Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and German Studies at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. A prolific author, he is one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of the Holocaust and the Nazi state, and of the impulses behind genocidal behaviour. Born in Hedera, Israel in 1954, he was educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. As a youth in Israel he grew up among Holocaust survivors, and in a militarised society where he served as a soldier for four years (including combat service in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973), he developed an interest in the scholarly study of war and genocide. Bartov’s teaching career began at Tel Aviv University, where he was a member of the History Department between 1983 and 1992. He joined Rutgers University in 1992 as the Raoul Wallenberg Professor in Human Rights and Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and was a Professor in the History Department at Rutgers between 1993 and 2000. He joined Brown University in 2000.
From the beginning, Bartov’s academic writing was directed towards the study of genocidal behaviour in wartime. His initial research was on the Nazi indoctrination of German soldiers in the Wehrmacht under the Third Reich during the war against the Soviet Union, and the crimes committed by the regular soldiery of the Nazi state. These themes formed the main thrust of his first two books, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (1985) and Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991).
In The Eastern Front, Bartov examined the German army in the war against the Soviet Union. He described the nature of warfare as seen by the German soldier, and analysed the social, educational and political backgrounds of the junior officer echelon. He argued that it was only by considering such personal factors, along with the impacts of Nazi propaganda and indoctrination, that the criminal activities of the German army in Russia could be explained. His analysis pointed towards an interpretation of the extent of army involvement in Nazi ideological crimes, which was previously commonly ascribed only to the SS.
Bartov’s second book, Hitler’s Army, developed these ideas further, challenging the notion that the German army was apolitical. He considered in depth the degree to which the army was riven with Nazi ideology, again through a focus on the Eastern front. Here, however, he went deeper, showing that propaganda and indoctrination motivated the troops not only to fight well, but also to commit crimes against humanity and genocide. Explaining the motivation through an exploration of two interrelated elements – an extreme demonisation of the Soviet enemy and an uncompromising reverence for Adolf Hitler – Bartov showed that most German troops saw the war from a thoroughly ideological perspective, believing it to be part of a struggle for the future of Western civilisation. The book saw considerable success, with translations subsequently appearing in Czech, Polish, French, Hebrew, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
Given these early works, it seemed a natural progression for Bartov to move towards studying the links between the impact of the First World War on mass consciousness (particularly views regarding death) and the genocidal policies of the Second. Thus, in Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (1996), he charted a direct causal link between the emergence of industrialised killing in the trenches during the Great War and the shift in people’s awareness of mass killing that took place because of it. And not only that; he traced this trend to the very nature of modernity, as he spelled out in the book’s Introduction:
War, slaughter, and genocide, are of course as old as human civilization itself. Industrial killing, however, is a much newer phenomenon, not only in that its main precondition was the industrialization of human society, but also in the sense that this process of industrialization came to be associated with progress and improvement, hope and optimism, liberty and democracy, science and the rule of law. Industrial killing was not the dark side of modernity, some aberration of a generally salutary process; rather, it was and is inherent to it, a perpetual potential of precisely the same energies and ideas, technologies and ideologies that have brought about the ‘great transformation’ of humanity. (Bartov, 1996: 4)
But, he added, ‘precisely because modernity means to many of us progress and improvement, we cannot easily come to terms with the idea that it also means mass annihilation’. While this idea has since been taken up by a number of other authors such as Paul R. Bartrop and Alan Kramer, it was Bartov, in this book, who spelled it out for the first time for a general audience (in particular in his Chapter 2, ‘The European Imagination in the Age of Total War’) as he sought to explore the complex relationship between violence, representation and identity in the twentieth century. Murder in Our Midst won Bartov increased recognition through the award of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Institute for Contemporary History and Wiener Library, London. It was in this work that he also introduced what would become another of his interests, in the form of a discussion of the role of cinema in the portrayal of mass death and genocide.
