Nazi Victims as Witnesses after 1945 Annette Weinke

“I would love to live to see the moment in which Although historians occasionally emphasize the the great treasure will be dug up and shriek to novelty with which the phenomenon emerged in the world proclaiming the truth. So the world the late seventies “quite suddenly out of no- may know all. So the ones who did not live where”, 3 its lines of development reach back through it may be glad, and we may feel like significantly further in time. To disregard the veterans with medals on our chest. We would be precursors in ancient historiography for the the fathers, the teachers and educators of the time being, from the eighteenth century onward future. ... But no, we shall certainly never live to a distinction can be made between three ideal see it, and therefore do I write my last will. May types of witnesses that still dominate linguistic the treasure fall in good hands, may it last into usage today. In addition to the religious “witness better times, may it alarm and alert the world to to the faith” – who is more the guarantor of a what happened ... in the twentieth century. ... We present belief in God than a source of infor- may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. mation on past events – there are the judicial May history attest for us. ” “eyewitness” who appears before court, and the “witness” of historical scholarship. If in different Excerpt from David Graber’s will, written in 1943 1 ways, we count on the statements of the latter two to give us insights into past occurrences. 4 Despite the profound changes the processes of I. Introduction modernization brought about in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this early history is still The late twentieth / early twenty-first century a key to understanding the modern conception is often referred to as the “era of the witness”. 2 of witness-bearing. The latter, for its part, can This label is a direct reflection of the unprece- be traced back predominantly to the mid-twen- dented ubiquity attained by the figure of the wit- tieth century, while the specific context of its ness and the act of bearing testimony over the emergence goes back to World War II and the past three decades. The degree to which tele- National Socialists’ Europe-wide persecution vision documentaries, feature films, exhibitions, project. 5 interview projects, reports and memoirs have be- come established as vehicles of historical con- What are the reasons for the fact that the emer- sciousness and mediums for conveying history to gence of the “Zeitzeuge” (German for “contem- the public matches the immense increase in the porary witness”) and the experience of Nazi rule significance of the “contemporary witness”. The are so inextricably interlinked? This question latter has also been charged with new contents can perhaps best be answered by a roundabout and meanings within this period. Even experts route. Both the National Socialist “rupture in sometimes have difficulty determining what kind civilization” (Dan Diner) and the endeavours to of witnesses they are dealing with in various come to terms with it afterward contributed contexts, and knowing how to assess those to temporarily unsettling traditional forms of persons’ – real and fictive – stories and reports testimony, leading to a veritable crisis. The cred- about history experienced and suffered. ibility crisis of the witness was by no means a

1 Quoted in Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O. S.” (Jerusalem, 1986), p. 66. 2 Annette Wieviorka, “The Witness in History”, trans. Jared Stark, Poetics Today 27 (2006), no. 2, pp. 385–97, here p. 386. 3 Martin Sabrow, “Der Zeitzeuge als Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten”, idem and Norbert Frei, eds., Die Geburt des Zeitzeugen nach 1945 (Göttingen, 2012), pp. 13–32, here p. 13. 4 José Brunner, “Medikalisierte Zeugenschaft. Trauma, Institutionen, Nachträglichkeit”, ibid., pp. 93–110. 5 As Laura Jockusch has stated, many works on Nazi-victim witnesses and witnessing tend to overlook the specific Eastern European Jewish tradition of “Khurbn-Forshung” (“destruction research”) that emerged around the turn of the century in reaction to the pogroms in Russian Kishinev; see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford, 2012), pp. 18–33.

