Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond

Stephanie Bird is Professor of German Studies at University College London, UK. She is the author of Women Writers and National Identity (2003) and Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (1998). Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London, UK. She is the author of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018, winner of the Wolfson History Prize) and A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012, winner of the Fraenkel Prize), amongst others. Stefanie Rauch is Research Fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, UK. She is the author of Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study (2020). Bastiaan Willems is Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern European History at University College London, UK. He is the author of Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945 (2021) and A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe: Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022).

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems

Part I Theorizing Ambiguity, Compromise and Complexity
2 ‘Compromised Identities?’, Ageing Perpetrators and Compromising Forgiveness Stephanie Bird
3 Conformity, compliance, and complicity: ‘Ordinary People’ and the Holocaust
Mary Fulbrook
4 Complicities, Re-presented: Literary Portrayals in Totalitarianism and Neoliberalism Juliane Prade-Weiss
5 In Search of the Bystander: Some reflections on the ‘social turn’ in Holocaust studies and its Ramifications
Christina Morina

Part II Confrontations with Violence
6 Studying East European Perpetrators: The Case of Belarus
Leonid Rein
7 Compromising roles: German actresses in German-occupied Minsk
Anne-Lise Bobeldijk
8 Gender and Transgressive Violence in Postwar Accounts
Stefanie Rauch
9 Israeli National Narratives, Complicity, and Activism: Noam Chayut’s The Girl who Stole my Holocaust and Breaking the Silence
Nina Fischer

Part III Law, Complicity and Perpetration
10 The Constitutive Role of Nazi Law: Constructing Complicity in the Third Reich
Simon Lavis
11 Public execution in your community: The summary courts of 1945 Germany
Bastiaan Willems
12 Excess and Normality: West German and Austrian Media and Nazi Crimes Trials from the 1960s to the 1980s
Christoph Thonfeld
13 Pinochet’s Accomplices: perpetration, complicity, and institutional culpability before the Chilean court
Francisco Bustos, Cath Collins, and Francisco Ugas

Part IV Framing the Past
14 Perpetrator Memory and the Fascist Exile in Argentina: A Case Study
Zoltán Kékesi
15 Complicity versus Cooperation: Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its Outtakes
Sue Vice
16 Challenging the Museum Visitor? Complicity and Perpetration during and beyond the Second World War in Contemporary Museum Exhibitions
Stephan Jaeger
17 ‘Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazi Rule’. An Exhibition
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems
18 Conclusion
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems

Index