NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,754 documented victims. Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943. The experiments remained at a high level of intensity despite imminent German defeat in 1945. There were more victims who survived than were killed as part of or as a result of the experiments, and the survivors often had severe injuries.

This monograph offers the first comprehensive history of the decolonization of the Indonesian economy, a process with a different momentum and timing from the achievement of political independence. It traces the origins of economic decolonization to the late-colonial period, covers developments during the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian Revolution as well as continued operations by Dutch enterprises in Indonesia during the 1950s. The account culminates with the takeover and nationalization of Dutch private enterprises in the late 1950s.

“ This is Munich all over again!”: Such comparisons between a present situation and a past one (i.e. a historical analogy) are common in public and political discourses. Historical analogies were used for centuries but have received increased interest in the last 50 years from scholars in political science, history, and psychology. Despite existing interdisciplinary exchanges, it remains difficult to identify the variables involved in the phenomenon as different methodologies and conceptualizations are used. Hence, we review part of this voluminous literature and suggest that the various effects related to the use of historical analogies can be grouped under four independent and non-mutually exclusive categories: representing a current situation, defining the roles of current actors, making decisions, and persuading others of a message. We conclude by acknowledging the limits of this current conceptualization and emphasizing its potential as a useful heuristic tool to organize findings in a way that makes them readable across various fields.

The sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Army's liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was commemorated on 27 January 2005 by dignitaries who deliberated about what lessons the world should l...

There is no state that has been and continues to be as haunted by the spectres of a criminal past as is Germany. Jeffrey Olick’s The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method examines, with an i...

BACKGROUND: Periods of extreme food shortages during war force people to eat food that they normally do not consider edible. The last time that countries in Western Europe experienced severe scarcities was during World War II. The so-called Dutch famine or Hunger Winter (1944-1945) made at least 25,000 victims. The Dutch government took action by opening soup kitchens and providing information on wild plants and other famine food sources in "wartime cookbooks." The Dutch wartime diet has never been examined from an ethnobotanical perspective. METHODS: We interviewed 78 elderly Dutch citizens to verify what they remembered of the consumption of vegetal and fungal famine food during World War II by them and their close surroundings. We asked whether they experienced any adverse effects from consuming famine food plants and how they knew they were edible. We identified plant species mentioned during interviews by their local Dutch names and illustrated field guides and floras. We hypothesized that people living in rural areas consumed more wild species than urban people. A Welch t test was performed to verify whether the number of wild and cultivated species differed between urban and rural citizens. RESULTS: A total number of 38 emergency food species (14 cultivated and 21 wild plants, three wild fungi) were mentioned during interviews. Sugar beets, tulip bulbs, and potato peels were most frequently consumed. Regularly eaten wild species were common nettle, blackberry, and beechnuts. Almost one third of our interviewees explicitly described to have experienced extreme hunger during the war. People from rural areas listed significantly more wild species than urban people. The number of cultivated species consumed by both groups was similar. Negative effects were limited to sore throats and stomachache from the consumption of sugar beets and tulip bulbs. Knowledge on the edibility of famine food was obtained largely by oral transmission; few people remembered the written recipes in wartime cookbooks. CONCLUSION: This research shows that 71 years after the Second World War, knowledge on famine food species, once crucial for people's survival, is still present in the Dutch society. The information on famine food sources supplied by several institutions was not distributed widely. For the necessary revival of famine food knowledge during the 1940s, people needed to consult a small group of elders. Presumed toxicity was a major reason given by our participants to explain why they did not collect wild plants or mushrooms during the war.

Much of the story about the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany has yet to be told. In Motherland in Danger, Karel Berkhoff addresses one of the most neglected questions facing historians of the Second World War: how did the Soviet leadership sell the campaign against the Germans to the people on the home front? For Stalin, the obstacles were manifold. Repelling the German invasion would require a mobilization so large that it would test the limits of the Soviet state. Could the USSR marshal the manpower necessary to face the threat? How could the authorities overcome inadequate infrastructure and supplies[unk] Might Stalin's regime fail to survive a sustained conflict with the Germans? Motherland in Danger takes us inside the Stalinist state to witness, from up close, its propaganda machine. Using sources in many languages, including memoirs and documents of the Soviet censor, Berkhoff explores how the Soviet media reflected - and distorted - every aspect of the war, from the successes and blunders on the front lines to the institution of forced labor on farm fields and factory floors. He also details the media's handling of Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust, as well as its stinting treatment of the Allies, particularly the United States, the UK, and Poland. Berkhoff demonstrates not only that propaganda was critical to the Soviet war effort but also that it has colored perceptions of the war to the present day, both inside and outside of Russia.

Even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day. The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present. Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were liberated into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.

The main argument of this article is that the middlemen paradigm which since the Second World War has come to dominate academic writings and popular perceptions of Chinese business in late colonial Indonesia is generally flawed, and has hindered the development of a more nuanced picture of the nature of Chinese economic activity in pre-war Southeast Asia.

OBJECTIVES: Late-life implications of early traumatic stress for the adreno-cortical system were examined in a sample of 133 child survivors of the Holocaust, who were subjected to Nazi persecution during infancy. METHOD: In a non-convenience sample of child survivors, born between 1935 and 1944, basal circadian cortisol release and cortisol reactivity to a stressor were assessed. RESULTS: Age, parental loss during the Holocaust, current depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and physical illness were not associated with differences in basal diurnal cortisol levels. Neuro-endocrine effects, however, were found in stress reactivity through elevated cortisol levels in male respondents in the youngest age group (born 1941-1945), and in male respondents suffering from PTSD-related functional impairment. CONCLUSION: The youngest survivors of Nazi persecution show late-life effects of traumatic stress during early childhood, evidenced by the early onset of differential neuroendocrine pathways to stress-regulating strategies.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels. Starting at Hindu-Buddhist, Chinese, Islamic, colonial, and prehistoric heritage sites in Indonesia, the focus is on people's encounters and the knowledge exchange taking place across colonial and post-colonial regimes. Objects are followed as they move from their site of origin to other locations, such as the Buddhist statues from Borobudur temple, that were gifted to King Chulalongkorn of Siam. The ways in which the meaning of these objects transformed as they moved away to other sites reveal their role in parallel processes of heritage formation outside Indonesia. Calling attention to the power of the material remains of the past, Marieke Bloembergen and Martijn Eickhoff explore questions of knowledge production, the relationship between heritage and violence, and the role of sites and objects in the creation of national histories.

This chapter explores the implications of recent developments in technology and social media, having a significant impact on the way in which young people learn history in schools and outside schools. New technology not only has a positive influence on education but also has unintended negative consequences. Positioning the increasing influence of the internet and social media in history education in a broader discourse about new technology and education, Haydn and Ribbens pay attention to the potentially harmful effects on history education. Furthermore, they focus on the attributes that are helpful to history teachers and students while reflecting on ways in which well-informed use of social media helps to obviate negative consequences of ‘bad’ history. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed away, oral history interviews yield important insights. Elderly Turks and Kurds in Eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories from family members or fellow villagers who witnessed or participated in the genocide. This article is based on interviews conducted with (grand)children of eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide. The research suggests there is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.

"Second generation to Holocaust Survivors" is a description of a segment of society, as well as an attempt at characterizing these individuals. It is common to speak of mechanisms of transmission of trauma as characterizing the dynamics of the second generation. This paper intends to advance differentiation between two kinds of transmission of trauma: direct transmission (also called transposition) and indirect transmission. There seems to be some confusion in this realm, since there is some discrepancy between clinical and the experimental publications: Whereas the first usually presents evidence of direct transmission of trauma in the second generation, the second mostly demonstrates indirect transmission. We shall present a clinical account of group therapy demonstrating indirect transmission, proposing a distinction between second-generation individuals owing to the relative dominance of each of the mechanisms in their mental structuring. This distinction has significant clinical consequences.

