Iryna Sklokina: Your book “Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine” is one of the first studies shifting the focus to Ukrainian lands and thus challenging the “Auschwitz syndrome” in Holocaust studies. How did you become interested in studying the Holocaust in this region? How did you elaborate the vision of the process of extermination in this region as related primarily to colonial practices of ruling?
Wendy Lower: I began my graduate studies in history in fall 1991. Ukraine had just declared its independence. The Soviet Union was breaking apart. As I read more about Ukraine’s history I realized that here was a country that had suffered the worst extremes of Stalinism and Nazism and yet so little was known about what had actually happened “on the ground” and how ordinary people shaped and fell victim to the two regimes. My training was in German studies, so I started my research in the captured German records at the U.S. National Archives, and focused on the Nazi occupation period. Fortuitous events and personal contacts brought me to the region of Zhytomyr. In the summer of 1992, I drove with a friend from Paris to Kiev, stopping in Lviv and staying mostly in Zhytomyr with a Ukrainian-Belorussian-Jewish family who “adopted” me. In Zhytomyr I was amazed to discover a significant collection of Nazi documents in the state archives, which became the basis of my doctoral dissertation and book, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005, Ukrainian edition, 2010). Combined with the central policy documents typed in Berlin, these regional Nazi records in Zhytomyr clearly showed how the Germans and their local collaborators pursued a campaign of total destruction of the Jewish population. The history of the forced labor of Ukrainians and massacres of resisters and Soviet prisoners of war was also evident. To corroborate this documentation and gain other insights into the social history of the Holocaust and occupation, I interviewed witnesses and visited the mass murder sites in Ukraine. Additionally, the German records revealed the details of a little-known experiment to resettle and transform the region into a colonial stronghold of ethnic Germans in an area coined “Hegewald” (preservation forest) by the Reich Fuehrer of the SS and Police, Heinrich Himmler. The colony was situated between Himmler and Hitler’s field headquarters near Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia.
The two aims of the Nazi regime- genocide and colonialism- were inextricably linked and could not have been more starkly represented than in this particular “heartland” of Ukraine. I began to take seriously Hitler’s “Lebensraum” fantasies and could see how his underlings strove to realize the Fuehrer’s wishes at the local level. Some regional leaders self-fashioned themselves as colonial lords in the crudest, most violent manner, enriching themselves, whipping the “natives,” exploiting Ukrainians whom they degraded as “negro slaves.” From the start of Operation Barbarossa in summer 1941, Soviet prisoners of war and Jewish civilians were deemed “the enemy” and subjected to mass murder policies. Studying all aspects of the German occupation in Zhytomyr—the Nazi ideology, the brutal military conquest, exploitive economic plans, genocidal population policies—led me to the conclusion that the entire endeavor was essentially a colonial-imperial campaign rooted in western history and combining the most violent practices of European anti-semitism and anti-communisim. Imperial-colonial pursuits and attitudes that had developed for centuries overseas in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas were brought back to continental Europe, and with a particular unfettered fury in Eastern Europe.
I.S.: Currently you are researching a book “Biography in the Age of Extremes: The 20th Century Lives of Holocaust Perpetrators in Ukraine, Austria and the two Germanys”. Please tell us more about this research. What kind of insights can we get from the study of postwar perpetrators’ biographies?
W.L.: This new research project has focused mainly on three questions: How do the postwar histories of war crimes investigations and prosecution compare in Soviet Ukraine, East and West Germany and Austria? Is a biographical approach adequate for explaining who commits genocide, why one becomes violent, and whether one is punished? Do wartime records, postwar investigations and other sources on Ukrainian collaborators, and German and ethnic German participants in the Holocaust in Ukraine reveal a new perpetrator typology, motivation, and explanation for the massive violence? The central-eastern European “biographies of violence” that I have selected for my study are more than a collection of individual stories. Woven together, they become an international, socio-political history of modern warfare as experienced by ordinary men and women in central and Eastern Europe, and a comparative history of the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet, Austrian, East and West German justice systems. The biographical approach offers an interpretive framework for analyzing perpetrator and bystander testimony, and shows that those who committed atrocities were not natural born killers, but became mass murderers because they were trained to do so and because of situational factors in Ukraine. Prewar experiences of men and women, whether they grew up in Stalinist Ukraine or the German Reich, were not as decisive as the prevalence of anti-semitism, and the individuals’ association with states and political movements that had institutionalized, normalized violence, and embraced genocidal campaigns of total war. My study will show how malleable and vulnerable we are, while this is not a revelation about human beings, it is a fact that bears stressing in the context of the history of genocide-- how does one actually come to commit such violence, and then stop killing and resume a normal life in another setting? This is the dark side of human adaptability, the “chameleon effect” that shocked postwar psychologists who studied Nazi perpetrators.
I.S.: One of your research interests is concerned with the problem of women perpetrators engaged in Nazi crimes. Did the source material related to Ukraine somehow change your general vision of the issue?
W.L.: Yes. In fact my interest in female perpetrators began with those first trips to Ukrainian archives in the 1990s. I was surprised to find many files about young, single German women who were active in Ukraine as nurses, secretaries, teachers, welfare workers, and colonizers. I heard from witnesses about the brutalities of German women, stories that had been suppressed in postwar German accounts but remembered by the victims and local witnesses. As I began to place more and more German women at the crimes scenes and in the Nazi machinery of destruction, I traced those biographies and gained a deeper understanding of the gendered dynamic of the violence. In the history of the Holocaust, we see the emergence of the nurturer-killer, both the perversion of femininity into a tool of violence as well as the ugly face of the conventional bourgeois woman who prized order, cleanliness and discipline over compassion, embodied in the kindergarten teacher in Ukraine, the nurse, the loving SS wife and doting mother who thought nothing of abusing and killing Jewish children and laborers, as well as routinely murdered the mentally and physically disabled in asylums. My study of German women in the killing fields of the Holocaust presents violence as a function of interpersonal, intimate relations and everyday recreation among the German occupation elite governing Ukraine.
I.S.: You direct the oral history project “German Witnesses to the Holocaust” for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Do these materials indicate any recent changes in the common ways of speaking about the Holocaust and WWII in Germany?
W.L.: There are many rhetorical variations among the interview subjects who speak about the Holocaust. In our project, we deliberately chose individuals from different social and political milieus. Though many shared a common wartime experience of witnessing the death marches in Bavaria when Dachau and its numerous subcamps were evacuated, each presented his or her own unique narration of growing up in Nazi Germany and experiencing the Reich’s collapse. The witnesses today are obviously elderly, and most live in smaller towns where the international culture of Holocaust memorialization has had a limited impact. Witnesses who come forward to be interviewed and agree to be videotaped for the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum are motivated by several emotional impulses and civic goals. Some feel an ethical obligation to talk about the atrocities and sufferings of others. Some wish to be relieved of their nightmares at the twilights of their lives by speaking with me, a stranger from abroad, about the horrors that they saw. Some wish to educate future generations and in the terms that you refer to in your question, remarking almost reflexively “never again.” But their reflections about the Holocaust reveal deep, persistent, generational cleavages in Germany. Talking about the crimes of one’s ancestors is both painful and shameful, something one would naturally wish to avoid. Witnesses prefer to speak about the war in general terms as that horrible time, adopting a broadly anti-war position as the historical lesson of “never again” and avoiding the specifics of culpability for the “Final Solution.” Some witnesses who spoke openly about the suffering of Jews often added a critical remark at the end of the interview (when my camera was turned off) about Israel’s aggressive policies against Palestinians.
There are many disconnects in Germany between the public culture of Holocaust remembrance and private memories of the Second World War. Much of this is colored by present-day politics including anti-Semitic sentiment. Talking about the Holocaust in Germany still has its taboos and aversions that are potentially more detrimental in terms of civic education than before because now many assume that they know all there is to know. In fact most of the persons with whom I spoke-- older folks, university students and school kids-- know little about the history of Jews in Europe and what actually happened during the Holocaust in Europe, let alone in their own hometowns.
I.S.: Holocaust studies are one of the most popular disciplines with vast literature and a lot of historians engaged in it all over the world. Still there are a lot of understudied problems. What is your opinion on the perspectives of this field of study? What are the most promising developments in this field?
W.L.: Like my answers to your “big” questions above, I can only respond here in this limited space in general terms that do not account for significant variations. Holocaust education has become a global interest, but the concentration of academic work on the Holocaust is in Israel, North America and Europe.
The achievements in Holocaust Studies are astounding and there is much momentum now that could sustain the field into the future for a long time. Interdisciplinary approaches do not work in all fields, but in Holocaust studies they do. Why is this so? The Holocaust is at its core a historical event that occurred in Germany and across Europe (1933-1945). The event became global, as a refugee crisis, as part of the world wars, and in the postwar era as part of the history of war crimes prosecution, restitution, and memorialization. It is the most well- documented genocide in our history, and therefore provides scholars with vast resources for studying this human problem in all its ethical, philosophical, cultural, psychological and scientific dimensions. Right now, seven decades on, we are still discovering massive amounts of documentation, and declassifying material from former Soviet archives and now in Germany itself in the holdings of the International Tracing Service. When, for instance, the full records of a hospital with doctor’s reports, x-rays and forensic analyses suddenly becomes available and can provide information about medical crimes, bio-ethics and specific illnesses and their treatment, how can a historian with his or her limited training work through the records without calling in medical professionals and scholars of science? Likewise, the last writings of a Jewish victim who was a poet demand the skills of literary analysis and historical knowledge. We are working in the wake of these cataclysmic events, in its debris and artifacts, studying its scarred landscape and human traces, trying to piece together what happened. The general contours of the history and its bureaucratic administration have been drawn by pioneers in the field such as Raul Hilberg. But there is still much more to discover, particularly in the national histories of all the countries that were occupied by Germany or allied to the Third Reich. For Ukraine in particular, the topic of collaboration has not been fully researched. What were its mechanisms, motivations and ramifications? Who collaborated and why, and what happened to them and their families after the war? The history of the pogroms in Lviv, despite all the public attention they have been given, still requires a more precise reconstruction to establish the “who, what, where, when, and how,” as do explanations for pogroms that occurred elsewhere throughout the occupation.
Most promising has been the combined work of government officials, activists, scholars and of course survivors who have pressed for the opening of archives and release of records. The source material is compelling and illuminating. The growth and receptivity to oral history, memoirs, cultural productions and other forms of relating and representing Holocaust history have pushed the field into new areas, bringing together disciplines and professions that share a common interest in understanding phenomena such as extreme violence, anti-Semitism, trauma, and grief. Like war, revolution and environmental disasters, the recurrence of genocide spans centuries and cultures, and continues to challenge human existence. For these reasons it will remain a serious course of study. But as an academic field Holocaust studies is just taking shape. We are working through the mountains of source material in multiple languages and forms, and this necessitates international and interdisciplinary cooperation, and supportive settings to discuss and publish findings.
Yet this young and vibrant field is not secure in Europe, not even in Germany. The recent flood of monographs, memoirs, and films has been significant and especially poignant as survivors are passing. But like all academic fields, Holocaust studies in Europe have an uncertain future.
Professor Wendy Lower holds the John K. Roth Chair in the Department of History at Claremont McKenna College and is an affiliated faculty member of Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, USA. Since 2007 she has been researching and lecturing at Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Munich, and managing an oral history project, "German Witnesses to the Holocaust," for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). In association with the USHMM, Lower authored, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005, audio edition 2009, Ukrainian edition, 2010); The Diary of Samuel Golfard and the Holocaust in Galicia (2011); and co- edited with Ray Brandon, Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008, Ukrainian edition, 2012). Her work on German female perpetrators will be published by Houghton Mifflin (NY) and in several foreign language editions in 2013.