Historical Judgement 04

Historical Judgement

Europe and Germany 1939—45: Violence in the Museum 20 02

Raphael Gross

To Our Readers 03

Jens-Christian Wagner

Exhibiting the History of Violence 07 A discussion with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

and Raphael Utz

“Museums Are as Much about the Intangible as They Are about the ­Tangible” 10

Meike Hopp

The German Looting of Cultural Assets in the Occupied Territories 23

Hermann Parzinger

Singularity from a ­Comparative ­Perspective 25

Wolfgang Eichwede

The Looting of Culture 26

Bianca Gaudenzi

The “Return of Beauty”?

Fritz Backhaus

Collecting, Studying, and Exhibiting O ­ bjects of the Occupation ­Regime

27

Julia S. Torrie

Occupation or Vacation?

30

Sabina Ferhadbegović

Under the Gallows

With examples from the collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, presented

by Sabine Beneke, Martin Borkowski-­Saruhan, Hagen Fleischer, Julia Franke, Lili Reyels, ­David Schwalbe, and Thomas Weißbrich

33 A discussion with Natalia Aleksiun,

Mary Fulbrook, and Philippe Sands

Objects of Memory

To Our Readers

To Our Readers

Raphael Gross

From 1939 to 1945, Germany occupied almost all of Eur­ope. Around 230 million people in 27 of today’s Euro­pean countries were affected. The violence and the crimes perpetrated by the occupiers have left an in­ delible mark on many of these societies. The German popu­lation, though, knows very little about Nazi rule in the occupied countries. Against this backdrop, the German Bundestag has decided to establish a new docu­ mentation centre devoted to the occupation regime and has commissioned the Deutsches Historisches Museum to draw up a proposal for implementing the project. The topic, which is of great importance for all of Europe, will shape the work of the Deutsches His­ torisches Museum in the years to come. We are taking the opportunity to examine the occupation in the fourth issue of our magazine Historical Judgement. For us as a museum, one central aspect of the following ­articles is the question of how to deal with the German occupation regime in our exhibitions and our collec­ tion. How can violence be exhibited? What objects docu­ ment the history of violence during the German war of extermination and Nazi rule in occupied Europe?

What stories do they tell, and what perspectives do they ignore? The authors explore these and other ques­ tions in an issue titled “Europe and Germany 1939–45: Violence in the Museum”.

Over the last few weeks, a new chapter in the his­ tory of violence in Europe has begun. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century events are being used to legitimise the current violence. Our central task – honing our “historical judgement” – appears all the more important.

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We have received comprehensive support for our work from a private initiative. It is thanks to Christiane and Nicolaus Weickart that we have been able to pro­ duce this magazine and organize a symposium of the same name. The trust they have placed in us and the freedom this has given us are a special gift.

Exhibiting the History of Violence

historical sources tell us about this history? And can in­ dividual suffering and mass murder be depicted in a museum at all?

On the Musealisation of the German Occupation in the Second World War Jens-Christian Wagner

Finding the courage to fashion a narrative without degrad­ ing objects as original historical sources or prescribing a particular interpretation of history – that is the challenge that all museums face when they present a disputed topic in the politics of memory and are required to provide academ­ ically sound historical education and to commemorate the victims. One such topic is the German occupation of Europe in the Second World War. The use of critical source analysis in presentations of photos and autobiographical documents can offer a viable approach.

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany, sup­ ported by its allies, established an unprecedented reign of violence in Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Nearly 300 million people in the occupied territories were subject to the murderous Nazi plan to introduce a racist New Order in Europe. Nearly 20 million civilians in the annexed and occupied territories did not survive the war, including the Jews, Sinti, and Roma who were shot to death or gassed, the Slavs in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe who died of hunger or were con­ scripted into forced labour and deported, and the peo­ ple in almost all European countries who were executed as resistance fighters or hostages or sent to concentra­ tion camps.

In October 2020, more than 75 years after the end of the war, the German Bundestag decided to open a new documentation centre for the victims of the occu­ pation regime. Its mission is to provide a comprehen­ sive account of the crimes. But how can such a history of violence be presented? What can museum objects as

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Life in the territories occupied or controlled by Nazi Germany varied greatly, depending on the form of oc­ cupation, the phase of the war, and the region. Consist­ ent with their racial ideology, the German occupation forces in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe treated the population with greater brutality than those in Western and Northern Europe. The life of a factory worker in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, for example, differed fun­ damentally from that of a farmer in occupied Norway, where a puppet government ruled under German con­ trol. In Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, several million people were conscripted into forced labour and deported to Germany. In Greece, on the other hand, which also suffered under a brutal occupation regime, such deportations were largely un­ known – with the exception of the Jewish population, especially in Salonika, who were deported to A ­­ usschwitz and murdered there. Finally, in France, men were ini­ tially recruited to work in Germany on a more or less voluntary basis. Only when they arrived did they learn that they were not permitted to return.

Every exhibition on the occupation regime must highlight these differences and at the same time take pains not to trivialise the suffering of the majority of people in Western Europe who did not live in constant fear of their lives. It must do so against the backdrop of the Shoah and the systematic starvation of the Slavic population in the East. These dictates apply particularly to the important topic of everyday life under the occu­ pation.

What other topics should be examined? A key ex­ perience for all people in the occupied territories was the German invasion itself, often accompanied by mili­ tary violence, “cleansing” operations, and direct threats to civilian life. Invasion was followed by the establish­ ment of a military or civilian occupation administration whose power was based on the German system of re­ pression and the collaboration of local organisations.

Even people who were not victims of raids, arrests, tor­ ture, or murder suffered under the occupation because of the hunger and the constant fear of being separated from family members or friends, who were deported to camps in Germany or were conscripted into forced labour. Another important topic, alongside collabor­ ­ ation, is resistance to the German occupation. There was individual and organised resistance in all of the oc­ cupied countries, ranging from support for persecuted persons and fugitives to strikes, sabotage, and armed underground resistance. It often culminated in regional

Exhibiting the History of Violence

Which Objects, Which Topics?

Exhibiting the History of Violence

uprisings such as those in Warsaw and Slovakia. In terms of topography and themes, the occupation covers an enormous range, which museums cannot present in ­encyclopaedic form or address for all regions. Conden­ sation, concentration, and typification are necessary strategies.

What objects can be used to show the experiences of people in the occupied territories? At first glance, this question seems relatively easy to answer: weapons can stand for uprisings, leaflets for resistance, work IDs and ration cards for the regimented life under the German administration, suitcases for deportations, barbed wire for incarceration, a dented bowl for hunger, a striped prisoner’s uniform for life in the concentration camps, and worn-out clothes and a hoe for forced labour.

But can these objects convey anything about the historical-experiential dimension of violence? Are they not banal, redundant exhibits that cannot adequately represent the crime? What do they tell us about misery, fear of death, and violence – or about the people who suffered from them? “Museum things”, as Gottfried ­Korff called objects displayed in museums, are “sign ­vehicles that mediate between the past and the pres­ ent”.1 How can the properties we attribute to them – their tactility, aesthetic quality, aura, authenticity, or emotiveness – support the process of appropriating or (more accurately) understanding history? Functioning as “tools of communication between the visible and the invisible”,2 these objects have a fragmentary character whose symbolic content must be (re)contextualised and (re)dimensioned through their selection and ar­ rangement as well as through textual explanations. This means that the representation and communication of history in museums is always a constructive process, in which some meanings are more strongly actualised than others, despite the supposed interpretive openness of the act of viewing.

Documentation or Narrative?

With a certain positivist mindset, curators at the con­ centration camp memorials of the 1990s believed that by basing their work on a documentary, quasi-forensic concept that involved searching for and preserving traces of history, they could offer exhibition visitors the opportunity to form their own views by presenting them with large, multi-perspective exhibits that were open to different interpretations. As part of this concept, ob­ jects were not meant to illustrate a prescribed interpre­ tation of history, but to provide a multi-layered, inten­ tionally ambiguous, and fragmentary glimpse of it. This concept deliberately distanced itself from the con­ structed, meaning-creating master narrative that had become ideologised as a result of interpretive disputes in the politics of memory.

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On the one hand, this documentary principle r­esulted from the rejection of the ideologically dis­ torted representations of history at the national me­ morial sites of the German Democratic Republic (the paradigm for this sober new documentary style was the first post-unification exhibition on camp history at the Buchen­wald memorial site, which opened in 1995). On the other, it arose from the realisation that the material traces of the history of the Nazi crimes were not only historical sign vehicles and objects for display, but evi­ dence that stood for the credibility of what was being narrated. This is especially true of written documents such as the protocol of the Wannsee Conference and the Master Plan for the East, which serve as proof of the crimes that were committed by actors in the minis­ tries and the repressive state apparatus. The forensic function of the objects is of fundamental importance, particularly in view of the highly charged societal treat­ ment of the Nazi crimes, the ­political instrumentalisa­ tion of history, and attempts to cast doubt on and rela­ tivise the atrocities.

From the perspective of the politics of memory, the documentary principle remains important, not only in terms of its use in exhibitions, but also with regard to its application to remains of the former camps. From a methodological and didactic perspective, though, it has fuelled doubts for two reasons: one, due to scepticism about a possible positivist conception of sources; and two, because of the didactic implementation problems it causes. It is not helpful to rely solely on relics, objects, or efforts to imbue them with a particular aura. The ­detailed information objects convey, as valuable as this may be, obstructs the view of the whole and can only be understood and interpreted with a great deal of prior knowledge that the average museum visitor does not have. Many people are overwhelmed by the sheer num­ ber of documents and objects if these are not classified or commented on.

Ideally, exhibitions are developed and produced on the basis of materials. However, we should not delude ourselves on one point: particularly in the case of exhi­ bitions about the history of the Nazi crimes, objects are secondary to the narrative, which most often takes the form of an authorial story about the crimes and their victims. At worst, objects are degraded to mere illustra­ tions of the narrative. At the same time, exhibitions on the Nazi crimes perform an important function for his­ torical political education and the democratic identity of German and European society. Through historical education work, they prevent the crimes from being suppressed and trivialised, and they also commemorate the victims.

This means we must acknowledge the intrinsic value of objects as sign vehicles, despite the dominance

Photographs, Eyewitness Interviews, and Autobiographical Documents Despite the dominance of the narrative and the impor­ tance of using text and media to contextualise exhibits, objects form the core element of an exhibition. When ­curators at the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Me­ morials Foundation developed the international travel­ ling exhibition Forced Labour: The Germans, the Forced Labourers, and the War – whose first stop was the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2010 – they were surprised to find comprehensive photographic documentation of signi­ ficant events during their extensive archival research in Germany and abroad.3 This exhibition on forced labour devoted one of its main sections to the occupation regime. Because the topic of the exhibition and its main section are closely intertwined, the new documentation centre for the vic­ tims of the occupation regime can be expected, con­ versely, to include a section on forced labour. The pres­ entation of photos based on critical source analysis could form an important thematic, creative, and didac­ tic pillar. In the exhibition on Nazi forced labour, the curators were able to reconstruct entire series of photo­ graphs, which facilitated a nearly scenic approach within the framework of case histories. Not only did this approach create visual anchors, but it also made it possible to visually represent historical situations in a quasi-cinematic way. This type of visuality, presented on the basis of source analysis, is not an end in itself meant to manipulate visitors or attract their attention by striking, superficial means. Its aim is rather to use photographs as a springboard for an intense immersion in history and at the same time to present them as sources that activate cognitive processes and form en­ sembles with other sources, including three-dimen­ sional objects.4

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The prerequisite is an approach to the photos based on critical source analysis. It is crucial to research and identify not only the photographers and the sub­ jects, but also the specific historical situation, the per­ spective adopted, how the photos have survived, and how they were used in different media. Source ana­lysis is essential for all museum objects, but it is especially relevant for photos, given their visual succinctness.

But there is another way in which the use of pho­ tos to present the history of violence poses academic, didactic, and ethical challenges – and creates a dilemma that every team has experienced that has ever worked on an exhibition about concentration camp history. On the one hand, curators must unsparingly document the history of violence. Not showing the shocking photos of corpses in camps or execution trenches could at worst amount to trivialising the Nazi crimes. But does the presentation of photos not degrade the victims a second time? And does it not contradict the ban on overwhelm­ ing and manipulating viewers (Überwältigungsverbot), which is one of the key principles in the Beutelsbach Consensus on Civic Education?5 This is not an easy dilemma to resolve, but it can be minimised if the photographs are used as historical sources as opposed to blow-up illustrations – and espe­ cially if they convey stories that are not immediately understandable and must be deciphered by viewers.

One example can be found in the permanent exhibition of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial, which opened in 2006. It contains a section on the death marches and the Gardelegen massacre in April 1945, when more than 1,000 concentration camp prisoners were forced into a barn that was subsequently set on fire. The visual anchor in this section is not one of the shocking photos of the burned corpses, but a black-andwhite image showing only a striped cap and a dark spot in a field. The cap belonged to a prisoner who escaped from the barn and was shot by the killers. The dark spot on the ground is a pool of blood. The deadly violence in the photo only becomes clear at a second glance; in add­ ition, the photo documents killing in an open field and thus in public. The photos of charred corpses, by con­ trast, are only shown as they once appeared in the news media – namely, in an issue of the American Life maga­ zine, which on 7 May 1945 was the first organisation to publish them.

Of course, the need for critical source analysis also applies to another type of source and object that is often the focus of exhibitions about contemporary his­ tory, especially those at concentration camp memorials: the eyewitness interview.6 On the one hand, such inter­ views are included to provide experiential access to the topic. On the other, in contrast to histories of political power, they lend a voice to the nameless. However, in

Exhibiting the History of Violence

of the narrative. This intrinsic value transcends the function of objects as evidence and documentation.

Objects are more than just footnotes to a historical nar­ rative. They lend history a visual form. They arouse cu­ riosity and are hopefully also a bit difficult to process because their meaning is ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory.

Curators face the challenge of not smoothing over this ambiguity or contradictoriness, despite using a narrative. They must help visitors to decipher and comprehend objects’ message without placing exces­ sive restric­tions on their open symbolic content. They can do so through unobtrusive textual i­nformation or by presenting historical facts in other media. The options include room and section texts (as brief as necessary), infographics, and animated media instal­ lations.

Exhibiting the History of Violence

exhibitions on the history of violence, including those centring on concentration camps, such interviews may also be also used because few other sources have sur­ vived or because the existing ones are not suited to pre­ senting the topic. Because of the functions assigned to them, though, these interviews are often not identified as complex sources that are historical constructs and producers of meaning themselves (especially if the in­ terviews have taken place long after the events at the heart of the narrative). Instead, they are treated dis­ paragingly as substitute sources, emotional attractions, or a means to authenticate the curatorial narrative.7 Direct experiential access to historical perception can be provided by diaries, letters, and other autobio­ graphical documents. Compared to retrospective inter­ views, these exhibits can be effective because they often come from people who, in contrast to the eyewitnesses reporting in videos, did not survive the war or the occu­ pation. Embedded in a biographical framework and touching on aspects of structural and social history, they provide information not only about contemporaneous perceptions of the occupation regime, but also about the subjects’ scope of action. In other words, in them, the victims are not transformed into objects, but are presented as subjects with options to act, if limited. This is important not only didactically, but also for the polit­ ical and ethical commemoration of those who suffered under German occupation. Finally, autobiographical documents provide a source-based, multi-perspective approach that helps to counter the further emotional charging of a disputed and often instrumentalised topic in the politics of memory.

Examining the Way Nazi Society Functioned Nevertheless, the focus should not be restricted to the victims, despite the need to commemorate them. If an exhibition is to initiate a reflection process that encour­ ages people to learn about history – which should be its main function – it must above all address the question of why these people became victims in the first place. It is thus of fundamental importance for exhibitions on the Nazi crimes to examine the motivation of the (co-)perpetrators, profiteers, and spectators. In par­ ticular, such exhibitions should question the workings of Nazi society, which took a radically racist form and was based on two corresponding pillars: first, the offer of integration into the promoted Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community; and, second, the exclusion, perse­ cution, an ultimatel murder of all those who stood out­ side this racially and biologically defined collective.8 An exhibition that adopts multiple perspectives by presenting the victims as acting subjects and ques­ tioning the perpetrators and their motivation for par­ ticipating in National Socialism (including those who

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collaborated in the occupied territories) will help to prevent our culture of remembrance from growing rigid through empty affirmations, displays of pathos, and ­rituals. It will ensure that historical reflection is not ­replaced by mourning without reflection. Furthermore, an exhibition that poses sociohistorical questions about National Socialism and the occupation regime can es­ tablish connections to the present beyond false histor­ ical analogies. It can activate reflection processes among visitors – especially about their own social, political, and ethical place in contemporary life.

1

Gottfried Korff, “Zur Eigenart der Museumsdinge”, in Museumsdinge: deponieren – exponieren (Cologne, 2002), 140–45, here 143.

2

Ibid.

3

4

7

See Jens-Christian Wagner, “Zeitzeugen ausgestellt: Die Nutzung von Interviews in Museen und KZ-Gedenkstätten”, in Erinnern an Zwangsarbeit: Zeitzeugen-Interviews in der digitalen Welt, ed. ­Nicolas Apostolopoulos and Cord Pagenstecher (Berlin, 2013), 59–67, and the comprehensive discussion in Steffi de Jong, The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums (New York, 2018).

