Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
April 9 2010

The Future of Holocaust Studies*

Johannes Houwink ten Cate

Holocaust awareness has become a worldwide phenomenon, and an
international free republic of Holocaust researchers has emerged.
Among long-term trends in the field of Holocaust studies are the
universalization of victimhood and the extension of the circle of
perpetrators. Present trends include Holocaust history as local
history, the integration of perpetrator and victim histories, and the
explanation of perpetrator behavior in ideological terms. Anticipated
future developments include greater discussion of the outlawing of
Holocaust denial, and the return of the explanation of perpetrator
behavior in terms of disposition. The term genocide has come to be
used too often. It is not only used a shield, but also as a sword in
new quests for utopia.

The History of the Field of Holocaust Research
The field of Holocaust research became truly international in the
1970s.[1] The single most important development since then has been
the growth of a worldwide free republic of researchers, which now
includes scholars from Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom,
both Western and Eastern Europe, Canada, and Australia. There is some
research by scholars from South America, but it mostly deals with
Jewish emigration to that part of the world during the 1930s, not with
the Holocaust proper. Not yet included are scholars from Africa and
Asia. The boundaries of this republic of Holocaust research are
essentially the boundaries of the part of the world that during the
Cold War, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, constituted the free
West – along with Eastern Europe.

This points to the fact that Holocaust awareness is a way to discuss
core political values of the West such as democracy, responsibility,
and solidarity. It also is an instrument to strengthen the democratic
ethos in Eastern Europe. As Omer Bartov has put it, "in a century
characterized by a quest for perfection," Holocaust awareness deals
with "the narrow path between utopia and hell." The murderous pursuit
of utopian politics has "been the engine of our epoch’s aspirations
and disillusionments, violence and annihilation…. In essence our
century has tried to define what and who is human, and then to set
rules as to how human beings should live in society and who must be
excluded from it altogether."[2]

In keeping with Yehuda Bauer’s outlook, the basis for these
discussions is the idea of the universalization of victimhood, that
is, the idea that everybody is a potential victim of genocide.[3] In
other words, identity is not only an unfailing source of empowerment;
the Holocaust makes abundantly clear that identity is also a risk, and
possibly a fatal one. As Bauer wrote: "What happened before, can
happen again. We all are possible victims, possible perpetrators,
possible bystanders…. The Holocaust is a warning. It adds three
commandments to the ten of the Jewish-Christian tradition: Thou shalt
not be a perpetrator; Thou shalt not be a passive victim; and Thou
most certainly shalt not be a bystander."[4]

This universality of the importance of the Holocaust by no means
contradicts the specificity of the Holocaust; the two notions are two
sides of the same coin. Holocaust educators across the globe prove
this every day. To quote Bauer once more: "This menace is universal
and at the same time – because it is founded on the experience of the
Holocaust – very specifically connected with the Jews. The specific
and the universal cannot be separated." And as Bauer also observed:
"as a symbol of evil the awareness of the Holocaust is spreading all
over the world."[5]

Division of Labor
In the somewhat smaller republic of Holocaust researchers there is –
or perhaps was – an implicit division of labor. American and German
scholars specialize(d) in studies of the perpetrators; Israelis have
strongly focused on the victims. In the past these two types of
research were not connected. There is not yet sufficient input by
younger scholars from Eastern Europe, although some of the younger
researchers from Ukraine appear promising. Within Eastern Europe,
however, Poland stands apart, as scholars from that country such as
Waclaw Dlugoborski, Czeslaw Madajczyk, Feliks Tych, Franciszek Piper,
and Jan T. Gross have been doing distinguished work since the 1980s at
the latest.[6] Not all East European political elites support
Holocaust studies and Holocaust education. They tend to regard the
states they govern as victims of Stalinist terror and not as
accomplices in the Holocaust; Ukraine is a case in point. Not many
institutions actively support the younger East European researchers.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, however, is doing
so.

Overall, the field is internationalizing because researchers from new
"member states" have entered the research republic. Sometimes this was
a result of the debates on the restitution of Holocaust assets. The
Scandinavian countries, Belgium, and Greece are examples of this
tendency.[7]

Worldwide, perhaps 250 PhD students are now in the later phases of
their work on the Holocaust. In April 2009, the Strassler Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies of Clark University (USA) organized its
First International Graduate Students’ Conference on Holocaust and
Genocide Studies. One hundred twenty graduate students applied; 53
delivered speeches, 80 percent of them dealing with the Holocaust.[8]
Genocide research, however, is not dominated by historians but by
social scientists and experts in international humanitarian law. Some
of the young European scholars working on the Holocaust have secured
international funding for their research, in particular at American
and British universities. But there seem to be too few possibilities
for them to remain in this field because, in Europe at least, the
number of available post-doc scholarships appears to be limited.