By now, Bartov’s reputation as a first-rank historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust had for long been established, and his contribution to the development of an understanding of how the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust were able to carry out their crimes frequently saw his name alongside those of such other historians as Christopher Browning. Bartov’s next book, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (2000), went one step further. Here, he examined the relationship between total war, state-organised genocide and the emergence of modern identity – as he summarised it, ‘a study in perceptions’. On this occasion, however, his focus was not so much on how perpetrators of genocide have been able to rationalise or justify their activities, as on how perspectives of violence ‘have molded European views and redefined individual and collective identities in a process of emulation, mutual reflection, and distortion’. (Bartov, 2000: 1) It was an ambitious book, offering a highly sophisticated analysis of complex interrelationships in German, French and Jewish literature and memory. As such, it dealt almost exclusively with the Holocaust; by extension, however, Bartov could have projected his ideas onto other genocidal experiences should he have chosen to do so. Ultimately, this work extended discussion of the intellectual disposition of modern societies towards genocide, through a consideration of visions of identity and national utopias. Inevitably, such visions are expressed through the histories that are written to explain how each of the nations has understood its past (and thus, how it arrived at its present), so this book also required Bartov to investigate and interpret a number of historiographical traditions, a theme he was to return to in his next major work, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (2003).
Here, he discussed the ways in which the Nazi years could be interpreted through an examination of the histories that have been written trying to understand the impulses and behaviours that characterised life under the Hitler regime. Bartov was inspired to investigate this topic in part by the appearance of two books in the 1990s: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in 1996 and the contemporary Third Reich diaries of German-Jewish classics professor Victor Klemperer. Bartov’s study was again a measured treatment of the interconnections between the Nazis’ destructive war, the genocide of the Jews and the subsequent reconstruction of German and Jewish identities in its aftermath. On this occasion, however, he considered his topic from within the labyrinth of historiography that had emerged in recent years, and through careful management of his material he was able to show the degree to which much of the literature proceeded from the wrong premise, was skewed or was otherwise flawed. We see here a Bartov who was pointing to the need for scholars to be more clear-headed when approaching the topics of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, to ask the right questions, and to seek answers based on objective scholarship rather than preformed selectivity of evidence.
As if to show that this issue of historical representation was not only to be found in the frequently dry world of academia, Bartov moved beyond historiography in his next work, and turned his attention to the ways in which the Holocaust and Jewish identity were portrayed in European, American and Israeli movies. In The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (2005), Bartov examined the recycling of anti-Semitic stereotypes in film, demonstrating the powerful political, social and cultural impact of these images on popular attitudes throughout the world. Addressing a range of movies, he argued that the representations they make of Jews generally fall into four categories, namely, ‘the Jew’ as perpetrator, victim, hero and anti-hero. Contextualising his topic with a range of examples taken from film’s early days to the present, Bartov considered a number of ways in which fundamental prejudices about Jews have remained deeply embedded in the creative imagination, concluding that some of these attitudes persisted in cinematic depictions throughout the twentieth century.
While engaged on all these projects, Bartov also led a multi-year collaborative project at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, entitled ‘Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires since 1848’. This project considered the nature of interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe, and was instrumental in changing the direction of Bartov’s research. From looking at the broad contours of Nazi policies and their impact, he now considered how genocide actually unfolded on the ground, and how the politics of memory – and erasure of that memory in the minds of the people and through the destruction of the material remains of Jewish culture in the affected areas – was resulting in a permanent loss of historical awareness in local communities. The result was Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (2007). Focusing his research on towns and cities in Western Ukraine, Bartov journeyed throughout the region, rescuing the past where he could and identifying the areas in which the Holocaust took place ‘on the ground’ – and what became of the memory of the experience once the war was over. In this regard his work complemented that of Fr. Patrick Desbois, who at the same time was making a similar journey – not to investigate lost communities, but to describe how the killing itself took place during the Nazi years (Dubois, 2008).
Bartov saw a great need for this to be done, as the Holocaust was not a phenomenon that simply came upon the Jews like an alien force and had no impact on anyone else, but was an event that involved all sectors of society while it was taking place. As he wrote concerning his own voyage to the subject:
I had to learn – often after already visiting them – the history of individual towns and communities, their moments of glory and demise, their accomplishments and their degradation. I had to imagine how – in these pretty little towns, the vast forests, the rolling hills – people who had lived side by side for generations were transformed into killers and quarry, how a few altruistic souls were drowned in an ocean of hate, greed, and incitement. (Bartov, 2007: xvi)
Moreover, based on such a private view, Bartov realised that he had to
rethink the very concept of what we have come to call the Holocaust, or genocide. Because in these little towns, in that corner of the world, this was no distant, neatly organized, bloodless bureaucratic undertaking, but a vast wave of brutal, intimate, and endlessly bloody massacres. Far from meaningless violence, these were often quite meaningful actions, from which many profited politically and economically. (Bartov, 2007: xvii)
As a result, Bartov produced a work that was at once poignant and informative. Considering the interethnic relationship between the various groups living in these communities before, during and after the war, he was able to demonstrate just how intimate the process of genocidal killing can be, and in so doing he brought to light a number of elements of the Jewish tragedy that might otherwise have been lost.
The experience of writing about lost communities led Bartov to his most recent project, in which he seeks to trace the origins of local mass murder in the complexities of relations between different ethnic and religious groups over a long time span within a single community, the Eastern Galician town of Buczacz. Already this research has seen the appearance of conference presentations and short written pieces, as well as a chapter in Erased. With this project, he investigates the dynamic that creates, or prevents, the transformation of a community based on interaction and cooperation into a community of genocide. Composed of a mixed Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian population for centuries, Buczacz saw the eradication of its Jewish inhabitants by Nazi murder squads assisted by local collaborators during the Second World War, and the ethnic cleansing of its Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists. While the main outlines of the Holocaust in East Galicia have recently been reconstructed, Bartov contends that little is known about the nature of the social fabric upon which Nazi policies were enacted, and to which the communities reacted. Bartov’s research will help to give a more complete appreciation of this past, through an investigation that will consider the perspective of all groups involved in the event.
In general, Omer Bartov’s contribution to the field of historical inquiry of the Holocaust and genocide has been considerable. His work has been pathbreaking in many respects: he has examined, in a manner rarely seen before, the multivariate relationships between war and the Holocaust; the motivation of soldiers and the involvement of the German army in the perpetration of war crimes and genocide; the role of ideology and stereotypes in both warfare and historiography; the links between the age of total war and genocide; the importance of testimonies and local studies in writing the history of the Holocaust and the development of a historical understanding of genocide; and, most recently, the crucial place of Eastern Europe in understanding the Holocaust. As a leading thinker and scholar of the Holocaust and genocide, Omer Bartov is – and will remain – one of the leading academic voices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Bartov’s major writings
The Eastern Front 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, Basingstoke, Hampshire (UK): Macmillan/St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1985.
Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
‘German Soldiers and the Holocaust: Historiography, Research, and Implications’, in Passing into History: Nazism and the Holocaust beyond Memory, in Honor of Saul Friedländer on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, special issue of History & Memory, 9, 1–2 (Fall 1997), 162–88.
‘Antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Reinterpretations of National Socialism’, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 1998, 75–98.
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
(Ed.) The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, London: Routledge, 2000.
(Ed. with Phyllis Mack) In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
(Ed. with Atina Grossmann and Mary Nolan) Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, New York: The New Press, 2002.
Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2003.
‘Seeking the Roots of Modern Genocide: On the Macro- and Microhistory of Mass Murder’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 75–96.
The ‘Jew‘ in Cinema: from The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust, Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 2005.
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 2007.
‘Interethnic Relations in the Holocaust as Seen Through Postwar Testimonies: Buczacz, East Galicia, 1941–44’, in Doris L. Bergen (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, vol. VII, From Generation to Generation, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, 2008, 101–24.
‘White Spaces and Black Holes: Eastern Galicia’s Past and Present’, in Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 2008, 318–53.
‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide’, Journal of Modern History, 80, 3 (September 2008), 557–93.
