Mary FULBROOK. A Small Town near Auschwitz

In the late 1980s, Saul Friedländer began to call for an “integrated history” of the Holocaust. Holocaust history, he believed, should include German and Jewish views and voices. In her intriguing study of the Holocaust in Będzin, Mary Fulbrook has done just that. Będzin, a small town in Upper Silesia, is located roughly twenty-five miles from Auschwitz. Fulbrook chose to write about Będzin for a very personal reason. The wife of Udo Klausa (1910–1998), the Nazi-appointed Landrat (provincial administrator) there, was Fulbrook's mother's best friend and her own godmother. As Landrat, Klausa oversaw the implementation of racial policies, including the isolation, ghettoization, and deportation of Będzin's 22,000 Jews. Fulbrook is intent on discovering how Klausa, a man she recalls as a charming, urbane family friend, could have been so deeply implicated in the Holocaust. An indefatigable researcher, Fulbrook draws on a great range of sources for her study. The most telling come from the Klausa family. Fulbrook carefully parsed Klausa's unpublished memoir, remarkable both for its many omissions and his insistence that he had not wanted “innocently to become guilty” (p. 8). Fulbrook argues that he, along with many professional historians, missed the point. Klausa was convinced that he was not a “real” Nazi because he never participated in violent actions against the Jews: that is, he never pushed Jews onto trains headed for Auschwitz. But Fulbrook argues that by raising such a high bar for guilt, we overlook a whole range of culpable Nazi behavior. In fact, Klausa, a young Landrat eager to impress his superiors, carried out innumerable decrees and policies that dehumanized Jews and laid the basis for their eventual murder.

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