Historical insights: focus on teaching
Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st century
Richard A. Hawkins
April 2014
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Contents1
1
Introduction
3
2
Contextualising the Holocaust
3
3
Survivor testimonies and memoirs
5
4
Field trips
6
4.1 Domestic field trips
6
4.2 Foreign field trips
6
5
Using film to teach the Holocaust
7
6
Teaching topics
8
6.1. Victims: the Kindertransport 1938-39
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6.2 Bystanders: the Bulgarians
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6.3 Perpetrators: post-war trials – the Koblenz trial 1962-63
15
7
Conclusion
17
8
Bibliography
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8.1 Online and audio-visual resources
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8.2 Primary sources
17
8.3 Secondary sources
18
Acknowledgments
20
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Cover photography: View of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp site of commemoration with monument to victims in the
background (© Richard A. Hawkins)
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1
Introduction
As Simon Schama has recently observed (Financial Times, 2012), it was almost ten years after the end of World War II
before historians began to research what later became known as the Holocaust or Shoah. It took more than another 30
years before Holocaust modules became a standard feature of UK undergraduate History curricula. Indeed, in most
cases this was initially reactive – a response to the introduction of the Holocaust as a compulsory element in England’s
History key stage three curriculum in 1994. An important feature of many of higher education (HE) Holocaust modules
has been the inclusion of face-to-face testimony by Holocaust survivors. Informal meetings between a survivor and small
groups of students are particularly effective. However, very soon the Holocaust will no longer be within living memory
and Holocaust education in HE will need to adapt.
There are a variety of different approaches to the teaching of the Holocaust in UK higher education institutions (HEIs).
At many institutions it is discipline specific, and is taught as part of History, Religious Studies, Literature, or Film Studies
degrees. Other institutions adopt an interdisciplinary approach. However, there are many issues regarding the teaching
of the Holocaust that transcend disciplines. All tutors will face the challenge of how to capture the full enormity of the
Holocaust. Historian Otto Dov Kulka (2013: 80) recalls reading an acclaimed history of the Holocaust which he felt, as a
survivor, totally failed to capture his own experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Simon Schama (Financial Times, 2013) in his
recent review of Kulka’s Holocaust memoir observes:
It is commonplace that in the matter of the Holocaust, words fail us, especially the wrought language of literature,
struggles to register atrocities unrecognisable as the acts of sentient humans… The dilemma is particularly acute
among the dwindling band of survivors whose personal testimony is unreproducable by second-hand accounts, yet
who are traumatically burdened with the indecency of adjectives; the sense that writing may never be more than an
artificial simulacrum of what remains buried in their nightmares like deep-lodged shrapnel.
Teaching can also never be more than an “artificial simulacrum”. Many students find it hard to comprehend the full
horror of the Holocaust or that the perpetrators were for the most part everymen and women rather than
psychopaths. Some students regard the Holocaust as akin to a horror film: something unreal. It should also be noted
that some learners find it difficult to engage with written texts or lectures and only start to empathise with the victims
during field trips to places such as the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. The artefacts have an
authenticity that textbooks and lectures lack.
There is an important issue about who qualify as Holocaust victims. Are they just the Jewish victims of Nazi mass
murder? Should we also include the 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war killed in Auschwitz or elsewhere, the 500,000 or
more Roma victims (Gregory, 2000: 41, 43), the gay and lesbian victims, the Afro-German victims and/or the Jehovah’s
Witnesses victims?
Paul R. Bartrop (2004: 10-11), an Australian History lecturer who specialises in the Holocaust, observes that, “The most
we can hope to achieve is that our students will come out of a course with a deeper understanding of what things had
been like at that time. I do not think that any course could cover every base, though that never stops me from trying.”
It is also important to note, notwithstanding the vast existing academic literature, that historical research continues to
throw new light on the Holocaust. Even so-called basic information has been revised. The collapse of the Soviet Union
and its satellite states in the late 20th century made previously closed archives accessible to historians. Researchers at
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have recently completed the documentation of all of the ghettos, slave
labour sites, concentration camps and other centres established by the Germans to implement the Holocaust. The
researchers have identified some 42,500 ghettos and camps scattered across Europe during the period 1933 to 1945.
This is many times the previous estimate of 7,000. Martin Dean, one of the project’s co-researchers, asserts that their
findings contradict the claims made by German civilians who lived through World War II that they knew nothing about
the Holocaust: “You literally could not [go] anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, POW
camps, concentration camps. They were everywhere.” (Lichtbau, 2013)
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Contextualising the Holocaust
It is very important to contextualise the Holocaust because it very clearly did not take place in a vacuum, though some
historians have fallen prey to this approach. For example, David Goldhagen’s (1997) thesis that the Germans have a
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unique genocidal mentality has not gained acceptance among Holocaust scholars because it does not take into account
the wider context. This broader context has numerous aspects.
Many Holocaust modules seek to place the Holocaust in the context of Christian anti-Semitism. There is a long tradition
of Christian anti-Semitism in Europe which remained extant in many European countries at least until the post-World
War II period. It is useful to remind students that the British Isles were not an exception to this tradition. England had a
very bad record of anti-Semitism dating back to the medieval period. In Ireland, the Limerick pogrom of 1904 is an
extreme manifestation of anti-Semitism in the modern era. It may also be worth looking at traditions of anti-Semitism in
other religions. In particular, it could be argued a consideration of Muslim anti-Semitism is relevant, given the German
occupation of North Africa, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’s support for the Holocaust, and the Bosnian Muslim
volunteers who served in the Schutzstaffel (SS). On the other hand, students need to be made aware of the fact that
Nazi anti-Semitism was primarily secular rather than religious.
Hubert Locke (2004) has observed in his foreword that no one who teaches the Holocaust can avoid addressing the
issue of comparability. Hitler is believed to have observed: “who remembers the Armenian genocide.” Indeed some
scholars seek to place the Holocaust in the context of other genocides. Deborah Lipstadt (2005) has argued that the
Armenian genocide is a comparable event to the Holocaust. Another historian has recently compared the Holocaust
with the dispossession and killing of the indigenous peoples of the United States (Kakel III, 2011). Certain scholars argue
that the Holocaust is a unique event. Michael A. Reynolds (2011) has presented a convincing argument in the case of the
Armenian genocide that it needs to be seen in the context of competition for land and resources with the Kurds, who
lived side by side the Armenians, where the rise of nationalism had turned the two communities against each other
creating a quite different context.
There is also a good case for including some course content on European and North African Jewry on the eve of the
Holocaust. It is often forgotten that the Holocaust also impacted on North African Jewry, although the Germans and
Italians were defeated in North Africa before they were able to deport the Jews of the French and Italian colonies to be
exterminated in Europe (Ochayon, 2011a and 2011b). For example, Paul R. Bartrop (2004: 10), , starts his module by
focusing on the nature of the Jewish communities in Europe that were about to be destroyed. In Europe, Jews had led
the way in embracing modernity. Indeed, Bernard Wasserstein (2012) has argued in that European Jewry was in decline
by the 1930s, suggesting that even in eastern European countries such as Poland there was a strong movement toward
assimilation accompanied by a growth in disaffiliation from the Jewish religion and marriages between Jews and nonJews. He also argues that among observant Jews the ultra-orthodox tradition was in decline. Similarly in North Africa,
many Jews had assimilated into the culture of the French, Italian and British colonists. This was particularly the case in
the French colony of Algeria (Ochayon, 2011a; Krämer, 1989).
There is also a case for exploring the Jewish reaction to the Nazi government’s anti-Semitic policies from January 1933.
The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC regards the anti-Nazi boycott organised by the Jewish
community in the United States in response to the boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany from 1933 as an important
part of the context of the Holocaust. In fact Jews around the world organised boycotts of German goods and services
including in Britain, France, Poland and the Netherlands. The most important leader in the American and international
boycott movement was the Wall Street lawyer, Samuel Untermyer (1858-1940), who devoted the last years of his life
to an unsuccessful attempt to save the Jews of Germany from mass murder by the Hitler regime (Hawkins, 2007; 2010).
It is important to note that these boycott campaigns were generally opposed or not supported by the governments of
the countries in which they took place. For example, Sharon Gewirtz (1991) has noted the opposition of the British
government to the boycott campaign. Only in the United States did the campaign prove sustainable, and even there it
failed to have a major economic impact, perhaps because the Roosevelt administration withheld its support.
Linked to the boycotts is the difficulty experienced by Jewish refugees trying to escape Nazi persecution during the
1930s. As the Evian conference of 1938 showed, no country in the world was prepared to grant refuge to significant
numbers of Jews. Many countries such as Britain and America placed strict limits on immigration during the interwar
period. The Canadian government’s Jewish refugee policy of ‘none is too many’ is an extreme example of pre-war
indifference to the plight of Central European Jewry (Abella and Troper, 2012) (The Kindertransport to Britain, discussed
elsewhere in this booklet, are an exception). As American Jewish boycott leader Samuel Untermyer presciently
observed in a speech in January 1934, that if Hitler was unable to rid Germany of its Jews by emigration he would
ultimately resort to mass murder (Hawkins, 2007). It is also worth noting that although Zionist leaders negotiated an
agreement with the German government to facilitate the emigration of Jews from Germany to Palestine, the growing
conflict over land and resources between the Jews and Arabs in the British mandate led the British authorities to
severely restrict Jewish immigration. Finally it is useful, as well as obvious, to place the Holocaust in the context of
German history. The defeat of Germany in the First World War, the subsequent revolution and counter-revolution, and
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the political instability of the Weimar Republic, all help to contextualise how a ‘civilised’ country succumbed to
barbarism.
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Survivor testimonies and memoirs
An important feature of many of HE Holocaust modules has been the inclusion of face-to-face testimony by Holocaust
survivors. Sue Vice and Gwyneth Badger (2008: 19) observe that students report that “the presence of an eye-witness
in the class was an invaluable part of their learning experience.” However, the passage of time means HE teaching will
soon have to adapt to a world where the Holocaust is no longer within living memory. Witness testimony is central to
our understanding of the Shoah. But as David Cesarani (2012) has observed, it is important to understand the
provenance of survivor testimony. When the first interviews took place with Holocaust survivors after the liberation of
the concentration camps, people still did not fully comprehend what exactly had happened or the full scale of the Shoah.
So interviewers might ask survivors questions such as “Can you tell me what happened in the gas chambers?” Likewise
the survivors were struggling to fully comprehend the full context of what they had experienced and, moreover,
Cesarani notes that very few interviews were conducted in the first few decades after the end of World War II. So we
have very few Holocaust survivor testimonies by mothers, fathers or elderly people.
Cesarani also notes that survivor recollections undergo subtle changes over time. People restructure their memories as
they grow older. He also notes that sometimes those who record survivor testimonies are unwilling to record
recollections of sensitive issues such as homosexuality or sexual misconduct by camp inmates toward other inmates.
However, Rainer Schulze (2012) has noted in the case of the survivor interviews he recorded for the Bergen Belsen
documentation centre, the interviewees were given complete freedom to discuss their experiences including what some
might regard as taboo topics.
So it is important when tutors make use of recorded survivor testimonies that learners are made aware both of the
specific issues and also more generic issues related to oral history. The University of Southern California Shoah
Foundation’s new resource, iWitness, had made available 1,000 selected videos from the nearly 52,000 Shoah survivor
and witness testimonies recorded between 1994 and 1999 by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
(now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute). The Institute interviewed a large array of victims: Jewish survivors;
homosexual survivors; Jehovah’s Witness survivors; liberators and liberation witnesses; political prisoners; rescuers and
aid providers; Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors; survivors of eugenics policies; and war crimes trials participants. Tutors
who wish to participate in iWitness, and more importantly provide their students access to the database, can apply to
register for iWitness (at [email protected]) in order to gain access to links to glossaries, timelines, frequently asked
questions, bibliographies, and additional links to museums, sites of remembrance and other relevant websites.
Filmed interviews are only one medium used to record survivor testimonies. Others include printed autobiographies
and memoirs. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947) is the first and probably most well-known Holocaust memoir (see
Rachel Falconer, 2008 for a discussion of teaching Primo Levi). However, there are now countless published written
accounts of the Holocaust. Some of the most interesting memoirs are those of Jews who managed to escape
deportation by hiding in plain sight. Both Sally Perel’s Europa, Europa (1997) and Cioma Schönhaus’s The Forger (2007)
provide fascinating insights into the German civilian population’s perception of the Holocaust as seen from the
perspective of U-Boote Juden (underground Jews). Diaries written by Jews who experienced the Holocaust are another
important primary source. The Diary of Anne Frank is the most well-known diary, however, tutors might also consider
using Avraham Tory’s Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary (1991). This diary, hidden and retrieved after World
War II, chronicles the experience of life and death in the Jewish Ghetto of Kovno, Lithuania, from June 1941 to January
1944 (Porat, 2007). It is also worth considering the use of memoirs of survivors that relate how they have dealt with the
aftermath of the Holocaust such as that of Anne Frank’s posthumous step-sister, Eva Schloss (2013).
Tutors may also wish to draw upon literary texts with Holocaust themes. The recent controversy regarding Bruno
Apitz’s critically acclaimed Nackt Unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves) (1958) further illustrates some of the issues
related to artistic license. Novelists often seek to adjust the facts so that there is a sharper contrast between black and
white. This novel by an author from the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) was partly based on his
experience of eight years’ imprisonment at Buchenwald concentration camp. Apitz tells the story of a group of
communist prisoners who smuggled a Polish Jewish boy into the camp in a suitcase. They saved his life by concealing him
from the SS guards. The Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) studio director Frank Beyer later turned the novel into a
film in 1963. The following year it was revealed that the boy in the film was based on Stefan Jerzy Zweig, a Polish boy
who was transported from the Krakow Ghetto to Buchenwald at the age of three with his father. Zweig who had
moved with his father to France after the liberation of Buchenwald was celebrated in the GDR and a plaque was
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installed at Buchenwald commemorating his miraculous survival. In the early 21st century, information emerged that
Zweig survived because the communists who saved him had made an agreement with an SS doctor who swapped him
for a 16-year-old Roma boy sent to his death in Zweig’s place. The Buchenwald site of commemoration is now located
in the unified German Federal Republic and is controlled by the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation. In 2012, in response
to the new information, the foundation removed the plaque. Zweig, now living in Israel, took unsuccessful legal action to
prevent the foundation from ascribing his survival to a ‘victim swap’. As Zweig observed “When you erase a name, you
erase the person” (The Observer, 2012).
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Field trips
Many Holocaust modules include field trips. They can be used to promote experiential learning. Henning Grunwald
(2010: 254) argues that the various forms of Holocaust memorialisation have had a ‘Europeanising’ dimension. It could
be argued that this is as true for Holocaust memorialisation in Britain over the last few years as it is for the Holocaust
memorialisation in Germany, France and Poland that Grunwald uses as evidence for his argument.
4.1 Domestic field trips
For HEIs in central England the Beth Shalom Holocaust memorial centre outside Newark in Nottinghamshire is an
excellent venue for a field trip. Beth Shalom, owned by a charitable trust, houses a main exhibition on the history of the
Holocaust; an exhibition on the history of the German government’s anti-Jewish measures from 1933 to 1939 narrated
by an actor in the role of a young German Jewish boy, and a memorial garden. It also features regular talks by Holocaust
survivors in Beth Shalom’s memorial hall. While this centre’s target audience is school children, a visit would also be of
great value to undergraduates studying the Holocaust.
The Imperial War Museum London is another excellent venue for a field trip. The museum has a permanent exhibition
on the Holocaust. Robert Eaglestone and Barry Langford (2008: 8) have observed that “the Imperial War Museum’s
outstanding Holocaust exhibition is an excellent, if underused resource…” The exhibition is supported by specialist
curators and educationalists. Once again, while the museum’s target audience is school children, the exhibition and the
related educational facilities will be of great value to undergraduates. Such a field trip might be combined with a visit to
the Wiener Library in Bloomsbury, though helpfully, the Wiener Library is also willing to do a joint presentation at the
Imperial War Museum London if the logistics of a combined trip are too challenging. The Wiener Library has one of the
world’s most important collections of primary sources relating both to the Holocaust and its context.
4.2 Foreign field trips
Foreign field trips can also form a very useful component of an undergraduate Holocaust module. The majority of
foreign field trips are to Auschwitz in Poland. Krystyna Oleksy (2000) provides a good introduction on behalf of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. However, as with all memorial sites there are issues regarding how the
events which took place at the site are interpreted by the custodians as well as issues regarding signage and the content
of information boards. Students can be encouraged to reflect on these controversies in logs and reflective essays.
From a pedagogical perspective, field trips to Germany are also of great value. A field trip centred on Berlin, for
instance, allows undergraduates to visit at least two important sites of Holocaust commemoration. Within Berlin there
is the House of the Wannsee Conference and English language tours of the exhibition are available. This site also serves
as a centre for civic education, providing an opportunity for undergraduates to participate in a workshop facilitated by
one of the site’s Holocaust education instructors. Outside Berlin there is the opportunity to visit the Memorial and
Museum Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen was a model concentration camp, a training camp, and the SS administrative
headquarters for all of the concentration camps. In addition to sites of Holocaust commemoration there are also sites
of commemoration that focus on other aspects of the criminality associated with National Socialist Germany. These
include the Topography of Terror exhibition which is on the site of the former headquarters of the Gestapo and the
Plötzensee Memorial Centre where from 1933 to 1945, nearly 3,000 people sentenced to death by the National
Socialist judiciary were executed, including 90 people involved in the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944. In addition
to memorial and commemoration sites, Berlin also has a Jewish Museum with a very well designed basement floor
permanent exhibition on the Holocaust. Unlike museums that focus exclusively on the Holocaust, this museum also has
on its other floors a permanent exhibition, which chronicles in great detail the history of German Jewry both before and
after the Holocaust. Significantly, Jews are not just portrayed as victims. In this way, Berlin’s Jewish Museum reflects an
approach taken by its counterpart in Frankfurt am Main.
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Image 1: The house of the Wannsee Conference, Berlin (© Richard A. Hawkins).
It is also worth considering a field trip to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The former Frank home and the secret
annex where Anne and her family were hidden have been transformed into a museum, which encourages visitors to
empathise with the story of Anne and her family. Quotes from Anne's diary are used to scaffold the visitor experience,
while original objects, documents, and photographs and three short films are also used to promote learner engagement.
Another field trip associated with Holocaust teaching in higher education is to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel’s
Holocaust History Museum, Museum of Holocaust Art, Exhibitions Pavilion and Synagogue. In the past, HEIs such as the
University of Wolverhampton have organised field trips to Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem provides an Israeli perspective on
the Holocaust. However, since the intifada of the early 2000s, negative institutional risk assessments have curtailed the
number of field trips there.
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Using film to teach the Holocaust
Film can be a very useful resource for teaching the Holocaust. It can be categorised in a number of ways: news films,
‘documentary films’, cinema films, and filmed survivor interviews. Gefen Bar-on (2005:180) has observed in the case of
cinema films, “On the surface, realism is a reasonable requirement for art that deals with history, especially with an
event as extreme as the Holocaust. The imperative never to forget, made more urgent by the growing problems of
Holocaust denial and Holocaust minimization, requires that alterations to Holocaust art be carefully scrutinized to
ensure that they do not propagate injurious ideas.” Seán Lang (2002) suggests if film is used carefully it can enhance
History teaching.
News films might be considered to be the most authentic type of film but it is always worth pointing out to students
that even news films are mediated as the producer will have decided what to film and the content of the commentary.
JISC MediaHub is a good source of news films from the both the cinema and, later, from Independent Television News
(ITN). For example, The Beasts of Belsen on Trial, a Gaumont British newsfilm, provides a very good example of how
news films can be used in teaching. In essence, it is a report on the Belsen trial which took place at the courthouse at
Luneburg between September and November in 1945. Deirdre Burke has created a very useful generative learning
object (a type of open educational resource) based around this film which can be downloaded for use in teaching (from
http://humbox.ac.uk/).
There have been some major BBC documentary series and those of note include The Nazis: A Warning from History
(1997) and Auschwitz – The Nazis and the Final Solution (2004). Episodes, and extracts from episodes, from these series
can be used to supplement lectures. It is important not to overwhelm students with information particularly if your
Holocaust module is offered at level four. Tutors might want to consider using Dutch Holocaust survivor and
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documentary filmmaker Frank Diamand’s When memory comes (2012), a film about the Jewish historian Saul Friedländer
and his life-long quest to describe the extermination of the European Jews without losing or repressing a primary feeling
of disbelief. Friedländer’s life and work is totally entwined with the history of Europe and European Jewry. He survived
World War II in a convent school in France
while his parents tried to flee to Switzerland in vain and were deported
and murdered in Auschwitz. The film balances Friedländer’s biography, with the explanation of his methodology, the use
of diaries, also those of children, the polyphony of individual historic experience to come closer to historical reality.
Interestingly, it shows Friedländer’s preoccupation with the trivialisation of the Shoah in film and literature. It also
illuminates Friedländer’s concept of Hitler’s ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’: Hitler’s ‘either, or’. Either he would exterminate
‘the Jew’, or ‘the Jew’ would destroy Aryan humanity, everything he had fought for. Friedländer convincingly argues that
this was the defining concept of Nazi policy leading to the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
Cinema films may be a useful teaching resource. Many Holocaust-themed films are based on true stories such as Steven
Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and Edward Zwick’s Defiance (2008). It may be
worth considering German language films such as the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa
(Hitlerjunge Salomon) which is based on the true story of Salomon Perel (1993 and 1997) who escaped the Holocaust
by masquerading as an ethnic German at an elite Hitler Youth boarding school. As with all filmmakers Holland does not
always stay true to Perel’s account. In fact his autobiography is even more extraordinary than Holland’s film. Holland’s
more recent film, In Darkness (2011), is also worth considering. This is based on the wartime story of Leopold Socha
who rescued a group of Jews by hiding them in the sewers of the city of Lwów (Lviv). This film uses a wide variety of
languages including Yiddish, German and the Lwów dialect of Polish.
Some film studies lecturers also make use of cinema films which fictionalise the Holocaust. For example, the Italian
filmmaker Roberto Benigni’s comedy drama Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella) (1997). Historians might justifiably object to
the use of a film for teaching that turns the Holocaust into comedy. However, the film is loosely based on the
filmmaker’s father’s experience of incarceration at Bergen-Belsen. Furthermore, it is worth noting survivor Joseph Bau
(1996) uses humour in his Holocaust memoir. Another example of this film genre is Mark Herman’s The Boy in the
Striped Pyjamas (2008). In this film an eight-year-old camp commandant’s son strikes up an unlikely friendship with a
Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence. Given this scenario could not have happened in reality, this type of film
is less appropriate for History discipline specific Holocaust modules.
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Teaching topics
The following teaching topics provide some useful case studies. The first topic on victims provides a useful insight into
the reaction of both the British establishment and the government to the plight of German and Central European Jews
after it apparently became clear that Hitler posed an existential threat even to children. It is a topic that opens a new
window into the Holocaust for most undergraduate students. The Baldwin Fund for Refugees advertisement shown
below raises an interesting question as to why former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin believed this, as the
Holocaust had not begun in January 1939. The second topic on bystanders provides a case study of a country where
Germany failed to implement the Holocaust. It raises an interesting question of why, apart from Denmark and Germanoccupied North Africa (Satloff, 2006), Bulgaria did not deport its Jewish citizens to the German extermination camps.
The third topic on perpetrators provides a case of study of the post-war trials and the issue of whether the victims of
the Holocaust achieved justice.
6.1. Victims: the Kindertransport 1938-39
During the 1930s it was extremely difficult for Central European Jews fleeing persecution to find refuge in the Englishspeaking nations. The situation became even more acute after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, but
English-speaking countries were particularly unwilling to take refugees. However, in 1938 the American President,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, initiated an international conference to discuss the difficulties faced by German and Austrian Jews
finding a safe haven. It was held in July of that year in Evian, France. The conference was a failure. Apart from the
Dominican Republic, the participants were unwilling to take more refugees (Feingold, 1992: 227-28). The unwilling
included the Conservative government of Neville Chamberlain, which opposed the entry of significant numbers of
Jewish refugees to Britain. Clement Attlee, the leader of the opposition, asked the Prime Minister in a House of
Commons debate on 1 November 1938 what he had done to help refugees since the Evian conference. He replied that
Britain had given refuge to up to 350 Jewish refugees from German-occupied Czechoslovakia subject to the undertaking
that means would be found to support these individuals during their stay in Britain. The Independent MP, Eleanor
Rathbone, responded by asking why Britain had only taken in 350 and, more specifically, the leader of the Liberal Party,
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Sir Archibald Sinclair, observed that there were actually 50,000 Czech Jews in desperate need of refuge (Jewish Chronicle,
1938a).
During the 1930s refugees were subject to the immigration laws of the countries where they sought refuge. The
international concept of the right to asylum had yet to be established and, in Britain, refugees were subject to the 1905
Aliens Act. This act had been a response to an influx of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia and Romania in the
late 19th and early 20th century. Before this time there were no restrictions on immigration into Britain (Holmes, 1988:
71). The act introduced immigration controls and registration.
The situation for German and Austrian Jews became
far worse after the events of the pogrom of 9-10
November 1938 commonly known as Kristallnacht.
Thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and
synagogues were attacked or burnt to the ground
leaving the streets littered with broken glass. Several
Jews were murdered and 30,000 Jewish men were
rounded up and interned in German concentration
camps. Some of those sent to the camps were dead
within a few weeks. If it had been unclear before, now
no one could be in any doubt that the Jews of
Germany and Austria were in mortal danger if they did
not find refuge abroad.
Between 1933 and November 1938 Britain had
granted temporary refuge for 15,000-16,000 Jewish
refugees from Germany. Of these, 4,000-5,000
subsequently emigrated. On 15 November 1938 a
group of prominent Jewish leaders met with Neville
Chamberlain to request the temporary entry of
unaccompanied Jewish refugee children from Germany
and Austria, which their community would take full
financial and physical responsibility for. Chamberlain
referred the request to his Cabinet. They decided to
agree to the request. Israeli historian Judith Tydor
Baumel-Schwartz (2012: 53) suggests that the British
government was under pressure from the American
government to do something in response to the
pogrom.
In a 21 November 1938 House of Commons debate
on Kristallnacht the government announced it would
allow the temporary entry into Britain of an
unspecified number of German Jewish child refugees.
The Prime Minister also talked of exploring colonising
opportunities in Tanganyika and British Guiana (the
colonisation projects were soon overtaken by the
outbreak of World War II). Some understood the
urgency of the situation. The Independent Labour MP,
James Maxton, pointed out that action was required in
days not in weeks or months.
The Kindertransport were permitted by the
government, albeit very slowly (Jewish Chronicle,
1938b). The first Kindertransport from Germany arrived
on 2 December 1938. Further transports were to
arrive from Germany during the next three months.
The children were initially accommodated at a
summer holiday camp, Dovercourt Bay near Harwich,
and subsequently also at Pakefield Holiday Camp near
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Image 2: An advertisement for the Lord Baldwin Fund,
The Times, 11 January 1939, p.6.
Lowestoft (The Times, 1938a; Jewish Chronicle, 1938c; The Times, 1939b; Baumel-Schwartz, 2012: 113). The focus then
shifted to rescuing Jewish children from Austria, and also Czechoslovakia and Poland.
The Kindertransport were overseen by a British charity, the non-sectarian Movement for the Care of Children from
Germany (later called the Refugee Children's Movement (RCM)). Children were sponsored by members of the British
Jewish community and by non-Jews such as the Quakers. Many of the older unsponsored children were absorbed into
the British workforce as agricultural labourers or domestic servants. The RCM built on the work of existing
programmes, for example the British Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany, the Quaker German Emergency
Committee and the Jewish Refugees Committee (The Times, 1939a). A significant part of the cost of the Kindertransport
was met from a fund to which a former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, lent his name in December 1938 (Jewish
Chronicle, 1939a). Baldwin then launched the Lord Baldwin Fund for Jewish Refugees in a special 15-minute national radio
appeal from all of the BBC’s transmitters on the evening of Thursday 8 December (Yorkshire Post, 1938). In early January
1939, the fund appointed one of Britain’s leading advertising agencies, the London Press Exchange, Ltd., (LPE) to handle
its advertising and editorial publicity (Newspaper World, 1939). LPE handled the government’s advertising and had a close
relationship with The Times, which also lent its full support to the appeal. It may be no coincidence that one of LPE’s
researchers, Mark Alexander Abrams, helped many academic refugees escape from Nazi Germany including Sigmund
Freud (Warren, 2003). The LPE produced several advertisements for the appeal which appeared in The Times and
various other newspapers during the next few months. What students may perceive as disturbing is the quote taken
from Baldwin’s radio appeal: “delay may prove literally fatal”, which is included in the advertisement above. It suggests
that as early as December 1938 the British establishment already had intelligence that the likely fate of Jews who were
unable to escape from Germany, including children, was death. The Baldwin Fund was very successful in raising money.
