Olga Wormser-Migot

Olga Wormser-Migot (born July 5, 1912 in Nancy as Olga Jungelson; died August 3, 2002 in Fontenay-en-Parisis ) was a French historian . After the liberation of France from German occupation in 1944, it initially dealt with the fate of French deportees . Sources and eyewitness reports that she had collected about the deportation from France formed the basis for an exhibition as well as Alain Resnais ' night and fog (1955) , one of the first documentary filmsabout the German concentration camps . Wormser-Migot published a study on the concentration camp system in 1968, which was received critically.

life and work

Origin, education and life under the occupation

Her parents were assimilated Jews from Russia who had gone into exile as militant Mensheviks and had met in Geneva in the vicinity of Lenin . Her father Aron Jungelson received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Nancy in 1917 , while her mother Sarrah-Vera Halfin studied law there . The Jungelson family finally moved to Paris in 1917 , where Aron died in 1920 at the age of 34, leaving behind his wife and four young children. Olga's younger sister Hélène became a well-known writer and journalist under the name Parmelin.

Olga Jungelson attended the Lycée Fénélon on a scholarship and completed the preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri IV . She studied history with Louis Halphen and Jérome Carcopino at the Sorbonne , but failed in the 1938 state examination. When France was occupied by Germany in 1940 , she taught history and geography at the Lycée Alain-Charrier. The first laws of the Vichy regime forced her to give up her position. Until the racial laws were tightened again in September 1941, Olga Jungelson worked at the Center d'information sur les prisonniers de guerre , who tried to locate the missing. Then she found employment at the private school Lycée Notre-Dame-de-Sion in Èvry .

During the occupation, Olga Jungelson occasionally took on orders for the Resistance . Jacques Monod regularly found shelter in the family's apartment .

Work as a historian

After the liberation , Olga Jungelson joined the Frenay Ministry for Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees in September 1944 , where she was responsible for the search for deportees and their care after their return. In May 1945 she and a delegation from the ministry visited the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . In May 1946 she looked in Poland for the files and names of French deportees and also visited the Auschwitz concentration camp . The information gathered was also intended to serve the French prosecution during the Nuremberg trials . One of her first publications, a treatise on the deportation of women written together with Andrée Jacob , appeared in an anthology on the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1946 . During this time, along with Jacob, she was also in charge of the general secretariat of the commission for those deported and interned for political and racial reasons. She was supposed to collect material for a black book . This concept for a book that ultimately never appeared was shaped from an inner-French perspective in order to unite all victims of the occupation in a community of suffering.

In March 1947, Olga Jungelson's position in the ministry was cut. In 1948 she worked on the Encyclopédie de la Renaissance francaise and worked as a secretary to the publisher Marcel Prenant . In the same year she married the communist Henri Wormser, who had previously been married to her sister Hélène, but whom Hélène had left for the painter Édouard Pignon . Shortly after the birth of their son, Henri Wormser left his wife Olga, who nevertheless kept his last name.

From 1952 onwards, Olga Wormser worked on the appointment of Henri Michel in the Comité d'histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (CHDGM) as a research officer. The task of the CHDGM was to acquire and secure sources for deportation from France. Extensive surveys were carried out among deportees in order to collect testimony. This work was promoted primarily from the circles of the deportee milieu. Under the auspices of the Réseau de souvenir in 1954, Wormser and Michel published an anthology of witness reports under the title Tragédie de la deportation and a special issue of the Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale on the subject of "The German concentration camp system". In it, Wormser published an essay on the concentration camp economy in the German war economy . The anthology, which was mainly compiled by Wormser, was still within the framework of the remembrance policy of the Réseau du sovereign and did not grant the murder of the Jewish deportees in the extermination camps any rank of its own, but was based on the model of a large unit camp based on the model of the concentration camps in the west such as Buchenwald .

Michel and Wormser organized the exhibition "Résistance, Liberation, Déportation", which opened in November 1954, for the CHDGM and the Reseau du souvenir. At the same time they announced that they were working on a film about the concentration camp system. The film project from which the film Nacht und Nebel was to emerge was based on the preparatory work of Olga Wormser. Director Alain Resnais coordinated the work and the procurement of photo and film documents with Wormser as historical advisor. The script was created in collaboration between Resnais on the one hand and Wormser and Michel on the other. The structure of the film, for example, was based on the documentary Tragédie de la deportation . The genocide of the Jews was taken into account by the historians, but according to the historiographical knowledge of the time, it was not the focus, but was only taken into account in the context of the concentration camp system. The finished film did not simply adopt the concept of the historians, but was shaped by Resnais' formal ambitions and the commentary of the writer Jean Cayrol . Nevertheless, Wormser and Michel accompanied screenings of the film to high school and history students all over France in the years that followed. A few years later she became a research assistant in the documentation department of the Institut pédagogique national .

Olga Wormser published the biographies of Katharina II and Friedrich II before returning to the subject of deportation in 1965. In 1961 she married André Migot, a physician, writer and filmmaker who was twenty years her senior, whom she had met in 1955, and took the name Wormser-Migot. Olga Wormser-Migot received her doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1968 with a thesis on the system of concentration camps, an early overall presentation of the subject that was hardly received in Germany.

In France, the publication aroused opposition because Wormser-Migot made the false claim that there were no gas chambers in the camps in the west . Since it injured the feelings of some deportees and methodically downgraded testimony to documents, it was sharply criticized from circles, above all from internees from Mauthausen and Ravensbrück - concentration camps in which there had been gas chambers. Pierre Serge Choumoff declared Wormser's book to be worthless in a letter in the respected daily Le Monde in 1969 and in 1972 published the book Les chambres à gaz de Mauthausen ("The gas chambers of Mauthausen"). Germaine Tillion attested to Wormser minor errors and serious errors. As a result, Wormser was cut by former deportees. In 1974 the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson , who was still largely unknown at the time, approached her. However, she refused to question the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek . When Faurisson succeeded in having his text "The Problem of the Gas Chambers" or "The Auschwitz Rumor" appear in the respected daily Le Monde , Wormser-Migot published the counter-text The Final Solution . In her last work during the 1970s she dealt with the genocide of the Jews.

Fonts

• Les femmes dans l'histoire. Corrêa, Paris 1952.
• Le Théâtre et l'enseignement, bibliography: Précédée d'une introduction. Center national de documentation pédagogique, Paris 1953.
• with Henri Michel (ed.): Tragédie de la déportation 1940–1945: Témoignages de survivants camps de concentration allemands. Hachette, Paris 1955.
• Amours e intrigues du Maréchal de Richelieu. Le Club français du livre, Paris 1955.
• Catherine II. Paris 1957.
• Frédéric II. Club français du livre, Paris 1958.
• Marie-Thérèse. 1961.
• Attrait de Delacroix. La Farandole, Paris 1963.
• La deportation. Institut national pédagogique, Paris 1964.
• Le Système concentrationnaire nazi (1933-1945). Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1968.
• L'ère des camps. Union générale d'éditions, Paris 1973.
• with Annie Guéhenno: La résistance. Du Burin, Paris 1971.
• Le retour des deportés: Quand les alliés ouvrirent les portes (= Historiques; 24). Éditions Complexe, Brussels 1985, ISBN 2-87027-155-7 .

literature

• Sylvie Lindeperg : Night and Fog: A Film in History (= texts for the documentary; 14). Translated by Stefan Barmann. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940384-24-9 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sylvie Lindeperg: Night and Fog. A History of Gazes . In: Griselda Pollock, Max Silverman (Ed.): Concentrationary Cinema. Aestethics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955) . Berghahn, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-85745-351-8 , pp. 58 f.
2. ↑ Sylvie Lindeperg: Night and Fog. A film in history. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2010, pp. 328–333.
3. ↑ Sylvie Lindeperg: Night and Fog. P. 335.
4. ↑ Sylvie Lindeperg: Night and Fog. A film in history. Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2010, p. 335 f.