Introduction

DAN MICHMAN

The ways in which history is being researched and written have become
themselves a topic of much research and contemplation. Usually the
emphasis is placed on theoretical, philosophical and analytical aspects.
Among historians, studies on historiography tended in the past to deal
mainly with the description and criticism of topics and schools of re-
search. However, in recent decades the awareness that historiography
itself is shaped within historical contexts has penetrated deeply; con-
sequently, the development of historical research as well as of other
scholarly disciplines has become itself a topic of historical research.
In Holocaust studies research on its emergence is a latecomer. Until
the mid-1990s, and even later, studies on this constantly growing eld
adopted the traditional denotation of historiography and focused on ma-
jor themes, theses and approaches that had been developed.1 But since

1 Such were the following studies: Yisrael Gutman, Holocaust Research Prob-
lems and Perspectives, in: Geoffrey Wigoder (ed.), Studies in Contemporary Jew-
ry Presented to Moshe Davis, Jerusalem, 1984, pp. 7383 (Hebrew); Michael
R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1987; Yisrael
Gutman and Gideon Greif (eds.), Historiography of the Holocaust Period, Jeru-
salem, 1988; Konrad Kwiet, Judenverfolgung und Judenvernichtung im Dritten
Reich: Ein historiographischer berblick, in: Dan Diner (ed.), Ist der Nationalso-
zialismus Geschichte?, Frankfurt am Main, 1987, pp. 23764, 294306; Abraham
J. Edelheit, Historiography, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, New York, 1990,
pp. 66672; Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiograhy of the Holocaust, Basingstoke,
2004. A somewhat different approach was followed by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, in:
The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, MA, 1981. There she tried to ex-
plain differences in approaches to Holocaust research by drives of nationalism and

9
 INTRODUCTION

the end of the 1990s, several younger scholars such as Nicolas Berg,
Conny Kristel and Boaz Cohen conducted in-depth studies of the
circumstances, drives and motives behind the appearance and develop-
ment of scholarly Holocaust research, rst and foremost in Germany
and Israel. They tried to situate the emerging research efforts, schools
and centers within the contexts of the collective and individual work-
ing-through processes of the terrible past (both by perpetrator and vic-
tim societies); the shaping of collective memories in the newly estab-
lished states (West Germany, Israel and The Netherlands); the tensions
between established academic and extra-academic popular historiogra-
phy; and the impact of the trials of war criminals and collaborators.2
The Yad Vashem International Institute of Holocaust Research decid-
ed to follow this new trend by dedicating its 15th International Scholars
Conference to a broad view on the evolution of Holocaust research,
with an emphasis on though not only the role of Jewish survivors
in the immediate postwar period. The conference convened on 2124
November 2004, and thirty-ve papers were presented. This volume
contains the greater part of these papers with the addition of some ar-
ticles, which were written by several scholars who did not attend the
conference. These were commissioned so that some aspects could be
more comprehensively covered.

commemoration such as Israeli historians putting emphasis on armed resistance.

Ulrich Herbert, Vernichtungspolitik. Neue Antworten und Fragen zur Geschichte
der Holocaust, in: Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspoli-
tik 19391945. Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen, Frankfurt am Main, 1998,
pp. 566, related to certain specically German psychological factors affecting re-
search and shaping approaches to the Holocaust.
2 Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und
Erinnerung Gttingen, 2003; Idem, The Invention of Functionalism. Josef Wulf,
Martin Broszat, and the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich) in the 1960s,
Jerusalem, 2003; Orna Kenan, Between Memory and History: The Evolution of Is-
raeli Historiography of the Holocaust, 19451961, New York, 2003; Boaz Cohen,
Holocaust Research in Israel, 19451980: Trends, Characteristics, Developments,
PhD thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 2004 (Hebrew with English abstract);
Conny Kristel, Geschiedschrijving als opdracht. Abel Herzberg, Jacques Presser
en Loe de Jong over de jodenvervolging, Amsterdam 1998. For overviews of the
contexts of other and general approaches see also: Dan Michman, Holocaust His-
toriography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches
and Fundamental Issues, London, 2003, throughout, but especially pp. 303416.

10
 INTRODUCTION

The Polish-Jewish poet Yitzhak Katznelson apparently heard about the

systematic mass murder of Jews in Poland for the rst time on 15 Au-
gust 1943, while incarcerated in the Vittel camp in France. In the diary
that he kept (Pinkas Vittel) he wrote upon getting this information:
I utterly repudiate every reason or formula that their scholars and even
some of our wise men put forward to explain this abomination. I despise
whoever utters such stupidity and nonsense. He must be infected by this
idiot [Hitler], by his incarnation of murder. Accursed be whoever seeks
to excuse this villainy [Nazism] on economic or political grounds! This
political economy! All respect to it in its proper context! What possible
connection, however, can this political economy have with the criminal
wantonness which this beast in human form metes out to us?3

Thus, Katznelson felt that historical explanations of the systematic

murder campaign of the Jews should be ruled out as being blasphe-
mous: explaining is understanding, and understanding is to a certain
extent forgiving.
Contrary to Katznelsons feelings, however, many other Jews felt
the need to document and analyze what had happened. This approach
started already during the Holocaust, when survivors established docu-
mentation centers in several places and even carried out some research;
the most well-known such effort was Emmanuel Ringelblums Oneg
Shabatt underground archive in the Warsaw ghetto.4 But immediately
after liberation Jews initiated documentation and historical research;
for some, such as Isaac Schneersohn in France, this happened already
in 1943, before the end of World War II. For many the published fruits
of such research would be a monument to the deceased; for many others
it was a means of coming to grips with the past, to work it through,
in order to be able to rehabilitate their lives. Historian Hans-Gnther
Adler formulated this need in the preface to his 1974 comprehensive

3 Yitzhak Katznelson, Vittel Diary 22.5.4316.9.43, Ghetto Fighters House, 1964,

p. 120.
4 See Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emmanuel Ringelblum, the War-
saw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2007.

11
 INTRODUCTION

study of the Nazi-German bureaucratic destruction machinery, Der ver-

waltete Mensch (The Administrated Man) with the following words:
[The] trigger [to this book] was my [rst] book Theresienstadt 1941
1945 which was published for the rst time in 1955, [and] which was
born out of the [desperate] need, to structure the experience which I had
gone through in an abstract form based on my own fate [but set] within
the more comprehensive contexts in such a way, that I myself would be
able to continue my life.5

Part I, the opening section of this volume, consists of three general

overviews. The rst, by one of the most eminent Holocaust scholars,
the late Raul Hilberg who died on 4 August 2007, gives a person-
al view of the developments in Holocaust research. His presentation
extends from the moment he himself embarked on such an enterprise
shortly after the end of World War II until the beginning of the twenty-
rst century. Hilberg emphasizes the miracle of the Nuremberg trials
that obliged the prosecutors to organize the German source material for
their purposes thereby doing an enormous service to the rst scholars
by providing them with a rm basis so that they would not get lost in
the enormous unorganized piles of documents scattered all over Eu-
rope. Hilberg also points to the fact that there was not yet an accepted
term for the event; what we now call the Holocaust was not yet dened.
Generally speaking, Hilberg discerns three chronological chapters in
the writing on the Holocaust: 1) the hesitant and unfocused early period
of research and writing, 2) the period of organized research, and 3) the
period in which complexity is acknowledged.
The rst research initiatives were taken on European soil. Here the
catastrophe happened, here were the sources, here was also a long-
standing tradition of writing history. However, in the Yishuv (the Jew-

5 This sentence reads in the original as follows: [Der] Anla bildet mein erstmalig
1955 erschienenes Buch Theresienstadt 19411945, das aus der Not entstanden
war, Selbsterlebtes in Abstraktion von meinem eigenen Schicksal und in grere
Zusammenhnge eingeordnet so zu gestalten, da ich selbst weiterleben konnte.
Hans-Gnther Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch. Studien zur Deportation der Juden
aus Deutschland, Tbingen, 1974, Vorwort.

12
 INTRODUCTION

ish population in Palestine before the State of Israel was established in

1948) and after, the Zionist enterprise claimed to be the spearhead of
Jewish revival, which also included the claim to be the center for Jew-
ish historical memory. To what extent was the research that emerged
in this setting and context different to the one conducted in Europe or
in other Jewish scholarly centers? Dan Michman, chief historian of
Yad Vashem, tries to examine in his article whether a distinct Israeli
school in Holocaust research did indeed crystallize. His answer is af-
rmative, but he points out that not all Israeli historians belong to that
school. The Israeli school, which emerged at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, and its guiding leaders Israel Gutman and Yehuda Bauer,
focused their writing on Jewish responses in occupied Europe, in the
Yishuv and in the United States.
David Engel of New York University tackles another issue. As a lead-
ing historian of modern Jewish history, he feels that most of his fellow
colleagues in this eld of research have actually sequestered the Holo-
caust from the eld of their professional attention, with the excuse so
as not to gaze through a distorting prism. This has led to a severance
between the study of modern Jewish history and the study of Jewish life
during the Holocaust, thus losing the broader historical context. His plea
is for an integration of the two elds, as there appears to be no com-
pelling logical reason why the relative quality and signicance of those
[prewar Jewish] resources should not be evaluated, at least in part, in
light of the manner in which they functioned during the Holocaust.
Part II of this volume focuses on the personalities who initiated
historical research on the Holocaust immediately upon liberation, as
well as on the social and intellectual contexts in which their initiatives
sprouted. Actually all involved in this endeavor were Holocaust survi-
vors themselves and they felt compelled to document, testify, record
and explain what had happened. Roni Stauber of Tel Aviv University
examines the career of Philip Friedman, probably the most important
among the immediate postwar historians who were instrumental in es-
tablishing historical commissions in Poland and later the Jewish His-
torical Institute in Warsaw. In 1948 Friedman emigrated to the United
States and inuenced Holocaust research in that country (particularly
in the YIVO institute) and in Israel (at Yad Vashem). Ada Schein, an
independent Israeli scholar, examines the extensive even compul-
sive documentation, research and publication efforts carried out by

13
 INTRODUCTION

the Sheerit Hapletah in the DP camps in 19451948. In November

1945 Israel Kaplan raised the idea of establishing historical commis-
sions in the camps. This venture developed with the help of Moshe
Joseph Feygenbaum and many others into a network which built up
a corpus that later became the basis of the Yad Vashem collection. Their
ndings were published in the periodical Fun Letstn Khurbn (On the
Latest Catastrophe), which brought a wealth of knowledge, and is still
today a valuable source for studies on the Holocaust. From this nucleus,
where Philip Friedman too played an important role, a group of devoted
historians was formed which later continued doing research in Israel
and the United States. Laura Jockusch of the Simon Dubnow Institute
at Leipzig University places these initiatives in context. Since the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, Eastern European Jews had reacted to
pogroms and major antisemitic violence by establishing documentation
and publication committees. This rst occurred after the Kishinev po-
grom of 1903, recurred during and in the wake of World War I and vis-
-vis the Ukrainian pogroms of 19171921, and was followed by Em-
manuel Ringelblum in the Oneg Shabatt archive in the Warsaw ghetto
during the Holocaust. Thus, the thread of a well-established tradition
was taken up after the Holocaust, which explains why this endeavor
materialized so quickly and without orderly nancial sponsoring. These
beginnings on European soil dissipated when the historians left the DP
camps and emigrated to other countries.
Another historian of Eastern European origin but who acted in an
entirely different context was Jzef Wulf, a Polish Jew who stayed in
Germany; his activity is discussed by Nicolas Berg, a German scholar
of the Dubnow Institute in Leipzig. He analyses Wulfs compulsion to
write about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and to confront German
society with the atrocities carried out not only by its leaders and or-
ganizations, but by many ordinary people too. Wulf had difculty in
confronting German scholars who from the beginning of the 1950s also
started to deal with the Nazi period, especially those working at the
Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. They, in turn, perceived
him as an unwelcome intruder in their eld. Consequently Wulf re-
mained a lonely warrior, but he left behind a series of documentary
books on all spheres of life in the Third Reich. His books were reprinted
in later editions and became appreciated by the third generation of Ger-
man scholars of the Holocaust.

