Echoes of Nazi Propaganda in a Collaborator Diary: The Case of Dutch Police Investigator Douwe Bakker (original) (raw)
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Director of the Institute of European Studies and Dutch Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Associate Professor Jeroen Dewulf lectured on clandestine Dutch-language literature during the Second World War. Dewulf’s books cover subjects ranging from the transatlantic slave trade to resistance publications under the Nazis to (post)colonial culture. Clandestine literature was published in all countries under Nazi occupation, but nowhere else did it flourish as it did in the Netherlands. This raises important questions: what were the risks of writing, printing, selling, and buying clandestine literature during the Second World War? What was the content of this literature? And why the Netherlands in particular? International studies on the Netherlands under Nazi rule have focused mainly on the political situation, and paid little attention to the local underground press other than considering its political message. This omission of cultural perspective led to an incomplete and sometimes distorted image of the Dutch wartime attitude vis-à-vis the German occupiers. It also hindered the understanding of postwar Dutch society. In this lecture, Jeroen Dewulf showed that, in all its complexity, clandestine literature offers a unique perspective on Dutch society under German occupation and on the postwar debates about heroism, resistance, collaboration, and victimization.
Journal of Genocide Research 15:4, 443-461, 2013
Using the example of several recent biographies of leading Nazis, the article explores whether biography enables us to understand involvement in racial violence and genocide. In particular, it questions whether the degree of agency, initiative and individual malleability in a dictatorship is visible from this vantage point. It also investigates the kind of understanding of leadership and agency held by the subjects themselves, and the model of action they sought to embody. Along the way it explores the methodological issues confronting any attempt to penetrate the minds of such figures. It argues that biography offers valuable glimpses, but the nature of the sources and the difficulty of interpreting speech acts before, during and after the Nazi period make it extremely difficult to identify the limits of agency and Eigensinn even of high-profile players in the Nazi system. Finally, it confronts the challenge of empathy and argues that the moral inadmissibility of empathizing with the perpetrators sets invisible limits from the outset on the explanatory potential of biography.
The 1930s in Nazi Germany as Seen through Diaries
2018
Diaries from the Nazi era and the Second World War, such as those of Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, or “A Woman in Berlin,” have found great resonance with readers for their personal perspectives into life under National Socialism and in the war’s aftermath. Historians have drawn upon diary sources for their seeming immediacy and “authentic” observations, usually using diaries to illustrate larger arguments without analysis of diaries as a form.[1] Janosch Steuwer’s “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse”: Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern 1933-1939 foregrounds the diary as a medium by asking what diaries reveal about the early years of National Socialism, and how Germans began to position themselves within the new political reality of National Socialism through diary writing. Steuwer’s main claim is that diary sources require us to recognize Germans in the 1930s as complicated individuals who were increasingly asked to take a stance and position themselves acc...
An 'Alter Kampfer' at the Forefront of the Holocaust: Otto Ohlendorf Between Careerism and Nazi Fundamentalism, 2017
On April 7th, 1951, Holocaust perpetrator Otto Ohlendorf’s death sentence was carried out according to the ruling of the United States Military Courts in Nuremberg. In The United States vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et. al., leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, were tried for war crimes which led to the deaths of millions of Jews and partisans. Under Ohlendorf’s leadership of Einsatzgruppen D, more than 90,000 people were liquidated in the Ukraine. After this assignment, Ohlendorf resumed his positions head of Domestic Security in the Reich Security Main Office. As the war ended, he surrendered, and revealed the full scope of Einsatzgruppen activity, which eventually led to the second set of Nuremberg Trials. Outside of the Holocaust and the trial, little has been written on Ohlendorf. His academic career and ideology are insufficiently analyzed. This dissertation analyzes Ohlendorf’s life, career, and National Socialist ideology. The key factor in exploring his motivations is to fuse together careerism and ideology through his elite status as an Alter Kämpfer, “old fighter” and Nazi party member before 1933. From this designation, Ohlendorf enjoyed privileged employment, promotions, and a high level of trust within the party. Further explored is the placement of Ohlendorf into the historiographical debate, and how his ideology, career, trial, and death connected to his position as an Alter Kämpfer. Ultimately, analyzing the historiography reveals how memory has been fashioned in such ubiquitous topics as World War II, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust.