The Relative Quiet of KZ Memorialization

Chapter 5 examines the period of quiescence in KZ memory which prevailed from the mid 1960s through the 1970s across all three locations. It outlines how practices of remembrance became more routine, with anniversary years providing pops of spectacle and grandeur. It evaluates the locals’ roles and contributions to these standard rites and rituals, which were often national (or otherwise regional) in significance. Amidst the quiet, it examines occasions when locals at Vught and, for the first time, at Neuengamme evidenced a heightened involvement in commemoration. The chapter reviews growing public sensitivities to camp history by the end of the 1970s through the resurgence of an épuration counter-memory at Natzweiler, and the effects of the Holocaust miniseries, which was shown in all locations. The chapter closes with a reminder of the ongoing pragmatic reuses of the camp sites for alternative purposes at Vught and Neuengamme, and the means these provided to constrain and detract from memories of the Nazi camps.

Pragmatism and Memorialization

After the internment camps closed, the KZs were used in further pragmatic capacities. Chapter 3 reviews how the refunctionalization of the KZs at Vught and Neuengamme displaced the connotations of Nazi history by inscribing new narratives onto the local landscape, and how the new institutions gave the sites more prevalent associations with the present than with the past. The chapter also assesses the ways in which memory culture began to develop at the three sites, with or without the presence of an official (national) KZ monument. It evaluates local contributions to rites and rituals, the occasions when the KZ site was used as the stage for alternative forms of commemoration, and the practical and administrative implications of hosting a KZ monument on local territory. It closes by analysing how KZ memory was not limited to the KZ site (in former occupied Europe) and assesses other contexts in which KZ memory affected local identity and self-understanding.

Introduction

Local populations interacted and engaged with their nearby Nazi camps whether in perpetrator or occupied nations, and these interactions continued with whatever became of the camps after the war. The introduction situates the book between historiographical debates that span wartime experience and post-war national memory cultures, and discusses the conceptual relevance of bystanders as a category of analysis. It shifts the perspective of KZ history to the durable intertwinement of camp and community and argues that local engagement with sites of terror is a critical vector in KZ history and memory.

Camps after Camps

Chapter 2 examines what happened to the Nazi camps in the immediate aftermath of the war. It narrates the transition from KZ to internment camp at each location in the context of cleansing responses to Nazism and transitional justice. It demonstrates how local populations responded to the renewed camp presence and the new inmates in their midst, and outlines the extent of official municipal involvement. It addresses the earliest forms of KZ memorialization, in particular the ways and means by which local communities were involved in enacting and debating commemoration, both of their own accord and in conjunction with other actors (namely survivors and the state). It details the swift consummation of Vught’s Fusilladeplaats as an official KZ monument and highlights local fraternity with prisoners as a key aspect of early post-war KZ commemoration (in formerly occupied nations). The chapter finally examines the significance of the actual KZ sites in terms of heritage and tourism.

Conclusion

This Conclusion brings together the three cases, underlining the importance of locality and how it is has been lastingly tainted by KZ history. Across European borders, amidst diverging national war histories, different heritages of guilt and myth, and diverse paths of national remembrance each with its own timeline and combination of motivational factors, it highlights some of the common denominators in the histories of camps and their neighbouring communities. Local populations shared the physical fate of close proximity; but they also commonly espoused stories of interaction (wartime and post-war), as well as undergoing processes of realization and recognition of being intertwined KZ history, and attempting to justify and rationalize their coexistence with a KZ. The Conclusion accounts for the different nature of local involvement in KZ commemoration across the three locations, and closes with some of the broad distinctions this reveals about KZ memory more generally.

‘You Always Had One Foot in the Camp’

The first chapter introduces the case studies of Neuengamme, Natzweiler-Struthof, and Vught in their respective wartime contexts of Germany, Alsace, and the Netherlands. It traces through the ways in which the outside world remained connected to the camps in each of the three locations. It highlights how camps were accommodated in host localities via administrative and economic processes, how they offered employment and trading opportunities, how the violence that was perpetrated was visible and audible in local spaces beyond the perimeters of the camp, and how local inhabitants tried to help prisoners. The chapter discusses the different motivational forces for civilians becoming involved and highlights the importance of situational factors. It concludes by examining the (unusually collective) ‘help actions’ which were coordinated by a pro-active number of individuals at Vught on behalf of prisoners.

Material and Moral Reassessments of the KZ Past

Chapter 6 assesses the fundamental changes that occurred at the three KZ locations at a time when the Holocaust became central to European understandings of the war and Nazism. It outlines the camps’ transformations from monuments to memorial institutions (KZ- Gedenkstätten), detailing the ways in which local communities were involved or were swept up into new presentations of camp history. Beyond the politics of memory and official memorialization at the new institutions, it goes on to evaluate how local communities found their own ways of reflecting on and acknowledging the burden of the past in personal, social, and municipal ways; in particular, Neuengamme’s aloofness in matters pertaining to KZ memorialization was reversed through the activities of the local pastor. It concludes by tracing through the sites’ memorial evolution into the new millennium which has seen narrative complexity embrace the specificities of local context and embed this in international and universal narratives.

Narratives, Agents, and Issues

This chapter focuses on the processes of making official monuments at KZs Natzweiler-Struthof and Neuengamme. It details how the commune of Natzwiller was crucial to the context of memorialization and consistently problematized the French state’s designs for a national memorial to the deportation. This was in terms of heritage-protection measures, land ownership, processes of acquisition, and land value. The chapter further relates how local and regional populations remained relevant to the processes of building and funding the final monument. The chapter contrasts this with the contemporaneous waves of memorialization in the locality of Neuengamme which engaged KZ survivors and the Hamburg state government, but elicited little by way of local response.