Introduction

Three and a half generations later, almost 70 years after the Holocaust, thinking and feeling people, with or without a family history of the barbaric atrocities inflicted by Germans toward the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” and others including Gypsies, Seventh-day Adventists, homosexuals, blacks, and the mentally or physically disabled, continue to examine the unthinkable: man’s inhumanity to man and its aftermath. With every passing

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year, historical writings, psychological research, memoirs, political science and sociological analysis, and fiction proliferate. The main actors are the perpetrators, victims, bystanders, rescuers, resisters, prisoners of war (P.O.W.), and liberators. In recent years, the descendants of the perpetrators, victims, and rescuers have been studied in terms of their own distinct personae and features. Inanimate objects such as memorials, Holocaust museums, and scenes of the crime such as concentration camps, ghettoes, and mass graves represent what James Young, a memorial expert, describes as “the texture of meaning.”

The historiography of the Holocaust is an area of study that, in itself, has been much debated among historians. Although psychology has contributed to our understanding of the Holocaust and other genocides, historians are reluctant to share the stage with psychologists. Clio’s Psyche, therefore, is unique. It is a journal that incorporates and expresses the views of scholars from many disciplines and thus provides a multidimensional approach to the Holocaust and genocide generally.

The perpetrators were the first to be studied because of the Nuremberg Trials and other tribunals. Rorschach tests were administered to some of the SS to assess their personalities. Stanley Milgram conducted his famous Obedience to Authority book, film, and studies (1974) to explore whether ordinary people will harm individuals if ordered to do so by a scientific authority. Phillip Zimbardo performed simulated experiments on prisoners and guards. Early studies of transcriptions of perpetrators’ testimony on trial, psychological testing, and simulations found that, as a general proposition, the killers were not psychotic.

Authority, sometimes wrapped in the language of science, has the power to transform ordinary citizens into killers. In the Third Reich, the propaganda machinery was an important vehicle that was implemented to dehumanize the Jews, to make them “the Other.” Those who continued to see the Jews as people just like themselves were able to transcend the propaganda that Jews are vermin and became resisters, rescuers, or passive bystanders.

The debate about who were the killers continued with Hannah Arendt’s conclusions from observing the Eichmann Trial. In her seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she concluded that Eichmann was just following orders, completely ignoring his initiative in orchestrating the depor-

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tation of a half million Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, more importantly, Arendt blamed the Jewish leaders in the Judenraete as actors and participants in the destruction of European Jewry. The Eichmann Trial was also an opportunity to hear survivor testimony; and, thus, began the discourse about Jewish victims’ behavior during and after the Holocaust. Raul Hilberg, in his magisterial work The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), blames the Judenraete for collaboration with the Germans, thereby blaming the victims. Israeli historians such as Yisrael Gutman in Warsaw Jews (1977) and Yehudah Bauer in A History of the Holocaust (1982) write that the Jewish victims should be praised for their heroic resistance despite all odds, when they were all destined for annihilation.

The debate about the persecutors heated up with Daniel Goldhagen’s publication of Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), in which Goldhagen identifies the killers as “all Germans pursuing German national political goals” (7). Ultimately, “eliminationist anti-Semitism” was the core ideological value that motivated the German killers. On the other hand, historian Christopher Browning, who initiated the process of looking at the police records of Reserve Police Battalion 101, came to different conclusions from the same testimonies, which he published in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). Browning understands the complexity of human behavior. He draws upon Milgram’s understanding of obedience to authority and Zimbardo’s prisoners’ dilemmas. Like a good social psychologist—although he is a historian—Browning merges the situational with the person and gives credence to the indoctrination that changed certain people over time. Although neither Browning nor Goldhagen interviewed any of the killers—a necessity for attributing in-depth motivation—Browning’s analysis is multidimensional. This rings true for my research. When I interviewed rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust about their reasons to rescue Jews at such a risk to themselves and their families, I found five different types of motivations, which I write about in Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (1994).

The discussions about the perpetrators continue in Clio’s Psyche’s Special Issue on Psychology and the Holocaust: Part I (Vol. 21 No. 1, June 2014, 1-68). It begins with Andreas Musolff’s captivating view of the Germans’ reception of the Nuremberg

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Racial Laws “for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” on September 16, 1935 which eliminated civil rights for German Jews. Victor Melaladze elaborates on Robert Jay Lifton’s discussion of the use of the defense mechanism doubling by Josef Mengele. Rochelle Saidel reviews the role of women killers from Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields and dissuades us from the notion that only men were persecutors.

Paul Elovitz movingly shares with the reader how two Jewish twin brothers, Gregory and Andre Bukstein, survived the German invasion of Soviet Russia when others in their family were killed and continues with how they reconstructed new lives in Displaced Persons’ (D.P.) camps, in Israel, in France, and in the United States where one became a benefactor of Ramapo College. David Beisel alerts us to a new group of protagonists, the eye witnesses during and after the atrocities, and the psychic effects of this. Pope Pius XII as an observer was discussed by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere.

The second generation of Holocaust survivors has become an identifiable group since Helen Epstein’s groundbreaking book Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979). The “Psychology and the Holocaust” issue of Clio’s Psyche has an entire section devoted to how the memory is transmitted to descendants of the Holocaust, what it feels like for these witnesses, and what meaning it has in their lives. Cinema, photography, and poetry are all part of the final stage of mourning, which supports George Pollock’s idea that from mourning comes creativity. This helps us understand why there is such a proliferation of studies of the arts relevant to the Holocaust. The articles by Ken and Ida Dancyger, Juhani Ihanus, and Rachel Youdelman are all valuable contributions.

Marion Feldman and Katy Hazan present a case study of two women who were children to parents in France who had emigrated from Poland and Bessarabia in the 1930s. Their findings confirm previous works by Eva Fogelman and Helene Bass-Wichelhaus, published in Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (vol. 4, no. 1, Jan. 2002, 31-47), that a group experience after the war, such as being placed in a children’s home, facilitated resilience.

A group of victims receiving attention are the psychoanalysts who were Jewish children during the Holocaust or adults who

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escaped during the early years of the Third Reich. How their ordeals shaped their contributions to psychoanalysis in Europe, the United States, and Israel is examined by Hanna Turken in her book review of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich by Emily A. Kuriloff (2014). For example, Henry Krystal coined “massive psychic trauma.” Krystal found that “secure attachment” is the single most important factor in the well-being of survivors.

As for the witnesses, Samantha Lakin, who has conducted a study on Jewish children who escaped from France to Switzerland during World War II, has since gone to Rwanda to interview survivors of the genocide of 1994, where more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed in 100 days by the Hutu militias. Miriam Victory Spiegel, who has done therapeutic and educational work with Holocaust survivors and their descendants in Switzerland, examines the impediments to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians as an extension of the influence of the Holocaust trauma.

As we get further away in time from the atrocities, other witnesses come forth. Peter W. Petschauer, a child of an SS father who was a German diplomat whose unit was coopted by the SS in Northern Italy in 1944, is looking for fragments of memory of what it was like for his father to be a POW in 13 facilities after the war. Petschauer and his wife travel to some of these POW facilities that are long forgotten: some have collapsed and present-day inhabitants in areas of these camps could care less about the past. Petschauer’s experience reminds the reader of the bystanders who, during the years of persecution, lived next door to the stench of the crematoriums of Auschwitz/Birkenau and who went about their daily chores oblivious to the mass murder. There were exceptions, and Petschauer points out Wendelgard von Staden, whom I had a chance to meet when she was promoting her book Darkness Over the Valley (1981).

Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of Hanns Elard Ludin, an envoy to Slovakia for the Third Reich convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1947, shares with the reader, a camera crew, and a child Holocaust survivor her journey to her grandfather’s grave in Bratislava, Slovak. Although Senfft’s uncle, Malte Ludin, directed a film, Two or Three Things I Know About Him (2006), about the denial in the family about Hanns Elard Ludin’s role in the Third Reich, Senfft takes this struggle against familial denial a step further toward the truth.

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Petschauer’s poetry, in both issues of Clio’s Psyche, is his attempt, like that of all of us in the post-Holocaust generation, to search for meaning and to break the pattern of denial. As memory becomes history and as geography erodes clues to family histories, a collective memory is being formed that can be transmitted to future generations as one step aimed at immunizing them against repeating such horrors.

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