Chapter 7: the Holocaust and Perpetration in War Museums

Chapter 7: The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums

The representation of the Holocaust is one of the most significant topics in the analysis of how Second World Warmuseums, and those military and cultural history museumsthat strongly emphasize the Second World War, combine narrative,memory, and experience to produce restricted, primary,and secondary experientiality.The term ‘Holocaust’ here will be referred to using the most widely accepted scholarlydefinition: “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”¹ However,this chapter will alsoshow that in warand military history museums, the Holocaust as the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews quickly becomes interwoven with other atrocities and genocidal activities carried out by the Nazi regime against various Slavic populations, the Romani people of Europe, the mentallyand physicallyhandicapped, Jehovah’sWitness- es, black and mixed-race Germans, and homosexuals (see Stone 2010,2–3). Two decades ago, Holocaust museums and warmuseums wereseemingly different entities with marginal overlap. This has changed in the twenty-first century,allowing Holocaust representations to be used in warmuseums as alens for un- derstandinghow these museumsmake the Second World Warcomprehensible or even experienceable for their visitors.There are two main reasons for this shift: first,the Holocaust,atrocities and genocidal activities – perpetratedby Germany, the Soviet Union, and other totalitarian regimes – and the Second World Warare seen as closelyinterwoven; and second, the merging of history and memorythat has been increasinglyspearheaded by Holocaust memorial museumshas been transferred to representations of the Second World War more generally. On the whole, thereare anumber of obvious historicalconnections that make the Holocaust an importanttopic in Second World Warmuseums.² The perspective of the Western Allies liberatingthe camps and the subsequent trials have shaped the perception of the ‘good’ war in the West and established a clear frame of good and evil. In this way, the Holocaust has become an integral part of assessing the war effort.All occupied countries took part,inone wayor another,indeportations and in the Holocaust.Inthe occupied countries of Cen-

 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019,https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust.Accessed 13 October 2019.  See also Celinscak 2018, 16 for asurvey summary of the Holocaust in Allied war museums.

OpenAccess. ©2020 Stephan Jaeger,published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664416-011 222 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums tral and Eastern Europe, othervictim groups sometimes takepriority in narrativesofthe war,which this studyfurther analyzes through examples taken from recent Polish exhibitions. The Allied countries that remained unoccupied had to react to streams of refugees and reconcile theirown values and, in part,their own antisemitism, with their objectiveofending the war. The first significant argument as to whythe Holocaust clearly belongsina contemporarySecond World Warmuseum is the concept of the space of violence (Baberowski 2015) or “bloodlands” (Snyder 2010), which connects the war in the East with the events of the Holocaust.Asseen particularlyinthe permanent exhibition of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden (MHM), the Holocaust,other atrocities, genocidal objectives, and the war effort are so inter-twined that it is impossible to narrate one story without referencing others. Although the permanent exhibitions opened in the last decade have aclear ten- dency towardintegrating the Holocaust,recent developments in the MHM³ and in the Second World WarMuseum in Gdańsk (MIIWŚ)⁴ alsoindicate that such integration might change, whether this is duetoapossiblystronger concentration on military forces than on cultural and societal history (MHM), or because the Holocaust has become asub-themeused to setupother,oftennational, narratives(MIIWŚ). Holocaust museums mainlyrepresent the persecution and extermination of European Jewry by Nazi Germanyand possiblyalso cover the experiences of othervictim groups such as the Sinti and Roma,orthe victims of other systematic Nazi killing programs such as the ‘euthanasia’ program that tar- geted patients with mental and physical disabilities.Inwar museums, otherNazi crimes against civilians,the killing of Poles, the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war,Slavs, and political opponents such as Communists and Social Democrats, overlapwith the events of the Holocaust.Further exhibitions alsorepresent war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by other powers such as Japan and by the So- viet Union from the Central and Eastern European perspective. The second compellingjustification for interweaving the Holocaust and the Second World Warwithin museum representations is connected to the observa- tion that historical representations of the Second World Warinmuseums today cannot be separated from culturalmemory.This can be traced back to the “rap- prochement between history and memory in the shadow of the Holocaust” (Ass- mann 2016 [2006], 32). This shift,inwhich the clear distinction between history and memory becomes blurry,leads to changes in historicalrepresentations. Alei- da Assmann identifiesthreedevelopments that have enhanced history writing

 See also chapter5.1.  See also chapter6.2. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 223 from the perspective of memory: “the emphasis placed by memoryonthe as- pects of emotion and individual experience; its emphasis on the memorial function of history as aform of remembrance; and the emphasis it places on an ethical orientation” (2016 [2006], 34). All of these developments have been first employed in Holocaust museums’ historical representations, particularlyinthe prototypicalUnited States Holocaust MemorialMuseum (USHMM) (Linenthal 2001 [1995); Luke 2002,37–64;Hansen-Glucklich 2014; Bernhard-Donals 2016). These developments have since been transferred over to warmuseums in recent years. While the representation of the Holocaust has clearlyinfluenced the representation of war,and the Second World Warinparticular, in museums, there are clear differencesbetween Holocaust and Second World Warmuseums. Fur- thermore, the Holocaust has become adifferent global phenomenon thanthe Second World War(Rothberg2009). Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider follow the- orists like Max Horkheimer,Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendtinidentify- ing the Holocaust as a “tragedyofreason or of modernity itself” (2002, 88) that leads – aided by new technology and media in aglobalized world – to “ashared consciousness and cosmopolitan memories that span territorial and linguistic borders” (2002, 91). Such ade-territorialization (Levy and Sznaider 2006 [2001], 46–49)isconsiderablyless present in war museums in which national perspectivesremain relevant,evenwhen the museum highlights transnational (House of European History) or anthropological (Bundeswehr Military History Museum) themes and perspectives. Another differencebetween Holocaust and Second World Warmuseums lies in the discussion about sayability versus unsayability – the challengeinbreak- ing the silence about the Holocaust and the simultaneous need to do so (Lentin 2004b, 2–3). This has channelled into the discussion about the representability and/or unrepresentability of the Holocaust (e.g. Friedländer 1992; Agamben 1999;Reiter 2000;Krankenhagen 2001;Lentin 2004a, Didi-Huberman 2008 [2003]; Frei and Kansteiner 2013). Ronit Lentin argues: “afurther crisis in representation is the tension between historical ‘facts’ and interpretation, or the di- lemmaofhistorical relativism versus aesthetic experimentation in the face of the need for ‘truth,’ on the one hand, and the problems raised by the opaqueness of the events and the opaqueness of language, on the other” (2004b, 3). The question of whether there are immersive representational techniques that allow empathyfor victims’ suffering, or the mind of aperpetrator to be created is particularlychallenging. Anysuch immersion immediatelyruns into the criti- cism that onlysurvivors should be (ethically) entitled to speak about the Holo- 224 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums caust (Lentin 2004b, 2),⁵ which leadstothe question of generational remembrance (Felman and Laub 1992; Hirsch 1997; LaCapra 2001, 2004). Museums that intend to represent the Holocaust,despite its enormity and incommensura- bility,which defy materialization, undergo representational and ethical challenges. They need to be aware of “the potential dangers of aesthetic spectacle,pre- venting victims’ voices from being heard” (Carden-Coyne 2011, 168). Consequently, museums are challenged to applydifferent techniques of distantiation to avoid simplistic immersive techniques. In contrast to Holocaust museums, the explicit representation of trauma in war museums is usuallyrelatively minor (see alsoJaeger 2017c). Museums depict the hardship, suffering,and valor of fighting;there is no discussion of secondary trauma. This onlyshifts when war,atrocities,genocide,the Holocaust,and the sufferingofcivilians begin to overlap, demonstrating again whythis book features chapters on the Holocaust and on the Air WarinEurope in order to further understand these connections. In museumresearch, the challenges of Holocaust representation have led to alarge bodyofmuseumscholarshipregarding Holocaust commemoration and representation (e.g., Tyndall 2004;Landsberg2004,2015;Williams 2007;Lutz 2009;Carden-Coyne 2011;Holtschneider2011;Hansen-Glucklich 2014; Schoder 2014; Alba 2015;Bernard-Donals 2016;Kleinmann 2017;Bielby and Stevenson Murer 2018;deJong 2018a; Paver2018;Reynolds 2018;Sodaro 2018). With minor exceptions (Arnold de Simine 2013;Paver 2018), this scholarship onlyre- lates to memorial museums, documentation centers,and exhibitionsatmemori- al sites, sometimes reflecting on the representation and memorialization of other genocidesaswell (especiallyWilliams 1997; Sodaro 2018). Are the ethical and representational standards for the museums representingthe Second World Warsimilar to the ones thathavebeen discussed for Holocaust museums?The institutions in this category thathavemost oftenbeen placed under scholarly analysis includethe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center with its Holocaust History Museum,

 Museumshaverecentlystartedtoexperimentwith hologram technology,which incorporates large sets of data fromextensive survivorinterviews,allowingthe hologram to ‘interact’ with the visitor,developed in acollaboration between the University of SouthernCalifornia Institutefor Creative Technologies and the University of Southern CaliforniaShoah Foundation. The technol- ogyaims to replace survivorwitnessingbeyond the end of livingmemory.The technologyispar- ticularlyused and refined in an installation in the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skoke. One of the challengingquestions – discussed particularlybyWulf Kansteiner (2017, 320 –321) – is whether the hologramissupposed to make the visitor forgetabout its technologyand mediated status,orwhether it can also use gaps between it and areal survivorinter- view to meta-reflect on the mediacyofHolocaust memory and hologram technology. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 225 the Jewish Museum Berlin (Jüdisches Museum Berlin), and TheHolocaust Exhi- bition of the Imperial WarMuseum in London (seePieper2006;Williams 2007; Holtschneider2011;Hansen-Glucklich 2014; Schoder 2014; Alba 2015;Bernard- Donals 2016;Sodaro 2018, 30 –57;Donnelly2019).⁶ Additionally, Second World Warand military history museums differ stronglyfrom original sites,particularly concentration camp memorial museums, such as those at Auschwitz (see Rey- nolds 2018, 29–71)and Dachau, sites of deportationslike the Kazerne Dossin: Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on the Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen (2012), and manyother historical sites commemorating the victims of the Holocaust,such as the Memorial and Educational Site House of the Wannsee Conference (Gedenk-und BildungsstätteHausder Wannseekonfer- enz) in Berlin. The InformationCentre to the Memorial of Murdered Jews in Ber- lin and the TopographyofTerror (ToT) have also been widelydiscussed (Haß 2002;Till 2005;Pieper2006). However,these discussions have placed astrong emphasis on the political and institutional history of these sites, and have had less of afocus on the representational techniquesused in their actual exhibitions. The concept of the Holocaust museum is mainlyused in reference to commemorative,i.e.memorial museums (Williams 2007), though its relation to documentary and historical museums is variable. All Holocaust museumshave astrongemphasis on educational purposes. In her exploration of Holocaust me- morialmuseums, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines different representational techniques in Holocaust memorial museums varyingfrom the illusion of acoher- ent narrative (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM) and ruptures of representation pointingtothe unrepresentability of the Holocaust (Jewish Mu- seum Berlin, YadVashem). Nevertheless, “all threemuseums displayasimilar purpose in their efforts to commemorate unspeakable trauma and to do so in alanguagethatresonates with what is sacred within each of theirnational

 Especiallythe Jewish Museum in Berlin is usuallydiscussed almost exclusively for the archi- tectural concept by Daniel Libeskind and hardly for its exhibition (see e.g. the studybyIonescu 2017). Another recent example of findingalanguagefor the Holocaust in the museum can be found in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich) in Warsaw, which opened fullyin2014. The museum places visitors intodramatic scenes, through which they experienceJewish history and the Holocaust in particular,inits historical moment of insecurities and historical perceptions (not memoriespost-1945). Forafull explanation of this scenographic and chronothematic concept as away to represent the Holocaust in the museum, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2015;for aconceptual overview of the permanent exhibition see also Polonsky et al. 2018;for an analysis of the museum’screation of ‘social space’ see Bo- gunia-Borowska 2016,243 – 252. 226 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums and culturalcontexts” (Hansen-Glucklich 2014,217).⁷ In contrasttoHansen- Glucklich’sorientation towardthe past,Michael Bernard-Donals demonstrates in his analysis of USHMMasamemorial spacethe temporality of museums that integrate the visitor in the interwoven processes of past,present,and future: “the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum does not preservememory so much as castmemory into the future: at its best,itforces museum visitors to bear witness not to the past but to their involvement in the present,apresent both haunted by traces of the past and racing into the future” (2016,19). Here, history becomes memory. Understandingthe different types and functions of museum exhibitions can help in explaining differences and links between Second World Warand military history museums on the one hand, and Holocaust museums, documentation centers, and memorial sites on the other.First is the commemorative function, which commemoratesthe victims and acts as areminder of the atrocities that are possible in human society;second is the historical function, serving to understand historical events and processes; third is the educational function – learning from the past for the present and future, includingareflection on how human action and society as awhole can prevent similar genocidal actions. The educational function is closelyconnected to the comparative function (4) that allows amuseum to comparenumerous atrocities,which can be performed either through astrongdidactic or moral messagebythe museummakers or in an open style that leavesmoreinterpretative room to the visitor.The authenticity function (5) relates to sites, witness accounts,and artifacts; and the documentary function (6) that reduces the immersive effect because of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust from avictim and aperpetrator perspective.Consequently, the experiential function(7) as amimetic endeavor must always be subdued: one can neither re-experience the Holocaust,nor does amuseum want to allow em- pathytoward acts of perpetration. At the same time, Holocaust representation in museumscan produce empathy(Landsberg2004,Arnold-de Simine 2013,John- ston-Weiss2019) and empathetic unsettlement (LaCapra 2001,2004).⁸ Exhibi- tions can pursue ameta-representational function(8) by reflectingontheir own methods of representation and by highlightingthe processes of memory

