Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 25, 2008

Things went well with our reports to ITS and to visiting press during a long, muggy, and rainy day today. My colleagues were upbeat, positive, and detailed and did great jobs describing parts of the collection – camp records, forced labor records, displaced person records, and general records – and then exploring small projects they carried out or that should be done in the future.

The general thrust of presentations was that the collection is a goldmine for doing certain research (not all kinds), and that there ought to be attention at ITS to linking or bringing parts of the archive together that once were united.

The sense was that the collection is and will be an important venue for new history on the Nazi Holocaust – including local history studies of particular transports, social history studies of the fates of people from particular towns in the camps, and specialized studies of groups of prisoners – women, children and youths, and others. It will be a place where the everyday practices of persecution beyond the juridical can be studied and where historical and comparative work on the camps and on the slave labor and forced labor systems that coexisted under Nazi rule can be carried out. The Displaced Person records also provide a basis for writing a massive history or histories of the European upheaval at mid-century, with global implications, since European refugees went everywhere.

Personally, I found the forced labor records discussion fascinating. Alongside the Nazi concentration camp and slave labor system, the Nazis built a forced labor system of great range and size. Forced labor involving foreign workers existed in the web of local German society. Laborers worked for firms but also for local professionals and churches and on farms. My colleagues did regional studies of forced labor that included local towns, particularly Kassel and Bad Arolsen. The two labor systems appeared to resemble pre-war American slavery (slave labor) and post-war American sharecropping (forced labor) and also to be new. Forced labor was better and freer than slave labor, of course, but both were forms of bondage.  Forced laborers worked on contracts, could complain to authorities about contract violations, and took leaves and visited families. But violations of contracts and other behaviors could land forced laborers in the camps as slaves.

Konrad Kwiet thinks the archive should be a European-wide institution, a repository for studying aspects of the upheaval of Europe. His group made a good case for the value of the Displaced Person documents in the ITS collection, noting the number and the variety of displaced persons (about 350,000 at war’s end) and the richness of holdings that include people’s stories, their strategies and choices after upheaval, and trace elements of what had happened to them and where they sought to go. The end of colonialism, the displacement of peoples in Europe, and the refugee movement mark this as a caesura of European history.

I made a final set of discoveries in my own work. Block 66 was a haven for children and youths during the final three months of Buchenwald, I knew. In the end, some 900-1000 boys were clustered here, including Elie Wiesel. But today I discovered a set of books marked Verlegungen inerhalben der blocks (transfers among the blocks), and quickly the numerical history of block 66 unfolded. The block was populated by mid-January 1945, then older prisoners were moved out and newer, younger prisoners were brought in – especially during late January and early February. The youngest prisoners, including Israel Lau, were placed in block 8. The coincidence of the coming of large transports of boys from the evacuation of Auschwitz (January 22, 23, and 26) with the commitment by the German Communist-led international resistance to assist them, led on January 25-26 to a huge transfer, opening up block 66 for clustering boys. Nearly 170 boys were moved in, then 180 boys, then another 95, and then 77 as new transports came from Gross Rosen. I’m not sure I’ve got all the numbers, but I now see the timing of and trajectory of the building of the main rescue block.

The computer consultant to ITS approached me tonight at dinner and said it was now possible to search the entire camp records database by birth date – that is, by age. One could thus ask for a sample of names and birthdates of all children in all the camps – all those born, say, in 1930 or 1931 and after. I am intrigued with the possibility of studying children in and across the camps.

Tomorrow, I will participate in the final ITS discussions during the morning, then pack up and head from Kassel to Weimar to be ready to speak at Buchenwald. I want to say tonight how well we’ve been treated here and what good, nice, sharp people are at ITS under the current leadership. Reto Meister, the director; Udo Jost, the head archivist; and Irmtrud Wojak, the new historian, are top-notch folks who have listened and engaged with us solidly and who have their own good ideas about how to use the current moment to preserve and strengthen this institution, charged with stewardship of these important materials, and also to make it into something new.

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

*Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to read PDF documents.