Survivors confronting the dimensions of the almost total destruction of European Jewry during World War II responded in various ways. This research project focuses on a group of Polish-born Jewish survivor-historians who would spend the rest of their lives documenting and researching the history of destroyed Jewish communities in German-occupied Poland, including the murder of their own families. They are: Tatiana Berenstein, Nachman Blumental, Szymon Datner, and Józef Kermisz. I will engage with practices of knowledge production such as site-specific Holocaust research, fearless truth-telling, the role of victim-witnesses or expert-witnesses in postwar trials. I seek to examine how the status of Jewish survivors as both a dominated and marginalized minority influenced and impeded the public expression of their experiences and how it shaped their work and place in Holocaust historiography. The socio-historical context in which they operated was characterized by ongoing antisemitic violence and by Cold War-influenced political struggles for discourse control. Given this, the survivor-researchers who exposed the neighbor’s role in the Holocaust, thereby undermining the dominant narrative of Polish innocence and martyrdom, faced the threat of social exclusion, out-of-placeness, violence, and death. What did it involve to research the events and engage with the traces at the geographical center of the murder of European Jewry, namely German-occupied Poland, and within a society that was complicit in the crime and in a culture that has affirmed the antisemitic norm instead of discarding it? The aim is to re-actualize survivor-historians’ work and to point out the paths they have taken which are worth following for scholars today.
project leader: Dr Katrin Stoll
Das Projekt untersucht anhand einschlägiger Exilpublikationen und Zeitschriften sowie der archivalischen Überlieferung polnischer und ukrainischer Emigrantenverbände und -institutionen zentrale Topoi und Narrative mit Bezug auf den Holocaust. Es fragt danach, welche äußeren und inneren Impulse eine Beschäftigung mit dem Holocaust auslösten, nach politischen Konjunkturen und personellen Kontinuitäten und nach dem Verhältnis organisierter Emigranten und Exilanten zu den jüdischen Gemeinden und Diskursgemeinschaften in ihren Aufnahmeländern. Das Projekt geht dabei auch der Frage nach, welchen Beitrag die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Holocaust bereits vor 1989 für ein um konkrete Tatorte erweitertes Wissen von der Vernichtung der europäischen Juden leisteten. Im Mittelpunkt stehen polnische und ukrainische Exilanten-, Emigranten- und Diasporaverbände in Westeuropa und in Nordamerika.
Projektleiter: Prof. Dr. Joachim von Puttkamer
Projektmitarbeiter: Dr. Yaroslav Zhuravlov
Eastern European Engagements with the Holocaust in Exile and Emigration
The subproject examines central topoi and narratives with reference to the Holocaust on the basis of relevant exile publications and journals as well as the archival records of central emigrant associations and institutions. It investigates which internal and external impulses triggered a preoccupation with the Holocaust, which political conjunctures and personal continuities, and the relationship of organized emigrants and exiles with the Jewish communities in their host countries. The subproject also explores the question of how the engagement with the Holocaust among these communities contributed before 1989 to the knowledge of the extermination of the European Jews, including the specific locations of mass murder. The first phase of the subproject focuses on Polish and Ukrainian exile, emigrant and diaspora communities and associations in Western Europe and North America.
In recent years, the rise of authoritarian governments in East Central Europe and far right and populist movements across Europe has sparked concern that the liberal democratic order established after 1989 is falling apart. In Hungary and Poland, populist governments are employing the legal system to sustain illiberal forms of rule, cementing control through constitutional reforms.
The current debate centering on Hungary and Poland, however, tends to be either highly normative or highly technical, and, too often, ahistorical. Politically the response on European level to the illiberal turn in these EU member states was unconvincing and inconsequential. We agree with those commentators who argue that this is, indeed, an emerging challenge to Europe as a whole. Given the overall situation at the continent the nascent illiberal constitutionalism in Poland and Hungary might be rather permanent than temporary phenomenon and it might tend to spread beyond these two countries and thus endanger the constitutional and political landscape in EU and beyond. This situation creates an urgent need for interdisciplinary research and for building bridges between scholarly milieus, both geographical as well as disciplinary, which our project seeks to answer.
