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1
Baer, Marc David. "Turk and Jew in Berlin: The First Turkish Migration to Germany and the Shoah." Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (April 2013): 330–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417513000054.
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AbstractIn this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
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Sinn, Andrea A. "Returning to Stay? Jews in East and West Germany after the Holocaust." Central European History 53, no. 2 (June 2020): 393–413. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938920000163.
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ABSTRACTTo better understand the position of Jews within Germany after the end of World War II, this article analyzes the rebuilding of Jewish communities in East and West Germany from a Jewish perspective. This approach highlights the peculiarities and sometimes sharply contrasting developments within the Jewish communities in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, from the immediate postwar months to the official East-West separation of these increasingly politically divided communities in the early 1960s. Central to the study are the policies of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which exemplify the process of gradual divergence in the relations between East and West German Jewish communities, that, as this article demonstrates, paralleled and mirrored the relations between non-Jewish Germans in the two countries.
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MENG, MICHAEL L. "After the Holocaust: The History of Jewish Life in West Germany." Contemporary European History 14, no. 3 (August 2005): 403–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0960777305002523.
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In July 1945, Rabbi Leo Baeck remarked that the Third Reich had destroyed the historical basis of German Jewry. ‘The history of Jews in Germany has found its end. It is impossible for it to come back. The chasm is too great’. Heinz Galinski, a survivor of Auschwitz who led West Berlin’s Jewish community until his death in 1992, could not have disagreed more strongly. ‘I have always held the view’, he observed, ‘that the Wannsee Conference cannot be the last word in the life of the Jewish community in Germany’. As these diverging views suggest, opting to live in the ‘land of the perpetrators’ represented both an unthinkable and a realistic choice. In the decade after the Holocaust, about 12,000 German-born Jews opted to remain in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and comprised about half of its Jewish community. Rooted in the German language and typically married to non-Jewish spouses, they still had some connections to Germany. xSuch cultural and personal ties did not exist for the other half of West Germany’s Jewish community – its East European Jews. Between 1945 and 1948, 230,000 Jews sought refuge in occupied Germany from the violent outbursts of antisemitism in eastern Europe. Although by 1949 only 15,000 East European Jews had taken permanent residence in the FRG, those who stayed behind profoundly impacted upon Jewish life. More religiously devout than their German-Jewish counterparts, they developed a rich cultural tradition located mostly in southern Germany. But their presence also complicated Jewish life. From the late nineteenth century, relations between German and East European Jews historically were tense and remained so in the early postwar years; the highly acculturated German Jews looked down upon their less assimilated, Yiddish-speaking brothers. In the first decade after the war, integrating these two groups emerged as one of the most pressing tasks for Jewish community leaders.
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Schoeps, Julius H. "Das (nicht-)angenommene Erbe. Zur Debatte um die deutsch-jüdische Erinnerungskultur." Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 57, no. 3 (2005): 232–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570073054396037.
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AbstractThis essay shows how Jewish identity in pre-1933 Germany defined itself and how the widely known concept of German-Jewish symbiosis came into question after the organized murder of the European Jews. The search for a German-Jewish legacy in postwar Germany as well as in the countries in which the Jewish émigrés found a new home will be explored. Moreover, the Eastern European cultural roots of Jews who migrated from Russia to Germany in the 1990s will also be discussed.
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Harviainen, Tapani. "The Jews in Finland and World War II." Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies 21, no. 1-2 (September 1, 2000): 157–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.30752/nj.69575.
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In the years 1989–1944 two different wars against the Soviet Union were imposed upon Finland. During the Winter War of 1989–1940 Germany remained strictly neutral on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact&&Great Britain and France planned intervention in favour of Finland. When the second, so-called Continuation War broke out in the summer of 1041, Finland was co-belligerent of Germany, and Great Britain declared war on Finland in December 1941. De jure, however, Finland was never an ally of Germany, and at the end of the war, in the winter 1944–1945, the Finnish armed forces expelled the German troops from Lapland, which was devastated by the Germans during their retreat to Norway. Military service was compulsory for each male citizen of Finland. In 1939 the Jewish population of Finland numbered 1 700. Of these, 260 men were called up and approximately 200 were sent to serve at the front during the Winter War.
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Zaremba, Marcin. "“That load of Jews is finally dead.” Extermination of Jews as presented in 1942 letters of German soldiers." Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, Holocaust Studies and Materials (December 6, 2017): 472–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.733.
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The Home Army intelligence intercepted letters written by German officers and clerks to their families as well as those sent from Germany to friends and relatives on the front line. On the basis of that correspondence the Polish underground draftedspecial intelligence reports, which were sent to London. The selection of letters devoted to the Holocaust presented in this article can make it easier to describe and understand the stances and opinions of “ordinary Germans” regarding the “final solution.”
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Hieke, Anton. "Aus Nordcarolina: The Jewish American South in German Jewish Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century." European Journal of Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 241–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187247111x607195.
