop will take place in Washington this year. Here are some of the research topics and projects suggested by the participants in last year’s workshop, based on the two weeks they spent in the six buildings that house the ITS archives.
The group that worked in the Incarceration collections emphasized the significance of the fact that the collections covered the entire period from the spring of 1933 to the spring of 1945, that is, the entire period of Nazi rule. The records were astonishing in their detail regarding individual prisoners, relations among different groups of prisoners, prisoner functionaries and the “gray zone.” The researchers felt the material would allow the creation of social histories of some of the camps and open new understanding of prisoner categorization practices and the use of categorization as a control technique. One member of the group suggested a study on violence in the camps over time, and specifically, when the perpetrators followed orders and when violence was used or not used contrary to existing orders.
The group that explored the forced labor records produced a list of over 25 categories of forced laborers and suggested fluidity in the system, as laborers moved or were moved from one category to another, with fewer or greater privileges or risks, according to a variety of factors. The Holocaust has often been described as a dynamic process. This applied to the forced labor system as well. Members of this group suggested unique opportunities for micro-studies of forced labor in particular towns or regions, and described case files in which forced laborer complaints about users of forced labor—a valuable and increasingly scarce asset—resulted in detailed SS investigations not of the laborers, but of the users.
The group that worked in the displaced persons material was “overwhelmed” by the research possibilities. They found records on 2,500 camps for survivors, including camps that operated for a time in what became the Soviet zone of Germany, and massive information about the stages through which DPs passed on the path from prisoner to a future, from “inhumanity to rehabilitation.” The records went far beyond the Holocaust, they asserted, to the broadest European and global impact of the waves of people who moved through the camps and on to somewhere else—not just Holocaust survivors, but forced laborers, perpetrators and collaborators, as well as people fleeing the Soviet advance or seeking to escape some aspect of their prewar and wartime lives. This group suggested that ITS archival materials could serve as the basis for a new field called “aftermath studies,” to explore the long-term consequences of genocide and mass displacement. Studies of postwar allied behavior; of the abuse of the system by war criminals and those who found little objectionable in what the perpetrators had done and therefore helped them; and of the impact the post-World War II experience had on later humanitarian efforts—All of these were possibilities opened up by this one archival section.
The group that worked in the postwar inquiry files stressed the potential in that material for refugee compensation studies and for study of the institutional history of ITS as a case study of the management of the needs of survivors of genocide and mass displacement. They proposed studies of post-Holocaust emigration and resettlement patterns, that is, a post-Holocaust geography of displaced humanity and of memory.
In summing up, the groups identified many opportunities for comparative study. They also called for longitudinal studies—studies over time—and in particular study of behaviors in the “chronological gray zone” or “fluid temporal space” from late 1943 to 1948, from the time when Axis defeat grew more likely to the advent of the Cold War, when perpetrators, survivors, forced and slave laborers, labor users, bystanders, DPs, Allied authorities and the populations of the defeated Axis states all lived in a situation of rapidly changing prospects and perspectives, and great uncertainty.
After 60 years when the massive collections held at the International Tracing Service were closed to researchers and educators, mobilizing them for scholarly purposes and for use in Holocaust education should be a research priority.
Holocaust in the USSR
I made reference earlier to massive documentation that has become available from the countries of the former Soviet Union, from the Baltic States in the north to Moldova in the south, from Ukraine in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. We have also witnessed the extraordinary effort and remarkable impact on public consciousness already made by the French Catholic priest Father Patrick Desbois, who for the past several years has been making his way from village to village in Ukraine to locate unmarked mass graves of Jews who were murdered there by shooting and other “non-industrial” methods from 1941 through the conclusion of German occupation of Soviet territory. Father Desbois has taken video testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses to these killings and is assembling that material to be opened to researchers in the fall. His book, The Holocaust by Bullets (Palgrave, 2008), recently won the National Jewish Book Award in the United States.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews from a number that would grow quickly to over 1.5 million were murdered by the Germans, their Axis allies and local collaborators in the towns and villages of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and other republics of the USSR. They were not transported in cattle cars to secluded sites far from their homes. These victims—mostly women, children and the elderly—were taken from their homes, on foot or by cart or truck, to locations just outside the towns and villages where they lived, if even that far, and were murdered, usually by shooting, and often in the presence of local residents, the victims’ non-Jewish neighbors, even friends. The names of the locations where they died fail to resonate with most students of the Shoah. This, of course, was just as the Nazis and their collaborators had wanted. Their goal was to make it as if their innocent victims had never existed.