Lessons and Legacies: New Currents in Holocaust Research, vol. 6 (review)

In this compilation of papers presented at the sixth Lessons and Legacies conference, held at Northwestern University in 2000, editor Jeffry Diefendorf has arranged twenty-five essays into six thematic sections: rethinking Nazi policies; resistance and rescue; German scholars and the Holocaust; historiography and challenges to historians; trials, compensation, and Jewish assets; and (the concluding section) confronting the past. Diefendorf deserves credit for clearly articulating a host of complex issues in Holocaust research in his concise and informative introduction. The greatest contribution of the volume is, in the words of Paul Jaskot, "to clarify the complicated road that led to Auschwitz" (p. 6). Clarification often means opening intellectual discourse on the legacies of the Third Reich; while we cannot summarize all twenty-five authors' contributions to this volume, a number deserve specific note.

In an opening section on rethinking Nazi policies, Sybille Steinbacher convincingly argues that Auschwitz symbolized the essential unity between mass murder and German reconstruction. Paul Jaskot casts light on the formation of SS forced-labor policies, arguing that concepts of efficiency, productivity and oppression in the camps are inextricably linked to Nazi cultural policy. In an essay on the Jews of Italy and the Nazis, Richard Breitman elucidates the role of Gestapo officer Herbert Kappler, citing newly declassified intelligence sources in the U.S. National Archives; just as important in Breitman's account is his clarification of the involvement of SS Chief-of-Staff Karl Wolff.

Of course, historians long ago came to expect from Yehuda Bauer sharp challenges to historiographical assumptions. His essay on non-armed Jewish reactions to Nazi rule in Eastern Europe calls into question the formation of "glib generalizations" regarding this important corner of research. In what may be the first study of several to follow, Bauer examines the idea of amidah, "actions that run counter to real or perceived German policies" (p. 57), in the communities of Brest-Litovsk, the shtetl of Kurzeniec, and Koskow-Huculski in Ruthenia. What he discovered are significant differences in the responses of the three communities—differences that defy easy categorization by historians.

Also woven into this section of the book are case studies of resistance or rescue involving the Dutch. Jonathan Goldstein tells the story of a little-known Dutch businessman Jan Zwartendijk and the creation of an escape route for Jews through Lithuania, the Soviet Union, and Japan to Shanghai. Here again, one notes a careful avoidance of blanket generalizations in trying to explain the motivations of Soviet and Japanese rescuers. Goldstein offers several plausible explanations, but underlines the fact that many questions associated with this journey remain unresolved. Yehudi Lindeman's essay on the various rescue efforts of over 425 Dutch Zionist youth, whose motto was "against all odds" is especially compelling because the operation took place in the western European country that suffered the highest Jewish fatality rate under the Nazis. Lenore Weitzman's "Women of Courage," on the daring exploits of the couriers of the Jewish resistance, constructs a historical narrative based primarily on oral history interviews, the only essay in the volume to do so. Weitzman shows how these women encouraged Jewish resistance by spreading throughout Eastern Europe news about Nazi mass murder.

In the section focusing on German scholars, Patricia Papen-Bodek offers a thoroughly researched piece on the formation of the wartime Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt-am-Main. Her work reveals the importance of career opportunism and political infighting among academic organizations engaged in anti-Jewish "research." Focusing on another part of the academic community, Konrad Jarausch presents the results of a study of seventeen postwar West German historians whose mentors had collaborated with the Nazis, focusing as well on how a still younger generation in the 1960s faulted its postwar elders for not condemning their Nazi-era mentors more explicitly. Jarausch's probing investigation discusses some of the pitfalls that appear when a younger generation makes moral judgments of the...