Research Projects

Mary Fulbrook (London), Principal Investigator, Project 1:

Exploring the dramatically varying death rates of persecuted Jews in different regions of Europe under Nazi hegemony, Fulbrook’s research focuses on the political and social conditions for survival and rescue. The project extends Fulbrook’s previous research on ‘bystander society’ in Nazi Germany, which argued that factors explaining widespread passivity or compliance with perpetrators in face of systemic violence include not only active antisemitism or hostility towards victim groups, but also ignorance, indifference, and a sense of impotence. These are not ‘given’ but are fostered by specific conditions. The current project focuses on the significance of surrounding societies for the survival or rescue of the persecuted in different regions, treating the Holocaust as a pan-European phenomenon.

The project pays particular attention to differing pre-war and wartime interethnic relations, the significance of distinctive structures of power and repression, and questions around social relations, cultural understandings, and sense of community. The research explores the conditions under which those seeking to evade persecution are more likely to be able to ‘go underground’, ‘pass’, or receive assistance (whether knowingly or otherwise, fleetingly or longer-term) from non-Jewish members of the surrounding societies. Case studies are drawn from Poland, Lithuania and Latvia in eastern Europe, and France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in the west, as well as from the central initiator and organiser of genocide, the Third Reich. The project additionally relates differing historical experiences of complicity and survival, and evolving constructions of community and collective identity, to later ‘sites of memory’ – in the broadest sense, metaphorical as well as literal – in subsequent patterns of remembrance, marginalisation or oblivion.

Christina Morina (Bielefeld), Principal Investigator, Project 2: Bystanding (in) the Holocaust

To this day, “We knew nothing of it...” and “There was nothing we could do...” are iconoclastic representations of the self-perceptions of members of the non-Jewish majority populations in Germany and beyond. Historians have probed these claims for decades, largely refuting them by pointing to evidence for a wide-spread “knowledge” of and, however diffuse, involvement in the crimes committed in Nazi Germany and through-out Europe. This scholarship emerges from complex, still mostly national settings, in which historiographical issues, historical representation and memory politics are inextricably intertwined.
Taking the two cases of Nazi Germany and the Netherlands as points of departure, Christina Morina’s project analyzes and systematizes the role of bystanding in the persecution and murder of the Jews as reflected in Jewish and non-Jewish diaries from both countries. In Germany, in spite of plenty of perceptive studies on the mobilizing force of the Volksgemeinschaft and the ensuing dynamics of violence, the experiences, motives, actions and dynamics within the bystanding population, remain obscure. This is not least due to a focus on documents stemming from state, local and party branches, the propaganda apparatus and media as well as the Jewish communities and rarely from among the wider non-Jewish population itself. In the Netherlands, considered a “Germanic brother nation” (K. Happe) by the Nazis, a narrative of the hapless bystander, allegedly ignorant of the genocidal intentions of the regime and thus lacking a sufficient sense of urgency to act, indicates a palpable scholarly and public desire to narrow the realm of concern for societal responsibility.
In both cases, more conceptual and systematizing rigor are needed to fully understand bystanders’ roles and the overall relevance of bystanding. Aware of these enormous historiographical and public history challenges, Morina’s project systematically explores how perceptions of Jews were related to involvement in the persecution in Nazi Germany and the Netherlands, and how Jewish contemporaries viewed bystanding attitudes and (in)actions in a comparative perspective. What was the language of complicity in bystander diaries – and the language for bystanding in victim diaries? Situating her case study within the wider European context and drawing on the insights from the other team members’ projects, the project aims ultimately to provide a new conceptual and narrative framework for writing the history of bystanding in the Holocaust.

Gaëlle Fisher (Bielefeld), Project Researcher, Project 3: New Perspectives on “Rescue” in Europe during the Holocaust: France and Romania

This research explores critically the topic of ‘rescue’ during the Holocaust in transnational and comparative perspective. Recent scholarship has emphasized the fact that the Holocaust was a social process; performing rescue too, then, was the result of specific social dynamics, reflecting the complex interplay of individual choices and societal conditions in any given place and moment. And like with other aspects of the Holocaust, critical explorations of the histories of different helpers and modes of assistance offer a much more complex picture than previously assumed. Help was often situational and spontaneous, contingent on an evolving political situation and changing power structures, and the result of collective action rather than the initiative of a single individual. Most importantly, it was mostly not the result of a fixed attitude, identity or even a consistent ethical stance but rather dependent on multiple (sometimes even seemingly contradictory) factors and incentives. Indeed, what is needed is a close examination of social situations – pressures, traditions, perceptions – of different protagonists at different times.

Building on the state of knowledge in this field, my research explores empirically three key problems and sets of questions in relation to France and Romania specifically: 1) Individual experiences of persecution and help: an exploration of social interactions as recorded in contemporary egodocuments from both countries; 2) Jewish organizations and the concept of self-help: an exploration of the relationship between local circumstances, international relations and transnational networks of Jewish solidarity; 3) The Righteous in history and memory: an exploration of the tensions and tropes surrounding the concepts of ‘rescuer’ as well as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in two very different postwar societies and national historiographies.

In so doing, the concepts of community, courage and compliance serve both as analytical impetuses and as terms used in the sources that need to be analyzed as such. For example, I ask not just what risks an action truly involved but also what did it mean to historical actors to be ‘courageous’ at the time? What were the implications of compliance as a contemporary behavior, but also the meanings and connotations attached to compliance (and other words within this semantic field as well as their antonyms such as ‘non-compliance,’ ‘disobedience’ or even ‘resistance’) in different contemporary and postwar contexts? The overall aim of this work is to launch a reflection on how to gain and convey better knowledge about the dynamics of rescue and the memory of rescue and thereby attain a more differentiated understanding of notions of ‘good citizenship’ and ‘civil courage’ for the purposes of future research as well as public education.

Margaret Comer (London), Project Researcher, Project 4:

Instead of reifying binaries of ‘healing/hurtful’ or ‘good/bad’, this project explores what different manifestations and presentations of Holocaust and local collaborator violence mean to different groups and how these groups translate their beliefs and aims into material culture, in public space or museums. This is an especially fraught topic because, during the Soviet period, WWII-era nationalist partisans, vilified by the authorities, became underground icons of resistance and freedom for many Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, in the diaspora as well as within the USSR. Many of these partisans had been deliberately hunted down and killed by the Soviet NKVD, making them victims of that regime of repression. A burst of memorialization and heroization of these figures in the 1990s and early 2000s has been countered by more memory projects that point out that some of these ‘heroes’ participated in acts of Holocaust violence. Different memory discourses and ideologies, encompassing national pride, national identity, (un)willingness to face difficult pasts, and both Jewish and non-Jewish diaspora needs, have led to a combustible memory situation.

The proposed project will study various portrayals of Nazi German perpetrators and local collaborators at sites of memory, especially memorial museums, across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Concurrently, it will examine the portrayal of the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ at such sites. This work sits at the intersection of different interdisciplinary fields of study; the proposed project will closely examine intersections of memory, public space, ideology, and identity in order to understand the recent spate of (re)memorialization of certain people and events across the Baltics in tandem with the removal or destruction of memorials and rewriting of historical narratives. What actions or beliefs constituted a ‘good citizen’ during the Nazi occupation opposed to during the Soviet occupations, and how have these conceptions shifted in the past 30 years of independence?