E S SAYS concomitant of Nazi race and nationhood policy, emphasis on the prominent status of the inter- but, quite to the contrary, one of the deliber- national working class and national inmate col- ately precipitated consequences of that policy. lectives in the antifascist liberation struggle. 8 To This was because the politics of the Nazi state be sure, in view of the National Socialist repres- differed from that of other repressive regimes sions – which were as comprehensive as they in that it endeavoured, firstly, to rid itself of all were heterogeneous in character – and the mul- undesirable population groups before, secondly, tiplicity of victim categories, it will hardly have also obliterating the memory of the abused and seemed conceivable that any kind of generally murdered victims. The persons directly affected valid and consistent persecution narrative would by this undertaking perceived its monstrosi- take shape after the end of the war. However, ty, lack of precedence and totality at an early recent research has clearly shown that, short- stage, and in many of them it triggered an im- ly after the war, there was still a heightened pulse to document the crimes for posterity. willingness in the majority of European post-war societies not only to concede compensation and Those among the victims of Nazi persecution reparation to the “political” victims of concen- in any way capable of bearing witness to their tration camp custody and deportation, but also own fates and those of other victims no longer to confirm the status they claimed for them- alive usually conceived of such testimony as selves as “survivor-witnesses”. 9 a means of preserving personal dignity and restoring integrity, and not least importantly as an expression of the will to survive. On the other II. Witness-bearing in the early post-war period hand, it was above all Polish-Jewish intellectu- and the incipient Cold War als who recognized, even before the war ended, that this extreme form of state-inspired National Although in the present-day perception the Socialist persecution would play into the hands Holocaust is considered the “key frame of ref- of the perpetrators. They correctly assumed, erence for witness-bearing” in the twentieth for example, that the Nazis would either claim century, 10 at the end of the war Jewish survivors ignorance of the facts or discredit the victims’ constituted only one of many victim groups. They reports across the board as exaggerations and sought to make themselves heard by various the products of a “Jewish” desire for revenge. 6 publics, often encountering rapidly changing The efforts to gather evidence and document interests in the process. Even if the conditions the events accordingly served the purpose of in the post-war European societies differed countering the – cognitively and emotionally – significantly, it can be said that, in general, there overwhelming language of the Nazi perpetrators. was a veritable boom of published memoirs and In connection with the Holocaust, a phenome- reports on experiences in the initial years. As non developed early on that the historian Laura Constantin Goschler has pointed out, however, Jockusch has referred to as the “moral impera- the impact and self-conception of this newly tive” to bear witness and the “collective duty to emerging genre was, on the whole, rather limit- testify on behalf of the dead”. 7 In the exercise of ed. After all, the primary concern was with the this duty, the boundaries between primary wit- public “verification of the persecution events nesses, i.e. those who experienced certain acts by the survivors, which was achieved primarily of violence first-hand, and secondary witnesses, through the claim to authenticity associated i.e. those endeavouring to preserve the fates of with contemporary testimony”. 11 their murdered fellow sufferers from oblivion, often grew hazy. To judge from the sizes of the respective edi- tions, Jewish voices were nothing more than a Members of the organized Communist resis- little-noted marginal phenomenon in this ini- tance in the camps and Europe’s leftist libera- tial phase. To be sure, the diary of Anne Frank, tion movements, on the other hand, had slightly published in 1950, became a world bestseller different motives. Already during their impris- practically overnight and by the early sixties onment in Nazi concentration and work camps, had reached more than 800,000 readers in the these persons undertook to draft the most Federal Republic of Germany alone. Otherwise, coherent possible historical narrative with an however, in a period in which myths of resis-

272 | 273 tance and self-victimizing legends attracted all information on the persecution practices of wide attention, descriptions of the fates of per- the German occupiers, but also described the secuted European Jews were extremely unpop- behaviour of the non-Jewish population as well ular. After 1945, despite a political and cultural as the Jewish community. A further aspect of climate ranging – in western and eastern Europe the collecting activities was directed towards alike – between latently defensive and down- compiling evidence for the Allied and national right hostile, Jewish relief organizations initially trials. Indeed, Jewish organizations in the United continued the efforts they had launched during States and Europe contributed substantially – the war to enlighten the public about the specif- both conceptually and materially – to making ic history of their own group’s persecution. Here those trials a reality. In view of that circum- the guiding principle was to respond to one’s stance, the fact that only few of their repre- own survival – a circumstance usually perceived sentatives were summoned to give testimony as coincidental and in isolated cases could lead in Nuremberg and other trial venues must have to the “survivor’s guilt” 12 syndrome – with an all been particularly devastating for those organi- the more resolute ethical self-commitment to zations. 14 Although the court records and docu- the act of bearing witness. A call to “all Jews in mentary evidence from early proceedings would Poland” published by the Central Jewish Histor- prove to provide important impulses for the first ical Commission (CZKH) in Lublin shortly after overviews of the history of the National Socialist the city’s liberation by the Red Army accordingly genocide of the Jews, the later near-complete proclaimed that “two thirds of the European silence of Jewish voices had thus already been Jewry have been murdered over the course of predetermined, for the most part, in the late the past six years. … We, the small group of 1940s.15 More or less the same also applied to surviving Jews, are obligated to do everything other victim groups that had no apparent back- in our power to perpetuate the time we suffered ground of political persecution. through in documents for the coming genera- tions. We must collect the testimonies to human Whereas Holocaust survivors were compelled to bestiality, gruesome barbarism, sadism and the adapt their stories to a heroic narrative of re- thirst for blood”. 13 sistance if they wanted to spark public interest, former political inmates enjoyed a relatively high Of the many diaries written, letters collected degree of respect, attention and sympathy in the and photo albums put together during the war early post-war period. This was especially true for documentation purposes, only a small pro- of the reports by the two left-wing intellectuals portion had weathered the turmoil of the Na- Eugen Kogon and David Rousset published imme- tional Socialist era. In the initial post-war years, diately after the war in the American-occupied institutions such as the CZKH therefore began zone of Germany and in France, respectively, in conducting extensive witness surveys among large editions. 16 Both of the former Buchenwald Jewish survivors. These reports provided above inmates linked their individual experiences with

