Aid Offered Jews in Nazi Germany: Research Approaches, Methods

Aid Offered Jews in Nazi
Germany: Research
Approaches, Methods, and
Problems
Beer, Suzanne
Monday 22 September 2014
Stable URL: http://www.massviolence.org/Article?id_article=752
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Aid Offered Jews in Nazi Germany: Research Approaches, Methods, and Problems
Introduction
Over recent decades much has been written about the perpetrators involved in the persecution of Jews in
Nazi Germany and the Nazi-occupied regions [1]. But despite scattered stories about hiding and rescue that
have emerged since the 1950s in public memorializing of the Holocaust, researchers have rarely taken up
the material concerning those Germans who helped save Jews from arrest and deportation [2] and subjected
it to systematic analysis. [3] We thus still know very little about this small, remarkable group of Germans"a
tiny minority of Germany's population, acting within a highly hostile environment"who actively interceded
on the behalf of persons of Jewish origin. The few empirical studies that have appeared on the subject since
the 1960s have in any event not established an independent field of research marked by an overarching
discussion of sources, methods, and problems.
This article is consequently meant as a spur towards deeper consideration of the possibilities and problems
tied to research on help offered Jews by Germans in Nazi Germany. Considering central methodological
problems tied to work with retrospectively written personal accounts, I will show how the help offered
Jews emerged from an interplay between social opportunity-structures and their individual appropriation. [4
] The following observations are meant to contribute to the renewal of research on rescuers as signaled, for
instance, in the recently published collection of articles La résistance aux genocides: research that has
critically analyzed the image of the rescuer, pointing to the importance of situational factors for
understanding rescue in the context of genocide. [5]
Sociological and Psychological Approaches
Initial reports by Jews who survived underground already appeared in the early postwar period. In the late
1950s, reports about individual helpers also began appearing. [6] But we can only observe a distinct
increase in publications on the theme starting in the late 1980s. [7] Most of these publications are memoirs.
Alongside them are various scholarly studies aimed at reconstructing individual episodes of assistance, but
with no far-reaching conclusions regarding the conditions making it possible. The few exceptions are
generally studies that try to draw conclusions regarding typical helpers, juxtaposed with typical
bystanders"individuals who had neither supported Jews nor practiced other forms of resistance.Here two
approaches can be distinguished: on the one hand we find sociological studies focused on helpers' specific
socio-demographic characteristics; on the other hand we find psychological studies looking into personality
structures and early childhood influences.
One of the first sociological studies was published by the American political scientist Manfred Wolfson in
the late 1960; it was based on interviews with 76 German helpers using a standardized questionnaire. [8] Its
assessment showed that most of these individuals were men (60%) who were married (73%) and born
before 1910 (84%). Nearly half of those interviewed had upper middle class or highly prosperous
backgrounds. Many of them had not only interceded on behalf of Jews but actively participated in other
forms of resistance as well (57%). From this Wolfson concluded that «the small group of rescuers were not
only very close to the resistance but actually constituted an important part of it.» [9]
More recent studies have raised doubts about Wolfson's conclusions. Hence a research project led by the
Berlin historian Wolfgang Benz pointed to women, not men, as being overrepresented among the helpers. [
10] The same study called the political and economic profile Wolfson ascertained into question: the helpers
mainly came from modest circumstances, it found; they were neither connected to the political resistance
nor were markedly different from other Germans in terms of economic position, familial status, and
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religious affiliation. [11] For this reason the effort to sociologically define the German helpers seems for
the time being to have failed. [12]
In respect to the psychological current running through this work, the American researchers Samuel and
Pearl Oliner have taken the lead with an extensive questionnaire-based study at the Humboldt State
University in California. Here 406 helpers from various European countries were questioned; 231 of these
subjects were compared with a control group of former bystanders. [13] The two Oliners saw the central
difference between helpers and bystanders as involving the hierarchy of values within each group: where
helpers strongly emphasized ethics"values such as concern for others and justice"bystanders were more
concerned with economic competence. [14] For the Oliners, the former group thus consisted of socially
competent and caring persons, the latter group of those tending toward egocentricism and individualism. [
15]
The Olners' study represented an important moment in the analysis of the rescue of Jews in the Third Reich.
It remains the most comprehensive treatment of the theme, establishing a methodological approach that
would be repeatedly taken up in subsequent years. [16] The approach is based on work with questionnaires
and interviews in which helpers are queried regarding their motives, attitudes, and personality traits. The
presumption here is that the information supplied in the questionnaires some forty years following the
events mirrors characteristics of the helpers possessing lifelong stability. In the 1980s, the Oliners thus
stated that «We&assume that despite the passage of years and change in external circumstances, the people
we meet today have many of the same predispositions they manifested at the outbreak of war.» [17] Only
this assumption of lifelong stable psychological dispositions allows conclusions about past behavior from
retrospective information on attitudes and motives.
However, psychological researchers have raised objections to the idea that personality traits remain
unaltered. Most studies in fact presume that such traits are even subject to steady change after
puberty"change that only subsides at the age of 40, 50, or even 60. [18] Some studies have actually
observed significant changes beyond the latter threshold. [19] There is in any event little empirical evidence
for the stability thesis. One of the severest critics of the thesis, the American psychologist Michael Lewis,
has argued that life circumstances determine changes in personality characteristics and that their stability in
old age is simply a reflection of stability of the circumstances, not any immutable psychological script. [20]
Recent research on memory and memory-linked narratives has come to similar conclusions, confirming not
only that human identity alters over a lifetime but that the description of one's life correspondingly changes.
[21] Memories as Source Material
Research on rescue has to cope with the fact that retrospective personal accounts by both Jewish survivors
and those who offered them aid are often the only available sources, given that there are few documents
dating from the events themselves. The lack of contemporary sources is tied to the clandestine nature of the
aid: those supporting Jews avoided leaving traces of their activities; in view of the frequency of
denunciations, their concern with maximum secrecy was not only centered on the police and Gestapo but
neighbors and acquaintances as well"and in some cases spouses and children. Hence many cases of aid are
only known to us because of postwar accounts by survivors and their supporters. These autobiographical
memories are not in themselves more problematic than other sources. Putatively objective sources such as
police and Gestapo minutes themselves contain false and misleading statements, for instance when arrested
individuals played down their activities for the simple sake of self-protection. No type of source is
inherently free of such bias. It would thus be mistaken to sweepingly demote personal accounts in favor of
other sources. It is nevertheless important to be aware of the practical and methodological problems tied to
a field of research that mainly relies on one type of source, retrospective autobiographical accounts.
What particular features of the accounts need to be emphasized here? Our memory, it would seem, does not
function like a machine that records what has been experienced and that can be consulted afterwards.
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Rather, it needs to be understood as a thematic network altering its structure with each new experience and
mnemonic act. In this way elements resting on belated or even indirect experience can be integrated into
one's own biography. [22] This does not mean that narratives of experience become increasingly less
reliable the further removed they are from the events. To the contrary, people can sometimes gain a better
grasp of their lives over time, gaining insight regarding actions and contexts that were once
incomprehensible. But precisely this altered insight means that the past experience can no longer be
comprehended with the earlier «naïve» perspective. [23]
Helene Jacobs' memoirs offer one example of the retrospective reinterpretation of one's own actions. Jacobs
first described her experiences in an essay she wrote in 1947. She here presented her help for persecuted
Jews as reflecting a sense of Christian responsibility for the ongoing crimes, a sense shared with the circle
of active Christians to which she belonged. In her text we thus read as follows: «The impossibility of
denying this responsibility held us upright. In this hopeless situation, Jesus Christ, whom we had come
together to hear and understand, wanted to make us ready for responsibility towards every person who laid
claim to a foundation for the hope he had given to us.» [24] If we compare this explanation to the contents
of an interview that a group of students conducted with Helene Jacobs nearly forty years later (1983), then
we see that religious motivation has now been replaced by democratic conviction and loyalty to the Weimar
Republic. «Discrimination,» she recalls, «was an impossibility for me because they were after all fellow
citizens and because I was for the Weimar constitution» [25] Likewise, contact with likeminded Christian
fellow helpers, emphasized so strongly in 1947, now played a subordinate role, Jacobs instead laying her
main emphasis on, as she recalled it, the fact that «finally everyone was in it alone.» [26]
Jacobs altered description of the motivations for her aid was presumably connected to experiences
accumulated since 1947. In the postwar years she came to realize that a strong antisemitic tradition
persisted within the Protestant Church. That was the background for her retrospective critique of the
behavior of her congregation under the Nazis and her call for a new theological perspective. [27] To this
end, she would be active for many years in Germany's Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische
Zusammenarbeit(Council for Jewish-Christian Cooperation) and the Ständiger Arbeitskreis von Juden und
Christen in Berlin(Permanent Working Group of Jews and Christians in Berlin). [28] But the differences
between the 1947 and 1983 narratives were also clearly tied to the altered narrative context. The first text
appeared in the Protestant publication Unterwegs; Jacobs was thus addressing a Christian public she wished
to remind of the resistance of Christians under National Socialism. In contrast, the second text emerged
from an interview in which she was asked to talk about her childhood, parents' house, and personal
experiences. Jacobs was now speaking as a witness wishing to transmit democratic values to her youthful
audience. [29]
The self-descriptions of former helpers did not convey fixed, definitive knowledge but depended on the
period in which they were articulated"their particular narrative context"and the nature of those they were
addressing. This has basic implications for research on their activities, as the catalyzing motives and values
of the 1980s were not necessarily those of the 1940s. The Oliners already encountered this problem in their
study. Namely, with their questionnaire they had not only registered the self-evaluation of those
interviewed but also evaluated the circumstances surrounding the first assistance the helpers had offered.
The results were surprising: more than half those surveyed indicating they acted on the basis of group
expectations and pressure"rather, that is, than citing empathy with persecuted Jews. [30] This information
stood in clear contrast with the self-evaluations, where factors such as ethical considerations, deep concern
for others, and feelings of universal justice were most often referred to as the chief motivations. None of
these subjects mentioned a sense of duty; only three percent indicated they acted for the sake of external
approval. [31]
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The situative context of aid offered persecuted Jews
In their work on autobiographical narratives, the sociologists Fritz Schütze and Gabriele Rosenthal
postulate that interviewed subjects offer far more information than is present in their explicit assessment of
the past. [32] The knowledge of these witnesses is «latent»: careful textual analysis is necessary to bring it
out. [33] To this end, their narratives are divided into various genres, in particular into descriptions,
argumentations, and stories. While argumentations and descriptions display a strong relationship with the
present, thus helping us understand the current positions of those being interviewed, stories about series of
past events convey more stable information that can be at a distance from the conscious processes
unfolding in the first two categories. [34] For reconstructing the dynamic at work in those instances of aid
offered Jews by Germans in Nazi Germany, an analytic focus on those passages from witness accounts
suggesting the concrete situations in which such action occurred thus seems justified.
Helene Jacobs' biography offers us an entrée to such a situational analysis. The first act of assistance she
recalls took place during Germany's nation-wide pogrom (so-called Kristallnacht) in November 1938. At
the time she was an employee in the office of a Jewish patent lawyer, Hermann Barschall. When a putative
policeman rang the bell at her boss's office, Jacobs, fearing he was going to be arrested, denied he was
present. In the days that followed, she helped Barschall hide; possibly he stayed for a time in her apartment.
[35]
Let us look more closely at the initial situation in which Helene Jacobs' aid was offered. When the doorbell
of Hermann Braschall's office rang, his wife Elise was present there as well. In her 1983 interview Jacobs
offers the following recollection:
That day we continued to work&and in the evening we were about to stop when the front bell rang. Frau
Barschall was on the floor above and the front garden was closed, so that no one could come into the
garden without the gate being opened from the inside. And she then asked who was there. And she was also
very fast-thinking when she noticed that a shady person was standing there. He naturally had no uniform;
he was a young man. He had to speak to the Herr Doktor&and then she said «the Herr Doktorisn't home.»
She said that immediately, and then she asked me to go to the garden and ask what he wanted. [36]
At the garden gate, the man explained he was from the police and was there for a foreign-exchange control,
upon which Jacobs told him her boss was not in the office and his time of return was uncertain. [37] It is in
any event clear from her account that her action was prompted by Braschell's wife having already informed
the unwelcome visitor her husband was gone. Jacobs repeated this lie, which she had probably already
offered at the entrance gate on previous occasions, acting as a loyal employee should.
The first step towards later helping actions was thus made in a familiar context and in the framework of a
customary role. It was a small, nearly self-evident step. But it represented an important experience, success
in fooling the claimed policeman and saving Hermann Barschall from imminent arrest. Such small
successes were of great significance for the emergence of assistance to the persecuted Jews. Many of those
who helped Jews survive underground in the 1940s were building on smaller and less dangerous forms of
assistance offered during the 1930s. [38]
Although framed by her employee status, Helene Jacobs' help was by no means predetermined. Obviously,
she could have betrayed her boss. We know that denunciation of Jewish acquaintances was common in
Nazi Germany. Non-Jews involved in private or professional conflicts with Jews could simply and quickly
resolve matters through a denunciation. [39] Jacobs could herself have used the putative exchange control
to show her boss that thanks to the new political regime, she, a simple employee, had the power to either
protect him or hand him over.
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But Helene Jacobs did not seize this opportunity. In order to understand her decision to offer her help, we
need to consider a broader biographical context. In November 1938 Jacobs was 32 years old. She had
already been working in Barschall's law office fourteen years, nearly half her life. If we trust her memories,
the job offered her great satisfaction. In her words: «I had such a lovely profession and my boss was ready
to respect me as an equal to an amazing extent.» [40] Barschall encouraged Jacobs to take an aptitude test
allowing her to begin a course of studies in mathematics and the sciences. [41] He was thus not only her
boss but her intellectual mentor, a man she esteemed. Through Barschall, Jacobs came into contact with
inventors and scientists «of Jewish humanist orientation» [42]"an environment that was new to her and
impressed her:
I also became acquainted with people&and these included Nobel Prize winners and very interesting people
I was able to meet although I wasn't academically inclined and actually in let's say a subordinate position to
them, actually only a head clerk. And they were all somewhat special, brought me into their thoughts as if it
was self-evident and were very pleased about everything I contributed to our conversations. [43]
Clearly, such respectful treatment deeply moved Jacobs; very likely it instilled strong feelings of gratitude
in her, so that betraying Barschall would have been out of the question. What this case suggests is that in
themselves structural opportunities offered in a certain milieu, for instance professional contact with Jews,
are insufficient for explaining the helpers' actions. Rather, just as important is the way a certain social
position is interpreted by the actors, both these dimensions calling for close consideration. The contact to
Hermann Barschall and Helene Jacobs' presence in his office at the time of the threatened arrest did not
determine a certain course of action. As suggested, her decision to offer help rather than engage in betrayal
is significantly clarified when we consider her subjective viewpoint, her emotional ties with and feelings of
thanks to the man she helped save.
Appropriating Possibilities for Action
The connection between social structures of opportunity and their individual appropriation is a complex
one. For people are not only able to interpret their social context differently but also to influence it and help
shape it to different degrees. They can reproduce it, withdraw from it, modify it. [44] Hence in research on
German helpers, we have to examine not only the structures and their appropriation but the strategies used
to exert such influence.
Following the November 1938 incident, Elise und Hermann Barschall decided to emigrate, Helene Jacobs
then supporting their preparations and traveling a number of times outside Germany to file entry requests
and secure the couple's assets. [45] Emigration would succeed in July 1939, Jacobs then remaining behind
and facing the task of private and professional reorientation. Now 33, she had neither husband nor children;
on account of her opposition to Nazism, she felt «very isolated.» [46]
She found a new peer group in the so-called Confessional Church (the Bekennende Kirche,BK) in
Berlin-Dahlem. This church had formed in May 1934 in opposition to the official German Protestant
church, in order to resist both state influence and the antisemitic program of the «German Christians.» [47]
Already in the mid-1930s, Jacobs went to sermons by BK pastor Martin Niemöller in the St. Anne Church
in Berlin-Dahlem. She there found a «community of people in whom you could have a certain trust in their
human intactness.» [48] But Jacobs only developed intensive contact with this BK congregation after a
grave mental crisis in the fall of 1939. At that time she entered into a relationship with a married
congregation member, then ending it with strong guilt feelings vis-à-vis the man's wife. A few months later,
she wrote as follows in a letter to her pastor Helmut Gollwitzer:
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My life is so astonishingly free of the ties that almost every person has. I do not have a profession, and
certainly no family....And thus it continues.&When I finally decided to participate in the life of the Dahlem
congregation, I immediately made myself as impossible as was conceivable. It is especially difficult for a
woman to live so completely disconnected and relying on herself. [49]
In order to exit this depression and feelings of isolation, Jacobs turned to BK member Gertrud Staewen,
whom a clergyman had recommended to her as a contact person. [50] A confidential relationship emerged
between the two women; it was Jacobs' deep wish «to be able to have a place in the Dahlem church,» [51]
and in the end she managed to join the circle of socially engaged congregation members with Staewen's
help. Among other activities, she participated in the «working group on dogma,» a reading circle that
focused on the work of Karl Barth. [52] In this context she became acquainted with, among other people,
the BK member Franz Kaufmann, himself to be persecuted for his Jewish origins, who appealed fervently
for displaying solidarity and offering help to Jews. He would become an important model for Jacobs as her
perspective developed. [53]
For the rescue activities of Helene Jacobs, her integration into the BK structures would be of central
significance. Through them she came into contact with «non-Aryan» Christians and existing aid networks.
Some BK members had been engaged in organized aid for such «non-Aryans» since 1938, [54] with
initiation, for instance, of a visiting service for persecuted members of the Dahlem congregation as a
reaction to the November pogrom. [55] In early 1941, Jacobs expanded this service. To do so, she procured
the addresses of those affected, who had previously been cared for by colleagues of the pastor Heinrich
Grüber, arrested in December 1940. [56] In March 1941 she participated in an action of the congregation
that involved sending packages of food and clothing to Jews from Stettin and Schneidemühl deported to the
Lublin ghetto. [57] As a result in August 1941 Jacobs had what she would later refer to as «my first
interrogation by the Gestapo,» which tried to ferret out the names of potential supporters of the project.
«This had no personal consequences for me,» she recalled, «but we had to stop our package action.» [58]
When the deportations began in Berlin in October 1941, «non-Aryan» members of the Dahlem
congregation were also affected. Helene Jacobs now developed strategies of aid going beyond the
charity-work within the BK. In cooperation with Franz Kaufmann, she began to support persecuted persons
who had taken the step into illegality, sheltered strangers in her apartment, procured false papers for them,
and participated in bribing Gestapo employees. In this way Jacobs emerged as one of the central figures in
Kaufmann's rescue network, which appears to have helped around 300 Jews; [59] according to my research,
at least twenty of these individuals were helped by Jacobs. These activities marked a sharp difference
between her and many other congregation members for whom illegal measures were unacceptable. They
weighed heavy on Gertrud Staewen, who in September 1942 wrote Helmut Gollwitzer as follows: «Helmut,
a year ago I was still a relatively bourgeois and proper woman. Now I've gradually become a gangster.
Translate that into the work, the terrible work, that connects Jacobs and myself.» [60]
One observation seems called for in light of this remark. A strong fear at disobeying laws even when they
conflict with basic principles of justice is frequently perceived as stemming from a German authoritarian
propensity: in our context, an absence of courage for civil disobedience because of affective ties to the
«Führer State.» Be this as it may, in the case of the German helpers, a hesitation to act is perhaps best
explained in terms of the specific situation of the early 1940s, when no alternative to the Nazi regime was
on the horizon. Otherwise than was the case with for example their counterparts in France, who could
legitimate their actions through some popular support, an established resistance network, and a functioning
exile regime, in breaking the law German helpers were largely isolated, and were maneuvering themselves
into social marginality. [61]
Taking this into account points all the more strongly to Jacobs' willingness to accept her isolation and her
efforts to shape her personal situation in order to amplify her room of maneuver. Although she suffered
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from her lack of family or a markedly successful career, she wrote to Gollwitzer in late 1940, that «this of
course doesn't only have a negative sense. Once I become very calm about this the positive sense will
reveal itself.» [62] Jacobs knew that as a childless woman she was offered possibilities other women may
not have had: possibilities offered, for instance, by flexibility with her time and a capacity to make
decisions without endangering family members. In addition, the special social position she had in the
neighborhood meant she could carry out her rescuing in a way that was both self-willed and discrete: no
one was interested in such a social outsider. She confirmed this in her 1986 interview: «My strength
was&anonymity, that no one cared about me.» And further: «I passed as a misfit in any case, intentionally
so.» [63]
Jacobs' active shaping of the conditions for her rescue work also emerges in the course taken by her
professional life. Following the Barschall family's emigration, she initially searched for a new job. But
when she was asked to furnish information about her «Aryan» ancestry, she found this morally
unacceptable and the idea of working in a regulated, state-supervised employment system intolerable. [64]
Instead she decided to earn her money as an independent patent consultant and secretary. As Jacobs
recalled things, she could in this way earn the very respectable sum of 250 reichmarks for only one full
day's work weekly. [65] Outside the Labor Front's control, this arrangement allowed her to intensify her
efforts on behalf of persecuted Jews and «non-Aryans.»
All told, Helene Jacobs' biography suggests that helping activities are best understood in the context of
specific social constellations. What was initially most important was personal contact to Jews, followed
later by membership in the Confessional Church, integration into existing aid networks, freedom from
family responsibilities, short working hours and relative financial independence tied to specialized
competence, and outsider status in the neighborhood. But all these factors were not simply givens"rather,
they were actively developed and utilized by Jacobs. This in turn suggests that it would be mistaken to
derive the sort of help she gave from a particular position and connected opportunities. Only their
individual appropriation makes the subsequent rescue efforts comprehensible.
Conclusion
This discussion has been based on two premises, the first of which is that the central source material of
research on Germans offering aid to persecuted Jews and «non-Aryans» in the Third Reich, retrospectively
written personal accounts, does not offer «objective data»; rather, it consists of narratives produced at
certain times in certain social contexts. For this reason the accounts need to be interpreted against the
backdrop of their context of origin and supplemented by historical-sociological analysis. Situational
analysis can help determine the social framework in which the aid emerged, thus allowing consideration of
the decisions made by the actors involved, independently of their own retrospectively formulated
interpretations.
The second premise is that the effort by researchers to identify individual psychological or sociological
factors distinguishing helpers from non-helpers does not furnish satisfactory explanations. Only the
interchange of social opportunities and their individual interpretation and appropriation offers insight into
why a small number of Germans became helpers while countless others in similar contexts did not. For this
reason, in the future researchers in this field should not focus on fixed distinctions between helpers and
bystanders but rather on biographical processes of change and efforts to appropriate possibilities of action.
The situational analysis I am proposing ties these two dimensions together: the help is located in its social
context and the appropriation of possibilities is rendered visible.
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[1] Translation by Joel Golb (J.Golb snafu.de). This article was prepared with financial assistance from the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah; thanks as
well to the Centre Marc Bloch for having helped fund the English-language translation.
[2] For a survey of the forms and extent of such assistance see Benz 2006 and Kosmala 2004. The more or less exact number of individuals involved here is
uncertain. For Berlin, Beate Kosmala has estimated around 7,000 Jews in hiding and around 30,000 helpers (Kosmala/Croes 2011, 124). For Nazi Germany as a
whole we can presume at least 10,000 Jews in hiding and 40,000 helpers.
[3] On public commemoration of these helpers in Germany, France, and Israel see Riffel 2002, Cabanel 2012, 19-45, Gensburger 2010, Kabalek 2011, and
Semelin 2013, 527-536.
[4] The term «opportunity structures» stems from research on political and social movements by social scientists. It was first used by the political scientist Peter
Eisinger to help explain the emergence of political protest in American cities. Eisinger was here concerned with systematizing those influences catalyzing or
checking social movements. The political scientist Sidney Tarrow defines opportunity structures as «consistent"but not necessarily formal or
permanent"dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations of success and
failure" (Tarrow 1994, 85). On the term's use by researchers, see Kern 2008, 152-174. In work on National Socialism the term is used in the context of the social
emergence of violence (see Welzer 2005, 202 and Welzer/Neitzel 2011, 218).
[5] Andrieu et al. 2011.
[6] For early accounts by survivors see Krakauer 1947, Boehm 1949, and Behrend-Rosenfeld 1949. For first descriptions by individual helpers see Friedman
1957, Leuner 1966, Horbach 1967, and Fink 1968.
[7] This observation is based on an assessment of the bibliography of the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook from 1958 to 2010. A detailed overview of developments
in research on Germans who helped Jews in Nazi Germany will be included in my Ph.D. thesis on that topic (planned completion date: 2015).
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[8] Walter-Busch 2002, 356.
[9] Wolfson 1971, 39.
[10] Kosmala / Schoppmann 2002, 21.
[11] See Kosmala 2007, 32 and Benz 2006, 48.
[12] It appears to have been more successful in respect to other European countries. For the French context see Gross 1994, Frenk 2008, Cabanel 2012, 47-102,
and Semelin 2013, 536-540.
[13] See Oliner 1988, pp. 261-262.
[14] Ibid., 292 (table 6.7).
[15] Ibid., 256-260.
[16] See for instance Fogelman 1995, Monroe 2004, Varese / Yaish 2005, and Kroneberg 2011.
[17] Oliner 1988, 11. See also Kroneberg 2011, 265.
[18] See the meta-study by Roberts / DelVecchio 2000.
[19] See Aldwin / Levenson 1994, Pervin 1994.
