The Review of the History of the Holocaust

The Review of the History of the Shoah also opens its field of study to other tragedies of the century: the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, that of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire and the massacre of the Gypsies.

The HSR is available online for free on Cairn.info for issues between 2005 and 2016

LEARN MORE CALL FOR CONTRIBUTION N°223

Vatican, Church and the Holocaust. Historiographic renewal around the archives of Pius XII

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, n°218, ed Mémorial de la Shoah, October 2023)

Edited by Nina Valbousquet

At a time when the Vatican archives are being used as an archive for the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958), the Review of the History of the Shoah intends to make a historiographical review and explore new avenues of research around the controversial question of the attitude of the Vatican and the Church towards the Shoah.

On 4 March 2019, Pope Francis announced the declassification of the Vatican archives relating to the pontificate of Pius XII, affirming his “confidence” in “serious and objective historical research”. One year later, on 2 March 2020, the Vatican makes these unpublished documents accessible to the scientific public: a historic opening due to the extent of the documentary funds and the exceptional nature of the archival process, but also because it is a pontificate discussed and a period of great political and religious changes, from the outbreak of World War II to the beginnings of the Second Vatican Council.

The «old polemics» (about the attitude of the Vatican towards the persecution of the Jews and towards Nazism) were immediately revived. These memorial debates and this polarized history, between condemnation and apologia, go back in part to the controversies of the 1960s around Rolf Hochhuth’s German play The Vicar (1963), accusing Pius XII of silent complicity in the genocide of the Jews. 

This vast subject has often been approached from a theological and moral point of view. But this file also takes into account the political issues, diplomatic, international and humanitarian issues by questioning the capacity for reaction and action of an institution that is both spiritual and temporal, as well as its limits in the face of extreme violence and genocide. 

To the question of the pope’s silences is added that of the «dilemmas» of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in a context of crisis: political, diplomatic, humanitarian and theological dilemmas between charity and neutrality. The complexity of these choices and their underlying motivations are now more clearly delineated, intersecting with other themes such as humanitarian assistance, the pre, during and post war refugee crisis, relations with fascism and democracy, the anti-communism, the protection of the former Nazis and fascists in the post-war period, the position of the Vatican vis-à-vis the justice of the Allies and the immediate memory of the Shoah in the Christian conscience. 

In fact, while the polemics focus on the personality of Pius XII, the new archives and their cross-referencing with other documentary collections allow us to grasp the diversity of the Catholic world and the «sociological complexity of the Churches». 

While the issue of the Vatican is the thread running through this dossier, the articles address broader themes and take stock of historiographical thinking and research through field surveys and case studies. 

Persecution of the Roma and Sinti and genocidal violence in Western Europe, 1939-1946 

(Journal of the history of the Shoah, n°217, ed Mémorial de la Shoah, March 2023)

Edited by Ilsen About

During the Second World War, Roma and Sinti were the target of multiple persecutions and genocidal violence whose chronology and intensity vary according to the territories of Europe. These persecutions have also involved the Manouches and the Gypsies, as well as groups associated by history with anti-Gypsy measures and designated by their profession or their supposed way of life, such as the Yenish, the Vanier, the Forains, the Circassians and the Travellers. 

The often deliberate concealment and belated recognition of these persecutions contributed to the marginalization of facts which resulted in the physical elimination of more than 200,000 people across Europe and the irreversible dislocation of pre-war Romani societies. Although many areas of shadows remain, the different chapters of this story now appear very clearly. 

This issue of the Review of the History of the Shoah focuses on several countries in Western Europe. There, the composite character of the repressive tools reflects a large plurality of devices according to the variable application of anti-Gypsy measures: house arrest, detention, internment, concentrations, targeted or random executions, deportations to killing centres or the concentration network. The diversity of the logics at work, the distinct modalities of violence and their effects on the target groups are explained here. The writing of this multiple history, through the exploration of new archives, the study of individual and collective destinies, as well as the memory of facts are at the heart of these studies, and of a research still in progress. 

New research on the Holocaust and the post-Oshoah in Poland

(Journal of the history of the Shoah, n°216, ed. Mémorial de la Shoah, October 2022)

Entitled “New research on the Holocaust in Poland”, this dossier brings together contributions on innovative approaches, both in terms of new sources mobilized and approaches. The sources and accounts of Jewish victims and survivors are mobilized in their crossing with official and clandestine documents of the time. The pioneering writings of the surviving Holocaust historians, such as Nachman Blumental, director of the Institute for Jewish History in Warsaw until 1949, are rediscovered and appreciated for their early clairvoyance. 

The micro-historical approach highlights the local diversity of situations, while revealing comparable mechanisms in the persecution and (low) survival of Jews in the most known cities (Warsaw, Lodz) or more modest (Tarnow). Taking into account the materiality – those of the bodies after gassing in killing centres such as Belzec or Sobibor, but also that of the waste accumulated in the ghettos – offers additional keys of intelligence for the daily life of these men, women and children hunted, locked up or hidden, and most often destroyed in immense suffering. 

Finally, the history of the extermination of the Jews of Poland gains to be placed in the long time, allowing us to see not only the rhetorical and effective dynamics of exclusion at work in Poland betweenWorld War II, but also the very long shadow cast by the Shoah bine after the war and to this day. This issue is all the more essential at a time when distorted discourses on the history of the Second World War and the Shoah are flourishing in Europe, aimed at questioning the irrefutable and consensual achievements of historical science in favor of a narrative more comfortable for societies, but dishonest and may even legitimize the most violent political actions.

The Jewish cemetery in the Holocaust

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, no. 215, ed.

Directed by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Judith Lyon-Caen

What happened to the Jewish cemeteries, some recent, others immemorial, in the persecution and the Shoah? Singular peri-urban or rural landscapes, they were, like all Jewish institutions, disrupted in Germany from 1933 and then throughout the war. Suicides and deportations can be read there. Sometimes they disappeared and were desecrated, while the bodies were transferred to mass graves. However, most of the Jewish cemeteries in Germany and Europe were not destroyed by the Nazis. 

During the war, the Jewish cemetery was a place of passage and transit in the heart of the hostile city (like the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, adjacent to the ghetto); it served to gather Jews and give them refuge when all other places were forbidden; It was the ultimate deposit of the bodies of victims (Jewish or not) to whom any human burial treatment was refused, resulting in the opening of mass graves; it also offered a framework for executions. 

After the Shoah, abandoned cemeteries, deprived of their “natural” deaths, remained the witness sites of the Jewish catastrophe, despite the reburial movements – surviving relatives searching for the bodies of the disappeared to return them to the Jewish cemetery. To the absence of graves responds the construction of thousands of memorials in the very cemeteries, dedicated to those who died in the camps, in hiding. 

Place of contemplation, a place to think of the deaths of those who disappeared during the Shoah, the Jewish cemetery is also the site of the traces of years of persecution, those engraved on the tombstones of premature deaths, those that form empty spaces, waiting for the dead never to come... 

Judging war criminals in Eastern Europe (1943-1991)

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, n°214, ed. Memorial de la Shoah, October 2021)

Directed by Audrey Kichelewski and Vanessa Voisin

This new issue of the Journal of the History of the Shoah looks at the fate of war criminals, which has been the subject of intense controversy among the Allies since 1942. Highly political from the beginning, the debate has nevertheless led to innovations in international law, adapted by most states in their criminal law. 

The purpose of this dossier is to present the most recent research conducted on the trials of war criminals in Central Europe and the Soviet Union. Less well-known and often accused of political instrumentalization, these war crimes trials have nevertheless helped to shape the representations of the Second World War and the Shoah. Their modalities and their impact make sense: did they take into account, deliberately or incidentally, the description of the fate of the Jews and the singularity of the Shoah? Their sociocultural, symbolic, memorial and transnational dimensions are analyzed here in the light of circulations between East and West as within the Eastern bloc, but also in the light of practices and imaginaries of justice.

These crimes, which go beyond the logic of borders and the classic criminal categories, even the context of the Cold War itself, also invite us to think about these trials, the polemics they have raised and the European judicial apparatus in their operation towards war criminals beyond strictly national frameworks and issues.

New approaches to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union

Directed by Jean-Marc Dreyfus

The plunder of musical instruments in the Shoah: first research

Directed by Claire Andrieu and Jean-Marc Dreyfus

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, n°213, ed. Memorial de la Shoah, March 2020)

The Shoah in the USSR. 

Up to 1.3 million Jewish Soviet citizens were murdered during the war. The recent historiography has allowed considerable advances, describing the great diversity of methods of killing, from massacres in pits to gas trucks. The vision of an organized and methodical genocide led by Einsatzgruppen is followed by that of a multitude of massacres perpetrated by police units and military forces seconded by Ukrainian or Baltic deputies. This new vision is reinforced by the perception of a much more extensive temporality and spatiality: the killings took place over months, even years, and on an immense territory that has not finished delivering its mass graves. 

Dispossession and restitution of musical instruments. 