8

See Jens-Christian Wagner, “NS-Gesellschaftsverbrechen in der Gedenkstättenarbeit”, in Der Ort der “Volksgemeinschaft” in der deutschen Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed.

Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann et al. (Paderborn, 2018), 421–37.

See Volkhard Knigge et al., “Einleitung“, in Zwangsarbeit: Die Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg, volume accompanying the exhibition, ed. Volkhard Knigge et al.

(Wei­mar, 2010), 6–11, here 9.

Ibid.

5

See Deborah Hartmann et al., “Zeitgeschichte ausstellen”, Mittelweg 36, nos. 5–6 (2021), 58–70, here 63.

6

For a critique of the term Zeitzeugen (eyewitness to history), see Martin Sabrow and Norbert Frei, eds., Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2012).

­library and archive more than from a collection of ob­ jects. But necessity is the mother of invention. For us, the narrative is of primary importance, and we would not be able to do much of what we want to do in the way that we think is most effective if we depended pri­ marily on ori­ginal artefacts, mainly because the ones we need have never been collected or have not survived.

If we had ori­ginal artefacts, we would certainly use them. And where we do have them, we do use them.

It’s not that we’re against original objects, but rather that we refuse to be limited by what does and does not exist. We treat the texts – not the physical material but what’s in them – as a kind of “artefact”. The intangible has a kind of artefactual status in our work. Museums are as much museums of the intangible as they are of the tangible. Although museums have tended to define themselves as institutions that preserve the tangible, in fact the tangible is only meaningful in relation to the intangible. It’s the ­intangible that makes matter matter.

Otherwise, the material object is mute. In our case, the intangible takes priority, partly by necessity, partly be­ cause we have i­ncredibly rich material in these testi­ monies and documents, and partly because of our strategy to narrate through primary sources and to re­ duce the third-person voice-over to a minimum. That way, our visitors come into very close contact with the voices of the ­period – whether from the Polish diary of Adam Czer­nia­kow, who was head of the Judenrat of the Warsaw Ghetto, or from Emmanuel Ringelblum, who organised and led the underground archive in the ghetto and kept a diary in Yiddish. That lets us create a multi-voiced narrative that gives voice to those whose story we tell in ways that we as scholars today never could. The fact is that nobody in the story had a crystal ball and could see what was coming. Only gradually do we lift the veil as the horizon starts to expand. We try to create a sense of immediacy for our visitors, to allow them to experience history as it unfolds rather than ­after it happened.

A discussion with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Raphael Utz

Historical museums frequently face the question of having to exhibit violent history. What was your approach to this problem as the Chief Curator of the permanent exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews?

Raphael Utz

We treat the Second World War within the borders of occupied Poland, beginning on 1 September 1939 with the German invasion and ­extending to the end of the war. Unlike most museums, we don’t begin the story of the Holocaust in the 1930s with the rise of Hitler. A fundamental principle of our thousand-year historical narrative is to push back against this teleological drive to the Holocaust. That dictates several basic principles that guide our approach to the narrative and to our mode of narration. We ask our visitors not to foreshadow what happened later, nor to backshadow or view this entire history through the lens of the Holocaust. We stay within the geography and within what we call the historical present, using “first-person narration” based almost exclusively on pri­ mary sources from the period. We don’t use any post-Holocaust video testimony interviews or other post-war accounts. To the degree that such material is relevant, it appears in the post-war gallery.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

RU A particularly rich source are photographs – and they are deeply problematic at the same time. How do you present and contextualise them?

We had the dilemma of how to provide visual an­ chors for the Holocaust narrative, because most of the photographs that we have are perpetrator photographs, and we know all the problems that they present. It’s one thing to work with them as a scholar in a book with all the reflection and care needed to discuss, context­ ualise, and analyse them; and it’s another thing to pre­ sent them in exhibitions, which is often done in ways that I consider to be irresponsible and unethical. The tendency is to show them as an unmediated window on BKG

What is the relationship between text and artefacts in the exhibition?

RU

BKG In developing the exhibition, we started more from textual sources than from artefacts, from the

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“Museums Are as Much about the Intangible as They Are about the ­Tangible”

“Museums Are as Much about the Intangible as They Are about the ­Tangible”

“Museums Are as Much about the Intangible as They Are about the ­Tangible”

a terrible reality. We wanted our visitors to have a kind same time evokes images that visitors already know. of a double or even triple vision: who took them, why They already know what these lynchings looked like. did they take them, and what did they do with them? ­After all, many people at the time photographed them We then try to communicate how those who were pho­ and mailed lynching postcards to family and friends. tographed experienced being photographed: there is The photos – which are also perpetrator images – don’t the humiliation of cutting off half a man’s beard or forc­ need to be shown again. The whole point is to activate ing Jews to do something very degrading, and then the the visitor, and not simply treat the visitor as a kind of humiliation of the photograph being taken, especially if passive receptacle for what’s being presented. In that the soldiers who are a part of this atrocity are standing spirit, the same stelae lie on the grounds outside, wait­ there witnessing it, smiling and laughing. And how the ing for people to take them back to the towns where the photograph is then exhibited is potentially a third humi­ lynchings took place. To commemorate these violent liation. In relation to the issue of respect for the victims events, people have to take action themselves. They and attuning our visitors to the experience of humili­ have to come, take the prepared object, put it in their ation – and not only to the act of humiliating – we used town, and confront this event. what we thought of as a principle of image ethics and only showed such photographs in their original size. In RU If one were to adopt such a practice, which is on the some cases the photograph is not much bigger than a borderline between artistic installation, commemora­ postage stamp. We do not enlarge such photographs tion, and participatory action – and between the tangible, ­because we object to a kind of pornography of atrocity, the intangible, and the interplay between the two – to the spectacularisation of atrocity, and to the manipu­ wouldn’t that mean that what you described as visitor ac­ lation of emotion that these photographs can engender. tivation also means that the museum in this case would It’s a cheap shot. Keeping the photographs the same be an institution which implicates visitors? Wouldn’t it size means that you have to move very close to them mean that implication is in fact the task of the museum? and establish an intimate relationship with a very vio­ lent act. In terms of the viewer experience, that means BKG Yes, and it’s interesting you should say that. The we don’t make it easy by having the photograph come to National Museum of African American History and you. We make you come to it, and that creates not only ­Culture – which is a really fabulous museum – tells the story not only of enslavement but also of resilience, intimacy but a very concentrated focus. ­creativity, and survival. There is so much in this story RU I’m particularly fascinated with the notion of the that’s uplifting, yet I came away profoundly sad and ­relationship between the tangible and the intangible. filled with a sense of shame. I was born in Canada, my How would you say the tangible changes perceptions of parents were born in Poland, we lost our families in the the intangible?

Holocaust. But this capacity for shame – not for any­ thing that I personally did, but for what human beings BKG Let me give an example that I think is pertinent. At could do and what this history shows they did do – is the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, the cura­ hugely important. Whether or not those who should tors paid visits to lynching sites in the region. They feel shame do actually feel it, I felt it on their behalf. So, gathered earth from each of the sites, put the earth in a that is another aspect of implication, the kind of rela­ jar, and brought the jars to the museum. There is a tionships – plural – that a visitor can have with this his­ whole wall of shelves presenting jars of earth from these tory, both individually and on behalf of others. lynching sites and the name of the place. It’s soil, earth, dirt – a kind of ground zero of the tangible. Its value RU Do you think museums can be empathetic? does not lie in it being rare or scarce or collectible.

Rather, the power of these jars of earth lies in their tan­ BKG Museums are schools not only for the senses but gible connection to the scene of the crime and the act of also for the emotions. They are schools for developing collecting this earth. Rather than exhibiting lynching it­ emotional intelligence. This means the ability to recog­ self, the museum evokes the sheer number of these nise how you yourself feel, to understand how some­ events in an installation of hanging stelae. Each stela body else feels, and to act responsibly in relation to bears a place name and the names of all the individuals those feelings, in terms not only of empathy but also of who were lynched there. It’s very abstract, but when the ability to feel shame. you walk amid all these hanging stelae – rusted metal, quite thick and heavy – it leaves a lot of room to actually RU There’s a wonderful, enlightened way of looking at imagine, to visualise what they stand for. The abstrac­ it: that we go to a museum and leave it improved. Per­ tion avoids the explicit display of violence but at the haps tired, but improved. What role do objects play in

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Depending on the objects and how they are pre­ sented, they can help to make the experience memor­ able. My favourite object, the most memorable one, at the Warsaw Rising Museum is a little ration of bread that a man saved. It made me start to think: what moti­ vated somebody who was starving and had this little bread ration to think that it was more important to save it as memento of this event than to eat it? What that brought home to me is something that I felt on 9/11 and now during the pandemic. The act of saving that little bread ration is evidence that a person was experiencing the present as already historical and was saving that bread for a future when the present would be past.

BKG

It also means that people at the time knew that this was not normal. That’s the perspective of the victim, not the perpetrator – because the perpetrators’ instinct would be to normalise violence.

jects is an act of violence. A Holocaust survivor once told his daughter that it would be a great achievement for him to have a tombstone when he dies. His whole family had been murdered and there were no graves. He was a typesetter for a Yiddish newspaper in New York.

He said that having a tombstone would be like being published. In Poznan, the Germans converted a syna­ gogue into a swimming pool. The city has faced the di­ lemma of what to do with it for decades: should they get rid of the swimming pool and restore the synagogue, even though there are very few Jews in Poznan, not the many thousands who lived there before the Holocaust?

Or should they leave the swimming pool as evidence of the violence inflicted on this holy place? The solution during the last few years was for artists to create instal­ lations there that would bring the synagogue’s history and desecration to light.

RU

BKG Or to hide, cover up, and destroy the evidence – which is also a form of violence.

So far, we have been discussing violence as if we were looking at a single, uniform phenomenon. Vio­ lence, however, comes in many shapes and sizes. Can objects help us to distinguish between them?

RU

BKG I have distinguished six categories of how objects function in the economy of violence. Instruments of vio­lence are the most obvious. They often speak vol­ umes without much help – whether it’s a rifle, a gre­ nade, or a sword. But if you look more closely, they say more than just “violence”. The weapons that we show in our presentation of the 17th-century Khmelnytsky Uprising are very elaborate, which adds an important layer of meaning: the glorification of violence. When showing such weapons, we have to think about the range of interpretations that can illuminate not only what that object does and did but also what it signifies beyond the act of violence itself. There are a lot of places we could go with these objects, including their manufacturer, forced labour, the perversity of having victims actually produce the instruments of their own destruction. One object could demonstrate that vio­ lence was not only direct physical violence inflicted with that object, but also deferred violence. This means thinking about it a little bit more broadly, with the ob­ ject as a starting point. A second category is violence against objects. Tombstones are an interesting case, as Jewish tombstones were used to pave roads and build the walls of the Krakow ghetto. The desecration of ob­

9

RU That of course is the other aspect of desecrated ob­ jects, that ironically the act of desecration may very well be the reason for their survival.

Exactly. Now, for my third category: some objects are evidence of violence. When I visited the Hiroshima Museum many years ago, they avoided the issue of who’s to blame: they did not take up the question of whether the Japanese had it coming or whether the Americans should never have dropped the bomb. All they wanted to show was why an atom bomb should never be dropped by anybody on anyone under any ­circumstances. This is somewhat similar to the 9/11 museum, where the focus is on objects that bear the wounds of violence and that are in and of themselves evidence of the violence. It might be a steel beam that is twisted, prompting the vis­ itor to imagine: What extraordinary violence would it take to twist such a beam? What level of heat? What level of impact? Such tangible, material evidence of violence is different from the ­human evidence, perhaps even a powerful proxy for it. The fourth category consists of metonyms of the victims of violence, especially their possessions. This is a huge category, in which certain ob­ jects have become iconic – child’s shoes and suitcases, for example. They have become almost clichéd and are an easy way to ­appeal to emotion. One of the most touching objects of this kind is a tiny photograph – even smaller than a postage stamp – in a collection in Warsaw.

A Jewish girl managed to hold on to this photograph dur­ ing the Holocaust, hiding it in her mouth or in her shoe.

What she did to hold on to this tiny photograph is so moving. There are many examples of objects that vic­ tims saved or created in response to the violence they experienced. Another category is proxies of violence: objects that do not present themselves as such, that are cloaked as something else.

BKG

“Museums Are as Much about the Intangible as They Are about the ­Tangible”

that transformative experience – to avoid the clichéd term “educational”?

RU Do you mean, for example, the public health pol­ icies pursued by the occupying authorities? When, say, members of the public health board ordered people shot who left the ghetto, ostensibly because of the out­ break of disease, such as typhoid fever?

Yes, such measures were ostensibly about con­ trolling infection, about medical research, but in fact they were a proxy for violence. A sixth category is what I call catalysts of violence. We present the story of a man whose Jewish features – a beard, sidelocks, a long black coat – infuriated a German officer so much that he shot him. The prospect of gaining property was also a catalyst for violence: Jewish property in return for ­cooperating with the Germans. In one case, a peasant was rewarded with the dress of a dead girl and then complained that it had a bullet hole in it. Objects ­acquired in this way can be shown not simply as the ­result of vio­lence but actually as a catalyst for violence.

Here violence is understood as existing on a spectrum from “denying it” to “accepting it” to “using it”.

Collecting, Studying, and Exhibiting Objects of the Occupation Regime

BKG

I think we should probably conclude here because otherwise we’ll fill an entire book. However, I’m sure that this will not be the last conversation we have about this topic. Thank you very much for the talk.

Collecting, Studying, and Exhibiting Objects of the Occupation Regime Fritz Backhaus

RU

Between 1939 and 1942, Nazi Germany succeeded in conquering large parts of Europe and bringing 27 of ­today’s European states under its yoke. The means of occupation and the legal form of rule conformed to the Nazis’ racist ideology, which distinguished between socalled Aryans and other peoples and assigned the latter a different role in a future Europe. Ideas about a Greater Germanic Reich and a Europe of nations under Ger­ man domination shifted in the course of the war, but the overriding goal of the occupation policy – as Adolf Hitler formulated it on several occasions – was to en­ sure that the occupied countries, without regard for their ­ local populations, provided industrial goods, food, raw materials, and even people for Germany and the German war effort and remained docile militarily.

This meant starvation, forced labour, and the suppres­ sion of all forms of resistance by means of brutal acts of terror against the civilian population. It also re­ sulted in a monstrous system of concentration and forced labour camps, countless killings, the systematic destruction of towns and villages, and looting cam­ paigns that targeted art and cultural treasures on a massive scale. German occupation policy was linked to resettlement operations and a population control pol­ icy in Eastern Europe that aimed to create room for Germans and that included plans to murder millions of people in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The Jewish population of Europe was to be completely ex­ terminated, a goal that Nazi Germany pursued with deadly determination until the final days of the war.

The murderous outcome is suggested by sober figures

10

11

Collecting, Studying, and Exhibiting Objects of the Occupation Regime

that even today remain mere approximations of the Bakar near Fiume. These consist mostly of idyllic land­ ­actual numbers: 200,000 Sinti and Roma, 5.7 million scapes, rustic genre scenes, cityscapes, and images of Jews, around one million non-Jewish Poles, 3.5 million tourist sights; only their origins reveal that they are not Soviet civilians, 2.8 million Soviet prisoners of war, innocuous travel scenes. They capture the gaze of the and some 400,000 non-Jewish civilians died as a result Wehrmacht artists who visually appropriated the con­ of forced labour, starvation, and campaigns of terror in quered landscapes. Although they do not appear ideo­ logical, they nevertheless document the advance of an the German-occupied territories.1 These topics are documented by objects in the col­ army preparing to extend Nazi rule across the continent. lection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). The idyllic images of Ukrainian and Russian landscapes, Today, the roughly 80,000 items from the period of the in particular, convey the message that German settlers Second World War and the occupation of large parts of will soon be the masters of the countries and their peo­ Europe between 1939 and 1945 account for around 8 to ple, who will be degraded to the status of slaves.

On the other hand, only a few objects in the col­ 10 per cent of the museum’s total collection, which spans a period of approximately 1,200 years from the lection show the perspectives of the people who were early Middle Ages to the present. A look at the perma­ subjected to occupation, the German reign of terror, nent exhibition German History from the Middle Ages to and the preparations for the monstrous land-grabbing the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which ran from 2006 to 2021, and resettlement projects in Eastern Europe. From the illustrates the Nazi period’s significance for the mu­ concentration camps, for example, the DHM holds a seum. All told, this era filled around one-fifth of the number of inconspicuous objects (among them many roughly 7,500 square metres of exhibition space. How­ self-made artefacts) that are attributable to prisoners ever, the German occupation and its consequences not from Germany. They reflect the will to survive or were just one topic among many. This section of the ex­ can be interpreted as evidence of resilience and hibition focused on the course of the war and its effects ­resistance. There are also a small number of pamphlets, on Germany, while also stressing themes such as the caricatures, and publications that were illegally distrib­ genocide of the population defined as Jewish and par­ uted by the resistance movements in the occupied countries. ticularly the Auschwitz extermination camp.

What the presentations in the previous per­It is noteworthy that the objects that show resist­ manent exhibition made clear is that the murderous ance by non-German prisoners in camps such as Buchen­ German occupation of large parts of Europe is docu­ wald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück came primarily mented by a large number of highly diverse objects in from the collection of the Museum für Deutsche Gethe collection. However, the vast majority of them are schichte (MfDG), the East German history museum informed by the perspective of the German occupiers. that the DHM took over in 1990. The MfDG’s goal was Soldiers photographed the subjugated populations in to document communist resistance in the concentra­ the occupied territories and did not shy away from tion camps and emphasise the role played by prisoners showing executions, killing operations, and degrading from the Soviet Union, Poland, and other socialist treatment. Countless documents and posters attest to countries. One such object is the “cigarette dispenser the enforcement of the occupation regime through dras­ made by the Polish prisoner Wilfred Depret in the Hein­ tic threats of punishment or through announcements of kel satellite camp of the Sachsenhausen complex”.2 The executions for the most trivial crimes. Discriminatory museum’s inventory book lists the origin of several badges point to the practice of assigning forced labour­ simi­lar items as “SED-Zentralkomitee” – Central Com­ ers to differently treated groups that were forced to mittee of the Socialist Unity Party. This shows how work for the German war economy under increasingly deeply the museum was integrated into the political poor and even deadly conditions. Documents from con­ structures of the GDR. At its own exhibitions and those centration camps provide evidence of the system of op­ it oversaw in the concentration camp memorials, the pression set up by the SS throughout Europe.

MfDG’s task was to highlight the contribution by pris­ One extensive group of objects worth mention- oners from “brother nations” to the resistance to Nazi ing in this context comprises the paintings, watercol­ Germany – and to collect relevant artefacts. These in­ ours, and drawings from the German War Art Collec­ clude reproductions such as that of an “illegal medium-­ tion – more than 7,000 works produced by artists in the wave receiver used by Soviet prisoners in the Buchen­ Wehrmacht’s art corps and confiscated by the US Army wald concentration camp”.3 In keeping with museum after the war. In addition to propaganda pictures and policy, the MfDG made copies of some of these objects ­depictions of German soldiers that clearly heroise the itself (e. g. concentration camp clothing) when ori­ subjects, it includes a large number of works with titles ginals were no longer available. In addition to objects such as Brittany, Portrait of a Caucasian in a Fur Cap, and from the camps, its acquisitions included documents

Collecting, Studying, and Exhibiting Objects of the Occupation Regime

written by members of the Danish resistance in 1943, which shed further light on its efforts to document com­ munist resistance to Nazi rule. However, research into the MfDG’s collection strategy is still in its infancy. So far, the studies commissioned by provenance research­ ers at the DHM have concentrated on the acquisition channels that need to be reconstructed and on possible explanations for entries in the inventory books such as “Übertragung” (transfer) and “SED-Zentralkomitee”.4 Since the DHM’s founding, its collection strategy has been based on a comprehensive catalogue of topics that was drawn up in 1987 for its planned permanent exhibition. It contains 100 keywords for the period 1933–45, of which the following are related to the topic of occupation in the broader sense: “Culmination in a new type of exterminatory warfare; mass extermina­ tion of European Jews, other minorities, and parts of the civilian population in the East; prisoners of war and forced labourers; persecution and terror directed inward and outward; the war economy, domestic pol­ icy, and war propaganda; German occupation policy and its effects in various countries; from war in foreign countries to total war at home”.5 Although the collec­ tion dir­ectors were able to draw on the MfDG’s hold­ ings for many of these topics, they attempted to ex­ pand other areas themselves, including the persecu­ tion of European Jews and the Holocaust, which had not been a separate field at the MfDG. The two paint­ ings by Felix Nussbaum that the DHM acquired in 1988 – documenting the perspective of the persecuted – are prominent examples of acquisitions related to these efforts. One painting depicts the artist’s incar­ ceration in the St. Cyprien internment camp in 1940.

The other, a portrait of three people, shows the desper­ ate situation faced by Nussbaum and his wife Felka Platek just a few months before they were deported from Brussels in 1944.

Overall, though, such works remain an exception.

The part of the collection devoted to this topic, which the museum has been constantly expanding since 1990, still consists mainly of objects created by German sol­ diers and occupation officials that reflect their perspec­ tive. As is the case with all historical museums, the growth of the collection is due primarily to d ­ onations or purchases from private collectors. This also applies to many acquisitions from the Nazi period. People who were victims of the German occupation or were active in the resistance, as well as their descendants, are often wary of German institutions. For this reason, the planned documentation centre “The Second World War and the Occupation of Europe” must seek to build trust over the long term as it pursues its goal of building a col­ lection that extensively documents the perspective of the victims of German occupation.

1

See Ulrich Herbert, Wer waren die Nationalsozialisten?

(Munich, 2021), 224.

2

DHM inventory no. MK 72/74.

3

DHM inventory no. HI 72/78.1.

4

See https://www.dhm.de /publikation/repraesentative -studie-zu-den-uebergaben -staatlicher-institutionen-und -organisationen-an-das -­museum-fuer-deutsche -geschichte-der-ddr-1/.

5

12

Deutsches Historisches Museum: Ideen – Kontroversen – Perspektiven, ed.

Christoph Stölzl (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 632.

After its string of military conquests in Europe, which began in 1939, Germany gradually increased its in­ fluence over the monetary systems in many of the countries it occupied.

On 23 September 1939, the first ­decree on the Reichskreditkassen (­ Reich Credit Banks) was promul­ gated. This was an occupation meas­ ure initially implemented by the Comman­der-in-Chief of the German Army in the Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland and later extended to other territories, including Nor­ way and the Balkan states. From then on, the head office of the Reichskred­ itkassen in Berlin issued banknotes not only to military institutions, but also to the civilian populations in the German-occupied territories.

The Reichskreditkassen bank­ notes were denominated in reichs­ marks but served as the de facto cur­ rency of the occupied countries – at an exchange rate to the local cur­ rency that was favourable to the German occupation regime.1 The occupation money resembled paper money and was issued in the usual denominations. The five reichsmark note, for example, features the im­ perial eagle of the Weimar Republic in its seal. The obverse is decorated with two heroic-looking head por­ traits framed in medallions, one showing a farmer with a scythe (left), the other, a worker with a hammer (right). Printed on the ­reverse is the Neue Wache, the Ber­ lin guardhouse designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.2 Like all of the Reichskreditkassen notes, it bears no date or signature.3 Acceptance of the Reichskred­ itkassen notes was decreed in all the occu­pied countries. The system en­ sured that the foreign economies bore the financial burden of occupa­ tion. If, for example, the German military used the notes to defray running costs such as soldiers’ pay,

food, or housing, the merchants who received them had to exchange them for their national currency at their local banks, which in turn submitted the notes to the central bank for credit. Ultimately, the outlaid sums were credited back to the occupiers’ account, and the Reichskreditkas­ sen notes could be converted back into goods. This incentivised enor­ mous levels of consumption on the part of the occupiers: mundane pur­ chases became an instrument of economic power.

Under the so-called Schlepp Decree, Wehrmacht members re­ turning from the occupied territo­ ries were allowed to bring back to Germany all the goods they could carry with them. Beginning in 1942, this decree led to a largely unregu­ lated form of exploitation. It be­ came increasingly common for troops in Eastern Europe to pur­ chase goods in the occupied western territories, even sending “shopping squads” equipped with Reichs­ kredit­kassen notes.4 The notes were not considered legal tender in Germany or the an­ nexed territories, but they could be exchanged at face value for re­ ichsmarks at banks within Germany, to be c­ overed by the Reichskreditkas­ sen. For example, Wehrmacht pay could be dispensed in Reichskredit­ kassen notes in the occupied terri­ tories, sent to Germany, and con­ verted to reichsmarks there. Lili Reyels 1

See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2005), 108.

2

Reichskreditkassen note, five reichsmark note, 1940 (undated). Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. N 93/616.

3

See Hans Ludwig Grabowski et al., Ausländische Geldscheine unter deutscher ­Besatzung im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Regenstauf: Gietl, 2006), 354.

4

See Jürgen Kilian, Krieg auf Kosten anderer: Das Reichsministerium der Finanzen und die wirtschaftliche Mobilisierung Europas für Hitlers Krieg (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2017), 260–61.

13

Identifying and ­Ridiculing On 3 May 1942, roughly two years after the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, the German occupa­ tion authorities began forcing the people they defined as Jewish to wear a badge in public. All Jews aged six and older were required to dis­ play a yellow-and-black cloth star.

This badge was one of the organisa­ tional and administrative instru­ ments used by the Nazi occupation regime as part of its policy of mar­ ginalising, persecuting, and murder­ ing the Jewish population of Europe.

In 1955 a star with clear signs of use was acquired for the collec­ tion of the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte, the GDR’s German his­ tory museum.1 It shows two over­ lapping equilateral triangles printed in black on a yellow background in allusion to the Star of David. The Dutch word Jood (Jew), which is en­ closed in the star, has a typographic design that mockingly references the shape of Hebrew letters. The colour yellow was deliberately cho­ sen because it had been used for centuries to stigmatise people of Jewish faith in Europe. Dutch Jews were forced to purchase the badge and sew it prominently at chest level on the left side of their clothing. The German occupiers put the Jewish Council in charge of distributing the yellow star to all members of the Jewish population and informing them how it was to be worn. Jews who went into hiding to escape per­ secution immediately removed the star from their clothes.

The fabric with the printed star was produced by N. V. Stoomwe­ vereij De Nijverheid, a textile factory in Enschede, to be sold by the metre.

The Jewish Van Gelderen family ori­ ginally owned the company, but a­ fter the German occupation of the Neth­ erlands, they transferred manage­ ment to non-Jewish directors to avoid expropriation. The Germans

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

Instruments of ­Economic Power

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

installed their own administrator any­way.

The introduction of a badge to stigmatise the Jewish population was one of the first measures taken in all the German-occupied terri­ tories. The badge became mandatory in Poland in 1939, but was not in­ troduced in Hungary (initially a German ally) until March 1944.

Although designs differed by the ­ ­region, most stars were made of yel­ low fabric. In the area of the German Generalgouvernement in occupied Poland, Jews were forced to wear a white armband with a blue hexa­ gram. In 2015 the historian Harriet Scharnberg ­ argued that this motif was deliberately modelled on the symbol of the envisioned Jewish state: the Nazis’ goal was allegedly to disseminate the blue star of the Zion­ist movement as a concession to the Jewish population. Although more than two million people in the Generalgouvernement were forced to wear the blue-and-white arm­ band, the Deutsches Historisches Museum has not yet been able to ob­ tain one for its collection. Julia Franke 1

Badge to identify Jews in the GermanOccupied Netherlands, Enschede (Netherlands), after April 1942. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. A 90/3111.

Lucullan Hunger After the Greeks drove the Italian in­ vaders back to their original base deep in Albanian territory in the win­ ter campaign of 1940/41, the Wehr­ macht saved the “honour of the Axis” by attacking Greece on 6 April 1941 and occupying Salonika on 9 April. The victors left most of the country for the Italians and Bulgar­ ians to occupy but kept the much-coveted city of Salonika for themselves. The German navy and various Nazi agencies planned to use the capital of Greek Macedonia as a staging post for operations against “Fortress Crete”, which, like Salon­

ika, they wanted to capture and “keep perm­anently in German hands”.1 From mid-April to late May 1941, the Hessian infantry sapper Hermann Hirchenhein was stationed in Salonika. In letters to his fiancée, he praised the exemplary and coura­ geous defence mounted by the Greeks. As the driver of a supply vehicle for his unit, Hirchenhein explored the “pleasant city, quite beautiful by Oriental standards”, ­almost on a daily basis. Its location was magnificent, its residents “sur­ prisingly friendly”.2 During these rounds he visited the Lukullus beer pub, which did not exactly live up to its name.3 The menu, which Hirchenhein took home with him as a souvenir, docu­ ments the obligatory bilingualism of all restaurants open to Wehrmacht soldiers at the time. As a mere snap­ shot in time, it provides only few clues as to the general supply situa­ tion in the city. The inclusion of a dish on the menu only meant it was potentially available: “sausage om­ elette” one day, “tomato omelette” the next. A restaurant of this cate­ gory could not possibly have pre­ pared all the listed meals in advance, particularly because of the growing food shortages and the difficulties of procuring ingredients. Scratched-out lines mean that popular dishes (in this case Bratspeisen, or fried foods) that were available at noon were ­already sold out by afternoon, when the sapper arrived with an empty stomach after finishing his duties.

A Lukullus menu from after October 1941 would probably docu­ ment the transition to the period of mass starvation in Greece, which had always relied on food imports from abroad. The reasons for the crisis were numerous and ranged from the British blockade of the continent to German looting. Starting in the Bal­ kan campaign, German soldiers and officers became infected with a war booty mentality, which extended to the highest Reich authorities and was

14

thus difficult to eliminate. As a result, goods in the port of Salonika consid­ ered “vital for the war economy” (i. e., almost all of them) were seized, as were “surplus products” ranging from olive oil to raisins. In response, one commander issued a special or­ der to his unit leaders instructing them to “take a most forceful stand against the view among soldiers which culminated in the saying ‘The Greek state pays for everything’”.4 When Bulgaria annexed fertile east­ ern Macedonian and Thracian supply areas, the effect was equally cata­ strophic. The death toll increased by the month, starting in the peripheral slums, which were home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Anato­ lia. In most cases, the corpses were collected in handcarts and thrown into mass graves. Many of the dead remained anonymous and uncounted because their relatives wanted to use their food stamps to prolong their own lives.

But the experience of the apo­ calyptic winter led to new survival strategies, ranging from a perfected black market, often operated in col­ lusion with certain of the occupiers, to armed resistance. Soon the Greek National Liberation Front (EAM) be­came the largest organisation in Greece’s long history. Hagen ­Fleischer 1

These plans posed an existential threat to the more than 40,000 Sephardic Jews living in the “stronghold of Judaism on the Aegean Sea”. See Völkischer Beobachter, 31 May 1941. Until 1933, they made up by far the largest number of students at the German Salonika School. See Hagen ­Fleischer, Krieg und Nachkrieg: Das schwierige deutsch-griechische Jahrhundert ­(Cologne: Böhlau, 2020), 153 ff., 189 ff.

2

Hermann Hirchenhein, Kriegstagebuch 1938–1945, April–Mai 1941. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. Ph 2018/25.2.

3

Lucullus was a Roman general known for his sumptuous banquets.

4

See Hagen Fleischer, “Schwert, Brot und Olive: Griechenland unter deutscher Be­ satzung 1941–1944/45“ in Deutsche Herr­ schaft. Nationalsozialistische ­Besatzung in Europa und die Folgen, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2022), 249–265.

Between October 1938 and May 1945, 27 of today’s European states were occupied at least temporarily

by German troops. Wehrmacht sol­ diers rarely spoke the languages of the occupied territories; the same applied to the mobile killing squads that operated behind the frontlines.

In order to communicate with the local population, they brought in Kampfdolmetscher (combat inter­pre­ ters), who were recruited from among the local civilians, ethnic minorities, and prisoners of war. ­ Pocket phrase books were also dis­ tributed to the frontline soldiers.1 During the Second World War, these language guides were published in a variety of languages, from Finnish to Berber, and were also produced for special groups such as prisoners of war and forced farm labourers.2 The Russian edition contains a total of 100 entries, including com­ mon phrases, time expressions, ways to ask for directions, the numbers from one to ten, and the Cyrillic ­alphabet with transcribed letters. It also lists foreign words “that every Russian understands” – a category that covers not only military ranks like Feldwebel (sergeant) and Gefrei­ ter (private), but also French loan­ words such as Restaurant, Garage, and Waggon (train carriage), as well as everyday terms such as Butterbrot (bread and butter), Lampe (lamp), and kaputt.

The selected phrases were ­almost exclusively commands, show­ ing that from the start, German ­occupation policy in the Soviet Un­ ion aimed at exploitation, depor­ tation, and murder. The changes in subsequent ­editions reflect the in­ creasingly harsh treatment of the population. Whereas the cover of the first edition shows a soldier talk­ ing to a woman and her child, in sub­ sequent editions he is aiming his gun at partisans and shouting “Ruki

­wwerch!” – “Hands up!” While a number of phrases were modified (“No talking!”, for example, was supplemented with “Or I’ll shoot!”), others appeared for the first time (“Idiot! / Dummkopf!”). Sentences like “Get lost!” and “Where did you hide everything, you devils!” testify to an increasingly aggressive tone, while expressions printed in earlier editions to create understanding be­ tween the two sides were omitted, such as “Don’t worry – nothing will happen to you!” and “Where’s the marketplace?”

In the post-war period, several publishing houses remained true to the genre. In 1946, for example, the Berlin-based Georg Siemens Verlag published a phrase book in German, English, French, and Russian to help German police officers to commu­ nicate with the occupying Allied ­forces.3 David Schwalbe 1

Bob W. Hindersin, Taschen-Dolmetscher für Frontsoldaten, Russisch (Berlin, 1943).

2

Werner Demelt, ed., Wörterbuch für ­ Wehrmachtsprachmittler, finnischdeutsch und deutsch-finnisch (Berlin, 1943); Martin Abel, Deutsch-Berberisch, Soldaten-Wörterbuch mit Redewendungen für Feldgebrauch (Berlin, 1940); A. B. C. de la langue allemande (Paris, 1942); Hans Thurn, Russisch-deutscher und deutsch-­ russischer Sprachhelfer u. ­Wörterbuch für landwirtschaftliche Ostarbeiter, Hausgehilfinnen und hauswirtschaftliche Ost­ arbeiterinnen (Berlin, 1941).

