Abstract
In English-speaking academia, the words “sociology” and “Holocaust” rarely appear together. When this reviewer a few years ago prepared to teach a course in the sociology of the Holocaust, he discovered that hardly any such course was taught on the North American continent. A look at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting programs yields equivalent results for the realm of scholarship: over the last decade, there were typically about two presentations that mentioned the Holocaust by name (the name Shoah was never used), with sometimes the same presenters. Searching Sociological Abstracts for the keyword “Holocaust” in the same time period replicates the picture: a small, amorphous body of literature without coherent core or thematic focus, dominated by recurring authors. Is the Holocaust irrelevant to sociology?
Not so fast. There are three main areas within Holocaust research to which sociology has made, and continues to make, contributions that deserve closer attention.
The first area is the study of organizations. Using Max Weber’s and Niklas Luhmann’s analyses of bureaucratic administrations, the German scholar Stefan Kühl published his pathbreaking study on normal organizations in 2014. In its English translation, Ordinary Organizations provides a simple observation: almost all murders of Europe’s Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were conducted by men as members of bureaucratic organizations (Kühl 2016). These organizations, tasked with carrying out the Holocaust, asked their members to commit these murders, and very few refused. Membership in these organizations, most infamously the Einsatzgruppen, was compulsory, not voluntaristic, which meant that the Nazi state could compel membership and make exit difficult or impossible. Kühl asserts that all organizations have “zones of indifference,” which pertain to an acceptable realm of tasks that members know and expect to perform as part of their contribution to achieving an organization’s goals. In organizations for which their goals include the mass killing of Europe’s Jews, members of the Ordnungspolizei, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Wehrmacht came to understand that this task could and did fall within their zone of indifference. As Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg famously showed in his forays into bureaucratic culture in the case of the German Reichsbahn, or train system, even this least-Nazified large state organization and its affiliated organizations in occupied Europe made their contributions efficiently when so charged (Browning, Hayes, and Hilberg 2020). Interestingly enough, almost as if to engage with sociologists, Hilberg decided to publish his pathbreaking essay “German Railroads/Jewish Souls” in 1976 in the journal Society, which had sociologists, rather than historians, as its core audience. Sociology, however, failed to take notice, and its opportunity to engage with Holocaust Studies was missed.
Kühl would reengage sociology with history almost four decades later. Had there been no English translation, the reception of Ordinary Organizations, his magnum opus, would have been severely limited. To motivate their members—here: as violence specialists—organizations can, as Kühl further notes, indoctrinate them to align with organizational goals, coerce them when needed (it rarely was), facilitate comradeship and collegiality internally, reward them (which included a share of the loot), and make activities within the organizations attractive. The latter include rituals of violence and dominance as bonding mechanisms. Apart from Hilberg’s Reichsbahn and Kühl’s Einsatzgruppen, a plethora of Nazi organizations remain available for sociological analysis.
A second realm for sociological contributions to Holocaust studies is, and has been, collective memory. How do nations come to terms with violence in their past? How are events, and victims, commemorated? Sociologists have studied these issues, and Ronald Berger is one of them. In an earlier book (Berger 2012), he addressed Israel, the United States, Germany, and Poland, and he presents his arguments and conclusions anew in Sociology and the Holocaust: A Discipline Grapples with History. Berger’s points are valid, but hardly novel.
In Poland, he notes, for four decades after the end of World War II, the nationalist narrative emphasizing Polish victimhood and Catholic martyrdom conflicted with the communist one focusing on antifascist resistance, leaving little room for an acknowledgement of Jewish victimhood. Post-communism, the latter received more of a voice, except that by then the number of Polish Jews had shrunk to less than 0.1 percent of the figure in 1939. The United States is aptly characterized for its “Americanization” of the Holocaust, portraying itself as a force for good in World War II: pro-Jewish (which it largely wasn’t) and opposing the major avatars of darkness (which it, arguably, mostly was).
In the case of Germany, it is unclear why Berger limits his analysis to parts of former West Germany and ends his examination around the year 2000, a quarter century ago. His reference to a (gradual?) “disappearance” of Jews from German society is contradicted by the fact that Germany has seen its fair share of recent Jewish immigrants with German ethnic roots from areas of the former Soviet Union, as well as from Israel, for both political and economic reasons. It makes Germany the country with the third-largest number of Jews in Europe, believed to be roughly matching the number of Jews in Russia.
One of collective memory’s most consequential imports concerning the Holocaust—the exhortation “never again!"—remains to be discussed, especially since its meaning has shifted for some of the four countries Berger discusses. In Germany (East and West), it came to mean never to become a military (and political) aggressor again (hence, its government’s initial decision to send military aid to Ukraine in the form of helmets). Only recently has much of the country, and even the Green Party, realized that such a policy prescription was naïve and predicated on cheap American defense. For Poland (and to some extent the people living in former East Germany; for a more comprehensive perspective, see Leggewie 2010) “never again" surely referred to the Holocaust, but not exclusively so. It also extended to the period of a second dictatorship that people behind the Iron Curtain were stuck with for decades.
