The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany, from The

The Rescue of Jews and the Memory of Nazism in Germany, from the Third Reich to the Present Kobi (Yaakov) Kabalek Master of Arts, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2004 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Corcoran Department of History University of Virginia June 2013 1 Abstract This dissertation examines the changing images and meanings of assistance to Jews in the German societies from the Nazi period to the present. Recent studies of the rescue of Jews claim that before the 1990s this topic was “forgotten” in the Germanys. I show, in contrast, that depictions of solidarity with and assistance to Jews appeared in a variety of media and social practices ever since the immediate postwar years and played important roles in debating the morality of Germans. This dissertation traces the roots of the postwar memory of rescuing Jews in the Third Reich. It examines the transformation of attitudes from the Nazi regime’s condemnation of solidarity with Jews as a primary condition for becoming a member of the “national community,” to reversed approaches after 1945. At the same time, it also demonstrates the continuation of cultural patterns, concepts, and images from and before the Nazi years to the postwar era. I argue that while in the first two decades after WWII descriptions of rescue were “scattered” in and among representations and practices whose main interest was rarely the rescue of Jews, they nevertheless occupied a crucial place in shaping memories of the Nazi past by presenting a positive image of a moral Germany and providing non-Jewish Germans with an relatively unproblematic path to approach the Holocaust. The dissertation then examines the various attempts to “gather” the dispersed references to rescue from the late 1950s up to the inauguration of the national memorial “Silent Heroes” in 2008. The study concludes by trying to understand the continuing claims on Germans’ “forgetting” of the rescue and rescuers of Jews and the functions of these claims in shaping the postwar memory of the topic. 2 Acknowledgments In the long years it took me to write this dissertation I received the help of many friends and collegues in the form of discussions, suggestions, and comments on parts of the manuscript. I would like to thank, first of all, my advisor, Alon Confino, for his continuous support and assistance. This dissertation also gained endless insights from numeours encounters I had in Germany, Israel, Austria, and the United States, and especially from: Susanne Beer, Guy Beiner, Mathias Berek, Lenard Berlanstein, Mike Caires, Peter Carrier, Miri Cohen Ahdut, Melanie Dejnega, Ainav Derkson, Michael Elm, Mark Gelber, Ulrike Heikaus, Manja Herrmann, Hamutal Jacobson, Christian Jaser, Hila Keinan, Julia Köhne, Beate Kosmala, Olga Kuminova, Jenny Le Zotte, Allan Megill, Jeffrey Olick, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Dennis Riffel, Erik Roubinek, Barbara Schieb, Gerd Sebald, Natalia Skradol, Alana Sobelman, Frank Stern, Alex Valdman, Sophie Wagenhofer, Jatin Waglé, Danny Wasserman, and Nimrod Zinger. I would like to extend my appreciation also to the generous assistance of the bodies that supported me financially throughout the different forms of this project: The Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, the DAAD, and also the Minerva Foundation, which funded the first stages of my work on a related topic. For their help at that early stage I would like to thank Gerhard Botz, Sieglinde Reichardt, Klaus Scherpe, Christina von Braun, and Elisabeth Wagner. Furthermore, I would like to thank the employees of the many archives and libraries I visited for helping me explore the various aspects and sources on which this dissertation is based. My greatest debt is to my parents for their never-ending love and support. I only wish that my father could experience the end of this journey with me. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 2 Introduction 4 Part One: The Roots of Postwar Memory Chapter One: “Compassion or Regret is Wholly Inappropriate”: The Rescue of Jews and Nazi Morality until 1945 24 Part Two: Scattered Memory Chapter Two: “I Protected Jews and Treated Them with Decency”: Scattered References to Rescue from the War Years to the Mid 1960s 80 Chapter Three: Celebrating Failure: Depictions of Unsuccessful Rescue in German Film and Literature (1945-1965) 155 Part Three: Gathering Memory Chapter Four: “There Were Also Others”: The Gathering of Rescuers from the Late 1950s to the mid 1970s 220 Chapter Five: “Silent Heroes” from the 1970s to the Present 283 Conclusion 337 Bibliography 348 4 Introduction In early 2006, German historian Wolfram Wette published an article with the title “A ‘Human Being’ in German Uniform: Wilm Hosenfeld and ‘The Pianist’.”1 In the article he uses the recent film by Roman Polanski as a pretext for discussing the figure of Hosenfeld, a German officer who helped save Jews in Poland during WWII, and whose story, he argues, has escaped public attention so far: Wilm Hosenfeld became known