[20] See Lewis 1998 and Lewis 2001. For a methodological critique see also Helson and Stewart 1994.
[21] See Welzer 2002 and Fried 2004.
[22] On this phenomenon of montage see Welzer 2002, 185-206 and Schacter 2001, 112-137.
[23] On the reconstructive character of memories see Halbwachs 1925, Fried 1994, and Rosenthal 1995.
[24] Jacobs 1947, 12.
[25] Jacobs 1983, 4.
[26] Ibid., 34.
[27] See Jacobs 1987.
[28] On Jacobs' engagement for a Jewish-Christian dialog see Lohwasser 1998, 24-34.
[29] For a detailed discussion of shifts of meaning in the accounts of Helene Jacobs see Beer 2010.
[30] See Oliner 1988, 199-209.
[31] See Oliner 1988, 142-170 and 287 (table 6.2).
[32] See Rosenthal 1995 and Schütze 1983.
[33] See Hermanns 1991, 185.
[34] On the significance of scenic memory for oral history see Wierling 2003. For a detailed description of the categories of narration, description, and
argumentation and their subcategories see Kallmeyer and Schütze 1977. See also Rosenthal 1995, 240-41.
[35] See Szepansky 1983, 61.
[36] Jacobs 1983, 22-23.
[37] Ibid., 23.
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[38] For the concept of «helpers' careers» as a way of approaching the learning process undertaken by these individuals, see Beer 2010.
[39] See Reuband 2001, 223 and Diewald-Kerkmann 1995, 148.
[40] Jacobs 1983, 8.
[41] Ibid., 13.
[42] Ibid., 17.
[43] Ibid., 17.
[44] See Lüdtke 2002 and Lüdtke 1993, 375-382, passim.
[45] Jacobs 1983, 24. Jacobs' trips outside Germany are confirmed in the personal account of Henry H. Barschall, the son of Hermann and Elise Barschall. See
Barschall 1999, 7.
[46] Jacobs 1983, 10.
[47] For an overview of the history of the BK see Gailus 2012. The Confessional Church emerged in reaction to introduction of the Aryan Paragraph and the
connected exclusion of Germans of Jewish origin from the Protestant Church. However, with the exception of individual ministers the BK did not speak out
publicly against antisemitism. The main focus of its resistance involved defense of Church autonomy against Nazi policies of Gleichschaltung. See Gerlach 1993.
[48] Jacobs 1983, 29.
[49] Jacobs to Gollwitzer, 2 and 3 Dec. 1940, Evangelisches Zentral Archiv Berlin, Helmut Gollwitzer archives (henceforth EZA), Bestand 686/3259.
[50] See Jacobs 1954.
[51] Jacobs to Gollwitzer, 21 Nov. 1939, EZA, Bestand 686/3259.
[52] On this working group see Schäberle-Koenigs 1998, 102.
[53] See Jacobs 1947, 10. Following his denunciation Franz Kaufmann was arrested in 1943 and murdered in February 1944 without being tried. For a biography
of Kaufmann see Rudolph 2005.
[54] A central «Grüber office» for helping «non-Aryan congregation members was set up to this end. For the history of the office see Ludwig 1991.
[55] See Schäberle-Koenigs 1998, 184-188.
[56] See Szepansky 1983, 65-66.
[57] Jacobs to Gollwitzer, 24 Aug. 1941, EZA, Bestand 686/3259.
[58] Cited from Szepansky 1983, 66.
[59] See Kroh 1984, 20.
[60] Staewen to Gollwitzer, 11 Sept. 1942, EZA, Bestand 686/974.
[61] On the development of civil disobedience among French helpers see Semelin 2013, 631-647. On the role of national resistance movements in the emergence
of assistance to the persecuted see Oliner 1988, 144.
[62] Jacobs to Gollwitzer, 2/3 Dec. 1940, EZA, Bestand 686/3259.
[63] Jacobs 1983, 46-57.
[64] In May 1934 Germany's workers and employers were incorporated into the so-called German Labor Front; their activities would henceforth be supervised by
the state. Starting in 1935, persons who were Jews or «first degree hybrids» (Mischlinge ersten Grades) were not allowed membership in this organization. See
Rohn 2012.
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[65] Jacobs 1983, 27. In 1944, the gross salary of a single female textile worker was 76 reichmarks; even an unmarried female concentration camp supervisor
only received 185.68 reichmarks. See Mailänder 2009, 100.
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