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Or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized by Expellees in West Germany on the History of the Book Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher Aus Dem Chaos

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Or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized by Expellees in West Germany on the History of the Book Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher Aus Dem Chaos “It Was the Poles” or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized by Expellees in West Germany On the History of the Book Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher aus dem Chaos Stephan Stach In the 1960s, Germany’s mass murder of European Jews during the Second World War was increasingly the focus of public attention. This was precipitated, to a great degree, by the shock of Adolf Eichmann’s capture and trial in Jerusalem in 1961. A great number of reports and books appeared at the time on that and other trials of Nazis and their crimes.1 A growing number of memoirs and diaries written by Holocaust victims and survivors, along with other books on the topic, were being published as well. 2 The Holocaust soon also became an issue entrenched in the 1 ARENDT, Hannah: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, Vi- king Press 1963; COHEN, Nathan: Rechtliche Gesichtspunkte zum Eichmann-Prozess. Frank- furt am Main, Europäische Verlangsanstalt 1963; KAUL, Friedrich Karl: Der Fall Eichmann. Berlin [Ost], Das Neue Berlin 1963; MŇAČKO, Ladislav: Já, Adolf Eichmann... [I, Adolf Eichmann…]. Bratislava, Slovenské vydavatelstvo politickej literatúry 1961. On the recep- tion of Eichmann’s trial in Hungary and its impact on the Holocaust discourse, see BOHUS, Kata: Not a Jewish question? The Holocaust in Hungary in the Press and Propaganda of the Kádár Regime during the Trial of Adolf Eichmann. In: Hungarian Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2015), pp. 737–772. 2 HILBERG, Raul: The Destruction of European Jews. New Haven, Yale University Press 1961; EISENBACH, Artur: Hitlerowska polityka zagłady Żydów [Hitler’s policy of the ex- termination of Jews]. Warszawa, Książka i Wiedza 1961; Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: “It Was the Poles” or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized... 43 confrontation between the two Cold War blocs. This was refl ected, for example, in the show trials of Theodor Oberländer and Hans Globke in East Berlin, who held high positions in the West German government despite their involvement in Nazi crimes.3 The GDR made particular use of these trials in absentia to depict West Germany as a bastion of Nazi criminals. In return, many West German politicians and jour- nalists compared the Berlin Wall with the one that surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto, thus bringing the GDR in connection with Nazi Germany.4 Such appropriations of the Holocaust were by no means limited to the German- German confrontation. Poland and its inhabitants were, in particular, depicted as “eternal anti-semites” in American and West European media. This stereotype was often even expanded to include the thesis that the deeply rooted Polish anti- semitism had been the true reason for German extermination camps set up in occupied Poland – a claim that has long been refuted by research.5 Western Bloc interest groups nevertheless instrumentalized this stereotype for their political aims. One particularly drastic example of this, and the subject of this article, was the instrumentalization of the work of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the organizer of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto,6 by expellees in West Germany. Numerous articles and commentaries appeared in various newspapers of the expellee press, beginning in the early 1960s, that referenced Ringelblum in an effort to frame Poland as being complicit in the Holocaust. Ringelblum’s last work, his 1944 essay with the title Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej woj- ny światowej [Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War] was printed in 1967 by the Stuttgart-based Seewald Publishing House with the misleading German title Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher aus dem Chaos [Warsaw Ghetto: Diaries from chaos].7 The Göttinger Arbeitskreis Ostdeutscher Wissenschaftler (Göttingen Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des 2. Welt- krieges. Berlin, Jüdischen Historischen Institut in Warschau 1960; ADLER, H. G. – LANG- BEIN, Hermann – LIGENS-REINER, Ella: Auschwitz: Zeugnisse u. Berichte. Frankfurt am Main, Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1962. 3 Several works were published in the GDR as part of the campaigns against Oberländer, including: Die Wahrheit über Oberländer: Braunbuch über die verbrecherische faschistische Vergangenheit des Bonner Ministers. Berlin, Ausschuss deutsche Einheit 1960, and Globke, der Bürokrat des Todes, bureaucrat of death, bureaucrate de la mort: Eine Dokumentation über die Blutschuld des höchsten Bonner Staatsbeamten bei der Ausrottung der Juden. Berlin, Aus- schuss für Deutsche Einheit 1963. 