Introduction
How do you define the Holocaust? When teaching this topic, inviting students to answer this question can be a stimulating way to start. What seems like a straightforward task is, in fact, more complex than it initially appears, as it raises a series of fundamental—yet often contested—questions: When did the Holocaust begin, and when did it end? Where did it take place? Who should be included among the perpetrators and the targeted? What about those who do not fit neatly into either of these two categories? And what about terminology—should we describe it as a genocide, a mass murder, a mass crime, unprecedented, or even unique?
This exercise is challenging precisely because these questions have elicited a wide range of answers over the years. While there is broad scholarly consensus concerning the facts of the Holocaust, views on how best to frame the event continue to evolve. In particular, responses to the questions “how” and “why” remain productively divisive.Footnote 1 And although the richness of research in this field is undoubtedly a strength, it also makes arriving at definitive conclusions increasingly difficult.
With this in mind, one cannot help but admire the ambition and courage behind the 16-volume document collection Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland, 1933–1945 (VEJ) [in English: The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (PMJ)]—a recently completed, state-funded German scholarly project, more than fifteen years in the making.Footnote 2 Launched in 2004 and concluded in 2021, the project was carried out by three leading German institutions: the Munich- and Berlin-based Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, the Chair of Contemporary History at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and the German Federal Archives. It was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with several million euros.Footnote 3 Over the years, its editorial board included some of the most eminent German or Germany-based historians.Footnote 4 The preparation of the individual volumes involved dozens of Holocaust scholars and regional experts, and when including translators, relied on the work of more than a hundred people.
The project’s significance was marked by a ceremony celebrating its completion, held in June 2021 at Bellevue Palace with the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in attendance. At the event, the collection was symbolically handed over to the German public. Two years later, following the end of the pandemic, a large international conference was held in Berlin to further discuss the project and its impact.Footnote 5
As early as 2014, a decision was made to produce an English-language translation of the entire collection. For this purpose, all sources are being translated anew from the original documents. This phase of the project includes a collaboration with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and a newly established international academic advisory board.Footnote 6 This translation effort, also funded by the DFG, is still ongoing.Footnote 7 A partial Hebrew translation of the volumes on Germany is also underway.Footnote 8
The collection’s descriptive title implicitly answers some of the questions posed above. Most notably, the terms “Holocaust” and “genocide,” are deliberately—and somewhat conveniently—avoided throughout.Footnote 9 Yet if one considers the immense challenge of capturing the scope and complexity of the persecution and murder of millions of European Jews before and during World War II through a curated selection of primary sources, the list of questions only grows longer How should the event be broken down into different parts, and where should boundaries be drawn? Which countries, territories, or themes should be included and how should they be grouped? What kinds of documents should be selected—how many from each perspective—and in what manner should they be presented? Most crucially, what are the implications of all these choices for the collection’s argument, its purpose, and its scholarly value?
These are not simple questions, and the answers will largely depend on how they are understood. On the one hand, the answers will reflect the historical moment, institutional setting, and intellectual frameworks within which the project was conceived and carried out. On the other, they will relate to intended and actual audiences: who will be reading and using the collection, and for what purpose
This review essay engages with the collection on multiple levels and from various perspectives. I begin with remarks concerning the collection’s background, structure, and format. For this, I draw in part on the editors’ stated objectives and claims, which I examine critically. In a second step, based on the collection’s initial reception, I offer reflections on how it is currently being used and how it might be used in the future—particularly how it may be read and understood by different types of audiences. Finally, I explore some of the conceptual and editorial decisions behind this project and interrogate some of the assumptions they entail. Specifically, I consider the collection’s potential for use in a research project that approaches the history of persecution and murder from a transnational perspective. For this, I focus on the cases of France and Romania—my own areas of interest.Footnote 10
This review thus highlights the collection’s many achievements and widely recognized importance, while also drawing attention to some of its limitations. It thereby seeks to offer a reflection on the state of Holocaust research in general.
A German Monument: Background, Structure, and Argument
The VEJ is, of course, not the first documentary collection on the Holocaust. Several notable precursors exist, including some in German or published in Germany, where such compilations have historically been rarer.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, this most recent addition stands out as exceptional in several respects.
