The Historiography of the Holocaust

Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe 135
6 The removal of Nazi war criminals from the US was made possible by the Holtzman
Act of 1978 and the establishment of the Office of Special Investigations in 1979. On
the investigation of Nazi war criminals in the West, see, for example, A.A. Ryan,
Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1984); D. Cesarani, Justice Delayed (London: William Heinemann, 1992);
and M. Aarons, War Criminals Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War
Criminals since 1945 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2001), all of which include case studies
of specific collaborators.
7 R.B. Birn, ‘Revising the Holocaust’, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 195–215,
especially 207–8.
8 See J.T. Gross, Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); on this debate, see, for example, Thou
Shalt Not Kill: Poles on Jedwabne (Warsaw: WIEZ, 2001).
9 Historical Commissions have been established in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and
Croatia, while in Poland the Institute of National Remembrance conducted a detailed
investigation into the events in Jedwabne and the surrounding area.
10 S. Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia during World War II (Amsterdam: Harwood,
1998), pp. 271–85 discusses local collaboration with the Nazis and assistance to Jews
in the same chapter as two sides of the same coin.
11 For a survey of the declining position of the Jews in inter-war eastern Europe, due
mainly to rising nationalism, see the classic study of E. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East
Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
12 See R. Breitmann, ‘Himmler’s Police Auxiliaries in the Occupied Soviet Territories’,
Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, 7 (1990), 23–39 and A. Ezergailis, The Holocaust in
Latvia, 1941–44: the Missing Center (Riga: Historical Institute of Latvia, 1996).
13 See, for example, the paper given by Arunys Bubnys, ‘Die litauischen Hilfspolizeibataillone
und der Holocaust’, at the conference organized by Uppsala University in
April 2002 entitled ‘Collaboration and Resistance in Reichskommissariat Ostland’
(conference proceedings, forthcoming). Bubnys is the author of a series of publications
in Lithuanian dealing with the Lithuanian police battalions. D. Pohl, ‘Ukrainische
Hilfskräfte beim Mord an den Juden’, in Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten
oder ganz normale Deutsche?, ed. G. von Paul (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002),
pp. 205–34 also examines briefly the role of Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft battalions
in the Holocaust. I am grateful to Wendy Lower for making this article available
to me.
14 C. Dieckmann, ‘Die Zivilverwaltung in Litauen’, in Täter im Vernichtungskrieg: Der Überfall
auf die Sowjetunion und der Völkermord an den Juden, ed. W. Kaiser (Berlin: Propyläen,
2002), p. 104.
15 M. Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and
Ukraine, 1941–44 (London: Macmillan, 1999). In his Ina Levine Scholar Award Annual
Lecture at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 13 March 2003,
Christopher Browning argued that the role of local collaborators was numerically
much more significant during the ‘second wave’.
16 See, for example, W. Röhr, ed., Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938–1945): Beiträge zu
Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen Okkupationspolitik (Berlin:
Hüthig, 1994).
17 In occupied Lithuania in 1944 only some 660 German officials worked in the civil
administration with about 20,000 Lithuanian officials subordinate to them. See
C. Dieckmann, ‘Die Zivilverwaltung in Litauen’, in Täter im Vernichtungskrieg, ed.
Kaiser, p. 105.