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Chapter 7 Political Prisoners and the Legacy of National Socialism For displaced Jews, the legacy of National Socialism was central. This was not, as we have seen, the case among displaced Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians . Although most of them had also been displaced by National Socialist policies, their collective identi‹cations centered on experiences of Soviet oppression and the Soviet threat in postwar eastern Europe. However, experiences under National Socialism did not disappear from the narrative framework. They were especially important to one subset of the Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian DP populations: former concentration camp prisoners . Like other Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, liberated prisoners justi‹ed their unwillingness to return home with reference to the new geopolitical order in eastern Europe. In fact, they were often central exponents of the anticommunist “political explanation.” Some played important roles in the anticommunist movement. Simultaneously, however, they were engaged in a different project: the reckoning with the Nazi past. They de‹ned themselves as “political prisoners” of the Nazi regime. Their image of the political prisoner was grounded in a nationalist reading of the struggle against National Socialism. That is, they saw themselves primarily as members of national resistance movements, as individuals who had fought and suffered for the nation. However, they also saw themselves as part of an international community of political prisoners. In general, they were deeply preoccupied with their wartime experiences and sought to have these experiences recognized and validated in the public sphere. Indeed, sharing a widespread prejudice among “politicals” in the postwar era, they presented themselves as a superior category of persecutees de‹ned by active resistance to National Socialism. They made few efforts to work with Jewish survivors, who by de‹nition belonged to the “inferior” victim groups. 211 In laying claim to the title of political prisoners, displaced persons entered a contentious debate about resistance and persecution. Members of the anti-Nazi resistance had imbued the ‹gure of the political prisoner with special signi‹cance. The political prisoner was de‹ned as a superior kind of victim on account of his—and this was indeed a male icon—active opposition to National Socialism. This sense of superiority, nurtured by the resistance movements, was validated by the Allied powers, who placed special emphasis on political prisoners in their planning for the postwar period. In the public imagination of wartime and early postwar Europe, the concentration camps were seen primarily as places of internment for political prisoners rather than Jews. Indeed, the term political prisoner was often used as a synonym for concentration camp survivor. Hence Jewish survivors sometimes also used the term. Conversely, internment in a concentration camp was seen as the central marker of persecution. These two themes—political opposition and internment—were fused in the key symbol of the political prisoner, the red triangle, the insignia politicals wore on their camp uniforms. However, the category of the political was open to debate. The central issue was whether all concentration camp prisoners who had worn the red triangle should be considered politicals. As Eugen Kogon noted in his 1946 study of the camp system, “All sorts of prisoners in the concentration camps were labeled ‘political’!”1 The SS used the political label quite liberally , especially after 1939. Those classi‹ed as politicals ranged from individuals who resisted German occupation to those rounded up more or less at random in the context of mass raids. Indeed, with the exception of Jews, most foreigners sent to the concentration camps were classi‹ed as politicals .2 Classi‹cation as a political, far from con‹rming one’s status as a member of the antifascist resistance, thus opened one up to scrutiny. Throughout postwar Europe, former prisoners, government of‹cials, and the general public fought over the de‹nition of the political prisoner and sought to eliminate potential “interlopers.” They were especially anxious to ensure that “common” criminals, who had been sent to the concentration camps in large numbers, did not receive any of the bene‹ts or recognition of politicals. DP politicals, as I call them, were both subjects and objects of these con›icts. They participated in determining what it meant to be a political prisoner, and their claims to political status were evaluated by others. As we shall see, some of them in fact had only tenuous claims to the status of résistant, having collaborated as often as they resisted. The actions of displaced politicals must therefore be viewed in a 212 Between National Socialism and...

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