The Dark Heart of Hitler’s Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government

by Martin Winstone

Even amidst the horrors of Nazi rule in Europe, the tragic history of the General Government – the Nazi colony created out of the historic core of Poland, including Warsaw and Krakow, following the German and Soviet invasion of 1939 – stands out. Separate from but ruled by Germany through a brutal and corrupt regime headed by the vain and callous Hans Frank, this was indeed the dark heart of Hitler’s empire. As the principal ‘racial laboratory’ of the Third Reich, the General Government was the site of Aktion Reinhard, the largest killing operation of the Holocaust, and of a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing against Poles which was intended to be a template for the rest of eastern Europe.

Utjiua Muinjangue is the chairperson of the Ovaherero and Ovambanderu Genocide Foundation. Ms. Muinjangue spoke on behalf of the school of Social Work at the University of Minnesota on the genocide of the Herero on November 10, 2014.

Q: Is there an official count and is it different from people’s own memories of the number of victims of the Ovaherero genocide?

A: The estimated number is that before the genocide, the Ovaherero people were more or less 95,000. After the genocide, they were reduced to 15,000.

Q: Were there other communities that were targeted in the same way?

A: We have 11 ethnic groups in Namibia and all these groups have been living there…during the time of the Germans as well. But for reasons known to the Germans they targeted mainly two groups. The Ovaherero and the other group, called the Namas. The Hereros then by that time they were living mostly in the central parts of Namibia, while the Namas were in the southern parts of Namibia. They had cattle and their cattle were targeted, their land was targeted and what is very interesting is that during war it’s difficult to differentiate who is not Herero or who is a Namas and so on. But what is interesting is that they, the Germans, issued an extermination order on the 2nd of October 1904, which was specifically directed towards the Ovaherero people. So for us, it’s like they knew there were other groups, but their aim was that specific group. And then in April 1905 they issued a similar order to the Nama people.

Q: How is the memory of the genocide kept alive? Not just among activists and activist groups but also among survivors?

A: There are very active commemorative events that are happening on an annual basis. Since we started, or since the establishment of the Genocide Foundation, we have been having commemorative events. We singled out the more important dates in the history. Like the 12th of January which commemorates the first bullets that were shot against our people. We have the 30th of March, we call that the reparation walk – we started with that one in 2007 when we erected a monument at the place which was a concentration camp. So we go there every year, and that is in another town, it’s a town called Swakopmund which is one of the coastal towns and that was and still is German. You still feel and see the German influence in the architecture, the numbers on the buildings, some buildings still have numbers like 1902, 1904 and so on…and it’s a tourist attraction. Then we have the 11th of August, that was the battle of Ohamakari, that was when people were driven into the Omahake desert; and then there is the 23rd of August, which  is a very important day also in the Ovaherero community – that is the day after the war, the Hereros fled to neighboring countries. Samuel Maharero, who was the chief of the Ovaherero fled to South Africa, where he died. Before his death he used to say “when I die I want my remains to be transported back to Namibia…”

Q: Considering that the genocide happened 100 years ago, how do you help non-Namibians make sense of it?

A: We started talking about the genocide because many Namibians needed this education and awareness. Many of them were ignorant. But today it’s in the schools, in the history books. Learners are becoming aware of it. And of course we have a lot of public lectures. We get lawyers and international speakers to come and talk about the genocide and compare it with other genocides that were committed. And especially the Jewish…the Holocaust. Because what happened to the Jewish people – they (the Germans) just copied what they did to the people in Namibia and they applied that to them. I remember also there was a time we had connections to a Jewish association in South Africa, to learn from them how they went about it…and so on. And of course some people are saying but this is something that happened over 100 years ago we should forget and move on. But we want to see justice prevail and done.

Q: Considering that the genocide convention came about almost 44 years after this genocide, have you received any push back against using the term genocide in the way that you see fit to use it to explain what happened to the Herero?

A: You know for us murder is murder, whether you committed it 100 years ago, today or tomorrow, it will remain murder. And we were happy when a German minister visited Namibia and attended one of our commemorative events. She said “on behalf of my government I want to say that what happened 100 years ago could be seen today as genocide and I want to apologize.” The German government was very unhappy about what she said and when she went back home she was severely criticized. When did the Jewish Holocaust take place? If they could see that as genocide what makes our case different? So we are saying, you have created that model already, so apply that to us as well. We cannot allow things to be discussed on our behalf, as if we don’t have voices. So that’s our motto: It cannot be about us without us. Anything about us without us is against us.

Q: Do the Herero now consider themselves survivors of the genocide or victims of the genocide? Or do they view the two as the same thing?

A: I would say the educated ones see themselves as descendants of survivors of genocide but you find the older generation who see or consider themselves as victims of genocide. Victims in the sense that they have no place to stay – we have been marginalised economically, socially, politically. As I said the other day, whether we like it or not, politics in Africa is organized along ethnic lines. So, today we are like the fourth largest group, about 200,000. If we are today 200,000 what would our numbers have been should there have been no genocide? So there are those who see themselves as victims but of course there are others who see themselves as survivors. If you see yourself as a victim there is a negative connotation to that. You know, you develop this “pity me” attitude which we don’t want. Some people are saying “but why can’t you just forget?” We are saying we want to talk about the past in order for us to understand the present. We want to talk about the past in order for us to liberate ourselves from what happened in the past and move on.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.  

