Verfolgen und Aufklären. Die erste Generation der Holocaustforschung
In the organizer's words:
A bilingual exhibition (German/English) by the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Center and Touro University Berlin in cooperation with The Wiener Library.
Between 1939 and 1945, the Germans and their accomplices murdered almost six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust was aimed at the extermination of people as well as the destruction of their culture. All traces of the crime were to be erased.
Jewish researchers tried to counteract this complete eradication while the murders were still taking place. By collecting testimonies, they documented the events in order to make the dimensions of the mass murder and the destruction of Jewish life visible and to remember it. In exile, but also under hostile conditions in the ghettos and camps, they researched the deeds, collected facts and secured evidence. They founded archives and committees that continued their work after the end of the war. And they wanted to remember those murdered, investigate the Shoah, bring the perpetrators to justice and at the same time make a repeat genocide impossible. Driven by different motives, these women and men with diverse professional backgrounds dedicated themselves to researching and commemorating the Holocaust. In doing so, they denied the criminals their final triumph: the millions of murders were not forgotten and did not remain without consequences: Books, memorials, research institutes, court cases and, last but not least, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 were the results of their passionate commitment. Our knowledge of the Holocaust today is based on this legacy.
The exhibition pays tribute to the lives and work of twenty of these pioneers of Holocaust research. Names such as Rachel Auerbach, Raphael Lemkin, Massimo Adolfo Vitale, Louis de Jong and Joseph Wulf exemplify a small group of tireless educators. Their work, which was accompanied by remarkable methodological reflections on their own dual role as researchers and survivors, took place under the most adverse conditions in the chaos of the war and post-war years and in the face of the painful loss of their loved ones and their homeland. Shunned by an indifferent and hostile environment, they laid the foundations for the universal recognition of the Holocaust as a crime against humanity and thus a starting point for Holocaust research as we know it today.
The exhibition reconstructs the life paths, considerations and concerns, but also the methodical approaches to the traditions of a crime that was previously unknown in this dimension. At the time, the name "Holocaust" was unknown; survivors from Poland mostly used the Yiddish term "Churbn" - destruction.
Not only did the majority of the victims come from Poland and what is now western Ukraine, but the German perpetrators had also set up most of their extermination camps there. As early as 1944, various Jewish historical commissions were established there, some of which were made up of several hundred survivors. They collected perpetrator documents, interviewed contemporary witnesses and secured evidence at the sites of extermination. This also took place in other parts of Europe. In Budapest, extensive interviews were conducted with survivors of the ghettos and camps and in Italy, Adolfo Vitale and his colleagues compiled lists of the approximately 11,000 people deported to extermination from Italy and the Adriatic region in order to record the extent of the catastrophe.
The dimensions of documenting, researching and remembering merged and were inconceivable without each other. Survivors set up the first memorial sites and memorial stones at the places of persecution. Another central aspect was prosecution and prevention. While criminal prosecution could only be initiated if the perpetrators could be identified and convicted, effective prevention only seemed possible if the specifics of ethnic-racist persecution could be made clear and clearly distinguished from other acts of violence. Early Holocaust research therefore had an eminently legal perspective. The "crime without a name", of which Churchill had already spoken in the summer of 1941, first had to be translated into legal facts. Theorists of international law such as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht developed concepts of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity"; practitioners such as Simon Wiesenthal and Tuviah Friedman tracked down murderers and brought them to the attention of the criminal prosecution authorities. Many of the protagonists presented worked for the judiciary with their expertise - from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel.
This gave rise to cross-border networks - a global Holocaust research community. Against this background, the theory that modern Holocaust research only emerged in the 1970s cannot be upheld. Quite the opposite: the first generation of these enlighteners was already active 30 years earlier. Their own standards of scholarship were interdisciplinary, methodologically sound and demanding - and they were met.
The first generation of Holocaust research often had to contend with setbacks, ignorance, rejection and denial. Even after 1945, they were often exposed to violence and state pressure - the multiple escapes and migrations of these survivors tell of this. Their biographies are therefore also an obligation to defend their achievements in the scientific and practical fields against those who doubt and openly question them. The exhibition aims to contribute to keeping knowledge about the Holocaust and the memory of the destroyed Jewish lives alive and to encourage people to come to terms with it themselves.
This content has been machine translated.Location
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