John Connelly

Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice

Increasingly, historians have been turning their attention to the effects of Nazi racism. In recent years major studies have appeared on forced sterilization, euthanasia, theft of “racially valuable” children, and “antinatalism,” as well as the destruction of “racially undesirable” groups: the handicapped, certain foreign laborers, and homosexuals.

Catholic Racism and Its Opponents

On October 14, 1965, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council voted on a resolution about Catholic relations to the Jews. They were called upon to consider the following propositions: that “Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” that Christ’s suffering and death “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” and that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers.” The result was so overwhelming—1,937 bishops for and 153 against—that subsequent observers have regarded it as preordained and have failed to wonder at the magnitude of the shift. The bishops had put an end to centuries of theologically supported antisemitism, a tradition so massive that right up to the Council Catholic schoolchildren routinely learned that Jews were a “rejected” people, cursed for “all time.”1 Those who have tried to explain the Church’s change in course—like Michael Phayer or Robert Louis Wilken—focus on the role of the Holocaust in changing Catholic sentiments about Jews.2 Yet in fact, the destruction of Europe’s Jews had little direct impact. The Vatican considered its role during World War II impeccable, and it disciplined those few Catholics who explored ways of overcoming theologically grounded contempt for Jews—such as the

Poles and Jews in the Second World War: the Revisions of Jan T. Gross

Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 261 pp., ISBN 0-691-08667-2. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Żydzi i Polacy 1918–1955: Wspolistnienie – zaglada – komunizm (Warsaw: Biblioteka Frondy, 2000), 731 pp., ISBN 8-391-25418-6. Leo Cooper, In the Shadow of the Polish Eagle: The Poles, the Holocaust, and Beyond (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2000), 255 pp., ISBN 0-333-75265-1. Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1999), ISBN 0-312-22056-1. Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union , 8th edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1999), 508 pp., ISBN 0-803-21050-7.

The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (review)

Hitlerism and Stalinism are “comparable” in the banal way that all things can be put next to one another and studied. The question is what we can learn by comparing the two dictatorships. Richard Overy does not explicitly respond to this question but rather names “two purposes” for his massive study: “to supply an empirical foundation on which to construct any discussion of what made the two systems either similar or different” and “to write a comparative ‘operational’ history of the two systems in order to answer the large historical question about how personal dictatorship actually worked” (xxxiii–xxxiv). This would seem a shallow conceptual foundation for over 800 pages of text. Overy is not concerned. Nor does he engage debates on the totalitarian character of the two regimes, on whether they were variants of “modernity,” or on whether they constituted “political religions.” Instead, Overy groups his analysis around what Robert Merton might have called “social mechanisms”:

Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word

Despite our best efforts, we never get beyond totalitarianism. The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. As Michael Geyer notes in his thought-provoking introduction, it was the word preferred by dissidents. Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old “theory” from the 1950s with its five (or was it six?) characteristics defining all such regimes. As a coherent framework that might account for development across space and time, totalitarianism has been dead for decades.1 I was surprised to see authors in this volume citing Friedrich and Brzezinski as though they still needed to be refuted, or claiming that no one had thought to

Obituary Gerald D. Feldman (1937–2007) Member of the Editorial Board of Contemporary European History

Gerald D. Feldman, professor emeritus of the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, died on 31 October 2007 at his home in Berkeley at the age of 70. He was a member of the editorial board of Contemporary European History from the journals foundation in 1992.