Who owns history? ‘Everyone and no one’ was the US historian Eric Foner's assessment in 2003. Noting a deep fissure between academic and public discourse on slavery, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction era, Foner urged historians to reinvigorate their engagement with public history.Footnote 1 Almost two decades later, in the wake of an anti-globalization backlash and resurgent antisemitism, Foner's worries apply even more so to the Holocaust. Perhaps the most contentious field of history, it truly haunts us.Footnote 2 Innovative research on this seminal twentieth-century event thrives as never before. The opening of Soviet archives and a globalized commemorative culture centred on the Holocaust have contributed to shifting scholarly attention from Germany to eastern Europe.Footnote 3 A state-directed mass crime carried out by the Third Reich, the genocide of the Jews, and the targeting of Soviet POWs, Slavs, LGBTQ, Roma and Sinti, and the disabled could not have occurred without the participation, tacit support, and inertia of millions of non-Germans. Paradoxically, scholars who point to the complexity of these social relations have never been so harshly criticized throughout eastern Europe as they are now.Footnote 4 Poland, Ukraine, and other countries have increasingly developed official memory politics that often consider local populations as victims caught between Hitler and Stalin.Footnote 5 In the face of scholarly discourse stifled by aggressive public voices, we historians must bridge this gap. One of the foremost tasks is to take stock of the available scholarship scattered across the fields of central European, eastern European, German, Soviet, and Jewish history. This historiographical review on social relations in Nazi-dominated eastern Europe – a central point of contention in recent heated debates – is meant to be a step towards a dispassionate engagement with public discourse.
The current historiographical moment is indeed ready for a new overview of the field. Historians have realized that genocide is a social practice, and have moved away from studying it only as a bureaucratic and industrial process. Innovative studies of the involvement of local populations in the Holocaust have transformed our understanding of the events on three levels. First, the uniqueness paradigm, which emphasizes the impossibility of comparing the genocide of the Jews to other historical events, has lost momentum.Footnote 6 Various scales of analysis have more recently included macrophenomena (wars), structural-political factors (totalitarian regimes), and social psychological analyses. Second, the now well-established field of genocide studies enhances this comparative perspective. In specialized journals, such as the Journal of Genocide Research and Genocide Studies and Prevention, this interdisciplinary field has unearthed the widespread potential for genocide in modern society. But unresolved tensions in and between the two fields remain. While most historians produce empirical studies, genocide scholars tend to prefer a theoretical approach.Footnote 7
Third, and most importantly, the regionalization of studies, resulting in the remarkable fragmentation of the field, has discredited the existing categories of analysis. The late Raul Hilberg, one of the founders of Holocaust studies, had established three categories for the protagonists, namely ‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’, and ‘bystanders’. For Hilberg, a political scientist, and Michael Marrus, a historian, the universal concept of ‘bystanders’ encompasses all those ‘contemporaries of the Jewish catastrophe’ who ‘saw or heard something of the event’.Footnote 8 As scholars studied eastern Europe, they increasingly criticized these categories, particularly that of ‘bystanders’, for their inability to consider specific levels of opposition to or approval of the Nazi regime.Footnote 9 A more complex picture of social relations during the Holocaust has now emerged, facilitated by an ever-growing dialogue with other disciplines.Footnote 10
As a result, the history of the Holocaust stands at a crossroads. In 2002, the historian Mark Mazower rightly lamented that the Holocaust had become such a strong reference for measuring modern mass violence that other cases pale into insignificance.Footnote 11 But studies of comparative genocide have not integrated recent empirical findings of Holocaust historiography either. Given the vitality of both fields, I wish to extend Mazower's thoughts. Despite early efforts by Jewish survivors, such as Philip Friedman, who drew attention to the complex relations between Jews and non-Jews in eastern Europe, historians have not adopted such a perspective frequently enough.Footnote 12 This review essay contends that if, and only if, historians speak a language understood by experts of other fields can the Holocaust serve as a sophisticated template for the study of modern mass violence in which racial and gendered classifications, robbing, and killings on a massive scale have occurred.
Yet scholars often lack the tools to engage in such a dialogue. To begin with, Hilberg's trilogy, along with the ‘resistance and collaboration’ paradigm, does not help consider a wider range of social groups and behaviours outside the political sphere. In the past, historians conflated rigid categories with an analysis of the complex experiences of communities and individuals. The fallacious compulsion to judge behaviours and antisemitism as a universal explanation has also limited our efforts to understand the web of social relations in the Holocaust. This article argues that merely using a transnational focus can enhance our understanding of the complex interactions between the Nazi regime, local populations, and east European Jews.Footnote 13 As a case study, it will focus on the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands (kresy), including western Belarus and eastern Lithuania, as well as the Baltic states, western Russia, and the Crimea. All these regions experienced drastic political and social change during the war and were deeply affected by both the Soviet regime and the Nazi occupation. Recent scholarship has emphasized similar local dynamics and interpersonal relations in the Axis states (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania), but such far-reaching considerations go beyond the scope of a single article.Footnote 14 As historians are probing transnational approaches to the Holocaust, I suggest reading the available literature on these borderlands through four criteria that stress the transnational and that may be productively incorporated into broader perspectives on modern genocide and mass violence: the importance of pre-war politics; the multiplicity of social groups involved; a multi-dimensional perspective; and spatial and gender views.
These four criteria need to be read within the recent opening of Holocaust studies to other disciplines and fields. Borderlands scholars could gain many insights from eastern Europe, a variegated space of multiple languages, religions, and ethnicities.Footnote 15 Attempts to apply cultural history to the Holocaust have proven meaningful.Footnote 16 Although disputed and sometimes overstating historical continuities, an ‘imperial turn’ has demonstrated how colonial history might inform the Nazi empire.Footnote 17 Holocaust studies can also join forces with global historians who are beginning to reflect on cross-imperial connections and the diversity of colonial societies.Footnote 18 Comparing is not trivializing, as entangled histories will even further underline the Holocaust's particularities. Social transformations via war and genocide, the reorganization of gendered relations, and the subordination of local populations along racialized or cultural lines respond to the interests of many scholars.
I
Scholarship on the Holocaust traditionally took as its starting point the search for origins. Earlier works were limited to the confines of Germany's borders. The ‘historians’ quarrel’ (Historikerstreit), inflamed by both scholars and the German public in the late 1980s, centred on contentious issues such as the weight of antisemitism in German society, Prussian militarism, and the failed modernization of the German bourgeoisie.Footnote 19 Since then, the field has evolved in two directions. The historian and survivor Saul Friedländer, releasing Holocaust history from its German shackles, elaborated the now widely accepted concept of ‘integrated history of the Holocaust’, a method that combines the voices of all social groups, particularly those of Jewish victims, and moves beyond the inner workings of Nazi institutions.Footnote 20 To explain the destruction of social relations in wartime eastern Europe, historians usually reflect on the Soviet occupation that began with the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact (23 August 1939), which divided eastern Europe between Berlin and Moscow. Recent studies now argue that the Holocaust constitutes the tragic peak of a century-long process of the ‘unweaving’ of European populations, stretching back to the 1870s – a period that A. Dirk Moses aptly dubs the ‘racial century’. At stake are thus nation-building, quarrels over national borders, imperialist rivalries, and ideological conflicts.Footnote 21 From such a vantage point, which, unlike earlier perspectives, includes the history of the Jewish victims, the Holocaust is embedded spatially within a broader European framework, and chronologically within the early twentieth century, and especially the interwar years.
Lithuania offers one powerful example of this trend. Christoph Dieckmann follows local nationalism from the nineteenth century and interweaves the boiling conflicts between Jews and non-Jewish Lithuanians during the Soviet and Nazi occupations. In Estonia, bitter memories of the Russian empire were combined with a sense of nationalism from which Jews were increasingly excluded. This ‘political promiscuity’, as Anton Weiss-Wendt calls it, left Estonians longing for a national state, which eventually led them to join forces with the Nazi regime. For the eastern Galician town of Buczacz, Omer Bartov traces ethnic conflicts back to the violent demise of the Habsburg empire.Footnote 22 In the aftermath of the First World War, hostility towards Jews intensified, and the feelings of belonging to a specific ethnic group significantly increased with the foundation of nationalist parties. The inability of Ukrainian nationalists to found a state ignited fascist ideology in eastern Galicia, with profound implications for Jews after 1941. New political movements and networks that emerged after the fall of the Romanov and Habsburg empires seem to have paved the way for extreme collective violence. Applying the notion of ‘fascism’ to eastern Europe, though still disputed, can potentially serve as a productive frame for a transnational approach to antisemitism and post-imperial politics.Footnote 23
But a longue durée approach to the Holocaust has not been confined to a political perspective. Lived experiences of ethnic groups have become central to explaining the origins of violence. Young Jews, having reached adulthood in the Second Polish Republic (1918–39) and used to embracing ‘cultural Polishness’, were simultaneously pushed to the socio-economic margins. Primarily focused on teasing out Polish antisemitism, earlier studies oversaw how Betar, one of the most popular Zionist youth movements, with nearly 40,000 members in Poland alone, negotiated its role in the nascent Polish state.Footnote 24 This complex picture makes it possible to consider ethnic groups as fluid entities, and Jewish communities engaged in Bundism (the Jewish socialist party), communism, orthodoxy (Agudat Yisrael), and Zionism as the most flexible on class and religious matters. In 1983, Ezra Mendelsohn wrote about ‘Jewries of varying nature’. According to his typology, which has not, surprisingly, more widely resounded in Holocaust studies, the Jews in the western borderlands, attached to German culture, were different from Galician Jews – who were usually bourgeois and close to Polish Zionism – and the majority of Jews from the rural eastern borderlands (kresy), traditionally disengaged from their Christian neighbours.Footnote 25 Different levels of politicization among Polish and Ukrainian peasants also point to a more complex panorama for non-Jews. After the demise of the Russian and Habsburg empires, peasant parties in western Galicia gained a sense of ethnic nationalism, in contrast to the eastern borderlands, where the lower strata of Poles assimilated into Ukrainian culture.Footnote 26 What was the depth of those nationalist sentiments? Scholars of the Habsburg empire have recently argued that borderland populations could be indifferent to the nationalistic endeavours of small groups of activists until the First World War, navigating among languages to their advantage.Footnote 27 How did these regional differences affect, some twenty years later, individual and group behaviour in the Holocaust?
