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Even the most recent German scholarship can find itself snarled in the legacy of Nazi propaganda related to the infliction of the Holocaust upon the Jews of Eastern Europe.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944 (2007) — Angrick and Klein's work exhibits the dichotomy endemic to current German scholarship on the Holocaust in Latvia, fact based on the one part, but demonstrably eschewing facts for propaganda where the possibility and myth of the Germanless—spontaneous, without Nazi involvement or organization—Holocaust remains.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution in Riga”: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944 (2009) — A brief review of Angrick and Klein's work translated from the German, highlighting a reliance on Nazi German accounts at face value where the Holocaust in Latvia is concerned—over a thousand footnotes does not mean a work cannnot still be lacking in certain aspects.
- Anita Kugler, Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier (2004) — Eleke Scherwitz, a Jew, was one of the first indigenous Germans to be tried and convicted for war crimes. Kugler's book attempts to extract the truth about Scherwitz’s life from the incredibly tangled, contradictory record, and ultimately seeks to rehabilitate him.
- A Letter to German Journalists: Between Judgment and Complexity — Ezergailis identifies the “six formidable renderings of the truth of the Holocaust,” Hitler's among them, none the same—a web of complexity which needs to be unraveled to fully understand the Holocaust.
- Katrin Reichelt, Lettland unter deutscher Besatzung 1941–1944: Der lettische Anteil am Holocaust (2011) — Reichelt's Elephants: In Reichelt's world, collaboration becomes self-occupation, as if rape connotes willful participation. Polarities are reversed, the object becomes the subject, the hunted becomes the hunter. The brutalities of the Nazis become those of the Latvians; the occupier becomes the occupied—prompting a deeper look at representation of the Holocaust.
Following are book reviews of a number of significant works.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Die “Endlösung” in Riga: Ausbeutung und Vernichtung 1941-1944 (2007) — Angrick and Klein's work exhibits the dichotomy endemic to current German scholarship on the Holocaust in Latvia, fact based on the one part, but demonstrably eschewing facts for propaganda where the possibility and myth of the Germanless—spontaneous, without Nazi involvement or organization—Holocaust remains.
- Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The “Final Solution in Riga”: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944 (2009) — A brief review of Angrick and Klein's work translated from the German, highlighting a reliance on Nazi German accounts at face value where the Holocaust in Latvia is concerned—over a thousand footnotes does not mean a work cannnot still be lacking in certain aspects.
- Anita Kugler, Scherwitz: Der jüdische SS-Offizier (2004) — Eleke Scherwitz, a Jew, was one of the first indigenous Germans to be tried and convicted for war crimes. Kugler's book attempts to extract the truth about Scherwitz’s life from the incredibly tangled, contradictory record, and ultimately seeks to rehabilitate him.
- Katrin Reichelt, Lettland unter deutscher Besatzung 1941–1944: Der lettische Anteil am Holocaust (2011) — Reichelt's Elephants: In Reichelt's world, collaboration becomes self-occupation, as if rape connotes willful participation. Polarities are reversed, the object becomes the subject, the hunted becomes the hunter. The brutalities of the Nazis become those of the Latvians; the occupier becomes the occupied—prompting a deeper look at representation of the Holocaust.
Following, more on German scholarship and versions of the Holocaust in Latvia.
- A Letter to German Journalists: Between Judgment and Complexity — Ezergailis identifies the “six formidable renderings of the truth of the Holocaust,” Hitler's among them, none the same—a web of complexity which needs to be unraveled to fully understand the Holocaust.