But the government had never intended to allow the mass immigration of Jewish children and, thus, the Kindertransport
were temporarily suspended in February 1939 while the government reconsidered its policy. In late February the Home
Office announced that from 1 March a £50 guarantee would be required for contingent re-emigration expenses in
respect of each child brought into Britain. For children between16 and 18 a £100 guarantee was required. The
requirement for a £50 or £100 guarantee, both large sums of money in 1939, had the desired result. It denied many
children the opportunity of a safe refuge in Britain. The requirement for guarantees was eventually rescinded in June
(London, 2000: 122) after the Council for German Jewry agreed to accept full responsibility for the re-emigration of
refugee children then entering Britain. The Lord Baldwin Fund for Jewish Refugees raised more than half a million
pounds from over a million people (Glasgow Herald, 1939b). The fund was closed on 31 July (The Times, 1939e), while
the RCM ran out of money at the end of August 1939 and was unable to rescue any more children (Harris and
Oppenheim, 2000).
Many German Jewish volunteers helped the RCM bring the children to safety in Britain. A notable volunteer was
Norbert Wollheim, who helped arrange and escort Kindertransport to Britain. Wollheim remained in Germany when
World War II started. He, his wife, and son were sent to Auschwitz in 1943, but Norbert was the only one to survive
the Holocaust (Berger, 1998).
Not all of the Kindertransport were organised by the RCM. Some were organised separately by a remarkable individual –
the English stockbroker, Nicholas Winton. He rescued 669 Jewish children from an almost certain death in
Czechoslovakia in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II. His last and biggest transport of 250 children on 3
September never left Prague railway station because that was the day Britain declared war on Germany. Among the
children Winton rescued was a six-year-old Czech Jewish boy, Alfred Dubs. Dubs went on to become a British Labour
politician and government minister.
The Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, pointed to some reasons why Britain had problems taking in large numbers of
refugees. Britain still had a high level of unemployment. Furthermore, he had had to ban demonstrations by the antiSemitic British Union of Fascists (BUF). Hoare recognised that MPs looked upon this problem with greater sympathy
than he did, however, he wanted to avoid anything in the nature of mass immigration as he believed this would
inevitably lead to a growth in support for the BUF. While he recognised that the 11,000 German refugees who had
settled in Britain had created 15,000 jobs for British workers (Jewish Chronicle, 1939c), he thought mass immigration
would lead to a loss of British jobs. Indeed the BUF had organised demonstrations against theatre and cinema
collections for the Lord Baldwin Fund in the West End of London on 15 January 1939 and distributed a million
pamphlets asking “why a relief fund for aliens should be supported when poverty and unemployment were rife in
Britain” (Glasgow Herald, 1939a). The BUF then went on to organise another demonstration on 26 February in
Manchester against a benefit performance for the fund at the Ardwick Hippodrome Theatre (Montreal Gazette, 1939).
There were also claims in the late 1930s that refugees were stealing jobs from Britons by the hundred every week. On
15 January 1939 the populist Sunday Pictorial claimed just this in a front page story with the headline “Refugees Get Jobs:
10
Britons Get Dole.” This followed a cartoon in the previous week's issue which showed a long line of prosperous looking
refugees queuing in front of a Union Jack-draped table to which Britons had “so lavishly subscribed.” In the foreground,
“hungry, taut and careworn” was “the unemployed Briton with his harassed wife and unhappy children looking enviously
on.” Not surprisingly, the Jewish Chronicle (1939b) called this “a contemptible campaign”. Although the cartoon’s
message mirrored that of the BUF, the cartoonist, TAC (Thomas Arthur Challen), was actually a left-wing Australian.
His cartoon was very misleading. The beneficiaries of the Lord Baldwin Fund were in fact mostly children who posed no
threat at all to the unemployed because they were required to re-emigrate by the age of 18.
This anti-refugee campaign did not go
unchallenged. On 2 February 1939
the Trades Union Congress (TUC)
issued a statement saying that the
allegation refugees were stealing
British jobs was a lie. Home Office
regulations prohibited refugees from
replacing British workers.
Furthermore as the Times pointed
out since the beginning of July 1938,
Britain had only admitted 4,587 adults
and 3,003 children from Germany and
Austria. The Times observed that the
government’s insistence that refugees
must be funded by private charity
meant that Britain was unlikely to
provide a safe haven to significant
numbers of refugees (The Times,
1939c).
The argument that Britain also lacked
the capacity to absorb more Jewish
refugees was refuted at the time by
the eminent Oxford economist, R.F. Harrod. He observed in a letter to The Times that Britain's birth rate in the late
1930s was below the replacement rate and, as a result, there was an annual shortfall of about 200,000 newly born
children in England and Wales to maintain the population at its then present level. Consequently he argued Britain could
have easily absorbed at least 20 times more refugee children. The country would also have benefitted from the fact that
the refugee children were already educated (The Times, 1939d).
Image 3: Jewish refugee children on a train arriving in the Netherlands from Germany,
1 December 1938 (© Wiener Library)
The arrival of the first 200 boys and girls, from the first wave of 5,000 Jewish children, in Harwich on 2 December 1938
was important enough to be filmed by an American news organisation. One of the children in their film is clearly
suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Many of the other children probably had the same disorder albeit
with less visible symptoms (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1938). Gaumont British News (1938) also
filmed the arrival. About half of the children were former residents of a Jewish orphanage destroyed on Kristallnacht and
the remainder were from the Hamburg area. Accompanied by eight of their school teachers they were placed in
temporary accommodation at the Dovercourt Bay holiday camp. There was no heating because it was normally only
open during the summer months. The sleeping accommodation was so cold that the children had to sleep in their coats.
Later the younger children were placed with British families. Most of the children had only been given 24 hours’ notice
by the German authorities to leave their homes with only one German mark and two bags (The Times, 1938). A special
correspondent for the Jewish Chronicle (1938c) observed:
A superficial gaze around the camp gave the impression that here was a large number of English schoolchildren (some with
their fair hair and complexion seemed more ‘Aryan’ than some of the Nazi leaders) enjoying the fine, sunny weather.
The Dovercourt Camp was administered on behalf of the British Home Office. Most of the work at the camp was done
by volunteers, including students from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A number of boys from the elite
public school, Eton College, also spent part of their Christmas holiday helping out at the camp. More camps were soon
established in southern England to receive the refugee children (The Times, 1939b).