The methodology of this research is not unlike that of medieval
studies. One needs to be multilingual to enter the field successfully.
The researchers study the documents that have not been destroyed by
the Nazis. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, they discovered that
many East European civil servants and individuals were just as
implicated in the largest and most total mass murder in history as
were German society and other West European societies and
bureaucracies.[9]

The Perpetrators
Thus, the universalization of victimhood has been one long-term trend,
and the steady extension of the circle of perpetrators has been
another. Important studies by Yaakov Lozowick and Michael Wildt, for
example,[10] have disproved Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of
evil[11] and have proved that many higher German bureaucrats were very
much ideologically motivated. The rich post-Cold War harvest of
regional studies of the Holocaust in Europe has now become meager.[12]
This, however, may well be a temporary setback. In addition to Bauer’s
forthcoming book on the shtetls in eastern Poland, one of his leading
students is now working on the Carpatho-Ukraine. And as the
abovementioned Strassler Center gathering in April 2009 made clear,
the regional approach remains to be selected by young researchers in
the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.[13]

There was a long and fruitful debate on the decision-making that led
to the Holocaust, but it has ended.[14] Following the famous
psychological experiments performed by Philip Zimbardo and Stanley
Milgram,[15] there has been widespread agreement that the behavior of
the ordinary perpetrators, those doing the actual killing, was
determined by the situation they were put in, not by their
psychological makeup.[16] As Bauer put it in his speech to the German
parliament in 1998: "the most horrible thing about the Shoah is in
fact not that the Nazis were inhuman – the most horrible thing about
it is that they were indeed human, just as human as you and I
are."[17] This notion has been extended to research on other
genocides. Donald J. Bloxham has maintained that "the very existence
of mass participation in most genocides shows that the context is
generally more important than the disposition and beliefs of the
individual perpetrator, since in the `right’ situation so many people
of demonstrably different characters and values participate…."[18]

This agreement on the normality of the ordinary, lower-level
perpetrators, however, perhaps belongs to the past. There seems to be
a strong contrast between the conviction that, if the situation is
"right," everybody is a potential perpetrator, and the results of
recent research on the evolutionary and neuroscientific aspects of
morality and on the links between (recidivistic) crime and genetic
factors.[19] This will lead to a new focus on the disposition of
perpetrators.

Present Trends
Certain present trends appear to be here to stay, at least for the
immediate future. One is the rise of "Holocaust history as local
history." That was the title of a major conference held in
Thessaloniki in June 2008, and it was apt.[20] Historians are
attempting to tell the large story of the Holocaust through the
perspective of the history, not of one region but of one single city,
or even in one major labor camp. As Christopher Browning recently
pointed out, this local research will show the need for a new
vocabulary on Jewish resistance as well.[21]

Another trend is the integration of perpetrator and victim histories,
as Saul Friedländer has done successfully in his recent synthesis.[22]
The writers of the new local histories are putting the Holocaust in
the perspective of the longer-term history of the relationship between
Gentiles and Jews in these localities and regions. In other words,
Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and East European history are
moving in each other’s direction.

Another development, as seen in works by Michael Wildt, David
Cesarani, and Saul Friedländer,[23] is the return of the explanation
of perpetrator behavior in ideological terms. There also is a new
focus on the history of the different types of camps, following larger
German research projects on the camps.[24] The use of personal
documents, particularly diaries, has become widespread, not only as a
source for the social history of the persecuted Jews, as done by
Friedländer, but as a topic in its own right, in order to study how
the persecuted Jews dealt with this. As Dan Michman has noted, the
future use of these "Jewish voices" as expressions of Jewish societies
and their structures (and not as the voices of mere individuals) also
offers an opportunity to bring Holocaust history and Jewish studies
more closely together.[25]

Genocides
There is a strong focus on post-Holocaust studies, dealing with how
European societies have in one way or another repressed their memories
of the Holocaust. Some of these studies, however, are not yet fully
integrated into the broader picture of postwar political and cultural
history of these countries. In a number of countries – but by no means
everywhere – a strong interaction has emerged between Holocaust
research and research on other modern genocides.

The Holocaust, however, remains the paradigmatic genocide, if only
because of the ideological radicalism of Nazism and the sheer number
of its Jewish victims. Since Rwanda, for example, there has been a
strong focus on open-air executions in the Holocaust. Scholars of
modern genocides draw heavily on the highly sophisticated
historiography of the Holocaust, and in doing so have made great
progress. This is especially evident in the research on the Armenian
and Rwandan genocides.[26]

Thanks to the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance and Research,[27] and as represented by the
work of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad
Vashem, the gap between the research output and Holocaust education
has been narrowed.

Future Developments
Some future developments may be safely predicted. There will be more
discussions on the outlawing of Holocaust and genocide denial in
European countries. One of the most fundamental current political
problems concerns the dangers of unbounded freedom of expression,
which have become apparent.[28] Another future tendency will be the
return of the explanation of perpetrator behavior in terms of
disposition.

As for the needs of researchers, one is for more research on
bystanders of the Holocaust and other modern genocides – that is, not
on foreign governments but on the passivity of those who have chosen
not to get involved. As a reviewer of a recent study on the passivity
of the United Nations during the Rwandan genocide accurately remarked:
"in seeking to blame western actors, [this book] twists logic to
excuse those who most obviously caused the tragedy…." Research on
the passivity of the foreign bystanders is useless if it blinds to the
"responsibility of the local actors who author their own
tragedies."[29]

There is a pronounced need to support the younger researchers from
Eastern Europe in their efforts to enter the field. A still stronger
integration of Holocaust and post-Holocaust studies in the more
general history of the (East) European countries is another necessity.
The need to secure more international funding in Europe for post-doc
fellowships is also obvious, and perhaps European universities should
offer more opportunities to young researchers from other countries.

Finally, there are good grounds for prudence as far as the frequency
of the use of the term genocide is concerned. As the denotation of
absolute evil, genocide is perhaps taking the place of the Holocaust.
As Jacques Semelin put it recently in a book focusing on the Holocaust
and the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica: "The term has been
applied, aptly or not, to all sorts of violent situations:… from
Cambodia to Chechnya, including Burundi, Rwanda, Guatemala, Colombia,
Iraq, Bosnia and Sudan." Retrospectively the term genocide has been
used to characterize the "massacres by the Greeks of the inhabitants
of Melos in the 5th century BC," the killing of the native Americans,
the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine, and the dropping of the atom
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In short: "Any group today that wants to construct itself as a victim
in the eyes of the entire world claims to have been a victim…of
genocide." And as, for example, Arab delegates proved when they
accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians during
the Durban Conference in South Africa in September 2001, "given the
powerful emotional charge the word genocide generates it can be used
and re-used to heap international opprobrium on whoever is accused of
genocidal intent."

The term genocide is used as much as "a symbolic shield to claim
victim status for one’s people, as a sword raised against one’s deadly
enemy."[30] This is a feature of currents efforts to shatter reality
in the quest for political utopia and racial purity.

* * *

Notes

* This article is a slightly redrafted and extended version of a
lecture presented by this author in Jerusalem in August 2009. Previous
versions of this text were read by Yehuda Bauer, Dan Michman, and
Manfred Gerstenfeld, whom I thank for their friendship. Any errors,
however, are mine and mine alone. The works referred to in the
following notes are selected.

[1] Johannes Houwink ten Cate, "The Enlargement of the Circle of
Perpetrators of the Holocaust," Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol.
20, Nos. 3-4 (Fall 2008): 52.

[2] Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern
Identity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4-5.

[3] "In fact, all of humanity is likely to be a victim, given the
current state of possibilities of destruction and unrest"; Yehuda
Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2001), xv.

[4] Ibid., 67.

[5] Ibid., 267, x-xi.

[6] The high level of Polish scholarship is, for instance,
demonstrated by the five-volume history of Auschwitz that was
published by Waclaw Dlugoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz
1940-1945. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und
Vernichtungslager Auschwitz (OÅ?wiÄ’cim: Verlag des Staatlichen Museums
Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1999) [German]. The first excellent Polish
historian in this field was Czeslaw Madajczyk, Die Okkupationspolitik
Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939-1945 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1988)
[German]. His successors include: Feliks Tych, see Beate Kosmala and
Feliks Tych, eds., Facing the Nazi Genocide: Non-Jews and Jews in
Europe (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2004) and Jan T. Gross, Neighbors:
The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

[7] See, e.g., Stéphane Bruchfeld and Paul Levine, Tell Ye Your
Children: A Book about the Holocaust in Europe 1933-1945 (Stockholm:
Swedish Goverment Offices, 1998); Rudi van Doorslaer, ed., Gewillig
België. Overheid en Jodenvervolging tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog
(Antwerpen/Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Manteau en Soma, 2007) [Dutch]; Mark
Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews,
1430-1950 (New York: Knopf, 2005).

[8] For the conference program, see:
rence/graduate/Program/html.

[9] Houwink ten Cate, "Enlargement," 53.

[10] Yaakov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police
and the Banality of Evil (London and New York: Continuum, 2002);
Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of
the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2010).

[11] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1968).

[12] Houwink ten Cate, "Enlargement," 67, n. 16.

[13] See note 8.

[14] Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The
Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942
(Lincoln/Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press/Yad Vashem, 2004).

[15] Philip Zimbardo, The Psychology of Imprisonment: Privation, Power
and Pathology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Stanley
Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental Approach (New York:
Harpercollins, first ed. 1973, latest ed. 2009).

[16] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion
101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harpercollins, 1992);
Harald Welzer, Täter. Wie aus ganz normalen Männern Massenmörder
werden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2005). [German]

[17] Bauer, Rethinking, 264.

[18] Donald J. Bloxham, "The Organisation of Genocide: Perpetration in
Comparative Perspective," in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W.
Szejnmann, eds., Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in
Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 187.

[19] See, e.g., Jan Verplaetse, Jelle de Schrijver, Sven Vanneste, and
Johan Braeckman, eds., The Moral Brain: Essays on the Evolutionary and
Neuroscientific Aspects of Morality (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London,
and New York: Springer Sciences and Business Media, 2009).

Although it has been previously argued that genetics play no part in
shaping antisocial and criminal behaviour a growing literature base
has served to substantiate that genetic factors are as important to
the development of some forms of criminal activity as are
environmental factors. First, there are simply too many studies, in
too many countries, using different methodologies that converge on the
same conclusion: genes do play a role. Second, other potentially less
controversial fields of behavioural trait research have not only
identified heritability in psychiatric disorders such as autism,
schizophrenia and reading disability, but also in personality traits
such as political conservatism. Thus it would be surprising, if
criminal behaviour – particularly recidivistic crime – was not in some
way influenced by genetic factors.

Sharon S. Ishikawa and Adrian Raine, "Behavioural Genetics and Crime,"
in Joseph Glicksohn, ed., The Neurobiology of Criminal Behaviour
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 81-82.

[20] Conference on "The Holocaust as Local History: Past and Present
of a Complex Relation," University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, June
2008. For the program, see:
_program_thessaloniki.pdf.

[21] Christopher R. Browning, "The Holocaust as Local History:
Survivor Memories of the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camp,"
lecture presented in Thessaloniki (see ibid.).

[22] Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of
Extermination, 1939-1945 (New York: Harpercollins, 2007).

[23] David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: Heinemann, 2003).

[24] Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann., eds., Die
nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, 2 vols. (Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 1998) [German]; Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel,
eds., Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen
Konzentrationslagern, 9 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2005-2009)
[German]. For the current state of the art in English, see Jane Caplan
and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds., Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The
New Histories (New York: Routledge, 2010). Despite the progress in
this field, it remains largely true – as the current trial in Munich
against the alleged Sobibor guard John/Iwan Demjanjuk also shows –
that (as noted by Margers Vestermanis and Michael Wildt in 1998) while
there is a large body of scholarly literature on Auschwitz, the
scholarship on the death camps Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor has been
far too limited. It is also true that virtually nothing is known about
the camps in the Nazi-occupied territories further east, in the Baltic
states and in the occupied Soviet Union; Michael Wildt, "Die Lager im
Osten. Kommentierende Bemerkungen," in Herbert, Die
nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, vol. 1, 508. Notable
exceptions are Witold Chrostowski, Extermination Camp Treblinka
(London: Valentine Mitchell, 2004) and Jules Schelvis (and Bob Moore),
Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (London: Berg, 2007).

[25] This was the essential point of a draft lecture that Prof. Dan
Michman prepared for the World Congress on Jewish Studies that took
place in Jerusalem in August 2009.

[26] Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the
Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2008); Ugor U. Ã`ngör, Young Turk Social Engineering, Mass Violence and
the Nation State in Eastern Turkey, 1913-1950, unpublished doctoral
dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2009; Scot Straus, The Order of
Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2006).

[27] The website of the Task Force is:

[28] Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA on combating racism and
xenophobia, 28 November 2008, Official Journal of the European Union,
6.12.2008, I.328/55-58.

[29] Alan J. Kuperman, book review of Daniela Korslak, The Role of
France in the Rwandan Genocide (London: C. Hurst, 2007) and of Fred
Grünfeld and Anke Huijboom, The Failure to Prevent Genocide in Rwanda:
The Role of Bystanders (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007), in
Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2009): 541.

[30] Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of
Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007),
308-313.

* * *

Prof. Johannes Houwink ten Cate studied contemporary and socioeconomic
history at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. From 1985 to
2002 he worked as a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for War
Documentation. Since 1989 his primary topic of interest has been the
Nazi persecution of the Jews in the occupied Dutch territories. Since
2002 he has been professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the
University of Amsterdam.

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