Library Guides: Kupferberg Holocaust Center-NEH: Collaboration and Complicity: Some Were Neighbors

Speaker Bio

Dr. Susan Bachrach

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Dr. Susan Bachrach is Curator of Special Exhibitions in the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has overseen numerous exhibits at the USHMM including: Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, Liberation 1945, Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, and Oskar Schindler: An Unlikely Hero. Her publications include: Tell Them We Remember: The Story of the Holocaust, and The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936.

Books :

Dr. Bachrach is presently serving as lead historian on the museum project to 'revitalize' the 25-year old permanent exhibition. This challenge will involve incorporating content on collaboration and complicity into the core narrative.

In what ways was the medical establishment complicit or collaborative during the Holocaust?

US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM: SOME WERE NEIGHBORS EXHIBITS

Click here to view the exhibits.

German officials round up Jews for deportation as neighbors look on. Lörrach, Germany, October 1940. Photo Credit: USHMM.

RESOURCES ON SOME WERE NEIGHBORS

Ordinary Men by C.R. Browning
Call Number: Holocaust Center - HOLOC D804.3 .B77 1992
ISBN: 0060190132
Publication Date: 1992
This is a shocking account of how a unit of average, middle-aged Germans who were not identified as Nazi members were able to murder tens of thousands of Jews. Considered a classic and necessary source for Holocaust scholars interested in analyzing the role of regular civilians and police battalions during the war, he poses difficult questions regarding collaboration during the Holocaust.
Nazi Terror by Eric A. Johnson
Call Number: D804 .G4 J55 2000
ISBN: 0465049087
Publication Date: 2000
Nazi Terror tackles the central aspect of the Nazi dictatorship head on by focusing on the roles of the individual and of society in making terror work. Based on years of research in Gestapo archives, on more than 1,100 Gestapo and "special court" case files, and on surveys and interviews with German perpetrators, Jewish victims and ordinary Germans who experienced the Third Reich firsthand, Johnson's book settles many nagging questions about who, exactly, was responsible for what, who knew what, and when they knew it. Nazi Terror is the most fine-grained portrait we may ever have of the mechanism of terror in a dictatorship.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton University Press by J.T. Gross
Call Number: DS 135 .P62 J444 2001
ISBN: 9780394736594
Publication Date: 2001
Described by one reviewer as “a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature.” The question of Polish complicity and collaboration is not an easy one to answer, but this scholarship goes a long way in looking at the role of regular people during World War II and their relationship with and oftentimes persecution of the Jewish population.
The Holocaust by Bullets by Father Patrick Desbois
ISBN: 9780230617575
Publication Date: 2008
One and a half million Jews were shot by Nazi mobile units known as Einsatzgruppen, the death squads that accompanied the Wehrmacht (German army) into the Soviet Union following the Nazi invasion in June 1941. These death squads were aided by Order Police, police battalions, and auxiliary units of non-Germans, whose primary mission was to kill Jews. Jews were rounded up and shot, and their bodies thrown into pits that became their unmarked graves. This brutal genocide of the Jews marked the beginning of the “Final Solution,” and preceded the use of poison gas that was used in death camps such as Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka and Auschwitz, Birkenau (the Holocaust by Gas).

The Hidden Holocaust: 60 Minutes interview of Father Desbois

The Ordinary Quality of Resistance:
The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram's Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon