Reporting on the Holocaust: the view from Jim Crow Alabama

The press in Alabama covered major events taking place in Germany from the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933 through the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Journalists in the state provided extensive coverage, and editors did not hesitate to opine on the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Yet, Alabama’s white-run press failed in the end to explain the events as a singularly Jewish tragedy. The state’s black-run press, for its part, used the news of the mass killings of the Jews to warn against the dangers of conceptions of racial superiority—a primary concern for black southerners living in the Jim Crow South.

Constructing interethnic conflict and cooperation: why some people harmed Jews and others helped them during the Holocaust in Romania

The authors draw on a natural experiment to demonstrate that states can reconstruct conflictual interethnic relationships into cooperative relationships in relatively short periods of time. The article examines differences in how the gentile population in each of two neighboring territories in Romania treated its Jewish population during the Holocaust. These territories had been part of tsarist Russia and subject to state-sponsored anti-Semitism until 1917. During the interwar period one territory became part of Romania, which continued anti-Semitic policies, and the other became part of the Soviet Union, which pursued an inclusive nationality policy, fighting against inherited anti-Semitism and working to integrate its Jews. Both territories were then reunited under Romanian administration during World War II, when Romania began to destroy its Jewish population. The authors demonstrate that, despite a uniform Romanian state presence during the Holocaust that encouraged gentiles to victimize Jews, the civilian population in the area that had been part of the Soviet Union was less likely to harm and more likely to aid Jews as compared with the region that had been part of Romania. Their evidence suggests that the state construction of interethnic relationships can become internalized by civilians and outlive the life of the state itself.

Europe, the final solution and the dynamics of intent

The scale and scope of the "final solution" of the "Jewish question" were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germany's allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the "final solution" at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.

"Cattle car complexes": a correspondence with historical captivity and post-Holocaust witnesses

This article explores critical complexes relating to the construction of historical captivity in deportation train journeys by examining fictional and testimonial accounts of that experience. Using Thane Rosenbaum’s short story "Cattle Car Complex," the author shows that fiction is a prism through which to view victims’ experiences of deportation-experiences that tend to be overlooked in interpretive literature about the Holocaust. Historians have examined deportations above all as a perpetrator narrative, utilizing contemporaneous documents and sources. Their treatment neglects the numerous testimonies about the debilitating effects of deportation travel, as well as the evocation of that traumatic transit in post-Holocaust texts and contexts such as fiction, film, art, and museological and commemorative practice. The author argues that sensory witness is a compelling paradigm that can reveal the silences and elisions in representations of historical captivity.

Written on the body: narrative re-presentation in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and after

In "re-membering" the atrocities inflicted on her body and those of her comrades in the Nazi concentration camps, the French memoirist Charlotte Delbo avoids the linear time scheme and the metaphors for self that have traditionally defined autobiography as a genre. Instead, her depiction of time is circular, and the depiction of self and other is that of dismembered bodies and fragmented psyches. As conditions for the French political prisoners improved late in the war, numbed emotions thawed and Delbo's group began to recapture their pre-Auschwitz identity by reviving their pre-Auschwitz language. In recording testimonies garnered more than twenty years after the war, Delbo demonstrates that although the women were forever frozen in the time-space continuum of Auschwitz, they were also bonded into something larger than the sum of their once "dismembered selves."

Gypsies and Jews under the Nazis

This article compares the fate of the Gypsies under the Third Reich to that of the Jews, arguing that, despite parallels, the treatment each group underwent differed fundamentally. The Nazis never formulated a plan for a "Final Solution" to the Gypsy problem analogous to that for the Jews. Compulsory sterilization affected only a relatively small portion of the Gypsy population, and killings that did take place were carried out to achieve Nazi solutions to specific local situations. Numerous sources, especially recently discovered local police files, show that large numbers of "racially pure" and "socially adjusted" Gypsies were exempted from deportation to the Gypsy family camp in Auschwitz and were allowed to survive the war.

Psychological perspectives on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: the role of situational pressures, personal dispositions, and their interactions

Three psychological approaches attempting to explain the behavior of the perpetrators of the Holocaust are reviewed and evaluated. The first is a situational approach building largely on the laboratory experiments of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. The second is an approach focusing on the personal dispositions of the perpetrators, the primary example being work which has tried to find evidence of psychopathology among the Nazi leaders. The third is an interactional approach-one that sees the Nazis' murderous actions as a product of both situational pressures and personal dispositions. Among the last, the work of Helen Fein stands out because, through its main findings, it encompasses the diversity of Nazi destructiveness: both the enthusiastic serf-initiated horrors of the hate-driven antisemite and the impersonal, routinized actions of the bureaucrat carrying out the orders of his superior.

The theory and prevention of genocide

The development of a social-scientific theory of genocide has been neglected by most social scientists, viewed with suspicion by several Holocaust scholars, and advanced in a fragmentary and confused manner by those few scholars who have committed themselves to this task. This paper attempts to clarify the problems which confront those attempting a social theory of genocide and proposes solutions which, while recognising a necessary pluralism in social science methodology, seek to clear the way for the advance of theory construction. A theoretical account of genocide is proposed which draws on work in the social sciences and in genocide studies. It is argued that this account provides the grounds for cautious optimism about the development of a theory of genocide. A precondition for the fulfilment of this optimism is the abandonment by both opponents and advocates of social-scientific approaches to the understanding of genocide of the outdated assumption that social science must be informed by a positivist philosophy. The project of preventing genocide should not rest upon positivist illusions which are incompatible with the conception of moral agency which we must employ both in our ethical judgments and in our social-scientific understanding of genocidal evil.

"Faith, ethics and the Holocaust": the Holocaust survivor's faith and religious behavior and some implications for treatment

The survivor's religious experiences, both during and after the Holocaust have been underexplored in the psychological literature. This essay concerns itself with the survivor's religious realm as it affects the psychotherapeutic process. it also provides a conceptual framework for helping the therapist understand the significance of religion in the survivor's life. When a survivor's religious framework, his symbolic world, can no longer "make sense" of his life, when he cannot recognize his own identity, his psychological world begins to crumble: Clinical symptoms are thus an attempt to preserve self-cohesion, self-continuity and self-esteem amidst a tottering symbolic world. Treatment should focus on helping the survivor rebuild or create new viable human meaning formations that support self-affirmation.