Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76371-4 - The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust Dan Michman Excerpt More information Introduction I will enumerate and describe briefly a number of questions which have hardly been studied so far and which require thorough and fundamental elucidation. The external and the internal Ghetto arrangements; the dif- ferences between the mediaeval Ghetto and the Nazi Ghetto in layout and purpose; the role of such creations as the Sammelghetto (Central Ghetto), Transit-Ghetto, etc. Naturally, the external and internal aspects of the Ghetto life should be considered as well. Philip Friedman, “Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe” (1959) The ghetto phenomenon was central to Jewish life under the National Socialist regime and is a keystone of Holocaust consciousness and mem- ory. The prevailing notion about the Jews’ fate during the Holocaust is that the Germans concentrated them in ghettos as a systematic element of their policy; and that in areas where the Nazis did not do so (for whatever reason), they nevertheless took the first steps toward ghettoization, mean- ing the segregation of the Jews without visible walls or fences. Indeed, much has been published about ghettos: many studies have dealt with particular ghettos, mainly in Poland and Lithuania and to a lesser extent in other regions. There are also extensive descriptions in the yizkor-bikher (community memorial books, of which about 1,400 have been published in the past six decades) and in the memoirs of survivors (a genre that today encompasses thousands of publications). This literature provides a multifaceted picture of life in quite a few ghettos. In 1959, Philip Friedman, perhaps the leading Holocaust scholar of the immediate post-war period, endeavored to define the goals of Holocaust research, then still in its infancy: 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76371-4 - The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust Dan Michman Excerpt More information 2 The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust In order to avoid dealing with abstract notions only, I will enumerate and describe briefly a number of questions which have hardly been studied so far and which require thorough and fundamental elucidation. (1.) The Ghetto and the Judenrat: We are confronted with some form of Jewish self-government, but as a matter of fact, this home rule is nothing but a travesty of the term as a result of the misuse and abuse by the Nazis of ideas of Jewish autonomy and territorialism, for the purpose of misleading and deceiving. Further problems are: The external and the internal Ghetto arrangements; the differences between the mediaeval Ghetto and the Nazi Ghetto in layout and purpose; the role of such creations as the Sammelghetto (Central Ghetto), Transit-Ghetto, etc. Naturally, the external and internal aspects of the Ghetto life should be considered as well.1 Astonishingly, however, the research literature has never dealt systemat- ically and in depth with a number of fundamental questions about the emergence and nature of this phenomenon. When exactly did the idea of establishing ghettos for Jews take shape in the minds of Third Reich officials who dealt with Judenpolitik (anti-Jewish policies)? Were the circumstances those of orderly and premeditated planning (as assumed by many), or the result of local pressures, without prior preparation (as hinted in some studies)? Who supported the idea and who opposed it? What are the origins of the idea? Why did the term “ghetto” take root (and how does it relate to alternative terms that Nazi-German dis- course applied to the same phenomenon)? How many ghettos were there? For what purposes were they actually used? Was their establishment linked to the development of the idea of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question? Should the term “ghettoization,” which is a derivative of the noun “ghetto,” be applied to the measures of concentration and segre- gation directed against Jews in regions where physical ghettos were not established (such as Western Europe)? Were the Judenrate¨ (Jewish coun- cils) – another foundational element of Holocaust history and conscious- ness – intrinsically linked to the phenomenon of the ghettos? Some of these questions have been left unanswered because it has become axiomatic that ghettos were an integral part of Nazi anti- Jewish policy.2 However, a thorough examination of the extensive source 1 Philip Friedman, “Problems of Research on the Jewish Catastrophe,” Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959), p. 37 (reprinted with slight changes as “Problems of Research on the Holocaust: An Overview” in Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust,p.564). On the emergence of Holocaust historiography and Friedman’s important role within it, see David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. 2 See, for instance, the definition given on the Simon Wiesenthal Center Web site: “Jews were forced to live in ghettos during WWII. They functioned as a transition before the Jews were deported to their deaths.” © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76371-4 - The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust Dan Michman Excerpt More information Introduction 3 materials at our disposal and of the scholarly literature on Nazi anti- Jewish policies, especially those published in recent years, reveals that this assumption is based on a fallacy: the central authorities of Nazi Germany never elaborated a clear and unequivocal definition of what a ghetto was or should be (from their point of view). Moreover, we do not have a single major document that points to the sources of the ghetto concept, its essence, and the ways for implementing and managing it (later in this study we discuss the exact meaning of Reinhard Heydrich’s well-known Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939, which is often perceived as the “smoking gun”3). On the contrary, the German documents of the period that were written by officials involved in setting up ghettos pro- pose varying reasons and explanations for their establishment and need – which shows that the officials themselves were not sure about the origins of the idea and its precise purposes. I attempt to suggest some answers to these questions – evidently the first attempt to do so (except for one article by Philip Friedman, written more than fifty years ago4). My discussion will focus on the history of the semantics and cultural contexts of the term “ghetto.” Most past treatments of the ghetto phenomenon during the Holocaust have tried to understand it from an administrative and organizational perspective and have neglected the linguistic and cultural aspects entirely. I believe that in this case a combined cultural, linguistic, and semantic approach can provide a better answer than the approaches tried in the past. It is clear to me that this novel approach will raise new questions for future research to address. But, if the thesis proposed here does indeed trigger a renewed discussion of a topic that is so central to the Holocaust, I will have done my part. The ideas presented in this study crystallized during the first months of 2007, when – in my function as the chief historian at Yad Vashem – I sat down to write an introduction to The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2009), then in preparation. As early as 2005, during the first deliberations by the team working on the encyclopedia, the problem arose of which places should be included in it. During these discussions we realized something that had been known 3 Yehuda Bauer, addressing the Schnellbrief in his comprehensive overview of the Holo- caust, attaches a note to the word “ghetto,” where it appears in paragraph 5 of the section on the Jewish councils, to the effect that this is “the earliest reference to the German plan to establish ghettoes”; see Yehuda Bauer (with the assistance of Nili Keren), AHistory of the Holocaust, pp. 149, 360n5. 4 Philip Friedman, “The Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi Era.” © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76371-4 - The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust Dan Michman Excerpt More information 4 The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos During the Holocaust but not fully appreciated, namely, that the Nazi bureaucracy never really defined what it meant by the word “ghetto.” Forced to come up with a definition of our own, the encyclopedia staff decided on the following: “Any concentration of Jews by compulsion in a clearly defined section of an existing settlement (city, town, or village) in areas controlled by Germany or its allies, for more than one month.” This definition included various patterns of residential concentration – neighborhoods, streets, groups of buildings (but not single buildings, such as the Judenhauser¨ [Jewish houses] in Germany), or barracks – and did not require the existence of a Jewish administration, although this element often existed. Parallel to our work, a team at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., developed a slightly different definition for their multi-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (of which volume 1 was also published in 2009). The essential problem posed here demanded a systematic study. The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust includes a short version of my thesis; this book is a much more extensive and fully annotated version. The initial questions were mine, but many friends and colleagues assisted me in clarifying problems and developing the ideas and answers. First of all, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Yad Vashem Interna- tional Institute for Holocaust Research and the team that worked on the Encyclopedia of the Ghettos: Professor David Bankier (an outstanding scholar and marvelous friend and colleague, who unfortunately passed away in February 2010), Dr.