"Bystanders" to the Holocaust: A Re-Evaluation (review)

The nine essays in this volume were originally presented as papers at the 1999 Uppsala Colloquium on the Bystander in Holocaust History, and later published in 2000 in a special issue of The Journal of Holocaust Education. The colloquium, involving mainly Swedish and British historians, was the first of a continuing series of events exploring bystander issues and marked the entry of Scandinavian historians into the general field of Holocaust studies.

The title is somewhat misleading: these essays deal only with the reactions of the Allied and neutral statesóBritain, Switzerland, and Sweden in particularóand with those of their residents who were involved in rescue activities. The essays do not address the churches, nongovernmental organizations, or the populations of the occupied countriesóthose entities that normally spring to mind first when "bystanders" are mentioned. In the editors' opinion the traditional "bystander" category is too broad, and they propose to redefine it but do not seem comfortable with that decision, placing the word in quotation marks throughout. Although categories are of course always somewhat arbitrary, Cesarani and Levine might have avoided confusion by choosing a title such as "The Democracies and the Holocaust." But that is only a question of packaging.

The volume includes state-of-the-art research as well as reflective pieces, bookended by the editors' summaries. The focus throughout is on refugee issues and rescue, omitting familiar topics such as the failure to bomb Auschwitz, emigration to Palestine, and Nazi gold. The close focus helps the volume maintain coherence, though again it means that the title perhaps promises too much. Meredith Hindley, Tony Kushner, and Jacques Picard discuss government policy (Allied, British, andSwiss, respectively); Paul Levine, Karin Kvist, and Sune Persson write about officialdom, that is, the implementation of government policy; David Cesarani, Sven Nordlund, and Raya Cohen focus on private citizens and officials who acted according to their consciences, either for or against institutional policy. (Cohen writes about Jewish institutions rather than governments; the parallels, however, are striking.)

Official policy in all these states treated "racial" (but not political) refugees as if they were voluntary migrantsómeaning that policy toward them was rigorously restrictionist. U.S. immigration quotas in the 1930s, for example, were set at historically low levels; the Swedish Aliens Act (1927) based immigration policy on the need to preserve the "purity of the Nordic race." Britain had repealed its own Aliens Act, which had provided limited protection for refugee claimants, in 1914, and at Evian declared that it was "not a country of immigration." The reasons cannot be reduced entirely to economics, generalized xenophobia, a justified fear of an immigrant "invasion," or fear of Nazi reprisals. No migrants received generous treatment in the 1930s, but Jews were seen as more of a problem than others. Sometimes explicitly antisemitic motives were evident. Thus German companies in Sweden complied with German "Aryanization" laws, and many Swedish companies practiced "voluntary Aryanization" to curry favor with German customers. Although many of these acts were illegal, Swedish courts did not intervene.

Both Sweden and Switzerland asked Berlin to mark the passports of "racial" Jews (with the result that the infamous "J" stamp was introduced) so that Jewish asylum seekers could be identified at the border. More often, however, discriminatory measures were introduced without explicitly mentioning the Jews at all. Thus, because people who had already arrived proved hard to get rid of, both Britain and Sweden introduced visas for German citizens in 1938. This allowed the weeding out of potentially troublesome visitors (read: Jews) to take place far from the border and out of the public eye. Antisemitic motives revealed themselves characteristically through the notion that (as Kvist puts it) Jewish immigrants had "nothing positive to offer," or that admitting larger numbers of Jews would stir up trouble, or, in shorthand, that Jews were "undesirables." Among the Swedes, such...