Probing the Limits of Categorization

Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Probing the Limits of Categorization
Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs

PART I: APPROACHES

Chapter 1. Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi or Crucial Clue?
Mary Fulbrook

Chapter 2. Raul Hilberg and His “Discovery” of the Bystander
René Schlott

Chapter 3. Bystanders as Visual Subjects: Onlookers, Spectators, Observers, and Gawkers in Occupied Poland
Roma Sendyka

Chapter 4. “I Am Not, What I Am.”: A Typological Approach to Individual (In)Action in the Holocaust
Timothy Williams

Chapter 5. The Many Shades of Bystanding: On Social Dilemmas and Passive Participation
Froukje Demant

Chapter 6. The Dutch Bystander as Non-Jew and Implicated Subject
Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans

SECTION II: HISTORY

Chapter 7. Photographing Bystanders
Christoph Kreutzmüller

Chapter 8. The Imperative to Act: Jews, Neighbors, and the Dynamics of Persecution in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945
Christina Morina

Chapter 9. Martin Heidegger’s Nazi Conscience
Adam Knowles

Chapter 10. Natura Abhorret Vacuum: Polish “Bystanders” and the Implementation of the “Final Solution”          
Jan Grabowski

Chapter 11. Defiant Danes and Indifferent Dutch?: Popular Convictions and Deportation Rates in the Netherlands and Denmark, 1940–1945          
Bart van der Boom

Chapter 12. The Notion of Social Reactivity: The French Case, 1942–1944
Jacques Semelin

SECTION III: MEMORY

Chapter 13. Ordinary, Ignorant and Noninvolved?: The Figure of the Bystander in Dutch Research and Controversy
Krijn Thijs

Chapter 14. Hidden in Plain View: Remembering and Forgetting the Bystanders of the Holocaust on (West) German Television
Wulf Kansteiner

Chapter 15. Stand by Your Man: (Self-)Representations of SS Wives after 1945
Susanne C. Knittel

Chapter 16. “Bystanders” in Exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Susan Bachrach

Epilogue I: A Brief Plea for the Historicization of the Bystander
Norbert Frei

Epilogue II: Saving the Bystander
Ido de Haan

Index