6 Prominent contemporary witnesses such as Primo Levi have accordingly spoken of a “war against memory”; Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved , trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London, 1989, reprinted 1991), p. 18. 7 Laura Jockusch, “’Jeder überlebende Jude ist ein Stück Geschichte‘. Zur Entwicklung jüdischer Zeugenschaft vor und nach dem Holocaust”, Sabrow and Frei 2012 (see note 3), pp. 113–44, here pp. 114 and 116. 8 See Philipp Neumann-Thein, Parteidisziplin und Eigenwilligkeit. Das Internationale Komitee Buchenwald-Dora und Kommandos (Göttingen, 2014). 9 Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation. Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2007), uses the terms “victim” and “patriotic martyr”, pointing out that “martyr” derives from a word meaning “witness”, see for example pp. 199–200 and 211; on the concept of the “survivor-witness” (“Überlebenszeugen”), see Brunner 2012 (see note 4), p. 96. 10 Jockusch 2012 (see note 7), p. 115. 11 Constantin Goschler, “Erinnerte Geschichte: Stimmen der Opfer”, Frank Bösch and idem, eds., Public History. Öffentliche Darstellungen des Nationalsozialismus jenseits der Geschichtswissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2009), pp. 130–55, here p. 136. 12 See Heidrun Kämper, Opfer – Täter – Nichttäter: Ein Wörterbuch zum Schulddiskurs 1945–1955 (Berlin, 2007), p. 176. 13 Quoted in Jockusch 2012 (see note 7), p. 120. 14 Stephan Stach, “’Praktische Geschichte‘. Der Beitrag jüdischer Organisationen zur Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechern in Polen und Österreich in den späten 40er Jahren”, Katharina Stengel and Werner Konitzer, eds., Opfer als Akteure. Interventionen ehemaliger NS-Verfolgter in der Nachkriegszeit (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2008), pp. 242–62; Annette Weinke, Die Nürnberger Prozesse , 2nd edition (Munich, 2015). 15 Annette Weinke, “Die Justiz als zeithistorische Forschungsstelle”, Bösch and Goschler 2009 (see note 11), pp. 156–89, here p. 158. 16 Eugen Kogon, The System of the German Concentration Camps (Oberursel, 1945); David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946).

