The Historiography of the Holocaust

74 Tim Cole
Within such an approach, the focus was much more on ghettoization as process
than the ghetto as place, and indeed for Hilberg ‘ghettoization’ encompassed
far more than simply the creation of the physical places called ghettos. It was
a five-step process involving ‘the severance of social contacts between Jews and
Germans, housing restrictions, movement regulations, identification measures,
and the institution of Jewish administrative machinery’. 46 Seeing ghettoization
in such general terms reflected, no doubt, the Europe-wide scale of Hilberg’s
project. After all, closed ghettos were not established everywhere within Nazioccupied
Europe, being primarily associated with occupied Poland and the
Baltic states (although ghettos were also formed in the Soviet Union, Romania
and Hungary). However, in a country such as Germany, where closed ghettos
were never established, the measures identified by Hilberg as ‘ghettoization’
clearly were. Thus, for Hilberg, the focus was less on the ghetto as place, which
was a largely eastern European ‘Jewish’ experience between 1939 and 1945.
Rather it was on the more blanket term ‘ghettoization’, which was an element
of concentration, with concentration itself being ultimately only one element
of the Nazi destruction process.
Seeing the ghetto as part and parcel of the Nazi destruction of European
‘Jews’ has characterized the literature generated by the field of Holocaust studies,
dominated as it is by the writings of historians. The main point of departure
has been the precise role played by ghettoization in the radicalization of the
Nazi destruction process. At the height of the functionalist versus intentionalist
debate in the 1970s and 1980s, the ghettos established in Poland in the early
years of the war played a crucial role in the debate about the authorship and
dating of, and motivation for, the implementation of a policy of Europe-wide
mass murders of the ‘Jews’.
A foreshadowing of the intentionalist position can be seen in Philip Friedman’s
early writings on ghettos. Friedman published a number of other short studies
of Holocaust ghettos, but his plan to write a book-length study was cut short
by his premature death. 47 In perhaps his most important work on ghettos, first
published in 1954, Friedman interpreted the ghettos planned and established
by the Nazis in Poland from 1939 onwards as a ‘step towards genocide’. 48
Heydrich’s September 1939 order to the chiefs of Einsatzgruppen units in newly
occupied Poland to concentrate ‘Jews’ in cities with a ‘Jewish’ population of
more than 500 in proximity to a railway junction was interpreted by Friedman
as a prelude to deportation and extermination. Heydrich himself had spoken
of ghettoization as a temporary measure to be implemented prior to the
‘ultimate goal’. While acknowledging that at this stage the precise nature of
that ‘ultimate goal’ remained somewhat hazy, Friedman claimed that ‘it is quite
possible that the plan for the physical annihilation had already been spelled
out’. 49 Thus Polish ghettos were seen as gathering points en route to the
ultimate goal of mass extermination.