4 Die Mauer: Rote Nazis. In: Die Zeit (31 August 1962); SCHNURRE, Wolfdietrich: Berlin: Eine Stadt wird geteilt. Olten, Walther 1962, p. 10. Also: MECKL, Markus: Helden und Mär- tyrer: Der Warschauer Ghettoaufstand in der Erinnerung. Berlin, Universität Berlin 2000, pp. 42 and 124. 5 STEINLAUF, Michael C.: Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust. Syra- cuse, NY, Syracuse University Press 1997, p. 80. 6 On Ringelblum: KASSOW, Samuel D.: Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto, London, Vintage 2009. 7 RINGELBLUM, Emanuel: Ghetto Warschau: Tagebücher aus dem Chaos. Eingeleitet von Pro- fessor Arieh Tartakower. Stuttgart, Seewald 1967, p. 22. The book will be referred to hence- forth as Ghetto Warschau. 44 Czech Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. VI Working Group of Eastern German Scholars, henceforth the “Göttingen Group”) took responsibility for the publication, as will be discussed in the presented article. This association of researchers who were either from the former German East or were active in researching the region, paved the way intellectually for the advocacy of a revision of the postwar Polish-German border along the Oder and Neisse rivers. They sought to instrumentalize Ringelblum’s work to this end. In the following text, I discuss the book, its publisher, and the manner in which an essay on Polish-Jewish relations in German-occupied Poland was transformed into an argument for a revision of the Oder-Neisse border, as well as the later infl uence of the book in Germany and Poland. To this end, I draw on various publications and the Pressedienst der Heimatvertriebenen (Expellee Press Service – hvp) published by the Göttingen Group, in addition to the book itself. Ringelblum as an Unauthorized Publication In early 1967, the Stuttgart-based Seewald Publishing House published the book Emanuel Ringelblum: Ghetto Warschau, Tagebücher aus dem Chaos, Eingeleitet von Professor Arieh Tartakower, Institut Yad Washem Jerusalem.8 Despite what the title may suggest, this was not in fact a diary that Ringelblum might perhaps have writ- ten in the Warsaw Ghetto, but was his last essay, which the author himself titled Stosunki polsko-żydowskie w czasie drugiej wojny światowej [Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War]. He wrote it from a hidden location after he was able to fl ee the Warsaw Ghetto.9 Unlike Ringelblum’s other observations from the Ghetto, this was not part of the Ghetto’s underground archives, which he himself initiated and ran, even if it was undoubtedly based on the materials that it contained. At the point in time that he wrote the piece, the archive had, however, already been buried beneath the Ghetto in metal boxes and milk cans at three different points. In his essay on Polish-Jewish relations, Ringelblum attempts to take on the neu- tral perspective of an historian, even if he himself was personally affected by the events. Even though he knew that the majority of the Polish people were indiffer- ent to the fate of the Jews and that some Polish people betrayed Jews – whether for reasons of avarice or deep-seated enmity – he himself owed his life to helpful Poles, who had freed him from the camp and hidden him in Warsaw. Ringelblum described this ambivalence in his preliminary remarks,10 which, in his biography published in 2007, Samuel Kassow referred to as “a fi nal synthesis and reappraisal of Ringelblum’s prewar scholarship.”11 Kassow alludes here to how Ringelblum’s 8 Warsaw Ghetto: Diaries from Chaos. (With a Preface by Professor Arieh Tartakower, Yad Vashem Institute, Jerusalem.) 9 RINGELBLUM, Emanuel: Z ostatnich notatek [Recent notes; Editors’ preface]. In: Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, No. 25 (1958), pp. 3–30, here p. 3. 10 Ghetto Warschau, p. 22. 11 KASSOW, S. D.: Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the War- saw Ghetto. The quote can be found on p. 373. Kassow discusses Ringelblum’s work on the “It Was the Poles” or How Emanuel Ringelblum Was Instrumentalized... 45 studies on the history of Jews in Poland did not view them in isolation, but always in relation to their Polish neighbours and with the awareness of the manifold social and economic interweavement of the two groups.12 In his essay, Ringelblum discussed various aspects of Polish-Jewish relations in several chapters. Ringelblum adopted a critical point of view as well, coming to the conclusion that the Polish underground and the Home Army (or Armia Kra- jowa in Polish) could have done much more for the Jews than it did. Ringelblum’s bitter disappointment, which becomes repeatedly apparent, refl ected to a large degree that Ringelblum, as a Jewish citizen of pre-war Poland, viewed himself as part of a common society. And it was to this society – or what was left of it after the war – that he in fact addressed his essay. This is borne out by the fact that he wrote it in Polish and not in Yiddish, as had been his habit.13 Along with his wife and his son Uri, Emanuel Ringelblum was discovered by the Germans and shot in March 1944. The fact that we can read the essay today is thanks to Adolf and Barbara Berman, friends of Ringelblum, who also lived in hid- ing in Warsaw, and whom Ringelblum had entrusted with his manuscript in three notebooks.
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