Thus, we aim to introduce much needed historical, interdisciplinary, practice-oriented and comparative perspectives to academic engagement with illiberal and authoritarian challenges to constitutional democracy. Many commentators have noticed that the illiberal constitutional architects of today were also in the front lines of the democratization movement in the 1980s and of the liberal transformation of the 1990s. This project intends to explain why it was so. We intend to situate present-day conflicts in the longer historical ebb and flow of ideas and practices of constitutionalism, democracy, legality and pluralism in East Central Europe. The project stretches from the post-war era with emphasis on the period since 1968, comprising the era of late state socialism, post-communist liberal transformation, into the present day. This will allow us to show how the rudiments of the rule of law and ‘liberal consensus’ of the 1990s evolved already in the late state socialist period and, similarly, how the rudiments of ‘illiberal challenge’ were born already within the liberal transition period.
This project will show why and how the East Central European experience is relevant to the current populist challenge to the constitutional foundations of liberal democracy in Europe and around the world. It supports junior researchers to focus on cutting-edge research on this urgent challenge, to form transnational network and thus to prepare the ground for their long-term academic engagement in the field.
responsible: Joachim von Puttkamer
Like other communist regimes, Poland has a long record of political violence after the Second World War. The attempts to curb violence and police brutality are less known. The project investigates the dynamics of police violence since the early 1950s and its impact on public awareness and the stability of the regime.
The results of the project were published in 2022 in the volume "Ich werde mich nie an die Gewalt gewöhnen. Polizeibrutalität und Gesellschaft in der Volksrepublik Polen", Hamburger Edition.
responsible: Dr Katrin Stoll
In his book The Yiddish Historians and the Struggle for a Jewish History of the Holocaust (2019), Mark Smith lists Nachman Blumental (1902–1983) among the Yiddish historians. While Blumental was indeed a Yiddish historian and a Yiddishist, he was also a survivor whose historiographical work on the Holocaust was produced within a specific institutional, cultural, and societal framework. The research project focuses on the Polish context of Blumental’s work by analyzing the outcome of the interaction between three factors within a triangular constellation: the interrelation between structure and individual, society and individual and structure and society.
In his function as a co-founder and vice-director of the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH, 1944–1947) as well as first director of its successor organization, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, philologist, linguist, literary scholar, zamler and historian Blumental, who had survived the Shoah in the Soviet Union, journeyed to towns and cities all over Poland in order to collect and produce evidence (survivor testimony, German documents etc.) to be subsequently used in court cases, such as the trials of Joseph Bühler and Rudolf Höß, in which he delivered expert witness testimonies. Blumental’s documenting in situ, as evidenced by both his hand-written descriptions of the landscape of the Shoah as well as his typescripts, included visits to the sites of the Nazi extermination camps in Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Majdanek and conversations with members of the surrounding population.
Drawing on the example of the material established in situ by Nachman Blumental in Poland after the liberation from German occupation, I seek to demonstrate that it is the site, the killing site, to be precise, that joins the history of events (Ereignisgeschichte) to the so-called “aftermath” and “aftermath studies”. The site is important because it connects the past, i.e. concrete cases of persecution and murder with social practices, performed in the immediate aftermath and up to the present-day in the physical spaces where destroyed Jewish communities had lived.
For Blumental, documentary truth involved revelation: revelation of the true aims of the Nazi campaign against European Jewry and the establishment of facts. It was both a semantic and a spatial project. It included a linguistic analysis of the German system of deceit and lies as well as an analysis of the changes Polish, Yiddish, and German underwent during the German occupation. The revelation of the truth of the murder of Jews in Poland, in which neighbors participated, posed a threat to the survivor researchers who revealed it, as well as to the culture and identity of the majority.
In the light of documentary truth established in situ by Jewish survivor researchers in the 1940s in Poland, in the light of the empirical evidence of the new school of Polish Holocaust research, which started with Jan Tomasz Gross’ Neighbors (2000) and in the light of the new school of Polish-Jewish studies the use of the terms bystander and bystanding in scholarly and public discourse is an attack on reality and the experience of those persecuted and murdered by Nazi Germany and their helpers.
The research findings of the project have been summarized in three essential articles published in peer-reviewed journals in Polish, French, and in English, some of which are available online.