CHGS is pleased to welcome Jennifer Hammer, new program associate in the Institute for Global Studies with special responsibility to support the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Center for Austrian Studies. Jennifer completed her degree at the University of Minnesota in Anthropology and Japanese, and has done graduate work in the history of design. Jennifer comes to us from the Department of Communication Studies and has programming and management experience at a number of non-profit organizations including JSTOR, Artstor, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

We will have the thankless task of proving to a world which will refuse to listen, that we are Abel, the murdered brother.
                      – Ignasy Shiper (historian, killed at Majdanek in 1943)

In his acclaimed book Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi recounts a recurring dream he and other inmates had in the Nazi death camp: that he returned home to his family and told them about it, but nobody listened. “The person standing in front of me doesn’t stay to hear, turns around and goes away,” he writes.

Levi’s nightmare became a reality for survivors in the immediate postwar years. Many made great efforts to bear witness to their ordeal under the Nazi yoke, to assure that the victims’ memory would not vanish into the abyss. They wrote testimonies, chronicles and other texts, many of which were never published. But few people were listening then. The meaning of the survivors’ testimony remained largely personal.

It was not until decades later that the witnesses were awarded a new social identity, that of survivors. They became the bearers of a singular and unique history – that of the Shoah – and also of fundamental moral and political lessons. They started talking to the media, in schools and at commemorative events. By sharing their stories they expanded their audience’s knowledge of the Holocaust but the primary functions of their testimony were to keep the Holocaust – not only the event in history, but also the potential for its repetition – before everyone’s eyes.

In a time when few eyewitnesses remain who were adults during the Holocaust, Primo Levi’s ghastly premonition could become an appalling reality again. As philospher Avishai Margalit has skillfully put it, the survivors have borne witness with the hope “that in another place or time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony.” The survivors of the Holocaust are leaving us, but their stories are preserved in oral history and video projects, museums, books, art and films. It is now our task as educators to ensure that new generations can become witnesses of the survivors’ historical experience and assume responsibility for the events that occur in the present. In other words, to remember the past but also to identify the warning signs and know when to react.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology. 

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature

Edited by Jenni Adams

The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and criticism.

A Conversation with Gabriel Gatti (Professor of Sociology, University of the Basque Country, Spain)

Due in large part to humanitarian law and transitional justice, the categories of detained-disappeared and forced disappearance are today well established – so much so that in some places like Argentina and Uruguay an intense social life has taken shape around them and in their wake. Victims mix with institutions, laws, and professionals (forensic anthropologists, social scientists, jurists, psychologists, artists, archivists, and writers), occupying intersecting positions and doing so with varied narratives, from the epic and heroic to the tragic and traumatic. Based on extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Uruguay, Gatti analyzes these worlds in an attempt to understand how one inhabits the categories that international law has constructed to mark, judge, think about, and repair horror.

Gabriel Gatti is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. His research and teaching focus on contemporary forms of identity, in particular those constituted in situations of social catastrophe, rupture, and fracture. He is the author of Identidades débiles, Identidades desaparecidas, Les nouveaux répères de l’identité collective en Europe, and Basque society. His latest work, Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaningwas published in august of 2014. He is also a main researcher behind the Mundo(s) de victimas (World(s) of victims) a study of four cases that deal with the construction of the “victim” category in contemporary Spain.

Professor Gatti’s visit is part of the Reframing Mass Violence Collaborative Series. Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Human Rights Program, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Political Science and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

When the National Football League’s Washington Redskins franchise traveled to the University’s TCF Stadium to play the Vikings, they brought with them a considerable amount of controversy. It has been difficult to avoid the debate surrounding the Washington team and their controversial moniker. This is not solely a Minnesota phenomenon; nearly all of the team’s away games have seen a significant amount of protest by both sides. The use of the redskin name has pitted advocates of a change to a more inclusive name against supporters of the football team and their more than eighty year history.  While fans of the franchise argue that the name does not reflect any racism, it is important to understand the origins of the term redskin and how it fits into the wider context of the Native American genocide.

The Washington Redskins are amongst the oldest NFL franchises, having been established in 1932. However, the origins of the term redskin run much deeper. Its first usage is uncertain, but the term entered American lexicon sometime in the late eighteenth century. In the 1840’s at the height of Manifest Destiny, racism towards Native people began to increase. Using redskin and other derogative language to describe Native people was used to differentiate them from ‘civilized’ European culture. This would make it easier for the influx of settlers migrating west to confiscate tribal lands.

By the 1860’s, we can find evidence of the term being used for bounties on Native Americans in Winona. Even beloved children’s author L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, used the term redskin while openly advocating for the elimination of Native American people. The usage of the term helped reinforce the us versus them mentality of the United States at the time, making it easier to initiate the American-Indian Wars, which totally destroyed Native American culture in the U.S. In 1915, Redskin Rimes was published. It included a direct rebuttal of James Fennimore Cooper’s (author of The Last of the Mohicans) assessment of the noble Native. By this time, the term redskin was firmly entrenched as a slur against Native people. With this historical understanding it is impossible to understand Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s claims that the team name honors Native communities.