3

Günter Blau, ed., Polizei-Sprachführer in deutscher, englischer, französischer und russischer Sprache mit Aussprachebezeichnungen (Berlin, 1946).

15

Racist Hierarchy “The patches were worn by five young girls, probably from Ukraine, who worked in Schering’s ampoule department (Müllerstrasse factory, Berlin). The girls were housed in the barracks at the Jung­fernheide plant.

They went to work together.”

This comment is part of the history of the Ostarbeiter (Eastern worker) badge that the East German Museum für Deutsche Ge­ schichte purchased from a private collector in 1972.1 The badge is made from a white cotton fabric with a printed blue design and hand-sewn edges.

With all the details it provides, the comment touches on various aspects of forced labour under the German occupation in Europe during the ­ Second World War. Exploiting the labour of people from the conquered and occupied territories was an important pillar of Germany’s war policy. In the time up to 1945, around 26 million people were forced to work in the occupied territories and in Germany itself. Ci­ vilians from the occupied European states, including some 8.4 million women, men, and children, formed the largest group of forced labourers.

In late fall 1941, the Nazi lead­ ership decided to increase the use of civilian workers from Eastern Eur­ ope throughout the German Reich to make up for the growing labour shortage caused by the war. In many cases, workers were forcibly de­ ported to Germany, where, with the help of the labour offices, they were deployed in the(armaments) indus­ try, mining, agriculture, and many other sectors, including the pharma­ ceutical industry mentioned above.

In keeping with their ideology, the Nazis divided up the foreign workforce according to a racist hier­ archy. Jewish workers were at the very bottom, along with those from East Central and Eastern Europe, who were treated much worse than labourers from other parts of Eur­

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

“Ruki wwerch!” – “Hands up!”

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

ope. Among other things, they were forced to wear stigmatising badges – the letters “OST” (East) for forced labourers from Ukraine and other occupied Soviet territories, and a purple “P” on a yellow background for those from Poland.2 Reflecting the racist world­ view of National Socialism, the working conditions of these groups differed fundamentally from those of forced labourers from other Eu­ ropean states. Labourers from the Soviet Union received a weekly wage of just five reichsmarks, significantly less than those from Western Eur­ ope or the Czech Republic, who earned 44 reichsmarks. Prevailing occupational safety measures did not apply to the Ostarbeiter. They were not entitled to days off, let alone vacations, and were treated so badly and received such meagre sup­ plies that they were often unable to meet the work demands placed on them. During air raids, they were prohibited from using air-raid shel­ ters, which meant that they were much less likely to survive than workers from other European coun­ tries. Death rates were particularly high among Soviet and Polish workers, who accounted for the largest share of the approximately 500 000 dead among civilian forced labourers.

We do not know the names of the five young women, probably Ukrainians, who were forced to wear the OST badge. Nor do we know if they survived. Julia Franke 1

“OST” badge to identify forced labourers from the Soviet Union. German Reich, 1941–45. Cotton, plain weave, printed, edges sewn by hand. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. A 93/13.

2

“P” badge to identify Polish forced labourers. German Reich, 1939–45. Regenerated cellulose, plain weave, printed. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. A 93/18.

Commemoration or Triumph?

A chancel opens to the crucifix and baldachin in the domed chapel of Les Invalides. It is slightly to the side of the composition’s central axis. Daylight streams in from the side, bathing the room in a warm golden glow. Instead of chairs for the faithful, we see in the foreground a low circular wall surrounding the crypt, which opens downwards.

German officers stand singly and in groups around it, looking as if they are gathering for a briefing at a map table. As is customary, they have re­ moved their caps in the church.

The painting was made in 1940; the painter, Franz Martin Lün­ stroth, wrote on the back of the stretcher frame: “Officers at Napo­ leon’s tomb on the day German troops marched into Paris, 14 June 1940.”1 The time, place, and protag­ onists are thus known: the work shows Wehrmacht officers viewing the French emperor’s monumental sarcophagus on the day of their mili­ tary victory over the French.

How was the French capital captured? The first German soldiers reached the outskirts of Paris on motorcycles and trucks at five-thirty in the morning. The city had been largely abandoned by its residents, and by ten it had been taken without a fight. The 60-year-old painter, who specialised in landscape and genre scenes, was evidently taking part as a war artist. He probably sketched the scene on the spot and used the drawings as a basis for his painting.

Why the painting was made and where it was found at the end of the war are not known. For the Ameri­ cans, it was evidence of Nazi Ger­ many’s aggressively waged war of territorial expansion. They confis­ cated the work and shipped it to the United States. Later they returned it to the Federal Republic of Germany together with other works from the German War Art Collection.

16

We can arrive at a political in­ terpretation of the composition by comparing it with one of the propa­ ganda photographs taken by Hein­ rich Hoffmann on the occasion of Hitler’s visit to Napoleon’s tomb on 23 or 28 June 1940 (the exact date is not known). In less than three hours, Hitler visited several sym­ bolic sites in Paris. Hoffmann took photos that went around the world and remained imprinted on collec­ tive visual memory. His shot in Les Invalides shows the crypt and Na­ polean’s monumental sarcophagus in the foreground. Hitler and his en­ tourage are visible above it, standing behind the circular wall. Dressed in a white summer coat, Hitler gazes at the sarcophagus as if paying homage to the emperor.

What interest could Hitler have had in making such an appear­ ance? In 1806 the French defeated Prussia in the Battle of Jena-Auer­ stedt; Napoleon marched into Berlin.

In the Garrison Church in Potsdam, he visited the tomb of Frederick the Great. Hitler, for his part, presented himself at Napoleon’s tomb. Was this his way of commemorating the great commander Napoleon, in whose footsteps he was to follow on his Russian campaign in 1941? Or was he posing in triumph over the conqueror of German territories? It is impossible to say with any cer­ tainty today.

Lünstroth’s painting, by con­ trast, looks like a chance documen­ tary snapshot. It clearly conveys the significance Napoleon held in the historical memory of German of­ ficers. After all, like tourists, they headed directly to his tomb after their arrival in Paris. But the painter only gives us a hint of the crypt as a real place. Sabine Beneke 1

German Officers at Napoleon’s Tomb, 1940. Franz Martin Lünstroth (1880–1968).

Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 50.5 cm. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. Gm 97/41.

Poland’s heraldic eagle is prom­ inently displayed on this German steel helmet. It reinterprets head­ gear worn by the occupying forces as a symbol of resistance. But is this seemingly impressive object authen­ tic?

After the partitioning of the Polish Republic in September 1939, opposition to the German occupa­ tion quickly formed. The most im­ portant resistance organisation was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), which was in close contact with the Polish government-in-exile in Lon­ don. The Home Army was founded in spring 1942 and fought in various ways, initially through espionage, sabotage, and assassinations. Dur­ ing the Warsaw Uprising, which be­ gan on 1 August 1944, an estimated 50,000 men, women, and children attempted to liberate Warsaw un­ der the Home Army’s leadership; fierce street and house fighting against the German troops ensued.

On 2 October, the insurgents finally surrendered, their situation hope­ less. During the revolt, the occupi­ ers had retaliated with a massive slaughter of the civilian population and now they proceeded to deport the residents and destroy most of the buildings.

Like almost all resistance groups, the Home Army had the problem of equipping its fighters.

Its weapons consisted of pistols and rifles captured from German troops, supplied by the Allies, or rescued from the Polish army and secretly stored. Some of its arms were self-manufactured, and much of its other equipment was improvised as well. Clothing was mostly of civilian origin, and helmets were either Pol­ ish army issue or captured from the Germans. The legend of the Home Army is based to a large extent on its often inadequate equipment, which underscored the courage and heroism of the resistance fighters.

Against this historical back­ drop, the helmet appears to be an extremely rare object with great his­ torical value – nothing less than a sensation. However, a recent exam­ ination has raised doubts as to its authenticity. The helmet itself is ­ ­deceptively similar to those worn by Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers, but it is actually a firefighting helmet (“fire protection helmet M 1934”).

A closer look at the paint reveals that the original black was painted over in olive green, and that the coat of arms was applied over this. This emblem is generally associated with the Polish armed forces, but not with the resistance movement. The Home Army’s emblem was an an­ chor (kotwica) on a white and red background, and armbands in the same colours were the most fre­ quently used identification mark. ­Finally, the helmet received a coat of turquoise paint, which would have offered little protection as camou­ flage in combat. It is likely that the piece was made at a later date, with the chipped paint and rust spots ­intended to create the impression of use and age.

An international market has existed for historical militaria for years – the helmet was purchased by the Deutsches Historisches Mu­ seum from a West German dealer in 1988.1 Among the items sold are many replicas and forgeries. In this case, the success of the forgery was probably helped by the fact that the material culture of the resistance movement is not well documented and few objects have survived. The Warsaw Rising Museum, which opened in 2004, faces the same problem. Its exhibition shows only a few authentic items and consists mainly of replicas, multimedia sta­ tions, and presentations. Thomas Weißbrich

1

Firefighting Helmet M 1934 with the Polish coat of arms. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. 1988/1874.

17

Shoes from W ­ eitramsdorf In summer 2004, the Coburg State Archive in Upper Franconia ac­ quired the records of a wood-pro­ cessing company. While looking through the files, its staff discovered that the company had used forced labourers during the Second World War in order to build cargo gliders for the military. A pair of heavily worn work shoes were found in its cellar, and the archive offered them to the Deutsches Historisches Mu­ seum for its collection.1 When the museum inquired about the exact provenance of the shoes, the archive revealed the company’s name: Mö­ belfabrik Albrecht, a furniture fac­ tory in Weitramsdorf, a district of Coburg. However, it requested that the “internationally known business not be named in any possible de­ scription of the object … in the inter­ ests of its liquidators”.

After the start of the war, women and men from the Ger­ man-occupied states of Europe were recruited to work in Germany. Later, large numbers were forcibly taken to Germany against their will. Starting in 1943–44, the German occupation forces took to deporting entire fam­ ilies or villages as part of their la­ bour mobilisation programme. The authority responsible for the re­ cruitment and exploitation of mil­ lions of Europeans in Germany was directed by Fritz Sauckel, Chief Commissioner for Labour Deploy­ ment. He assumed the post in 1942.

On arriving in Germany, most of the civilian forced labourers were still wearing the clothes they had on the day of their deportation. New shoes were rarely available, nor was protective clothing for the often dif­ ficult and dangerous work. The poor-quality shoes that the labour­ ers wore on their way to work (often walking considerable distances) and during the long hours of hard phy­s­ ical labour could seriously damage their health. The improvised pair of

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

A Special Helmet

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

shoes from the factory in Weitrams­ dorf – with their thick wooden soles, clear signs of use, and soiled fabric – clearly offered little protection and even less comfort.

The forced labourers’ clothing has rarely survived. The fact that the Coburg State Archive offered the shoes to the Deutsches Historisches Museum reveals a historical aware­ ness of the topic of forced labour.

The archive evidently saw the shoes – discovered almost 60 years after the Second World War – as worthy of being presented in a mu­ seum and preserved for future gen­ erations. Its request at the time not to mention the company’s name re­ flects not only a consciousness of in­ justice but also the fear of harming the reputation of an internationally known furniture manufacturer. Rai­ sing questions of acknowledgment, responsibility, compensation, and remembrance, the history of this pair of shoes points beyond the pe­ riod of German occupation.

Julia Franke

1

Work shoes. German Reich, 1941–1945.

Wood, leather, rubber, cardboard, and cotton; sawed, nailed, perforated, riveted, and sewn; plain-weave fabric. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. KT 2004/236.1–2.

Straw Box Many handcrafted items of straw have survived from the Second World War. Most were made by people from Eastern Europe who ­ were deported to Germany as la­ bourers. Woven articles have a long tradition in Eastern Europe, particu­ larly in the region of Polesia (Ukrain­ ian: Polissja, Belarusian: Palesse). To­ day the largest part of this cultural landscape, which is dominated by agriculture, is located in Ukraine and Belarus, but before the Second World War its western section lay in Poland. The hexagonal straw box was made by a forced labourer who probably came from this region.1 He

worked on a farm with a mill in Was­ bek in Schleswig-Holstein.

Several million people from all over Europe – mostly men, but also women and children – were forced to work in the German agricultural sector. Many were civilian labourers from Poland and the Soviet Union or Soviet prisoners of war. Assign­ ment to a farm meant close contact with the farmers and their families; civilian workers often lived in sta­ bles or even with the families in their homes. Although many experi­ enced cruelty and violence, some were treated well. Nevertheless, all of the workers were entirely at the mercy of their masters and depend­ ent on their goodwill. Forced labour in the agricultural sector usually meant somewhat better living and working conditions than in industry or mining, but even in rural areas, life was characterised by long hard workdays, even on weekends. A common form of punishment was to deprive the workers of food. In many cases, Polish and Soviet men used their craft skills and knowledge to improve their situation. They made objects like this intricately woven straw box and exchanged them for food, hygiene items, and other necessities, although this was strictly prohibited. There was a brisk demand for the decorative basket­ work, which was popular with the Germans.

In some cases, the men gave away the baskets to show gratitude for good treatment. After the war, the objects were often kept for dec­ ades in the recipients’ families. They sometimes had an exculpatory func­ tion as confirmation of the good treatment of the foreign workers or as alleged proof of a critical distance towards the Nazi regime. What most of these stories have in common is that they ignore the coercive nature of the labour.

According to information that has been handed down about the straw box from Wasbek, it was in­

18

tended to be exchanged for food.

Not only does it testify to the poor living conditions of foreign workers in German agriculture, it also tells us something about agency – the ca­ pacity of people to act of their own free will in situations that at times appear hopeless, even though their options are extremely limited. Julia Franke

1

Wasbek near Neumünster (Schleswig-­ Holstein), 1939–1945. Straw, threshed, tied, bent, twisted, and braided; cardboard, paper, glued. Deutsches Historisches ­Museum, inv. no. AK 2004/62.

Stripped of Their Rights A file from the Bromberg District Court, dated 1944 – researchers would normally expect to find such a document at the Bydgoszcz State Archives in Poland, which currently contain thousands of records of the same provenance. But this file was discovered in a Berlin auction house, where the Deutsches Historisches Museum acquired it in 2000.1 Just how it got there is unknown.

At the very bottom of the stained yellow cover, we can deci­ pher the handwritten file number “4 Ds 620/44” with some difficulty.

The sequence of digits and letters indicates that this case was handled by a single judge – the German judi­ ciary still uses the same code today.

It dealt with the charge of theft and was heard on 20 November 1944 at 10 am – as shown by the box in the bottom left corner. The eye-catch­ ing pink “Haft” (detention) stamp suggests that pre-trial custody was ordered. The note next to the stamp has a more discreet colour, consist­ ing of the word “Pole” in a black frame. The collective singular, set in quotation marks, symbolises the racist perversion of the legal system under German occupation.

After invading Poland in 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union carved up the country. The result

dered the women’s arrest. The ac­ cused, who had no criminal record, confessed in court. The judge had no doubt that they had committed the offence due to material hard­ ship. One said that she had stolen the fabric because she needed to make an apron to cover the many worn spots and holes in her clothes, which she had not been able to re­ place for years. Under the Penal Code for Poles, the judge – identi­ fied as “Degenkolb” in the file – sen­ tenced both women to the min­imum sentence of three months in a penal camp and gave them full credit for their 52-day pretrial detention. It is not known where Wanda K. and Re­ gina S. were imprisoned or whether they were released on 29 December 1944, as ordered. On 27 January 1945, the Red Army liberated the city from German occupation.­ Martin Borkowski-Saruhan 1

Investigation File, Bromberg District Court (Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia, occupied Poland), 1944. Deutsches Historisches Museum, inv. no. Do2 2000/2084.

19

Examples from the Collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

was an occupation regime whose ad­ ministrative divisions in the Ger­ man territories resembled a patch­ work quilt. Large areas of western Poland were annexed, and Byd­ goszcz, renamed Bromberg, now found itself in the Reichsgau Dan­ zig-West Prussia.

At first, most Polish laws con­ tinued to apply in the annexed terri­ tories. But in June 1940, the Ger­ mans introduced a modified version of their own criminal code that dras­ tically toughened punishments and imposed the death penalty for what they considered crimes against the Germans. Finally, in December 1941, the occupiers issued the Regu­ lation on the Administration of Criminal Justice for Poles and Jews in the Annexed Eastern Territories.

This cemented the racist legal sys­ tem that stripped people of their rights and was in force throughout the German Reich, including the other annexed territories. Polish Jews and non-Jews now faced, among other things, immediate de­ tention, imprisonment in penal camps, and even the death penalty for trivial offences. They had no right to appeal. By contrast, offences committed by Germans against these groups were not subject to criminal prosecution.

A closer look at the Bromberg file reveals how the destruction of rights played out in practice, even when petty crimes were committed.

The case dealt with two Polish women, both of whom worked in the Schwan laundry shop. Inde­ pendently of each other, these women were caught by the “shop steward, Fräulein Lüdtke”, in late September 1944 attempting to steal some worthless, partly torn pieces of laundry. A search of their homes turned up two additional shirts and a handkerchief. Because these items came from a laundry order for the Wehrmacht, the owner, Henrik Reg­ linski, alerted the criminal investi­ gation unit, which immediately or­

The German Looting of Cultural Assets in the Occupied Territories Why Attempts at Categorisation and Quantification Fail

The German Looting of Cultural Assets in the Occupied Territories

Meike Hopp

Do you own an antique? A secretary perhaps? Or an armchair? Did you inherit it from your grandparents or perhaps purchase it at a flea market? Have you ever wondered about its history and tried listening to its story? Yes, this is possible – objects do tell stories. They provide us with clues about their past through incon­ spicuous details such as labels, stamps, glue residue, abbreviations, numbers, and erasures. Objects bear marks, scratches, and sometimes even scars. Have you ever purchased an old book at a second-hand book­ shop? Pay attention to its messages – old dedications, bookplates, notes, and symbols. Much is hidden be­ tween the lines. Objects can speak to us and tell us their story(ies).

The story of your antique could possibly be the story of a transfer from one place to another, perhaps from Paris to Berlin in fall 1943: packed by one of the 30 female or 82 male “officials and employees” who handled such tasks until July 1944 at the Western Office of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territor­ ies; then loaded onto one of the 26,984 freight cars on 674 trains providing a total of 1,079,373 cubic metres of cargo space.1 It might have been sent to Germany, where it was distributed to ­people whose households had been damaged by bombs. Should your object tell you such a story, listen carefully, as it is likely that it came from one of the 69,619 flats that were left behind in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands by arrested, deported, or emigrated Jews – flats whose contents were subsequently confiscated.

I am deliberately providing detailed figures be­

cause they represent seemingly reliable and objective parameters for precisely describing and defining histor­ ical and political events, contexts of injustice, and crimes – and for measuring and rendering the dimen­ sions of these crimes tangible and visible. In a truthful, clear, and seemingly neutral way, they document past realities that are incomprehensible to us today. It is for this reason that they are important for our understand­ ing, study, and discourse on historical injustice. The cited figures can be found in the supplementary ma­ terial about the so-called M-Aktion (Möbel-Aktion, or Furniture Operation) in the files on the Nuremberg tri­ als of the major war criminals. Thanks to their digital preservation by Stanford University Library, they can be ­accessed online from anywhere in the world. The fig­ ures are shocking and troubling.

Yet despite their dryness and objectivity, all they really show is that they cannot say or clarify anything at all. They are just a small part of what today we call (in brief) the “Nazi looting of cultural property”, which cannot be quantified in figures. Neither the number of vacated flats nor the cubic capacity of cargo space ­allows us to draw conclusions about the extent or the material or non-material value of the objects that re­ mained in the flats or were transported from one place to a­ nother. And they tell us even less about the fates of their owners or the perfidious mechanisms of system­ atic stigmatisation, disenfranchisement, and expropria­ tion that forced the people whom the Nazis persecuted for racist, political, or other reasons to liquidate, sell, or leave behind possessions, real estate, and assets in a process that began in 1933.

The many objects that today we subsume under subcategories such as “Nazi-looted goods”, “war booty”, or “Fluchtgut” – belongings that fleeing people were forced to sell – reflect how, beginning in 1939, the wilde Arisierungen (unauthorised Aryanisations), in which private-­sector companies and the civilian population participated alongside the authorities,2 evolved into in­ creasingly coordinated confiscation campaigns, espe­ cially in the German-occupied territories.3 It was not only the Nazi organisations, offices, and authorities that contributed to the gradual institutionalisation, radicali­ sation, and brutalisation of these processes. Academics, directors, and curators, along with the staff of museums, archives, and libraries, served as experts and brokers in efforts to “find” the property of emigrated or deported Jews – acting with the same submissiveness that marked their support for the bureaucratic administration and logistical planning of what Götz Aly has called the Mas­ senraubmord (mass murder and robbery).4 These pro­ cesses were frequently marked by violence, torture, and extortion.

20

inventory of the artworks in the Rothschilds’ flat in Paris. The military administration protested, and the ERR responded by claiming that such assets were those The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR, Task of “enemy” powers. Rosenberg’s mission was recon­ Force of Reich Leader Rosenberg), which was later re­ firmed by the OKW and in October was extended to in­ sponsible for the above-mentioned M-Aktion, was both clude northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.10 The confiscated objects were stored in the Jeu de the largest looting organisation in Nazi Germany and, from the Nazis’ perspective, the most efficiently struc­ Paume museum in Paris. On 13 November 1940, after tured.5 As an official party organ, it confiscated not only Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall and Command­ art and cultural property for the purpose of “enemy re­ er-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, ordered works removed for search” and the “struggle against Bolshevism”, but also his own collection, Rosenberg wrote a message to the books, archival documents, files, maps, teaching ma­­­ Führer emphasising that the ERR had already collected terials, research reports, photographs, sound recordings, cultural assets worth “half a billion reichsmarks” and and films. Concerted looting operations commenced in mentioning the “ownerless” possessions left behind by 1939 with German troops occupying European terri­ emigrants in the ports of La ­Rochelle, Bordeaux, and tories. Rivalries and disputes over responsibilities with Deauville. He wanted to expedite their transport to pre­ the Reich authorities that pursued similar goals (the­ vent other interested bodies from exerting control over ­Reich Propaganda Ministry, the Reichsführer-SS, the them. His rivals included above all Hans Posse, the spe­ Foreign Office, and their respective suborganisations) cial commissioner for the planned (but never built) influenced the ERR’s actions, as did developments in Führer Museum in Linz.

Ultimately, Hitler extended his Führervorbehalt – the war and the constantly changing military, political, the unofficial decree guaranteeing him the right of first and administrative circumstances.

In 1934 Alfred Rosenberg was appointed the Füh­ refusal over confiscated cultural property – to include rer’s Commissioner for the Supervision of All Intel­ the occupied western territories.11 Although the Vichy lectual and Ideological Training and Education of the government denounced the confiscations as a violation NSDAP. He initiated a project to establish an elite uni­ of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations of 1907, 12 Hit­ versity for the party’s future leaders called the “Hohe ler issued an order on 31 December 1940 to transport Schule” and in 1939 began setting up a central library 25 railway cars full of cultural assets to Neuschwanstein for the university in Berlin. He planned to gather the Castle. necessary materials from the confiscated holdings of Extension of Activities to the Occupied ­Eastern other libraries and archives.6 After the German attack Territories on the Netherlands and Belgium, the invasion of France

by German troops, and the Franco-German Armistice At the same time, after the surrender of Yugoslav and of 22 June 1940, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Greek forces in late April 1941, Rosenberg extended the Abetz, instructed the High Command of the Wehrmacht ERR’s activities to include the Balkans. In military oper­ (OKW) to “secure” approximately 1,500 artworks and ation zones in Greece, he confiscated the holdings of antiquities from private, predominantly Jewish, collec­ synagogues, schools, associations, and other institu­ tions. This came on top of seizures of art owned by the tions. Liaison offices for the Yugoslav territories were French state.7 Because of concerns over international set up in Belgrade, the Italian-occupied section of Cro­ law, the German military administration, which was atia, and Agram (Zagreb). A bureau was also opened in subordinate to the Army High Command and ran its ­occupied Denmark. own so-called Art Protection Office, quickly put an end In the “Memorandum on Eastern Questions”, to the confiscations, but Rosenberg nevertheless de­ dated 2 April 1941, Rosenberg laid the foundations for manded that the seized cultural goods be removed to continuing the ERR’s activities without restriction in the Soviet Union as well. On 20 August 1941, after his Germany.8 In July 1940, Rosenberg was authorised to search appointment as Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern for relevant written documents in France.9 After the Territories, he promoted Gerhard Utikal to head all the ERR was founded, he sent employees to Paris to exam­ task forces in the Ostland (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, ine the holdings of synagogues, associations, and lodges, and Belarus) and instructed him to confiscate cultural as well as the confiscated documents of Jews who had assets in these territories too. On 3 October 1941, he fled the country. In early September, he demanded add­ gave similar instructions to Erich Koch, the Reich Com­ itional authorisation to seize objects from “ownerless” missar for Ukraine in Rovno (Rivne). Finally, 1 March collections. That this ultimately meant cultural assets 1942 saw the issuance of an additional “Führer decree” in general became clear when the ERR compiled an that confirmed Rosenberg’s all-encompassing right to

21

The German Looting of Cultural Assets in the Occupied Territories

The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg in the Western Occupied Territories

The German Looting of Cultural Assets in the Occupied Territories

“cultural assets that were owned by Jews, that were ownerless, or whose origin could not be conclusively determined”.13 A growing ruthlessness characterised the actions by the Central Office for the Registration and Recovery of Cultural Property in the Occupied Eastern Territories, founded in April 1942. In the east­ ern territories, the ERR was permitted to work in areas under military administration, but renewed wrangling over responsibilities with the SS death squads, the dir­ ector of the army’s libraries, the Main Office for Ques­ tions of Race and Settlement, the Sonderkommando Künsberg, and the Sonderkommando Jankuhn (in charge of archaeological excavations) led to increas­ ingly uncontrolled and brutal operations. The Jewish staffs of archives, libraries, and museums were forced to help compile inventories and load objects for trans­ port, and many were subsequently murdered in mass shootings.14 Archival materials, books, and cultural ­assets were gathered as truck or train cargo. Today, the contents and whereabouts of many of the transports cannot be precisely traced or quantified, despite Soviet efforts from 1942 on to assess the damage. Many ob­ jects were lost during the redistribution measures, and holdings not intended for transport to Germany were often destroyed on the spot.15 After Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad and its with­ drawal from Ukraine in 1943, a growing number of transports of cultural goods went to alternative sites in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many objects remained in the evacuated territories. Sober statistical reports were written that completely disregard the events of the war; the files on the removed goods remain haphazard as a whole. The figures in the reports cannot even be consid­ ered approximations, as they merely reflect what was inventoried, not what was looted, sold, or destroyed.16 As a result, there is still no central list or documenta­ tion of all that was stolen.17 Against this backdrop, it once again becomes clear why any attempt to quantify the “Nazi looting of cultural property” – inextricably linked to the NSDAP’s racial ideology, the murder of European Jews, the eradication of Jewish culture and identity, and the brutal war of extermination – must fail.

So what does an object tell us, and what are we ­capable of understanding? As the art historian Emily D. Bilski recently noted, “Engaging with the provenance of objects establishes a cultural conversation across time and space with previous owners.” Bilski encourages us to view provenance separately from the (legal) issue of restitution and to honour the “social relationships that objects embody” – the “human dimension”. Objects are not merely silent witnesses to historical events.18 We owe them our attention and should treat them sensi­ tively as representatives of the fates of their rightful owners and in acknowledgement of vanished and erased

family histories. Their stories can fill historical gaps and hone our awareness of European history and cultural heritage. They can connect people, families, societies, and memories.

1

2

3

4

5

6

22

Dienststelle Westen: Gesamtleistungsübersicht bis zum 31. Juli 1944 (copy), see Stanford Digital Repository, RF Exhibit 1329, International Court of Justice Archives of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, Item H-4871; accessible online at https://purl.stanford.edu/np -875pv8977 The report fails to mention that internees of Jewish origin were also deployed as forced labourers for these processes.

On “Aryanisation processes”, see Constantin Goschler and Jürgen Lillteicher, eds., “Arisierung” und Restitution: Die Rückerstattung jüdischen Eigentums in Deutschland und Österreich nach 1945 und 1989 (Göttingen, 2002).

See also Meike Hopp, “Ideologie und Exzess – Die Kulturgut-Raubzüge der Nationalsozialisten”, in Beute: Eine Anthologie zu Kunstraub und Kulturerbe, ed. Isabelle Dolezalek et al. (Berlin, 2021), 305–12.

See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005).

See, among others, Anja Heuß, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub: Eine vergleichende Studie zur Besatzungspolitik der Nationalsozialisten in Frankreich und der Sowjetunion (Frankfurt am Main, 2000); Hanns Christian Löhr, Kunst als Waffe: Der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg; Ideologie und Kunstraub im “Dritten Reich” (Berlin, 2018).

Heuß, Kunst- und Kulturgut­ raub, 98–102; Löhr, Kunst als Waffe, 27–32.

7

Jean Cassou, ed., Le pillage par les Allemands des œuvres d’art et des bibliothèques appartenant à des Juifs en France: Recueil de documents (Paris, 1947), 78; Löhr, Kunst als Waffe, 31.

8

See, among others, Christina Kott, “‘Den Schaden in Grenzen halten …’: Deutsche Kunsthistoriker und Denk­ malpfleger als Kunst­ verwalter im besetzten Frankreich, 1940–1944”, in Kunstgeschichte im “Dritten Reich”: Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, ed.

Ruth Heftrig et al. (Berlin, 2008), 362–92.

9

Löhr, Kunst als Waffe, 34.

10 Ibid., 35.

11 Ibid., 39.

12 Cassou, Le pillage, 189–229; Elizabeth Campbell Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage under Vichy (Stanford, 2011), 191–234; Löhr, Kunst als Waffe, 24–45.

13 Ulrike Hartung, Verschleppt und verschollen: Eine Dokumentation deutscher, sowjetischer und amerika­nischer Akten zum NS-­Kunstraub in der Sowjetunion (1941–1948) (Bremen, 2000), 71.

14 Ibid, 30–40.

15 See also Corinna Kuhr-­Korolev et al., eds., Raub und Rettung: Russische Museen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Studien zu kriegsbedingt verlagerten Kulturgütern, vol. 1 (Cologne, 2019).

17 Many projects have focused on creating an overview of archival records on the confiscations carried out by the ERR and its allies. See Patricia K. Grimsted, “Reconstructing the Record of Nazi Cultural Plunder: A Guide to the Dispersed Archives of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) and the Postwar Retrieval of ERR Loot”, IISH Research Paper 47 (Amsterdam, 2015); ERR Project, accessible online at https://www.errproject.org; and, recently, the Jewish Digit­al Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP) of the Commission for Art Recovery and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, see https://de.jdcrp.org/.

18 Emily D. Bilski, “The Lives of Objects beyond Ownership: The Meaning of Provenance”, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 1 (2021), 300–322, 303.

Singularity from a Comparative Perspective The Destruction of Culture in National Socialism Hermann Parzinger

The Nazis engaged in the wholesale destruction of cul­ ture, and the radical nature of these activities continues to shock us today. On the one hand, they involved a fight against all forms of art that did not conform to Nazi ideals – in other words, against modernist trends in the visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and film, which the Nazis condemned as “degenerate”. On the other hand, within the context of the Nazi campaigns of conquest throughout Europe, the goal of the destruc­ tion was to erase the cultural heritage of those nations and peoples considered inferior and slated for exter­ mination for racist reasons. In both cases, the Nazis planned and carried out not only the destruction of art­ works and cultural assets, but also the annihilation of their creators and supporting institutions. In this re­ gard, one can speak of a cultural genocide whose vast dimensions, cold-blooded organisation, and brutal exe­ cution is without parallel in human history.

Initially, the Nazis launched a destructive assault on modernism within the German Reich. This was ­accompanied not only by the denunciation, dismissal, persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of all those who allegedly exerted a deleterious influence on the character of the German people, but also by the burning of books and artworks in Berlin and other German ­cities, orchestrated as perfidious “purification rituals”.

In the course of these activities, some 10,000 artworks from countless public museums in Germany were tossed into the flames. But the perpetrators soon recog­ nised the great commercial value of this art, and instead of destroying it, they sold it abroad through regime-­

23

Singularity from a Comparative Perspective

16 Heuß, Kunst- und Kulturgutraub, 118–20, 200–202.

Singularity from a Comparative Perspective

affiliated art dealers like Hildebrand Gurlitt in order to obtain urgently needed hard currency for the war econ­ omy.

It is not uncommon in history for regimes to con­ demn art for political, ideological, or religious reasons and to seek to destroy it, frequently in spectacularly staged annihilation rituals, while at the same time en­ gaging in a lively art trade – often clandestinely. This can be observed in the iconoclasm of the Reformation, in connection with the French Revolution, among the primitive communists of the Khmer Rouge in Cambo­ dia, and even in the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq: ISIS blew up the ancient monuments in Nineveh and Pal­ myra and presented the destruction to a global internet audience as an act of performative iconoclasm, but its members also ransacked these cities with u ­ nprecedented zeal, looking for antiquities they could sell on the inter­ national black market to finance terrorism.

The Nazis pursued an additional strategy of cul­ tural destruction that was closely related to their racist war of conquest and annihilation. They did not limit themselves to persecuting the Jewish popu­lation in Germany and the occupied territories and ­destroying their culture. They also judged the people of Eastern Europe and their cultural assets to be inferior, espe­ cially in Poland and the western Soviet Union, and set out to systematically eradicate them. Because cultural heritage has great symbolic value and significance, they targeted and mercilessly destroyed this heritage as well, including historic buildings, medieval city centres, and institutions of cultural memory such as lib­raries and museums.

The persecution of individuals on the basis of their religion, nationality, or ethnicity, accompanied by the destruction of their cultural assets, was intended to make the eradication irreversible. Nothing was to recall what had once existed. Current history offers examples of this as well. In the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, people were massacred because of their na­ tionality or religious affiliation, and their cultural monuments became popular targets because of their great symbolic value.

The Nazis’ destruction of culture in Germany and the occupied European territories was complex and pursued different goals and strategies. In many cases, one can find analogies to these criminal strategies in the preceding and subsequent periods of history. How­ ever, in terms of the breadth, intense brutality, and ­dimensions of the cultural destruction, these and other Nazi crimes are without parallel, targeting people and cultural assets alike.

What makes the Nazi crimes singular is above all the extent of the destruction and the systematic me­ ticulousness with which it was carried out. Cultural as­

sets were not destroyed in order to topple the symbols of despised regimes or to keep displaced persons from ­returning home, but solely because the creators of the artefacts were reviled for racist reasons. This is unique in history. Through their actions, the Nazis made it clear to everyone that their grim determination to des­ troy knew no bounds.

24

Wolfgang Eichwede

On 17 September 1941, barely three months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht occupied the village of Pushkin at the gates of Lenin­ grad, home to one of the most splendid residences of the Russian tsars, the Catherine Palace. According to an eyewitness account, only a few days after the German occupation, the legendary Amber Room was in a dismal state. Parts of the amber panels and the inlaid Floren­ tine mosaics had been torn from the walls, and debris lay scattered on the floor. Soldiers had apparently be­ gun dismantling the treasure, making it necessary for the occupying power to quickly organise an “orderly” looting. Already on 14 October, the war diary of the Heeresgruppe Nord contained an entry reporting on the “evacuation” of the room to Königsberg.1 The most spectacular legends have grown up around the Amber Room, which is still missing, but more important than the treasure hunters’ fantasies is the question of what actually happened to the room in 1941. This question takes us back to the reality of the German war of extermination in Eastern Europe. The files on the planning of the war contain instructions to confiscate cultural objects, particularly those of Ger­ man origin. The Amber Room was such a case: in 1720 the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I had given the Amber Room to the Russian tsar Peter the Great as a gift. However, the Germans soon set their sights on all areas of culture and education. The wide network of National Socialist task forces involved, which often competed with one another, included the Sonderkom­ mando Künsberg, the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, the Amt

Ahnenerbe, and the Wehrmacht’s so-called Art Protec­ tion Office.

Looting shaped daily life in wartime. Thousands of rare books and paintings, as well as silverware and furniture, were confiscated from imperial palaces – all that could not be evacuated at the last minute before the German occupation. In the medieval cities of Novgorod and Pskov, large numbers of icons and bibles were hauled off. In Ukrainian cities such as Kiev and Kharkiv, and Belarusian cities such as Minsk and Vitebsk, libraries, archives, and museums were completely emp­ tied out. Even butterfly collections were taken. Hun­ dreds of thousands of irreplaceable treasures were lost.

The goal was to completely eradicate cultural identities in Eastern Europe, including Jewish culture. The Ger­ man war was a war against human civilisation.

It is often overlooked that the state-organised looting was accompanied by “wild” plundering by an appallingly large number of ordinary soldiers. The state of the Amber Room before its official confiscation is just one example: dozens of Wehrmacht soldiers had apparently taken “souvenirs”, including an entire 18th-century Italian mosaic that could only have been transported by truck. It resurfaced on the black market in Bremen in 1997, and in 2000 was returned to the Catherine Palace. In Pskov, one of the city’s priceless 16th-century icons of a patron saint disappeared, only to turn up in a private collection in Berchtesgaden in 1999. From many places we have reports of an irregular “trade in art”, carried out by the impoverished popu­ lation in order to survive. While military files are full of complaints about looting, German soldiers claimed that they had rescued valuable books, unique old photo­ graphs, and watercolours from the “flames” or “floods”, only to take them home.

The aggressors intended to annihilate not only millions of people and their states, but also entire cul­ tural landscapes between the Black and the Baltic Seas.

Unique, diverse laboratories of European history were lost.

1

25

See Corinna Kuhr-Korolev et al., Raub und Rettung: Russische ­Museen im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Vienna, 2019), 114.

The Looting of Culture

The Looting of Culture

The “Return of Beauty”?

Looted Art in Post-War Italy

The “Return of Beauty”?

Bianca Gaudenzi

On 22 July 1945, a long string of US military trucks pro­ ceeded along the narrow streets of war-torn Florence, carrying 750 artworks removed by retreating German troops the previous year – including world-class mas­ terpieces from the Uffizi and other galleries.1 At the ­Piazza della Signoria, trumpeters in medieval attire and a growing crowd saluted what decades later would still be emphatically remembered as “the return of beauty”.2 The restoration of state collections in Florence and elsewhere constituted a milestone in the cathartic rebuilding of the Italian nation after fascism. In the fol­ lowing years, restitution would often be brought into play to present the country as a victim of Nazi Germany and thereby whitewash the crimes of its own dictator­ ship. These included first and foremost Italy’s role in the persecution and extermination of its Jewish citizens as well as its ruthless colonial practices. This collective amnesia was to grow stronger in the following decades and was not limited to Italy, as the Austrian and French cases demonstrate.

While the return of national collections acquired remarkable visibility, references to the looting of Jewish citizens remained the exception. Even in the rare in­ stances in which the question did come up, its treat­ ment was rather typical of Italy’s lopsided processing of the involvement of its authorities and citizens in the persecution of Jewish neighbours. For instance, the newspaper Corriere covered the story of Leo G., forced to flee Milan for Switzerland “for racial reasons”.3 At the end of the war, he discovered that his collection of antique books and furnishings had dis­appeared. Some

of the books resurfaced in the catalogue of an antiquary bookshop less than a block away from his home. The in­ vestigation eventually led to his doorman, who claimed to have received the books for safekeeping by a certain Luigi, whom the doorman identified as “a member of the SS”. When Luigi (a typical name for someone in the Waffen-SS, indeed) allegedly never came back, the doorman sold them for “a few packs of cigarettes”.4 Not much is known about how the story ended, unfortu­ nately. One of the manuscripts, a rare copy of Dante’s works, had already been sold to a British collector and was never retrieved. Two Chinese vases and a number of books had been removed by EGELI, the fascist state agency entrusted with the confiscation of Jewish prop­ erty, and were returned.5 Leo G.’s case testifies to the improvised local (and even personal) character of many of the lootings car­ ried out during the Salò Republic. Indeed, the fascist ­republic issued almost 8,000 confiscation decrees in one year, and countless more raids were conducted by paramilitary corps or neighbours.6 In particular, the case shows how looting was often presented as a Nazi enterprise, even when it blatantly was not. By project­ ing the blame onto the National Socialists, or in some instances onto their collaborators, those involved pre­ sented ­expropriation as an external matter rather than as a domestic one, thereby exculpating the new repub­ lic from its antisemitic past.

1

2

3

26

See Photographs, War Damage Series, Ward-Perkins Collection, British School at Rome; “Art returns”, combat film no. RW00901, Archivio Storico Luce, Rome.

A. Cecconi, Resistere per l’arte (Florence: Medicea, 2015).

“I preziosi libri trafugati e i loro successivi trapassi”, Corriere dell’Informazione, 21–22 May 1946, 2.

4

“Un pacco di libri preziosi per qualche pacchetto di ­sigarette”, Corriere d’Informazione, 20–21 May 1946, 2.

5

Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Fondo Anselmi, folder 47.

6

See Commissione, Rapporto generale, 6.

Germans in France, 1940–44 Julia S. Torrie

The Deutsches Historisches Museum’s collections in­ clude a small paper-bound volume with the Eiffel Tower in red on the cover. It looks like a typical Paris guide­ book, but the title, Kleiner Führer durch Paris für deutsche Soldaten (Short Guide to Paris for German Soldiers) suggests a more complicated story. Published in August 1940, the book dates from the earliest days of the Ger­ man occupation of France and was produced with the permission of the local military authorities. Why would anyone publish a guidebook for soldiers? Why did the National Socialist regime sanction such a publication, and what can it tell us about German rule in Europe during the Second World War? The occupation of France, and of Western Europe, is thought of as comparatively peaceful. On the Eastern Front, Germany fought a brutal war, but conflict in the West was more temperate and less ideological in na­ ture – soldiers treated local populations with respect.

These perceptions, nourished by veterans’ reminis­ cences, photo albums, and souvenirs, reflect only part of the picture. Drawing on narratives established during the war, they echo stories about occupied lands that were constructed by the National Socialist regime. Oc­ cupations in Western Europe did not exhibit the same unrelenting brutality as those in Eastern Europe, but neither were they harmless; rather, they were perme­ ated by violence from the start.

In France, as elsewhere, this violence took both ­obvious and subtle forms. As they invaded France, sol­ diers massacred some 1,500 to 3,000 French African sol­ diers and initially subjected African prisoners of war to harsh treatment.1 Wehrmacht members sometimes killed French civilians, likely because they believed them

to be “franc tireurs”, or partisans.2 After a lull in late 1940 and early 1941, open violence resumed. Repression directed towards minority groups, especially Jews, and their deportation to extermination camps from 1942, was an integral part of German projects.3 From late 1941, French Resistance attacks were met with escalat­ ing reprisals that included executing so-called hostages from the population. Later, German troops razed the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and killed civilians at Tulle and elsewhere.4 The occupiers routinely tortured cap­ tured resistance members and raped female prisoners.

More generally, sexual violence and murder, particularly associated with soldiers transferred to France from the Eastern Front, increased from late 1941 onwards.5 The shocking array of open violence was accom­ panied by forms of oppression that are harder to recog­ nise. Occupiers expressed dominance through everyday activities like tourism, leisure, and consumption.6 In the context of a military occupation, sight-seeing, shopping, and fine dining reinforced the occupiers’ privileged position, exploited enemy resources, and bolstered support for the war effort. Publications like the Kleiner Führer amplified and disseminated official narratives that painted over the occupation’s violence.

Today’s perception that the German presence in the West was quite harmless owes a great deal to ground­ work laid during the Third Reich.

Soldiers came to France expecting to interact with it as tourists. Like tourists, though with different inten­ tions, they left home and entered a foreign land. Once there, they used their free time to explore the sights.

Tourism generates “experiences which are different from those typically encountered in everyday life” and enables people to “view a set of different scenes, land­ scapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary.” It presupposes a decision to use one’s leisure time to ex­ plore a new environment.7 Perhaps because it was eas­ ier to imagine themselves as visitors than as conquer­ ors, the occupiers readily transposed themselves into the role of tourists.8 France lent itself to this activity. The Kleiner Führer began by describing the French capital’s size and popu­ lation and affirmed that “the treasures and marvels that Paris possesses, as well as its magnetic attraction, make Paris the centre of world tourism.”9 Radio operator Hans Klumpp, who fought in 1940 with Infantry Regi­ ment 75, could hardly wait to reach the capital. He con­ fided in his diary that “tomorrow’s finally the day we’re heading to Paris. I’ve already got the travel bug.” Later, with a sense of wonder, he wrote, “I saw the Eiffel Tower, the emblem of Paris, for the first time in my life.” Once inside the city, Klumpp was impressed by amenities like the subway and commented on the “funny feeling” of riding an escalator for the first time. On Bastille Day, he

27

Occupation or Vacation?

Occupation or Vacation?

Occupation or Vacation?

and a friend snuck downtown without permission. In 45 minutes, with “lots of sweat”, they climbed 1,800 steps to stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower next to the Reich war flag. Later, they visited Montmartre and saw a caba­ ret, where “the women were doing their dances half-­ naked.” “Simply amazing”, Klumpp concluded. “When you have the chance to be in Paris once, you’ve got to see it!”10 Klumpp was from Karlsruhe, a provincial town by comparison, and Paris offered wonders beyond any­ thing he had experienced. But even another rather more sophisticated occupier remarked after a whirlwind visit to Paris that “the impression is … big and lasting, and … I count these days among the finest I have ever enjoyed.”11 The regime exploited France’s attractions while also trying to control the soldiers’ interactions with the land and its people. Organised tours shepherded as many as 6,500 occupiers through Paris daily, while men on the coast visited sites like Mont Saint-Michel.12 Uni­ formed soldiers projected an image of sophistication and culture as they admired local monuments. Unlike the barbarians of French popular imagination, these Germans seemed orderly and “correct”. Leisure activi­ ties raised a “smokescreen” of civility that helped hide the exploitation underlying the Germans’ presence.13 Simply by sitting in cafés or riding the metro, the occu­ piers took possession of public spaces, making them uncomfortable for locals to use. Dining in a fine res­ taurant overlooking the Seine or climbing the Eiffel Tower and photographing Paris at their feet reinforced the soldiers’ sense of superiority. The letters they wrote, their snapshots, and the goods they mailed home al­ lowed their families to share vicariously in their victory.14 As the war dragged on, the regime relied increasingly on France as a site for rest and relaxation, regrouping and retraining tattered units from other fronts. Time spent recuperating in France became a common wartime expe­ rience and the respite offered notably by tourism under­ girded violence and brutality elsewhere.

The Kleiner Führer was one of the first guidebooks for soldiers. More than 30 such guides were published for France and similar volumes appeared in other occupied areas. The pocket-sized Kleiner Führer was widely available from the late summer of 1940. The clumsy wording of this book suggested it had been translated from a French text, possibly produced for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The guide highlighted the Deutsches Haus, claiming that “German arts and sciences and the immense pro­ gress in various domains of human activity were widely admired here.”15 On the whole, the depiction of Paris in the Kleiner Führer seems little different from a non-­ occupation era book – since Germany now controlled ­Parisian treasures, their value could be underlined. The guide mentioned the American embassy on the Place de la Concorde and alluded to a “Jewish quarter” in passing,

stating that Saint Paul’s church was located there, and that there were other interesting sights nearby.

Other guides commented on major sights and proposed itineraries for soldiers. The bi-weekly Der deutsche Wegleiter, printed from 15 July 1940 through mid-August 1944, listed regime-sanctioned events.

Longer books gave historical background, and the spe­ cial interest publication Pariser Nächte (Parisian nights) focused on nightlife.16 The choice of sites and forms of entertainment to either recommend or omit, like the wording of these publications, reinforced messages the authorities sought to convey.

Some guides presented a National Socialist world­ view more overtly. A striking example was the undated pocket guide Paris: deutsch gesehen (Paris as Germans see it), published by the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organisation. Distributed free to soldiers, it included segments referring to a rampant Jewish “problem” that the French had been unable to master.

Recognition of this issue, the guide contended, “led du­ ring the occupation … to the first far-reaching ­measures of racial protection. The usual instruments of ­police power did not allow for drastic measures, so le­gislation was used to enable a sharper crack-down from spring 1941. Non-French Jews were sent to French concentra­ tion camps.”17 This guide exhibits the racializing world­ view that the regime applied to Western occupied areas, as well as Eastern ones.18 Armed with this primer on how to “see” France and its inhabitants, not to mention German policies towards them, a soldier could, as the guide’s foreword put it, “shape” his many impressions of Paris into “a lasting memory”.19 Guidebooks for soldiers had an avowedly com­ memorative purpose. Soldiers were meant to keep such a book, read it over, and share it. The regime also invited them to document their experiences through photog­ raphy and write patriotic accounts of this “world-histor­ ical” moment. Guidebooks, like newsreels and radio pro­ grams, offered frameworks through which to perceive the world. These then inflected the soldiers’ memoirs and photographs, which the regime collected and redis­ seminated, creating a reciprocal dynamic to reinforce its messages.

More than simply tolerating the soldiers’ sightseeing, the regime encouraged it because it entertained and relaxed them, helped disguise oppression, and raised morale. Over the longer term, however, tourism became a liability. The relatively easy life the occupiers enjoyed in France made other men jealous. The occu­ piers were accused of exhibiting an “Etappengeist” and becoming “westweich” or “soft” from having been too long in the West. Despite the regime’s attempts to limit the numbers stationed in the West and rotate adminis­ trators out after two years, these resentments grew. In

28

1

2

Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. P., 2006); Raffael Scheck, French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. P., 2014).

Peter Lieb, Konventioneller Krieg oder NS-Weltanschauungskrieg? Kriegführung und Partisanenbekämpfung in Frankreich 1943/44 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2007), 15–20.

3

Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. P., 2019).

4

Peter Lieb, “Repercussions of Eastern Front Experiences on Anti-Partisan Warfare in France 1943–1944”, The Journal of Strategic Studies 31, no. 5 (2008): 818–19.

5

Fabrice Virgili, “Les viols commis par l’armée allemande en France (1940– 1944)”, Vingtième Siècle, no. 130 (April 2016): 103–20.

6

The focus here is on tourism.

See Julia S. Torrie, German Soldiers and the Occupation of France, 1940–1944 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U. P., 2018).

7

8

29

John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 2002), 1.

Peter J. Brenner, “Schwierige Reisen: Wandlungen des Reiseberichts in Deutschland 1918– 1945”, in Reisekultur in Deutschland: Von der Weimarer Republik zum “Dritten Reich”, ed.

Peter J. Brenner (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997), 143; Bertram Gordon, “Ist Gott Französisch? Germans, Tourism and Occupied France 1940–1944”, Modern and Contemporary France NS 4, no. 3 (1996): 287– 98; Bertram Gordon, “Warfare and Tourism: Paris in World War II”, Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 3 (1998): 616–38; Alon Confino, “Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945–1960”, History & Memory 12, no. 2 (2001): 92–121; Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

9

Kleiner Führer durch Paris für deutsche Soldaten (Paris: Dompol’s Editions, 1940), 1.