More Kindertransport soon arrived in England. It proved more difficult to find foster homes for those aged between 12
and 18 than for the younger children. Many of the older boys were required to train as agricultural labourers and many
11
of the older girls as domestic servants. One lucky 12 year old who did find a foster home was Irene Bejach together
with her ten-year-old sister, Helga. They were taken in by Frederick Attenborough (father of Richard) and his wife in
August 1939. The Bejach sisters seemingly went from one privileged family setting to another – their Jewish father had
been the chief medical officer of health for Berlin. Even so, they were victims of the Holocaust, as their father was later
murdered at Auschwitz (Brooks, 2008). The Bejach sisters were very fortunate to be placed with a family who were
sensitive to their cultural background – many Kindertransport children were placed with non-Jewish foster parents who
were ignorant of Jewish religion and culture.
The refugee children were assisted by a number of nonJewish groups in addition to Jewish groups. The most
important of these were the Quakers, who sponsored
scores of refugee children. Susan Seymour, clerk of
Meetings for Sufferings (the representative body of Quakers
in Britain), recalled in November 2008:
My mother's parents fostered Susi, a Kindertransport girl from
Vienna. Eventually she introduced my mum to my dad who had
been sent away from Germany… So I owe my existence to the
Quakers' courageous response to the Nazis… (Religious Society
of Friends, 2008).
Professor Amnon Rubinstein, in an article in the Jerusalem
Post, reflects that Britain did not allow the children to
immigrate to Britain, they were only given temporary
refuge. In addition they had to leave their homes without
their parents. “The Evian participants could have
conceivably deluded themselves into believing that no
mortal danger awaited the Jews,” he notes, “But now, in
December 1938, after the pogrom [Kristallnacht], the
readiness of the parents testified to their realization that
they had to save the lives of their children.” Rubenstein also
observes that “even Britain's unique act of humanity delivers
a double message – a double sense of horror at the actual
slaughter as a sense of being betrayed by the Western
democracies” (Jerusalem Post, 2008).
Image 4: Mealtime at Dovercourt Camp
(© Wiener Library).
A speech given by Lord Lytton, the British Undersecretary
of Colonies, in July 1939, only two months before the
outbreak of the Second World War, tends to support Rubenstein’s view. While Lytton was sympathetic to the plight of
European Jewry, he made it clear that the British government was not prepared to take any further substantive action.
He said the refugee situation would take decades rather than years to resolve. While the government was prepared to
go to the very limits of its resources in supplying services and administration and even transport, it did not feel justified
at that stage in giving actual financial assistance. In response, the Jewish Chronicle called for pressure on what they
perceived to be the dilatory and unwilling British
government to make it abandon the short-sighted
and discredited notion that refugees were a
burden rather than an investment (Jewish Chronicle,
1939d).
David Cesarani, a British historian, is less
censorious than Rubenstein. He observes that the
greatest legacy of the Kindertransport is that
neither the hatred nor the generosity should ever
be forgotten, and that lessons should be learned.
First, racism and ideologies that lead to genocide
do not exclude innocent children. Second,
bystanders may eventually be moved to intervene,
but these interventions often come too late and
assist too few. He concludes, “The
Kindertransport was a great, if flawed,
12
humanitarian gesture which should inspire us to do more and do it better when such emergencies arise again.”
(Cesarani, 2000: 19).
Image 5: Photographic still of Dovercourt Camp Tuck Shop (which was
probably created by the Etonian volunteers) (Gaumont British News
The Kindertransport rescued 9,354 children.
(1938)
Refugee Children Come to Britain, 5 December). Available from:
Additional children were rescued by a number of
http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/record/display/030-00040800
[4 February 2013].
private organisations and individuals, most notably
by Nicholas Winton. So in total about 10,000 children were rescued of whom some 7,000 were Jewish, and the
remainder either Christians of Jewish descent or mixed descent. Baumel-Schwartz (2012: 5) observes another 2,000
children found refuge in the United States,
Switzerland and Sweden. The Swiss and
Swedish Kindertransport have been
overlooked by English-speaking historians.
However, the Gothenburg University
doctoral thesis of Ingrid Lomfors (1996),
whose mother was a Swedish Kindertransport
girl, provides a definitive account in Swedish
of how 500 Jewish children were brought to
safety in Sweden in 1938 and 1939.
Image 6: Frank Meisler’s* Kindertransport Sculpture
(2006), Liverpool Street railway station, London (©
Richard A. Hawkins).
* The Israeli artist and sculptor, Frank Meisler,
arrived at Liverpool Street railway station on 30
August 1939 with 15 other Jewish children from his
home city of Danzig (Gdansk). They were part of
the Kindertransport. On two of the four edges of the
sculpture’s plinth there are sixteen milestones
bearing the names of cities from which the Kinder
were rescued (Frazer, 2006).
6.2 Bystanders: the Bulgarians
In the mid-20th century, levels of anti-Semitism differed between the various nation states of Europe. In most cases this
had very little effect on the ultimate fate of the different Jewish communities of Europe. If there was insufficient cooperation, the Germans assumed direct control of the deportations to the death camps. During the war there were
only two countries in continental Europe that were occupied or allied to Nazi Germany where most of the Jewish
population survived. The first country is Denmark, which transported most of its Jewish citizens to safety in Sweden.
The second is Bulgaria. Unlike the Danish government, the Bulgarian government considered co-operating with the
German requests for the deportation of its Jewish citizens, but popular protest by both hundreds of Jewish and nonJewish Bulgarians twice led to the postponement of the deportations. As a result, almost all of the Jews in the territory
of pre-war Bulgaria survived the war. The events that resulted in the survival of Bulgaria’s Jews are the subject of
controversy because politicians in both communist and post-communist Bulgaria have sought to take advantage of the
memory of this period.
After the beginning of World War II, German influence in Bulgaria resulted in the introduction of anti-Jewish laws. On
23 January 1941 the Bulgarian government promulgated a Law for the Defence of the Nation (LDN) modelled on the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Jews who had participated in war, who were in mixed marriages, or who had converted to
Christianity were exempt. This law was the work of the pro-German Minister of the Interior, Peter Gabrovski. A wide
variety of professional bodies and ordinary citizens protested against the law before it was enacted (Boyadjieff, 1989: 3440). But the LDN was reinforced in March 1941 when Bulgaria entered the war as an ally of Germany, and from the
second half of 1942 all Jews were obliged to wear yellow Stars of David (Koen and Assa, 1977: 79-80), while from May
1942 nearly all Bulgarian Jewish men were rounded up and placed in forced labour camps.
The Bulgarian government came under pressure from its German ally to deport its Jewish citizens to the death camps in
Poland. In February 1943 the Bulgarian government agreed to the deportation of the Jews living in its newly occupied
territories of Thrace and Macedonia. 11,300 Jews were deported to their deaths in Treblinka and other camps via the
Bulgarian Danube port of Lom (Boyadjieff, 1989: 64). Since the Bulgarian government had agreed to deport 20,000 Jews,
13
it drew up lists of 7,000 further deportees from within the pre-war territory of Bulgaria. However, the Jews of
Kiustendil were warned that they were included in the lists and protests from Jewish and non-Jewish civic leaders led
the Bulgarian government to fear the consequences of handing over the deportees to the Germans. On 9 March 1943
Gabrovski postponed the deportation, probably on orders from King Boris III (Boyadjieff, 1989: 76-79). Gabrielle Nissim
has suggested that it was in fact the Deputy Speaker of the Bulgarian National Assembly, Dimitar Peshev, who
persuaded Gabrovski to halt the deportations (Boyadjieff 1989: 79; Nissim, 1998). Indeed on 9 March 1943, the
Archbishop of Plovdiv had led a demonstration against the internment of the deportees and succeeded in securing their
release. On 17 March, according to Nissim, Peshev persuaded 42 MPs of the majority group in the National Assembly to
sign a petition against the postponed deportation.
