Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 23, 2008

It was back to work in the Red Cross ITS archive today and the beginning of a countdown to when we make presentations to the archive staff, Paul Shapiro of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and CAHS staff, and the international press.

Our scholars’ group has been examining the concentration camp records at ITS, which include about 18 million pieces of paper, and is the first group to report. We'll be followed by other groups that have examined the forced labor, displaced persons, and ITS administrative records. We’re up Wednesday morning, so we put our heads together this afternoon, led by Elissa Mailaender-Koslov, to develop the main thrust of our report.

We are asked to comment on the general structure and content of the collection and to identify key parts for priority cataloguing and detailed emphasis. We are asked to evaluate the scholarly potential of the collection and perhaps to share insights that the collection, properly tapped, might or will convey. Finally, we are asked to explore specific research projects that might fit with the collection and its holdings and to assess in what ways the collection may or may not add to our understanding of Nazi persecution during the 1930s and 1940s and of the experiences of the Nazis’ many victims.

A huge cloud of expectation hangs over all this, so it might be best to first address what opening ITS to researchers and scholars does to our knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust. Some survivors and families and some in the public have outsized expectations of what will be revealed when ITS is opened. The concentration camp records are largely the records of the Nazi camps in Germany and Austria that were liberated by the Allied armies. There is less from the camps in the Nazi-occupied east, in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, which were liberated by the Soviets. Strictly speaking, then, the archives will reveal only a little bit about key aspects of the Holocaust, mainly about Auschwitz, for ITS holdings are thin on the Operation Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and on the mobile persecution of Jews by Einsatzgruppen and the Nazi order police. They are also thin on the eastern ghettos.

This said, there will nonetheless certainly be an important payoff in terms of the greater availability of information on and about Holocaust victims, selected at Auschwitz or elsewhere for work in the concentration camps after mid-1944, and who were transported around the system and to outlying commandos until liberation. A large share of the survivors were freed by the Allies, and they and their families will be much better informed on what happened at (among other places) Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthaussen, and many auskommandos. Some survivors and their families have already been in touch asking about Buchenwald and Schlieben, to which many prisoners were shipped in 1944-1945 to help make the Panzerfaust. Being able to see the personal card envelopes of many prisoners will enrich our view of the complex circuit of coerced and terrorized travel and work system in place until the Third Reich came crashing down.

But the archives at Bad Arolsen will also reveal a lot, it should be emphasized, about other victims in the Nazi camps, including German, Polish, French, and Czech political prisoners, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and many, many others. They were the majority in what one writer has called “the concentrationary universe,” and they constructed their own forms of response and prisoner society against their overlords inside the system. They also comprised the majority of the millions of forced laborers who worked in somewhat better conditions under the German overlords. 

ITS, then, serves as something of a window not only onto a part of the Nazi Holocaust but also onto the large-scale upheaval and transformation of the European continent and its labor supply during this period. Europe ceased to be a center for many peoples during the 1940s, not merely Jews. Many of these camp and forced labor people subsequently were part of the displaced persons numbers who settled elsewhere in Europe and also affected other lands far away from Europe through post-war migration.

We tend to think, then, and so we will say on Wednesday, that the collection holds all sorts of promise for scholars who want to study the development of the camp system, that is, to historicize the camps and study their growth and increasing connections during the 1930s and 1940s. We think also that the detailed materials available for some of the camps, if not all, notably for Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthaussen, but not Bergen-Belsen, will enable us to probe aspects of the structure and functioning of the camps beyond the juridical (that is, the practical workings of these places); to explore specific groups in the camps and their histories, often with an accompanying broadened sense of the diversity in these camps; and, in general, to open new possibilities for doing the social history of prisoner functionaries and of prisoners in the camps.

The Gestapo records reveal the growth and change in methods of persecution and the creation of more complex penal and camp institutions; the records of the camps themselves – all the transport lists, zugangsbucher, block bucher, and transport lists to auskommandos, together with remarkable personal card files – make possible the study of the camps as complex social places filled with small groups from particular towns and backgrounds, even with small fragments of social networks and families as well as terrorized prisoners. 

Wolfgang Sofksy’s The Order of Terror serves as a taking-off-and-arguing-against point for most of us as it does for those in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who are now compiling an encyclopedia of camps and ghettos. Sofsky posited the camps as a world apart, a regime of absolute power; he overlooked the diversity of the camps, both comparatively and across time, and he overstated the consequence for prisoners of becoming a coerced, seriated mass. The collection here enables us to see the camps as distinct and different, albeit parts of a synergistic, terrible, and gigantic system, and it also helps us sense the great complexity of movement and re-movement that pulsed through the nasty Nazi web. In this kinetic picture, prisoner functionaries and prisoners possibly found resistance modes and forms of adaptive strategies of their own to fight off power and its effects and to express personal meaning while holding on, enduring, and seeking to survive.

Each of us will then provide examples of the kinds of specific projects that might be undertaken and even supported in a refurbished and strengthened ITS archive. Elisa Mailaender-Koslov will talk about the Gestapo records and what they reveal about the evolution of persecution methods during the 1930s and 1940s. Jessica Anderson Hughes will explore the poor German women who populated the brothels in eight Nazi camps and who sought to earn their way out of captivity (none did). Alexandre Doulut will talk about how the records make possible fuller documentation of the native French Jews and also refugee Jews from Germany and Belgium who were deported from his small southwestern French town. Finally, Ken Waltzer will talk about the camp records and how they can be linked to study what happened to people from shared towns in the camps, what happened to children and youths, and what happened to many prisoners who were or were not helped by others. 

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

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