The editors have described it modestly as a “thematically broad” and “scientifically sound selection of sources,” reflecting their aim to be both comprehensive and representative, while adhering to the highest academic standards.Footnote 12 Yet what most clearly distinguishes the VEJ is the scale of the undertaking. Each of the 16 volumes is around 800 pages long, amounting to more than 13,000 pages in total. Each volume contains over 300 transcribed—and in many cases, translated and unabridged—documents. Altogether, the collection presents more than 5000 sources drawn from 230 international archives, originally written in more than 20 languages, including Yiddish and Hebrew, and covering the history of the Holocaust across 20 countries. It is without question the largest documentary collection on the Holocaust ever produced.
In addition to the sources themselves, the volumes offer substantial supplementary material. Every document is carefully edited and extensively annotated, with notes indicating provenance, original language, and relevant contextual information. Roughly 10,000 individuals (“handelnde Personen”) referenced in the documents are footnoted, where possible, with biographical details. Key places, events, terms, and publications are also meticulously annotated—references to newspapers, for instance, often include not only publication dates but their print runs as well. Last but not least, each volume begins with a 50- to 80-page introduction that provides historical background and links the volume’s theme to the broader “historical context” of the National Socialist persecution of the Jews.Footnote 13
In general, the collection takes stock of an expanding field. The 1990s and 2000s saw a significant surge of research on the Holocaust, spurred by the opening of Central and Eastern European archives and broader trends toward the liberalization of archival practices. This collection thus offers a unique and reliable overview of the state of knowledge and available sources at that point, as well as of the major repositories for Holocaust research worldwide. Indeed, the size of the project enabled an unprecedented pooling of resources and expertise. Editorial teams were recruited specifically for each volume, bringing with them knowledge of regional contexts and case studies. Partnerships with major archival institutions—such as the German Federal Archives and Yad Vashem—ensured privileged access to documents and close collaboration with archivists. Over time, the project became increasingly international in both scope and personnel.Footnote 14
As a long-term endeavor, the project necessarily evolved over time, but it was grounded from the outset in a clear structure and plan. Its main organizational principles were defined early on and remained consistent, guiding a diverse and shifting team of contributors throughout.Footnote 15 One of these key principles was geography: the collection aimed to cover all areas where the persecution and murder of European Jews took place, with a particular emphasis on the German Reich and the states and regions where most European Jews had lived before the war.Footnote 16 Thus, the primary organizing principle for the volumes was political territory, in accordance with the administrative boundaries of the time. Apart from the final thematic volume concerning Auschwitz and the “death marches,” each volume focuses on a specific country, region, or group of states. In contrast to earlier collections, therefore, the VEJ possesses a strong international dimension. Notably, however, it does not include dedicated volumes or sections on Allied or neutral states such as the United States or Switzerland, thereby defining involvement in the Holocaust in terms of direct participation in persecution.
Chronology forms a second foundational principle. Almost all documents in the collection are contemporaneous with the events they describe and are ordered by the date of their production. In the few cases where the documents were created later—during the post-liberation or early postwar period—they are positioned according to the events they reference rather than the date of writing. This structure emphasizes the simultaneity of events across and within volumes and highlights the documents as immediate historical evidence.
A third major organizing principle is what the editors term “multiperspectivity.”Footnote 17 Drawing on Raul Hilberg’s classic triad of “perpetrators, victims, and bystanders,”Footnote 18 and explicitly inspired by Saul Friedländer’s call for an “integrative and integrated history” of the Holocaust,Footnote 19 the editors sought to represent these three perspectives in a balanced way. Their stated goal was to alternate sources frequently in line with the following proportions: 40% perpetrators, 40% victims, and 20% others, namely, “individuals indirectly affected by the events.”Footnote 20 This was intended to foster a “frequent change of perspective” and to “capture the incidental and contradictory coincidence of events as contemporaries themselves experienced them.”Footnote 21 While the exact wording of this approach varied across volumes and changed over the years, the essential goal remained the same: to do justice to the complexity and messiness of historical experience and convey a sense of historical contingency.Footnote 22
Another notable editorial choice was the decision not to include virtually no visual material. The collection is composed almost entirely of written sources and contains no images. In the foreword to the first volume, the editors explain that photographs were excluded because these cannot capture “the motives of decisions and actions” and because their provenance is often difficult to verify.Footnote 23 However, facsimiles or documents with clear visual elements such as flyers, posters, postcards, or maps, which do not raise this issue, are also rare.Footnote 24 And In light of current research on the role of visual culture under Nazism, this omission has been viewed by many as a missed opportunity.Footnote 25
Still, perhaps even more significant was the choice to keep explicit evaluations of the documents to a minimum. The only real form of commentary consists of short headings summarizing the documents’ contents, intended to reflect the original authors’ intent. The editors justify this minimalist approach by citing the strictly chronological structure and extensive use of footnotes. However, this leaves readers largely on their own to interpret the material.
What ultimately defines the VEJ, therefore, is not only its vastness but also its architecture. The succession of documents—presented without overarching or interspaced commentary—confronts the reader with a massive amount of primary material, which is expected to speak for itself. Indeed, the project was designed to be historical rather than historiographical and was in fact described by its editors as having no argument—and by implication needing none. As Susanne Heim noted in her opening remarks at the project’s final conference, while the selection might result in a kind of “dramatic composition,” “the documents were not selected according to any hypothesis.”Footnote 26 This avoidance of a strong historiographical stance was meant to preserve objectivity and ensure that the collection would not quickly become outdated.Footnote 27 Accordingly, the introductions do not so much reflect on the editorial process, discuss the documents’ contents in depth, or present a critical state of research as offer the factual background deemed necessary for understanding what comes next.
In practice, however, it is impossible to create a project on this scale without making an argument. Even the document headings—however descriptive—imply why a source was chosen and suggest how it should be read.Footnote 28 In general, historical evidence is shaped by its context, and the surviving record is never neutral. Decisions about what to include and exclude, what seems meaningful, and what does not—all of these forge a narrative and an argument. Besides: How about people or events that left no trace—especially no written trace? What about sources that do not make sense in isolation and would therefore seem unimportant, or those that are abundant as opposed to rare? What of evidence that lies outside conventional repositories or is itself an unusual source? In this light, letting the archive speak is still a decision—one that might even be regarded as its own distinctive approach.Footnote 29
To a degree, then, the argument here is a function of the collection’s design. Limiting the selection to contemporaneous sources, for instance, means that certain themes, such as many forms of help and rescue or some aspects of persecution, cannot be included in a representative way. Unsurprisingly, the most prominent voices in the collection are those of officials, men, the educated, “Westerners,” and above all, perpetrators. This reflects historical power dynamics as well as later epistemic power structures.
Some editorial choices, however, were more deliberate. From the start—and as the introductions make clear—German perpetrator sources formed the project’s evidentiary core.Footnote 30 Despite the inclusion of numerous documents from the perspective of victims and “bystanders,” it is ultimately the actions of perpetrators that were believed to drive the narrative forward. Unavoidably, therefore, other sources serve primarily as illustrations of these actions from a different angle.Footnote 31 In my view, this reflects more than just the editors’ familiarity with German sources or their greater availability. It stems from the project’s underlying framing, and the questions it implicitly poses. These are: How did persecution and murder happen, how was it possible, and, by extension, “who was responsible—as well as the most consistent answer the project offers: National Socialist Germany and its supporters.Footnote 32
Given the context in which the VEJ was developed—reunified Germany at the turn of the millennium—this emphasis is hardly surprising, and it may even be welcomed.Footnote 33 But twenty years later, when Nazi Germany’s role and the broader constellation of perpetrators are more fully and readily acknowledged (thanks in part to efforts like this one), other questions come to the fore: How did the victims respond and how did their actions shape events, what role did neighbors or seemingly uninvolved parties play, how did persecution look from the perspectives of so-called neutral actors, and how could the context of violence and war be better accounted for?Footnote 34
What this tells us, then, is not just that a project like the VEJ is inherently historiographical, but that Holocaust historiography itself never ceases to develop. Interestingly, some of these points are being addressed in the ongoing English edition. With the help of international partners, the introductions are being revised to include more references to Jewish sources and wider historiographical debates.Footnote 35 The foreword to the English edition also offers a more explicit reflection on the challenges of selecting sources for a project of this nature.Footnote 36 In sum, the VEJ’s significance and scholarly value are beyond dispute. Yet it remains, unavoidably, a product of time and creators.