10 Diary entries, 7, 8, 9, and 14 July 1940 (Deutsche Tagebucharchiv: 1942).

11

Emphasis in the original. HansPeter Eckener, letter of 25 Oct. 1941 in Hans-Peter Eckener and Peter Wolter, Lieber Vater – mein lieber Per: Briefwechsel mit zu Hause 1940– 1944 (self-pub., 1998), 127.

12 Kommandantur Paris, Erste Generalstabsoffizier, to Deutsche Rote Kreuz, Beauftragter für Frankreich, 5 Feb. 1941. This figure is a high point for the period. A fragmentary accounting for 10 Oct. to 30 Dec. 1940 shows that ca. 3,000 men per day took part in tours at that time (Archives nationales, Paris, 40 AJ/873 and 878).

13 Birthe Kundrus, “Greasing the Palm of the Volksgemeinschaft? Consumption under National Socialism”, in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, ed. Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166–69.

14 See Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fisher, 2006).

15 Kleiner Führer, 6.

16 Doré Ogrizek, ed., Pariser Nächte (Paris: Odé Verlag, 1941).

17 Schulz-Wilmersdorf, Paris: deutsch gesehen (Berlin: Hermann Hillger, 1941), 53; Petra Bopp, Fremde im Visier: Fotoalben aus dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009), 28.

18 See Jane Caplan, “Jetzt judenfrei”: Writing Tourism in NaziOccupied Poland (London: German Historical Inst., 2013).

19 Ernst Schaumburg, foreword in Paris: deutsch gesehen, 3.

20 Otto von Stülpnagel to Wilhelm Keitel, Nr. 11/42, 15 Feb. 1942 (Bundesarchiv, RW 35/1).

Occupation or Vacation?

the face of increasing resistance attacks, it became harder to decide what tone the occupation should strike, how to navigate between overt repression and the de­ sire to maintain what Military Commander Otto von Stülpnagel described as “calm and order” in order to ­exploit France “in the most useful and extensive way” for the German war effort.20 This dilemma was exacerbated by the growing gap in culture between longer-term occupiers and incoming troops from the East. Men reeling from hard fighting had little time for what they saw as “soft” occupiers in the West. As the security situation worsened, and espe­ cially after the Allied invasion of Normandy, a new “stab-in-the-back” myth arose, which argued that Ger­ many would have had no trouble defending Western Europe if occupying troops had not been asleep at the switch. Historian Bertram Gordon has suggested that the closer relationship the soldiers developed with France after long years of occupation, in addition to the deeper knowledge of the country they gained through tourism, may have put a brake on violence. At the same time, Peter Lieb has shown that SS troops, elite units, and those that had experienced setbacks fighting in Eastern Europe were most likely to commit atrocities in France. Taking a closer look at the occupiers’ tourism and the attitudes it engendered suggests why both of these contentions make sense, and, more importantly, how they are related. Among longer-term occupiers, a close relationship with France and its people may have rendered violence less likely. Equally, for men who had just arrived after punishing combat in the East, the tourism, leisure, and consumption of those comforta­ bly stationed in the West must have seemed like a slap in the face. Perhaps they fought more viciously not only because they were accustomed to suppressing East ­European insurgencies harshly, but also in order to show that, unlike France’s long-term occupiers, they had not gone westweich. In this way, the tourism that the National Socialist regime did so much to en­ courage became a double-edged sword. Even as it smoothed the path of occupation and increased sup­ port for the war effort, it also gave rise to resentments that undermined military solidarity and favoured radi­ cal violence.

Taken out of context, the many guidebooks, let­ ters, and photo albums from this era suggest that, for soldiers, being in France was like being on holiday. But these objects also draw attention to the occupiers’ everyday exercise of power. Not only are they a key to understanding the occupation’s end, but they also ­reveal the violence of superficially harmless activities – activities that, for the occupiers, made being in France seem more like a vacation soldiers wished for than an occupation they enforced.

Under the Gallows Remembering the German Occupation in Yugoslavia

Under the Gallows

Sabina Ferhadbegović

Little is known about the photograph. We do not know who took it or who the victims are. While we know who found it – investigators from the Yugoslav State Com­ mission for Investigating the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Collaborators – we do not know where it was found. It shows three lifeless bodies, probably men, hanging from a tree. Three other men are gazing at them, two uniformed soldiers and a civilian. The equip­ ment, uniform, and helmet of the soldier in the fore­ ground suggest he is a member of the German forces.

Only the caption gives us a more precise idea of the vic­ tims, place of the crime, date, and probable perpetra­ tors: “Tree blossom in Serbia. Spring 1941.”

The photograph of the hanged men was a souvenir, a military memento of the war and spring 1941 in Ser­ bia. Thousands of similar photos exist. They are discon­ certing. They show laughing Wehrmacht soldiers in front of beautiful Bosnian orchards. Only upon closer inspection do we recognise the bodies hanging from every tree. Or they present the Swabian-German Cul­ tural Association marching down Belgrade’s main thor­ oughfare, lined with hanging corpses. Executions on gallows, trees, lampposts, and poles were not crimes against humanity committed behind the gates of the ex­ termination camps or hidden from view in forests and ravines. They were crimes perpetrated in public as open displays of inhumanity by a criminal regime.

Like their counterparts in other Allied countries, the investigators in Yugoslavia began collecting evi­ dence of the occupation crimes while the Second World War was still underway. Their goal was to bring the per­ petrators to justice after Germany’s defeat. But the State Commission to Investigate Crimes Committed by

the Occupiers and their Collaborators (henceforth “­ Yugoslav Commission”) was much more than just an investigative authority. It influenced the ­jurisprudence and narrative of the Second World War, the German ­occupation, and the civil war in Yugoslavia. Its photo­ graphic material provided a foundation for the visual remembrance of the Second World War and the war crimes.

The photographs of atrocities collected by the ­Yugoslav Commission were shown in public for the first time at the exhibition Crimes of the Occupiers and Their Collaborators, which opened at the centrally located Art Pavilion in Belgrade on 15 March 1946. Such exhibi­ tions were not uncommon in post-war Europe. They were often co-organised by the national commissions entrusted with investigating the crimes. The bestknown is perhaps the French exhibition Crimes Hit­ lériens.1 By exhibiting their collected evidence, the com­ missions laid the groundwork for the remembrance of the German occupation of Europe. The exhibitions were shown in Paris, London, Warsaw, Prague, and ­Vienna, and in all these places, visitors saw the same or similar images: destroyed cities, levelled villages, hanged people, firing squads, emaciated, lifeless bodies in death camps, execution posts, and gallows.

The Yugoslav exhibition on the crimes of the ­occupiers and their collaborators was also conceived as a travelling show. Unfortunately, the files kept by the Yugoslav Commission provide no information about its curators, who presented the commission’s ­evidence on around 36 wall panels. These panels were designed as collages of photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings. They recalled the wall news­papers used by the partisans’ agitprop departments during the Second World War to inform the population of the crimes of the occupying forces. As a rule, each panel had its own “slogan”, according to which the images were arranged.

The conceptual similarity to Aby Warburg’s Mne­ mosyne Atlas was unmistakable, but whereas Warburg’s atlas showed unexpected similarities between images, the panels followed a different logic: the photos were not meant to speak for themselves, but were arranged as illustrations of the respective slogan. In this way, the ­exhibition served as a selective visual repository that shaped Yugoslav collective memory and exposed or sug­ gested connections between subjects and events. This method had been frequently used in works created by leftist artists in the interwar period, including the pho­ tomontages of John Heartfield. As Susan Sontag has ­emphasised, observing the pain of others tends to serve the dual purpose of not only arousing emotion but also provoking action.2 If we assume that what was depicted in the execution images was less important than their

30

ganised the resistance in the Serbian town of V ­ aljevo.

During Christmas 1941, he was arrested by S ­ erbian Chetniks7 and handed over to the Gestapo in Belgrade.

Despite being tortured, he did not reveal any infor­ mation, and the German military court sentenced him to death in spring 1942. On his way to the gallows, Fili­ pović shouted anti-fascist slogans. Once there, standing on the scaffold, he raised his fists to the sky and ­addressed the crowd: “What are you waiting for? Why are you enduring this oppression? Arm yourselves and expel the bastards from the country!”8 Thanks to a young female photographer, Slobodanka Vasić, all these scenes were captured. She was just 17 when she photo­ graphed Filipović’s execution.

It is not surprising that this photograph was widely disseminated, as it succinctly captured central slogans of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Filipović’s raised fists signal “no surrender”. The photograph shows that this is not a frightened victim submitting to his fate. In the cropped composition, the gallows ­recedes into the background – as do the German and Serb soldiers present at the hanging. The young man standing on the gallows epitomises resistance.

Through this photo, the Yugoslav Commission re-encoded death on the gallows, transforming it into an act of resistance and a symbol of anti-fascist martyrdom.

It individualised the victims of the occupiers’ violence by naming their names and rendering them visible as human beings to be remembered and mourned. It is ­estimated that more than 50,000 people visited the trav­ elling exhibition during its 38-day run in Belgrade. The exhibition was later shown in cities all across Yugoslavia, from Ljubljana to Niš, and even in places like Kragu­ jevac, where the mass crimes had been committed. In total, it attracted almost 100,000 visitors.

This visual interpretation of the occupation had a powerful influence on Yugoslav public memory of the Second World War as reflected in the numerous gallows monuments built in the following decades. Among these are the Ballad of the Hanged (1967) by the Subot­ ica sculptor Nandor Glid, and the Avenue of Fallen ­Patriots (1959) by the Yugoslav architects Bogdan Bog­ danović and Svetislav Ličina. The latter monument commemorates the victims of the execution carried out in Belgrade on 17 August 1941.9 The photograph of Stjepan Filipović is referenced by two large monuments erected in his honour: one in Valjevo, where he was executed, and the other in Opuzen, his birthplace. Both show the partisan with raised fists, a gesture of resistance against fascism.

The Monument to the Revolution erected in Ljubljana in 1975 integrates the raised fists and the gallows in a bronze sculpture that is 11 metres high and 17 ­metres wide. Reliefs and figures meld together to form a gallows

31

Under the Gallows

implicit message,3 the question arises as to what emo­ tions they were intended to trigger and what story they told.

In many occupied countries, above all in Eastern Europe, images of the crimes that the Nazis committed as Sühnenmaßnahmen (reprisal measures) – especially of the mass shootings and hangings – were part of the iconography of the Second World War.4 The Belgrade exhibition placed these images at the centre of remem­ brance. Particularly in Yugoslavia, where partisan units offered strong resistance, the occupying forces applied systematic methods of terror as means of coercion and reprisal. These included the murder of civilian hostages and the hanging of communists and partisans. The first victims were always people defined as Jews or Roma.

Anyone killed by shooting had to be hanged afterwards – this was stipulated by the directive issued by the com­ mander of the Second Army, Maximilian von Weichs.5 However, the many photos of gallows are also explained by the fact that gallows are a typical subject of “war tro­ phy photography”.6 During the First World War, many German and Austrian soldiers took pictures of their ­victims as war souvenirs. Similar examples can be found in the lynch photography of the American South. The soldiers of the occupying forces converted lanterns, bridges, trees, and utility poles into murderous objects and backdrops. Their goal was not just to symbolise ­disempowerment, express perversion, or demonstrate masculinity, but also to dehumanise their victims. They did so simply because they could.

Tree Blossom in Serbia is just one of the many tro­ phy photographs discovered in the pockets of captured or fallen German soldiers. When the Yugoslav Commis­ sion exhibited such trophy images, it not only sought to show the suffering of the Yugoslav population, or point to the moral turpitude of the occupying German forces.

It also used the symbolic indeterminacy of the gallows – long a symbol of both fair punishment and egregious in­ justice – to directly reference the systemic criminal logic of the occupation. Moreover, it drew on this inde­ terminacy to integrate the Yugoslav population after the Second World War through the shared expe­rience of suffering. At the exhibition, visitors did not observe the suffering of others – they observed their own suffer­ ing. It was thus all the more important to invest this suffering with a higher meaning. For this reason, the Yugoslav Commission used the exhibition to construct the idea of the Yugoslav population (“our people”) as a community of resistance fighters.

One photograph, in particular, shows how the symbol of the gallows became inscribed with new mean­ ing – the now iconic image of the communist Stjepan (Stipan) Filipović, just 25 at the start of the occupation.

Filipović was a member of the Communist Party and or­

Under the Gallows

monument on whose upper edge we see outstretched arms with clenched fists raised defiantly. The work ex­ emplifies the evolution of Yugoslav monument archi­ tecture moving away from the typical socialist realism.

The core message, though, has remained the same: the triumph of life over death.10 Out of thousands of photographs and motifs, the image of the gallows established itself as a symbol of the systematic criminal nature of the occupation – and a unifying common signifier for all its victims. The oc­ cupying forces executed all anti-fascists, regardless of their ethnic, national, or religious background. In the realm of Yugoslav collective memory, the gallows had multiple meanings. It was not only a place of suffering, but also a place of resistance, a place on the threshold of freedom.

1

See the companion catalogue to the exhibition that reconstructed the original show in Germany in 1945/46: Hitlers Verbrechen / Crimes Hitlériens: Eine Ausstellung der französischen Besatzungsmacht, ed. Hans-Georg Merz and Herbert Uhl (Stuttgart, 2008). I wish to thank Rachel Perry for this reference.

2

See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, 2003), 80.

3

See Bernd Stiegler, “Photographie im Amerikanischen und Spanischen Bürgerkrieg”, Bürgerkriege erzählen: Zum Verlauf unziviler Konflikte, ed.

Sabina Ferhadbegović and Brigitte Weiffen (Konstanz, 2011), 113–52, here 115.

4

See Dieter Reifarth and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhof, “Die Kamera der Henker: Fotografische Selbstzeugnisse des Naziterrors in Osteuropa”, Fotogeschichte 7, no. 3 (1983), 57–71.

5

The order is published verbatim in Verbrechen der Wehrmacht: Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941– 1945 (Hamburg, 2021), 510.

6

Anton Holzer has written a remarkable study on this subject, see Anton Holzer, Die andere Front: Fotografie und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Darmstadt, 2007).

7

Chetnik (Četnici, from četa, meaning military squad) originally referred to members of the military units that fought to overturn Ottoman rule in the Balkans in the 19th century. During the Second World War, the name was adopted by the Serbian nationalist and royalist ­forces led by General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović. Under Mihailović, the Chetniks organised the resistance against the occupation, but also cooperated with the German and Italian occupation forces. For a detailed discussion, see Jozo Tomasevich, The Chetniks: War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 (Stanford, 1975), 115–21.

32

8

Milan Radanović, “Stjepan Filipović: heroj radničke i antifašističke borbe: 70 godina od smrti”, http:// www.starosajmiste.info/ blog/stjepan-filipovic-heroj -radnicke-i-antifasisticke­ -borbe-70-godina-od-smrti/.

9

In addition to numerous smaller memorials at the execution sites themselves, there are (or were) additional large gallows monuments in Gospić (1956–1991), Zaječar (1971), and Koprivnica (1985).

10 This point was emphasised

by Bogdan Bogdanović, one of the most famous Yugoslav architects, in an interview with Vladimir Kulić. See Vladimir Kulić, “The Scope of Socialist Modernism: Architecture and State Representation in Postwar Yugoslavia”, in Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities, ed. Vladimir Kulić et al. (Austin, 2014), pos. 1316.

Objects of Memory

topography of the time. What I find fascinating are the insights given into people’s subjective frames of mind: the way they perceive the world around them through letters to others at the time, through their own diary en­ tries, and then later through their memoirs, in which they try to re-conceive and represent what can be con­ strued very differently from the documents of the time.

A discussion with Natalia Aleksiun, Mary Fulbrook, and Philippe Sands

I also spend a lot of my time going to the actual places to understand. I crossed the Dolomites with my daughter in the footsteps of Otto Wächter, whom I wrote about in my book The Ratline, because I wanted to obtain a sense of what he had experienced.

And of course, on those journeys, you come across ob­ jects. On that walk that we took in June 2019, we came across a stone with a little heart that had initials and the year “1949” carved into it. It was not Wächter, of course, but someone had walked past that spot at the same point. That opens things up. Letters, diaries, and note­ books of reminiscences are of course objects. You can go onto the website of the United States Holocaust Me­ morial Museum (USHMM) and find all of the letters from the Wächter Archive. But having held them in my own hands opens the imagination in a way that other things – copies, transcripts – just don’t. You are taken to a different place. I just got back a French spade that I lent to a museum, made by the Bleckmann steel mill in Mürzzuschlag in 1915. I found it on eBay for 20 euros.

My wife gets very irritated with all these things coming through the post that I’ve bought, but you hold some­ thing that actually went through the factory of Char­ lotte Wächter’s family. It’s completely fascinating.

The historian Natalia Aleksiun led the discussion digitally from Warsaw. She was joined by the legal scholar Philippe Sands and the historian Mary Fulbrook in London. Sands most recently published the international bestseller The Ratline, in which he reconstructs the escape of Nazi war criminal Otto Wächter after Germany’s surrender. In her award-winning book A Small Town near Auschwitz, Ful­ brook traces the lives of her godmother and her godmother’s husband, who lived and worked not far from the Auschwitz concentration and death camp during the war.

You stressed getting an almost sensual sensation by touching, feeling, and seeing the historical objects that have lived through the events. I read Clara Kramer’s Polish diary in the form of fantastic scans. On her ­mother’s initiative, she kept it while living in hiding for over a year and a half in her hometown of Żółkiew, now Zhovkva. Then I actually saw the object at the USHMM. Yes, it’s about experiencing a different relationship with the object, the story, and the person behind it, but it’s also a cognitive process because the archive contains her ­Sztambuch, which starts before the war and contin­ ues under the Soviet occupation in 1939 and 1940, when her classmates and teachers wrote in it. It’s dec­ orated with drawings of Snow White, and seeing a young Jewish girl obsessing about the latest Disney film in this way puts a completely different spin on Żółkiew, a shtetl in East Central Europe. For me, Clara’s diary has to be seen together with these inscriptions and drawings, with the materiality of that Sztambuch, which you don’t come across unless you search for these additional docu­ments.

NA

Natalia Aleksiun All three of us have encounters with ob­ jects in our research. How do you see the role they can play in uncovering and telling the story of violent con­ flict?

For me, it’s not objects on a small scale that would fit into a museum. I try to reconstruct stor-ies by imagining the places, the distances between them, and what you can see from one place to another. When I was working on my book A Small Town near Auschwitz, it took me a long time to figure out where the Landrat, the chief executive of the county, and his wife, my god­ mother, actually lived, and a long time to work out where the sports field was where the 15,000 Jews were col­ lected that August day in 1942 for the selections for Auschwitz or forced labour camps. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening without being able to imagine the places in which it happened. They must have been so close. This was absolutely crucial to disentangle the post-war self-presentation as innocent, and the actual Mary Fulbrook

33

Objects of Memory

Philippe Sands

PS I’ve come to know the owners of the house where Clara Kramer hid, and I was contacted by the USHMM to ask if I might enquire with the owners whether they would be willing to sell the fake floor with the door lead­ ing into the cellar, where she hid. And they have bought it – it’s now in their possession.

I’m quite worried about the combination of two things here. One is quite rightly that sense of really be­ ing in touch with a real past. There is a sense of authen­ ticity. I can remember when I first saw a document in an archive which had Adolf Hitler’s signature on it. I touched it and thought, “My God, his hand was here on this bit of paper.” That’s an awful feeling. You have a kind of shudder. But what really worries me is the use of such objects in museums or in public history presenta­ tions. You can be given a spurious sense of connection with a real past, which is essential for people today to feel – this was real, there were people there. But you can put these things into the wrong surrounding categories and contexts and totally misunderstand what they are.

The sort of imaginative re-enactment of history, where you don’t get the context, is really problematic. There’s a kind of shock of recognition, but there’s also a real danger of misinterpretation.

Objects of Memory

MF

An individual’s relationship with an object is neces­ sarily a deeply personal thing. Ten people holding the same object may react in ten different ways. It’s the per­ sonal element that’s so significant. That’s one of the ­aspects that’s interesting for me in how a museum pre­ sents its objects. I’m completely with you in terms of the importance of context and giving as much infor­ mation as possible to the viewer in such a space. But I also think it’s important not impose a particular inter­ pretation of what this item is or means, or of its context.

I believe we have a different relationship to things than we do to words. To give an example, when I’m in court during a case, the words are obviously hugely impor­ tant – what a party says, the question a judge asks, and so on. But just as important are the silences accom­ panied by the tiniest of details, a raised eyebrow when you make a submission, interpreted by people in com­ pletely different ways. So I think it’s very important to respect the individual’s relationship with the object. It’s something that Mary and I both do in our writing: we’re quite careful not to impose an emotional response on the reader. We tend to set up the material and leave it to the reader to form their own view. And I think that’s what a museum should do with an object.

PS

One of the things that strikes me with objects and museums, though: they’re in juxtaposition to each other and that together creates a narrative. Thinking of Auschwitz, for example, and the piles of shoes, the piles of spectacles, and the piles of hair – this is all, because there is so much of it, wilfully anonymised and multi­ plied. Here the narrative emerges from the hordes of people who passed through, who are now dead and gone. There are little children’s shoes, and those little children never grew up. There are old people’s specta­ cles, and they never lived through their old age. And the suitcases – the suitcases are extraordinary. I have an old leather suitcase of my half-brother, who was brought to England in January 1939, and I sometimes look at it and think that it could have been on the heap in Auschwitz if he hadn’t come out. What’s interesting about these museum objects in that quantity is that they’re telling a story that isn’t the individual story, but the story of so many people to whom the same fate occurred. It’s diffi­ cult then to ensure that the narrative that the viewer comes away with isn’t just an immense feeling of sad­ ness about the enormity of it, but also a narrative that explains it, that allows the viewer to have a greater un­ derstanding of how this could come to be or who was responsible for this. Objects in juxtaposition are doing something different from the single object that we as researchers or we as individuals have a relationship with.

MF

NA There are two things happening simultaneously, which both of you did more or less explicitly in your work. First, we can speak of the experience of a scholar who touches, sees, experiences, and understands space because he or she stands at that site. But there is also the knowledge derived from interacting with that physical object, which is not necessarily or not only an emotional experience. Both are part of our encounters with objects and both can be misleading. We need to remain cautious concerning the extent to which we can decipher and the extent to which we can experience through these objects, and in both cases we often can’t. I’m thinking about the exhibition And I Still See Their Faces, organised by the Shalom Foundation. In 1994, Gołda Tencer – the general director of the foundation – made a public appeal to peo­ ple to hand over photographs of former Jewish neigh­ bours, classmates, business partners, and acquaintances.

It’s fascinating to see these fragmentary and at times completely orphaned objects. Sometimes people were able to identify those in the picture: “This is so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so, we sat together in school from second to seventh grade and she perished with her par­ ents.” Sometimes it was just a collection of photos they found in the attic when their family moved into that building, and there’s probably no way of ever knowing who these people were or how they died. There is this tension between what the objects do for us and do for our understanding – but they can only do so much.

34

35

Objects of Memory

PS We’ll agree that there are dangers. Whenever I go post-war survivor testimony, where what looms largest to that museum, I always look at the names and the in their memory is the horror of the camps or the de­ ­addresses on the suitcases, which of course convey par­ portations. ticular information. Is it a Polish name? Is it a Jewish name? Is it a Roma name? There are choices to be made PS I faced this issue just as squarely as Mary, because I about which suitcases you choose to put there. You’re had diaries and letters from 1929 to 1949 and then sending out a message of who went to Auschwitz. Right notebooks written in the 1970s and 1980s. The two sets now, there’s a tremendous battle going on as to who of documents told similar but not identical stories. But were the greatest victims, the Roma, the Jews, the Poles, I think I’m probably influenced by my experience in the the homosexuals, etc. There are subtle things that can courtroom. Nothing beats a contemporaneous docu­ be done. It’s the same with those photographs opposite ment, because it has an authenticity in capturing a par­ the suitcases: I wonder who went through the selection ticular moment. So my starting point would always of the photographs to choose what was portrayed in have been the earlier documents, the ones written terms of the kinds of folk who went there. Every object shortly after the events. contains a myriad of details. How you and I as writers – and how museums as guardians of historical memory – MF Another point is even interpreting what’s written at present that is vitally important, very delicate, and the time. I have a letter written by my godmother, in which she comments on mass murders and dead bodies ­often controversial. lying around in the streets on the occasion of deporta­ NA We mentioned letters and diaries as documents tions: “It was so terrible that one would have liked to closest in time to the events that we’re trying to recon­ leave the place oneself. Russia is as nothing compared struct, explain, and contextualise, and that museums to this.” When I read this, I thought, first, she’s wit­ seek to present to the public and memorialise. I’m in­ nessed something really dreadful and she knows full terested in your relationship to the chronology of ob­ well where the train is going, down to Auschwitz, a mere jects – those immediate objects, those later objects. 25 miles away; and second, she knows all about what’s Does it matter for you? been going on in Russia. In the autumn of 1941, there had been mass slaughter in Russia, and 90 to 95 per cent MF What people perceive and write at different times is of the Jews in the Baltic states were killed, often shot highly context dependent. That sounds awfully abstract, into mass graves. So, I think, “Ah, here we have this per­ but I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you, as a perpetra­ fect example of an authentic letter at the time, which tor, talk about shooting Jews and you, as a representa­ shows that she knew in a way that she denied during the tive of the Nazi regime, feel clearly discomforted, but entire post-war period.” When I ran this interpretation try to make it sound better to yourself by saying, “I’m by her son, he said something on the lines of, “No, no, thinking of my two babies at home, and I think if I let she wouldn’t have been referring to the Soviet Union these Jewish children grow up, they will grow up to take and the murder of the Jews on the Eastern Front. She revenge on my children. So, what I did today was the would’ve meant the Russian pogroms at the turn of the right thing to do.” Then, later on, in an interview you century.” He could interpret it in a much more benign give in the post-war period, you reframe the same inci­ sense than I did. I am 100 per cent certain that my in­ dent as: “Well, it was a defensive war. We were afraid of terpretation is correct, but for her son it’s easier to be­ what Judeo-Bolshevism would do to us. The Jews were lieve that she was comparing it to Russian pogroms in assisting the partisans in the woods.” You frame it in the past, and that this is not showing her current know­ the defensive language of different times, but both ledge and in effect complicity. The same little phrase, framings betray something significant about the emo­ the same little sentence in the same letter, could be in­ tions of those separate times. It’s a bit of a detective terpreted differently. story, puzzling out what is being silenced, covered up, repurposed, repackaged. That is the perpetrator side. NA Both of you have had the experience of encounter­ On the victim side, in terms of chronology, there’s the ing the objects through families and by meeting the phenomenon of not yet knowing the future, at the time families. How do you as historians, as scholars, interact of persecution: the writings of people in 1939 or 1940 and negotiate with them? who got out of Germany just before the war and who didn’t yet know that worse was still to come. They have PS I feel one has a real responsibility to treat the ma­ a different horizon of judgement and a detailed mem­ terial fairly, spend time on the objects, treat them with ory of the small incidents in everyday life in the 1930s care, look at them from different angles, in particular in which is different from the memories recounted in one’s encounters with the families, who are of course

Objects of Memory

successors and in no way responsible for the acts of their parents, grandparents, whatever it may be. In The Ratline, which tells the story of Otto Wächter, I set out the interpretations of the successors so that the readers can form their own view. In December 1939, Wächter writes to his wife Charlotte, saying, “Tomorrow I have to have 50 Poles shot.” Seeing that letter in black and white, holding it, reading those words, there’s no escap­ ing the context of that letter. I did a whole lot of re­ search on what happened, and it turned out to be a very significant event, the first act of a reprisal killing in Ger­ man-occupied Poland, personally ordered by Hitler. Fif­ ty-five young men were lined up and executed who had no responsibility at all for the alleged killings of two German officers. It was plainly a war crime. His son says that this sentence doesn’t prove anything at all, since it says, “Tomorrow I have to have 50 Poles shot”, not “Tomorrow I want to have 50 Poles shot”, or “I have to have them shot because I want to kill them.” Such in­ terpretations are not credible. Nevertheless, I have faithfully reproduced them to allow the reader to form a view and to immunise myself from criticism that I’ve imposed a conclusion upon the reader, or am taking a one-sided approach to the material. In the end, you are answerable to yourself when asked, “Have I treated this material fairly?” If I can’t answer that question with a straight “yes, that material has been treated as it should be treated”, I would be concerned. It’s a self-imposed, very high threshold to protect oneself.

MF The more I explored the significant role my god­ mother and her husband played in occupied Poland, the more I realised this was not just a personal story, but was of historical significance in two ways. First, the mid-level administration in the Third Reich was only just beginning to be opened up historiographically. It was just outside the sphere of the public imagination, where perpetrators shoot guns and everybody else is an innocent bystander or a victim. Second, there was the West German silencing of the perpetrators’ roles in that past. The over-up job, which was so complete that this man could have a wonderful, celebrated post-war career as a top-level West German senior civil servant and live in a large house with a beautiful garden and a big pen­ sion, was very typical. The silencing was ordinary. But my emotional reactions were quite complicated be­ cause I didn’t want to hurt the children, and I asked my­ self, “How much of my godmother’s privacy do I re­ spect?” Then I read and listened to the testimonies of the victims, of the survivors from the Bedzin-Sosnowiec ghetto, through which 84,000 Jews passed on their way to Auschwitz, and thought: Was not their lack of respect for the lives of others something that needs to be writ­ ten about so that we can understand how that could

happen? How could people feel they were still decent and honourable human beings when they were pre­ pared to work in a system that uprooted, dispossessed, exploited, and ultimately murdered other human be­ ings? It’s a very conflicted situation because you do feel bad about people you know and like. Children and grandchildren of perpetrators only have two choices ­really. One is to try and deny it. The other is to some­ how criticise, reject, or renounce somebody whom you love desperately. That is an impossible situation to be in. I have every sympathy with that, but I don’t know how the historian should deal with it, because I don’t want to also be complicit in silencing a difficult past. In Reckonings, I focus on the case of an ethnic German in a place called Mielec in Poland, a man who proved useful to the invading Germans because he spoke both Polish and German, had grown up there, knew who all the Jews were, could point out where they lived. When he got into a uniform, he really started acting under orders to select Jews, shoot them into ditches, and so on. After the war, he made himself into a model GDR citizen, un­ til he was arrested and put on trial and sentenced to life imprisonment. When I went to do an interview with his son, I was absolutely shocked to discover that the son had no idea that his father had done these things. He hadn’t read the trial documents in the archive. His mother had done an excellent job of saying that her hus­ band was the victim of a Stasi show trial. The discussion was more a question of my breaking it to him gently, what it was his father had admitted. Every time the son asked questions like “But surely he was only d ­ oing it un­ der orders and if he hadn’t done it, he would have been shot himself?”, I felt quite agonised on his behalf and caught myself wanting to say, “Yeah, it’s not that bad.

He was only a small fry, he had to do it.” And I couldn’t.

I had to say, “No, actually, at the time, he probably loved exercising power. He certainly wasn’t forced to do it.”

This so reminds me of an encounter I had with the grandson of a local collaborator, who also knew that his grandfather was missing for several years, following a trial and a sentence. However, this was presented to him as an injustice done in the Stalinist years of the People’s Republic of Poland. I hesitated tremendously when he asked me to discuss the files, the 400 pages of documents explaining why his grandfather was in prison. I was very ambivalent about my role – linking him to very painful knowledge. While it seems that this is a particular challenge when one deals with perpetra­ tors and their families, there are those difficult choices and very ambiguous situations with research on victims as well. I recently dealt with the case of a woman who was rescued by a Polish man in Lwów (today Lviv). She passed as his Catholic wife, but this rescue story may NA

36

have a darker side. She became pregnant pretty much immediately after he took her in. There are references to verbal abuse and alcohol in their post-war corres­ pondence. She came from a very traditional Hasidic family. When her family found out about her after the war, surviving with a son fathered by a Polish non-Jew, this was not an easy discovery for them. Writing about her story and going into the details of that dark side of her rescue, of the Polish man who was awarded the title of the Righteous Among the Nations, I did feel a tremen­ dous sense of responsibility. One of the questions I asked myself was, “Do I write the story anonymously? Do I give her name? Do I give his name?” I decided to give their names, but there was a lot of unease and uncertainty about what the right path was with the precious archival objects. Do you have a different way of dealing with docu­ments and objects that come from perpetrators as opposed to those that belong to the universe of victims, or do they involve the same kind of detective work?

There is perhaps a slightly greater scepticism in dealing with a document or object from a perpetrator, in the sense that it may have been created partly for self-serving purposes, whereas this underlying poten­ tial mostly doesn’t exist in the case of a victim. But that’s not always the case. By way of example, let me mention an object that, of the recent objects that have come my way, inspires in me the most complex feelings and emotions. The object is a poem written by the Pol­ ish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka, who was in hiding in Lviv and who subsequently, between denunciation, capture, and death, wrote “Non omnis moriar”. In the poem, she identifies the caretaker of the apartment block, Mrs. Chomin, as the person who denounced her to the authorities. After the war, the Polish national tri­ bunals held a trial, convicted her, and sentenced her to five years in prison, solely on the basis of the poem.

How do you begin to deal with such a situation? You don’t wish to undermine the veracity of the account given by the poet, and of course one doesn’t assume that Ginczanka had another reason for pointing out this lady. On the other hand, to convict someone to years of deprivation of liberty on the basis of a single short document – or even a single sentence – written in this way raises points of enormous complexity. It is an extraordi­ narily powerful poem, on its own, but then when you follow the suggestions of putting it in its context, it rises to another level of intensity. We have to treat everything with an equal degree of scepticism or we undermine our own effort to understand the significance and value of an object. Nothing is ever only what it seems.

NA Thank you so much, both of you, for this conversa­ tion.

37

Objects of Memory

PS

Ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, 1947 © Walter Studer/Keystone

Historical Judgement Published by Deutsches Historisches Museum Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin www.dhm.de President Prof. Dr. Raphael Gross Editorial Staff Dr. Nike Thurn (Head) Lisa Sophie Gerhard Dr. Heike Krokowski Ilka Linz Oliver Schweinoch Translation Adam Blauhut, Berlin Copy Editing Stephen Locke, Berlin Design and Final Art Fotosatz Amann, Memmingen, based on a design by Stan Hema, Berlin Printing Königsdruck GmbH, Berlin © 2022 Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and the authors