Karin Stoll, Établir la vérité sur le meurtre des Juifs en Pologne. La Vernichtungswissenschaft dans les travaux in situ menés par Nachman Blumental de 1944 à 1950, in: Revue d’histoire de la Shoah CCXVI (2022), S. 165–194. (abstract in English)
Katrin Stoll, Traces of the Holocaust in Nachman Blumental’s Archive: The Murder of Maria and Ariel Blumental in Wielopole Skrzyńskie during the German Occupation, in: Yad Vashem Studies 49 (2021), pp. 155–193.
Katrin, Stoll, Producing an antisemitic consensus within the framework of the Judenjagd: The role of Poles in the Holocaust based on the murder of Nachman Blumental’s family in Wielopole Skrzyńskie during the German occupation [Produkowanie antysemickiego konsensusu w ramach Judenjagd. Rola Polaków w Zagładzie na przykładzie zamordowania rodziny Nachmana Blumentala w Wielopolu Skrzyńskim podczas okupacji niemieckiej], in: Studia Litteraria et Historica 10 (2021), pp. 1–89, Article 2358. https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.2358
Research on this topic is being continued in the DFG-funded project “Pathfinders?”, which focuses on the textual and documentary practices of a group of Polish-born Jewish survivor-historians who would spend the rest of their lives documenting and researching the murder of Jews in German-occupied Poland during World War II. They are: Tatiana (Tauba) Brustin-Berenstein (1906–1997), Nachman Blumental (1902–1983), Szymon Datner (1902–1989), and Józef Kermisz/Kermish (1907–2005).
Concepts of property and conflicts over privatisation:
Local self-government and municipal property in post-socialist Poland (Dr Florian Peters) – Subproject B7 of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) Transregio 294 “Structural Change of Property”, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
In the multidisciplinary framework of the Collaborative Research Centre “Structural Change of Property”, this project addresses the most profound change in property regimes in recent European history: the large-scale privatisation of the formerly state-socialist economies in Eastern Europe since 1989. My research focusses on post-socialist Poland and includes a set of local case studies investigating the processes of (re-)establishment of private and municipal property. By analysing contradictions arousing from divergent notions of economic self-management and local self-government, the project aspires to add a historically informed perspective to ongoing debates on post-socialist transformations, as well as to provide historical reflection for recent re-evaluations of communal property.
'Tribunals. War crime trials in socialist Yugoslavia' (Dr Sabina Ferhadbegović) - funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/ German Research Foundation) -
The project focuses on the Yugoslav prosecution of the war crimes in aftermath of the Second World War. The primary aim is to break with the prevailing tradition of looking at Yugoslav war crimes trials solely from the perspective of retribution. Their purpose was not only to punish and eliminate the former or potential combatants but also to overcome the implications of the civil war and integrate the Yugoslav society. Military trials were also an experimental ground for the development and the implementation of the concept of the revolutionary justice and socialist law. How did they influence the state-building process of Second Yugoslavia?
Before the World War II Yugoslav legal scholars participated in discussions about international criminal law. But what rules and ideas guided Yugoslavian Communists to their law concepts and what traditions, ideological agenda and international developments influenced their jurisdiction of war crimes? Soviet Union was their role model. The adaption of soviet criminal law took place already during the war. The war crime trials can only be analyzed assuming that parallel history just as well as considering the specific Yugoslav situation: The experience of the civil war and the victory of the Partisan movement.
The project emphasizes different, partly simultaneous developments: the transition from the civil war to peace, the communist take-over of power, the participation of Yugoslav jurists in the development of the international criminal law, the building of the Yugoslav State Commission for the investigation of the crimes of the invaders and their assistants and the reorganization of the courts and the jurisdiction.
The analysis of the Yugoslav War Crimes Commissions and their work takes the central part of the examination. How did they impact the Yugoslav perception of law and justice, which is visible until today, as we can see in discussions about the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in Rehabilitation of former convicts as Draža Mihailović.
Works on Yugoslavia in aftermath of the Second World War rarely adopt the current international research results on civil wars and transitional justice. This project combines current interdisciplinary discussions and links them with Yugoslav experiences analyzing the impact of the war crime trials on the Yugoslav society and integrating the Yugoslav developments in broader European context.
The research project has been completed. The findings were published in the book "Recht und Gerechtigkeit? Ahndung von Menschheitsverbrechen in Jugoslawien zwischen Völkerrecht und Partisanenjustiz (1941–1948)", Brill/Schöningh 2025.