War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice

by David M. Crowe

In this sweeping, definitive work, leading human rights scholar David M. Crowe offers an unflinching look at the long and troubled history of genocide and war crimes. From atrocities in the ancient world to more recent horrors in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda, Crowe reveals not only the disturbing consistency they have shown over time, but also the often heroic efforts that nations and individuals have made to break seemingly intractable patterns of violence and retribution – in particular, the struggle to create a universally accepted body of international humanitarian law. He traces the emergence of the idea of ‘just war,’ early laws of war, the first Geneva Conventions, the Hague peace conferences, and the efforts following World Wars I and II to bring to justice those who violated international law.

He also provides incisive accounts of some of the darkest episodes in recent world history, covering violations of human rights law in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, the Iran-Iraq war, Korea, Tibet, and many other contexts. With valuable insights into some of the most vexing issues of today – including controversial US efforts to bring alleged terrorists to justice at Guantánamo Bay, and the challenges facing the International Criminal Court – this is an essential work for understanding humankind’s long and often troubled history.

Standing on Polish soil is to stand upon the fertile ground of memory. Poles see themselves as a people who have struggled to maintain their national identity amidst occupation and oppression. The Polish past is negotiated on a daily basis between the generations of Poles who lived (or grew up) during World War II, those who lived during the Soviet regime, and those who have come of age after the fall of Communism. All three of these groups have grown up with the narrative of Poles as rescuers, resisters and martyrs. This idea was shaped during the Soviet years and reinforced through Polish popular culture.

Immediately after World War II Polish cinema began this narrative with the first film to deal with Auschwitz, Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop (Ostani etap), 1948. Jakubowska, who wrote and directed the film, was a former inmate of the camp. Filmed in Auschwitz, the narrative was crafted to be a story of resistance and solidarity of the inmates against Fascism. Jews were folded into a national victimhood. Jakubowska highlights this by equating the Jewish prisoners and the Polish prisoners in the struggle against the Nazis – the Jews are not singled out as the intended targets of mass extermination. Communism, with Stalin at its helm, is the hero of the film and reinforces the Soviet – created narrative about Poles as victims and martyrs during World War II.

The Polish film Aftermath (Pokłosie) fundamentally challenges this narrative. And the reaction to the film is a prime example of the fragility of Holocaust memory in Poland. Aftermath is based on Jan Gross’s book Neighbors. Neighbors received much attention in Poland when it was released in 2001, as it exposed a horrible truth about the actions of the Poles against their Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. After years of believing the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the town’s Jews it was brought to light by Gross that, in fact, it was the Polish neighbors who committed the murder. Gross’s revelation caused much pain amongst the Polish people, as it forced them to take a closer look at their historic narrative and understand their role in the destruction of Polish Jewry.

Aftermath continues what Gross started. Over seven years in the making, it is not a Holocaust film; it is a film about the paving over of history, of hiding an uncomfortable truth about a past in anarrative that absolves the witnesses of the crime they helped to commit or of choosing to remain silent in the face of this crime.

This film touched a nerve with Polish nationalists and right-wing political factions, as well as the general public, who labeled the film anti-Polish. They prompted a media barrage of anti-semitic rhetoric and propaganda against it’s director, Wladyslaw Pasikowoki, and one of the lead actors, Maciej Stuhr, equating his role of one of the brothers trying to uncover the past to betraying Polish nationalistic honor. Immediately after the release of the film mainstream Polish weeklies ran covers of Stuhr, including one with a Star of David scrawled across his face, calling him “a Jew.”

This is not the first time a film has angered the Polish populace. In 1985, Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH was televised on Polish TV to scathing reviews, as it was criticized for making Poles look ignorant, cruel and willing accomplices to the Nazis. While it is not uncommon in European Holocaust film history that locals resent outside filmmakers telling them how to remember their past, Aftermath is a Polish film made about Poles for Poles. There are no Jews in the film; instead the film focuses on two Polish brothers who unwittingly discover the truth of what happened to the Jews that lived in their town, which causes much discontent among their fellow Polish neighbors.

No film about the Holocaust or the actions of Poles towards Jews during the war will bring about a change in the memories that have been crafted over time. More careful and deliberate dialogues will need to take place, but, as has been shown many times over, it is often popular culture that directs the discussion towards exploring history and its unfolding through memory narratives. If Aftermath is allowed to be seen by Poles once the initial reaction has played out, it could be used as a catalyst for examination and opening a productive and process of self-awareness and responsibility.

The European Studies Consortium, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Institute for Global Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of French & Italian, the Center for Austrian Studies and the Film Society of Mpls/St. Paul will present the Twin Cities premiere of Aftermath at the International Film Festival on April 10 & 16, 2014.

Jodi Elowitz is the Outreach Coordinator for CHGS and the Program Coordinator for the European Studies Consortium. Elowitz is currently working on Holocaust memory in Poland and artistic representation of the Holocaust in animated short films.  

Last week CHGS and several other centers and departments at the University of Minnesota voiced their concern and condemnation regarding a Nazi-themed dinner that took place in the Minneapolis restaurant Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC) and the Minnesota Rabbinical Association (MRA), also responded to this disturbing event and sent a public letter to the restaurant’s owner.

The news and photographs of the gathering – Nazi flags and men clad in SS and Wehrmacht uniforms – were shocking. But even more worrying was to discover how many people, who posted their comments on the Star Tribune website or emailed and voice-mailed the Center, were ready to defend the Nazi re-enactors and the restaurant that hosted the party. Their response reveals an astounding lack of common sense and a failure to understand the gravity of the case.

How “innocent” was this re-enactment? Were the participants and the restaurant owner really unaware of the implications and effects of the symbols they were displaying? One hopes that all of Gasthof’s cards will soon be on the table.

• Star Tribune Commentary: Minneapolis group ‘plays’ Nazi: Sorry, it’s no trifle

• Jewish Community Relations Council: Letter to owner of Gasthof

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. 

Genocide: A Reader

By Jens Meierhenrich

Genocide is a phenomenon that continues to confound scholars, practitioners, and general readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Disciplinary boundaries have inhibited integrative studies and popular, moralizing accounts have hindered comprehension by advancing simple truths in an area where none are to be had.

Genocide: A Reader lays the foundations for an improved understanding of genocide. With the help of 150 essential contributions, Jens Meierhenrich provides a unique introduction to the myriad dimensions of genocide and to the breadth and range of critical thinking that exists concerning it. This innovative anthology offers genre-defining as well as genre-bending selections from diverse disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the humanities as well as from other fields. A wide-ranging introductory chapter on the study and history of genocide accompanies the carefully curated and annotated collection.

In the past month two significant events occurred in two of Africa’s on-going conflicts. The National Transitional council members in Central Africa Republic elected former Bangui (the nation’s capital) mayor, Catherine Samba-Panza as its new interim president and South Sudan signed a ceasefire between Kiir and Machar. Kiir is the president of South Sudan and Machar is his immediate former vice-president and the de facto rebel leader.

Ordinarily this would be good news, not this time however. What we have instead seen in CAR is an increase in hostilities between the Muslim and Christian Militias , the killing of a politician who spoke out against the violence, and the threatening of Catherine Samba-Panza by self-proclaimed anti balaka leader Richard Bejouane. Peter Bouckart, of Human Rights Watch, has done a wonderful job of highlighting the ever-shifting loyalties of the Chadian troops, a lynching by CAR military and claims of a failure by the French military to carry out its mandate to protect the civilian population.

In south Sudan, barely 24 hours after the peace agreement was signed clashes across South Sudan with both government and rebel leaders accusing the other of breaking the truce. The sticking point appears to be the refusal by the Kiir government to release political prisoners. The situation is complicated by the claims that rebel forces have committed atrocities against some of the populace.  As if all this is not complex enough, Uganda has refused to withdraw its troops sent to help the Kiir government.

One would have assumed that the election of a new interim president in CAR and the signing of a peace deal in South Sudan would do the trick. Unfortunately, both of these are often a means to an end and not an end in and of themselves. Foreign intervention has been shown to not be the panacea for ending intrastate conflict not just in South Sudan and CAR but also other conflicts like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Assumptions that power-sharing deals (like the one crafted by Koffi Annan in Kenya) are the best solution have also been shown to be a mixed bag. If Rwanda, Darfur, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Mozambique tell us anything, it’s that power sharing agreements are fragile at best and catalysts for future violence at worst. Peace talks need to be understood as stopgap measures and the international community has to  exert more pressure on the leaders to ensure a resolution occurs in a timely fashion; instead of assuming that the parties at conflict are altruistic and wish to maximize the welfare of the nation as a whole. As CAR and South Sudancontinue to show us leaders sometimes do not have the political and institutional capabilities to maximize the nation’s welfare.

So how do conflicts end? Unfortunately there is not clear-cut answer to this question. The case of CAR provides a counter narrative to the assumption that all we need is the presence of peacekeepers and South Sudan highlights the dangers of weak and non-existent political institutions that are inclusionary and transparent. There is no magic drug in the pursuit to end these conflicts. In my previous post I called for a rolling of sleeves by the international community. What we have mostly received is moral outrage instead of actual proposals to solve the long-term problems in both these countries. It is within this context, one of multiple actors and issues and of near lack of functioning institutions that the setbacks in CAR and South Sudan should be understood. Any proposals must contain processes for structural changes and be cognizant these changes have to remedy the situation while also chart a way forward.

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.

Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy

by Rebecca Clifford

Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy reveals how and why the Holocaust came to play a prominent role in French and Italian political culture in the period after the end of the Cold War. By charting the development of official, national Holocaust commemorations in France and Italy, Rebecca Clifford explains why the wartime persecution of Jews, a topic ignored or marginalized in political discourse through much of the Cold War period, came to be a subject of intense and often controversial debate in the 1990s and 2000s.
How and why were official Holocaust commemorations created? Why did the drive for states to “remember” their roles in the persecution of Jewish populations accelerate only after the collapse of the Cold War? Who pressed for these commemorations, and what motivated their activism? To what extent was the discourse surrounding national Holocaust commemorations really about the genocide at all?

Commemorating the Holocaust explores these key questions, challenging commonly-held assumptions about the origins of and players involved in the creation of Holocaust memorial days. Clifford draws conclusions that shed light both on the state of Holocaust memory in France and Italy, and more broadly on the collective memory of World War II in contemporary Europe.

Noemi Schory, a documentary film director and producer, was the Schusterman Visiting Artist in Residence at the Center for Jewish Studies 2013 Fall Semester. Schory taught The Holocaust in Film: Recent Israeli and German Documentaries Compared and spoke at various film screenings and events on campus and in the community. Schory produced the award-winning documentary film “A Film Unfinished” about the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, which was screened by CHGS on November 12th, 2013 at the St. Anthony Main Theatre.

How does film play a role in shaping Holocaust memory?
Film, fiction or documentary, has become the most important building block of memory-of historic knowledge. The images remain etched in our minds regardless of their veracity, their origins. The little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto, the emaciated prisoners near the barbed wire in Buchenwald (Margaret Bourke White) are iconic representations universally known.  Fifty percent of all West German citizens watched the NBC mini series “Holocaust” in 1979 that was criticized by Elie Wiesel for being a soap opera. Today, the broadcast is still considered to have marked an absolute watershed in coping with Holocaust memory in Germany. We are now entering a phase without witnesses, where all that will be left are the images, and our common memory will be shaped exclusively by them and by the films, which will withstand the erosion induced by time. 

Are there still limits of representation in Holocaust film?
The limits to representation start from what doesn’t exist. There are no visual documents of the mass, industrialized extermination. It seems that the visual archives are endless; there are only two films, which show the deportation trains and none that show the reality of inside the trains. “The Auschwitz Album,” shot by SS photographers, captures the arrival of deportees from Hungary and some images of the selection, but there are no known images of the daily life of the prisoners in the camps. There is or ought to be self-imposed limit on the use and repeated use of atrocity images(mostly shot after the liberation of the camps), which run the risk of desensitizing the viewer and humiliating the victims (exposing them once more). Repeated use also has the potential of turning the viewers off from dealing with the Holocaust.