However, the Bulgarian government had not given up its attempt to comply with the German demand that it deport its
Jews. A further attempt was made by Gabrovski to comply in May 1943. However, the Bulgarian government decided
that deporting Jews directly from their homes was too dangerous, especially in the capital, Sofia, which was then home
to some 25,000 Jews. Instead it was decided to deport the Jews to the countryside. It is probable that the anti-Semites
in the government hoped that this would create ill-feeling towards the Jews in rural Bulgaria and make deportation less
unpopular in the future. However, in June 1943 King Boris decided, for reasons that still remain unclear, that he would
not allow the deportation to take place while he was in power.
On 28 August 1943 King Boris died and a Regency was
established for his son Simeon. The government was
reformed and Gabrovski was dismissed. From this time
onwards the situation of Bulgaria’s Jews improved,
although it was not until August 1944 that all anti-Jewish
laws were cancelled. On 8 September the Russians
entered Bulgaria, and the following day a Fatherland
Front Administration replaced the wartime Bulgarian
government (Boyadjieff, 1989: 112-114).
Image 7: Plovdiv memorial with the inscription: To all who helped
to save us on 10 March 1943 from the grateful Jewish community
of Plovdiv (Courtesy of Yossi Nevo, Wikimedia Commons).
At the close of World War II the overwhelming majority
of Bulgaria’s Jews had survived in contrast to the rest of
the Balkans. Indeed, in Autumn 1945, the Jewish
community had 49,172 members as opposed to 47,154 in
1943 and 48,398 in 1934 (the latter two years include the
Jews of southern Dobrudzha). The 1945 figure does not
include 3,000 Jews who emigrated to Palestine; 1,100
who died in internment; and 123 killed serving with the
partisans (Meyer, 1953: 575). This suggests Bulgaria
received as many as 5,000 Jewish immigrants.
The survival of the Bulgarian Jewish community is noteworthy. Bulgarian texts from the Communist era suggest that the
Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) was the decisive force in saving most of Bulgaria’s Jews (Koen and Assa, 1977; Oliver,
1978). On the other hand, the expatriate Bulgarian nationalist, Christo Boyadieff (1989), argued that the BKP only
played a minor role and that the real hero was King Boris III. This view is supported by former post-Communist
President, Peter Stoyanov (Anti-Defamation League, 1998). However, another former post-Communist President,
Zhelyu Zhelev, disagrees with both Stoyanov and the former BKP. In 1995 he attributed the survival of Bulgaria’s Jews
to opposition to the prospective deportation from a broad spectrum of Bulgarians. Zhelev does not include King Boris
III (Bell, 1995). Zhelev’s view is supported by the wartime German Minister in Sofia, Adolf-Heinze Beckerle, who
observed in his report of 22 January 1943 to Berlin that:
The [Bulgarian] public does not understand the real significance of the Jewish problem. Besides the rich Jews, there
are in Bulgaria many poor ones, who work as labourers and artisans. Having grown up together with Greeks,
Armenians, Turks and Gypsies, the ordinary Bulgarian does not understand the struggle against the Jews especially as,
naturally, the racial problem is not close to his mind… (Koen and Assa, 1977: 112).
The research of Tanev et al. (2005) supports Zhelev’s position. They provide more evidence relating to the mobilisation
of Bulgarian civic society against the deportation of their Jewish fellow citizens. They focus in particular on the role
played by the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The title of their book, The Power of Civil Society was
adopted by the Bulgarian government for an exhibition on the survival of Bulgaria’s Jews during World War II, which has
been displayed in various countries around the world since 2008. On the other hand, research by the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum during the early 2000s challenges the claim that Bulgaria is a second Denmark. This is
14
because the network of forced labour camps referred to above was harsher and more extensive than previously
thought (Lipman, 2004).
6.3 Perpetrators: post-war trials – the Koblenz trial 1962-63
When a country has committed war and human rights crimes on the scale of Nazi Germany, the victor country or
victor countries might be expected to achieve justice for the victims. However, justice needs to be balanced against the
need to ensure that the defeated country’s state continues to function. The Iraq War of 2003 provides a cautionary tale
of what happens when the victor country dismisses virtually all of the government employees of the former regime on
the grounds that they have collective responsibility for its crimes. The anarchy in post-war Iraq was a direct result of
this misguided decision from which Iraqi civil society has still not fully recovered. The victorious Allies did not make that
mistake when they occupied Germany in 1945. All of the Allies, including the Soviet Union, sought to preserve a
functioning state. This meant that many Holocaust perpetrators escaped justice. The initial post-war trials mainly
focused on the former ruling elite with some exceptions such as the Bergen Belsen trial of 1945. It could be argued that
the Soviet Union was more thorough in the de-Nazification of its zone of occupation than the western Allies were in
their zones of occupation. Ironically some of those who were purged were imprisoned in former Nazi concentration
camps such as Sachsenhausen. Since German unification these inmates have been classified as victims because of the lack
of due process in the Soviet Zone.
After the initial post-war trials organised by the victorious Allies, there was a loss of interest in bringing the
perpetrators to justice. In the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) the authorities wanted to forget about the
Second World War and most perpetrators were able to return to civilian life. Shik (2007) also observes the difference
between the legal code that was established in the Nuremberg Trials and the framework of Federal German criminal
law made it more difficult to achieve convictions of accused war criminals in Federal German courts. However, the
communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany) produced propaganda which sought to damage West
Germany by throwing a spotlight on the number of perpetrators who had escaped justice, and in particular those
employed by the state (Pendas, 2009). Indeed in the early 1960s Nazi war criminals were working for the government in
the Federal Republic of Germany at the highest levels. Notorious examples include Hans Globke, the Director of the
Federal German Chancellery between 1953 and 1963, and Dr Karl Friedrich Vialon, State Secretary of the Ministry of
Aid for Underdeveloped Countries. In response to the East German propaganda in the late 1950s, the West German
government belatedly began to investigate and prosecute German perpetrators of the Holocaust. For example in 1962,
12 former SS officers were on put on trial in the Koblenz Regional Court accused of war crimes in occupied Byelorussia
during the Second World War. The principal defendant in the trial was Georg Heuser, a former SS Hauptsturmführer,
who had served in German-occupied Minsk during the Second World War. Minsk had been turned into a concentration
camp. He was alleged to have committed appalling crimes, including pouring petrol over a dozen Jewish prisoners and
burning them alive. The 11 other former SS officers were also alleged to have committed heinous crimes. Prior to the
beginning of the trial in October 1962 the defendants were employed in respectable positions, for instance, Heuser was
head of the criminal police in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Image 8: Photographic still of Georg Heuser from The
Victims Accuse documentary. Available from:
http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/record/display/000-00000025
[27 October 2012].
Initially the Soviet Union was not allowed to present
evidence at the trial. There was concern about its
reliability. A Soviet propaganda documentary film, The
Victims Accuse (1962), produced during the trial made
serious allegations about both the conduct of the trial and
West Germany’s commitment to bringing the
perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Later in the trial
witnesses from the Soviet Union were given the
opportunity to testify. Time magazine (1962) had argued
at the beginning of the trial that it was standard
communist propaganda to allege that the Federal Republic
was merely brushing Nazi war crimes under the carpet. It
observed that since 1949 some 13,000 people had been
prosecuted for war crimes in the Federal Republic and
that about 5,000 had been sentenced to prison. However,
contrary to Time magazine’s view, the Federal Republic
was less than zealous in seeking justice for the victims of
Nazi Germany. In addition, no attempt was made to
purge the state of former Nazi functionaries. This is in
stark contrast with the purge of government employees
15
carried out by the Federal Republic in the former German Democratic Republic after German unification in 1990.
However, contrary to the Soviet propaganda documentary film, justice was achieved in the Koblenz trial. In May 1963
the 11 remaining defendants pleaded guilty to complicity in the murder of 180,000 Jews in the Minsk area of Byelorussia.
Heuser was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour. Franz Stark was given a life sentence and the nine others were given
prison sentences of between three and a half and ten years. Arthur Harder’s prison sentence of three and a half years
was subsequently annulled by the German Federal Court of Justice.
16
7
Conclusion
There are many different approaches to teaching the Holocaust. This booklet has sought to provide some examples. It
is worth noting in conclusion that there are aspects of the Holocaust which could be given more prominence in
teaching. For example, Yael Weinstock (2010) has noted these aspects include the destruction of the Sephardi Jews who
resided principally in south-eastern Europe, including Greece and the former Yugoslavia. The experience of the North
African Sephardi, Maghrebi and Ashkenazi Jews during the Holocaust has also been neglected (Ochayon, 2011a; 2011b).
8
Bibliography
8.1 Online and audio-visual resources
Humbox: ‘Beasts of Belsen’ [online]. GLO. Available from: http://humbox.ac.uk/537/ [22 April 2013].
Roots of Antisemitism. (2012) Imperial War Museum ‘The Way We Lived’: A Free Learning Resource for Schools. DVD.
The Victims Accuse (1962) [online]. Soviet Documentary. Available from: http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/record/display/00000000025 [22 April 2013].
The Way We Lived. (2012) Imperial War Museum ‘The Way We Lived’: A Free Learning Resource for Schools. DVD.
When memory comes: a film about Saul Friedlander. (2012) Directed by Frank Diamand. Interakt/Diamand & Friends
Productions. DVD.
Beit Hatefuzoth-The Israel Diaspora Museum. Available from: http://www.bh.org.il [22 April 2013].
Gaumont British News (1938) Refugee Children Come to Britain, 5 December [online]. Available from:
http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/record/display/030-00040800 [22 April 2013].
The Ghetto Fighters House-Beit Lohamei Hagetaot. Available from: http://www.gfh.org.il [22 April 2013].
The Holocaust Centre Beth Shalom. Available from: http://www.bethshalom.com [22 April 2013].
Jewish Heritage in Europe. Available from: http://www.judaica-europeana.eu/ [22 April 2013].
Jewish Witness to a European Century: An Interactive Database of Jewish Memory. Available from:
http://www.centropa.org/ [22 April 2013].
Museum of Tolerance Online Multimedia Learning Centre. Available from:
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=358201[22 April 2013].
Testaments to the Holocaust from the Wiener Library, London (a subscription based online resource):
www.gale.com/Holocaust/USC Shoah Foundation iWitness. Available from: http://iwitness.usc.edu/SFI/ [22 April
2013].
Survivors of the Holocaust Visual History Foundation. Available from: http://www.vhf.org [22 April 2013].
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Available from: http://www.ushmm.org [22 April 2013].
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (1938) March of Time – The Refugee Today and Tomorrow – December 1938 –
outtakes – Kindertransport: German Jewish Kids in England [online]. Available from:
http://resources.ushmm.org/film/display/detail.php?file_num=1087 [3 February 2013].
Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority [online]. Available from:
http://www.yadvashem.org/ [22 April 2013].
8.2 Primary sources
Bau, J. (1996) Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? Tel Aviv: Joseph Bau Museum.
Frazer, J. (2006) Kindertransport sculpture arrives at Liverpool Street. Jewish Chronicle. 6 October, p. 10.
Glasgow Herald (1939a), “Fascist Demonstrators Clash with Police”, 16 January, p. 6.
Glasgow Herald (1939b) Baldwin Refugee Fund: Allocation of Grants. 29 September, p. 10.
Jewish Chronicle (1938a) Premier and the Refugees: A Negative Statement. 4 November, p. 21.
Jewish Chronicle (1938b) Refugees: The Present Position. 25 November, pp. 7-8; 30-37.
Jewish Chronicle (1938c) In Camp with The Refugee Children. 9 December, p.17.
Jewish Chronicle (1939a) The Refugees: The Lord Baldwin Fund. 6 January, p.24.
Jewish Chronicle (1939b) A Contemptible Campaign. 20 January, pp.7-8.
Jewish Chronicle (1939c) Refugees Benefit Britain: Sir Samuel Hoare’s Tribute to Jewish Intellect.10 February, p.17.
Jewish Chronicle (1939d) No More Dilly-Dally! 14 July, pp.7-8.
Montreal Gazette (1939) British Fascists Held: 12 Arrested for Protesting Refugee Fund Benefit. 27 February, p.12.
Perel, S. (1993) Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon: Er überlebte in der Uniform seiner Feinde – ein erschütterndes Schicksal. Munich:
Wilhelm Heyne Verlag.
17
Perel, S. (1997) Europa, Europa. New York: John Wiley & Sons/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Schloss, E. (2013) After Auschwitz: A story of heartbreak and survival by the step-sister of Anne Frank. London: Hodder &
Stoughton. An interview with Eva Schloss is available from:
http://www.hodder.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9781444760682 [13 April 2013]
Schönhaus, C. (2007) The Forger. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press.
Sunday Pictorial (1939) Refugees Get Jobs: Britons Get Dole. 15 January, pp. 1, 5.
The Newspaper World & Advertising Review (1939) New Advertisers. 7 January, p. 20.
The Times (1938) Jewish Children from Germany: First Party of 200 Land At Harwich. 3 December, p. 14.
The Times (1939a) Hospitality to Refugees: Finding Homes for Children. 6 January, p. 18.
The Times (1939b) Camp for Child Refugees: Brightening Young Lives. 17 January, p. 4.
The Times (1939c) The Work of Rescue. 3 February, p. 13.
The Times (1939d) Refugee Children: Letter from R.F. Harrod. 9 February, p. 10.
The Times (1939e) Nation’s Sympathy with Refugees: Lord Baldwin’s Message. 28 September, p. 10.
Yorkshire Post (1938) This Week’s Events in Review.10 December, p. 6.
8.3 Secondary sources
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr Peter D’Sena, Higher Education Academy (HEA) Discipline Lead for History; Toby Simpson,
Learning and Engagement Manager at the Wiener Library; and Rachel Donnelly, Holocaust Learning Officer, Imperial
War Museum London. I would also like to thank Professor Mike Dennis of the University of Wolverhampton for
inviting me to participate in several memorable student field trips to Berlin which he organised in association with the
European Academy Berlin Grunewald during the 1980s and 1990s.
20
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