Dan Porat, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. 276 pp.

This chapter looks at Dan Porat's important book, Bitter Reckoning: Israel Tries Holocaust Survivors as Nazi Collaborators (2019). The focus of Porat's book is the so-called kapo trials that were conducted in Israel between 1951 and 1972. Many of the defendants were not alleged former kapos in Nazi concentration camps but rather former Judenrat (Jewish Council) members and Jewish policemen in ghettos. The legislative authority for the kapo trials derived from the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law promulgated by the Knesset in 1950. This is the law on the basis of which Adolf Eichmann was tried and convicted in Jerusalem in 1961. But, as Porat points out, when the Knesset debated and then passed the legislation, first and foremost in legislators' minds were survivors in Israel who were suspected of cooperation with the Nazis. Unlike the proceedings in Jewish honor courts, which resorted to deontological criteria — that is, whether the accused had a duty to refrain from lending a hand to the Nazis' persecution and murder of other Jews — the Israeli trials, conducted under state authority, were bound by the rules of criminal law to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Criminalized Liaisons: Soviet Women and Allied Sailors in Wartime Arkhangel’sk

From 1941 to 1945 thousands of British and American sailors came to the northern Soviet ports of Arkhangel’sk and Molotovsk with Lend-Lease convoys. On the shore they made many casual contacts with local residents, in particular with Soviet women. These contacts came under close scrutiny of the Soviet authorities who tried to limit the alleged subversive influence of foreign nationals on Soviet citizens. Local women who dated Allied personnel faced harassment and repression that ranged from administrative exile to imprisonment in the Gulag. Resentments against women who had intimate relationships with foreigners during the war were widespread throughout the European theater, and not limited to the USSR. Still the Soviet authorities’ treatment of Arkhangel’sk women who dated nationals of ‘friendly’ countries was particularly harsh. They faced not just moral condemnation, but legal prosecution and long prison terms. The severity of their repression is comparable to how the Soviet side treated civilian Nazi collaborators. Ultimately, Soviet reactions to such wartime contacts with Allied nationals shed light on the broader social history of the Soviet home front, inter-Allied relationships on a grassroots level, and Soviet wartime and postwar justice that was arbitrary in nature and largely defined by local initiatives.

Folk culture as a foundation for preservation and development of the state

The subject of this research is the cultivation in younger generation of respect to folk culture as a foundation of uniqueness and self-identification of the people. An intrinsic element of folk culture, along with the folksong and folkdance, is the memory of historical events as the basis for the development of folklore. Having analyzed the events of the late XX – early XXI centuries, the conclusion is made on inadmissibility of nullification of panhuman values and separate acts as crimes against humanity. Thus, it is suggested to view the culture of preservation of historical memory as an essential element in cultivation of folk culture. The author establishes correlation between the development of cultural diversity of ethnoses, peoples, nationalities and nations populating the Russian Federation and the formation of the unified national idea of the state. The result of analysis of the events related to violation of the provisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal Verdict on recognition of Nazi collaborators as freedom fighters in separate European states, led to realization of the need to cultivate the culture of preservation of historical memory and refrain the younger generation from overrating the outcome of World War II. Emphasis is made on the need to develop culture of working with the archival data as the foundation for preservation of historical memory of the population of modern Russia.

Dirty words: The politicisation of Dubuffet’s Hautes Pâtes

In the spring of 1946, Jean Dubuffet presented the series Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie/Hautes Pâtes at the Gallery René Drouin. This exhibition has rightly been cast as a breakthrough event in the cultural landscape of the immediate post-war period; it was the first public unveiling of Dubuffet’s matter painting and the press erupted with cries of ‘cacaïsme’ and ‘peinture à la merde’, pronouncing him a ‘peintre en excréments’. The critical reception of this exhibition is part of the historical record. This article examines the popular (and even less sanitised) reception of Dubuffet’s contentious hautes pâtes, as recorded in several completely overlooked documents from the period, most notably the exhibition’s ‘livre d’or’ or Guest Book. Littered with swastikas and the francile, the insignia of Pétain’s collaborationist regime, the anonymous comments inscribed in the pages of the Guest Book charge Dubuffet with ‘décadence totale’, characterising his art as ‘judéo-décadent’. Despite the fact that the series avoids any reference to contemporary events, the materiality of his work raised anxious references to the polemic on decadence waged during the Occupation as well as to the post-war political purges of Nazi collaborators.

Transnational Identities of Dutch Nazi-Collaborators and their Struggle for Integration into the National Community

Transnational Identities of Dutch Nazi-Collaborators and their Struggle for Integration into the National Community This article aims to shed light on how Nazi collaborators’ transnational encounters and exchanges generated attitudes and outlooks that are different and more diverse than those that one would be able to find when focusing solely on the issue of reintegration from the perspective of the nation-state framework. Military service in the German forces produced significant reconfigurations in the sense of identity and belonging of these non-German Nazis. Highlighting the Dutch example, we argue that such far-reaching experiences strongly affected the position to which these people aspired in the restored post-war nation-state. We will demonstrate their ambition to adapt their own outlook in some respects to the guiding principles of their liberal-democratic surroundings, and indicate the limitations as well as the opportunities that both state and society provided in the process.