14
 INTRODUCTION

In Western Europe too, Jewish research started shortly after the end
of the war. In France Lon Poliakov was denitely the most inuential
historian of the rst hour. A paper on his activities could not be obtained
for this conference, although his role is mentioned in Part III of this
volume in an article by Georges Bensoussan. In The Netherlands three
historians, two who were survivors and one who had ed to London in
1940 but lost most of his family in the Nazi murder campaign, made a
decisive impact on the perceptions of the Holocaust as well as on the
overall picture of that countrys experience during the German occupa-
tion: the Zionist lawyer and author Abel Herzberg, the Amsterdam Uni-
versity historian Jacques Presser, and the Director of the State (today:
Netherlands) Institute for War Documentation (RIOD, today: NIOD) in
Amsterdam and Rotterdam University Professor Lou de Jong. Conny
Kristel of the NIOD examines the motivation and the historiographical
yield of these historians, and interprets them as ways of coping with the
traumatic past.
Part III of the volume focuses on Jewish research centers that came
into being during the rst decade after the Holocaust, their initiators and
their activities. Feliks Tych, former director of the Jewish Historical In-
stitute in Warsaw, discusses the complex history of this institution from
the moment the idea of a Jewish Historical Commission was raised and
materialized in August 1944 in just-liberated Lublin. Tych chronicles
the activities of this commission in different locations throughout Po-
land, which was gradually being liberated, and its transformation into
an institute in Warsaw (JHI-IH) in 1945 that had to cope with the
changing political situation in the country from the second half of the
1940s onwards. Georges Bensoussan, editor of the periodical Revue
dhistoire de la Shoah, depicts the transformations undergone by the
Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC) in Paris and the
problems it faced during its existence, especially during its rst years.
The origins of this institution are to be found in Grenoble, in 1943,
when the Holocaust was still raging, but it did not really take form until
the end of World War II. Itzhak Schneersohn was the pivotal personal-
ity who organized the activities and also engaged the rst researchers,
among them Lon Poliakov and Joseph Billig. He sent them as advisors
to the French prosecution in the Nuremberg Trial, and thus they became
acquainted with the vast German documentation. The institution con-
tributed through its publications to a certain awareness of the Holocaust

15
 INTRODUCTION

in France, but had to ght for many years against the marginalization
in the French public memory of the Jewish plight and of the French in-
volvement in the persecution of the Jews. Boaz Cohen of Western Gali-
lee College, whose doctoral thesis deals with the history of Holocaust
historiography from 1945 to 1980, discusses in this volume the polem-
ics that raged among Israeli scholars, and especially in Yad Vashem, on
the way in which research on the Holocaust should be conducted. His
paper encompasses issues such as the scope of research, the sources and
their assembling, important topics that needed emphasis, geographical
diversity, etc. It is noteworthy that most of these researches emphasized
Jewish behavior during the Holocaust vis--vis the perpetrators, res-
cue possibilities and the Allies salvage efforts in the free world. These
Israeli historians felt that this kind of research could teach a lesson on
how to build a better and more secure future for the Jewish people in
general, and for the State of Israel in particular. Iael Nidam-Orvieto,
of the Hebrew University and a Yad Vashem historian of Italian Jewry
during Fascism and the Holocaust, relates the history of the Center for
Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDEC) in Milan. Although of-
cially established in Venice in 1955, this institution too had its origins in
1944, i.e., like the JHI, CDJC and Yad Vashem in wartime. The CDEC
also started with an emphasis on documentation and publication, and
saw its role as being an institution dedicated to be both commemorative
and scholarly. It was instrumental in putting out the rst publications
on Italian Holocaust historiography and in providing material for the
prosecution in trials of war criminals. However, within the context of
the public memory in Italy after the war, it was hard for the CDEC
to create a special place for the Jewish unique ordeal, and even more
so for Italian antisemitism and for the role of Italians in the persecu-
tion. From the start the Leo Baeck Institute, an institution established in
1955 by the Council of German Jews to serve as a scholarly framework
that would preserve the memory of pre-Holocaust German Jewry, had
branches in the major cities in the three countries where most surviving
German Jews had dispersed London, New York and Jerusalem. The
last article in this section by Guy Miron, of the Schechter Institute for
Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and Yad Vashem presents the evolution of
the Jerusalem branch. Miron analyses the discussions of its members,
most of whom had been at the helm of German Jewry on the eve of the
Holocaust regarding the evaluation of German-Jewish leadership in

16
 INTRODUCTION

the rst years of the Nazi regime (19331939). Although most of the
Institutes scholarly efforts dealt with the pre-Nazi period, those rst
years of the Nazi regime were the most sensitive and elicited much
reection. The author sheds light on the tension that emerged when
the intention of shaping balanced scholarship clashed with the personal
involvement of those in charge of the research.
Part IV of the volume tackles Holocaust historiography from an-
other perspective: the importance of national contexts in shaping his-
toriographical interpretations. Jrgen Matthus of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. takes a look at the
historiography of perpetrators i.e., the German aspect of the Ho-
locaust which has undergone a series of changes in the six decades
since the end of World War II, and has been led to a great extent by Ger-
man historians. Its meaning for German self-understanding is so im-
portant that it has impacted on past research, and at the same time also
sets goals for what still has to be done. David Cesarani of the Royal
Holloway College of the University of London takes a penetrating look
at the history of British historians perceptions of Nazi Germany and
the Holocaust from Allan Bullock in the 1950s to Ian Kershaw at the
beginning of the present century. British historians, Cesarani claims,
made a major contribution to the historical understanding of the Third
Reich, unmatched by historians in any other country outside Germany.
Nevertheless, for many years it suffered from some typical aws. By
juxtaposing the early works of Allan Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper
with the later work of Ian Kershaw, Cesarani suggests that in order to
maintain the illusion of virtuous British liberalism, Hitler had to be de-
picted as either a statesman like any other or a monster without equal.
Every current of Nazi society that made it distinctive could be charted,
while the anti-Jewish racism that it shared with Britain was discreetly
avoided. Consequently, Nazi and Hitlers antisemitism were not given
the central place they had in Nazism. While Dutch Jewish historians
of the rst generation were analyzed in the above-mentioned article by
Conny Kristel in Part II, Ido de Haan of Utrecht University explores
Dutch Holocaust historiography from its beginnings to the present. He
points to the fact that Holocaust historiography in The Netherlands had
an early start, but stagnated later, in the 1960s, precisely when it started
to develop in many other countries. It only took up again at a much later
period. Many more paradoxes characterize Dutch historiography, not

17
 INTRODUCTION

the least of which is that the three early historians (Herzberg, Presser
and de Jong) wrote master-narratives, with a clear Jewish input, and had
an impact on public discourse while current research, even though
much more extensive, is fragmented, professional and has less public
impact.
The spotlight of Part V is on another topic: the broader contexts of the
Holocaust and especially of the Final Solution as historical events. In-
ternationally renowned historian of World War II, Gerhard Weinberg
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, maintains that many
Holocaust historians today are not sufciently aware of the context of
the war in which the systematic murder of the Jews was perpetrated. In
an assertive plea not to forget this essential fact, he presents a series of
examples showing that it is impossible to understand major develop-
ments and decisions regarding the fate of the Jews without taking into
account the war situation. Christopher Browning, the successor of
Gerhard Weinberg at Chapel Hill, and whose major study Origins of the
Final Solution (written upon the invitation of Yad Vashem from 1981)
was published shortly before the conference, presents the readers with
four core issues that he had to deal with when organizing the fundamen-
tal historical topic which is the Holocaust. These are: the framework of
Nazi population or demographic policy and overall vision of a racially
restructured empire in Eastern Europe; the Nazi ghettoization policy in
occupied Poland; the key turning point of SeptemberOctober 1941 as
well as the general nature of Hitlers involvement for the decision on
the Final Solution; and the participation of so many ordinary Germans
in murdering the Jews of Europe. He maintains that antisemitism was
essential in all these contexts. Shlomo Aronson of the Hebrew Uni-
versity of Jerusalem tries to reassess the rescue options in four much-
contested cases in Slovakia and Hungary, while using German, Allied
and Jewish sources, among them some recently released intelligence
reports, thus presenting a broader context of the forces and interests that
played a role in rescue operations and that made the chances for large
rescue totally unreal.
The last two parts of this volume include papers that examine the role
of survivors testimonies in shaping Holocaust historiography, memory
and awareness. Dina Porat of Tel Aviv University opens Part VI with
an attempt to explain the strange fact that throughout World War II and
in the immediate aftermath, groups and individuals arrived in Palestine

18
 INTRODUCTION

and told about the atrocities that had befallen the Jews of Europe, but
each time their accounts were called the rst report, caused conster-
nation, and faded away. Her explanation is that there were long inter-
vals between the arrivals, that there was much disbelief in the content
of the stories because the enormity of the crimes made it hard to grasp,
and that the listeners did not have a comprehensive picture of what went
on in Europe. One of the sensitive polemics among Hungarian Jews
is the issue of existing knowledge about the systematic extermination
before the occupation of Hungary by Germany in March 1944 and the
ensuing mass deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz. Rob Rozett, direc-
tor of the Yad Vashem library, scrutinized a long series of testimonies
of Hungarian Jews who were recruited to the forced labor service from
1941. He found that many of them were eye-witnesses to or had hearsay
testimony on mass murders, but that they developed no real awareness
of an overall destruction campaign, and thus created a gap between
information and its correct interpretation in real time. Rita Horvth
of Bar-Ilan University also deals with Hungarian Jewish testimonies,
but those given in the immediate postwar period. The National Relief
Committee for Deportees in Hungary (DEGOB), which was the main
address Jews came to for assistance after the war, started immediately
in 1945 to collect testimonies from the survivors, and was thus part of
the Jewish Historical Commissions phenomenon, dealt with in Part
II of this book. Horvth discusses the guidelines and principles that
underlay the project, and also points to the methodological possibili-
ties that these testimonies offer to both historical research and research
on memory. Alan Rosen, also of Bar-Ilan University, focuses on what
could be seen as the most extraordinary individual recording effort of
Holocaust testimonies: the one carried out in Europe between late July
and October 1946 by Jewish psychology professor of Chicago Univer-
sity David P. Boder. Rosen traces back the origins, planning and execu-
tion of the project, bringing to light the problematic context in which
the interviewing took place, the obstacles that Boder had to overcome,
and the changes in his perception and in the conceptualization of the
project. Rosens analysis adds a useful insight into the complexities of
interviewing survivors and the testifying itself, an issue that has been
widely researched in recent years. The last contribution in this part is
an article by Hebrew University professor emeritus Dalia Ofer, which
compares testimonies given in the second half of the 1940s and in the