A Historical Resource: Uses, Users, and Purpose
For many users, the monumental character of the VEJ is undoubtedly a strength. There are more documents in its 16 volumes than there are days between 1933 and 1945. Searching for a single date or a specific location—whether by systematically flicking through the hard copies, consulting the index, or using digital search functions—is almost guaranteed to yield at least one result. The collection offers a granular, nearly daily account of the Holocaust as it unfolded. As Martin Doerry noted in his keynote speech at the project’s final conference, the VEJ might be seen as a “gigantic diary”—or perhaps more accurately, a giant chronicle—of hatred and brutality.Footnote 37 Granting readers what seems to be an almost omniscient perspective, the experience is as overwhelming as it is impressive. This consolidation of evidence renders visible what was previously unseen and offers an acute sense of the crime’s magnitude, transnational character, and many facets. In that sense, the collection does indeed function as what it has often been called: a new kind of memorial—“a documentary memorial”—to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.Footnote 38
At the same time, the collection provides a much-needed documentary overview. Holocaust research has grown so much in recent decades that it is no longer feasible to have comprehensive knowledge of events, let alone of source materials, across all regions of Europe. Connecting disparate national case studies empirically has become increasingly difficult. With the VEJ, certain patterns, continuities, and divergences—in both state policies and human responses—become immediately apparent. Some connections, such as the progression of anti-Jewish legislation, are highlighted in the editors’ introductions or outlined schematically in timelines included at the end of several volumes.Footnote 39 A particularly helpful tool in this regard are the “systematic document indexes,”Footnote 40 added from Volume 2 onward. Alongside obvious terms like “deportations” or “ghettos,” these include entries such as “women,” “churches,” and document types like “diaries.” The collection thus enables researchers to launch investigations into the role of specific actors, institutions, or practices across different regions, or to track linguistic patterns over time and across contexts.Footnote 41 In this way, the collection becomes a generator of new and genuinely transnational research questions.
For patient and resilient readers, the compilation of diverse voices is especially powerful. Reading documents around a single date, one begins to grasp the simultaneity—and often contradiction—of events and experiences occurring in the same area or timeframe, something that is not necessarily apparent when reading a book about one single aspect of the Holocaust. For instance, in Volume 3, Deutsches Reich und Protektorat 1939–1941 (German Reich and the Protectorate September 1939 to September 1941), one encounters in succession an official police decree concerning the forced labor recruitment of Jews in Bielefeld, a young German Jewish woman’s desperate diary entry about her mother’s and sisters’ deportation to a camp in southern France, and a speech by Hitler regarding “the fight against Jewry”—all within a few days of each other in November 1940.Footnote 42
This example illustrates the editors’ deliberate inclusion of so-called Schlüsseldokumente (“key documents”), such as speeches by high-ranking officials and well-known decrees, many of which have appeared in earlier collections.Footnote 43 However, the large volume of material also allowed for the inclusion here of lesser-known documents from private collections, local archives, and smaller organizations. Many ego-documents—diary entries, letters, and personal notes—have only surfaced in recent years and remain unpublished or hard to access.Footnote 44
The sources thus vividly demonstrate how ordinary lives were shaped by, and entangled with, the unfolding persecution. Ego-documents from victims, in particular, offer a window not only into their lived experiences and emotional worlds but also into their interpretations of others’ actions.Footnote 45 Such documents reflect the extreme vulnerability—and often extraordinary perceptiveness—of the persecuted, a point frequently noted in previous scholarship.Footnote 46 Equally valuable are reports from the foreign press, which provide a surprisingly informed outside view, as well as documents revealing how some individuals profited from, participated in, or resisted persecution.Footnote 47 In that way, the collection captures the layered and cacophonous nature of social and political life at the time. For those interested in understanding the Holocaust as a “social process” or in writing a social history of Europe during the Holocaust, therefore, the collection offers many valuable clues.Footnote 48
Still, drawing more definitive or substantial conclusions would require going beyond the VEJ—to other books for interpretation and to other sources for additional evidence. Most VEJ documents are mere snapshots—brief glimpses into people’s lives or a single moment. Often, we can only infer the outcomes of the events described or place them into a broader context with difficulty. Regardless of origin or type, all documents in the collection demand contextualization and critical reading: What does the source say? What kind of source is it? How does it fit into the larger picture? The purely documentary nature of the VEJ makes it hard to assess the representativeness of specific events or voices and to grasp their nuances and ambivalences.
The much-discussed diary of Luise Solmnitz, a woman from Hamburg whose husband and daughter were considered Jewish by the Nazi authorities, is a case in point. Initially, a supporter of National Socialism, Solmnitz gradually changed her views as she came to realize the consequences of the regime for her family and began to experience persecution firsthand.Footnote 49 The VEJ only includes diary entries from that point on.Footnote 50 How might our interpretation shift if we had her full trajectory? Can these excerpts alone help us understand her experience or draw wider conclusions? Many other cases similarly resist easy categorization and force us to think of roles as fluid, relational, and deeply shaped by circumstances and compromises—by fear, complicity, greed, powerlessness, or violence.Footnote 51 These are interpretive challenges the editors leave unresolved. In short, the collection reveals what could be known at a particular time and place, and hints at what some people did—or did not—believe or know. However, it provides few answers as to the consequences of events or how that knowledge was acted upon.
The editors themselves acknowledge that the VEJ is a highly fragmentary collection.Footnote 52 Intellectually, this can be a strength: assembling such disparate and disconnected material is a powerful scholarly experiment. But this then also raises the question of who the collection is for.Footnote 53 For scholars teaching the Holocaust at university level or even for dedicated school teachers, the VEJ might offer immense value. The high-quality translations and carefully edited documents make it possible to analyze a wide range of sources in detail with students and pupils. The introductions provide reliable and informative overviews that will be useful as both teaching tools and reference texts. Even seasoned experts will likely appreciate the breadth and rigor of the selection, even though they might not find much new data for their own research. For scholars embarking on new projects, the collection can serve as a springboard.
However, for more in-depth research, additional postwar sources—such as oral history testimonies, legal records, or memoirs—would be indispensable. Meanwhile, readers with limited time, background knowledge, or access to other resources may struggle to process the vast quantity and complexity of the material without further guidance. Where should they begin? How should they interpret the fragments? Making sense of individual documents—written in different idioms, dialects, or codes—and analyzing antisemitic language (terms like Mischling, Judenfrage, or euphemisms such as Umsiedlung) requires considerable prior knowledge and are tasks for which the introductions and footnotes provide only partial support.Footnote 54 Whether the VEJ can be used more widely in applied research or in political education, therefore, remains to be seen.Footnote 55
Yet it should also be said that, as it stands, the collection’s potential is far from exhausted. Already, digital formats (PDFs and e-pubs)—available for purchase or downloadable from many academic libraries—make the VEJ searchable and usable in many new ways. Ideally, the collection would now be made open access as a single searchable database, rather than 16 separate volumes.Footnote 56 In the early 2000s, the editors discussed releasing document facsimiles on CD-ROM, and though the format is now obsolete, the intention remains valid and relevant.Footnote 57 One could envision a future digital edition linking transcriptions and translations with the originals and additional material, offering more context for users who need it.Footnote 58
More simply, providing curated selections of documents or thematic groupings, along with guidelines for educators, would help make the VEJ still more accessible and exploitable. In 2023, the Bavarian Broadcasting Company (Bayerischer Rundfunk) launched a project titled Die Quellen sprechen (“The Sources Speak”), in which selected VEJ documents were introduced and read aloud by eyewitnesses and survivors and then published online as podcast episodes.Footnote 59 How widely this initiative was received is not clear, but it shows that repackaging the material for broader audiences is possible.
A Research Tool: Contexts, Comparisons, and Contribution
As a scholar of the Holocaust, I now want to connect the broader insights into the collection’s features, strengths, and limitations with a closer examination of the volumes that pertain to my own areas of interest: France and Romania. Specifically, I reflect on the editorial choices made to represent these two very different national and historical settings, both within the collection as a whole and in their respective volumes. In so doing, I consider what the VEJ collection reveals about these two cases—and, conversely, what these cases reveal about the collection itself, and how it might be utilised in comparative and transnational research.