The Soviet occupation, another centrepiece of recent literature, left each ethnic group suffering. Soviet rule had profoundly traumatized the Estonians. Polish nationalists believed that Jews had plotted with Stalin's local henchmen. Ukrainian extreme nationalism had formed in south-eastern Poland, targeting Soviets, Poles, and Jews as so many obstacles to an ethnic state. In Belarus, the Soviet regime had already embarked on an anti-Jewish policy, sharpening the general animosity towards the Jewish minority. Here, Timothy Snyder's framework of a ‘double occupation’, first Soviet, then Nazi, serving as a laboratory of escalating genocidal violence, is more persuasive than the old stereotype that Jews were punished for their involvement with the Soviets.Footnote 28 Case studies from eastern Galicia and Białystok have revealed that the number of Jews in the Soviet administration was not higher than were those from other ethnic groups.Footnote 29 This myth of Judeo-Communism (Żydokomuna), which replaced the obsession with blood libel between 1941 and 1945, is best seen as 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.Footnote 30
Therefore, to grasp the history of the Soviet occupation, one must recognize that attitudes towards Jews and other minorities differed from one region to another. Although the Soviets were ethnically cleansing the Poles of eastern Galicia until July 1941, the asymmetric trio of Ukrainians, Jews, and Poles left the last more sympathetic to Jews in western Galicia. The analysis of long-term social structures could thus help to overcome the existing scholarly opposition between the Institute for National Remembrance, which praises the help given to Jews by Christian Poles, and the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, which highlights their betrayal.Footnote 31
Long-term structures of political and cultural geography also help to explain individual choices under Nazi rule from June 1941. The will of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Baltic nationalist groups to participate, for instance, in pogroms must be understood via the concept of a ‘National Revolution’ and Christian apocalyptic visions, such as in the German-uniformed battalion Nachtigall in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine). After unsuccessful attempts to proclaim a Ukrainian state on 22 June 1941 and a Lithuanian one the following day, local nationalists turned their attention to ethnic cleansing and neighbour-on-neighbour violence, long considered the bloody pinnacle of eastern European antisemitism. In 2001, Jan T. Gross's much-contested and harrowing account of the Jedwabne pogrom on 10 July 1941 centred explicitly on the Polish villagers as the brutal executioners.Footnote 32 Extending Gross's case study to 219 pogroms across the eastern Soviet borderlands, the political scientists Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg explain the pogroms’ occurrence through pre-war behaviour. They argue that 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 about 10 per cent of all localities were merely retaliation against Jewish–Soviet collaboration, once the Party officials had left, other ‘collaborators’ besides Jews would have been targeted.Footnote 33 The authors’ thought-provoking argument, focusing on political rather than cultural integration of Jews, contradicts recent findings that every pogrom had a unique scenario.Footnote 34 Current scholarly differences seem to centre on the importance of Nazi violence and the ideological convergence between local and German perpetrators. A comparative analysis of local non-German perpetrators, their pre-war organizations, and anti-Soviet background is still missing.
In his study of the ghettos of Minsk, Krakow, and Białystok, Evgeny Finkel develops a typology of Jewish reactions to Nazi policy by delineating the vast range of stances between ‘collaboration’ and ‘armed resistance’. Adding ‘cooperation’, ‘compliance’, ‘coping’, and ‘evasion’ to our tools for understanding victim behaviour, he contends that Jewish communities with pre-war experiences of discrimination and violence were more likely to resist and escape from ghettos. 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.Footnote 35 Firmly grounded in eastern Europe, a broader framework tackles the stigmatization of ethnic minorities, disabled people, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Only in this condition can the genocide of the Jews be understood within the history of European mass violence.
II
To write about social interactions, historians usually begin with the history of one group. How, when, and why did some people become mass killers, whereas others did not? Since Christopher R. Browning's seminal study entitled Ordinary men (1992), ‘perpetrator history’ (Tätergeschichte) has become a staple of Holocaust studies. Browning demonstrated that the Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, comprising middle-aged men from Hamburg, killed around 83,000 Jews because of peer pressure, feelings of duty, obedience to authority, and brutalizing circumstances. While the ‘ordinariness’ of these men has been challenged, historians have stressed a ‘particular National Socialist morality’ (Harald Welzer) and male bonding and comradeship for the generation of Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders in the Main Security Office (RSHA) in Berlin, the concentration camps, the German army (Wehrmacht), and the paramilitary Stormtroopers (SA).Footnote 36 Explanations have included a cult of self-sacrifice, submission to higher authorities, and personal ambition. Courage and responsibility were essential virtues the military and SS leaders on the ground propagated and endorsed.Footnote 37
This ever-widening subfield of ‘perpetrator history’ has led to scholarly interest in previously unstudied German-speaking groups in eastern Europe through lenses of class, race, and gender. For instance, Wendy Lower tackles the neglected role of German women in the occupied territories. At least 500,000 – nurses, teachers, secretaries, and wives, of whom Lower follows thirteen eastwards – became witnesses and accomplices, sometimes murdering Jews on their own. For a sense of adventure, careerism, romance, upward social mobility, and independence from oppressive family authority back home, these women, a generation whom Lower calls ‘World War I baby boomers’, often engaged in intimate relationships with future victims, such as Jewish hairdressers in Warsaw's police department.Footnote 38 Scholarly attention has shifted towards daily life and the variety of German groups in eastern Europe, first and foremost ethnic Germans.Footnote 39 Current debates concern women's participation in Nazism, the levels of ideology and indoctrination, and the transgression of gender norms. Future studies need to broaden these perspectives to female physicians, cooks, nurses, drivers, and other German professional groups that participated in mass murder.
But to implement the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi regime required active involvement and depended heavily on locally recruited auxiliaries. Beginning in the late 1980s, Holocaust historians became interested in non-German groups, which, in turn, inflamed the nationalist ethos in eastern Europe. Civilians becoming auxiliaries in modern genocides remain comparatively little studied, but the numbers of individuals involved in executing the Holocaust are staggering. Himmler and the SS had 300,000 local policemen at their disposal in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe. In the administrative unit of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the SS employed some 15,000 Germans and 238,000 local police, a ratio of nearly 1 to 16 by late 1942 and sometimes 1 to 50 by 1944. As for the Wehrmacht and the SS, Mark Edele estimates that between 120,000 and 250,000 Red Army soldiers became ‘German skins’ (nemetskie shkury) after the Nazi invasion, called Operation Barbarossa, on 22 June 1941.Footnote 40 Nazi units killed 110,000 Soviet officers, well below the traditional 800,000 given in historical accounts. By spring 1942, many Communist party cadres had become ‘accomplices (posobniki) of the enemy’, as N. K. Spiridonov, the chief of the Red Army's political department, complained in an internal report.Footnote 41 For many Russian populations, a German victory was considered inevitable until late 1941. Most excesses of Stalin's regime were, therefore, meted out on Russian Jews.Footnote 42 If one follows Jan T. Gross's suppositions, then approximately 1–1.5 million Jews would have died at the hands of non-Germans in Nazi-dominated Europe. Jan Grabowski estimates that 250,000 Polish Jews might have escaped ‘Operation Reinhard(t)’ – the Nazi codename for the extermination of Jews in death camps after July 1942. Many Christian Poles contributed to the fact that fewer than 50,000 survived this hell.Footnote 43
We now know that local henchmen participated in the search, robbing, and killing of Jews. Across eastern Europe, local police, such as the Estonian battalions (Omakaitse), carried out Nazi orders, whose sheer brutality becomes particularly evident in the case of the Latvian Arājs and the Lithuanian Hamann Commandos. The most controversial case in public discourse remains the Polish ‘Blue’ Police (Polnische Polizei) because of their widespread participation in Nazi terror. This unit, composed of 20,000 men at its peak in late 1943, undertook mass executions and liquidated ghettos.Footnote 44 Moreover, the armed wing of the SS (Waffen-SS) employed many non-Germans, such as the Galizien, Wiking, and Handschar divisions, composed of Ukrainians, ‘Germanic’ volunteers, and Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina, respectively. Often, intimacy with the victims incited murder. Henchmen, whom local Jews often knew personally, guarded ghettos and cordoned off shooting sites. In Buczacz, eastern Galicia, 300 Ukrainian policemen and two dozen Nazis murdered 60,000 ‘neighbours, colleagues, classmates, or parents of their children's friends’.Footnote 45
In this vein, more systematic analyses of the triangular relationship between Nazi occupiers, Jews, and local populations have emerged. The General Government (GG) – that is, Nazi-occupied Poland – in which one of every three Jews perished, can illustrate such a valuable approach. The so-called Trawniki men, a heterogeneous group, were composed of 4,000 to 5,000 men – first, mainly Soviet POWs, then Ukrainian and Polish civilians, and sometimes ethnic Germans.20 These men, whose group took their name from their training camp near Lublin in south-east Poland, served as guards of deportation trains and in the death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.Footnote 46 Two recent accounts of Operation Reinhard(t) complement this largely unknown phase of the Holocaust by delving into its core, namely ideologically driven mass murder without primary economic interests, with kill rates ten times higher than in other genocides. In its dark heart in south-east Poland, approximately 1.6–1.73 million Jews were killed in twenty months.Footnote 47
Rescue and betrayal by local populations are two crucial aspects of interactions among ethnic groups after most Jews had been forced into ghettos or deported. The most innovative body of literature on the ‘hunt for Jews’ (Judenjagd) exists, again, for the General Government. In his work on Dąbrowa Tarnowska County, south-east Poland, Jan Grabowski emphasizes the extent to which middle-class farmers, along with the Blue Police, handed Jews over to the Nazis for material rewards, out of fear, or because of antisemitic attitudes. Quite often, those who began as helpers betrayed the victims after they had exhausted their financial means, or, at times, sexually abused them. A mere 1–2 per cent of Polish Jewry survived.Footnote 48
These studies have helped to reinforce our appreciation of a more precise chronology and to understand that the Holocaust included multiple episodes of violent intimacy shaped by abuse, hope, trust, and treachery. Most Jews in eastern Europe were shot in the open, near their homes. By late 1942, approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in eastern Europe, along with 250,000 from western and central Europe.Footnote 49 How did interactions between Jews and non-Jews evolve at this stage? When the ‘liquidation actions’ of the camps and ghettos began, Jewish prisoners fomented the well-known uprisings in Sobibór and Treblinka, and some managed to escape. Two volumes of micro studies expand these perspectives to nine counties in today's Poland and Ukraine between mid-1942 and 1945. They remind us that we still know relatively little about the firefighters, farmers, Polish youth organizations, and village watchmen involved in handing over Jews. The extreme struggle for survival of the 10 per cent of Jews in hiding is not well explored either.Footnote 50
Therefore, interactions during the Judenjagd have yet to be addressed, as the Polish countryside represents only a fraction of eastern Europe. After murdering between 70,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians, Ukrainian nationalists, internally divided between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Orhanizatsia Ukraїns'kykh Natsionalistiv, OUN), hunted down several thousand Jews.Footnote 51 Blind spots remain, such as rural Russian populations’ attitudes towards Jews and the second largest group of victims, the Soviet POWs.Footnote 52 How did the loyalties and attitudes of Russian non-Jews evolve in areas that had fallen under Nazi rule and were reconquered after the battle of Moscow in January 1942? Most recently, Soviet historians have emphasized the intimate link between politics of retribution and reaffirmation of Soviet authority.Footnote 53 How did these wartime behaviours and post-war belonging affect the ongoing Holocaust? We have only begun to grasp the complexities on the ground, such as for the often-neglected non-European areas, including the Crimea and the north Caucasus. After the Nazi mobile killing squad D (Einsatzgruppe D) had shot 30,000 Jews in the Crimea and 40,000 Jews in the north Caucasus, many Tartars, in the former, and Cossacks, in the latter, were recruited to hunt down any remaining Jews. The thoroughness of Nazi mass crimes spared only particular groups, such as two-thirds of the Mountain Jews in the north Caucasus, and the Karaites, considered half-Muslims, in the Crimea.Footnote 54 Comparing Poland with these understudied eastern borderlands would help explain to what extent and why locals’ involvement and Jewish survival rates varied from region to region. But the diversity of protagonists in these regions was not limited to east Europeans. For instance, several thousand Dutch Nazis attempted to participate in the build-up of the murderous Nazi utopia in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics, smitten with the fantasy of a common Germanic race.Footnote 55 Recent scholarship has both turned to interpersonal, often sadistic, episodes and shied away from notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
Many of these studies focus on the search for motives and the willingness of locals to participate in the murder of the Jews. The cohesion of Nazi perpetrators contrasts sharply with the Nazi euphemism of ‘voluntary helpers’ (Hilfswilligen), extremely diverse yet wholly treated as second-class human beings, who triggered genocidal behaviour. Unlike German policemen, for whom Christopher R. Browning found hints of scruples, east European auxiliaries participated in the killings of Jews in the hope of securing favourable treatment for their communities, liberation from the Soviet yoke, or their own survival, or simply for entertainment. Ideology, opportunism, and inertia all played a role. Non-Germans constantly compromised between their values and the inclusive policies of Nazi Germany.Footnote 56 Former Soviet party members put themselves at the service of the Nazis because the authorities labelled anyone behind their lines a ‘collaborator’. Historians have begun exploring the worldview of these men and women and have found, for instance, that Ukrainian nationalists embraced a form of fascism that valued antisemitism, national independence (samostiinist’), and the indiscriminate use of violence and racism towards other groups.Footnote 57 Here, a mere focus on Jews does not suffice to account for genocidal violence. For instance, the participation of peasants in the mass murder of Jews in western Ukraine and Belarus foretold the ethnic cleansing of up to 60,000 Volhynian Poles in 1943.Footnote 58 How do we explain this?
Continued historical exploration of the complex relations between a diversity of social groups should be encouraged. In light of persisting Holocaust denial, scholars have been concerned, understandably, with reconstructing the timeline of the persecution and the inner workings of death camps and major ghettos. But the multiplicity of ethnic groups involved in mass killing reminds us that historians, in concert with scholars in other disciplines, can elaborate new frameworks for understanding social interactions beyond psycho-social theories of obedience and conformity drawn from the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments. Most models have, indeed, only been applied to German perpetrators. And yet violence changes everyone. Social psychologists have stated that becoming a ‘perpetrator’ is a social process – for which we should distinguish actions, actors, and mutual perceptions, notably the sense of the self in relation to, and moral judgments made about, others.Footnote 59 Historians play a crucial role in analysing relationships through social and cultural history. Two directions seem most promising. The much-used expression ‘local nationalists’ hides vast differences in these actors’ worldviews and pre-war training that need further exploration, as well as their social and political background and their wartime experiences. This holds for the Holocaust and other instances of mass violence.Footnote 60 The idea that locals in eastern Europe acted upon ‘primitive’ instincts needs to be foregone, as this is nothing less than a post-war opposition between western and eastern Europe.
How do we move forward? Using broad categories to define social groups in the Holocaust, historians have produced excellent studies that have recently found an echo in what Father Patrick Desbois and others now call the ‘Holocaust by bullets’, namely mass shootings of 2.8 million Jews over pits across eastern Europe.Footnote 61 The term ‘Holocaust’ summons a variety of events, places, and groups, which means accepting the limits of scholarly language and the necessity to use categories for social behaviour. Nevertheless, we need to reflect more on analytical terms such as ‘locals’ and ‘nationalists’. Social identity theory is probably best for enhancing our grasp of, for example, Ukrainian nationalists who understood themselves as members of a racist and fascist movement. After the Nazi occupiers had retreated, they continued mass murder.Footnote 62 We thus need more studies on their organizations, the relations between Russian populations and the Nazi regime, Soviet POWs, the Sinti and Roma, the Holocaust in the Baltics, and petty yet murderous initiatives taken at the grass-roots level. Future studies, on smaller ghettos and labour camps for example, make more sense through a transnational focus on what social groups did to each other.
III
Communal violence in eastern Europe left no-one indifferent. Remaining passive was impossible between Nazi warfare and interethnic violence.Footnote 63 However, a multi-dimensional history of the Holocaust that takes into account the shifting social fabrics and interethnic relations must be further encouraged.Footnote 64 Indeed, the field has moved in recent years from Nazi policies to the perceptions of those under German occupation. These lived experiences range from daily violence and economic plunder to severe hunger and shortages.Footnote 65 There is still much to be done, building either on the range of rich, fascinating micro studies of cities, camps, and ghettos,Footnote 66 or on the macro approach best represented by Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, understood as the area of eastern Europe where up to 14 million people lost their lives.Footnote 67
The multiple levels and types of interaction require that the typical focus on ‘politics’ be abandoned for a broader range of social behaviour. To exemplify much-needed histories of the Holocaust beyond a political focus, we can use the General Government as a laboratory. Martin Winstone offers the first comprehensive account of this brutally exploited zone, including Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish voices. Emphasizing the horror in its daily face, he carefully assesses that, although only Nazis and a minority of ethnic Poles killed Jews, the majority did not assist them either. In a compelling account of wartime Poland, Halik Kochanski discusses different Polish groups’ hardships. Unfortunately, she overstates Christian Poles’ sympathy towards Jews and does not reference the vast German literature.Footnote 68 The complex encounters between Germans, ethnic Germans, Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians are not addressed – one could begin here with the Polish Underground State (Polskie Państwo Podziemne, PPP). By June 1944, its 350,000 members represented the largest resistance movement in Nazi-dominated Europe. Survival of Polish Jews and Ukrainians depended on varying attitudes that the Polish Underground bore on the ground, ranging ‘from aid efforts to the murder of the Jews both in hiding and as armed partisans’.Footnote 69
Other perspectives are less known. Few historians have systematically studied how the attitudes of Jews towards Germans, Poles, and other groups evolved, although social classification is an inherent historical process.Footnote 70 In this vein, Tomasz Frydel argues for a combination of Nazi-directed policies and bottom-up perspectives that centre on Polish villagers and, often, their fear of Jews and other persecuted groups, such as deserter Soviet POWs.Footnote 71 Have we seen, thus far, only the peak of what was massive structural violence? Invaluable material awaits historians. The mass desertion of Soviet party cadres and the large-scale purges after the ‘liberation’ of Nazi-occupied zones produced myriad post-war trial records, 32,000 in Poland alone.Footnote 72
To promote this type of social history of genocide, we need to concentrate on the different ethnic groups – such as ‘ethnic Germans’. In the broader scheme of Nazi population policies (Volkstumspolitik), ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) – amounting to 70,000 former Polish citizens – were to replace local groups as warriors-farmers (Wehrbauern).Footnote 73 We now possess studies on these communities in Ukraine, interwar Poland, Prague, and the Banat region (Yugoslavia) that contributed to the forcible acquisition of Jewish goods (‘Aryanization’).Footnote 74
Ethnic Germans were among those thousands who bought and managed Jewish property across Nazi-occupied Europe. Thus far, Hamburg and Vichy France are the best-documented cases of this type of complicity in the Nazi genocide.Footnote 75 In 2005, Götz Aly drew public attention to the economic aspects of the Holocaust, arguing that the Nazi regime, which he presents as a system of redistribution and social provision, bought the loyalties of Germans via the plunder of the Jews and the occupied territories. In 2017, Aly broadened his argument across Nazi-occupied Europe, claiming that antisemitism was motivated by social envy, with Jewish assets serving as rewards for local non-Jews.Footnote 76 But his characterization of Germans proves highly problematic regarding Nazi Germany, let alone eastern Europe. Recent research has advanced our understanding of the economic history of genocide in these regions.Footnote 77 The pauperization of Jews and their expropriation were indeed a ‘social dynamic of the Holocaust’ (Martin Dean). What happened to property whose owners were robbed and killed in eastern Europe? A much-needed comparative focus would underscore similarities across national frames. Local administrators, from the Nazi administration (Haupttreuhandstelle Ost) to the village elder (starosta), enrolled Jews in forced labour and administered their property.Footnote 78 How did the persecution of Jews affect the fabric of society on a regional level, along with the socio-economic life of non-Jews?
Another possibility for transcending political history comes from historians who study everyday life.Footnote 79 Veritable cultural warfare reached many people through millions of leaflets in Poland, or the 200 Russian-language and 160 Ukrainian newspapers that the Nazi regime sponsored.Footnote 80 If one attempts to analyse daily life (Alltag) in the Holocaust, the persecuted appear as members of families and communities, as individuals who strove to maintain normality under extreme conditions.Footnote 81 Here, scholars of mass violence can profit from Walter Johnson's reflections on Afro-American slaves. He urges historians to elaborate other concepts than ‘agency’ to think about dignity and social self-determination. A history of slavery which perceives the lives of enslaved people ought to be written as ‘powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to, their slavery’.Footnote 82 In this vein, social history needs to show more how Jews and other victim groups strove to preserve their humanity.
Fresh perspectives on subjectivities might help. At the peak of the German advance in late 1941, close to 80 million Russians came under Nazi rule. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Belarusians, and Russians all had competing visions of territory and society that brutal warfare pushed to the extreme. A spate of innovative studies on Stalinist society at war highlights two points. The first is the Nazis’ dependence on locals, which partly restored their self-determination: 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. Second, the lived experiences of ‘ordinary’ Soviet citizens prompt us to consider their inner worlds when the Germans, often seen as liberators, arrived.Footnote 83 As Masha Cerovic shows, no formal category of ‘collaborator’ existed for Russian partisans in Belarus. Insightful studies on the Soviet Union have worked towards a subtler understanding of people's capacity to make sense of their environment, negotiating rather than internalizing the regime's values.Footnote 84 This approach offers a promising outline for other ethnic groups during the Holocaust.Footnote 85
A change of perspective is thus necessary, which leads Holocaust scholars from high Nazi policies, via the cultural challenges facing the persecuted Jews and other ethnic groups, to the very terms of social being. Furthermore, we need to connect all ethnic groups; historians have come a long way since the 1980s, when Ukrainians were either defended or accused.Footnote 86 The farther one moves eastwards, the more the legacy of multi-ethnic empires forces us to deconstruct traditional dyads and to take into account all ethnicities – such as, in the Crimea, Russians, Ukrainians, ethnic Germans, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Tatars, and Sinti and Roma. In these understudied Nazi-occupied borderlands, ‘religion’ shaped the very contours of interethnic relations, such as family dynamics and age.Footnote 87 For its claimed ‘crusade against Bolshevism’, Nazi Germany exploited Muslims’ open enmity towards the Soviet regime. In the Crimea, Islam was a powerful marker of difference that defined group survival after 1941.Footnote 88
Despite much excellent work done by east European historians, some parts of national historiography tend to echo or replicate official memory politics. The Lithuanian government elaborates on the ‘Double Holocaust myth’, the equation of Nazi and Soviet crimes that dates to the Prague declaration of 2008. Academic quarrels in Ukraine, revolving around the Nationalists (OUN-B), have not reached a broader audience. ‘They lived among us, didn't they?’ asked the historian Sofiya Grachova in 2005, defying some fellow scholars to forgo nationalist politics of memory – an ongoing challenge in politically charged contexts.Footnote 89 Fortunately, scholars continue to tackle vital questions. For the concentration camp system, we now possess a multi-dimensional history, thanks to Nikolaus Wachsmann's monumental effort to combine a history of institutional violence with the study of different ethnic groups.Footnote 90 Such an entangled perspective will be useful beyond the extensive network of camps. Jewish informers worked for the Gestapo in Krakow, while prostitution for survival was common practice in the Warsaw ghetto.Footnote 91 Grief and black despair pushed parents to kill their children. Historians are not judges of the past. As disquieting as it proves, research on taboos – for instance, on moral dilemmas faced by the victims – is essential to advancing our understanding of a social system of genocide that did not spare the most intimate theatres of violence.
IV
Considerations of gender are relatively recent in the history of the Holocaust and modern genocide. It was only during the 1990s that this subfield emerged but, although strongly informed by a feminist framework, it neglected the diversity of women's experiences. Despite some foundational volumes, a gendered perspective must still be integrated into mainstream Holocaust studies, as must the willingness of (male) academics to engage further in such discussions. Gender mattered for social relations, as Zoë Waxman shows with her ‘feminist history of the Holocaust’, revealing 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 (DP) camps.Footnote 92 Studies on the sexual nature of Nazi crimes and its deleterious effects on Jewish masculinity are most welcome, not the least because recent writings have been prolific on non-Jewish east Europeans.Footnote 93 Indeed, the omnipresence of sexual violence in genocide invites us to rethink the connection between masculinity, war, and queer experiences.Footnote 94 Gender relations in the killing fields, for Jews in hiding, in the occupied Soviet territories, and in the vast forests of Belarus are not yet well known. Between 10,000 and 13,000 people, primarily women and children, joined ‘family units’ there to build a surrogate community. What were their experiences? Were women more frequently spared in some areas? More research is needed into the connection between anti-partisan warfare and the killing of Jews,Footnote 95 and into the role of gender as a marker for social norms, the effects of age and generational differences, the dynamics of hierarchical relationships, and bearing witness after the war's end.Footnote 96
Encouraged by broader historiographical trends, the spatial turn has also made its first marks on Holocaust history. Timothy Snyder's much-debated works have challenged us to think about ‘space’. Recent work has shed light on topographies of the Holocaust and camp geographies, and has applied new GPS-led technologies to testimonies concerning the Janowska camp on the outskirts of Lviv, Ukraine.Footnote 97 Impetus from environmental history compels us to integrate the landscape into broader narratives.Footnote 98 For instance, few hiding spots existed in the Crimea, two-thirds of which is covered by semi-arid prairies. Research on hiding, flight, forced migration, and deportations can only be inherently transnational.Footnote 99 The oft-forgotten history of Polish Jews who lived in the Soviet-occupied territories in 1939 is one such case. Between 150,000 and 300,000 Polish Jews found harsh yet life-saving shelter as refugees, political prisoners of the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD), or Red Army soldiers. The integration of ‘mobility’ into Holocaust studies is merely in its infancy, despite the high numbers of people who moved in what Andrew Denning defines as ‘a circulatory state’.Footnote 100
The focus on rescue offered by non-Jews equally provides a new window onto intimate relationships in Nazi-occupied territories. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews were rescued, but a comprehensive history of this process, moving beyond the Vatican or government structures, such as the US War Refugee Board, is yet to be written.Footnote 101 The circular paradigm of the ‘strong self’ and ‘altruistic personality’, centred on the rescuer, shrouds an array of interactions ranging from sexual barter to sincere support.Footnote 102 This catch-all category of ‘rescuer’, designating between 50,000 and 500,000 non-Jews (less than 0.5 per cent of the total population under Nazi rule), needs to give way to the comparative analysis of local factors. In this vein, the sociologist Aliza Luft rightly points to ‘behavioral boundary crossing’ in Rwanda.Footnote 103 The death penalty for hiding Jews hung like a sword of Damocles, not just over Poles' heads, but over all of eastern Europe. Further research needs to address how and why non-Jews, after decades of often intimate relations with their Jewish neighbours, became able to betray them to foreigners and sometimes murder them.
V
Forty years ago, Jan T. Gross published his dissertation on Nazi-occupied Poland. The book quickly became a hallmark study but, in keeping with the prevailing assumptions of the day, Gross allotted merely a page and a half to the fate of 3 million Poles of Jewish faith in these war-torn regions.Footnote 104 Scholars have made significant progress since the 1980s, when they abandoned a bureaucratic image of the victims and confronted such past horrors. Nowadays, post-colonial historians fear that the universality of Jewish suffering eclipses other cases of mass violence, although Holocaust historians have begun to engage with broader historiographical trends. The time has come to rethink our engagement as scholars and citizens in today's challenges, whereby academic training in national contexts has proven insufficient. The Holocaust was a socially rooted, transnational genocide. A continued dialogue, based on the notion of history as a ‘discipline of context and of process’, is necessary.Footnote 105
The most inspiring legacy of Timothy Snyder's vividly debated concept of ‘Bloodlands’ has been the merging of Jewish and non-Jewish stories in eastern Europe. These encounters have begun to be explored through shared lenses, such as ethnic violence, mass murder, politicization, everyday life, upward social mobility, and geographic displacement. A palpable tension concerns the explanatory power of antisemitism, not least because scholars have mostly dwelled on national frameworks. Furthermore, Nazi population policies, economic greed, and fear of Bolshevism cannot account for the effect of social processes that allowed for the murder of the Jewish minority.Footnote 106 If we write about ‘age-old hatred’ of Jews, then we need to give ourselves the tools to do so with the history of emotions.Footnote 107 Such an approach, along with visual and digital history, is a path by which Holocaust history can bring forward pioneering results, a challenge raised by Shelley Baranowski in 2018.Footnote 108
Since the first decade of this century, scholars have established the extensive complicity of local populations in the Holocaust. Of every three Jews who survived killing fields and ghettos, two perished, often at the hands of non-Germans. Group histories have indeed produced a complex picture of the social fabrics under Nazi occupation. Simultaneously, a battle for the recognition of victimhood emerged. Therefore, we need a multi-dimensional and transnational approach that includes all social groups and the full array of human behaviours. Basic assumptions remain unchallenged. To what extent were ethnic groups in these Polish–Ukrainian borderlands, and eastern Europe more broadly, cohesive or culturally adaptable? Should we continue to use ‘ethnicity’ as an analytic tool? What socio-economic criteria made people ‘ordinary’? Based on social system theory, the sociologist Stefan Kühl's argument – ‘ordinary’ organizations both seduced and coerced Germans into killing – fails to move beyond some core Nazi, ‘not-so-ordinary’ organizations.Footnote 109 Complex encounters require historians to allow for and compare local meanings of ethnicity, racial fantasies, belonging, and religion. Fragmented subfields of the Holocaust ought to be brought together through a common language.Footnote 110 The four criteria I have suggested in this article can illustrate the potential for such a transnational approach that welcomes other disciplines.
‘We, the east Europeans’, therefore, serves as a call to think about social groups using a transnational focus, extending Julian Tuwim's heart-breaking manifesto My, Żydzi Polscy (We, the Polish Jews), whose pages reveal an ‘infinitely great grave of relatives’ (nieskończenie wielka bratnia mogiła).Footnote 111 Both historians and citizens have long puzzled over how a frightful regime could first be created and then murder millions of people, at the heart of ‘civilized’ western Europe. Though scholars’ focus has now increasingly shifted to eastern Europe, public discourse in these regions still tends to compare human suffering or to look away from the vanished Jewish life. As painful as this public reckoning with the past may be, only a transnational perspective can further our understanding of the history of local populations and their complex encounters.