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Abstract For many German Jewish papers of the nineteenth century, the United States of America was held up as an ideal. This holds true especially for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, then Germany’s most influential Jewish publication. In America, Jews had already achieved what their co-religionists in Germany strove for until complete legal emancipation with the formation of the German Empire in 1871: the transition from ‘Jews in Germany’ via ‘German Jews’ to ‘Germans of the Jewish faith.’ Thus, the experiences of Jews from Germany in America represented the post-emancipation hopes for those who had remained behind.2 When examined for the representation of Jewry living in the American Southern states,3 it becomes apparent that German Jewish papers in their coverage of America largely refrained from a regionalization. Most articles and accounts concerning Jewish life in the South do not show any significant distinctiveness in the perception of the region and its Jews. The incidents presented or the comments sent to the papers might in fact have occurred in respectively dealt with any region of the United States at the time, barring anything that remotely dealt with slavery or secession prior to 1865. When the Jewish South was explicitly dealt with in the papers, however, it either functioned as an ‘über-America’ of the negative stereotypes in respect to low Jewish piety, or took the place of an alternative America of injustice and slavery—the ‘anti-America.’ Jewish Southerners who actively supported the region during the Civil War, or who had internalized the South’s moral values as supporters of the Confederacy and/or slavery were condemned in the strongest words for endangering the existence of ‘America the Ideal.’ As the concept of the United States and its Jewish life is represented in a largely unrealistic manner that almost exclusively focused on the positive aspects of Jewish life in America, the concept of the Jewish South was equally far from being accurate.
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Haynes, Stephen R. "Who Needs Enemies? Jews and Judaism in Anti-Nazi Religious Discourse." Church History 71, no. 2 (June 2002): 341–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009640700095718.
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The so-called German Church Struggle has been a subject of scholarly study and popular interest for several decades. For obvious reasons, the minority of Germans who opposed the Nazis in word or in deed have become compelling symbols of courage and resistance, human reminders of the auspicious role religion can play in situations of political crisis. Rarely, however, has the discourse of anti-Nazi resistance been analyzed in terms of its assumptions concerning Jews, their role in Germany, or their historical destiny. When these assumptions are illuminated, it is apparent that despite their opposition to National Socialism and its encroachment in the affairs of the church, Christian resistors to Nazism transmitted concepts of Jews and Judaism that did little to ameliorate, and often exacerbated, the anti-Semitic environment in interwar Germany,
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Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. "The Pre-History of the Holocaust? TheSonderwegandHistorikerstreitDebates and the Abject Colonial Past." Central European History 41, no. 3 (August 21, 2008): 477–503. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938908000599.
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In chapter eleven ofMein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, having constructed aneal type “culture-bearing” Aryan race,1came to elucidate his views on the history of Jews within Germany. Until the time of Frederick the Great, he argued, “it still entered no one's head to regard the Jews as anything else but a ‘foreign’ people.”2Thereafter, he asserted, came a period of transition wherein Jews had “the effrontery to turn Germanic.”3The rest of the chapter, for Hitler, was an attempt to reverse this putative historical mistake, and presents the reader with a vitriolic casting out of Jews, described as “parasites” and a “noxious bacillus,” from the German body politic.4The aim of this textual expulsion, Hitler explained, was to ensure that the Germans would not be destroyed from within, as had “all great cultures of the past.”5To Hitler, Jews were what Julia Kristeva has called “the abject”6—that which is simultaneously part of the self but radically rejected by the self. In seeking to expel the “Germanic Jews” from theVolkskörper, Hitler sought to expel that part of the German self that, in his view, was a source of weakness and taint.7
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Pegelow, Thomas. "“German Jews,” “National Jews,” “Jewish Volk” or “Racial Jews”? The Constitution and Contestation of “Jewishness” in Newspapers of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938." Central European History 35, no. 2 (June 2002): 195–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15691610260420665.
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After reading the “Jewish News Bulletin” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt) in early 1939, the Romance language scholar Victor Klemperer wrote: “Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else … They were and remain (even if now they no longer wish to remain so) Germans …” Klemperer, a convert to Protestantism, but a “full Jew” by Nazi decree, continued, “It is part of the Lingua tertii imperii [LTI, language of the Third Reich] that the expression ‘Jewish people’ [Volk] appears repeatedly in the ‘Jewish News'…”
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Mohammed, Khaleel. "Wissenschaft des Judentums as a Paradigm for New Muslim Approaches to Islam." American Journal of Islam and Society 28, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 143–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v28i2.1266.
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Although Wissenschaft des Judentums was the brainchild of German Jews,it reflected the aims of European Jews in general. As noted by the late ProfessorAmos Funkenstein, “even if we grant that the majority of traditionalJews in France, Austria, and Germany were not aware of the full scopeof the achievements of the Wissenschaft, its results nevertheless faithfullyreflected the desires and self-image of nineteenth-century Jews craving foremancipation, the mood of the “perplexed of the times.”1 The period ofthe Enlightenment did little to change the lot of the Jew: he was still seenby many as a Christ-killer, his identity linked to a particular nation—andhe could, therefore, never be fully accepted as part of any other nationalentity. Although some Jews may have become totally assimilated and evenconverted to Christianity, the general perception was that the Jews wantedto be conditional citizens: while adopting the culture of the environment,they wanted to preserve their special nature as a subculture ...
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Langer, Armin. "Telling Holocaust Jokes on German Public Television." Race and European TV Histories 10, no. 20 (December 1, 2021): 7. http://dx.doi.org/10.18146/view.263.
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Since 2015, Israeli-born German artist Shahak Shapira has initiated several satirical campaigns targeting antisemitism and racism in Germany and the country’s relation to the Holocaust. These interventions set Shapira’s career in motion, and in 2019 he landed a slot on the ZDF public broadcasting channel for the talk show Shapira Shapira. The show mocked antisemitism and far-right movements in Germany and reminded the viewers of the country’s history with Jews. His jokes about concentration camps and their contemporary perceptions proved to be especially effective. This article shows how Shahak Shapira and his show challenged the official narratives about Jews, antisemitism and the Holocaust. It argues that Shapira’s jokes might empower Jews and foster Holocaust awareness among the general public in Germany.
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Koch, Anna. "Exile Dreams: Antifascist Jews, Antisemitism and the ‘Other Germany’." Fascism 9, no. 1-2 (December 21, 2020): 221–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22116257-20201171.
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Abstract This article examines the meanings antifascist German Jews invested in antifascism and highlights its role as an emotional place of belonging. The sense of belonging to a larger collective enabled antifascist Jews to hold onto their Germanness and believe in the possibility of an ‘other Germany’. While most German Jewish antifascists remained deeply invested in their home country in the 1930s, this idea of the ‘other Germany’ became increasingly difficult to uphold in the face of war and genocide. For some this belief received the final blow after the end of the Second World War when they returned and witnessed the construction of German states that fell short of the hopes they had nourished while in exile. Yet even though they became disillusioned with the ‘other Germany’, they remained attached to antifascism.
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Silbermann, Alphons, and Herbert Sallen. "Jews in germany today." Society 32, no. 4 (May 1995): 53–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf02693324.
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Kałczewiak, Mariusz. "When the “Ostjuden” Returned: Linguistic Continuities in German-Language Writing about Eastern European Jews." Naharaim 15, no. 2 (September 9, 2021): 287–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/naha-2020-0015.
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Abstract This article examines the dynamics that allowed the derogatory term “Ostjuden” to reappear in academic writing in post-Holocaust Germany. This article focuses on the period between 1980’s and 2000’s, complementing earlier studies that focused on the emergence of the term “Ostjuden” and on the complex representations of Eastern European Jews in Imperial and later Weimar Germany. It shows that, despite its well-evidenced discriminatory history, the term “Ostjuden” re-appeared in the scholarly writing in German and has also found its way into German-speaking public history and journalism. This article calls for applying the adjectival term “osteuropäische Juden” (Eastern European Jews), using a term that neither essentializes Eastern European Jews nor presents them in an oversimplified and uniform manner.
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Benz, Wolfgang. "Germans, Jews and Antisemitism in Germany After 1945." Australian Journal of Politics & History 41, no. 1 (April 7, 2008): 118–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8497.1995.tb01340.x.
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Kwiet, K. "Forced Labour of German Jews in Nazi Germany." Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 36, no. 1 (January 1, 1991): 389–410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/36.1.389.
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Grakhotskiy, A. P. "THE VERDICT IN KARLSRUHE: "LIFE IMPRISONMENT FOR THE BUTCHER FROM MINSK!»." Lex Russica, no. 12 (January 4, 2020): 105–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.17803/1729-5920.2019.157.12.105-121.
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The trial against Karlsruhe criminal police Secretary Adolf Rube, held in 1949, was the first trial in Germany, during which Nazi atrocities committed on the territory of Belarus were considered. By the example of this process, the paper attempts to identify the specifics of West Germany courts’ consideration of criminal cases related to the commission of Holocaust crimes in Eastern Europe. German law excluded the possibility of punishing Nazi criminals for genocide, crimes against peace and humanity. Guided by the norms of the German Criminal Code of 1871, German justice considered each case of murder of Jews during the years of national socialism as a separate crime, caused by personal motives. Based on this, A. Rube was punished not for participating in the state-organized, bureaucratically planned genocide of the Jewish people, but for committing separate, unrelated murders. The defendant, who was accused of killing 436 Jews in the Minsk ghetto, was found guilty of unlawfully depriving 27 people of their lives and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, in 1962 he was amnestied and was released. By presenting the Holocaust as a mosaic of individual, unrelated criminal acts, German justice maintained the illusion that "normal" Germans "knew nothing" about the mass extermination of Jews, that the Holocaust was solely the product of the Hitler’s actions, his fanatical entourage, and individual "pathological sadists," "sex maniacs," and "upstarts" such as A. Rube, who sought to assert themselves at the expense of Jewish victims.
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Walch, Teresa. "Just West of East: The Paradoxical Place of the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Policy and Perception." Naharaim 14, no. 2 (December 16, 2020): 243–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/naha-2020-2001.
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AbstractWhen German authorities established the Theresienstadt Ghetto for Bohemian and Moravian Jews in late 1941, the site initially functioned much like other ghettos and transit camps at the time, as a mere way station to sites of extermination further East. The decision to reconfigure the ghetto as a site of internment for select “privileged” groups of Jews from Germany and Western Europe, and its advertisement as a “Jewish settlement” in Nazi propaganda, constituted an apparent paradox for a regime that sought to make the Greater German Reich “judenrein” (clean of Jews). This article investigates the Theresienstadt Ghetto from a historical-spatial perspective and argues that varying prejudices and degrees of antisemitism shaped divergent “spatial solutions” to segregate Jews from non-Jews, wherein the perceived divide between so-called “Ostjuden” and assimilated Western Jews played a central role. In this analysis, Theresienstadt emerges as a logical culmination to paradoxical policies designed to segregate select groups of German and assimilated Western European Jews.
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Freudenthal, Gad. "Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and the First Call for an Improvement of the Civil Rights of Jews in Germany (1753)." AJS Review 29, no. 2 (November 2005): 299–353. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009405000152.
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Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden of 1781 is generally believed to be the first call issued in Germany for the improvement of the Jews' civil rights. This commonly held belief is mistaken. Following in the footsteps of Volkmar Eichstädt's Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Judenfrage of 1938, Jacob Toury called attention to the Schreiben eines Juden an einen Philosophen nebst der Antwort (in what follows: Schreiben), a pamphlet published anonymously in Berlin in 1753, which is “the first German composition on the Jewish question” calling for complete equality of the status of the Jews in Germany. Toury shed important light on this work but was unable to identify its author. Subsequent historiography took little notice of the Schreiben, perhaps because its author, and hence the context in which it was composed, remained unidentified. In this article, I show that the author of the Schreiben is the Berlin physician and early maskil Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, also known as Aaron Zalman Emmerich (1723–1769) and that his friend, the noted poet, playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), was directly involved in its publication. This identification should give Gumpertz and his Schreiben the place they deserve in German history and in the history of the Jews in Germany; at the same time, it enhances our appreciation of Lessing as a central figure in promoting the rights of Jews in Germany.
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Kabalek, Kobi. "“Other Germans”: Exceptions and Rules in the Memory of Rescuing Jews in Postwar Germany." Central European History 55, no. 3 (September 2022): 390–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938921001357.
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AbstractThe rising German interest in rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust has been accompanied by an emphasis on their exceptionality among the wartime German population. Seen as aberrations, rescuers are used to present a simplified generalization of the German majority’s wartime conduct by defining what it was not. This article argues that this view, as well as the common claim that rescue and rescuers of Jews were “forgotten” in the postwar Germanys, are based on a certain interpretative model concerning the relationship between exception and rule. I trace the different uses of this model and show that from 1945 to the present, many Jewish and non-Jewish Germans employed variously defined exceptions to trace and determine one's preferred image of the majority—as an object of desire or critique. The article presents the different conceptualizations and idealizations of rescue and their functions in imagining a collective self in commemorative and historiographical portrayals of past and current German societies.
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Ankum, Katharina Von, and Y. Michal Bodemann. "Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany." German Studies Review 21, no. 2 (May 1998): 389. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1432242.
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Geller, Jay Howard. ":Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany." American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 231–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/ahr.114.1.231a.
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Kaplan, Marion. "Friendship on the Margins: Jewish Social Relations in Imperial Germany." Central European History 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 471–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15691610152988017.
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Historians who look at the stark contrast between the spectacular successes of Jews in late nineteenth-century Germany and their horrific end in the Holocaust only a few decades later continue to argue about the relative success or failure of Jewish integration into German society. Were Germany's 600, 000 Jews — only 1 percent of the population — fully integrated or not? Did they have non-Jewish friends or not? Were they accepted or were they strangers in their own land?
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Feldman, Jackie, and Anja Peleikis. "Performing the Hyphen." Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 23, no. 2 (September 1, 2014): 43–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ajec.2014.230204.
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The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) is a dynamic, performative space that negotiates between representing the Jew as an integral part of German history and as ultimate Other. While this tension has been documented through the political history of the museum (Lackmann 2000; Pieper 2006; Young 2000), we focus on the dynamics of guided tours and special events. We claim that guiding and festival events at JMB marginalise Holocaust memory and present an image of Jews of the past that promotes a multicultural vision of present-day Germany. In guiding performances, the identity of the guide as German/Jewish/Muslim is part of the guiding performance, even when not made explicit. By comparing tour performances for various publics, and the 'storytelling rights' granted by the group, we witness how visitors' scripts and expectations interact with the museum's mission that it serve as a place of encounter (Ort der Begegnung). As German-Jewish history at JMB serves primarily as a cosmopolitan template for intercultural relations, strongly affiliated local Jews may not feel a need for the museum. Organised groups of Jews from abroad, however, visit it as part of the Holocaust memorial landscape of Berlin, while many local Jews with weaker affiliations to the Jewish community may find it an attractive venue for performing their more fluid Jewish identities – for themselves and for others.
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Jockheck, Lars. "Od agenta do kolaboranta? Współpraca żydowskiego publicysty Fritza Seiftera z Bielska z władzami niemieckimi w latach trzydziestych i czterdziestych." Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, no. 2 (December 2, 2006): 163–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.32927/zzsim.185.
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Fritz Seifter, a Jewish-German journalist and Polish citizen, collaborated with the German authorities on two occasions: first during 1933–1934 in Bielsko, where, supported by the Reich Ministry of National Education and Propaganda, he launched his newspaper Jüdische Wochenpost; second, in July 1940, when the General Governor's Department of National Education and Propaganda in Cracow appointed him editor-in-chief and managing director of Gazeta Żydowska. But in either case the circumstances and motives for collaboration differed significantly.
In the case of Jüdische Wochenpost, Seifter completed a project he had been planning to carry out since the late 1920s. His newspaper was to consolidate the bonds of German-speaking Polish Jews with Germany. The Reich Ministry of National Education and Propaganda supported the establishment of this newspaper in order to tone down the opinions of Polish Jews regarding the Nazi regime in Berlin. During 1933–1934 Seifter saw himself as an agent of the German Ministry of Propaganda.
In 1940, German occupation authorities in Krakow searched for and found Fritz Seifter, who was to be appointed editor-in-chief and managing director for the German-planned Gazeta Żydowska, completely controlled by the Germans. Its principal aims were to isolate the Jews even further from their Polish environment, herd them to work and give illusions of hope for emigration after the war.
Thus there was no continuity in Seifter's co-operation with the German authorities, and collaboration was not the case. During 1933–1934, Seifter's main reason to launch his newspaper was German nationalism, which ostensibly linked him to the Germans. In 1940, however, Fritz Seifter no longer acted of his own accord, and any illusions as to the genocidal character of the Nazi regime was out of the question: Seifter alongside the rest of Polish Jews wanted only to survive.
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Grakhotskiy, A. P. "Trials of Members of Einsatzkommando 8 in West Germany: Gaswagen and the Holocaust in Mogilev." Actual Problems of Russian Law 17, no. 1 (December 20, 2021): 11–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.17803/1994-1471.2022.134.1.011-030.
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In 1942, in order to execute the genocide of Jews in Belarus, along with carrying out mass executions, the Nazis began to use gaswagens. In June 1942, a «special vehicle» appeared at the disposal of Einsatzkommando 8 in Mogilev. Based on the trials’ recordings and protocols, it can be assumed that at least 2,500 Jews of the Mogilev region were poisoned in gas vans (gaswagens). Details of the crimes committed by the Nazis with the use of gas vans became known in the 1960s, when lawsuits were held in the Federative Republic of Germany against former members of Einsatzkommando 8: A. Garnishmacher, G. Richter, G. Haase, G. Schlechte, K. Strohammer. The paper sets the goal, using the example of trials against the members of Einsatzkommando 8, to determine what legal assessment West Germany justice gave to the Nazi atrocities associated with the extermination of Jews in gaswagens. On the one hand, the trials against former members of Einsatzkommando 8 testified to the desire of German justice to critically rethink Germany’s recent past, to ensure the principle of inevitability of criminal responsibility for Nazi criminals. On the other hand, the outcomes of the trials under consideration indicated that West German Themis, as well as the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany, refused to treat the former members of Einsatzkommando as criminals. In German society, the prevailing opinion was that the blame for the Holocaust and other crimes of National Socialism lay exclusively with A. Hitler and his entourage (G. Himmler, R. Heydrich, etc.). The rest of the Germans were only «hostages of the regime» who «due to special life circumstances» were forced to perform the criminal orders of the Fuehrer. In juridical practice, that approach took shape in the theory of complicity, based on which the German courts assigned minimal punishments to Nazi criminals, and often the courts completely exempted them from criminal liability.
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Popkov, Viacheslav, and Ekaterina Popkova. "Russian-Speaking Groups in Germany: Motivation for Migration." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 4. Istorija. Regionovedenie. Mezhdunarodnye otnoshenija, no. 1 (February 2020): 229–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu4.2020.1.19.
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Introduction. The article considers motivation for migration of Russian-speaking groups who came to Germany from the territory of the former USSR countries. The article focuses on the analysis of ethnically privileged migrant groups – late migrants (Russian Germans) and quota refugees (Russian Jews) who came to Germany in the period of the late 1980s to mid-2000s. The aim of the research is to reveal the main reasons for and motives of the Russian-speaking group migration from the post-Soviet republics. The authors focus on the migration motives which have not been fully described, shown or analyzed in foreign research works, thus, enabling the readers to broaden their view on the migration of Russian-speaking groups to Germany. Methods. The research is based on qualitative methodology using the method of thematically-centered interview. The selection was done by the “snowball” method. Analysis. The authors carried out a comparative analysis of several research works with the results of the project conducted with Russian-speaking groups in Munich in 2005–2006 and 2011. The analyzed basis makes 43 interviews. The paper discusses the most questionable aspects regarding the ascertainment of the motivations of Russian Germans and Russian Jews for moving to Germany; it also compares the groups and reveals common features of migratory background characteristics to both of them. The paper gives special attention to ethnic motivations of migration which turn to be both pushing and pulling factors for both Russian-speaking groups. It also compares interpretations of significance of ethnicity and ethnic discrimination being the reasons for migration of Russian Germans and Russian Jews in the research works analyzed here. Results. The hypothesis is that after the USSR split ethnic discrimination of both groups may be considered on the basis of “wrong” ethnicity in the countries of exodus. The conclusion is drawn that discrimination on ethnic basis cannot be the main reason for migration of Russian Germans and Russian Jews to Germany. It is more probable that in the case of Russian-speaking groups we deal with “drifting” ethnicity which may be suggested to or imposed on individuals. The data presented in the article may be of great interest for improving the state policy of this country towards compatriots from abroad and working out migratory regulations.
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Kuzovova, Natalia. "SOVIET REPRESSION AGAINST REFUGEE JEWS FROM THE TERRITORY OF POLAND AND CZECH-SLOVAKIA BEFORE AND AT THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II." Intermarum history policy culture, no. 9 (December 25, 2021): 105–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.35433/history.112018.
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Purpose: to analyze a set of documents stored in the funds of the State Archives of Kherson region – cases of repressed refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1938-1941. Based on historiographical and source studies on this topic, to outline the general grounds for arrest and persecution of refugees by Soviet authorities and to find out why Jews – former citizens of Poland and Czechoslovakia – found themselves in the focus of repression. Research methodology. The main research methods were general and special-historical, as well as methods of archival heuristics and scientific criticism of sources. Scientific novelty. Previously unpublished documents are introduced into scientific circulation: cases of repressed refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia, analysis of the Soviet government's policy towards Jews who tried to escape from the Nazis in the USSR and the Union Republics in southern Ukraine, including Kherson. The forms of repression applied by the NKVD to refugee Jews are analyzed, and the consequences of such a policy for the German government's policy of genocide in the occupied territories are examined. Conclusions. The study found that the formal reason for the persecution of Jewish refugees was the illegal crossing of the border with the USSR, since the Soviet Union, like many countries in the world, refused to accept Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution. The Soviet government motivated this by the fact that refugee Jews spread mood of defeat and panic, spied for Germany, Britain, and Poland, had anti-Soviet views, and conducted anti-Soviet campaigning. As a result of the arrests and deportations of Jewish refugees, the Jewish population, particularly in southern Ukraine, was unaware of the persecution of Jews in lands occupied by Nazi Germany. In fact, the Jewish refugees sent to the concentration camps, along with the Germans of Ukraine and the Volga region, were the only groups of people thus "evacuated" by the Soviet authorities on ethnic grounds. However, due to the enemy's rapid offensive, refugees who did not fall into the hands of the NKVD shared the tragic fate of Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust.
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Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. "Interdenominationalism, Clericalism, Pluralism: The Zentrumsstreit and the Dilemma of Catholicism in Wilhelmine Germany." Central European History 21, no. 4 (December 1988): 350–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938900012504.
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In April 1909 Emil Schüler, a Jew of Lippstadt, a small town in Catholic Westphalia, died. The passing of this otherwise unremarkable man was noted in a number of newspapers because Schüler was known to be both a good “Israelite” and a loyal supporter of the Center Party—a party denounced as “ultramontane” by its enemies and acknowledged even by its friends to have a constituency almost entirely Catholic. The Jüdische Rundschau commented, however, that it considered this Lippstadt Jew's political allegiance “absolutely worth considering,” opining that recent proceedings in the Reichstag had shown that at least the religious interests of Jews found better representation within the Center than with, for example, either Liberalism or Social Democracy.
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Kaplan, M. "Unter Uns: Jews Socialising with other Jews in Imperial Germany." Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 48, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 41–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/48.1.41.
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Steer, Martina. "Nation, Religion, Gender: The Triple Challenge of Middle-Class German-Jewish Women in World War I." Central European History 48, no. 2 (June 2015): 176–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008938915000333.
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AbstractGerman-Jewish women are elusive figures in the current literature on World War I. Looking at the complexity of their wartime experience and its consequences for the Weimar years, this article deals with Jewish middle-class women's tripartite motivation as Germans, Jews, and females to make sacrifices for the war. To that end, it traces their efforts to help Germany to victory, to gain suffrage, and to become integrated into German society. At the same time, the article shows how these women not only transformed the war into an opportunity for greater female self-determination but also responded to wartime and postwar antisemitism. The experience of the war and the need for reorientation after 1918 motivated them to become more involved in the affairs of the German-Jewish community itself and to contribute significantly to shaping public Jewish life in Weimar Germany—but without giving up their German identity.
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Späti, Christina. "Arrests, Internments, and Deportations of Swiss Jews in France, and the Reactions of Swiss Authorities, 1941–1944." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 35, no. 1 (March 24, 2021): 25–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcab012.
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Abstract Hundreds of Swiss Jews were living in France when Germany attacked and conquered it in mid-1940. Antisemitic laws came into force soon thereafter. One question was whether these measures would apply to citizens of a neutral state. German and French authorities applied such laws, for instance, interning approximately sixty Swiss Jews in the Northern Zone. The present study focuses on the arrests, internments, and occasional deportations of Swiss Jews living in France, and the often feeble efforts of Swiss diplomats and other authorities to extricate them. The haunting question remains how much more could have been done.
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Cohen, G. Daniel. "Ruth Gay. Safe Among The Germans: Liberated Jews After World War Two. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. 330 pp.; Zeev Mankowitz. Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 348 pp." AJS Review 28, no. 2 (November 2004): 378–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009404320210.
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In the last decade or so, new research on Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany has pushed the traditional boundaries of “Holocaust studies” (1933–1945) toward the postwar period. Indeed, the displaced persons or “DP” experience—the temporary settlement in Germany of the Sheءerith Hapleitah (“Surviving Remnant”) from the liberation of concentration camps in the spring of 1945 to the late 1940s—provides important insights into post-Holocaust Jewish life. The impact of trauma and loss, the final divorce between Jews and East-Central Europe through migration to Israel and the New World, the rise of Zionist consciousness, the shaping of a Jewish national collective in transit, the regeneration of Jewish demography and culture in the DP camps, and the relationships between Jews and Germans in occupied Germany are some of the many themes explored by recent DP historiography—by now a subfield of postwar Jewish history.
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Herrmann, Manja. "Travelling Heroes—A Transcultural Re-evaluation of Kurt R. Grossmann’s Unbesungene Helden (1957), an Early Compilation of Rescue Stories." German History 39, no. 4 (October 29, 2021): 585–601. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghab069.
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Abstract This article concentrates on the first German-language compilation of ‘rescue stories’, narratives of Jews who survived the Holocaust with the help of non-Jews. While Kurt R. Grossmann’s 1957 book Die unbesungene Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (The Unsung Heroes: Humans in Germany’s Dark Days) has received some scholarly attention, its original sources have not yet been examined. Previous research on the remembrance of the ‘rescue of Jews’ in Germany has tended to read Grossmann’s anthology within a single national—that is, German—context. This article provides a short introduction to Grossmann’s biography and the development history of The Unsung Heroes. It then traces the editorial history of four chapters in the anthology dealing with German cases: ‘Mieze’, ‘The Block Warden and the Eastern-Jewish Tailor’, ‘The Yellow Badge—A Symbol of Protest’ and ‘The Case of Schindler’. The article proposes that in light of its collection of material, its various sources and its production context of formerly German Jews in the United States, the text serves as a superb example of ‘transcultural’ remembrance or ‘travelling memory’.
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Suuronen, Ville. "Nazism as Inhumanity: Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt on Race and Language." New German Critique 49, no. 2 (August 1, 2022): 15–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-9734791.
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Drawing on a large array of less-known materials, this article offers a new comparison of Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt by focusing on their opposing understandings of National Socialism as a novel political ideology. While Schmitt’s Nazi writings theorize a new kind of racial politics under Nazi rule, Arendt’s political thought develops as a systematic critique and response to the histories of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. After joining the Nazi Party in 1933, Schmitt endorsed the expulsion of Jewish intellectuals from Germany, celebrated the burning of their writings (including those of Arendt), and supported the process of Gleichschaltung as the first steps in creating a nazified Germany. While Schmitt claimed that the Jews have no access to German substance, culture, and language, noting that “the Jew lies when he speaks German,” Arendt always emphasized that for her, Germany meant precisely “the mother tongue, the philosophy and the poetry.” Relying on thus far unacknowledged biographical and theoretical contrasts, this article aims to show that Schmitt and Arendt understand the political meanings of race and language in a radically different manner.
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Baczkowski, Michal. "Żołnierze żydowscy w armii austro-węgierskiej podczas I wojny światowej." Res Gestae 13 (January 7, 2022): 96–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.24917/24504475.13.5.
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The military service of Jewish soldiers during World War I caused controversies, with the term“Jew” itself being problematic. In Austria-Hungary, a Jewish nationality was not recognized, andthe only criterium of identification was a declaration of practicing religion (Judaism). This isnot a problem for establishing the number of Jewish privates, but it disrupts the statistics of theofficer corps, where it was common to abandon Judaism. In the Austro-Hungarian Army, Jewshad the ability to acquire higher officer ranks (general), but in practice, this was only applicableto Jews assimilated to German culture. The percentage of Jews among reserve officers was higherthan average due to their high level of education. According to data from 1910, Jews constituted3.1% of all privates in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. World War I took the lives of about25,000 Austro-Hungarian Jews, i.e. about 8.3% of all followers of Judaism mobilized to the army.This was a percentage slightly lower than for Christians, which became fodder to anti-Semitism.Jewish soldiers showed loyalty to the state and did not engage in military rebellions in 1918. After the war, the memory of Jewish soldiers was not cultivated in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s successor states. In contrast to Germany, however, they were not accused of acting to undermine the empire’s military potential during World War I.
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Scott, T. "Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany." English Historical Review 119, no. 481 (April 1, 2004): 496–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ehr/119.481.496.
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Schwarzschild, Rabbi Steven S. "Jews in Communist Germany, Aug. 1950." Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 60, no. 1 (2015): 279–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybv015.
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Bagchi, David. "Catholic Anti-Judaism in Reformation Germany: The Case of Johann Eck." Studies in Church History 29 (1992): 253–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0424208400011335.
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In any inquiry into Christian attitudes to Judaism in sixteenth-century Germany, exhibit A would undoubtedly be the later writings of Martin Luther against the Jews. The choice for exhibit B presents more of a problem, but a strong case can be made out for an almost contemporary anti-Jewish treatise from the pen of Luther’s staunchest Catholic opponent, Johann Eck. His Refutation of a Jew Pamphlet tends to attract superlatives—‘the most abusive to have been written against the Jews’, ‘the most massive and systematic formulation of the blood libel… the summa of learned discourse on ritual murder’, ‘the absolute nadir of anti-Jewish polemic in the early-modern period’—and something of its unpleasantness can be gauged from the fact that Trachtenberg cited it so often in his disturbing book, The Devil and the Jews. The year in which our Society has chosen to take for its theme ‘Christianity and Judaism’ is also the 450th anniversary of the publication of Eck’s remarkable treatise. It is perhaps an appropriate occasion on which to explore, in rather more detail than has been done before, the context and nature of Eck’s anti-Jewish polemic.
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Wylie, Braden Michael. "Fair Warning." General: Brock University Undergraduate Journal of History 4 (May 6, 2019): 143–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.26522/tg.v4i0.2132.
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The present text explores the persistently popular 20thcentury narrative regarding the heroic rescue of 7,742 (97%) Danish Jews from deportation by German Nazis to death camps during WWII. This text challenges the narrative, uncovering certain circumstances and issues that suggest Nazi Germany allowed the Jews to escape across the Oresund River in light of various political and economic conditions. This text compiles new research and first-hand accounts of events that suggest the escape of the Jews from Denmark should be understood as an equally balanced result evolving from certain action of the Danes and inaction of Nazi officials, even those part of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle.
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SYLWESTRZAK, Bartosz, and Rafał NIEDZIELA. "POLAND AND ITS RESIDENTS IN THE EYES OF GERMAN SOLDIERS DURING POLISH CAMPAIGN OF 1939." Scientific Journal of the Military University of Land Forces 162, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 209–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0002.3225.
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The authors present the circumstances related to the German invasion of Poland during the campaign in September 1939, with special emphasis put on the attitude of Germans towards Poland and Polish people. This is presented on the basis of the letters from Poland to soldiers’ families in Germany and reports in company or battalion chronicles.The moment when German soldiers entered Polish towns and villages was a terrible experience for their residents. The behaviour of the invaders was crude and rough: not only was it caused by war, but also by the attitude of Germans towards Poland and Polish people. Poles were perceived as a lower category of people, without any right to defend themselves. Each part of their life was criticised and damaged. Germans’ irritation was intensified by Jews living in Poland. The article can be useful for supporting lessons on military history.
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AVRAHAM, DORON. "RECONSTRUCTING A COLLECTIVE: ZIONISM AND RACE BETWEEN NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND JEWISH RENEWAL." Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (February 7, 2017): 471–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0018246x16000406.
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AbstractSince the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, German Zionists initiated a public debate about the racial meaning of Judaism. Drawing on scientific racial, sociological, and anthropological definitions that emerged within Zionism since the late nineteenth century, these Zionists tried to counter Nazi accusations against Jews. However, as the Nazi propaganda against Judaism became widespread, aggressive, and dehumanizing, Zionists responded by traversing the academic outlines of racial categories, and popularized a constructive racial image of Jews, thus hoping to rehabilitate their status and consolidate Jewish identity.
