Doris L. Bergen

Catholics, Protestants, and Christian Antisemitism in Nazi Germany

Some recent trends in the study of National Socialism tend to downplay the significance of antisemitism*—in particular of Christian antisemitism—in producing the Holocaust. Indeed, it would be inaccurate and misleading to present the Christian legacy of hostility toward Judaism and Jews as a sufficient cause for Nazi genocide. Christianity, however, did play a critical role, not perhaps in motivating the top decision makers, but in making their commands comprehensible and tolerable to the rank-and-file—the people who actively carried out the measures against Jews as well as those who passively condoned their implementation. In his analysis of pre-Nazi forms of German antisemitism, Donald Niewyk concludes that, “The old antisemitism had created a climate in which the ‘new’ antisemitism was, at the very least, acceptable to millions of Germans”.

Forum: Holocaust and the History of Gender and Sexuality

Historians of sexuality in the Holocaust go where most fear to tread: Lisa Heineman called the intersection ‘doubly unspeakable’. Why is it important to explore the history of sexuality in the Holocaust and what are the methodological, ethical and political issues at stake? In this Forum, five historians of gender, sexuality, Nazism and the Holocaust discuss what the field of Holocaust history gains from integrating sexuality and gender as analytical categories. By connecting Holocaust studies to the history of sexuality, the field gains, as we will argue, new theoretical insights, recognizing power hierarchies and societal shifts. As the scholarship moves to examining gender and sexuality in the Holocaust beyond a sole (if understandable) focus on sexual violence, topics like agency, love and prostitution, same sex desire and memory and subjectivity of both the perpetrators and victims come to the fore. What are we allowed to research? Why do we consider so many topics connected to mass violence and sexuality as taboo? How are we to make sense of them? The history of sexuality and gender not only introduces new topics to Holocaust studies; it also offers, more importantly, new perspectives on familiar themes.