NO EMPIRICAL WORK OF HISTORIOGRAPHY is complete. The condition of incompleteness in such a literature is inherent in the sources themselves. An entire flow of events in all their complexity cannot be carried in the memory of witnesses. It cannot be stored with all of its attributes in remaining artifacts, and it is not replicated in all of its facets in contemporaneous records. All that has gone on in the world, which in theory is the whole of history, can be preserved only in fragments, and these leftovers constitute our material. The attempt to recapitulate anything at all is therefore an exercise that cannot be encompassing, no matter how large or small the subject of investigation may be. The effort will be a compromise between imagined perfection and something that can possibly be accomplished. Empirical historiography is by definition salvage. It cannot be more.
Historians are people who, for whatever reason, decide to pursue a project about the past. They employ resources with which they have to work as best they can. They may be different in their knowledge and intellectual capabilities, but empirical research demands its due. The researcher will inevitably traverse three phases. The first is a certain bewilderment as original sources are examined. Who took this photograph? What does it show? Who wrote this letter? To whom? What do the abbreviations mean? What is the content about? After a while—sometimes a long time—connections are seen, meaning is drawn from something that had been incomprehensible, insights are added to insights, and a picture emerges. The work continues in a quest for fulfillment—the elimination of errors, the closing of gaps, the clarification of conclusions. Then the researcher encounters the principle of diminishing returns. More and more searching is required for fewer and fewer results. Resources are exhausted, time limits are reached, inspiration is used up. A compromise is made: the work stops.
These two realities, the one embedded in a preordained impossibility, the other in the limitations of human beings, are well known to practitioners in any field of historical research, and in other disciplines as well. They are reiterated here, because nowadays the words “Holocaust” and “compromise” are usually not found in the same sentence. One should remember, however, that in the early years after the war, the Holocaust had no place in academic life, that it was not even acknowledged as a topic, and that special claims later had to be made for its importance.
The claims are not baseless. It has dawned on the Jewish community that the sudden loss of nearly a third of its numbers in the space of a few years ranked with the expulsions from Spain of 1492 and with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem of 70 C.E., that it was a catastrophe that was bound to have consequences in the life of Jewry for many generations. To Germans it gradually became clear that in the midst of all the havoc that the Nazi regime had wrought, the annihilation of European Jewry was a special act that defied understanding and that raised questions about the nature of a society in which such events could occur. This concern surfaced also in countries where governments or volunteers had collaborated with the Germans. And finally, wherever there was a tendency inside or outside postwar Europe to stand by and do little or nothing, the age-old query, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” acquired new meaning as new threats arose to the stability of humanity in a shrinking world. Clearly, all these reflections had spawned or catalyzed a growing Holocaust literature, but they did not erase the compromises with which historians must wrestle. Holocaust research still entails the familiar problems of research, and writing about the Holocaust still requires the usual skills of writing.
The evolution of Holocaust historiography had its bare beginnings more than fifty years ago and it is far from finished. What has not been accomplished in the aggregate so far is attributable to two basic factors. One represents the researcher’s inability to be more comprehensive, accurate, or descriptive. The other is a form of self-restraint in confrontation with sensitive subject matter. There is an element of insufficiency in the first case and of distancing in the second, but neither is always self-evident.
When an omission is involuntary, the reason may often be found in at least one of several circumstances. An entire segment of the facts may have been bypassed because the researcher could not recognize their relevance. A factual finding may be in disarray because a piece of the puzzle was not at hand. A skeletal picture may have been drawn because a close-up view was blocked. The following are a few illustrations of these difficulties.
Detecting particular aspects of the Holocaust, such as the background of the perpetrators or the connections of the Holocaust with other developments, has been remarkably slow. Even basics that may now be regarded as obvious had to be discovered, and each discovery was a change of a common impression. It is in the nature of things that these accomplishments do not tell us how many revelations are still in the offing. One can only assume that whatever none of us has observed so far, one of us may notice in the future. Here, then, are some advances of the past that serve as a reminder not to conclude at any time that nothing more has to be done.
