Compromised Identities? Reflections on perpetration and complicity under Nazism

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Under Nazi rule, millions were involved in the machinery of persecution. In 2015, the UK's Holocaust Commission noted that, while the Holocaust could only be carried out 'with widespread complicity', there is 'a great deal of education on perpetrators' roles, but not enough on the role of society and bystanders' ('Britain's Promise to Remember', p.49). This statement reflects both the character of public education and the current state of research. Yet the category of 'bystanders' is too broad to encapsulate the ambiguities of a wide range of behaviours variously motivated by conviction and careerism, conformity and passivity, partial enthusiasm or self-distancing, as well as capitulation rooted in fear and powerlessness. This interdisciplinary project analyses how people became entangled in Nazi systems and practices, and how they responded to what later, under different circumstances, came to be seen as a 'compromised' past. Exploring perpetration and complicity in state-sponsored violence and questions of justice in its aftermath, it focuses on representations by and of people 'on the perpetrator side' from the Third Reich to the present. We explore patterns of involvement on the side of the perpetrators in a multi-facetted manner, contextualising and interpreting the 'voices' of the perpetrators and raising awareness of the complexities of representation.The project examines ways in which people who were involved in or witnesses to Nazi crimes talked about, silenced, or variously negotiated accounts of their roles, often constructing retrospective accounts of having been merely an 'innocent bystander'. It analyses how individual identities come under pressure when circumstances and value systems change, and how self-representations develop over time. It explores how public discourses - political, cultural, journalistic and judicial - address state-sponsored violence and interrogate or contribute to exculpatory strategies at a personal level. Public images often helped to demonise 'excess perpetrators' as unlike 'ordinary people', while others suggested the significance of 'just following orders'; private self-understandings and exculpatory strategies were affected by such images. We develop a concept of 'compromised identities' in relation to collective violence and its legacies. Four interrelated research strands examine the interplay between wider social, cultural and political contexts, and people's self-representations over time. The first analyses the emergence of a 'bystander society', as people accommodated themselves to changing roles under the Nazi regime. Using ego-documents (letters, diaries, memoirs) it explores behavioural shifts and social relations while people often retained an inner distance from new demands. A second strand analyses oral history interviews from the 1960s to the present to explore ways in which changing public images affected private discourses and self-representations among those who had been complicit in sustaining the system and assisting the crimes of the Third Reich. The third strand analyses the significance of postwar political and legal systems, and the character of professionals and others involved in trials, in shaping constructions of 'perpetrators'; and it explores how specific crime complexes are refracted through the media and local settings in selected cases. The fourth strand explores intriguing twists in the ways in which questions of agency, identity and morality have been engaged with in works of creative literature and films that specifically thematise issues of justice. These strands are brought together in a wider comparative context.The project will have an impact on academic debates on perpetration and complicity. It will also develop for research and educational purposes a unique collection of filmed interviews with some 250 former perpetrators and witnesses of Third Reich crimes. A website, public events and a mobile exhibition will engage wider audiences.