to a broader public when in 2002 the film “The Pianist” […] came to the film theaters. It was accepted with great interest, as was Steven Spielberg’s rescuer-film “Schindler’s List” before it. This can be an indication that the “rescue-resistance,” which was accomplished during WWII against the National Socialist system of injustice and terror, is now finally appropriately perceived and honored.2 Wette argues that until recently, Germans who helped Jews escape Nazi persecution received no attention in public discussions in Germany. He therefore welcomes the tendency to commemorate and honor these Germans and views international film productions, such as Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), as having direct influence on that. Wette, who in the last decade headed a number of projects that explored the lives and actions of German rescuers of Jews,3 expresses his hope that these popular representations will urge historians to write about the rescue of Jews and give rescuers a more central position in public depictions of the Nazi past. 1 Wolfram Wette, „Ein ‚Mensch’ in deutscher Uniform: Wilm Hosenfeld und ‚der Pianist’,“ Freiburger Rundbrief 13: 1 (2006): 37-42. 2 Wette, „Ein ‚Mensch’ in deutscher Uniform,“ 38. 3 This research project resulted in the following books: Wolfram Wette, ed., Retter in Uniform: Handlungsspielräume im Vernichtungskrieg der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002); Wette, ed., Zivilcourage: Empörte, Helfer und Retter aus Wehrmacht, Polizei und SS (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003); Wette, ed., Stille Helden: Judenretter im Dreiländereck während des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Freiburg: Herder, 2005). 5 In pursuing his commemorative goal, Wette published several articles on rescuers in a variety of German journals and newspapers.4 In an article called “Denied Heroes” (verleugnete Helden) that appeared in November 2007 in the German weekly Die Zeit, he states that until the 1990s German rescuers were not publicly honored and their actions were “repressed, silenced, slandered” (verdrängt, verschwiegen, verleumdet).5 Wette calls attention to these individuals’ unsuccessful attempts to receive official recognition or compensation for their actions and points out that in many cases these rescuers were denounced as swindlers or simply ignored.6 Wette does not only bemoan the neglect that individual rescuers encountered when looking for acknowledgment, but also claims that the topic of rescue in general was suppressed and silenced before the mid 1990s. Yet, in condemning the lack of public awareness to the topic he points to the “exceptional” initiatives that did, in fact, commemorate these rescuers and which, according to him, struck out in the overall silence surrounding this issue. The cases he describes took place mostly in West Germany and included books and media debates from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that discussed the actions of rescuers. Since quite a few of these early initiatives also assert that the Germans “forgot” the rescuers of Jews and that these figures should be celebrated as the real heroes who came out of the Nazi period (a commemorative effort that Wette himself promotes) he willingly accepts them as reliable evidence for the existence of “collective forgetting.” 4 These include: „Lieber als Helfer krepieren,“ Die Zeit (4.5.2000); „Der verfemte Menschenfreund,“ Ossietzky 25 (2002), as well as several articles and reviews on the topic in Freiburger Rundbrief in the years 2004-2009, such as: „Zivilcourage unter extremen Bedingungen“ (2004) and „Karl Plagge – ein Retter in Uniform“ (2007). 5 Wolfram Wette, „Verleugnete Helden,“ Die Zeit (8.11.2007). The title of this article, as well as much of its argument, clearly draws on Kurt Grossmann’s book “The Unsung Heroes” (Die unbesungenen Helden) from 1957 and the ensuing commemorative initiative of the West Berlin Senate that are traced in a book Wette surveys in this article. On these issues see chapter four. 6 One prominent example is the case of Hermann Gräbe, who received the title of “Righteous among the Nations” from Yad Vashem in 1965, and whom the German weekly Der Spiegel accused of lying in his postwar testimonies. See more on this case in chapter four. 6 Yet in reading Wette’s texts we7 should ask whether the initiatives and publications that he surveys exaggerated the extent of “forgetting” in order to advance a certain commemorative agenda. Unlike Wette, we can contend that these early (i.e., pre-1990s) accounts demonstrate that there actually were commemorations of rescuers in the postwar Germanys, although not necessarily in the same “appropriate” manner and extent that Wette is looking for. What is, therefore, the logic that stands behind Wette’s argumentation? What are the assumptions regarding remembering and forgetting that guide his assertions? The question of the relationship between remembering and forgetting stands at the heart of recent discussions on the memories of the Nazi past in Germany.

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