Forced Confrontation

AUP’s George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention collaborated with Yahad-In Unum, a French organization founded to identify the sites of mass graves of Jewish victims of the Nazis, to host a guest lecture on April 18th. In front of an engaged audience of student and faculty in our Combes building, visiting History Professor Christopher Mauriello, PhD, Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Salem State University, presented his latest book: Forced Confrontation: The Politics of Dead Bodies in Germany at the End of WWII.

Mauriello began the evening by explaining the ideas behind his book and the research area of necropolitics, or “dead body politics.” He spoke about the death marches forced by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War, describing them as one of the very last acts of the Holocaust. In his own research, he focuses specifically on only one route of one of the death marches. Putting his research in the context of its contemporary impact, he said: “My research will not stop genocide, of course, but I hope that it sheds light on some of the atrocities and makes people look back and try to understand what happened.”

His most recent scholarship shines a light on the acts of US military forces shortly after they discovered the atrocities carried out by the Nazis, finding mass graves containing the bodies of Jews, slave laborers, POWs and other victims of the Nazi genocide and mass murder. The US military forces, instead of simply reburying the victims, carried out a series of “highly ritualized ‘forced confrontations’ towards German civilians featuring the actual dead bodies of the victims.” Mauriello shared stories of the German townspeople forced to witness the sites of atrocities carried out by the Nazi Party, disinter bodies and “parade these bodies through town”, before the bodies were laid to rest in a local cemetary.

“Every town’s civilians from the age of 5 to 80 was forced, at gunpoint by American soldiers, to watch the bodies be moved in open caskets through the center of town,” Mauriello said. These were not top-down Allied policy decisions, instead, they were initiated and carried out at the field command level and by ordinary US field officers and soldiers, appalled and angered by the evidence of violence and killing they discovered in small German towns in April and May 1945. “There is no record of any general in the Army ordering it. It is a practice, not a policy – but it was accepted as such by the higher-ups.”

Mauriello’s book explores in detail these hectic, horrible final weeks of World War II and places these “forced confrontations” into the emerging field of necropolitics. This study of the experience of war and forced confrontations around dead bodies compels readers to rethink the nature of the American soldier fighting in Germany in 1945 and the evolution, practice and purpose of American political and ideological conceptions of German collective guilt.

Yahad-In Unum:

Yahad-In Unum combines the Hebrew word “Yahad,” meaning “together,” with the Latin phrase “In Unum,” meaning “in one.” Founded in 2004 by internationally renowned humanitarian and activist, Father Patrick Desbois, they are a global organization raising consciousness of the sites of Jewish and Roma mass executions by Nazi killing units in Eastern Europe during World War II. This was the infamous “Holocaust by Bullets,” the prototype for the ensuing disease of modern genocide. The massacres in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the Balkans and Syria have all been modeled after the systematic tactics carried out during the “Holocaust by Bullets.” By researching and exposing the evidence of these horrific, but lesser known crimes against humanity, they bring closure to the memory of the victims. Moreover, they work to spread universal awareness of the need to recognize and denounce the ongoing epidemic of global genocide. Yahad-In Unum is the world’s only Christian organization dedicated to this solemn cause.

The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights, and Conflict Prevention:

The Center promotes innovative research, curricula, and pedagogies, in the hopes of reaching a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of genocide and mass violence. The American University of Paris is the first institution in France to house the USC Shoah Foundation’s complete Visual History Archive, which contains over 53,000 testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Shoah and the Armenian, Rwandan, and Nanjing genocides, representing 62 countries and 39 languages. The University is making this important resource available to researchers, teachers and students, in their investigation and dissemination of new insights into the origins and aftereffects of collective hatred, fundamentalist ideologies, discrimination and mass violence in historical, social and individual memory.

The Center fosters scholarly discussion with conferences, lectures and publications, on how individuals, communities and governments can respond to the challenges of extreme violence in the service of enduring peace and understanding.