For Israel, as Berger rightfully points out, the phrase’s meaning remains that the nation can never allow itself to be politically and militarily weak. In a different sense, this is also true for the United States: “never again" has meant that it would not be willing to relinquish its political and military leadership and influence over global affairs (until recently, that is). Berger’s views are presented in just one of the eight chapters of the book. Sociologists continue to make important contributions to this field, often in the form of country-wide or even comparative analyses.
Such historical comparative analyses centering on the Holocaust beyond collective memory are the third area in which sociology remains relevant. Rachel Einwohner’s Hope and Honor: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust makes a significant contribution to it. It proceeds in the footsteps of political scientist Evgeny Finkel’s award-winning book Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust, which asked the question: what explains Jewish survival in the Holocaust? Rejecting simplistic notions of a Jewish “passivity,” he shows that in the major urban ghettos of Białystok, Kraków, and Minsk, rapidness of response to danger, prior familiarity with political repression, degree of integration into non-Jewish society, and the composition of Jewish groups as well as the reach of German power predicted the choices victims had or made, ranging from cooperation to resistance. The latter he defines specifically as participation in organized activities intended to harm the perpetrators physically or materially.
Einwohner builds on these insights by exploring social determinants of resistance. Almost hidden away in her book is her definition of the term as “collective, organized efforts at resistance, in the form of sustained armed uprisings” (p. 8), which is more limited than Finkel’s. The ghettos under consideration are Warsaw, where sustained armed resistance existed; Vilna, which did not see a large-scale armed resistance even though plans for it existed, and Łódź, with no armed resistance. Between the three ghettos; far more than half a million Jews at peak were crammed in, which made them much larger in total than the ones Finkel considered. The Łódź ghetto housed also about 5,000 Austrian Roma, which were soon to be included in the first major gassing actions that commenced in late 1941 in the nearby extermination center, Chełmno. Still, the number of ghettos included in Finkel’s and Einwohner’s studies, as Einwohner herself notes in reference to information provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, leaves out at least 1,137 other ghettos during the war. Of those, for only about 30 is there a record of armed uprisings.
Einwohner’s range of primary sources is impressive, even though the list of the secondary sources she uses is devoid of German scholarship. She produces an explanation of variation in armed resistance that is both simple and elegant: a combination of what she calls “critical conclusions” in terms of Jewish assessment of opportunities and threats the ghettos faced and “resonant responses” to such opportunities and threats that seem appropriate and feasible. An outcome of the two was the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was staged after it had become clear that death was inevitable and imminent, as the first trains to Treblinka—the logistics of which were studied by Hilberg—were leaving. The feasible choice of action that remained was to die with honor and dignity.
In Vilna, where deaths appeared to be somewhat less certain, the Jewish resonant response was fractured and vacillated between armed resistance and the hope of surviving through accommodation to the Nazis. Ultimately, armed resistance did not occur, and a small number of resistance fighters were able to join partisans in the surrounding forests. In the Łódź ghetto, geographic isolation from surrounding communities and other ghettos contributed to a lack of knowledge about the Nazi murders in the death camps, and fighting hunger superseded fighting Germans as the means to survival. Smuggling arms into the ghettos proved very difficult. Ultimately, of the over 200,000 Jews that passed through the Łódź ghetto, only 10,000 were still alive at the end of World War II. In 1939, the city’s Jewish population was around 230,000. It is estimated to be in the few hundreds today.
Einwohner’s book is a fine contribution of historical comparative sociology to Holocaust Studies. The same can be said for the sections of Berger’s book not reviewed here. Berger’s book is much wider in scope than Einwohner’s—in fact, no other book written by a sociologist about the Holocaust comes close to Berger’s breadth. Since the book’s other main chapters have been aptly included in Robert Braun’s recent review in this journal (Braun 2025), a few remarks shall suffice.
Berger confirms the paucity of sociologists’ contributions to the study of the Holocaust, but he manages to outline the few that were conducted or published during or after the Nazi period. After exploring how Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxist approaches can inform theoretically what is studied about the Holocaust and how such study can be undertaken, he proposes his own theoretical approach. It consists of the consideration of leadership, ideological, and organizational resources that could be mobilized against structural constraints, that is, the degree of Nazi control. It is not clear in the following how much Berger actually applies this approach to the subject matter under study. His chapter on the class composition and economics of Nazism is perhaps the most novel and compelling. Other chapters employ a mostly historically driven narrative.
Some minor corrections: Action T4 (or, better, the T4 program, where T4 stands for Tiergarten Strasse No. 4 in Berlin, where most of the bureaucracy of the program was centralized) has come to be understood as not the wider “euthanasia” killings, but the gas murder program of 1940 and 1941 in six killings centers specifically. There is no need to use a subscript number in this term. Berger does not mention that the first large-scale killing specifically for Jews occurred in the so-called “special action” (Sonderaktion) that targeted Jews in psychiatric care facilities. In it, groups of about 2,500 exclusively Jewish men, women, and children were sent to some of the T4 gassing centers. By the time the T4 gassing program was abruptly stopped in August 1941, few Jews in German psychiatric facilities were still alive.
Einsatzgruppen is the proper spelling for the mobile killing units, and Lehmann the name of the German publishing house that published books in support of Nazi ideology. Scholarship in the German language is notably absent in the otherwise large array of secondary studies consulted in Berger’s book. These quibbles should not distract from the important analyses provided in it.