E S SAYS the collected survival testimonies of other in- Mauthausen inmate Maurice Lampe reported on mates. The combination of ego story and funda- how 400 Soviet and some 70 American, British mental analysis lent these accounts a high level and Dutch officers had been murdered in ex- of authenticity and credibility and laid the foun- tremely cruel manner in the quarries. 19 A his- dation for the reception of the National Socialist torical exhibition staged in Clermond-Ferrand, concentration camp system in scholarship, the France in 1946/47 mirrors the extent of the media and the judicial system. As a witness for power wielded by the Communist organizations the prosecution, Kogon – who worked for the after the war in dictating how the circumstanc- American occupying power as a publicist – had es surrounding the crimes against humanity frequent opportunities to renew his individu- were to be interpreted. In order to underscore its al perspective on the history of the camp, for exclusive claim to historical truth and authen- example in the Nuremberg doctors’ trial of 1947 ticity, the Fédération nationale des déportés et and the main Buchenwald Trial held in Dachau in internés résistants et patriotes (FNDIRP) had 1947/48. replicas of (among other things) the Buchen- wald gate building, crematorium and an inmates’ In April 1945, shortly after the liberation of barrack constructed especially for the show. As Buchenwald by American troops, the former Philipp Neumann-Thein observes, the visitors members of the Communist camp resistance would thus not only be granted an opportunity to composed and distributed the “Oath of Buchen- empathize with the inmates’ suffering, but would wald”. As is evident in its famous wording, the also serve to “support their stylization as mar- German and French-dominated Communist tyrs and heroes, who, even if they had suffered, inmates’ organizations felt called upon to speak had ultimately retaliated and triumphed”. 20 on behalf of their murdered party comrades. “We survivors”, the oath reads, “we who wit- Nevertheless, the fact that doubt would soon be nessed the Nazi bestialities, looked on in power- cast on the activities of the Communist camp less rage as our comrades fell.” 17 From the resistance was already foreseeable at the end beginning, however, the Communists pursued of the war. For one thing, as early as December more wide-reaching aims with their remem- 1945 the American occupying power arrested brance politics. On the one hand they undertook three former inmate functionaries in preparation to serve not only as intermediary witnesses but for the later Buchenwald Trial in Dachau. What also as judges in the prosecution of the crimes is more, attacks against prominent survivors (“The day of revenge will come!”). On the other holding French Communist party membership hand, from their common experience of perse- cards also began to grow fiercer at around cution and imprisonment they deduced a hege- this time. The associations’ leaderships sought monic status in conjunction with the process to arm themselves against these attacks by of commemorating the hardships suffered, but continuing the efforts to canonize the Commu- also pride of place in the task of designing a new nist resistance narrative, but also by calling Europe, both politically and socio-economically. on their members to attest the good character of the comrades under suspicion. In the long In the initial post-war phase, if not longer, it run, counter-strategies of this kind naturally appeared as if the former Communist inmates could not prevent the ever-widening dichotomy would actually succeed in implementing this between the Eastern and the Western-orient- expansive conception of historical testimony. ed perception of the Nazi concentration camp Even if this was less true of the western section system and the ambiguous role of the Commu- of post-war Germany, it did apply to freshly nist inmate functionaries within it. Yet even if, in liberated France, where a Buchenwald survivor view of the looming Cold War, this development – Marcel Paul – even held a ministerial office in ultimately appeared inevitable, the targeted the first de Gaulle administration. 18 The French politicization pursued on both sides decisively prosecution in Nuremberg assigned the Commu- accelerated the loss of credibility of the early nist witnesses a prominent role when it came to post-war testimony to Nazi crimes. attesting war crimes committed against mem- bers of the Allied militaries in the concentration camps. In January 1946, for example, the former

274 | 275 III. From the courtroom to a media-enhanced culture, one lasting effect of the trial was the culture of remembrance fact that the survivors – who now came into view as a great imaginary collective – became Some time ago, the Israeli historian José Brun- conveyors of a traumatic history. Virtually over- ner pointed out that witnesses are always night, they became “embodiments of memory”, “part of an institution” that dictate their words to quote Annette Wieviorka, of whom it was and actions. 21 This observation implies that, as expected that, with their memories, they would society’s institutions change, so do the forms bear witness to a version of history with which and functions of witness-bearing. Precisely this even those persons who did not share the same process got underway in the early 1960s when past could identify. 23 the antagonism of the Cold War began to soften and the history of the war – which in many If in a somewhat less spectacular form, the ma- post-war societies had been a factor inhibiting jor Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963–65) sparked peaceable international and economic coopera- similar public response. Although in concept and tion – now returned to the agenda. Two decisive realization these proceedings differed strongly barriers that, ten years earlier, had prevented from the Jerusalem trial, Hessian State Attor- the consolidation of the witnesses with regard ney General Fritz Bauer likewise banked on the to remembrance policy had thus been overcome. victims among the witnesses, whose testimo- nies he hoped would have a cathartic effect on Of all the institutions facilitating the gradual rise the entire society. Yet whereas the media gave in the social status of the witness, the judiciary broad scope to the reports of former Auschwitz made by far the most important contribution, inmates, a large proportion of the West Ger- but the growing influence of psychiatry and the man population now avoided confrontation with emergence of a new trauma discourse also bore the Nazi crimes to a greater extent than ever. an impact. To a decisive degree, this process In the long run, however, the trial did spark a was triggered by the second wave of Nazi trials turnaround in the remembrance culture of the conducted at the behest of dedicated individu- Federal Republic of Germany. This was mani- als: criminal prosecutors and victim activists. fest, for example, in the fact that survivors such The most important court proceeding was as Hermann Langbein abruptly became much undoubtedly the 1961 Eichmann Trial in Jeru- sought-after interview partners for the ma- salem, which played a key role in creating the jor opinion-forming media as well as political conditions for the development of a victim-ori- education institutions. Not all victims of Nazi ented conception of witness-bearing. More than persecution dealt equally well with this new a hundred Holocaust survivors were chosen to social role of the witness, which in the percep- appear in court, where they were questioned tion of Katharina Stengel was tantamount to a as to their experiences. It was by these means certain “reduction”. 24 Those of them who had that the Israeli prosecuting authority sought to joined to form inmate associations after the link the genocide of the European Jews – which war claimed comprehensive testimonial com- until that time, in the words of chief prosecu- petence for themselves, encompassing not only tor Gideon Hausner, had remained a “fantastic, the role of witnesses in court, but also that of unbelievable apparition” in the minds of many the contemporary witness and even that of contemporaries – with individual human beings the witness-bearing historian. The increasing and their feelings. 22 In terms of remembrance professionalization of contemporary history

17 “Buchenwald-Schwur” (“The Oath of Buchenwald”), 19 April 1945; facsimile of German original reprinted in Neumann-Thein 2014 (see note 8), p. 75. 18 Neumann-Thein 2014 (see note 8), p. 106. 19 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York, 2013) [1st edition 1992], pp. 300f. 20 Neumann-Thein 2014 (see note 8), p. 93.

21 Brunner 2012 (see note 4), p. 95. 22 Quoted in Wieviorka 2006 (see note 2), p. 390. 23 Ibid., p. 391. 24 Katharina Stengel, Hermann Langbein. Ein Auschwitz-Überlebender in den erinnerungspolitischen Konflikten der Nachkriegszeit (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2012), p. 552.

E S SAYS and the emergence of a historiography of the major video documentation project, present- Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany ed to the American and international public in gradually brought about a change in this state Yale in 1982 as the Fortunoff Video Archive for of affairs. Now there was an increasing division Holocaust Testimonies , was carried out only a of labour between surviving “Zeitzeugen” and few years after U.S. television had broadcast the historians. Yet whereas the voices of the Nazi series Holocaust . This phenomenon is even more victims now became “more audible than before – tangible in the case of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah not least importantly the voices of those groups Visual History Foundation , which he founded of persecution victims previously overheard in 1994 in response to the overwhelming suc- entirely …, their memories and accounts no cess of his movie Schindler’s List . The Spielberg longer possessed the same claim to contempo- foundation and other institutions were not only rary-historical explanation that they had in the expressions of society’s heightened desire for initial years”. 25 authenticity and identification with the victims of mass violence, but they also contributed, For many, it came as a surprise when, in the conversely, to a substantial redefinition of the late 1970s, a process got underway that is term “contemporary witness”. This was be- described in hindsight as a recodification of cause, on the one hand, against the background the contemporary witness that ushered in a of their gradual extinction, such witnesses rose boom in the popularity of this role. Even if there immensely in the public esteem. On the other were isolated signs of a cautious loosening of hand, however, they rapidly mutated into artifi- the heroic Communist resistance narrative in cial media figures who reproduced themselves the Eastern bloc countries, this development in the form of “secondary witnesses”. 26 Yet was for the most part confined to the West. It the much sought-after twenty-first-century had been triggered on the one hand by a grow- contemporary witnesses must pay a high price ing interest in the marginalized and subaltern for their hardly foreseeable move up the social voices of history, for example those of colonized ladder: today the emancipatory potential of their populations, women, and the “forgotten” vic- recollections is frequently concealed by history tims of National Socialism. On the other hand, formats whose smooth and shiny narrative style this period was distinguished by a more emo- deflect from the fact that these witnesses often tionalized approach to contemplating the past have no more than very banal messages to con- and a new form of historicism that gave fresh vey to their publics. impetus to the biographical and autobiograph- ical genre in the Federal Republic of Germany and elsewhere. The decisive factor, however, was the dawning of the digital age, complete Annette Weinke with all manner of new technical possibilities. It Research assistant to the Chair for Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Jena was no coincidence, for example, that the first

25 Goschler 2009 (see note 11), p. 145. 26 Sabrow 2012 (see note 3), p. 27.

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