At the very beginning references to the Holocaust were cloudy. The phenomenon had no name and could not be distinguished from hostility to Jews in prior centuries or from acts of contemporaneous aggression against other groups. The vocabulary generally used in discourse about the Jewish catastrophe was limited to such expressions as “anti-Semitism,” “persecution,” “atrocities,” “Nazis,” or “beasts.” The words were limited and could not encompass what had happened. They were obsolete, because the German outburst could only be perceived in a fog. Its unprecedented character could not be grasped. Its actuality was unimaginable.
Consequently, many initial attempts at understanding were misguided shortcuts. The SS and the Gestapo were conspicuous, but in one of the Nuremberg trials it came as a surprise that the officers of the Einsatzgruppen, who were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands by shooting, were not hooligans but lawyers or other professionals with academic degrees.1 Again, the leadership of the ministerial bureaucracy in Vichy France, which drafted and signed many anti-Jewish decrees and at first was thought to be a throwback to the nineteenth century, turned out to contain a number of young technocrats who wanted to modernize the country.2 The Romanian Iron Guard, viewed after the Bucharest revolt of 1941 only as a bunch of street battlers excelling in brutality, had, among others, poets and mystics in their midst.3
Nazi Germany as a whole was crudely described as a totalitarian regime, operating under the leadership principle and demanding blind obedience by automatons. Then Uwe Dietrich Adam showed how the system was developing without many new laws and how it was spewing out “implementation decrees” that did not necessarily implement the old laws.4 Christopher Browning, in turn, found an incident that literally tested the presumption that absolute, uncompromising orders were indispensable. In the Polish town of Józefów, the commander of a newly deployed German police battalion had actually given his men a choice between shooting Jews or stepping aside. A sufficient number were ready to carry out the action.5
In the web of decision-making by all sorts of agencies, the Holocaust was a distinct undertaking, but one that was not unseparated from other concurrent operations. The links had to be uncovered, one by one, and that is an ongoing effort. Götz Aly, who is an exceptionally astute practitioner of this art, revealed the strands between the Holocaust and resettlement policies and between the Holocaust and the search for funds to finance the war.6 Susanne Willems, following on this path, showed how the concentration and deportations of the Jews in Berlin were planned in conjunction with the housing program for the German capital.7 Walter Manoschek and Ulrich Herbert observed a confluence of goals in military reprisals and the shooting of Jewish men.8
In the realm of studies exploring the Jewish communities, Isaiah Trunk’s dissection of their reactions was a major step forward. Trunk discovered something that no one had looked for: a Jewish political culture so deeply rooted that it emerged in the closed-off ghettos of Eastern Europe, notwithstanding their geographic isolation from one another and the lack of direct contacts between them. Trunk did not write his massive work as a history of individual ghettos. He cut across all of them to deal with the way they approached problems of housing, labor, health, and other challenges. In that manner he demonstrated that atomized Jewry had a common mode of reacting to restrictions and danger. Trunk did not proclaim his conclusions, but they leap from his chapters. More than thirty years after his book was published, nothing of this scope about the ghetto Jews has yet appeared in print.9
Discernment cannot be programmed. One must wait for a researcher who can detect the characteristics of a phenomenon, or explore its environment, or draw its Gestalt. But what if someone is already pursuing a project and something goes wrong? We almost never have all the sources that we might like at our disposal, and sometimes a single missing document may generate a problem. If the historian believes that the item cannot be found or that it no longer exists, what then? Months, years, or decades may be spent in conjectures about its content. Indications may be gathered from other, albeit inconclusive materials, and in a compulsive attempt to complete the picture, something may be said to take the place of the elusive fact. A date may be offered, or the identity of a person—anything that one might wish to know. In lieu of certainty, assumptions will be inserted and extrapolations may be built on them, thereby compounding the author’s vulnerability.
The following two cases are examples of what may happen. Both pertain to numbers. This selection is deliberate because the finding of an error in numerical manipulations is unambiguous. The first illustration deals with calculations of the Jewish death toll in Belzec, which was the destination of many transports of Jews from Polish cities and towns and did not receive non-Jewish deportees.
The Israeli historian Yitzhak Arad used a variety of estimates prepared in Poland and Israel to construct a table of deportations to the Belzec camp. The approximate figures pointed to an overall sum of somewhat more than 500,000, including some 280,000 from the Galician district alone. Arad also assumed that German Jews who had been deported first to the Lublin district and only then to Belzec were not counted in his sources. The Jews in small villages, he thought, had not been taken into account, either. Therefore, he believed that at least one hundred thousand people should be added to the list, bringing his total to six hundred thousand.10 There was, in fact, no such dark area and his upward adjustments were in error. I myself did not make that particular mistake. I made a different one.
Shortly after I began my work in the late 1940s, I examined two documents. One was the report about the results of the “Final Solution,” which covered deportations in Poland to the end of 1942, by the SS statistician Richard Korherr.11 The other was a “Final Solution” report by the SS and police leader in the Galician district of the so-called Generalgouvernement of conquered Poland, Fritz Katzmann, dated 30 June 1943, about operations in his territory.12
In the Korherr report, I noted two figures:
| “Dragged through” the camps of the Generalgouvernement by 31 December 1942: | 1,274,166 |
| Remaining in the Galician district on 31 December 1942: | 161,514 |
In the Katzmann report I noted:
| Deported or killed in Galicia by 27 June 1943: | 434,329 |
| Remaining in labor camps within Galicia on 27 June 1943: | 21,156 |
My initial focus was on the number 1,274,166. I knew that three camps were definitely included in this total: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. I had also found out that gassing had ceased in Belzec on 8 December 1942, but I could not disaggregate the overall figure.13
Many years later, when I learned more about the flow of deportees to this camp complex, I surmised that the majority of the Belzec victims must have arrived from Galicia and that virtually all of the Galician deportees must have been sent to Belzec. By 1971, I computed a total of roughly 600,000 dead in the camp,14 and by 1985, I scaled my estimate down to 550,000.15 In pursuing the number, I had arranged the three other “Final Solution” figures reported by Korherr and Katzmann in the following manner:
Maximum number of Galician Jews killed in 1943:
161,514 (alive 31 December 1942) − 21,156 (alive 17 June 1943)
= 140,358
Maximum of Galician Jews killed in 1942 after the start of deportations:
434,329 (total killed) − 140,358 (number for 1943) = 293,971
Maximum number of Galician Jews killed in Belzec:
293,971 the number shot in 1942 = ?
At this point, however, I did not follow the subtractions to their logical conclusion, even though I might have obtained a reasonable approximation. My problem was the 140,348 who vanished between 31 December 1942 and 27 June 1943. Some were undoubtedly in hiding and others had succumbed to typhus and other diseases, but at least 130,000 must have been killed. I could not confirm the sparse witness testimony of Galician deportations to other camps in any German document, and I could not substantiate shootings of such a volume from the fragmentary records at my disposal. Therefore, I set aside Korherr’s year-end figure of 161,154. It was not the product of a census, after all, and the local reports from which it must have been constructed were not at hand. Perhaps these reports were rounded, or late, or both. Only after the appearance in 1997 of a highly detailed monograph by Dieter Pohl, who visited archives in Galicia after they had been opened in the 1990s and whose knowledge of their holdings was greater than mine, did I realize that many of the 1943 shootings had escaped my notice. More ghettos than I had suspected were still in existence early in 1943, and several of the larger ones were thinned out more than once.16
The actual Belzec toll was revealed in 2001 by Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas. It was 434,508, and the German report containing this number had been unearthed only shortly before among radio intercepts that the British government had kept secret for more than fifty years.17 I had overshot the mark by more than one hundred thousand.18 Needless to say, when the breakdown of a sum is incorrect, more than one other constituent number will be wrong. In my case, there were two more: those for Treblinka and Lublin (Majdanek). My suppositions regarding the number of people killed at these facilities were too low. As to Majdanek, I had hesitated to include it as a Generalgouvernement (General Government) camp, because it was not under the same jurisdiction as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The new document set matters straight also on this point. Majdanek’s victims were to be included in part.
A more complicated anatomy of a faulty numerical compilation is exemplified by a table in a book by Israel Gutman about the ghetto of Warsaw.19 Gutman states that the source of the table, which lists the number of Jews deported daily from the ghetto to Treblinka, is a 1951 issue of a bulletin published by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.20 His heading for the table is “German Statistics of the Deportations.” The data cover the dates from 22 July to 21 September 1942, and his total is 253,741. For 19 to 24 August, a single entry is a round twenty thousand with the notation “estimate”; for 26 August, a round three thousand (again an “estimate”); and for 11 September, a round five thousand, a third estimate. In addition, two intermissions are indicated as well.