How can (especially documentary) films be used for teaching the Holocaust? At what age would you recommend that?
Documentary films are not synonymous with factual representation; they often deal with memory, with the aftermath. Recognizable, three-dimensional accounts of daily life, of coping and the struggle to survive, can contribute to the emotional understanding. One of the neglected fields (partly because of scarcity of visual material) is the life before the Holocaust. I regard understanding the rich fabric of Jewish life in Europe (which was almost entirely wiped out), as of utmost importance but too little touched upon. We are used to see very old survivors telling their memories and are not aware that the experiences they talk about happened to them when they were young, sometimes very young. In a series of short films, which I recently directed, based on diaries, wills and other writings of victims, I insisted on finding voices of the same age as the writers of those documents. I think this brings home, on an emotional level, the enormity of dilemmas, fears and choices. The issue of age is one of the toughest ones to which I have no answer. In Israel since Holocaust Remembrance Day is a national day of commemoration marked by sirens and silence, children are exposed to it from a very young age, often leaving deep scars on their psyches or turning them off from dealing with it.I think that the teaching and for that matter Holocaust remembrance ought to lead to universal, humanistic values and not be its own aim.

How would you define the new/third generation of Israeli films about the Holocaust?
I think that in Israel (as elsewhere) the third generation moves in a more reflective and interpretative direction. The realistic testimonies have been recorded-the survivors are passing away. Emotionally, the third generation moves further away, towards more philosophical interpretations. “A Film Unfinished,”directed by a young director, Yael Hersonski, and produced by me, is an example for that, and so is “Numbered.” Animated films, video art probing the limit of true and false memory – I believe that this is the direction for the future.

Verena Stern is the 2013/2014 BMWF Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Austrian Studies/University of Minnesota and a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. She is writing her dissertation on migration of asylum seekers from Somalia to the European Union. Stern´s research interests include Human Rights and transnational migration. 

After concerted efforts by the Economic Community of Central African States, Prime Minister Djotodia, stepped down last week following a two-day summit in Chad. This concluded the shuttle diplomacy by Ambassador Power and concerted efforts by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to raise awareness of what was happening in CAR. His replacement, Mr. Alexandre-Ferdinand Nguendet is the former speaker of parliament and upon his ascension to office has claimed that violence has largely subsided.

Now the hard work begins. As countries such as Ivory Coast and Mozambique have taught us there is always a risk of an increase in violence rather than a decrease during transitions. As mentioned in my previous article , CAR was about a power struggle that had taken religious and regional undertones. The stepping down of PM Djotodia should not be taken to imply that there is a cessation of this struggle. With multiple players jostling for political power, it is incumbent on the observers to engage those pulling the nation apart.  If all the parties and not actively involved in this transition, we may find ourselves in this very same situation a few months down the line.

A report by Emmanuel Braun and Tom Miles from Reuters stated today that there were ‘Seeds of Genocide’ in Central Africa Republic. To be clear, this same claim had been made last year by John Ging the director of the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs as well. With in mind, its safe to say that Mr. Braun and Mr. Miles did not make any news today about the situation in CAR, we have heard this before. What we need now is active engagement in the process to ensure peace and provision of safety and food during this transitory period.

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.

It is with great sadness that the Center for Holocaust and Genocide announces the passing of Gus Gutman. We recently had the pleasure of working with Gus on the “Portraying Memories” project with artist Felix de la Concha. Gus was an enthusiastic participant, turning what is typically a 2-4 hour session into a daylong adventure involving a trip to the Shalom Home, where he introduced Felix to his good friend Walter Schwartz, so he could participate as well.

Gus was always full of energy, a wonderful storyteller and great to be around. We were very surprised to hear he was ill and extremely saddened to hear of his passing on January 11.

Although Gus was a child during the Holocaust, he spoke often about remembering the events of Kristallnacht (the Nazi pogrom) that took place throughout Germany and Austria on November 9,10, 1938. “I was just a small child in Hildesheim when my father held me up to see the smoke coming from our beloved synagogue. The experience was so embedded in my memory I even wrote a play, “Guests of the City,” about my return to Germany with flashbacks to that time which was produced and performed in my home town Hildesheim in 2005 (I played my father).”

We are very fortunate that Gus’s story will live on the CHGS website and that others will be able to view his painting session with Felix de la Concha. The portrait will also be on display in an exhibition planned for Spring of 2015, and website dedicated to all of Felix de la Concha’s Holocaust portraits.

Gustav Gutman, 01/20/1935 – 01/11/2014: Obituary