 Avril Alba argues that analyzing the sacred narratives(of the ‘secular museum’)inthe United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,YadVashem, and the Sydney Jewish Museum that the Holo- caust “has now also been eternalized (…). [T]he mythic scopeofthe sacredsymbols,rituals,ar- chetypes and narrativesunderscoringthe institutions’ displayand commemoration of the Holo- caust ‘lifts’ the Holocaust fromthe plane of historyand imbues it with the enduring qualities of myth” (2015,193).  See also chapters 1.3and 2.2. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 227 that constitutethe narrativesofthe past.With the exception of the historical and documentary functions, the aforementioned functions are more pronounced or differ considerablyfrom those used in most war museums. To further understand the similarities and differences of these representational functions, aprecise analysis of how the coremuseums in this studyintegrate the Holocaust and other genocidesand atrocities in their exhibitionisneeded. However,abrief look at the opposite question of how Holocaust museums integrate the Second World Warisuseful as well. When analyzingthe different comprehensive exhibitions,⁹ such as the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Mu- seum (USHMM) or the Imperial WarMuseum in London (IWML), it is obvious that the Second World Warassuch plays onlyaminor role in representing the history of the Holocaust.Onthe second floor of the USHMM, the war is depicted as aspringboard for the start of deportations from the various occupied countries; also, in the final part of the first floor,the museum provides an overview of the downfall of Nazi Germany. Although the Imperial WarMuseum (IWM) has amandate for representing wars fought by Britain, its former Empire, and the Commonwealth since the First World War,¹⁰ its Holocaust Exhibition (2000) is astand-alone exhibition. Most visitors will thus perceive the lead-up into fascism as causal explanation for the Holocaust.The redevelopment of the permanent Second World Warexhibition and the permanentHolocaust exhibition in the IWML,however,strongly emphasizes the link between the Second World War and the Holocaust.Inits 2018–2019 Annual Report,the IWMmakes asurprising statement – ignoring all the efforts of war museums across the world analyzedin this chapter – that “the IWMwill be the first museum in the world to present the Holocaust within the context of the war” (2018–2019,11n3). The current IWMDi- rector-General, Diane Lees,notes on the IWM’swebsite: “At the centreofthe brutal and barbaric conflict was the state sponsored massmurder of 6million Jew- ish men, women and children. This is whyweare placing IWM’snew Holocaust Galleriesatthe central chronological fulcrum of our iconic London museum and linking them, architecturallyand conceptually, to our new Second World War Galleries.”¹¹ It remains to be seen whether this new strategy will lead to network-

 That do not develop their narrative fromaspecific site.  “IWMwas founded in the midst of the First World Warwith amission to preserveand tell the stories of all kinds of people,not onlyfromBritain but fromthe countries of its empire. And we continue to do this work right up to present dayconflict,covering100 years of experience throughout the Commonwealth” (https://www.iwm.org.uk/about,accessed 13 October 2019).  https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/new-second-world-war-and-holocaust-gallery-plans-un veiled, accessed 13 October 2019.Lees’squotationcould be read with the understanding that the war leads to the Holocaust,providing alinear causal connection rather than networking.Rachel 228 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums ing effects between the Second World Warand the Holocaust,orwhether the idea of astand-alone gallery dedicated to the Holocaust willprevail and the link between the two galleries will remain mostlyrhetorical.¹² Questions such as the involvement of Germansoldiers in the crimes of the Holocaust mostlyremain aquestion for German museums. This allows most non-German¹³ to present the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ageneralized evil collective engendered by evil leaders. Fascism and antisemitism, as well as the events of the Holocaust¹⁴ dominate Holocaust museums and autonomous exhibitions. Theonlydirect connection made to anarrative on the war comes from the liberation perspective. If we consider all twelve museums analyzed in this study,itispossible to identify five different representational strategies for integrating the Holocaust into war and history museums, which are closelyrelated to the eight functions identifiedabove. First,asmentioned above, there are stand-alone exhibitions such as the one found in the Imperial WarMuseum in London (seeCooke 2001;Hoskins 2003;Lawson 2003;Bardgett 2004;Holtschneider 2011, 31–44; Schoder 2014,78–140). While this exhibition can certainlyproduce different forms of experientiality,itfalls outside the scope of this study.Stand-alone sec-

Donnelly(2019,117– 120) provides acritical discussionofHolocaust-specific questions and challenges that could influence practical, museological dimensionsofthe new 2021 exhibition. For example, the IWMisexpectedtoemphasize new perpetrator research and create morespaceto reflect on second-generation testimony: “Spacesoftestimonyinthe new Galleries will clearly movebeyond alargely contemporaneous approach to include multiple narrativesand potential- ly,through co-productionwith members of the second generation and beyond in Britain, it is hoped visitors will begin to engage with the complexity and legacy of the Holocaust in an innovative way” (Donnelly 2019,119). Donnellyhighlights that new representationsneed to challenge the idea that the historical knowledge of the Holocaust is “somehow ‘fixed’ and demonstrate through innovative use of research that multiple interpretations of history can enhance, but also complicate(…)our collective memory and understanding of the Holocaust in the twenty- first century” (2019,120).  The IWM’swebsite notesthat aV1flyingbomb will be suspended between the two new galleries, “presentingastrikingsymbol of how the Holocaust and the Second World Warare interconnected.” It specificallymentions the British victims killed through the V1 and those whodied makingthese weapons in Nazi Germany, the “thousands of concentration camp prisoners,la- bouringinthe most appallingconditions” (https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/new-second- world-war-and-holocaust-gallery-plans-unveiled, accessed 19 September,2019). See chapter8 for adiscussion of V2 rocket (and V1 flyingbomb) installations in London and Dresden.  Or to alesser extent,non-Austrian museums.  Discrimination; failed emigration; destructionofcivil structures; deportations; ghettos; Ein- satzgruppen killings,presented with focus on genocidal action and not in relation to the war; concentration camps;extermination camps;death marches, liberation of camps;trials,emigration; and remembrance. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 229 tions in which the Holocaust is part of the permanent exhibition can be consid- ered as an alternative within this representational strategy – although they are usually found in arelatively isolated section, as seen, for example, in the Impe- rial WarMuseum North.¹⁵ In both cases, the connections these stand-alone sections have to other parts of the museumare fairlyminimal. In other words, there are not anyforms of experientiality regardingthe Second World War, although a different studycould easilyuse this strategy to demonstrate the relevanceofthe concept of experientiality for networkingthe perspectivesand structures of the Holocaust.¹⁶ In the second and third representational strategies, experientiality is stronglyrestricted by one-sided perspectivesand ideologies.The second representational strategy, the restricted collective perspective,ismoretypical of classicalmilitary history museums. Thiscan be seen in the New Orleans WWII Museum and the CanadianWar Museum. Since the Holocaust was neither the focus of the Allied war effort nor part of the soldiers’ collective gaze,itonly comes into perspective when respective military groups discover and liberate concentration camps. Athird representational strategyemergesinthe Warsaw Rising Museum. The Holocaust disappears behind the suffering of another group:Polish civilians rebellingagainst the Germans. The fourth strategy stems from local or thematic restrictions placed on amuseum such as in the Oskar Schindler Factory,the Bastogne WarMuseum, or the German-Russian Mu- seum.¹⁷ All of these institutions find ways to integrate the Holocaust into the fabric of the museum experience.Indoing so, the Holocaust takes aminor but significant role in producing different forms of experientiality. The fifth representational strategy is the most relevant to this study and en- tails structural networkingofthe Holocaust.Thismeansthe Holocaust – as past events and in terms of its memory – is present in different ways throughout the exhibition, creating secondary experientiality.The war and the Holocaust as well as other atrocities and genocidesare so deeplyintertwined that they cannot be separated. Versions of this networkingstrategycan be found in the House of Eu- ropean History,the Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War, the Bundeswehr

 The German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) also presents the Holo- caust in acornersection of its 2005 permanent exhibition so that the visitor can easilymiss it.Itreferences the destruction of Jews in other parts of the war and post-war period, but remains documentary throughout.This also means that the visitor will not,inall likelihood, experience manynetworkingeffects.  See also – with afocus on perpetration – the analysisofsecondary experientiality in the Topography of Terrorinchapter 5.3.  Similar to the WarsawRisingMuseum though without its ideological restrictions. 230 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums

Military History Museum, parts of the Imperial WarMuseum North, and in the earliest predecessor of these exhibitions, the Mémorial de Caen.¹⁸ Afteranalyzing these five representational strategies,this chapter willcontextualize the experiential potential of Holocaust representations in war museums with regard to immersive and emotional exhibition strategies includingempathyand consider the use of visual media in the depiction of violence. Finally, this chapter will con- clude by discussing perpetrators and actsofperpetration in Second World Warand military history museums. Whereas the Holocaust is asignificant part of this discussion, to understand how war,the Holocaust,and genocide are interwoven, it is important to consider all kinds of representations concerning perpetrators.¹⁹ These include theirdepiction as the enemyand as those responsible for the atrocities and crimescommitted within their own groups. An analysis of the stand-alone Holocaust Exhibition in London goes beyond the scope of this study. However,the concept of stand-alone sections is relevant in understanding the different options and effects that war and military history museumscan produce when representingthe Holocaust.With this in mind, the Holocaust section in the permanentexhibition of the Imperial WarMuseum North (IWMN)serves as agood example. Bagnall and Rowland examine the Holocaust section in the IWMN,asopposed to the ones in the United StatesHol- ocaust Memorial Museum and the exhibition on aseparate floor of the Imperial WarMuseum in London: “Representations of the Holocaust in war museums will increasinglyfigureasscaled-down versions of the exhibitions in spaces that focus more specificallyonthe event” (2010,67). Therefore, one cannot compare comprehensive Holocaust exhibitions or autonomous Holocaust museumsto representations of the Holocaust in warmuseumsand even less so in cases wheremuseums do not exclusivelyfocus on the Second World War. Bagnall and Rowland describe the Holocaust section in the IWMN as follows: “asober exhibition rejects the multimedia approach prevalent in the rest of the museum, and deploys minimalist techniques – which are still, of course, aparticularform of aesthetics – in ashort, but effective,exhibition; one that is for some, ‘graphic and almost too personal to look at’” (2010,64). Nevertheless, the IWMN chooses an approach that differs from most of the other museums analyzed in this book. The Holocaust is hardlypresent in other parts of the exhibition, with the exception of the aforementioned theme Kindertransport,represented in the silo

 The TopographyofTerror could also be mentioned here, but sinceitisaHolocaust perpetration documentation center,its networkingofthe Holocaust and war works on adifferent level (see chapter5.3).  These include the depiction of the perpetrators as the enemyaswell as the atrocities and crimes committed within the same national, cultural, or ethnic group as the perpetrators. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 231

“Experience of War” and the Big Picture Show “Children of War,” and aTime- Stack tray entitled “Holocaust,” in which clusters of objects are represented in relation to the stories of four survivors.²⁰ In highlightingfour stories and objects related to them, it is the least didactic TimeStack tray in the museum,although some items remain merelyillustrative.The visitor is presented, for example, with three items related to Vernon Fischer who escaped Germany through the Kinder- transport with his mother.Classified as ‘enemyaliens,’ they wereinterned for six months in acamp on the Isle of Man, and later Vernonworked in Manchester and survivedthe Manchester Blitz. The visitor is challenged to interpret the connections between Fischer’sKindertransport suitcase, currencyused in an intern- ment camp, and apiece of shrapnel from the Manchester Blitz.How would a child have experienced these different phases? What would it mean to be an enemyofthe Germans, persecuted because one was Jewish, and experiencing the Air War, while simultaneouslybeing viewed as atemporary enemyin one’snew home? Though the items have an illustrative function, the connections they hold to individuals and their stories have the potential to triggerthe visitor’s imagination and sense of empathy. The actual “Genocide” cabinet is located at the lowest point of the museum – the floor slopes down from the permanent exhibition’sentrance area (Bagnall and Rowland 2010,67). In away,itseems to act as the final continuation of the Second World Wartimeline before the fourth section, “1945–1990:Cold War,” begins, while also being situated in aspecial spot in the museum. The section contains a2013 artwork AStarShall Stride from Jacob and aSceptre Bearer Shall Rise by Chava Rosenzweigand alarge displaycabinet entitled “Genocide,” identical in style to the five previous cabinets in the Second World Warsection. On the opposite wall, the visitor finds two other artworks relatingtothe Holo- caust: the painting TheDeathCart by Edith Birkin (1980 –1982) and facsimiles of ten 1946-sketches from athirty-six-sketch series of life in Ravensbrück concentration camp by Violette Rougier Lecoq.²¹ The cabinet title “Genocide” provok- ingly implies thatthe Holocaust is comparable to other genocidal actions in

 Because of mechanical failure, it was not accessible in May2018.  This analysis is based on visits in the IWMN in August 2013 and May2018. The museum occa- sionallyswitchesartworks to create different aesthetic effects (however,not since2013). Forex- ample, Bagnall and Rowland (2010,70–73)base their analysis on stills by Darren Almond’s 8mmfilm Oswiecim March 1997. The spot where Rosenzweig’sartwork was presented has also served to present figuresfromthe Second World War, explicitlyleavingout figuresof those killed in the Holocaust or genocidal actions in the Second World War(Bagnall and Row- land 2010,66–67). 232 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums the Second World War.²² The cabinet itself is very object-oriented, holding the potential to stir the imagination and allowing the visitor think about absences. Unlikethe relatively flat Second World Warcabinets with almost exclusively illustrative objects, the “Genocide” cabinet works like aspatial arrangement. items displayedare from the Holocaust,depictingthe different victim fates that comprised the genocidal action: the visitor sees, among other things, aclus- ter of sixteen photographs of Jewish people from the Polish villageofFrysztak (see Bagnall and Rowland 2010,75–76,note 32),²³ thirty identity cards for Jewish people living in the Kraków Ghetto from Kraków,currencyand other items from the Lodz Ghetto,²⁴ an insulator from an electric barbed wire fence in Auschwitz, and apiece of timber from the destroyed gas chambers and crematoria in Ausch- witz-Birkenau. Manyitems are individualized and attributed to their owners, so that they leadinto astory.Upon seeing aphotograph and letter of Walter Horwitz to his ex-wife Gretl, the visitor learns that he was aGerman-Jewish veteran from the First World Warwho was deportedfrom HamburgtoMinsk in 1941wherehe was murdered. This opens up alarge array of possible questions. The IWMN does not try to answer them but the visitor emotionallyconnects to the absurdities and tragedies as well as to moments of resistancethat the material items convey. All are contextualizedtoexplain theirstory or illustrative function. The dis- playedobjects do not fit together,nor are they connected in anynarrative sense, but together the spatial arrangement can give the visitor – similar to the Poland cabinetinthe Bundeswehr Military History Museum, analyzed above(seealso Jaeger 2017a, 36–39) – astructural picture of different pieces of the Holocaust,while surpassingany illustrative or didactic function. Many thingsremainuntold; there is no narrative or interpretation, so that this cabinet is the most open installation in the IWMN,challengingvisitors to interpret its meaningsfor themselves. Itsexplicit refusaltocreateacomprehensive overview about the Holocaust strengthens the emotional and imaginative effect of the section.

 Sincethe museum relates to other genocides in its exhibition, the title seems abit confusing, sinceitonlyrelates to the Second World Warand the displaycabinet restricts itself to the Holo- caust.  Bagnall and Rowland (2010,67) read this as “basicallyaminiatureversion of the Holocaust Tower of faces [sic]” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (for an analysis of the Tower of Faces, see also Hansen-Glucklich 2014,91–98). Unlike the Washington museum, the photographs areinaglass cabinet,providingthe visitor far moredistancetothink about the fact that these people werephotographed in their regular livesbeforethey became victims of the Holocaust.  To understand the full nature of aghetto or its chronological placeinthe Holocaust,the visitor needs to possess prior knowledge or educational guidanceduring their visit. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 233

The artwork further intensifies this effect.For example, Chava Rosenzweig’s installation AStar Shall Stride from Jacob and aSceptre Bearer Shall Rise can also challengevisitors to reflect upon their ownpersonal connections to the Holo- caust.The rectangular upright-positioned ceramic artwork is held in aglass case and contains alarge number of stars of David, “asymbol of pride for Jewish people that was turned into asymbolofhumiliation by the Nazis.” Each star has been fired in agas kiln, so that the process affected it “in its ownunique way.” Thus “[t]he stars invite the viewer to consider how their ownfamilies have been uniquelyshaped by twentieth century conflict.” Separated from the artwork in a small, flat triangular displaycase thatisfitted into the corner,the lowest point of the exhibition space, broken dolls and their bodyparts represent the impact of the war on children. The artwork first – as the text indicates – speaks to Jewish survivors of the second and third generation. Itsdeeplyreligious connotations might lead some visitors to see it as an artwork exclusively for Jewish families. But visitors are alsoencouraged to go beyond that and feel invited to reflect on their own status as well as the one of their familyinthe Holocaust,evenif one werenot Jewish,asbystander,perpetrator,ormember of aspecific group or nation. The stars firedinagas kiln turned out very individually. They have astrong material presenceofanelement or even asymbol of ahuman who has survivedthe gaschamber.Thus, Rosenzweig’sartwork is aperfect example of how ahistory museum can includeinstallations thatfunction in acommem- orative or in areflexive waytoput the visitor in amediator position in order to createastructural experiential space. In combination with other forms of commemoration and mourning,the artwork allows for secondary experientiality and for the possibility for self-reflection. The second strategyofHolocaust representation in awar museum is the restricted collective perspective.Inthe CanadianWar Museum (CWM), the visitor onlyhears about the Holocaust in the penultimatesection of the Second World Wargallery.Asthe visitor approaches the gallery’sexit,they pass through asmall section of acorridor with displaycases on both sides. The cabinet on the left focuses on the Holocaust; the right,onCanadianprisoners of war in Japan (Jaeger 2017c, 149). The Holocaust cabinet is shaped through aquotation by a Flight Lieutenant from the Royal Canadian Air Forcesaying “Whywefought World WarII”pointing to photographs of horror in Bergen-Belsen. By focusing on the spontaneous present reaction of Canadiansoldiers at the moment of lib- eratingBergen-Belsen, the visitor receivesthe (false) impression that Canada had foughtthe wartoend the Holocaust.Consequently, the Holocaust becomes an argument in ahistoricallyprogressive narrative that represents Canada’sgrowing self-confidenceand national identity and independence originating in war, pointing directlytoits subsequent self-understanding as anation of peace-keep- 234 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums ers. The Holocaust functions as anarrative event of the progression of Canadian identity.However,the narrative effect is slightlyreducedbytwo camp uniforms belongingtoHélene Garrigues, who survivedthe Ravensbrück camp, and to Szla- ma Zajderman, who survivedAuschwitz and the Holocaust,the onlymember of his familytolive.²⁵ Both objects also partiallyconceal the photographs of mass corpses in Bergen-Belsen. It is important to consider here that the CanadianWar Museum underwent a large public controversy in relation to the idea of its hosting aseparate Holocaust gallery in the second half of the 1990s (Chatterley 2015,190 –192; Moses 2012, 218; Hillmer 2010,21–23;Celinscak 2018, 18–26). In 1997, the originallyplanned Jewishwar veterans’ gallery,was largely transformed into aHolocaust galleryof 6,000 square feet, making it the largest in the entire museum(Chatterley 2015, 191;Celinscak 2018, 21–22). This created an outcry amongst war veterans. The National CouncilofVeteran Associations in Canada withdrewits support since it did not see anyconnection between the Holocaust and Canada’smilitary history.Similarly, Jewishgroups advocated for aseparate Holocaust venue in Can- ada. Eventuallythe public debate led to the decision that the CWMwould not include aseparate Holocaust gallery and the Holocaust story would be told in aseparate venue as astand-alone Holocaust museum. This public debate dem- onstratesthatinacountry thatseesitself on the right side of a ‘good war,’ the connection between war and the Holocaust is far less automatic than in Europe- an countries.Ifamuseum such as the CWMtakes its mandate to informCana- dians of the nation’srole in the Second World Warliterally, it is not surprising that it focalizes the collective view of its soldiers and the general public at the time. The Holocaust did not playamajor role in the general public’sperception of the war as it was being conducted, and consequentlythe collective shock of the soldiers liberating concentration camps created the feeling that the horror they sawjustified the war effort.However,ifamuseum represents this collective gaze without further contextualization it inadvertentlyfinds itself complicit with the revisionist narrative that the Holocaust was the reason for Canadian and Al- lied troops to fight the war.This restricts possibilities for experientiality and differs greatlyfrom most European museums that have opened or revised their Sec- ond World Warexhibitions within the lasttwo decades.²⁶

 The Canadian WarMuseum added the Zajderman jacket in recent years (post 2012). It is com- plemented by asmall table panel in front of the cabinet telling the story of the family, supported by facsimile photographs and documents.This counterbalancesthe collective soldier perspective to acertain extent.  It is, however,important to point out that the Canadian WarMuseum has started to change the impression of its 2005 permanentexhibition in recentyears. In 2018 alone it featured two 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 235

The New Orleans WWII Museum operates in asimilar fashiontothe Cana- dian WarMuseum,with the key difference that the Holocaust is so deeplyen- grained in the fabric of Americancollective memorythat it seems part of the war whenever it is presented as afight for freedom and human rights. However, the threevirtual maps and tables wherethe visitor can learn about war events do not mention the Holocaust at all. The large map charting the war’smajor events in the entry hall of the Louisiana Pavilion abovethe train stationand the virtual map introducing the warinthe first room of the “RoadtoBerlin” exhibition do not allude to the Holocaust or to genocide in general. The interactive Command Central tableonthe first floor of the Boeing Pavilion is organized by battlesand missions. In all three of these installations,the New Orleans WWII Museum proves itself to be atypical, traditional war museum. The museum makes it clear thatthe Holocaust does not belong in awar museum. Consequently, the visitor hardlyhears anything about events on the war’sEastern front,whether in Poland or in the Soviet Union – with the exception of brief references to atrocities and the Holocaust in the chronologicaltimeline. The museum is restricted to an Americancollective perspective,similar to the waythat the Canadian WarMuseum restricts its perspective to that of the Canadiancollective.The chronological “Road to Berlin” first mentions the Holo- caust in the context of the liberation of Auschwitz, located at the beginning of the penultimate room on the Battle of the Bulge.The final room, though much more complex than the one in Ottawa, presents the discovery of the camps by focusing on the Ohrdruf concentration camp²⁷ through the collective gaze of Americansoldiers and commanders.What is particularlyimportant,isthat it is atotalsurprise: shades of what was previouslyknown about the Holocaust playnorole, making it so thatthe gaze of Americanand Allied forces become auniversal gaze: “After six years of war,Allied soldiers are certain they have seen the worst of Nazism, but nothing prepares them for what they are about to discover.They stumble upon one concentration camp, then another,and another.Thesewar-weary soldiers and soon the entire world cannot fathom the massive scale of this heinous crime.” After providingsome data on the atrocities in Nazi Germany,the narrator provides an anecdote: “When aGerman soldier asks an American GI, whyare youfighting,the GI replies,weare fighting to

special exhibitions dealingwith the Holocaust: St. Louis – Ship of Fate and Canadian JewishEx- perience. Even if both exhibitions wereproducedbyother institutions, their presencedemon- strates achange in the museum’sobjectivesand stance on whether the Holocaust should be part of the museum’smission. This change also seems to be related to the adjacent National Ho- locaust Monument that was unveiled in September 2017.  Asubcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia near Gera. 236 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums free youfrom this idea that youare amaster race.” The museum streamlines the soldier’sspontaneous reaction at the horrors they discovered and in doing so points towardNaziexceptionalism and racism as the reasons for the war. In six interactive Dog TagExperience stations,²⁸ Charlotte Weiss tells her story in the civilian category of the “RoadtoBerlin.” This is comprised of an ap- proximatelysix-minute narrative,supported by the voice of amale narrator.The very personal, highlyemotional story is the onlyone in the museum that reflects on details of the Holocaust.Weiss charts her “earlylife,” the discrimination and racism she faced, earlyreports on German atrocities,and her movetothe Mates- zelka Ghetto in Hungary.She then describes how her family – minus her father – was deported and how Dr.Mengele performed the selection in which her young- er brother and her mother were sent to theirimmediate deaths, while she and her five sisters survived. They weresent to asubcamp of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Geislingen. Her story alludes to the fears they faced in the camp and mentions the kindness of two Germans who helpedthem survive. When they are put on atrain they believethey are going to their death, but instead see Americansoldiers when the train carts open. After the warthey find out that theirfather is still alive – he survivedBuchenwald and emigratedto the United States in 1949.The narrator notes thatdespite all the atrocities that Charlotte Weiss suffered, she still has faith and hope for humanity. On the one hand, Charlotte Weiss’sstory seems out of place in the Dog Tag Experience station. All otherstories and accounts by oral witnesses employed by the museum are thoseofsoldiers or civilians that accompanied or supported the Americanforces. Thus, Charlotte Weiss is used as atoken witness of the Holo- caust.The museum does not contextualize Charlotte Weiss’soralmemory further: like in all dog tag stories and all oral witness accounts found on the computer stationsinthe museum, memory is presented as historical truth. Since most visitors onlychoose asingle Dog TagExperience, onlyafraction of them end up listeningtoWeiss’sstory.While this story corresponds to the liberation story and the museum’smaster narrative,italso clearlygoes beyond it in terms of representation depth with regard to the Holocaust.However,ifthe museum genuinelywanted to integrate the Holocaust as apart of its representation of the war,itshould have at least developed astationorsection in the “Roadto Berlin” exhibition thatwould allow multiple oral witnesses to speak. The Dog TagExperiencesgiveanillustrative insight into the different backgrounds, deeds, and experiencesofAmericansoldiers. While doing so, the museum

 See chapter 4.1for an explanation of this immersive oral history technique in the New Or- leans WWII Museum, 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 237 also embeds afew Holocaust experience stories within them.For example, Felix Sparks, who led the 3rd Battalionofthe 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th In- fantry Division of the US Army, describes enteringand liberating Dachauconcen- tration camp. His voice can createaconnection for the visitor to the final film in “Road to Berlin”²⁹ by describing “the ultimateevil of the Nazis” and the emotional reaction to seeing the corpses and people who werebarelyalive at the moment of liberation and who did not know whether they would be liberated or killed. Sparks’ story also creates one of the few experiential tensions in the museum: he mentions how,upon capturingafew remaining SS guards,some US soldiers lost control and shot them before he was able to stop them. The New Orleans WWII Museum plans to open its final building,the Liber- ation Pavilion, in 2021.Init, the museumwill explore “the closing months of the war and immediate post-war years, concluding with an explanation of links to our livestoday.”³⁰ These immersive galleries will seemingly continue the development of the Americancollective gaze and explorehow “the world – and Amer- ica’splace in it – changed afterWorld WarII.” They will relatetothe internation- al tribunals “seeking justicefor war crimes” and feature an immersive Anne Frank room (National WWII Museum 2016,60). The plansfor these elements indicate that the construction of amaster narrative centeringonthe Americangaze will continue. Furthermore, they alsoindicate that the messageofthe war to de- feat evil and freethe worldwill include the Holocaust in the post-war construction, despite its lack of presenceinthe museum’sexhibitions before 1945.³¹ In the Beyond AllBoundaries multimedia show,the Holocaust is introduced when Americantroops enter Germany. The show then retroactively immerses the audience in giving them the feeling of being in acamp. One hears guards shout- ing in Germanasflashlights from the watchtower blind the audience. Narrator TomHanksexplains the Holocaust with reference to the long outdated and ex- aggeratednumber that six million Jews and eleven million people died in the

 See chapter 4.1.  https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/museum-campus/liberation-pavilion, accessed 13 October 2019 (this source references all quotations in this paragraph).  Another waythe New Orleans WWII Museum integrates the Holocaust in the museum is through its special exhibitions.Here, the New Orleans WWII Museum clearlyidentifies the Ho- locaust as part of its mandateand can represent it in separate venues in the JoeW.and Dorothy D. Brown Foundation Special Exhibit Gallery in Louisiana Pavilion. Forexample, in 2017,the New Orleans WWII Museum showed the special exhibition State of Deception: ThePower of Nazi Propaganda and in 2007 it showed Anne Frank:AHistoryfor Today,both in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 238 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums camps alone,³² and calls it a “systematic program of organized murder,” based on “Hitler’stwisted idea of amaster race.” The voice then switches to afemale voice narrating an eyewitness account: she describes how the Americantroops liberated the camp in Dachau, supplemented by extremelyslow,emotionalizing music. In comparison to Spark’svoice and personal story in the dog tag section, the individuality of the eyewitness here seems to be subsumed into apinpointed didactic, moral masternarrative.Ithighlights Dachauasthe “first and largest of the Nazi concentration camps.”³³ “The minute the two of us entered a[…]bar- rage of ‘Areyou Americans?’ in about sixteen languages came from the barracks. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium;tattered, emaciated men weeping and yelling ‘LongliveAmerica’ swept through the gate in amob; those who could not walk limped or crawled.” The case maybethat this narrative reflects the personal memory or experiencesofasingle soldier; however,itdemonstrateshow the museum includes the liberation of the camps as more of acelebration of Amer- ica than an attempt to understand how this happened and what ordeals prisoners and survivors went through. Since the audience is placed into the perspective of being imprisonedinthe camp,italmostseems to be alogical consequence that the show would ask the audience to join in weeping, crawling, and yelling “long live America.” That most survivors needed along time to fullyunderstand that their ordeal was over and to come to terms with the atrocities they experienced is not significant in Beyond AllBoundaries. The few visitors who have the chance to listen to the voice of Felix Sparks will getadifferent and considerably more realistic description of the liberation of Dachau. In contrast, Beyond All Boundaries shows the coreidea behind the museum’sretroactive integration of the Holocaust as part of the war without historical or culturalcontextualiza- tion. Instead, it is enough that the Holocaust is the symbol of ultimate evil, fit- ting perfectlyinto the master narrative of the ‘good’ war guaranteeingfreedom in the world. By emotionallyoverwhelmingthe visitor,this show restricts anypo- tential for experientiality. The third strategyfor representingthe Holocaust in awar museumcan be found in the WarsawRisingMuseum (WRM), in which the Holocaust and the identity of the (Polish) Jewalmostcompletelydisappear.The victim status of Pol- ish Jews is transferred to all Polish people and particularlytothe insurgents of

 Formoreaccurate and methodicallyreflected estimates, see UnitedStates Holocaust Memo- rial Museum 2019,https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers- of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution, accessed 13 October 2019.  The imprecise claim that Dachauwas the largest concentration camp is typical for afilm that is so focused on emotionalizingvisitors with superlativesand immersingthem in astory of good defeatingevil that historical accuracy falls by the wayside. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 239 the Warsaw Uprising.Thismoveisparticularlyimportant since the WRMhas taken major curatorial cues from the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum and from the House of TerrorinBudapest (Kurkowska-Budzan2006,138). The victim and targetofall German atrocities is directlytransferred to the insurgents who symbolize all Poles (with the exception of the Communists Poles,who sided with the Soviet Union).³⁴ The diagram of main events in the museum’sentrance vestibule does not mention the WarsawGhetto Uprising or anyother event related to the Holocaust.Inthe section dedicated to the German occupation, it is written that: “The Germans established concentration camps wherethey imprisoned thousands of Poles.” In the text’slastparagraph, it mentions that Jews were as- sembled in ghettos and that from December 1941onwards,Germanscarried out the mass murder of Jews. One displaywall depicts the ghettoand notes its cata- strophic conditions.The text panel ends as follows: “Nonetheless [despite the threat of the death penalty if Poles helpedJews], manybrave Poles try to save Jews by offering them food and shelter.Unfortunately, thereare others that blackmail Jews or hand them over to the Germans.”³⁵ The exhibition then enters the beginning of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and anyreferencetoJewish identity disappears from the exhibition. Since the exhibition highlights religious life, rituals, and values, the visitor obtains the strongimpression thatall Poles are Cath- olic. It is onlyinthe later part of the exhibition, in the section “Foreignerswith the Insurgent Armband,” that the visitor hears about Jewish people again: “Manypeople of different nationalities decide to fight in the WarsawRising alongside the Poles.Jews are the most numerous.” The exhibition does not take the idea of Jews fighting in resistancetothe Nazis anyfurther.However, it is tellingthat the WRMfollows the tradition of Eastern European historiogra- phyregardingthe representation of Jews and gentilesinthe Holocaust: it differ- entiates between Poles and Jews when it is important to underscorethe collective aid giventothe ‘real’ Polish insurgents, whereas at otheropportune points in the exhibition, the Jewish Poles become Polish heroes and martyrs. This is evident in the section “The Deathofthe City,” which features the pianist Władysław Szpil- man, who survivedinthe destruction of Warsaw, as a “WarsawRobinson.” The visitor onlyincidentallyfinds out that Szpilman was Jewishbecause the exhibition mentions that he escaped the Ghetto. The wording remains ambiguous: “After the fall of the Rising,he[Szpilman] shares the fate of the ‘Robinsons.’” In other words, it implies that Szpilmanwas not aWarsawRobinson himself.

 See also chapter3.2.  See Chu 2019,133– 135,for amoredifferentiated picture. The MIIWŚ under its new directorship shows similar tendencies as discussed below in this chapter. 240 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums

In order to hear about the Ghetto Uprising,the visitor must go into the base- ment to see the stand-alone exhibition “Germans in Warsaw” (see alsofigure 3). Avisitor who readsevery line will find afew traces of the Holocaust: one sign indicatesthatJews wereforbidden in the new German government district; several panelsonthe biographies of German perpetrators mention their crimes against Jewish people; the WarsawGhetto is represented in one photo montage with amap of the ghettoand numerous historical photographs that show the rounding-up of Jews, but in comparison to the museum’srepresentation of the WarsawUprising,noatrocities are depicted. The onlytext is abiographical sketch of the crimes of SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop: “From April till [sic]Oc- tober 1943hecommanded the WarsawDistrict SS and police; is responsible for the deportation of Jews to the concentration camp in Treblinkaand the bloody suppression of the ghetto uprising.” In other words, the Ghetto Uprising is an af- terthought – one cannot leave it out in its entirety,but here it clearlyseems to serveasaspringboard for the ‘more horrific’ atrocities to come.Thisbecomes clear in the second half of the “Germans in Warsaw” exhibition. When the visitor reaches the panel “The Crime of Genocide,” there is no doubtthat the genocide exclusivelyrelates to German massacres during the WarsawUprising in 1944.The Holocaust has been – notwithstandingafew token mentions – written out of history in order to tell the story of the Germangenocide against the Poles. The fourth strategyrelates to war museums with amore local perspective, which use different networkingtechniques to integrate the Holocaust into their exhibitions. Theseinclude the Bastogne WarMuseum, the German-Russian Museum, and the Oskar Schindler Factory.Inhis analysis of Saul Friedländer’s TheYearsofExtermination: Nazi Germanyand the Jews, 1939 –1945 (2007), Wulf Kansteiner (2013,23) has demonstrated how historical writing on the Holocaust can deal with its representational challenges by jugglingnumerous historical places,peoples, and strandsofevents to createachronosophic net that does not operate in achronologicallylinearway,but rather multidimensionally. This indicates that networkingtechniques toward astructural secondary experientiality in the museum are well suited to and necessary for the challenges of representing the Holocaust in the twenty-first century. My first example of alocal museum employing networkingtechniques,the Bastogne WarMuseum (BWM), does not represent the Holocaust as an individual theme,with the exception of asystematic summary in acomputer station in the penultimateroom of the exhibition after the discovery and liberation of the camps. This means that the visitor cannot understand the full historicalcontext of the Holocaust,though it is present in the global and local parts of the museum. The exhibition begins with an imagemontagefeaturing iconic photographs 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 241 and an introductory imageslideshow.³⁶ In the second room,the visitor sees a couple of historical photographs depicting the exclusion of Jews in Fascist Ger- man society and the Reichspogromnacht. Furthermore, in the first scenovision Mathildeonlymentions the round-ups of the Jews in passing. The coreroom featuring the Holocaust is the fourth devoted to Belgium underGerman occupation. Photographs show how the discrimination of Jews transferred from Germanyto occupied Belgium. One cabinet and acomputer station displaythe topic “Prison- ers and Deportees,” with afocus on the camp in Breendonk and the Deportations from the Dossin barracks. These deportations included Jews, prisonersofwar, and political prisoners. It is clear that the Holocaust was part of Belgian historical reality and that some Belgians were participatingascollaborators at the same time that others wereresistingthe Germans. In the penultimate room the visitor can see one panel featuring amontageof images entitled “The Jewish Question.”³⁷ This panel provides asurveytext that explains some of the Holocaust’shistorical context,accompanied by supporting images on acomputer station.Itrelies on iconic images of freed inmates from the Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps and masses of corpses from Bergen-Bel- sen and Ohrdruf.The final room shows awall panel with photographs of memorials and monuments, among them the Holocaust memorials in Charleroi, Dora, Buchenwald, and Terezin. Clearly, the memories of the Holocaust and the war are intertwined. The BWMfunctions as an example of awar museum in which there is anodoubt that the war cannot be represented without referenceto the Holocaust.Tounderstand the interweaving of the local and globaltheaters of war and of Holocaust,war,and occupation, the Holocaust must be present throughout.Visitors can decide for themselves, how the suffering of civilians and war atrocities committed by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge relate to the Holocaust or whether they constituteseparate themes. The German-RussianMuseum alsoconnects its focus on the German-Soviet war with the Holocaust throughout the exhibition,³⁸ without isolating the Holo- caust or representingitasaseparate theme. From the beginning,the visitor un-

 The conceptual words framing the wall of the image slideshow include ‘Nightand Fog,’ the Final Solution, Genocide,Night of the BrokenGlass,and WarCrimes relating to the Holocaust and genocide. See chapter4.3 above.  The Bastogne WarMuseum avoids the term ‘Holocaust’ in its textpanels.  The exception is the room “Consequences of Warand WarMemories” in which the German- Russian Museum seems to run out of space. It has brief displaycases on the NurembergTrials and on the “Suppression and Reappraisal” of war crimes,but neither the Holocaust nor the concentration camps are mentioned explicitly. The local question of the German-Soviet war seems to become narrower and moretraditional here. 242 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums derstandsthe connection between the policiesofthe war of annihilation and the Nazi’sracialpolicies. The conspiracy theories of ‘JewishBolshevism’ and the consequent genocidal policiesare clearlydocumented: there is no doubt about how they impact wartime policies, first brieflyinPoland and then in the Soviet Union. The different victim groups are clearlyvisiblethroughout the museum,including Sinti and Roma and psychiatric patients. In the prisonerof war room, the transnationalfocus highlights camps in the Soviet Union and Ger- manyand places astrong emphasis on forced laborers. The impact of the Holo- caust is particularlypresent in manygraphic perpetrator photographs in the room featuring the Germanoccupation of Soviet Territory following the onset of Operation Barbarossa. The visitor is presented with images from the pogroms in Lviv,the humiliation of Jews, numerous massshootings, scenes from the mas- sacre in Babi Yar, and images and items from the MalyTrostinets extermination camp, among others. The extermination camps on Polish territory are not high- lighted due to the museum’sSoviet-German focus. The strategyseen here varies from other museums insofar as graphic photographs of victims and corpses are not enlarged; the photographs seem to steer the visitor’sgaze more towardthe systemic natureofthe depicted acts, rather than highlightingiconic images and artifacts of the Holocaust.For aGerman museum, and even more so, one with transnationalGerman-Russian focus, it is crucial thatthe war crimes in the East,includingthe Holocaust,are represented as one overall event that created ‘aspace of violence.’ Similar to other museums thathighlightalocal theater of war or specific perspectivesand weave the Holocaust into theiroverall representations, the genesis of the Holocaust is onlypartiallyorbrieflyreflected upon. The Oskar Schindler Factory(OSF)³⁹ serves as afinal example of amuseum in which the Holocaust is present throughout the museum while being placed into alocal setting.Since the museumisless concentrated on the events of the war thanonthe events of an occupied city,the decisive choice to represent the Holocaust comes from the decision to present Jewish victims as one clearly identifiable, major collective perspective thatexperiencesthe occupation (Heine- mann 2015,267– 271). The museum’slocation in the authentic space of the Oskar- Schindler factory adds another commemorative layerinwhich the Holocaust is represented. Due to the fact thatthe OSF stages an experiential space, making the visitor atime traveler who experiences the events of occupied Kraków,the museum must relyonnarrative proximity to the historicalspaces and events. The exhibition’sgoal is to see, experience,and understand how the Holocaust unfoldedinthis specific situation, spanning from pre-war life in Kraków to

 See chapter 4.2for further details. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 243 the earlystages of German occupation. This includes the discrimination and exclusion of Jews from public life, the terror experienced in Gestapo cells, the es- tablishment of the ghetto, and the plundering of Jewishproperty.The visitor then experienceslife in the ghetto, the role playedbythe Schindler factory and the saving of the Schindler Jews, the ghetto’sliquidation, and the Plaszów concentration camp. It is here that the story of Kraków’sJews stops and is mainly taken up in the final room, the “Hall of Choices,” and in the studio portraits of former workers in the Oskar Schindler’sEnamelFactory.The OSF walks a fine line between ensuring visitors do not believethey can experiencethe atrocities of the Holocaust as atrue primary event and integrating the Holocaust into the overlapbetween primary and secondary experientiality producedbythe museum. However,asseen in Bastogne and in Berlin-Karlshorst,the Holocaust re- ceivesits own voice within the local context of the museum. The Polish story of the war cannot be told without the Holocaust,nor can the Holocaust be separated from the war and the Polish story of occupation. The fifth and most important representational strategyrelevant to this study is that of structurallynetworkingthe Holocaust.This meansthatthe Holocaust, in its largerhistoricalcontext,ispresent in different ways throughout amuseum exhibition and complements the experientiality of the Second World War. Since war museums mostly avoid generating direct empathywith the individual or collective perspectivesofHolocaust victims and perpetrators,the majorityofthe networkingefforts are towardsecondary experientiality and structural experiences.This means that the Second World Warand the Holocaust,along with other atrocities and genocides, are so deeplyintertwined that they cannot be separated. The TopographyofTerror(ToT), House of European History (HEH), the Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War(MIIWŚ), the Bundeswehr Military History Museum (MHM), and the Mémorial de Caenindicate different forms of networking. The Holocaust is present throughout each of these exhibitions. How- ever,aclose analysis demonstrates differences in how this networkinginter- weavesthe war and the Holocaust and helps to determine whether the persecution and extermination of European Jewry maintains its own status or disappears in the face of other atrocities and civilian suffering. Though themes like racism,antisemitism,and the Holocaust appear at several spots in the museum, at first glancethe Mémorial de Caen seems similar to the Imperial WarMuseum in London due to its decision to isolate the Holocaust. However,acloser analysis of the current exhibitionindicates how closely the genocidal strategies employed in the war and the concept of total warfare are interconnected with the Holocaust.The Holocaust is depicted as ahistoricalevent that is closelyintertwined with totalwarfare and other wartime atrocities.The Holocaust and genocide section, entitled “Genocide and MassViolence – the Ex- 244 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums termination of the Jews in Europe,” is part of the “World War, Total War” section that charts the development of aEuropean war into aworld war.The Holocaust and genocide section is followed by asection discussingthe idea of atotal war.⁴⁰ The formerpresents importantaspects and phases of the Holocaust and the experiences of various victim groups.Indoing so, this section employs graphic images of crimesand victims and creates aseparate commemorative space entitled “‘Face-to-Face’ Extermination” in the middle of the gallery in which the voices of survivors can be heard.⁴¹ The differencebetween this museum and the two branches of the Imperial WarMuseum is that its focus lies less with the evil of Nazism and its antisemitism/racism (IWML). Neither does it uniquelysepa- rate the Holocaust from the war (IWMN). Instead, the Mémorial de Caen’scon- cept of violence shapes its representationofthe Holocaust and allows it to be presented as an event thatneedstobeunderstood on its own terms on the one hand,but also in close relation to the development of violence duringthe war on the other.This is evident at the end of the room wheretwo displays are located: “Violence on Partofthe Japanese Army” and “Violence and Nazism” explain how violence was at the heart of Nazism and how it affected the German campaigns in Poland and the Soviet Union in particular. These displays also highlight the bombing of cities and civilians as parts of such violence, building abridge between the atrocities represented in the Holocaust room and the following room reflectingupon the concept and impactsoftotalwar.⁴² Placing the Holocaust in aconstellation with total warfare always runs the risk of bringingupquestions of comparability.There is also the danger that the Holocaust could be universalized to the point whereitbecomes part of ageneralized scheme of illustrating totalwar and in which it might lose its individual status – resulting in an exhibition that onlygenerates restricted experientiality.⁴³

 The “World War, Total War” section will be extensively analyzedinthe followingchapteron the Air War.  The enlargedfaces of the survivors whoremember the atrocities are combined with large poster walls depictingthe overgrown sites of former exterminationcamps.The pyramid-like glass ceiling of the roomopens up to the ground floor aboveand offers hope for the future.  See also chapter8.  See Alexander 2009 for the social construction of moral universals explaining how the historical event ‘Holocaust’ was redefined as atraumatic event for all of humankind with Nazism as the representation of absolute evil: “As the sense that the Holocaust was aunique event in human history crystallized and its moral implications became paradoxicallygeneralized, the tragic trauma-drama became increasinglysubject to memorialization” (Alexander 2009,60). Whereas this memorialization is evident in manyWestern museums with either anational or acosmopolitan memory focus, the complication of the Holocaust’sreceptionthrough recentde- velopments of populisms,antisemitism, and new nationalistic identity policies,casts some 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 245

That is not the caseinthe Mémorial de Caen. However,itisobvious that in the museum’snetworkingofthe Holocaust and total war,itwalks afine line in order to maintain the specificity of the Holocaust as ahistorical event and the individual voicesofits victims. As seen above,⁴⁴ in the House of European History (HEH), the Holocaust is in danger of being subsumedbyanabsolutetotalwar concept and as ageneralized founding myth of contemporary Europe in the museum’smemorysections. The HEH is able to interweave the Holocaust into along history of violence in Europe, the emergence of totalitarian systems, the atrocities and sufferinginatotal war context and in totalitarian systems.Yet in doing so, it increasinglyruns the risk of eliminating the historical specificity of the Holocaust and otherevents of the Second World Wartoestablish anew master narrativethatcenters on extreme suffering in totalwar as the decisive component leading to European unity.⁴⁵ The TopographyofTerror is an obvious exception, due to its status as adoc- umentation center of German perpetration.⁴⁶ All phases of the Holocaust are documented throughout: while all victim groups are systematicallyrepresented in the third section “Terror,Persecution and Extermination on Reich Territory,” in which different sub-sections represent each victim group of German persecution. In the othersections, various victim groups are recognizable. Although the exhibition’sperspective is that of German perpetrators,with astrongfocus on institution and the ‘Volksgemeinschaft,’ the visitor is led to understand the Holo- caust through the secondary experientiality discussed above.⁴⁷ Expressions of antisemitism are present throughout the museum, as has been alreadymen- tioned in regardtopublic shaming. Bystanders watch the destruction of synago- gues, the auctioning off of Jewishproperty,and massexecutions. Structural net- workingcreates astrongexperientiality concerning the structures of the Holocaust and the different gazes of the perpetrator.Historicalspecificityisevi-

doubt on the exclusivity of Alexander’sidea of moral universalism based on “social processes that construct and channel cultural trauma” (2009,70) at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.  See chapter 6.3.  Occasionally, the House of European History is also historicallyspecific about the special status of the persecutionagainst Jews in Nazi racial ideology,such as in the section on German totalitarianism.Amongother items, it displays acopyofthe special no. 1(“Sondernummer 1”) entitled “Jewish plans to murder non-Jews revealed (“Jüdischer Mordplan gegendie nichtjüdi- sche Menschheit aufgedeckt”), published in May1934.  Forother German and Austrian sites of perpetration see Kleinmann 2017,2019;for aEuro- pean comparison between Austria, Hungary,and Italy, see Meyer 2018.  See chapter 5.3. 246 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums dent in the museum’srepresentation of the events of the Holocaust and how it networks the Holocaust,German perpetration, atrocities,and war. In the Bundeswehr Military History Museum (MHM), the Holocaust and other genocidal activities duringthe Second World Warare spread around the museum.Atfirst glance, thereisonlyone coredisplaycabinet representing the Holocaust,entitled “The Shoah,” in the museum’ssection on the war of extermination in the East.Itdisplays single shoesfrom Majdanek concentration camp, arranged on shelveslikeinashoe storeand mixed between children, women, and men. Thiscan potentiallytriggervisitor reflections on the background of each shoe,while presentingiconic Holocaust objectsre-individualized by their arrangement (Arnold-de Simine 2013,80–86;Paver 2018, 111–112).⁴⁸ The cabinet also displays the text of the poem Shoes of the Dead,asurvey text,and amap of the camps and population movements duringthe Holocaust. This is supplemented by aGerman-languagecomputer stationthat holds further encyclopedic information on antisemitism and the Holocaust,includingphoto- graphs and film material.⁴⁹ At second glance, however,the Holocaust is present throughout the museum.⁵⁰ Thisincludes the “EconomyofWar in World WarII”cabinet on the armament industry (Jaeger 2015b, 238), the mass murders in Greeceinthe “Homeland and Hinterland” cabinet; the perpetrator,bystander,and victim biographies throughout the chronological exhibition, and the experience station “Exclusion, Forced Immigration, Murder: Stripping German Jews of their Civil Rights,” con- taining snow-globes depicting scenes of newlyenacted racial laws. There are also the in-depth cabinets about “Jewish Fatesinthe 1930s” (see also John- ston-Weiss2016, 97– 99) and “Resistance in the Arts” duringNational Social- ism.⁵¹ In the sections of the thematic tour,the visitor findsthemes related to the Holocaust as well, for example under “Silent Heroes” in the “Memory” sec-

 Chloe Pavercriticizes that the degradation of the shoes which “evokes apowerful sense of physical damage,neglect and dishonouring decay” is not explicitlyreflectedinthe MHM’sdis- play(2018, 112).  Here, the visitor has the opportunity to enter an almost encyclopedic archive supplemented with images, footage,and interactive maps.Thereis, however,onlyone computer station, exclusively in German.This means the computer station has little to no effect on most visitors.Inmore than twenty extensive visits to the museum, Ihavenever observed avisitor spendingtime at the computer station, which would work moreeffectively as an online museum archive on the museum website.  The cabinet does not merelydocumentthe links between the economy, war,and Holocaust, but performs them.  Furthermore, thereare several several other historical cabinets such as those about the Po- land campaign and the Barbarossa cabinet,asdiscussed in chapter5.1. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 247 tion or the pogroms in Lviv in the “Warand Suffering” section.⁵² The Holocaust is networked throughout the museum; the MHMtakes adocumentary approach without explicitlyinterpreting the networks it creates.This allows for an open- ness that forces the visitor to interpret the objects, images, and constellations on displayfor themselves. TheHolocaust is clearlynot represented in amemo- rializing mode, nor is it presented as an autonomous topic. Instead, the MHM demonstrates, for example in the “EconomyofWar in World WarII”cabinet, that the Holocaust is closelyconnected to the war effort and its actors.Eventu- allythe visitor will be led back into the continuities in German history,into challenges of rememberingthe Holocaust today, and into the human history of violence more generally. Finally, the networkingfound in the Museum of the Second World War (MIIWŚ)iscomplex. At first glance, it is easy to assume thatbecause the museum focuses on civilian suffering, the Holocaust would be overlypresent throughout.Acloser analysis indicates amore subtle dynamic at work. On the one hand, the Holocaust is deeplyingrained in the museum’srepresentation. On the other, there are some places whereitseems to either disappear behind Polish suffering, or be held up as ageneral human form of suffering. Thisfits with the original mission of the museum. The Holocaust receivesaseparate large gallery and considerable recognition as ahistorical event,and additionallyisalso networked throughout the museum. One can arguewhether this networkingeffect makes the Holocaust more or less prominent as acentral theme for the museum. Aside from the dedicated Holocaust section,⁵³ the discrimination of Jews is present in the room on German Nazism; the room on pre-war Danzig/Gdańsk; the room on Hitler’sand Stalin’ssocial engineering and the subsequent resettle- ments and expulsions presented in the terror section; in the section on concentration camps; in the brief section on the liberation of the camps; the “Justice Triumphs” section relatingtothe post-war trials; and through aMatzevah, a tombstone from aJewish cemetery in the destroyed road installation near the exhibition’send. The fate of the mentally and physicallyhandicapped under Naz- ism is present in the room on German Nazism and at the end of the concentration camp room. Sinti and Roma are represented in one computer station at the end of the Auschwitz section. Homosexuals are onlymentioned in the introduc-

 See also the Felix Nussbaum paintinginthe “Politics and the Use of Force” section (see chapter5.1)orthe markingofthe parallel between the KZ Mittelbau-Dora, the V2 rocket, and its devastation in London in the “Technologyand the Military” and “Warand Play” sections (see chapter 8for amoredetailed discussion). The Holocaust is also alluded to in various com- missioned artworks (see chapter 9).  Here, the visitor,also finds aseparate section on the persecution of Sinti and Roma. 248 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums tory panel of the concentration camp room. Nevertheless, acareful analysis of the displays indicates that the Holocaust – whether in relation to Jews or to the other main victim groups of Nazi atrocities – and the identities of Jewish victims playarelativelyminor role outside of the Holocaust section. The concentration camp roomsinthe “Terror” section mainlyuse the wordprisoners or identify victims by name and occasionallyasPoles or Jews from other countries. Monika Heinemann reads this as inclusion of Jews and otherPolish minorities into the Polish collective (2017, 472). However,itseems clear that the word ‘Poles’ is shorthand for non-Jewish Polesand most individualized names refertonon-Jewish Poles.⁵⁴ The first room of the “Terror” section is entitled “Terror of the German Occupation: Plan- ned Extermination and Blind Revenge.” Itsintroductory survey text ends with the words: “Polish Jews condemned to total elimination, formedaseparate category.” This seems to indicate thatthe section displaying massacres by Germans in villages across Central and Eastern Europe is onlyconcerned with Polish and other gentile victims. Moreimportantly, it seems to signify that the Holocaust can be mainlycompartmentalized into asingle separate section. In that section, the museum discusses death and extermination camps, which allows the museum to arrangethe preceding concentration camp section without highlighting the group identitiesofmost victims unless they are Polish.⁵⁵ In the opening version of the exhibition, the estimates of the number of people killed in the war were listed in millions and categorizedbycountry and soldiers versus civilians.Itnoted that0.3 million Polish soldiers and 5.3millionPol- ish civilians died in the war.Below the table, it read: “The civilian victims included about six million murdered European Jews, of whom threemillion werePolish citizens.” In other words, the original exhibition was careful in dif- ferentiatingbetween Polish gentiles and Polish Jews, although it also incorporat- ed all of them as Polish citizens in its numbers. In the new exhibition, alarge panel entitled “Casualties Sustained by aGiven Country during the Second World War” has replacedthe statistical table on asmaller displaybox.Poland

 This trend has been strongly intensified through the recentadditionstothe permanent exhibition, such as acabinet on Maksymilian Maria Kolbe, aCatholic priest,killed in Auschwitz after offeringhis life for another prisoner.The careful avoidanceofmost group identifiers in the original exhibition hereturns into acelebration of aspecific group and Kolbe’sCatholic faith.  Former museum directorMachcewiczreflects exclusively on all victim groups as a “shared fate” (2019 [2017], 87); the partial compartmentalization of the Holocaust seems moreofanun- intentional side effect of auniversalization of civilian victims. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 249 clearlyranks at the top.⁵⁶ Jewish casualties have been mergedwith Polish casualties so that the number appears higher;there is no wayfor the visitor to tell how manyofthe 5.7million Polish civilian casualties were Jews. In the smaller displaybox neither the word ‘Jewish’ nor specific Jewish artifacts appear any longer.Instead, the visitor sees adrawing of Mary holding Jesus made by aPol- ish concentration camp survivorwhile receiving treatment for his trauma, among other objects. The changes made by the new museumteam clearly reducethe role of Jew- ish suffering and replaceitinthe well-known matyrological narrative of Polish (Catholic) suffering.Thisconsequentlyreducesany structural experiencesofci- vilian sufferingdown to mere ideological arguments. Forexample, at the end of the “Road to Auschwitz” section there is anew displayentitled “Poles in the Face of the Holocaust” with alarge poster board and acomputer.Unlikeinother texts and displays in the same section, which acknowledgesadegree of complicity on the part of Poles regarding the Holocaust,this new displaypresents aclear black-and-whitenarrative.The poster and single story found on the computer stationisabout the Ulma family,who recentlyreceivedtheirown museum.⁵⁷ The text begins “Saving their neighbors cost them their life [sic].” The enlarged poster is aphotograph taken by father Józef Ulma, depicting the mother Wiktoria Ulma with her six children and several sheep. In the overall narrative trajectory of the slideshow,itisincreasinglymadetoseem like all Poles formedasingle group that had afullypositive attitude towardthe country’sJews and were eager to help them – all in the face of Germans implementing the death penalty for everybodyaidingorhiding Jews. In regardtothe Ulma family the slideshow notes: “Unfortunately, most likelyasresult of adenunciation, the Germans learned about it [the hiding].” Possible reasons for whygood Poles would de- nounce their fellow Poles are nowheretobefound in this additiontothe section. The mostlymultifaceted approach of the museum’soriginal exhibition, which differentiated within groups and performed amore complex analysis beyond as-

 The new table is particularlymanipulative sincethe visitor first sees agraph that is more than twice the length of the next one (civilian casualties in the Soviet Union); onlyupon acloser examinationitisrevealed that the Soviet percentage was almost as high as the Polish one; if one adds up civilian and military casualties and that the overall number of victims was much higher.  https://muzeumulmow.pl/en/, accessed 13 October 2019.The Museum was opened in Marko- wa on March 17,2016.Its webpagedescribes its mission as follows: “The primary goal of the Mu- seum is to show heroicstanceofthe Poleswho helped the Jews during German occupation, risk- ing their own livesand the livesoftheir families.” https://muzeumulmow.pl/en/museum/about- museum/ Accessed 13 October 2019.For adiscussionofthe museum and its exhibition see Hack- mann 2018, 597– 600. 250 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums signingindividuals and events to black-and-white categories has disappeared. Instead, Poles are held up as acollective group with good values. After stating that Polish people are the nationality thathas receivedthe most – specifically 6,800 – titles of Righteous among Nations, the slideshow’stext continues: “How- ever,itshould be rememberedthat manypeople who helped Jews duringthe German occupation remain anonymous.” That this holds even truer for Polish people who profited from the plight of the Jews or collaborated with the Germans – whether out of fear of German persecution, out of antisemitism, or for other reasons – is not mentioned. Polish people appear as acollective moral entity. It is particularlytellingthat the visitor has to go very deep into the slideshow,specificallytothe captionofthe third imageaccompanying the text on the Ulma family, to receive anyinformation about the Jewishfamilythat was killed. The captionaccompanying aphoto of four men simply states: “TheGold- mans, aJewishfamilyhiddenbythe Ulma family.”⁵⁸ Lookingatthese separate images requires more time than most visitors can invest in the museum. Instead they will in all likelihood stick to the main poster and possiblythe survey slides of the computer slideshow.Thus, the impression remains that in contrast to the Jewishfamilythey werehiding,the death of the Polish familywas more important – or perhaps even of sole importance.The Jewishvictims become anonymous sidekicks to the suffering of the courageous Poles.⁵⁹ These kinds of representations lend afeelingoffactualitytothe ethnic/racial split between gentile

 Forthe historical record of the known circumstances surroundingthe murder of the Ulma familyand the Jewish people they werehiding, see Rozett 2019,25.  This impression is further reinforced by the fact that the MIIWŚ,atleast in April 2018, represents the story of Polish gentile people helpingJews as the coremission of the museum, as stated in the welcoming words of director KarolNawrocki(2018) in the museum flyer: the visitor will meet “people of the highest standing, such as the first partisan in occupied Europe Major HenrykDobrzańki ‘Hubal,’ Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki whovolunteered to the Auschwitz German concentration camp, or Irena Sendlerowa whopersonifies the phenomenon of nearly seven thousand Polish Righteous among the nations.” The first displaythat the visitor sawin April 2018, when enteringthe museum on level -1 was adisplaycase with several objects entitled “Polish people helpingthe Jews in the times of German occupation.” Next to the cashier desk and entry to the permanentexhibition on level -3,the visitor encounteredaposter exhibition with twelveportrait posters with brief captions (tenindividuals and twocouples/families) detail- ing PoleshelpingJews,amongthem the Ulma family. Throughout the revised museum, alop- sided narrative is developed, with some specific stories,likethe one of the Ulma family, receiving an almost mythic character in their matyrological quality.The 2019–2021 special exhibition of the MIIWŚ,entitled Fighting and Suffering:PolishCitizens during WorldWar II,further enhan- cesthis matyrological narrative.The MIIWŚ,also unveiled aheroic statue of Witold Pilecki in front of the museum buildingonSeptember 17,2019,onthe eightieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland(https://muzeum1939.pl/en, accessed 13 October2019). 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 251

Fig. 27 Section “Poles in the Face of the Holocaust” between “RoadtoAuschwitz” section (background)and “People likeus”installation (foreground). Permanent Exhibition. Muzeum II Wojny Światowej (Museumofthe Second World War), Gdańsk (Photo: Author,2018).

Polesand Polish Jews. Even though the displaydid not receive much attention from visitors duringmytwo-day visit in April 2018, it is situated at acrucial point between alarge iconic poster-sized photograph of the unloading ramps – with remains of the victims in the front and the Birkenaugateinthe back – and the “People like us” installation that allows for the commemoration of victims (see fig.27). Here, visitors walk through rectangular columns displaying portraits of JewishHolocaust victims.⁶⁰ If the visitor standsbetween the columns

 The visitor can stop and react to an individual face or take in the overall impression, which – 252 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums and turns around to look at the back wall of the portrait room, they can see the Auschwitz gateinthe distance and the Ulma familyonthe side. The Holocaust and German crimes against Polish people seem to have merged, providingthe visitor with the possibility of wonderingwhether all of those portraits trulyrep- resent Holocaust victims. The most extreme transfer of attention from Jewishvictimhood during the Holocaust to Polish victimhood can be found in the aforementioned new final film. Earlyinthe film, the narrator says “The Soviets deport Poles in cattle cars to gulagsinthe East,” while aflashing red picture with atrain running to the right side, i.e. into the endless East,isshown.Thisremains the only train metaphor in the film, clearlytransferring the imageofdeportation to Nazi death camps to Soviet perpetration. The Holocaust then appears four times in quick succession, always dependent on Polish heroism and good deeds: Poles help Jews despite the threat of the death penalty,Poles (“we”)create resistancemovements, “even within the German concentration camps,”⁶¹ and Poles (“we”)who are “the first” to alert adismissive and disbelieving world to the Holocaust.Finally, “Polish Jews fight the Germans in the Warsaw ghettowithout even achance for success,” right before the rebirth of the Polish armywho, following the imageofthe underground state rising, fights asuccess- ful battle in the WarsawUprising.All of the changes that the museum has under- gone under the new directorship have employed the samenarrative-rhetorical technique: historicalfacts, such as thatthere weregentile Poles involved in the resistanceinthe concentration camps, become universal and all encompass- ing.Any room for ambiguitiesorthe consideration of other groups with similar achievements disappears into the collective ‘we.’ Polish Jews seem to be subsumed by Polish gentiles when it comes to overall sufferingand the unbroken will of the ‘unconquered’ Polish people. In other words, the tendencyinthe original exhibition towardcollectivizing Jewishsufferingwith Polish suffering – partiallytomake the museum accepta- ble to awider Polish audience – becomes the singular choice for the new muse-

if connected to the section’stitle – seems to indicatethat anybody could be persecuted in aspecific historical situation. Unlikethe installations in the United States Holocaust MemorialMuse- um or the Imperial WarMuseum North, the faces areunnamed and from all over the world, which opens up the empathetic possibilities,but also de-contextualizes anyhistorical specificity.  Here, the film shows amap entitled “Großdeutschland” (Greater Germany), including all of Poland, with all the largerconcentration camps and death camps as part of its territory.This relates to the public discussionaround the new Holocaust lawinPoland and the lawitself that dictates that one can be sued for using the expression ‘Polish concentration camps.’ 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 253 um leadership. In particular,antisemitism outside of Germanyand within Po- land does not exist in this story; furthermore, the development of Poland into an apparentlyhomogeneous Catholic nation seems logical. Since the war in the museum’sinterpretation continues until the fall of the iron curtain, it does not seem to matter that the conclusive sentence “We prevail” does not apply to the millionsofPolish Jews that did not.Jews are opportunelyintegrated into anarrative of Polish suffering,neatlyseparated from the rest of the Poles, or forgotten. Followingthese changes, anypossible experientiality is reduced to amasternarrativeand ideological argument. In contrast, the angle of civilian suffering and resistanceaswell as the transnational constellations found within and beyond sections allows the MIIWŚ to produce anetworkingeffect and secondary experientiality.The Holocaust re- ceivesparticularattention in its large autonomous section. When considering the museum on the whole, the Holocaust melts into an anthropologyofviolence perpetratedbytotalitarian regimes,inparticular Nazi Germany. This does not mean that the original creators of the MIIWŚ argued that the Holocaust was comparable to anyotherevent; it simplymeans thatthe understandingofthe spaces of violence or bloodlands in the East go beyond depictions of the Holocaust.The MIIWŚ – at leastinits original version – includes andconcretelydepicts theHolo- caust as an integral part of the Second World War, while incorporatingauniver- sal anthropology of violence and ahistorical trajectory thatrepresents the suffering of the Polish people and other occupied countries under totalitarian regimes. Closelyconnected to the discussion of representability and ethics regarding the depiction of the Holocaust in museums is the use of Holocaust photographs and images of atrocities (see Baer 2002;Prager2008).⁶² Carden-Coyneargues: “Repetition withouthistorical context wasseen as producing aHolocaust ‘aesthetic’ and embroiling historical truth in a ‘spectacle of horror.’ Voyeurism and dehumanization wereseen as the result of such photographs becomingsignifiers of reduced meaning and mere depictions that stood in for – rather than ex- plained – the Holocaust” (2011,172). Photographs of the Holocaust wereoften taken for propaganda purposes – by perpetrators and by the Allies; anyuse of perpetrator images in exhibitions runs the risk of directlyreproducingthe gaze of the perpetrators,sothat museums must think of how to contextualize

 Rachel E. Perry demonstratesthe “bifocal” pattern of Holocaust photographscurated in museums,depictinglife and death. Whereas documentary photographs areused to provide objec- tive truth, give evidenceand allow for the visitor to witness the atrocities (death), “personal pho- tographsact as empathic triggers:toelicit identification and provoke an affective,emotional reaction,” pointingtolife (2017, 223). See also Holtschneider (2011, 45 – 78)for adetailed description of the different functionsofHolocaust photographyinmuseums. 254 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums or rearrangethe photographs to avoid the “fragility of empathy” (Dean 2004) and allow for reflections by the museum visitor.Toavoid anydesensitization via shock value, the visitor must be put in asituation wherethey can read images and theirhistorical context critically (Carden-Coyne 2011, 172).Itisproblem- atic to use photographs of atrocities as historical sources or as simple illustra- tions of historical facts. The techniques museums employ to deal with this challengevary.Someprovide barriers to watching, such the United States Holo- caust MemorialMuseum, wherein the viewers onlysee the footage/the images if they specificallydecide to foregothe museum’swarning and look at the evidence in the container.The “Warand Suffering” section in the Bundeswehr Military History Museumgives awarning to the visitor and particularlytochildren that the section contains human remains,which the museum tries to exhibit in adig- nified manner. Museumsmust be particularlycautious when displaying historical photographs,sothat they do not re-objectify victims (Dean 2004,36–38; Johnston-Weiss2016,96–97). In the museums analyzed in this study, one can identify three main functions for displaying images of victims of the Holocaust and other massatrocities:using iconic images, establishing historical evidence for the audience, and simulating structures of perpetration. These threefunc- tions can overlap, and their exact use differs from museum to museum. They can be used in illustrative,emotional, and symbolic ways,and they can reflect the mediality of the image. Distantiation, on ascale between proximityand distance, is an important tool to understand the possibleeffects of the use of Holo- caust and atrocity imagery. Photographs of atrocities are mostlyusedsparingly.Their first function is their iconic effect.This is employed throughout museums thatrepresent the Holocaust,but it is particularlycommon in museums that focus on the discovery and liberation of the concentration camps, such as the CanadianWar Museum or the New Orleans WWII Museum. The Bastogne WarMuseum usesasimilar set of iconic images. The well-known liberation images illustrate horror;they emotion- allyexpress the historical stageinthe war wherethe Allies felt that the cause of the war was totallyjustified, while establishingaframework for humanity to overcome such horrors.Especiallyinnewer exhibitions, this use of images relies on the well-known iconography of traumatic events (Arnold de-Simine 2013, 80 –86;Mikuska-Tinman 2018). This reduces the shock factor and allows the visitor to reflectinthe name of humanity and ‘the good war’;inapositive sense it allows for the transfer of the expression ‘never again’ to the visitor’sown present. The second common function sees graphic images used as evidence.The museum that most aggressivelydisplays images of perpetration, along with those depicting dead and suffering victims is the Museum of the Second 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 255

World WarinGdańsk (MIIWŚ). In comparison to the United States Holocaust Me- morialMuseum – the model for manyemotional-mimetic Holocaust and atrocity exhibitions – the MIIWŚ uses asimilar amount of pictures showing atrocities and, in general, employs comparable representational techniquesinits Holo- caust section. The MIIWŚ primarilyshows manyimages of corpses and war crimes for evidence.Itisthe (original) museum’sobjective to tell the story of civilian suffering in the Second World War, and in Central and Eastern Europe in particular, within astrongnarrative frame (Machcewicz2016,7–8). In doing so, it attemptstoprovethat the responsibility for these atrocities lies with the totalitarian powers and establishes an iconographyofdeath and sufferingthat relies on visual images that emotionallyimpact the visitor.⁶³ In this strategy, the Holo- caust becomes part of the evidence of human destruction caused by the war.It clearlyreceivesits own space as an event,yet it is also part of the much wider network of violence stemmingfrom avast array of German, Soviet,and other crimes committed during the Second World War. The imagery of the sections on German terror in Poland, the section on the killing and death of Soviet prisoners of war,and of the terror section, which includes liquidated villages, is iconographicallycontinued in the Holocaust section. Whereas different victim groups receive individual attention, includingJew- ish people in the Holocaust,and their experiences can be understood as separate historical events, the MIIWŚ clearlyuses an over-abundanceofcorpses in the exhibitiontobring home an emotional point,while taking the risk of numb- ing the viewer’sexperienceofseeing so manyunnamed corpses: The emotional messageofthe MIIWŚ highlights the disaster of the war in general human terms and the clearlydivided frame concerning the origins of this violence in particular.Incomparison, the photographs serving as evidence in the three Germanmu- seums and the MémorialdeCaen informthe visitor about who committed the crime and about its horror and inhumanity.However,these museums – in contrast to the MIIWŚ – attempt to deepen visitors’ understandingofhow war and violence – and war and the Holocaust – are interconnected, without emotionally overwhelmingthem or narrowing their interpretative possibilities through anarrative frame.

 Warand military museums in general, and the ones in North America and Britain in particular,haveatendency to sanitize their exhibitions fromdepictingtoo manydead bodies or too much physical mutilation. This goes back to the British and Commonwealth war art tradition, which hardlydepicts corpses (Shah 2017,550,byexample of the Canadian WarMuseum). Shah argues that regarding the displayofweapons and data on advancedmilitary technology, “far fromremovingthe element of death and injury technical criteria [can] sayalot about the bloodshedinherent in war” (2017, 563). 256 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums

If we examine the German museums in this study, the third main function of images of atrocities and violence includingthe Holocaust becomes clear.Here, the structure of perpetration is particularlyemphasized. As seen in the Topogra- phyofTerror,⁶⁴ visitors are challenged to take on the gaze of the perpetrators and the ethical challenges of doing this, which produces asecondary experientiality of terror and war crimes through visualization. Visual components interact much more stronglywith museum objectsinthe Bundeswehr Military History Museum (MHM). However,when images of atrocities are used, such in the cabinet on “Op- eration Barbarossa,” there is aclear indication that they are part of the perpetrator’sperspective on the atrocities.Therefore, Arnold-de Simine’sargument that the MHM “clearlywants to shock by showing the horrific psychological and physical wounds inflicted by war” (2013,77) seems to onlycapturepart of the effects created by the museum’srepresentation of atrocities.The MHMoftendis- plays photo albums belongingtoGermansoldiers and emphasizes the presence of German observers and spectators. Similartechniques can be found in the Mé- morialdeCaen,which shows photographs of the mass killing in Babi Yarasfilm negativesonanAgfacolor paper.This both highlights that photographyisacon- structed medium and allows the visitor to follow the gaze of the photographer. As seen in the Bundeswehr Military History Museum or the German-Russian Mu- seum, the MémorialdeCaen also oftencontextualizesimages by (briefly) reflecting on the photographerand on the story behind the photograph. This, at least, provides astarting point for visitors “to learn to read images – not just recover their context or believeinthem as documents” (Carden-Coyne 2011, 173). In summary,the analysis of Second World Warmuseums representing the Holocaust leads⁶⁵ on the one hand, to restricted experientiality in which the Holocaust is reduced to confirm an ideological statement or master narrative. On the other,itleads to secondary experientiality,wherein the events and structures of the Holocaust become part of structuralnetworkingthroughout the museum: the visitor can activatethese networks to understand the different dimen- sions of genocide,violence, and the Holocaust,and historical representation and memory.Primary experientiality hardlyplays arole, with the exceptionofsol- diers whose collective emotional reactions are depicted during the discovery and liberation of the concentration camps. Bonnell and Simon warn that museums representing difficult knowledge aiming to engagevisitors emotionallyand elicit empathyhaveunrealistic expectations of their visitors’ attention, depth of

 See chapter 5.3.  With the exception of the representational strategyofthe completelyautonomous exhibition, as exemplified in the Imperial WarMuseum in London. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 257 involvement,and faculties (2007, 67). In Second World Warexhibitions, this chal- lengeinrepresenting the Holocaust seems to be even more evident,since most museumsdonot have the space to either develop the historical context of anti- semitismand the racial ideologyinNazi Germany, or the consequences of the discrimination and persecution of the Jews. None of the museums under studypretend to be able to immerse the visitor in the victims’ perspective on the Holocaust.Immersion onlyseems possible in a very limited way, as we have seen in the experiential scenes of the Ghetto in Kra- ków or the Plaszów concentration camp. Yetthere is always astrongelement of distantiation. The visitor,asakind of space- and time traveler in the Oskar Schindler Factory,issteered towarddistantiation and prevented from merely identifying with somebodyelse’sperspective.Museums, such as the New Or- leans WWII Museum or the CanadianWar Museum, createimmersive collective perspectivesfrom the point of view of the soldiers discovering the concentration camps. The Holocaust cannot become an autonomous event in these institutions, since war museums in the USAand Canada are shaped by the reiteration of the narrativeof‘the good war’ freeing the world of evil, of which the Holocaust is the ultimateexample. In the WarsawRisingMuseum, anyJewish perspective is fil- tered through thoseofnon-JewishPoles who observed the crime. In the Bastogne WarMuseum, the Holocaust becomes part of the museum’sfabric, which com- bines local, national, and global events, while concrete perspectivesare restricted to the local level. However,evenifthere is no immersion with Holocaust victims, museums can create empathywith victims at times – such as in the TopographyofTerror (Johnston-Weiss 2019,97–98). Here, it is particularlyimportant to consider how the object or photograph on displayworks with techniques of distantiation. Is the visitor put in ageneralized situation, such as perceiving a public humiliation through the eyes of avictim?Somemuseums copy techniques from Holocaust memorial museums, particularlythe United StatesHolocaust Me- morialMuseum, on asmaller scale. This is done to allow for empathyinthe sense that the visitor considers what they might do or would have done in asimilar situation. The Holocaust Tower of Faces in Washington is, for example, re- produced in miniature form in Manchester⁶⁶ and in the “People like us” installation in Gdańsk. Immersion can usually onlytake place in astructural sense, such as in Dres- den, where – as seen above⁶⁷ – the Holocaust is performed through the mecha- nisms and connections between industry,the war effort,racist policies, commu-

 See also chapter5.2 (Bagnall and Rowland 2001,67).  See also chapter5.1. 258 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums nity perception, different forms of memory,and the Holocaust’sactual historical events. This kind of structuralimmersion can also be seen in Berlin-Karlshorst. Alternatively,museums such as the Imperial WarMuseumNorth (IWMN), or the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in its displaycabinet “Resistance in the Arts,” use artwork that allows the visitor to reflect upon how experiences of discrimination, persecution, or imprisonmentcan be expressed. Artworkcan also be used to produce different modes of commemoration, such as in the Rosen- zweigartwork in Manchester,while always maintaining or emphasizing amo- ment of distance between the visitor and the immersive perspective.Ritula Fränkel’sand Nicholas Morris’s Jozef’sCoat in Brussels alsocreates distance between the visitor and Fränkel’sfather’shistoricalexperience in the Holocaust, while fosteringanact of commemoration. As seen above,⁶⁸ the teleological narrative in the House of European History,namelythatHolocaust remembrance is required in order to birth common European values,isprimary to the artwork’s presence. If one looks at the representation of perpetration and the perpetrators of the Holocaust in war museums, it quickly becomes clear that these representations can onlybediscussed by analyzingthe ways in which all kinds of atrocities, crimes, and injustices are presented. The lastsystematic question in this chapter extends the previous discussion about representing perpetration toward the question of how perpetrators and their causes and motivations are displayed in the museums under study.⁶⁹ Perpetrators are represented in threedifferent ways in these institutions: first,through the depiction of high-rankedleaders such as Hitler,Himmler,Heydrich, or criminal commanders and officers such as Höß, Mengele, and Stroop. Second, perpetration is depicted through the documentation of criminal acts. Scenes of individual or mass shootingsinwhich the perpetrators and victims are visiblepoint to the perpetrators’ participation in crimes. Asofter approach is highlightingthe role of the bystanders and profi- teers of discrimination and crimes to reflect upon the role of society,atechnique

 See chapter 6.3.  See Linienthal 2001 (1995), 199–210, for the discussion of the boundariesused for representing perpetrators in the development of the concept for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). TimothyW.Luke notesthat the USHMM lacks the ability to depict “[r]eal human complexities” such as “individual acts of resistance as wellaspersonaldecisionstoac- cept fascism” (2002, 60). Susanne Luhmann analyzesthe “affective economies” of the female guard exhibition at concentration camp memorialsiteRavensbrück (Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück), particularlythe “ethicality of representingperpetrators” and “anxieties over the kinds of interpretations and identifications” such representationswill produce amongvisi- tors (2018, 248). 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 259 that is particularlyprevalent in the TopographyofTerror. Third, perpetrators are represented through the focus on criminalcollectives, usually the nation-state or the Nazis explicitly – this runs the risk of indicating adifferencebetween the perpetrators and all other Germans. If one discusses the representation of perpetration and the Holocaust,the question arises of whether war museums – the TopographyofTerror as aperpe- tration museum notwithstanding – are trulyinterested in the perpetrators or just in the evidence of crimes. The American, Canadian, and British museums mini- mallydiscuss the perpetrators of the Holocaust,other atrocities,and war crimes. They name the Nazis or Hitler and possiblysome other individual Nazi leaders as the ultimateexpression of evil. The Japanese side is similarlyrepresented; once this claim is established, one can focus on the good mission and on commemorating one’sown heroes.The evil of the other side appears mostlyasageneral- ized abstraction. In the last room of “Road to Berlin” in the New Orleans WWII Museum, it is Hitler who “flingschildren and grandfathersinto battle.” The museum is not interested in understanding the German situation in the war’sfinal days in detail; it is particularlyimportant that ordinary Germansoldiers surren- dered in large numbers to the Allies, implying that they accepted the good cause and the superiorAmerican value system and thatthey sawthe Americansaslib- erators.When the final film discusses the discovery of the concentration camps, it names Nazism, the Germans, and the Nazis as an anonymous collective of perpetrators.The New Orleans WWII Museum displays one info panel with aphotograph of murdered Americanprisoners of war at the MalmedyMassacre in the Battle of the Bulge.Itnames the 1st SS Panzer Division as acollective perpetrator,but does not go into further details aside from noting that the Germanbru- tality often provoked retaliation by outraged Americans. Aserious discussion of one’sown troops’ perpetration of warcrimes and atrocities cannot be found in American, Canadian, or British museums. Instances of perpetration in Allied countries,such as the forced relocation and internship duringWWII of Japanese Canadians depicted in the Canadian WarMuseum, name the state,government, or the collective population as the agents of injustice. In the New Orleans WWII Museum, the perpetrator always remains anonymous (e.g. ageneric recruitment officer,denying Japanese-Americans or African-Americans aplace in the overall community). The British museums similarlyabstract German perpetration so that we find the Imperial WarMuseum North, for example, speakingabout the “brutal occupation” by the Germanswithoutgoing into specifics. The perpetration of the Holocaust receivesthe most attention in cases where museumsfocus on post-war trials, such as the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk (MIIWŚ), the TopographyofTerror,and to lesser extent the Bundes- wehr Military History Museumatthe beginning of its “1945–Today” section, 260 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums and the still-to-be-built Liberation Pavilion in the New Orleans WWII Museum that (presumably)emphasizes on the NurembergTrials. The MIIWŚ provides the most detailed exhibition room out of all of the analyzed museums: it distin- guishesbetween trials (justice) and perpetrators who escaped and werenever chargedbythe Allies. Aside from these details, however,the main perpetrators in the MIIWŚ are Hitler,Stalin, other nationalleaders, and collectivessuch the Germans or Soviets. In the museums that specificallyexamine countries under occupation, there is astronger focus on crimes against the local population and on collaboration. In this study, this can be seen in the Bastogne WarMuseum and in all threePol- ish museums under analysis.InBastogne, the museum reflects on collaboration and the excesses taken in punishing collaborators after the war.The House of European History represents collaboration with Nazi Germanyasaphenomenon that occurred during the war throughout the whole of occupied Europe. Similar to the Bastogne WarMuseum,itemphasizes the existential reasons behind collaboration, giving visitors room to make their own moral assessments of this phenomenon. In the same vein, although within astricter framework, that makes it impossible to identify motivessufficient to justifycollaboration, the MIIWŚ dedicates awhole transnational section to the issue.⁷⁰ This provides the visitor with the opportunity to use the tool of comparison to make more complex judgmentsoncollaboration. In almostall of these museums – apartfrom the TopographyofTerror and, to acertain extent,the Bundeswehr Military History Museum – all of the agents of atrocities and warcrimes remain anonymous, with the exception of references to certain political leaders and military commanders.Onthe video screens in the Bastogne WarMuseum thatdisplaythe traumas of warininterviews with local survivors of German war crimes during the Battle of the Bulge,the visitor can listen to narrativesofthese crimes. The actual perpetrators stayanonymous in these narratives, however sometimes the humanity of individual Germansis stressed.⁷¹ Indeed, these agents are always referred to as “asoldier” or “aGer- man officer.” The visitor cannot possiblycontextualize these crimes in regard to the agency of the perpetrator;nor can they decide whether these atrocities occurred through the individual initiativesofordinary German soldiers or whether they wereacting on orders from superior officers.This is very similar to what happens in the WarsawRising Museum: the exhibition “Germans in Warsaw” focuses on crimes against Poles and presents the institutions and leaders of the

 See chapter 6.2.  See also chapter4.3. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 261

German command structure in considerable detail. The visitor is not encouraged to understand how ordinary soldiers participated in these crimes – instead, they receive numerous detailed biographies of criminalcommanders and officers. These biographies always first note that the German officer is awar criminal, and then continue to run through his career in the 1930s, his crimesduring the Second World War(mainlyintheWarsawUprising), and end with the post-war war crimes trials. The focus of the section lies more with underscoring the crimes thatthese people orchestrated than with understanding the spiral of violence. TheOskar Schindler Factory operates in asimilar fashion, except that it also explicitlyreflects upon the perpetrators of the Holocaust,especiallyAmon Leopold Göth, the SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and commandant of the Kra- ków-Płaszów concentration camp. The viewer sees photographs of Göth’sdeca- dence as he rides awhitehorseand sunbathes shirtless,while the museumtext and eyewitness quotations inform the visitors about the atrocities in the camp. Most Second World Warmuseums and Second World Warsections or galleries in war museums do not focus on perpetrators of the Holocaust or other atrocities beyond well-known political and military leaders,ornational and ideological collectives. They present acts of perpetration first and foremost to provethat there werethese acts of perpetration and atrocities. The complex German process of working-through the past is not particularlyrelevant to anymuseum outside of Germany, with the exceptionofthe House of European History (HEH). In the HEH, the understandingoftotal war and the Holocaust as universal phenomena of ashared European past dictates conformity to certain memories. In regard to the HEH’srepresentation of the Holocaust,its emphasis is almost exclusively placed on racism and antisemitism, particularlyonthe racist Nazi ideology. Ger- man museums such as the German-Russian Museum or the Bundeswehr Military History Museum (MHM)make clear how the atrocities of the war and the Holo- caust were made possible in astructural sense. The German-RussianMuseumis, however,more victim-focused,after it establishes the political and military reality of German war policies earlyoninits exhibition. Despite the fact that there are manyquotations and orders givenbyperpetrators throughout the exhibition, the visitor never has the chance to getclose enough to aperpetrator to empathize with him (or her), or to even follow one concrete story.Asinthe Topographyof Terror,the system dominatesthe individual – however,the documentation center opensenough gaps in its imagemontages thatchallengethe visitor to think about individual motivations. The Bundeswehr Military History Museum depicts perpetrators particularly in the concrete letters and diary entries found in “Warand Suffering” as well as in its shorttabular biographies spread throughout the chronological exhibition. These are arranged in such away as to link contrasting pairs of people 262 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums who livedduringthe sameperiod, but took divergent routes in the same situation (Pieken 2012 [2011], 23). Tensions between the manytabular biographies of leaders, ordinary people, victims, bystanders,and perpetrators open up room to think about differinglife trajectories, and what justifies and changes these paths under certain circumstances. Forexample, close to the “Economy of WarinWorld WarII”cabinet in the chronological exhibition,the MHMcon- trasts Hitler’sarchitect and armament minister Albert Speerwith the Russian forced laborer Ekaterina Nikolaewna Korobzowa, who survivedthe warbut became blind in one eyeand wasconsequentlyunable to work afterreturning home to the Soviet Union. Her husband left her after the war because she was seen as traitor,since she had worked for the Germans, and he chose Communist Party membership over his wife. When the visitor reads of her fateand contrasts it with Speer’spost-war biography – he was released from prison in 1966 and described himself as an “apolitical technocrat” in his memoirs – the full contrast of suffering and perpetration can be felt by the visitor as astructural experience. How could Speer see himself as basically innocent,while thosewho wereclearly victims had to suffer after the war?The tabular biographies are one of the few installations in anyofthe museums that lead the visitor to question simplistic black-and-whitepatterns of good and evil and potentiallytriggerthoughts con- cerningshadesofgrey between the two. It is here that the biggest representational differencebetween the Bundes- wehr Military History Museum (MHM)and the Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War(MIIWŚ)becomes evident.Whereas the original version of the MIIWŚ mostly places the perpetration of the Holocaust and of all other atrocities in ascheme with clear concepts of right and wrong, the MHMleavesittothe visitor to come to such realizations. This becomes even clearerwhen one looks at the onlyconcrete story of Polish perpetration featuredinthe MIIWŚ:the pogrom in the village of Jedwabne on June 10,1941, in which several hundred Jews were murdered.⁷² The text reads: “Poles were persuaded by the Germans, probablyfol- lowing apre-existing German plan to round up their Jewishneighbours in the market square.They humiliated, beat and killed them there.” One object is the facsimile of a1933photograph from Jedwabne School, showing Jewish-Polish and gentile Polish children together. The explanatory text names numerous like- ly and possible victims and highlights one formerstudent that was savedbya Polish woman. The explanation focuses fullyonthe victims. No Polish perpetra-

 Jedwabne has become the symbol for Polish perpetration since the publicationofJan Gross’s Neighbors (2001 [Polish 2000]). See also Orla-Burkowska2004 and Hackmann 2018, 592–594 for further contextualization of the roleofJedwabne in Polish memory politics. 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums 263 tors are mentioned by name, nor does the overall displaymention the deep di- vide in Polish society.Itisunclear from the exhibitionwhy Polish people might have participated in the pogrom. However,the Jedwabne exhibit alsoallows the visitor to empathize with the atrocity’svictims and reflect upon their situation: aset of keystoJewishhomes in Jedwabne that was found in abarn wheremanyJews wereburned is one of the most powerful objects in the museum. The museum notes that the keys tell the visitor that the Jews locked their housesand had no idea that they would not be returning.The keysare astrongreminder of how objects can make visitors think and empathize with victims. Forexample, they might ask themselveshow it would have been to go to the market square without knowing that they would never come back. Did they have anyforeboding what would happen?Whereas the Jedwabne exhibit fails to allow the visitor understand perpetration beyond ageneral scheme, the displayofkeys impressively shows how museumscan allow visitors to connect to the past of the Holocaust without ob- jectifying or dehumanizing the victims. In other words, both exhibitions, in Gdańsk and in Dresden, allow for different forms of secondary experientiality. At the end of the second decade of the twenty-firstcentury, there seems no doubt that the Holocaust belongsinSecond World Warmuseums. There is, however,afine line separating the view that the Holocaust should be represented from avery restricted perspective,for example when it is functionalizedfor the expression of other war themes, or local, national, or transnational discours- es (restricted experientiality), or whether it should be represented so that the visitor can understand the structures connectingthe Holocaust to the war,its policies, and other atrocities (secondary experientiality). Because the Holocaust is the most challenging Second World Warevent in which to immerse avisitor, all museums avoid techniques of immersion thatare too aggressive and instead leave visitors at acognitive distance from individual and collective perspectives. There is no perfect or correct waytorepresent the Holocaust in awar museum. Some exhibitionsraise questions; others foreclose on them. The crucial matter to be determined is how to interweave the Holocaust and the Second World War from the individual perspective of each museum,insuch away that the visitor can understand their interdependence. Here, one can see how the more subtle displays in twenty-first-century war and military history museumsneed ways of producing secondary experientiality in theirrepresentations of the Holocaust, so that the visitor can understand its occurrence without being steered, manip- ulated, or emotionallyoverwhelmed into adopting one interpretative or ideological standpoint. With regard to the representation of perpetrators,museums must continue to explore further approaches that overcome mere stereotypes, allowing the visitor 264 7The Holocaust and Perpetration in WarMuseums to gain abetter understanding of how it is possibletobecome aperpetrator.Cer- tain approaches,especiallythoseseen in the Mémorial de Caen, the Bundeswehr Military History Museum, the German-RussianMuseum, the TopographyofTer- ror,and Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War, offer avariety of displays and techniques devoted to explaining the history of violence structurally. They demonstrate that violence goes beyond the evil of individual perpetrators,yet their techniques of abstraction also run the risk that individual behavior and choices cannot be understood. Overall, the representation of perpetrators in such museums lagsbehindrepresentations in other media, whether in fictional accounts found in literature and film, or in documentaries, historiographicaltexts,and biographies.