The Nazi organisations in charge of looting paid specific attention to musical instruments, both old and prestigious as well as familiar and banal. Because classical music, and especially German music, was at the heart of the staging of the Nazi regime. Within the large organization of looting cultural goods, a «kommando musique» was created, which gathered the most valuable instruments, but also old scores and treatises on musicology, for many very rare. Hundreds of thousands of musical instruments, stolen from all over Europe, were distributed to the German population, to the museums of the Reich. With a strong emotional dimension, these instruments were little restored after the Holocaust. This dossier on the plunder of musical instruments is the first ever on this subject and sets valuable benchmarks for future research.

“Vichy, the French and the Shoah – A state of scientific knowledge”

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, n°212, ed. Memorial de la Shoah, October 2020)

under the direction of Laurent Joly (CNRS)

For its second issue from the new editorial board led by Audrey Kichelewski and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, RHS – Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, the oldest scientific journal on the subject, testifies to the vitality and richness of international research on the Shoah.

In 1945, faced with the cleansing, the leaders of Vichy, Pétain and Laval had justified their policy against the Jews: Vichy avoided to the Jews of France the fate of the Jews of Poland; its policy was guided by the desire to protect the French Jews, even if we sacrifice the foreign Jews to give change; and it is thanks to this policy that the majority of the Jews survived in France...

RECOUNTING THE SHOAH – 40 YEARS OF PERSONAL WRITING IN THE JEWISH WORLD

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, n°211, ed. Memorial de la Shoah, March 2020)

This 211th issue is devoted to all the writings published between 1946 and the mid-1980s. In the four decades after the war, publishers in the Jewish World mobilized their national and international networks to publish a wide range of personal writings. These first-person accounts evoked undocumented aspects of the persecution or extermination of the Jews, far beyond France. Sometimes they came in support of historical records; or they accompanied the great commemorative events. Extracts from books published abroad also appear in the review: thus the reader encounters Jan Karski, Primo Levi or Leib Rochman. But very diverse in their style and authors, these personal accounts are also often one of the only traces we have of these witnesses, to whom this issue pays tribute by giving to read their writings.

The intellectual roots of Mein Kampf

 (Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, n°208, ed. Mémorial de la Shoah, March 2018)

The subject of this issue is an analysis of the multiple sources used by Hitler to write Mein Kampf, the first volume of which was published in 1925. Where did his main ideas come from? What were the milestones of his ideological formation? What texts did Hitler read in Vienna before 1913 and in Munich after 1919? Which authors, in particular, evidently fed his thought? Which of these are the major, overestimated or secondary sources of inspiration? Although it is well known today that Mein Kampf is by no means an original work and that this text amalgamates, often in a confused way, many ideas prevalent at the time, it is still necessary to list these influences. Their common denominator is anti-Semitism.

Philosophers facing the shoah

(Journal of the history of the Shoah, n°207, ed. Mémorial de la Shoah, October 2017)

This issue proposes to offer a table of the contribution of philosophers to reflections on the Shoah, which it tries to present various faces. Although the majority of the philosophers summoned were contemporaries of the Third Reich and Nazism, an abyss often separates them. There are those who, from near or far, were victims (Jean Améry, Hannah Arendt), those who “saw nothing” (Paul Ricoeur), those who hailed the Reich and the “destruction of the Jews of Europe” (Heidegger), contributing to bring philosophy down with them.

Italy and the Holocaust. Representations, political uses and memory

(Journal of the History of the Shoah, no. 206, ed. Memorial de la Shoah, March 2017)

Despite the racial laws of 1938 and its collaboration with the Reich, fascist Italy did not participate directly in the deportation of Jews from the peninsula until September 1943. Many Italian Jews were protected and, compared to neighboring Yugoslavia, the Holocaust in Italy was among the least lethal in Europe. Today, the memory of the genocide occupies an important place: publications, conferences, history centres are multiplying. Italian visitors to Auschwitz are the third largest group in number. This second issue of our diptych questions the meanders of a memory of genocide that has become a matter of history.

The Jews of the East in the face of Nazism and the Shoah (1930-1945)

(N°205, October 2016)

In partnership with the Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, Israel

The scattered Jewish communities from Morocco to Iraq, from Egypt to Yemen, are well aware of the vicissitudes of a European Judaism which was then by far the majority. As soon as the Nazis came to power, they organized with more or less success the boycott of German products, at the risk of cutting themselves off from local authorities and Arab nationalist movements. But this solidarity quickly experiences its limits, especially when war breaks out in Europe. For the Jewish communities in the Arab world, Nazism and war are a major turning point. In 1945, their future in their homeland seems less certain than ever.

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