Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens (review)

138 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No.1 received an excellent education in her segregated Jewish schools. Life in the Jewish ghetto in Riga was much harsher than it had been in Vienna. Even there, however, Schneider's family was lucky because they were at least allowed to remain together, unlike families which were sent to concentration camps. They, along with other German-speaking Jews from the Altreich and Prague, were also entertained by Viennese Jews "who put on shows and organized concerts and cabarets, mainly on Sunday afternoons when people did not have to go to work" (p. 87). The author reveals that not only were Viennese Jews sent to many different ghettos, work camps, and extermination camps, but the method of apprehending them also varied substantially. Some people were informed oftheir deportation by letter ordering them to report at a school on a specified day, whereas others were arrested in their homes by the police. Early deportations could result from incredibly minor infractions of laws such as the one against Jews attending cinemas. Schneider is understandably indignant over the chilly reception most survivors received when they returned to Vienna after the war as well as with the unwillingness ofthe Austrian government to compensate Jews for their losses. What she does not say, however, is that the Austrian case was far from unique. Austrian gentiles at least did not murder the returnees, in contrast to the fate of literally hundreds of Jews who found their way back to Poland. Even the much-praised Danes, who rescued thousands of Jews by smuggling them into Sweden, did not willingly return Jewish property. And it took the American government nearly fifty years to compensate Japanese-Americans for their wartime incarceration. Exile and Destruction will certainly be of great interest to all survivors of the Holocaust, especially those who came from Austria. For scholars, however, the book offers little in the way of fresh insights or newly uncovered facts. There are only 27 endnotes and a six-page bibliography. Bruce F. Pauley Department of History University of Central Florida Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944. Organisation und Durchfiihrung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens, by Dieter Pohl. Vol. 50 of Studien zur Zeitgeschichte by the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. 455 pp. DM 88.00. The author of this painstaking study must have an abiding commitment and a strong stomach. Dieter Pohl is another of Germany's younger scholars determined to shed a Book Reviews 139 bright light on the crimes ofNaticlIial Socialism against JeWs and other helpless people under their control. Unsentimentally and without circumlocution, he describes the unremitting horror of the killing operations in Eastern Galicia. Having published a slimmer study on a neighboring region of the former Polish state in 1993 (Von der 'Judenpolitik' zum Judenmord. Der Distrikt Lublin des General-gouvernements 1939-1944 [Frankfurt-am-Main et al.: Peter Lang]), Pohl expanded his research for his University of Munich dissertation into this magnificent, though terrifying, narrative. This is a microscopic examination of the exact processes by which some 500,000 Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1944. Pohl has used the records of some 60 German prosecutions and extensive documentation from archives in Poland and the Ukraine, as well as more than 50 different record groups from the various parts of the Bundesarchiv, including the former Berlin Document Center. He has converted this plethora of fragments and disjecta membra into a carefully designed indictment and judgment of hundreds, even thousands, of particular human beings-largely male-who killed with enthusiasm, with bestial cruelty, and with venal cupidity to get at the possessions of the victims. While protecting the names of witnesses at the trials by initials, Pohl identifies more than one hundred perpetrators by name with sufficient detail to supply a sense of who the chief actors were: SS and Police figures. The book is divided into six main sections plus a methodological introduction and a very substantial conclusion. Pohl breaks up the stages of destruction into a period before October 1941, a warm-up period through early summer 1942, the apogee of death July 1942-June 1943, and a fmal clean-up extending through the fall and winter of 1943...