In the months before the November 2nd game, the University made an attempt to block the use of the Redskin name, but agreements between the school, the Vikings and NFL restricted the university’s ability to dictate any changes, including the usage and display of the controversial team name. Before the game, thousands of protesters gathered outside TCF Stadium to vocalize their anger at institutionalized racism. It is easy to think of the 21st century as being far removed from the atrocities committed in the United States against Native American people, but the insistence on keeping the Redskins name is a stark, ugly reminder that progress has not come as far as we think. Until the National Football League and its Washington franchise agree to change its name, it will forever be stigmatized with an aura of ignorance and racism.

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

One of the lasting effects of the genocide in Rwanda is that all African conflicts are always compared to Rwanda. The metric always seems to be whether or not they will be as bad as Rwanda if intervention does not occur. Rwanda has become a sign of guilt, a reminder that we as humanity did nothing to stop one of the more atrocious and rapid killings of peoples in an African country. Of course this ignores that the Democratic Republic of Congo has been embroiled in some variation of the same conflict for as almost as long as I’ve been alive (and I’m somewhat old enough to remember images of the late Mandela walking free from Robben Island holding Winnie Madikizela’s hand).

When the atrocities in Darfur first made international headlines several politicians and advocacy groups were quick to categorise it as a conflict pitting Christians against Muslims. There was a sense of déjà vu; a clearly identifiable group (Muslims/Arabs) was killing another discernable group (Christians/black African). Samantha Power,  (herself an advocate of intervention) would subsequently start working on raising awareness with a rising star in intervention advocacy circles- John Prendergast. Soon, celebrities like George Clooney (Sudan), Ben Affleck (DRC) and Don Cheadle (Genocide and the environment) had pet projects in African countries. Africa as a whole, and Sudan specifically, has provided the opportunity for foreigners to “find themselves” what scholars refer to as individuation.  As eloquently expressed by Alex Perry’s wonderful piece for Newsweek a few weeks ago, no place has suffered more from individuation than South Sudan.

As the conflict in South Sudan has raged on over the past several months one thing has become clear, president Kiir and his erstwhile deputy Dr. Machar appear to be in no hurry to solve the crisis. Despite numerous peace meetings, renewed hostilities seem to appear each day with both sides blaming each other.  What is frustrating is that the same voices that were keen on pushing for South Sudan’s independence appear content with issuing statements lamenting the humanitarian crisis.

You may ask, “shouldn’t the onus to stop the conflict be on the government of South Sudan?” Yes it should, however this question assumes that South Sudan had a proper functioning government to begin with. It assumes that the state apparatus was such that accountability and transparency were built-in from the get-go. The truth is that none of these things existed prior to this crisis and they certainly do not exist now. All the humanitarian help that was poured into South Sudan once it became a country never seemed particularly interested in this. Neither was president Kiir’s government ever held accountable.

The guilt of having not done anything to stop Rwanda in 1994 meant that a lot of humanitarians were willing to turn a blind eye to massive levels of corruption and lawlessness. They went as far as setting up a $526 Billion fund for infrastructure project (in a country with plenty of oil). Moreover, the impact of the Clooney-Prendergast type of intervention has meant that even South Sudanese government officials are willing to forgo their responsibility to protect if it means continued humanitarian intervention. No one epitomises this more clearly than South Sudan’s former ambassador to the US (on trial for treason) remarking, “George Clooney must get more engaged now to help shape the future of this country.”

And that is the complicated and incongruous nature of the relationship between humanitarians and conflicts in Africa.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 & Spring 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

This past weekend, Germany launched three days of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which led eventually to a reunified German state. The bright lights of the jubilee, however, may cast a shadow on other important events in German history that also took place on November 9, events to which the German post-war division can be traced back. On November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch marked the emergence of the Nazi Party as an important player in Germany’s political landscape. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis set hundreds of synagogues on fire throughout Germany and annexed Austria, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Both pasts, the Nazi crimes and the partition of Germany, are connected. This twofold remembrance on November 9 may serve Germans as a counterbalance to the flood of self-congratulation that is engulfing the country during these days of celebration.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

European Muslim Antisemitism: Why Young Urban Males Say They Don’t Like Jews

By Günther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. Looking for insights into the views and rationales of young Muslims toward Jews, Günther Jikeli and his colleagues interviewed 117 ordinary Muslim men in London (chiefly of South Asian background), Paris (chiefly North African), and Berlin (chiefly Turkish).

The researchers sought information about stereotypes of Jews, arguments used to support hostility toward Jews, the role played by the Middle East conflict and Islamist ideology in perceptions of Jews, the possible sources of anti-Semitic views, and, by contrast, what would motivate Muslims to actively oppose antisemitism. They also learned how the men perceive discrimination and exclusion as well as their own national identification.

This study is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe