Contenu du sommaire : L'histoire de la Shoah face à ses sources

When Witnesses Pass Away
This article looks at the historiographical consequences of losing witnesses of the Holocaust. In particular, it examines the “testimonial turning point” that is situated at the crossroads of several temporalities: political, archival, historiographical and biographical. Throughout the chronological passage from first-hand witnesses to a new generation of scholars and researchers, our relationship to historiographical sources must necessarily change, evolving towards the increasing routinisation of practices in fields that were long defined by their exceptionality. Consequently, is it possible that different currents will converge to decompartmentalise historical studies of the Holocaust?

The “Auschwitz Album”, between Object and Historical Document
For six decades, the photographs from the “Auschwitz Album” have been central to the representation of Auschwitz, how the camp functioned and how it was part of the Final Solution. However, there are many questions surrounding this now-iconic source. In fact, we know almost nothing about the album. Why was it made, by whom and for whom? What do the 197 photographs taken during the spring and summer of 1944 – during the deportation of Hungarian Jews – truly depict? How can these pictures be analysed as historical sources, and what can they tell us about operations at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp?

“The Song Will Survive Intact...”: In Defence of the History of the Holocaust's Literary SourcesThis article seeks to examine the Holocaust's literary sources by analysing the first volumes of poetry produced in ghettos and concentration camps, publications which appeared in Poland in the aftermath of the war. These early ventures prompted a shift in perception regarding Holocaust literature, which was usually viewed as testimony, and instead encouraged the public to consider the use of writing, and especially literary production, as a specific facet of the Shoah's history. The career of Michel Borwicz, a poet of the Resistance and a camp survivor who became a historian, serves as a case study.

Establishing the Historicity of Soviet Visual Documents of the Holocaust (Estonia, Lithuania, 1944-1948)To the historical corpus of the Holocaust, this article introduces the visual material captured by Soviet filmmakers in Estonia and Lithuania at the end of the Second World War, during the period that these territories were in the process of being annexed by the USSR. Filming took place as the Red Army advanced and Nazi war crimes were being investigated. By analysing this material and how information was processed by key players in the world of cinema and politics, this article seeks to establish the historicity of these different perspectives, accepting them as full-fledged contributions to the history of the genocide. Through an examination of textual and visual archives, this article studies filming processes, the professional attitudes of filmmakers, the circulation of images, and variations between different versions that depended on the objectives assigned to the visual testimony of Nazi crimes.

A World Vanishes along with its Archives? The Children of Lublin, an Organisation of Polish Jews
From the end of the 19th century until after the Second World War, landsmanshaftn, or mutual aid societies formed by Jewish immigrants from the same hometowns, actively participated in the cultural and economic integration of Polish Jews in France. After the Holocaust, they likewise became a privileged place where survivors and recent refugees from Poland could share their traumatic experiences. Unfortunately, these societies still receive relatively little attention as historical sources of the Holocaust, a reality made all the more regrettable by the fact that they have been gradually disappearing since the 1980s. This article explores the possibilities of gaining access to a “lost world” despite rare and scattered sources, a rich tapestry of sociability and memories of the Holocaust woven into the post-war landsmanshaftn.

Dreams as Historical Documents of the Holocaust?
Dreams are rarely investigated by historians. However, they too can also become a kind of historical document, if they are viewed as the expressions of individual experiences of a specific time and place in history. Analysing the dreams of victims of persecution during the period of the Holocaust can thus lead us to address the great diversity of emotions felt by these individuals, as well as their unspeakable experiences and desire to see their loved ones again.

Bypassing Birkenau, Autumn 1942 : Re-Examining the Diary of SS-Doctor Johann Paul Kremer in AuschwitzThe article takes another look at a classic document in the historiography of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex: the diary that SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer kept during his stay at the camp, between early September and the end of November 1942. After examining the judicial, historiographical and negationist purposes for which this document has been exploited, we demonstrate the interest of cross-referencing this Nazi source, contemporaneous with the camp's industrial-scale implementation of murder, with individual data regarding the Jewish victims, made available by the International Tracing Service (ITS). This diary is one of the very few sources allowing us to establish a precise and accurate date not for the disappearance, but in fact for the murder of thousands of deportees from Western Europe between the summer and winter of 1942.

Critically Assessing the Use of the Personal Journals of Nazi Leaders as Historical Documents
What can we learn from the personal diaries of high-ranking Nazi officials? Aside from the fact that these intimate journals reveal the inner workings of Nazi minds, they also provide a description of historical events leading from when power was first seized to the advent of the national-socialist dictatorship. Moreover, although they hardly ever mention the Holocaust directly, individuals who fought on the frontlines of the First World War justified the crimes that occurred during 1939-1945 by using a number of established interpretative frameworks: in that way, these diaries came to function as a kind of continuous self-deception. For members of the post-war generation, personal writing was a tool that allowed them to pen the grand narrative of a historical period they believed to be epic.

What Did French Police Know about the Fate of Jewish Deportees ? Reflections on the “Sadosky Report” (Berlin-Paris, 20 July 1942)What did French police officers know or imagine regarding the fate of Jews they arrested and handed over to the Nazis during the Occupation? In an exceptional piece of testimony, Louis Sadosky, a non-commissioned officer with the Parisian intelligence service (the Renseignements généraux), revealed that, as early as April 1942, he was informed while visiting Berlin about Hitler's plan for the “complete and definitive destruction” of all European Jews. Sadosky knew. And yet, once back in Paris, he apparently concealed this information and continued to mercilessly hunt down Parisian Jews until the capital's Liberation. As for his colleagues, most of them already knew that the deportation of Jews was a one-way trip and that these Jews were likely slated for death.

Conflicting Memories: History, Testimony, and a Hanging at the Majdanek Camp in 1943Starting with the occurrence of a hanging that took place in the women's section of the Majdanek concentration camp during the summer of 1943, this article analyses the depositions made by survivors of the camp before the Court of Appeal of Dusseldorf (1975-1981). In the absence of any written documentation, prosecutors in the Majdanek trial relied exclusively on the testimonies of survivors, which became problematic given that although all women prisoners of the camp had been forced to attend the execution, they did not all claim to have witnessed the same things. Examining survivors' depositions from a strictly epistemological perspective, this article explores the heuristic value of such a highly ambiguous source. The triangulation of survivors' testimonies with other sources allows us to shed light on the complex dynamics that operated within the society of the concentration camp, as well as on the ambivalent and contradictory nature of the depositions.

Transcribing Violence and Trauma: Administrative Narratives of Persecution in the Immediate Aftermath of the HolocaustThe Canadian Jewish Archives in Montreal have preserved more than one thousand visa applications filed by Holocaust orphans who immigrated to Canada during the late 1940s. From the casefiles, one can retrace the individual trajectories of these young survivors and, more importantly, understand how their trajectories were transcribed by the administration. This article examines this early administrative narrativization of the Holocaust, where violence and trauma form the implicit backdrop. It investigates the use of casefiles in the social sciences and addresses recent developments in the historiography of childhood in the wake of the Holocaust.

The Litigation of Former Nazi Policemen in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s: A Source for Writing the History of Nazi CriminalsIn the Federal Republic of Germany, former career policemen who had worked for the Gestapo tried to re-enter public service by insisting on their rights as civil servants. These individual demands addressed to the Federal Ministry of Interior were mostly rejected, however, on account of the fact that the Gestapo had been labelled as a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. This article presents the administrative sources of this litigation in the 1950s in order to show that these were the locus for the elaboration of a discourse wherein former policemen distanced and exonerated themselves from the crimes they had committed under the Nazi regime.

High Stakes – Micro-History Seen Through the Lens of Exceptional Cases
Under what conditions can micro-history emancipate itself from the singularity of its subjects? This article looks at this question by examining the “exceptional” case – in the sense that it was a singular and unique occurrence – of French police officers sabotaging the collective arrests of foreign Jews during the Second World War. Micro-history establishes the exception as a “total empirical fact” by describing the systems of action within which individuals are embedded and by analysing how these systems interact depending on the context. From this point of view, exceptional cases allow us to challenge the accuracy of standard descriptive and explanatory categories (a critical contribution), to identify the distinctive features of a class of processes or phenomena (a paradigmatic contribution), and to highlight the conditions for their emergence (a heuristic contribution).