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Gay, Peter. "Book review: Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany." Modernism/modernity 4, no. 2 (1997): 205–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.1997.0017.
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Besier, Gerhard. "Anti-Bolshevism and Antisemitism: The Catholic Church in Germany and National Socialist Ideology 1936–1937." Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43, no. 3 (July 1992): 447–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002204690000138x.
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In his essay ‘Judaism and Christianity in the ideology and politics of National Socialism’ Klaus Scholder outlined the basic principles of Hitler's world view and examined his perception of the relationship between Christianity and antisemitism. According to Hitler, there could be no doubt that Christian leaders, given the nature of their beliefs, should be active exponents of antisemitism. He revitalised the old motif of the Jews as ‘Christ killers’ and described Jesus as ‘a leader of the people’ who ‘opposed Jewry’. Because of this he had been murdered on the initiative of the Jews and the Jew Paul ’refined, falsified and exploited the teaching of the Galilean for his own ends’.
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Baiduzh, Dmitrii V., and Victoriia O. Medvedeva. "THE IMAGE OF THE OTHER: THE DISTINCTIVE SIGN OF THE JEWS IN MEDIEVAL GERMANY (13th-16th CENTURIES)." Tyumen State University Herald. Humanities Research. Humanitates 8, no. 4 (2022): 110–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.21684/2411-197x-2022-8-4-110-133.
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This paper studies the special distinguishing sign of the Jews in the Germany during the 13th-16th centuries. Since early 12th c., Europe saw a large-scale process of rethinking the place of existing social groups and the emergence of new ones, clearly expressed by a set of iconic practices. The legitimization of the Jews’ emblems is its direct consequence. Using semiotic analysis, the authors consider visual signs in written and pictorial sources of various types as elements within the framework of a common sign system, as well as reveal the specifics of emblematic manifestations characteristic of Jewish identity. Most often, the signs were yellow and round. In Germany, the signs were used quite late relative to other European countries. In addition, Jews in Germany were in a better position because they depended on the emperor, and political decentralization had an impact on it. The authors conclude that the church prescription for Jews to wear specific signs was explained by the processes of streamlining the social organization of the Christian world. Finally, the authors state that the emblems were part of two strategies: the distinction between Jews and Christians, and the integration of Jews into the medieval urban space. In addition, the emblems could be a means of defamation or a positive, neutral sign.
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Becker, Sascha O., and Luigi Pascali. "Religion, Division of Labor, and Conflict: Anti-Semitism in Germany over 600 Years." American Economic Review 109, no. 5 (May 1, 2019): 1764–804. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.20170279.
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We study the role of economic incentives in shaping the coexistence of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, using novel data from Germany for 1,000+ cities. The Catholic usury ban and higher literacy rates gave Jews a specific advantage in the moneylending sector. Following the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Jews lost these advantages in regions that became Protestant. We show (i) a change in the geography of anti-Semitism with persecutions of Jews and anti-Jewish publications becoming more common in Protestant areas relative to Catholic areas; (ii) a more pronounced change in cities where Jews had already established themselves as moneylenders. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that, following the Protestant Reformation, Jews living in Protestant regions were exposed to competition with the Christian majority, especially in moneylending, leading to an increase in anti-Semitism. (JEL D74, J15, N33, N43, N93)
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Hildesheimer, Meir. "Auserwältes Volk und Staatsbürger Juden und Nichtjuden in der Lehre von Rabbi Elias Gutmacher." Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 61, no. 1 (2009): 25–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157007309787375975.
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AbstractThe Jewish emancipation in Germany (1869-1871) brought about a fundamental change in the position of Jews in state and society, leading to a rapprochement between Jews and their non-Jewish surroundings. For religious Jews, this transition into neutral society brought up fundamental theological questions: How is emancipation to be evaluated from a religious perspective? What is the appropriate relationship with the state? How should Jews interact with Gentiles? How could Jews integrate into society without denying the singularity of Israel and without neglecting their religious obligations? Rabbi Elias Gutmacher (1796-1874) was one of the religious leaders of Judaism in Germany whose scholarship was deeply concerned with such questions. Gutmacher was from Grätz in the Posen region and became primarily known as a cabbalist. The following article summarizes his views on the topic, which can be found in his literary oeuvre and most of all in his sermons.
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Jordan, William Chester. "Jews, Regalian Rights, And The Constitution In Medieval France." AJS Review 23, no. 1 (April 1998): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009400010011.
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It is fashionable to imagine a great dichotomy between the feudal monarchies in the West and the brittle, particularistic entity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. To Voltaire's mean-spirited gibe that the latter was neither holy, Roman, nor an Empire might be added that it was also not really German, since millions of Netherlanders, Italians, and Slavs, as well as Provencals and Savoyards, lived within its territorial limits. France and England, the stereotype goes, had achieved a precocious unity, at least in the thirteenth century. Nothing could be clearer, one might conclude, than the contrast between the great kingdoms of the West and the so-called Empire. The fashionable cliche even affects our understanding of Jewish life in the Middle Ages. Fritz Backhaus put the commonplace this way: “The territorial division (Zersplitterung) of Germany prevented a comprehensive expulsion [of the Jews] as could be carried out in England, France, and Spain.” This neat dichotomy is inadequate. At best it makes sense in a comparison between England and Germany. Only in England, a few exceptions aside, were the claims of a paramount lord, the king, to the control and exploitation of the Jews more or less uncontested by other secular authorities or by ecclesiastics in the role of secular lords.
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Kaplan, Marion. "Unter Uns: Jews Socialising with other Jews in Imperial Germany." Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 48, no. 1 (August 1, 2003): 41–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/007587403781898654.
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