Dr. Rozett, author of Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War (Yad Vashem, 2014), suggested that the term "intimate" could be appropriate for describing this kind of persecution: intimate in the sense of a familiarity or a personal relationship, and as an antonym for cold, calculated and impersonal.
Indeed, the workshop participants illustrated different places in Europe where persecution by people who knew the Jews they were pursuing happened – or where face-to-face murder occurred.
Prof. Rael Straus of Tel Aviv University spoke about the Hadamar psychiatric hospital in western Germany, one of the main sites of the so-called "T4 Euthanasia Program." Prof. Straus showed how Hadamar reflected critical aspects of the first stage of the mass murder by the Nazi regime, before the "Final Solution," and he demonstrated the more intimate aspects of that murder. He discussed physicians from around Germany who sent their patients to Hadamar, knowing full well what would happen to them there. He also described how Hadamar physicians observed the actual murder of their patients in the gas chambers constructed in the hospital.
French historian Tal Bruttmann examined a largely unknown aspect of the last months of the German occupation of France. He described the murderous hunt for Jews carried out by French "ultra-collaborators." Often, these collaborators worked in their native areas hunting down Jews whom they knew. In the Lyon area alone, he observed, several hundred Jews were killed in this way.
Prof. Therkel Straede University of Southern Denmark, investigated Bobruysk, one of 40,000 camps and camp-like facilities established by the Nazis, where Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were imprisoned. The camp was rather small, with about 1,500 inmates, and in that situation, guards – among whom were Danish volunteers in the SS – and prisoners sometimes got to know one another well. Owing to the brutal regime, only 91 prisoners survived. The role of the Danish SS men in this intimate situation of murder was a new revelation, given the more familiar connection of the Danish people with the rescue, not murder, of the Jews during the Shoah.
Other presentations discussed face-to-face murder in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Ukraine and Italy, highlighting the fact that intimate persecution and murder were phenomena that touched the entire breadth and scope of the Shoah.
The workshop was held with the generous support of the Gutwirth Family Fund.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 87.