France is covered in both Volume 5, Western and Northern Europe 1940–June 1942 (2013) and Volume 12, Western and Northern Europe June 1942–1945 (2015).Footnote 60 In each of these, France is treated as one of several countries, alongside Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the Nazi-occupied Scandinavian countries—Norway in both volumes and Denmark in Volume 12. In both cases, France receives the most extensive coverage, with nearly a third of the documents. The cutoff date between the two tomes, June 1942, is also particularly significant for France, marking the start of regular transports from detention camps in the occupied zone to Auschwitz and the French authorities’ negotiations over the deportation of 10,000 Jews from the unoccupied zone.
“France” in this context, however, refers to three distinct zones: the German-occupied north, the unoccupied south (until November 1942), and the Italian zone of occupation. This country thus illustrates a core historical challenge of the collection: using national frameworks as organizing principles, even as borders shifted during the war and themselves warrant discussion. For example, French North Africa—home to half a million Jews before the war—or, for that matter, any other of France’s overseas territories, are not shown on the map in either volume, although they are mentioned in some of the documents. Meanwhile, while the northeastern military zone, governed from Brussels, and Alsace-Lorraine, annexed to the Reich in 1940, appear on the maps, they do not in the documents. Finally, persecution did not stop at the borders of Vichy and occupied France. Thus Volume 16, The Concentration Camp of Auschwitz 1942–1945 and the Period of the Death Marches (2019), is a crucial complement, providing insights into deportees’ experiences in Auschwitz and immediately after liberation.
Romania presents its own complexities. It is primarily addressed in Volume 13, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria (2018).Footnote 61 But to gain a fuller picture, one must consult Volume 7, The Soviet Union and Annexed Territories I (2011),Footnote 62 which includes a section on “Transnistria, Bessarabia, and Bukovina under Romanian civilian administration,” and Volume 15, Hungary 1944–1945,Footnote 63 which covers Northern Transylvania—a region that was Romanian until 1940.
These border regions—discussed across three volumes—are critical to understanding the Holocaust in Romania. Northern Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina were part of Romania between 1918 and 1940 and were the home of much of its prewar Jewish population.Footnote 64 Although these areas changed hands—in some cases several times—between 1940 and 1944, they were also where most of the Romanian Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from. Transnistria, meanwhile—a region between the Dniester and Bug Rivers in what is now southwestern Ukraine—was carved out and placed under Romanian administration in 1941 and became central to the Romanian-led genocide. Between 1941 and 1944, Romanian authorities deported tens of thousands of Bukovinian and Bessarabian Jews to Transnistria, and an estimated 280,000 local Ukrainian and Romanian Jews were murdered there.Footnote 65
In both the French and the Romanian case (as well as in others), the editorial decisions regarding borders, territorial definitions, and the distribution of attention have significant implications. They underscore the tension between the need for structure and order in such a collection and the risk of reproducing traditional divisions, hierarchies, or blind spots. It is notable, for instance, that France—with a prewar Jewish population of approximately 250,000—is given more space (both in quantity and length of documents) than Romania, whose prewar Jewish population exceeded 750,000. This discrepancy may reflect the collection’s title emphasis on actions undertaken “by Nazi Germany,” and the decision to thus place less focus on countries like Romania, Slovakia, or Bulgaria, which were aligned with Germany without being occupied. But it also echoes long-standing conceptions of Germany as the Holocaust’s center, reinforcing a traditional division between “core” and “periphery” in Europe.Footnote 66 At the very least, it reminds us that the project initially conceived of the Holocaust as a German-led initiative with European consequences, and not necessarily as a pan-European phenomenon or even a “European project” with significant local iterations and ripple effects extending well beyond Europe.Footnote 67
That said, within the logic of the collection, the sections on France and Romania definitely offer valuable overviews of relevant sources. While some of the documents have appeared elsewhere before, many existing document collections on these two countries are outdated, difficult to access, and multilingual.Footnote 68 What is more, the VEJ collection usefully brings together materials that are usually treated separately or in isolation such as German policies and actions, the involvement of local authorities, Jewish and international responses, and the press. In this regard, the volumes demonstrate convincingly the value of juxtaposing perspectives.
