Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust is an internationally used reference book that more than a thousand entries for keywords on measures of oppression, ghettoization , deportation and extermination of the Jews in the time of National Socialism contains as well as resistance from the perspective of the victims.

expenditure

The first Hebrew version, with contributions from more than one hundred authors from various institutions worldwide, was compiled by a committee of editors under the direction of Israel Gutman and was published as a three-volume work in 1989 in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem , then in 1990 as a translation into English in New York .

Under the title Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. The persecution and murder of European Jews followed in 1993 by Argon Verlag (Berlin) in a three-volume German-language edition. In 1995 a four-volume paperback edition was published under license by Piper , a second edition there in 1998. The German edition, co-edited by Eberhard Jäckel , Julius H. Schoeps and Peter Longerich, was fundamentally reworked in order to “incorporate updates, clear up some errors and To make cuts and additions in order to do justice to the level of knowledge and the interests of the German audience [...]. "

In the German edition, the partly revised articles are no longer identified by name. However, the authors are listed in the 1998 edition in an appendix.

International editorial board

• Yitzhak Arad , Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
• Yehuda Bauer , Hebrew University , Jerusalem
• Randolph L. Braham , City University of New York
• Martin Broszat (1926–1989), University of Munich
• Christopher R. Browning , University of North Carolina
• Richard I. Cohen , Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Henry L. Feingold, City University of New York
• Saul Friedländer , Tel Aviv University
• Martin Gilbert , University of London
• Andreas Hillgruber (1925–1989), University of Cologne
• Eberhard Jäckel , University of Stuttgart
• Steven Katz , Boston University , USA
• Shmuel Krakowski , Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
• Otto Dov Kulka , Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Dov Levin , Hebrew University, Jerusalem
• Czesław Madajczyk , Polish Academy of Sciences , Warsaw
• Michael Marrus , University of Toronto
• György Ránki , Hungarian Academy of Sciences , Budapest
• Jehuda Reinharz , Brandeis University , USA
• Shmuel Spector , Yad Vashem, Jerusalem
• Jerzy Tomaszewski , University of Warsaw
• Aharon Weiss , Yad Vashem; University of Haifa
• Leni Yahil , University of Haifa
• Geoffrey Wigoder , only in the English language edition

criticism

According to an assessment by Nicolas Berg in 2003, the German version, which had been revised “strongly, but still inadequately”, was already out of date when it appeared.

In 1994, Wolfgang Scheffler subjected the German edition to extensive criticism. One of the problems is the different quality of the contributions and the expertise of the authors in the underlying original edition. On the other hand, the available knowledge has expanded considerably - for example through the archive holdings of the former Eastern Bloc that have been accessible since 1990 . The valuable material from numerous court hearings on National Socialist crimes was also not taken into account .

Scheffler complains that the editors and collaborators of the German edition did not review the manuscript more carefully despite the shortage of time. Errors, mistakes and contradicting representations should not provide revisionists and Holocaust deniers with a starting point. A number of lemmas such as anti-Semitism or the final solution are presented excellently and reflect the current state of research from 1993. In many articles about individual events, localities, ghettos, camps, people or institutions, however, there are errors in the German version that could have been avoided. Apparently, many authors did not know that extensive investigation results were to be found and evaluated in German Nazi court cases. Scheffler criticizes as a "substantial omission" that there is a lack of a thematic and numerical overview of the investigations by the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations and a reference to the "collection of German criminal judgments for National Socialist homicides".

In the enclosed maps, Scheffler measures important district boundaries for understanding, shows examples of errors and judges: "The [...] map material [...] has nothing to do with the scientific accuracy corresponding to an 'encyclopedia'." Scheffler shows more on the following five printed pages Defects in articles on deportation , Danzig , Kovno , Theresienstadt , Zyklon B , Reichsvereinigung , security service of the Reichsführer SS and crematoria of Birkenau . The “chronology” printed in the appendix is ​​criticized as an arbitrary compilation that lacks important events.

According to Scheffler, the encyclopedia contains an abundance of errors or mistakes, omissions of crucial facts, contradictions and bad or ambiguous formulations that should not appear in this amount. Even if the German-language revision is better than the English version, which is riddled with errors, a revision must be urgently requested.

See also

• Shmuel Spector, Geoffrey Wigoder: The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust , NYU (Engl.)
• The Holocaust Encyclopedia , an online encyclopedia to the same range of subjects on the side of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Engl.)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Israel Gutman, Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich, Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - the persecution and murder of the European Jews. 2nd Edition. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , p. XVI, foreword to the German edition.
2. ^ Israel Gutman, Eberhard Jäckel, Peter Longerich, Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - the persecution and murder of the European Jews. 2nd Edition. Volume 4, Piper, Munich / Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , pp. 1742-1758.
3. ↑ Nicolas Berg: The Holocaust and the West German Historians - Research and Memory. Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-610-5 , p. 644.
4. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: Holocaust research at the turning point - Critical comments on the German edition of the 'Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. 3: 341-353 (1994).
5. ↑ Justice and Nazi crimes : Dick W. de Mildt, Christiaan F. Ruter (eds.): Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Amsterdam University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-90-8964-491-6 .
6. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: Holocaust research at the turning point - Critical comments on the German edition of the 'Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. 3 (1994), p. 345.
7. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: Holocaust research at the turning point - Critical comments on the German edition of the 'Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. 3 (1994), p. 346.
8. ↑ Wolfgang Scheffler: Holocaust research at the turning point - Critical comments on the German edition of the 'Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. In: Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism. 3 (1994), p. 352.