What is unusual about this tabular enumeration is that it conflicts with another number that Gutman must have found in a report made by the SS and police leader of Warsaw, Jürgen Stroop, after the ghetto battle of 1943. There, Stroop states that 310,322 Jews had been deported in the summer of 1942.21 Could the fact that the table used by Gutman was a detailed accounting, and the number by Stroop only a solitary sum, have been the reason for choosing the former and discarding the latter? His choice, whatever its basis, was fraught with multiple mishaps.
Gutman was evidently not aware that his figures were not German to begin with. They came from the Jewish Council in the ghetto. To the extent that his August numbers were precise, they coincided—except for incorrect copying of a few insignificant digits—with those of the council report for that month. Inasmuch, however, as he did not have that document, he was ignorant of a sentence in its text stating, “We have no statistic of those persons who volunteered to be resettled.”22 The “volunteers” were a large component of the total.
There is a second, partially countervailing complication. Whenever Gutman’s table contains an approximation, it is a rounded multiple of the preceding exact figure. Thus, for 19 to 24 August, the twenty thousand are roughly five times the 3,926 for 18 August, and for 26 August, the three thousand are taken from the 3,002 for 25 August, but in the report of the council there are mere dashes beside the dates for which Gutman inserted his estimates. That forcible substitution is negated by entries in a ghetto diary by Abraham Lewin, which Gutman cited repeatedly in other contexts, and includes explicit statements to the effect that no transports left on 19 and 20 August as well as on other specific dates.23
Errors, like breakthroughs, are the acts of individual authors. They may be spread when they are copied. It should be stressed, however, that missteps of this sort are not altogether unusual, either in Holocaust historiography or the writing of history generally. They do not invalidate an entire work, unless they are the foundation of everything their creator had to say. When they do arise because a specific item of information was missing, overlooked, or misconstrued, knowledge is not impaired for all time and progress is not foreclosed.
The situation is different when the historian wishes to step closer to the scene of the action, to be inside its space. Most of the sources are essentially dry, not reaching the senses. Generally, they do not have the quality of something that is visible, audible, or palpable. Official correspondence in particular tends to be telescopic, purposeful, and problem-oriented. In such writing, mention may be made in a clinical manner of the psychological burdens carried by shooters, or comments could be added without elaboration to the effect that Jews were literally collapsing in the course of forced labor, but there is seldom more. Witnesses, especially Jewish victims, struggle with language to express what they saw. Consequently, neither Germans nor Jews will convey much about the atmosphere of the time. In this respect, the inadequacy of the sources is a common limitation affecting all historians in all fields, but the problem is more acute in attempts to deal with an event like the Holocaust, which is far removed from ordinary experience.
Although survivors have greater motivations than their tormentors to provide details about the impact of the blows inflicted on the Jewish community, the results are nevertheless meager. A former inmate of the Croatian camp network at Jasenovac, where many Jews, alongside Serbs and others, were held and killed, wrote about his observations at length. His account, however, is filled only with repetitious statements that Jews were “flogged,” “killed,” “gunned down,” “killed behind the kitchen,” “clubbed to death,” “shot,” “bayoneted,” “hit,” “murdered right then and there,” and so on.24 In the extensive survivor testimony, this kind of rendition is fairly typical.
Less ordinary is the commentary of Stanisław Adler, a lawyer who served as a police officer in the Warsaw ghetto, that is, its Jewish police. In his memoir he relates that toward the end of spring of 1941, when thousands of Warsaw Jews labored in water regulation and other outdoor projects, the returning workers were escorted by Polish police to the “Dulag” (Durchgangslager, or transit camp), a spacious school building outside the ghetto boundaries at 109 Leszno Street. Many who were dying or ill with infections rested there, segregated from the others, on bare stone or cement floors. Adler heard their testimony uttered in “monotone.” He does not attempt to repeat exactly what they said. We are shown only shadowy figures in tattered clothes. He wonders “when, during their tortures” these people had time to work. He is “unable to explain by what miracle” some of them survived after having been chained and dragged on the ground for several kilometers. In short, we see the men in a mirror. The reflector is Adler, who tells us what he perceived and to what he reacted.25
In the testimony of a German policeman who participated in mass shootings, there are denials and hints that raise suspicions but leave little certainty. Yes, he stood in the ditch when the victims, lying down, were shot. No, he did not stand on bodies. Yes, he shot children but told the mothers to hold a child tightly during the shooting. Yes, he smoked during these actions, but there was no alcohol. And no, he did not eat at the site. Eating would have been impossible because of the odor. Then he described what kind of odor it was.26
Infrequently, a shimmering sentence in a report evokes presence. “Barley soup with chunks of beef was served,” a captain of the Order Police, who had accompanied a transport of Jews from Düsseldorf to Riga with a small detachment, noted in his report. He did not forget to praise the German Red Cross who fed his men when the train had halted after three days in Siaulai, Lithuania, during a wet and cold December night in 1941. The Jews, who had to manage with provisions they had brought with them, were allowed only water en route.27
Rare also is the description of food purchased in the Lodz ghetto in February 1944, after the Germans had decreed that during work hours no Jew would be allowed in the streets or an apartment. To obtain their weekly ration of two kilograms of bread, the workers, many of whom had not eaten during the previous day, hurled themselves after 5:00 p.m. at the distribution centers to avoid having to wait at the end of a line outside in the snow and in fear that a “shortfall” would leave them emptyhanded. They banged on the windows, shouted, and pressed against each other tightly, eyeing the loaves. The passage about this scene, which was written in the official Jewish Lodz ghetto chronicle for posterity, has remained unpublished.28
Through lengthy searches, it is possible to uncover other scattered images, but such descriptions cannot be manufactured by the historian. It is for this reason that novelists and film directors step in. To fill the gap they promise an imaginative reconstruction, but given the manifest difficulties it is often imaginary.
In sum, when we consider the inabilities of observers to recognize a pattern in a maze, or to steer around a missing link, or to penetrate the blackness surrounding the nucleus of an event, we surmise the existence of an elusiveness—a quality that is unreached and unachieved. Yet there are also questions that are consciously avoided. To this day, one topic that is noticeably underdeveloped touches on an issue of prime importance, and that is the story of how specific groups in the Jewish community, caught in the grip of destruction, reacted daily to restrictions and danger. What did coping look like? In their dilemma, what did lawyers do or illiterates? How were family relations preserved or transformed? What was the significance of age? What role did money play? What might have been the personal budget of working Jews in the Berlin of 1941, or the Saloniki of 1942, or the Theresienstadt ghetto of 1943? Information about such seemingly mundane matters in published essays and books is rather fragmentary or presented in outline form.29
One reason for this dearth is plainly the loss, in the course of ghetto clearing operations or the clearing of Jewish apartments, of the great bulk of Jewish records, including private diaries and letters, as well as correspondence and reports of Jewish councils. Another is the failure, especially during the initial postwar years, to question Jewish survivors in detail about conditions and occurrences that were antecedent to climactic moments. Ultimately, however, there is a persistent reluctance to approach the subject of interpersonal relations among the Jewish victims. The “No Trespassing” signs were placed at the boundaries of this topic by the researchers themselves. For some, the markers set up by the British army in Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, “Here Lie Buried 2,000 Bodies,” “Here Lie Buried 2,500 Bodies,” “Here Lie Buried 5,000 Bodies,” were the final word. Nothing more could be said about these people, united and indistinguishable in death. Others, like Primo Levi, called upon everyone to heed the command not to make judgments. Who, after all, could step into the shoes of those victims? No one. For still others, the psychological limit had been reached. There were some things they did not want to know.
Still, when Primo Levi wrote about a “gray zone,” he placed the problem on the agenda. Levi, the chemist and Auschwitz survivor, measured freedom of action and gradations of behavior. Moreover, he had to have symmetry between victims and perpetrators in his analytical commentary. Although he would not allow any merging of “prisoners” and “custodians,” as he called them, he did not hesitate to attribute weaknesses to the former and to grant saving graces to the latter. He cites the case of two merchants, one who was the Jewish “Elder” of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, the other the ghetto’s German manager, Hans Biebow.30 Both were ambitious and both had a vested interest in preserving the ghetto from deportations. Rumkowski even sacrificed children to maintain the ghetto as a manufacturing enterprise, and Biebow—with his staff of 198 employees—concerned himself with food rations, production, and ghetto exports until the last moment, that is, just before the transportation of the Lodz Jews to Auschwitz, when he told them in a duplicitous manner that they would be resettled for their safety from Allied bombs. Rumkowski perished in the camp and Biebow was executed after the war. Levi did not know the whole story of the strange symbiosis that paired the two men, but he understood that each played his role consistently. They may have been self-serving, but they pursued the same goal. In the end they failed, and that failure sealed also their personal fate.
Rumkowski has received considerable attention because he is commonly regarded as the most notorious ghetto leader. With few exceptions his counterparts in other places remain indistinct. They are described in the aggregate but seldom as individuals. Noteworthy is the fact that an extensive memoir by the last Slovak Jewish council chairman, Oscar Neumann, written in the spring of 1946 and published ten years later in the original German language, never appeared in English,31 and that the diary of the French Jewish leader, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, published in France, is also unavailable in English translation.32 We hardly have to remind ourselves that such firsthand accounts are not abundant.
The inhibition to study the invisible victims is even greater. Information about them is not completely unattainable, since it may be located, at least in the charts and tables of remaining Jewish council reports, as well as in other sources, but its implications have not been seriously addressed. Unanswered are principally those questions that hint at fissures and breakdowns in the Jewish community and that point to differential vulnerabilities of its component groups. These variations emerged during the earliest anti-Jewish constrictions and became more pronounced in the ensuing years. When, for example, only half of the Jewish school-aged children in France or Częstochowa received an education, which ones were selected and which were in the other half? When Jewish men were impressed for labor in Poland or Romania, who had to work and who was exempt? When the number of calories consumed on average in a ghetto was such and such, which families were near or above that line and which fell to the bottom? Primo Levi raises this question briefly when he alludes to Auschwitz survivors as having eaten more than the usual camp ration.33
A handful of authors probed the lives of ordinary people at some depth. One was Stanisław Adler, who wrote his sophisticated memoir at the end of the war in Polish. He committed suicide in 1946 and a friend brought his manuscript to Israel. An English translation was published by Yad Vashem thirty-six years later, but the book was not distributed in the United States.34 Another was the American sociologist John K. Dickinson, who spent several years in Germany during the 1950s, where he interviewed 172 persons about the life and death of a single unknown Jewish victim. He wrote a biography of this man, giving him a fictional name. The publication of the account in 1967 did not attract much public or academic interest.35 In 2001, it was still one of a kind. Reissued that year by a small publisher who had edited the book thirty-four years earlier, but this time with an appendix identifying the place of the story and revealing the real names of the victims and witnesses, the monograph was largely ignored again.36 The relative silence that greeted the insightful work of Adler and Dickinson is symptomatic of an extraordinarily low receptivity to issues at the core of the Jewish catastrophe and of an unmistakable psychological unpreparedness to examine them.
We have always known that the progress of research depends, in the first instance, on accessibility of source materials. What we did not readily admit to ourselves for several decades is that even sizable stockpiles of records in wide-open archives do not guarantee any substantial growth of interest. We have had to learn the hard way that advances of knowledge are not automatic. They become possible when someone steps out of a habitual framework of thought to recognize complications or connections not seen before, or when fortuitously a missing fact is found, or when patient sifting through large collections of records allows glances at life as it was lived. All this is part of a process that may span several generations of researchers. The sheer passage of time governs also the slow disintegration of inhibitions that have blocked questions and answers with respect to the behavior of victims in extreme situations. But the reticence that persists will be overcome, and the ambiguities that it produced will disappear.
1. See the opening paragraphs, listing the academic and professional qualifications of the accused, in the sentencing portions of the judgment rendered in United States v. Ohlendorf (the Einsatzgruppen case), in Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Trials of War Criminals (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946–49), vol. 4, 510–96.
2. See Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to Liberation, 1938–1944 (New York, 1984), 56.
3. Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, trans. Peter Heinegg (Boulder, CO, 1990).
4. Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972).
5. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).
6. Götz Aly, Endlösung: Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den Europäischen Juden (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), [and Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York, 2005).]
7. Susanne Willems, Der entsiedelte Jude: Albert Speer’s Wohnungsmarktpolitik für den Berliner Hauptstadtbau (Berlin, 2002).
8. Walter Manoschek, “Serbien ist judenfrei”: Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42 (Munich, 1993); Ulrich Herbert, “Die deutsche Militärverwaltung in Paris und die Deportation der französische Juden,” in Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit, ed. Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer, and Bernd Weisbrod (Berlin, 1995), 439–40, 447.
9. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York, 1972).
10. Yitzhak Arad, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 126–27, 383–89. Arad also referred to a German court judgment setting forth six hundred thousand. The number appears in a Polish handbook as well. See Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce and Czeslaw Pilichowski, Obozy hitlerowskie na ziemiach polskich 1939–1945 (Warsaw, 1979), 293–94.
11. Korherr to Himmler [27 March 1943], Nuremberg trials document NO-5194.
12. Katzmann to Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Krüger, 30 June 1943, Nuremberg trials document L-18.
13. I listed only “hundreds of thousands” for each camp. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), 572.
14. Raul Hilberg, ed., Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry, 1933–1945 (Chicago, 1971), 206.
15. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 893, 1219.
16. See Dieter Pohl, Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941–1944 (Munich, 1997), 245–65.
17. Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews During ‘Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 468–86. The item was a radiogram by an SS officer, Hermann Höfle, who was stationed in Lublin, to another SS officer, Franz Heim, in Krakow, 11 January 1943, decoded by the British Code and Cypher School. “Reinhardt” was the German code name for the operation that eventuated in 1,274,166 Jews dead by the end of 1942. The figure in the radiogram was the same as Korherr’s.
18. I corrected the error in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 958, 1320.
19. Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943 (Bloomington, IN, 1982), 212–13.
20. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny (Varsovie), Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 1 (1951), 81, 86, 90, as cited by Gutman with his table.
21. Stroop to Higher SS and Police Leader Krüger, 16 May 1943, Nuremberg trials document PS-1061.
22. Chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, Marek Lichtenbaum, to the German Kommissar of the ghetto, Heinz Auerswald, 5 September 1943, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen in Ludwigsburg, Akten Auerswald, Red Series 365e.
23. For an English-language translation of the diary, see Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto (Oxford, 1989), 160–62. Gutman’s error also had reverberations. Thus, his underestimate of the deportations is coupled with his corresponding failure to gauge the actual size of the ghetto population just before their start. That figure must have been over 380,000 rather than his 350,000. See the census count (397,016) for 1 March 1942 in a report by Regierungsdirektor Curt Hoffmann (Labor Office, Warsaw District), 12 June 1942, Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg, Red Series 365d. Gutman did not have that statistic, either.
24. Duro Schwarz, “The Jasenovac Death Camps,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996): 383–430.
25. Stanisław Adler, In the Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–1943 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982), 211–12.
26. Excerpts from the testimony by Adolf Petsch, a member of the Security Police in the area of Pinsk-Stolin who participated in massacres during 1942 at Janov, in the indictment of the prosecutor at the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main, 4 Js 901/62, dated 28 March 1968, 64–66.
27. Report by Captain Paul Salliter, covering 11–17 December 1941, in Hans G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch (Tübingen, 1975), 462.
28. Typescript of the entry of 26 February 1944, with the initials of Alice de Bunom. Courtesy of Lucjan Dobroszycki.
29. See, for example, the fragmentary description of conditions affecting Parisian Jewry by Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Hanover, NH, 2001), 327–32.
30. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1988), 60–69.
31. Oscar Neumann, Im Schatten des Todes: Vom Schicksalskampf des slowakischen Judentums (Tel Aviv, 1956). The book has three hundred tightly printed pages.
32. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin (Paris, 1985).
33. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 41.
34. Adler, Warsaw Ghetto.
35. John K. Dickinson, German & Jew: The Life and Death of Sigmund Stein (Chicago, 1967). “Stein” is a pseudonym. The publisher, Quadrangle Books, is now extinct.
36. The publisher was Ivan R. Dee, the editor of Quadrangle Books in the 1960s.
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Originally published in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Jonathan Petropolous and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 81–92.