19
 INTRODUCTION

1950s with those given in recent years. The differences between the
earlier and later testimonies have caused many a scholar to prefer the
earlier ones as far as historical accuracy is concerned, while empha-
sizing the psychological importance for the survivors and collective
memory of the later ones. Ofer emphasizes the fact that in many of
the later testimonies new information is brought forth which had been
intentionally or unintentionally omitted in the earlier ones, thus making
these in many cases no less important. On the other hand, the initiators
of the earlier projects already had in mind psychological aims. Thus,
both generations of testimonies have their relevance.
Part VII, the closing section of this volume, examines the role of the
testimonies of Jewish Holocaust survivors in several war criminals tri-
als. Donald Bloxham of the University of Edinburgh looks at the war
crimes trials of the immediate postwar years. He observes that Jews
were disproportionately under-represented among the witnesses ap-
pearing in those trials and attributes this phenomenon to two factors.
First, there was the mistrust of witnesses testimony in general, and of
victims testimony on the criminal actions of the perpetrators in par-
ticular on the part of the American team of the prosecution at the Inter-
national Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. The Americans believed that
criminals were to be indicted mainly on the basis of objective Nazi
documentation. Second, Bloxham claims, there was an unwritten rule at
Nuremberg and elsewhere that Jews and the Jewish fate not be allowed
to steal the show. University of Toronto historian Rebecca Wittmann
discusses the role played by the Jewish witnesses in the Auschwitz trials
conducted in West Germany in 19631965. Witnesses, not only Jewish,
testied in the trials, but, as Wittmann concludes, the sincere effort of
the public prosecution to indict Auschwitz was hindered by the law as
it was dened in the West German penal code This meant that the
Holocaust, and in turn the Jewish voice, was not the main focus of the
trial. The closing article of this part, and of the entire volume, is on
the Eichmann Trial, held in Israel in 1961, in which 110 eye-witness-
es were called to testify. Hanna Yablonka of Ben-Gurion University
demonstrates in her article that while the judges allowed this parade,
they in fact gave it little weight in their verdict. On the other hand, for
the broad public the personal testimonies given by the witnesses were
the heart and highlights of the trial. Thus, there were actually two nar-
ratives: the judicial, and the public which was perhaps the more last-

20
 INTRODUCTION

ing and which in any case had the major impact on further Holocaust
memory.
The volume thus shows that the very beginnings of Holocaust his-
toriography, which was in fact initiated by Jewish historians and am-
ateur historians already during the Holocaust and more intensively
immediately after, attributed much importance to survivor testimony,
together with a broad variety of written and some visual documenta-
tion. Therefore, many testimonies were taken and recorded during the
rst postwar period. Later on, however, the perpetrators perspective,
and consequently German documentation, became the dominant as-
pect of Holocaust research, even for Jewish historians. Only in the last
two decades did survivor testimonies again acquire importance, both
in scholarly research and in the context of the developing Holocaust
memory in the world. One of the problems of Holocaust historiography
was and still is the overall comprehension of the unprecedented
murder campaign against the Jews. The historiographical efforts under-
taken to meet this challenge were made by individuals and by a series
of research centers in different countries; local efforts thus contributed
to the building of an international scholarly venture in which despite
differing opinions and schools there is common agreement about the
centrality of the Holocaust to the western experience. One of the main
accomplishments of this research is the entirely different comprehen-
sion today than of several decades ago of the developments that led to
and crystallized the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. The articles
in this volume, taken together, present the reader with a broad even
if incomplete overview of how the eld of historical research on the
Holocaust developed and matured, who shaped it, and what challenges
it met.

Dan Michman
Yad Vashem, October 2008

21