Barbarians from our "Kulturkreis"

Notes that literature dealing with Holocaust victims' perceptions of Nazi perpetrators is scarce. The wartime diaries and postwar memoirs of German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish survivors provide researchers with the insight of only one specific group into the world of the perpetrators - the insight of the victims who shared language and cultural background with their tormentors. E.g. the former tried to understand the motives and psychology of the latter. Shows that while Eastern European Jewish survivors perceived German perpetrators as one uniform hostile mass, inhuman "Nazi beasts", German and Austrian Jews saw variations in the perpetrators' personalities and behavior. Many German Jewish victims saw themselves as part of the German nation, and did not initially identify the inhumanity of their tormentors with their "Germanity". However, once they emigrated or were deported to the East, the German Jews began to lose their sense of belonging to Germany and to perceive the perpetrators as one uniform mass, ascribing their brutality to their Germanness. Remarkably, in Eastern European ghettos, local Jews sometimes identified the deported German Jews with Nazi Germans, and held them culpable for their common disaster. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)