Ethnic Killing and Genocide Flashcards
What was the old historiographical division with regards to Holocaust and Genocide?
Perpetrator/Bystander/Victim
Why is the division between perpetrator/bystander/victim no longer sound?
Recent analysis and discovery of how the Holocaust played out in Eastern Europe has shown that the traditional perpetrator/bystander/victim categorisation isn’t that helpful and those traditionally viewed as bystanders are actually something more complicated
What analytic categories have been proven to have outlived their usefulness due to recent studies of the Holocaust which have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities?
Perpetrator/victim/bystander
Collaboration/resistance
What has contributed to the shift of scholarly attention from Germany to Eastern Europe?
The opening of Soviet archives and a globalised commemorative culture centred on the Holocaust
Why did scholars studying Eastern Europe increasingly criticise the categories of perpetrators/victims/bystanders particularly bystanders?
for their inability to consider specific levels of opposition to or approval of the Nazi regime
What did Hilberg and Marrus define bystanders as encompassing? (now we are against this)
encompasses all those ‘contemporaries of the Jewish catastrophe’ who ‘saw or heard something of the event’.
What does perpetrator/bystander/victim and resistance/collaboration as analytical tools not help us as historians consider?
A wider range of social groups and behaviours outside the political sphere
What does Burzlaff argue the fallacious compulsion to judge behaviours and antisemitism as a universal explanation has done?
Limited our efforts to understand the web of social relations in the Holocaust
What criteria does Burzlaff suggest reading the available literature on the East European borderlands through that stress the transnational and may be productively incorporated into broader perspectives on modern genocide and mass violence? (4)
1) the importance of pre-war politics
2) the multiplicity of social groups involved
3) a multi-dimensional perspective
4) spatial and gender views
Why does Burzlaff argue comparing is not trivialising?
Because entangled histories will even further underline the holocaust’s particularities
What did early holocaust scholarship centre on (moved past this)? (3)
- Weight of antisemitism in German society
- Prussian militarism
- the failed modernisation of the German bourgeoisie
What do Historians now tend to reflect to explain the destruction of social relations in wartime Eastern Europe?
the Soviet occupation that began with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (23 August 1939) which divided Eastern Europe between Berlin and Moscow
How does Estonia provide an example for the importance of pre-war politics? (2)
- Bitter memories of the Russian empire combined w a sense of nationalism from which Jews were increasingly excluded
- Weiss-Wendt “political promiscuity” left Estonians longing for a national state, which led them to join forces with the Nazi regime
What happened in the aftermath of WWI in eastern Galicia? (2)
- hostility towards Jews intensified
- feelings of belonging to a specific ethnic group significantly increased w foundation of nationalist parties
What does Barbatov trace for eastern Galician town of Buczacz?
- ethnic conflicts back to the violent demise of the Habsburg empire
How did Soviet rule have implications for Holocaust? (5)
- Left each ethnic group suffering
- Traumatised the Estonians
- Polish nationalists believed jews had plotted with Stalin’s local henchmen
- Ukranian extreme nationalism formed in south-eastern Poland, targeting Soviets, Poles, and jews as obstacles to an ethnic state
- In Belarus the Soviet regime had already embarked on anti-Jewish policy, sharpening the general animosity towards the Jewish minority
What is Timothy Synder’s analytic framework and argument?
- framework of a ‘double occupation’, first Soviet then Nazi, serving as a laboratory of escalating genocidal violence
What is Synder’s framework more persuasive than?
The old stereotype that Jews were punished for their involvement with the Soviets
What have case studies from eastern Galicia and Bialystok revealed, supporting Snyder’s framework over the old stereotype?
That the no of Jews in the Soviet administration was not higher than those from other groups
What does Hanebrink argue the myth of Judea-Communism which replaced the obsession with blood libel between 1942-45 is best seen as? (2)
- A symbol of the overall culture of hatred
- the more the latter took root in public discourse, the lower the threshold for physical violence became
How did attitudes towards Jews and other minorities differ from one region to another under Soviet occupation?
- Although Soviets were ethnically cleansing the Poles of eastern Galicia until July 1941, the asymmetric trio of Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles left the Poles more sympathetic to Jews in western Galicia
Why does Burzlaff argue the will of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic nationalist groups to participate in pogroms must be understood via the concept of a ‘National Revolution’ and Christian apocalyptic visions? (Example of German-uniformed battalion in Lwow) (3)
- June 1941: unsuccessful attempts to proclaim a Ukrainian state, and Lithuanian state 1 day apart
- Local nationalists turned their attention to ethnic cleansing and neighbour-on-neighbour violence
- Previously considered the pinnacle of Eastern European antisemitism
How do Kopstein and Wittenberg explain the pogroms across eastern Soviet borderlands through pre-war behaviour? (extending Gross’ case study of Jewdwabne) (2)
- Argue pogroms happened in places where the perceived threat of Jewish political rights and the longing for an ethnically homogenous state were high
- if pogroms in c. 10% of all localities merely retaliation vs jewish-Soviet collaboration, once the Party officials had left, other ‘collaborators’ besides Jews would also have been targeted
What does Kopstein and Wittenber’s analysis contradict?