In both cases, particular attention is paid to the role of local actors in antisemitic persecution alongside the German authorities. This highlights both ideological and practical convergences and divergences—points of alignment and tensions between different actors. The complex relationships between the Germans and their collaborators and abettors—especially within the Vichy and Antonescu regimes—emerge with clarity and offer fertile ground for comparative analysis.Footnote 69
Reading these sections also reveals the power of presenting the voices and actions of victims and so-called bystanders alongside those of perpetrators. The collection showcases a wide spectrum of responses and reactions—from defiance to denial, and from aid to betrayal.Footnote 70 In doing so, it challenges generalizations about “the French,” “the Romanians,” or “the Jews,” highlighting behaviors ranging from complicity and compliance to resistance.
Nevertheless, in light of the editors’ stated aim to include 40% perpetrator, 40% victim, and 20% “uninvolved” documents several observations are in order. In the case of Romania, especially, “victim documents” do not appear to make up their full share.Footnote 71 And in both cases, identifying genuinely uninvolved individuals seems to have been tricky. Indeed, in either case, the third group largely consists of either accomplices or helpers—not necessarily representative of ”ordinary” citizens or people only “indirectly affected.” This supports what scholars have long observed, namely that the bystander category is elusive and highly heterogeneous, and that new methods and approaches are required to better grasp this group.Footnote 72
Comparing France and Romania also reveals notable differences in the kinds of documents used. For Romania, victim documents tend to be official in nature—exchanges between Jewish leaders and the authorities—while the “uninvolved” are mostly foreign diplomats or humanitarian figures.Footnote 73 In France, in contrast, many victim documents are personal writings—diary entries or private correspondence—while the third group is mostly represented through antisemitic pamphlets or, on the contrary, evidence of outright resistance.Footnote 74
Interpreting these differences is complex. They likely reflect a combination of factors: the character of civil society in both countries, the degree of antisemitism and Jewish assimilation, respective political cultures, the nature and legitimacy of each regime, and how the war and persecution unfolded locally.Footnote 75 The Holocaust, after all, was a multi-sited event: From a distance, its patterns may seem coherent, but the closer one looks, the more fragmented and nonlinear it becomes.Footnote 76
Still, both the archival record and editorial choices surely also played a role. Decisions about which documents to include are shaped by available sources, existing research, and guiding questions.Footnote 77 And here there is significant variation: different archival contexts result in more letters or diaries surviving in one place than another, or in more bureaucratic evidence being preserved.Footnote 78 France and Romania are not only historically distinct settings, but also vastly different research environments.
Other comparisons—France with Belgium and the Netherlands, or Romania with Bulgaria and Slovakia—might be closer to what the editors had in mind. But, the conditions under which sources were produced, preserved, and can be accessed deserve attention no matter what. The comparison of France and Romania thus ultimately raises broader questions: What does it mean to define the Holocaust based on “significant” sources alone? What of inaction, omission, or missing evidence? What about phenomena that only make sense when challenging the caesura of 1933, 1939, 1941—or even 1945? What about spontaneity, serendipity, and chance? Recent research shows that the behavior of majority populations—whether silent, compliant, indifferent, or willing—mattered deeply.Footnote 79 But understanding these behaviors requires looking beyond the Holocaust’s conventional timeline to deeper traditions of community, solidarity, and citizenship.Footnote 80
By foregrounding the voices of a wide range of actors—not just perpetrators—the VEJ collection marks a shift. It shows that these broader societal attitudes and norms mattered, and that they varied significantly across Europe. Yet how and why they mattered remains an open question. What the VEJ leaves us with, then, is not a conclusion but an invitation: initial data and a research agenda.
Conclusion
The 16-volume Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der Europäischen Juden (VEJ) edition is an impressive scholarly achievement. As a multifaceted compendium containing an exceptionally large and diverse selection of documents—meticulously curated and edited—it offers not only a panoramic but also a kaleidoscopic view of the Holocaust: a mosaic of “perceptions and reactions.”Footnote 81 Unmatched in scope, depth, and detail, it stands as a vital resource for any university library or institution engaged in the study of the Holocaust or its historical antecedents.