Post-Soviet Russia’s ambivalent efforts to confront its Stalinist past have generated heated discussion about what should be remembered. Official ambivalence is reflected in school history texts that emphasize Soviet achievements, in commissions that gate-keep archives and historical facts, and in monuments and commemorations. In consequence, the surviving victims of Stalinism are insufficiently acknowledged, let alone compensated. This tension forms the central focus of this article as it explores the individual, public, and official efforts in the aftermath of seven decades of state-sponsored repression to remember, represent and even rehabilitate the Stalinist past. The prevalence of the state-sponsored narrative over the victims’ counter-histories indicates the persistence of a post-Communist repression which is part cause and part effect of the failure/lack of transitional justice mechanisms.

Conventional understandings of genocide are rooted in the ‘Holocaust model’: intense mass killing directed at the immediate destruction of the group. Yet, such conceptions do not encompass cases of so-called “slow-motion” genocide, where the destruction of the group may occur over generations. The destruction of indigenous groups often follows such a pattern. This article examines the case of West Papua with a view to developing a new analytical model distinguishing high-intensity “hot” genocides, motivated by hate and the victims’ threatening nature, with low-intensity “cold genocides,” rooted in victims’ supposed inferiority.

This article focuses on early archaeological activities on Java between 1800 and 1850 in the context of the multiple regime changes of that period. It engages with the New Imperial History’s network-centred approach by looking at circuits of archaeological knowledge gathering in which not empire, but Java’s ruined Hindu and Buddhist temple sites provide ‘the nodal points’. By tracing how people, objects and ideas travelled via these sites, and between the Netherlands and the colony, the article aims to understand the origins and nature of heritage awareness of the modern colonial state. It argues that this archaeological site-centred approach helps us understand how both European concepts and indigenous appropriations of archaeological sites contributed to the development of heritage awareness. There were complex multilayered power-hierarchies at work at these sites and forms of indigenous agency that we might miss if we follow only empire-centred networks. This article is part of the special issue 'A New Dutch Imperial History'.

Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between the First World War and the persecutions of Ottoman Armenians. So far, little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, in particular the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best as they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this hiatus and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the war and the genocide on Armenian women and children during and after the war. It examines how the violence generated innumerable orphans, and how these orphans became a battleground between Turkish and Armenian political elites. It reviews how the Young Turk regime dealt with the unforeseen phenomenon of Armenians converting to Islam to circumvent deportation orders, and focuses on the government’s orders and decrees issued to confront this issue. Finally it briefly canvasses the hitherto neglected problem of prostitution by Armenian women as a strategy for survival during the war.

"A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa: 1930–1948." Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 72(1), pp. 93–94

"Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population":The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941-45 Karel C. Berkhoff (bio) When Nazi Germany invaded the expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that the Soviet media would report in a substantial way the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, known today as the Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that "antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism," and added that "brotherly feelings for the Jewish people" would "define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur." The Soviet press also covered the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a "massacre of a defenseless Jewish population." That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, the first Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany.1 But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in the people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the war with Germany, what mattered to him were the Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented the [End Page 61] exploitation of the occupied regions.2 Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of "treason," for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in the public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit the sites of the murder of the Jews of Kharkiv in December 1943. "Those killed were the less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, the part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity," he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: "Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with the Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, kept his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor."3 When to the suspicion one adds Stalin's personal, if usually hidden antipathy to Jews,4 the likelihood that readers of the main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that the Nazis were targeting Jews in particular seems slim indeed. Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews, this never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about the three meetings in Moscow of "representatives of the Jewish people" and various articles by Il´ia Grigor´evich Ehrenburg mentioned the Jews as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as the present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1.7 million Jews had been gassed to death at Birkenau. All investigations of the presentation of Nazi mass murder by the Soviet media during the war with Nazi Germany focus on the campaign known today as the Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet life, emphasized a total or near-total silence about the mass murder of the Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that "the very fact of the wholesale extermination of Jews" was "shrouded in silence" and "kept out of the Soviet newspapers."5 Gennadii Vasil´evich Kostyrchenko [End Page 62] wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin's Secret Policy, 2003) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about the "Hitlerite genocide of the [Soviet] Jews." The Soviet leadership, allowing for just a few exceptions, "decided … to remove any reference...