- Recent findings that every pogrom had a unique scenario
What does Finkel in history of the ghettos of Minsk, Krakow and Bialystok develop? (2)
- a typology of jewish reactions to Nazi policy by delineating the vast range of stances between “collaboration: and “armed resistance”
- Adds “cooperation”, “compliance”, “coping”, and “evasion” to our tools for understanding “victim” behaviour
What does Finkel argue in his study of the ghettos of Minsk, Krakow, and Bialystok? (2)
- That Jewish communities with pre-war experiences of discrimination and violence were more likely to resist and escape from ghettoes
- everyone had to make choices, often reflecting pre-war habits, at every stage of one’s involvement - or not - alongside the Nazis and the war, inseparable from the Holocaust
What does Browning’s study demonstrate?
- that the Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, comprising middle-aged men from Hamburg, killed c. 83k Jews bc of peer pressure, feelings of duty, obedience to authority, and brutalising circumstances
What does Lower’s study of German women in occupied territories show?
- at least 500k women became witnesses and accomplices, sometimes murdering Jews on their own
What does Lower argue motivated these German women? (5)
- motivated by a sense of adventure, careerism, romance, upward social
mobility, and independence from oppressive family authority back home
What does Lower call this generation of German women?
WWI Baby boomers
What does Lower say these women often did?
often engaged in intimate relationships with future victims, such as Jewish hairdressers
in Warsaw’s police department.
What does Jan Gross’ estimate ?
c. 1-1.5 million Jews died at the hands of non-Germans in Nazi-dominated Europe
Evidence of local henchman paritcipating in the search, robbing, and killing of Jews and that local police carried out Nazi orders in Eastern Europe (3)
- Polish ‘Blue’ Police - widespread participation in Nazi terror
- 20k men at its peak in late 1943
- Undertook mass executions and liquidated ghettos
How were the Trawinki men a heterogenous group?
- Originally mainly Soviet POWs
- later came to include Ukrainian and Polish civilians and sometimes ethnic Germans
- c. 4k-5k men
What did the Trawinki men do?
served as guards of deportations trains, and in death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka
What does Jan Grabowski’s work on a county in South-East Poland argue? (2)
- Emphasises extent to which m-c farmers, along w Blue Police, handed Jews over to the Nazis for material rewards, out of fear, or bc of antisemitic attitudes
- Usually those who began as helpers betrayed the victims after had exhausted their financial means, or at times sexually abused them
Why did east European auxiliaries participate in the killings of Jews? (5)
- hopes of securing favourable treatment for their communities
- liberation from the Soviet yoke
- for their own survival
- for entertainment
- ideology, opportunism, and inertia all played a role
Why did Soviet party members put themselves at the service of the Nazis?
because the authorities labelled anyone behind their lines a ‘collaborator’
What have historians exploring former Soviet party members found out about Ukrainian nationalists’ fascism?
- Ukrainian nationalists embraced a form of fascism that valued antisemitism,
national independence, and the indiscriminate use of violence and racism towards ther groups
Why does a mere focus on Jews not account for genocidal violence in Volhynia and Ukrainian nationalism?
- peasants participation in mass murder of Jews in western Ukraine and Belarus foretold the ethnic cleansing of up to 60k Volhynian Poles in 1943
What do Desbois and others now call the ‘Holocaust by bullets’?
- The mass shootings of 2.8 million Jews over pits across Eastern Europe
Who were ‘ethnic Germans’? (3)
- 70k former polish citizens who were to replace local groups as warriors-farmers
- contributed to the forcible acquisition of Jewish goods
- among those thousands who bought and managed Jewish property across Nazi-occupied Europe
What are the best-documented cases of the Ethnic German-type of complicity in the Nazi genocide?
- Hamburg
- Vichy France
What does Martin Dean say was a ‘social dynamic of the Holocaust’?
The pauperisation of Jews and their expropriation
What does Burzlaff argue social history needs to show, in line with Johnson’s reflections on historians of Afro-American slaves?
- Needs to show more how Jews and other victim groups strove to preserve their humanity
What two points do recent studies on Stalinist society at war highlight?
1) the Nazis’ dependence on locals partly restored their self-determination
2) the lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ Soviet citizens prompt us to consider their inner worlds when the Germans, often seen as liberators arrived
What is evidence to support the point highlighted by recent studies of Stalinist society at war that the Nazis, dependence on locals partly restored their self-determination? (2)
- Russian administrators had a surprising degree of freedom in their everyday lives as long as they executed Nazi orders.
- For many rural Russian populations in the north-west, the Nazi occupation even
improved their living standards after the dissolution of the much-hated collective
farms and the revival of the Orthodox church.
What does Masha Cerovic show? (2)
- no formal category of ‘collaborator’ existed for Russian partisans in Belarus
- need for a subtler understanding of people’s capacity to make sense of their environment, negotiating rather than internalising the regime’s values
How did some Jewish people’s involvement with the Holocaust in Poland complicate and proves the bystander/victim/perpetrator framework and collaboration/resistance is unhelpful? (3)
- Jewish informers worked for the Gestapo in Krakow
- Prostitution for survival was common practice in the Warsaw ghetto
- Grief and black despair pushed parents to kill their children
What does Zoe Waxman’s feminist history of the holocaust reveal? (3)
- Gender mattered for social relations
- hardships specific to Jewish women
- They were targeted in their role as mothers and were the victims of sexual violence in ghettos, hiding, concentration camps, and displaced persons camps
What does the omnipresence of sexual violence in genocide invite us to rethink?
- the connection between masculinity, war, and queer experiences
What does Ulrich Herbert criticise?
Critcises the misguided tendency to seek explanations for the involvement of non-Jewish Germans/non-Jews living under occupied territories in the Final Solution that will be emotionally satisfying