Building on nearly eight decades of research, the VEJ collection marks a major milestone in Holocaust historiography. It clearly demonstrates the interplay of continuity and radicalization in Nazi planning and policy, and effectively settles, as others have noted, long-standing debates—such as that between “functionalists” and “intentionalists.”Footnote 82 More broadly, it evidences both the widespread reach and deep roots of antisemitism across Europe and underscores the crucial role of practical conditions and pragmatic decisions in shaping the implementation—and, in rare cases, the obstruction—of genocide. In so doing, it contributes to redrawing the geographic contours of the Holocaust. No longer seen as a phenomenon confined to Germany or even to German-occupied territory, but rather as one with European dimensions, this collection empirically challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationships among ideology, identity, and behavior—or about the supposed predisposition of certain individuals or societies toward violence
Yet perhaps the collection’s most enduring contribution lies in the methodological questions it raises. A close examination of its structure, usage, and underlying logic prompts critical reflections that resonate across the field of Holocaust studies. These include fundamental issues of framing, accessibility, and representativity—questions that confront historians daily in their work. In this sense, then, the VEJ is not exceptional but rather emblematic. Whose voices do we hear—and by extension, whose perspective do we unintentionally adopt? Where do silences persist, and what might they conceal? How should we interpret contradictions and ambiguities? And how can we fully acknowledge the complexity of the Holocaust and its diverse settings, while maintaining both historical empathy and moral clarity?
These are not easy questions, and there is no doubt that the editors wrestled with them carefully. More than anyone, they understand where the collection places emphasis—and where gaps remain. But engaging with these tensions and limitations is not only important; it is intellectually productive. It challenges any assumption that the collection offers a definitive or exhaustive account of “persecution and murder,” or that it presents a complete picture of European societies during the Holocaust. As Ulrich Wyrwa has cautioned, there is a real “danger of canonization.”Footnote 83 The very authority and comprehensiveness of such a collection risk ossifying what remains an evolving, open-ended field of inquiry.
Approaching the VEJ both critically and appreciatively is therefore essential. It is a vital scholarly resource—but it is also a springboard for future work. How can we build on this remarkable foundation? How might we present Holocaust history in ways that are more dynamic, inclusive, and attuned to new lines of questioning? How do we keep asking “how” and “why” in ways that are fresh and meaningful?
In the current era of rapid research developments and accelerating digitization, the central challenge for scholars is less about access to information than about making sense of an overwhelming abundance of it. The difficulty lies in how to structure, interpret, and navigate such material. Herein lies one of the VEJ collection’s greatest potentials: as a professionally curated, secondary archive, it offers a stable and accessible basis for new forms of scholarly inquiry. It invites us to explore patterns and connections that might otherwise remain hidden. What emerges if we analyze only one type of source, one region, one social group? What if we juxtapose unlikely cases— a village and a metropolis, the young and the old, France and Romania?
Pursuing these questions may mean taking the collection apart, disrupting its chronology, and stepping back from the immediacy the editors sought to create. In that sense, it involves reading the material against the grain. But doing so also gives the collection renewed purpose. It becomes not just a record of history for remembrance and reckoning, but a tool for ongoing learning.
Acknowledgements
This essay was written while I was a postdoctoral fellow at Bielefeld University, working on the DFG-AHRC funded project “Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in and beyondthe Holocaust.” I am grateful to my colleagues Margaret Comer, Mary Fulbrook, Teresa Malice, Christina Morina, Anna Strommenger, as well as the editors of Central European History, especially Eli Rubin, for their comments on earlier versions of this draft. Any remaining errors are my own.
Gaëlle Fisher has a BA in German and History (2007) and an MA in East European Studies (2009) from University College London. Her PhD in History (University College London, 2015) was entitled »Locating Germanness: Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War, 1944-2014«. From 2017 to 2023, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Holocaust Studies of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. From 2023 to 2025, she was a postdoc fellow at Bielefeld University, working on the DFG/AHRC-funded project »Good Citizens, Terrible Times: Community, Courage and Compliance in the Holocaust and beyond«. She has many years of experience as an English-language editor and copy-editor of academic texts. She was a founding member of the editorial team of the »European Holocaust Studies« series published by Wallstein Verlag. Since February 2025, she has been working for the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (Specks Hof, Entrance A, Reichsstr. 4-6, D-04109 Leipzig; email: gaelle.fisher@leibniz-gwzo.de). She oversees the institute’s English-language publications and international science communication and carries out her own research on the history of the Holocaust in Romania.
