Intimate Murder

Dr. Robert Rozett

Most people think of the Holocaust as an event of industrial killing, symbolized by a vast undertaking of streamlined, anonymous mass murder. Yet that wasn’t always the case. From a very early stage, many of the atrocities committed by both the Nazis and their collaborators were carried out in an “intimate” fashion, wherein the victims knew their persecutors, and vice versa.

Does this aspect of the Holocaust surprise you? Were you aware of it before?

References

• Bartov, Omer, “The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Reconstructing Genocide on the Local Level,” in Norman J. W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), pp. 105 – 134.

• Gross, Jan Tomasz, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

• Kaplan, Marion A., Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

• Kubátová, Hana and Jan Láníček, eds., Jews and Gentiles in Central and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2018).

• Redlich, Shimon, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

• Rozett, Robert, Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2013).