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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566633796 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dee, Ivan R. Publisher |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2001 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 873,287 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.18(w) x 8.66(h) x 0.85(d) |
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Chapter One
Types of Sources
* The sources of information about the Holocaust may beseparated into distinct types of material. This systematizationshould be clear-cut. In the simplest way, structures and objectsthat in a conventional sense are regarded as three-dimensionalmay be placed in one category, and flat items in another. Eachof these groups may then be divided further, so that allthe principal subcategories are identified, explained, and illustrated.
Structures are fixed on specific sites, whereas objects aresmaller and movable. Not much is left of whole compounds,like ghettos and camps, or of mass graves. Most of them aregone. The buildings of the largest ghetto, in Warsaw, wererazed by the Germans after the deportations of 1943. Today anewly built cluster of houses along redirected streets occupiesthe space. The constellation of three annihilation camps inBelzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka was similarly leveled before thearrival of the Red Army. The bodies in most of the massgraves of eastern Europe were systematically removed andburned by a special SS-Kommando. Several sites that had notbeen obliterated by the perpetrators were immediately orgradually transformed by the victorious Allies. The woodenbarracks of the Birkenau section of Auschwitz had to beburned down by a Soviet sanitation unit to prevent epidemics.The ravines at Babi Yar in Kiev, where a major massacre tookplace, are no more.
Still standing are small apartment houses in which the VienneseJews were concentrated for deportation. Virtually pristineis the Lublin camp, also known as Maydanek, which washastilyabandoned by retreating German forces. The brickbuildings in the main camp of Auschwitz survived, and innearby Birkenau the ruins of the gas chambers blown up bythe Germans at the last moment were left in place. In the villageof Serniki, Ukraine, an Australian team dug up a gravecontaining hundreds of bodies that a German cremationKommando had not destroyed. Limited archeological explorationsat Belzec took place shortly after the war and again inthe 1990s to determine the configuration of the former camp.But that is nearly all. The many facts of the Holocaust cannotbe recovered from such physical remains.
The situation is not very different with regard to objects ofvarious kinds. Railroad boxcars of the type that carried Jewishdeportees stand on a track near Treblinka, and one can befound in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inWashington, D.C. Also preserved are planks with which prefabricatedbarracks (horse stables—Pferdestallbaracken) wereassembled in Auschwitz for inmates. Bales of cloth with theyellow star have been shown in the Jewish Museum in Vienna,and individual stars worn by Jews may be viewed in variouspublic exhibits. Paper money and coins that were currency inthe Lódz ghetto, and notes that were circulated in the ghettoof Theresienstadt, are still common. In Auschwitz, some ofthe luggage that Jews had brought along is kept under glass,and so are eyeglasses and women's long hair. Shoes gatheredby the SS in the Belzec-Sobibór-Treblinka complex fill entirebarracks in the Lublin camp. A Gypsy cart, a fishing boat thatcarried Jews to safety from Denmark to Sweden, the rustedweapon of a resister—these are the other kinds of objects thatstill exist, but there is little else.
Sources that are physically flat may be divided into two media:pictorial and verbal. Visual materials comprise blueprints,sketches, drawings, photographs, and contemporary films.Once again, one is faced with comparative scarcity. Only photographsmake up recognizable quantities in this group, andeven here the collection becomes small if one subtracts thescenes of pre-Nazi times—the "world that was"—and concentrateson photography inside the Nazi power sphere. The depictionsof the earlier period help define a baseline, showinghow people lived, what sorts of possessions they had, and whatkinds of schools, workplaces, or resorts they went to beforedestructive measures descended upon them. Later pictorialsources include "action" films and photographs, sweeping aghetto from the entrances guarded by police to bodies on thesidewalk inside, or showing a group of Jews boarding a deportationtrain.
The information in photographs is different from verbaldescriptions. The details are not the same. Although a snapshotis momentary, it would not be easy to summarize all thatit contains in words. Often a witness would simply not thinkof including features that the operator of a camera would captureautomatically. This is true of all photographs, regardlessof whether a scene was staged or candid. Each of them is revealingand each tells a story. One might look at a posed groupportrait of Dutch Jews at a wedding, wearing their best clotheswith the obligatory Jewish star; or Jews in the Lódz ghetto,sitting in a semicircle in coats and caps on the pavement withtheir backs to one another, apparently slurping soup fromtheir pails; or the gentile Parisian intellectual Jean-PaulSartre, pipe in his mouth, having a glass of wine in the Café deFlore in 1943. Jews are the most frequent figures in Holocaustphotographs, but they contributed the smallest portionof the photographic record. Eventually their cameras wereconfiscated, and the relatively few photographers in the Jewishcommunity worked clandestinely to record the fate ofJewry on film. By contrast, many German photographs reflecta propagandistic aim. Some Jews were selected for a picturebecause they were unkempt, or a regimented production linemight have been set up on a clean floor so that one could seeJewish laborers made "useful" under strict German discipline.Finally, there are chance photographs—most of them by spectatorsbut some by members of professional German propagandacompanies—which were forbidden and which aresought out for that very reason. But a researcher may not beable to determine the place, time, or other particulars of whatis shown.
Verbal sources constitute the great bulk of the material athand. By the beginning of the Nazi regime, Europe washighly literate and produced an enormous quantity of writtenwords. The word flow was generated in public and private domainsby ranking officials and by ordinary clerks, by trainedspecialists and by individuals whose education had stopped atage fourteen or thereabouts. Generally the texts are typed, butone can also find handwritten pages ranging from short fieldreports of low-level military or police offices to lengthy privatediaries. Inasmuch as measures against Jews covered areasunder German control as well as states allied with Germany,the languages of this output number more than twenty. Germanis paramount, but satellite governments added a substantialvolume of enactments. Even in occupied regions,indigenous offices and formations like municipalities andpolice battalions dealt with internal matters in their own languages.Similarly, Jewish councils and community organizationsusually employed the national language of the countryin daily communications between their departments andbranches: Romanian in Romania, French in France, Dutch inthe Netherlands. Within the prewar boundaries of Poland, theextent of Jewish assimilation influenced the choice of languagefor the internal records of the councils: Polish in Warsaw andLublin, Yiddish in Bialystok and Vilna.
Linguistic diversity could appear in a single place. Thefiles of native administrations in German-occupied territorieswere bifurcated: the local language, plus German for all correspondencewith the German overlords. The same situationapplied also to Jewish councils. German was prescribed,whether in Warsaw or Pinsk, for reports or petitions to Germansupervisors. Inside one or another Jewish bureaucracy,more than one language could be used for exchanges amongJewish council members and functionaries. The Lódz. ghettochronicle, which was composed by Jewish journalists or writersover a period of four years as an internal record of dailyevents, and which totaled about a million words, was begun inPolish and continued in German. The protocols of meetingsin the Jewish council of the Kaunas ghetto shifted fromLithuanian to German and then to Yiddish. In the division of"special tasks" of the Jewish council in Slovakia, the reports ofpreparations in transit camps for deportation were made inSlovak or German, depending on the writer.
The authors of private diaries wrote in German, French,Dutch, Polish, Yiddish, and other languages. Comparativelyfew are in Hebrew. In postwar testimony, former perpetratorsand local bystanders availed themselves of their nativetongues. Jewish survivors returning to their homelands continuedto use the language of their youth. Those from easternEurope who settled in different regions of the world wrote anumber of memoirs during the first postwar years in Yiddish.Later they composed accounts, sometimes with professionalhelp, in the languages of their new countries, including Englishbut also German.
For purposes of analysis, the verbal sources may be furtherdivided into two groups, one containing all the items producedbefore the collapse of Nazi Germany, the other comprisingthe materials created retrospectively after the war. Tohold this distinction in place, the contemporaneous materialswill be called "documents," and the recollections "testimony."
Like all artifacts, the documentary collections were subjectto attrition until a finite quantity remained. Quite a few Germanrecords went up in flames when the buildings in whichthey were stored were hit by bombs in air raids. Similarly,Jewish ghetto correspondence as well as private diaries inWarsaw were lost during the revolt of 1943, and a year later inthe larger Polish uprising. German documents having onlytransitory value were not necessarily preserved beyond the periodof their usefulness. Moreover, upon the approach of Alliedforces, many office files were routinely destroyed. In railwaystations it was common practice to dispose of all items,not only those under lock and key, in the course of retreats.Regional authorities did the same. Four days after Kraków wasabandoned by the German army, Generalgouverneur HansFrank, who had ruled a large part of Poland from that city, andthree of his assistants burned most of the folders they hadbrought along to German soil. By February 20, 1945, PropagandaMinister Joseph Goebbels ordered the systematic destructionof Germany's secret and sensitive materials,including those dealing with Jews. Taken as a whole, theconsiderable size of the missing aggregate is revealed in thegaping holes of what remains.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sources of Holocaust Research by Raul Hilberg. Copyright © 2001 by Raul Hilberg. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | 7 | |
| 1 | Types of Sources | 13 |
| Three-dimensional and two-dimensional materials. In three dimensions: structures and objects | ||
| In two dimensions: pictorial and verbal items. In verbal form: documents and testimony | ||
| Documentary: published and confidential. In confidential: circulating and noncirculating | ||
| In circulating: directions of flow (orders, letters, reports) | ||
| In noncirculating: personnel records, notes, official and private diaries | ||
| Testimony: legal, interviews, oral history, memoirs | ||
| 2 | Composition | 50 |
| In documents: signing, sequences, formats, density, distribution, security classifications, notations, storage, survivability | ||
| In testimony: answers to questions, segmentation, and complex themes | ||
| 3 | Style | 72 |
| Prosaic Formulations | 73 | |
| Lists and "problem solving." | ||
| Special Words and Symbols | 86 | |
| Required nouns and favored verbs and adjectives | ||
| Blunt and Blunted Language | 106 | |
| Unvarnished expression. Veiled usage in legitimation, in cover words, and in roundabout formulations | ||
| Flourishes | 121 | |
| Iconic, vernacular, wit, wordplay, and irony | ||
| 4 | Content | 133 |
| Premises | 134 | |
| Basic presumptions and derivative postulations | ||
| Kinds of Information | 142 | |
| Detail, nonoccurrence in coverage, hearsay | ||
| Omissions | 164 | |
| In documents: excluded background known to recipients, and cryptic notation. In testimony: excluded background not known to readers; inability to describe experiences; self-censorship; initial reluctance and delayed disclosure | ||
| Falsity | 175 | |
| Common errors in rendition, errors of memory, denial of facts, and fabrication | ||
| 5 | Usability | 184 |
| Principles of exploitation: significance, nonexchangeability, interlinkage | ||
| Possibilities of exploitation: from exceptional releases to exceptional withholding | ||
| Index | 205 |