Indra Wussow
Black Napkins on Our Hearts: Baltic German Accomplices in the Expropriation and Murder of Jewish and Polish Citizens by the Nazi State in Litzmannstadt
2025 | Full access
This study examines the role of Baltic German settlers in Litzmannstadt as both beneficiaries and enforcers of Nazi expropriation policies, focusing on five case studies. By analyzing official files, letters, diaries, and memoirs, it reconstructs five cases’ personal trajectories within Nazi administrative and economic structures, exploring how they (un)consciously contributed to the Final Solution – a fact they later evaded acknowledging.
In an interdisciplinary approach bridging history and psychology, this research integrates micro-historical analysis to uncover silences, omissions, and selective remembering in postwar narratives. Rational Choice Theory provides insight into the settlers’ pragmatic calculations under Nazi rule, while memory studies expose strategies of self-exoneration, reframing complicity through displacement and victimhood. The findings challenge the perception of Baltic Germans as passive actors, revealing their active participation in racial expropriation and genocide, even when framed as a bureaucratic or economic necessity.
By combining historical and psychological perspectives, this study contributes to debates on collaboration, bureaucratic complicity, and the legacy of Nazi occupation. It underscores the fragility of moral boundaries under totalitarian rule and highlights the mechanisms through which individuals became complicit in state crimes. The practical implications serve as a reminder that administrative structures and ideological conditioning can facilitate atrocities – a warning that remains relevant today.
Supervisor:
Prof. Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg