The State of the Field: Four Transformative Shifts

Holocaust historiography today rests atop an archive so vast, multilingual and globally dispersed that its mastery lies beyond the reach of any single scholar. The Cambridge History of the Holocaust arrives as not merely a scholarly milestone but also a synthesis necessitated by the field’s explosive expansion since the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet bloc opened a floodgate of archival material – from long-sealed German records to Soviet commission reports, local police files and post-war investigations – decisively shifting the field’s centre of gravity eastward. This geopolitical transformation converged with political and institutional forces to make Holocaust research a European imperative. EU expansion and digitisation projects like the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) began retrieving scattered records and provincial collections, placing small-town municipal ledgers, registers and testimonies at historians’ fingertips. Simultaneously, national commissions investigating economic spoliation and state violence – probing Swiss bank secrecy, Catholic silences and French police-led roundups – generated vast new corpora of evidence, entangling historical research with legal redress and memory politics. In the West, the 1990s also heralded what Annette Wieviorka dubbed the ‘era of the witness’: Schindler’s List permeated popular consciousness, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened its doors in 1993 and the Shoah Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation) began building what would become the world’s largest video testimony archive a year later. Wieviorka’s prescient diagnosis of a cultural shift towards the individualisation of experience and the psychologisation of memory has been fully borne out – a shift that continues to fundamentally shape historiography today.Footnote ¹¹

In the wake of these shifts, a new generation of scholars emerged, fluent in Eastern European languages and armed with unprecedented archival access. The result has been an extraordinary, polyglot acceleration of knowledge production, visible in initiatives like Father Patrick Desbois’s work on the ‘Holocaust by bullets’ and the Warsaw-based research group around Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski; in the rapid digitisation of local archives; and in the rise of specialised journals and collaborative networks that solidified Holocaust research as a European, then global, enterprise.Footnote ¹² The CHH registers this transformation in both scope and citations, with the vast majority of works post-dating 1990. Earlier studies on German policy and the architecture of annihilation remain vital, but they now constitute one stratum within a sprawling, interdisciplinary landscape. Holocaust studies has matured from a subfield into a global research ecosystem – methodologically ambitious and inevitably morally charged, even if its centres of gravity remain uneven and shaped by linguistic, institutional and regional disparities.

The CHH volumes, reflecting and distilling these developments, lay bare four central tendencies that now define the field. The most profound historiographical shift since the 1990s has been the dethroning of German exceptionalism (Sonderweg) as the sole axis of Holocaust analysis. What was once framed as a top-down, ideologically coherent project emanating from Berlin is now understood as a European catastrophe, shaped by not only Nazi ambition but also local complicities and grassroots dynamics that varied dramatically across the continent. The old debates between intentionalism and functionalism have given way to granular analyses of scarcity, coercion and choice. Nazi occupation now appears less as a monolithic imposition and more as a structuring force – a generator of fear, trust and logistical improvisation that reconfigured the local fabric. A wave of micro-studies – town by town, ghetto by ghetto – has revealed the intimate worlds of murder, betrayal and fleeting solidarity. Eastern Europe, long obscured by a tangle of Cold War politics, restricted archival access and nationalist memory frameworks, has emerged as the epicentre of ‘communal genocide’: open-air killings enacted with the knowledge, participation or at least the acquiescence of non-Jewish neighbours. Omer Bartov’s 2018 study of Buczacz exemplifies the field’s embrace of this granular perspective, showing how genocide was lived, observed and enabled at the local level.Footnote ¹³ As the CHH demonstrates, the field’s centre of gravity has shifted decisively from the once-iconic Auschwitz to the forests, towns and ghettos where mass murder unfolded in plain view. We now possess an increasingly precise map of the negotiations between Nazi directives and the behaviours, hesitations and incentives of local societies.Footnote ¹⁴

This empirical and methodological turn has also dismantled the field’s rigid binaries: between centre and periphery, and between German and non-German agency. Raul Hilberg’s classic triad – perpetrator, victim, bystander – is now seen as wholly inadequate.Footnote ¹⁵ The category of ‘bystander’, in particular, has become a blunt instrument, incapable of capturing the behavioural ambivalence and local tensions that defined the lives of mayors, clerks, farmers and schoolteachers who constantly moved between roles – as perpetrator, enabler or strategic silencer.Footnote ¹⁶ Collaboration is no longer understood as a fixed political activity but as a fluid repertoire of behaviours, driven as much by opportunism, fear or self-preservation as by ideological conviction. Antisemitism, too, has been provincialised – recognised as one potent factor among many in a shifting matrix of state ideology, community bonds and wartime pressures.Footnote ¹⁷ As a result, the Holocaust is now understood as a European process enacted across a constellation of diverse lifeworlds. In this view, Europe appears as not merely the setting for genocide but also the very set of relations that rendered mass violence both possible and disturbingly ordinary.

The second, and perhaps most visible, historiographical shift is the re-centring of victim worlds – a transformation so significant it now commands an entire volume of the CHH.Footnote ¹⁸ In the earliest decades, Jewish experiences were often marginalised, summoned mainly to illustrate Nazi policy or corroborate legal proceedings. While early Israeli and Jewish scholarship certainly foregrounded armed resistance, Jewish councils and rescue narratives, these efforts were shaped as much by post-war state-building and moral urgency as by analytical priorities. As David Engel argued in 2009, the field as a whole long remained detached from Jewish history, treating the Holocaust as an isolated cataclysm rather than a process embedded in the political, social and cultural life of European Jewry.Footnote ¹⁹ Only in the 2000s did this separation begin to dissolve. Since then, Jewish society, institutions and cultural frameworks have been recognised as active historical agents. Testimony is now treated as its own way of knowing perception, decision-making and daily life under duress. This encompasses not only the high-stakes deliberations of Jewish councils but also individual strategies, gendered endurance and the cultural tenacity of families and communities. Lawrence L. Langer’s concept of ‘choiceless choices’ remains vital for capturing impossible decisions in the death camps, but the CHH demonstrates how diaries, communal rituals and even silence are now read as forms of agency and sites of meaning.Footnote ²⁰ Understanding why and how people assessed their options, however constrained, has moved from the margins to the epistemological core of the field. This commitment will endure beyond the era of living witnesses, even if for many, it comes too late to recover their voices first-hand.

This centring of Jewish experience forms part of a broader bottom-up turn in Holocaust historiography, a movement away from a field once dominated by perpetrators, policies and state structures towards one grounded in lived experience. Volume III of the CHH, in particular, embodies this shift by redefining Holocaust history from below – as a European catastrophe that encompassed millions of non-Jewish victims: Roma, Soviet POWs, queer people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled and others targeted by racialised and medicalised policies.Footnote ²¹ Their acts of documenting hunger, persecution, exclusion and silence under duress are now integral to the history of victimhood. This is simultaneously a history of wartime experience and post-war memory, encompassing the politics of the archive and the long afterlife of testimonial erasure. What began in the early 2000s as a tentative restoration of voice has matured into a field-wide commitment to recognising victims as historical agents in their own right. In this sense, Holocaust historiography has not merely added victims to its canvas – it has redrawn the canvas altogether.

The third major shift has been temporal: the collapse of containment. An event once bounded by 1933 and 1945 – or even more narrowly between June 1941 and the liberation of Auschwitz – is now embedded in the longue durée of European history. Across the CHH, the Holocaust is framed by the aftershocks of the First World War, the disintegration of multiethnic empires, inter-war fascism, post-1918 pogroms and revolutionary violence and the transnational spread of eugenics and colonial fantasies. Economic crises, paramilitarism and the politics of antisemitism in the 1920s and 1930s created a crucible for both Nazi violence and local variations of persecution.Footnote ²² Renewed attention to the exclusions of the racial community (Volksgemeinschaft), interethnic tensions in Eastern Europe and the cultural logics that normalised humiliation has revealed how genocide was socially prepared long before it was physically enacted. Complementing this, a biographical turn – from Christopher R. Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) onward – has traced the lives of regional functionaries, local leaders and grassroots killers from their pre-war socialisation through wartime actions to their post-war trajectories.Footnote ²³ The Holocaust has thus emerged as a cumulative process of radicalisation that linked bureaucratic exclusion and street-level violence across an interconnected Europe.

If the pre-war period provided the scaffolding, the post-war years have become a consequential afterlife in their own right. Volume IV treats this period as a distinct subfield – a terrain where displacement, testimony and political ambition collided. Trials, reparations and repatriation unfolded across Cold War landscapes, entangled with nation-building, ideological realignments and legal improvisation. Memory itself became a fiercely contested arena where survivor testimony, state legitimacy and global commemorations competed to define what the past meant and to whom it belonged. Displaced persons’ camps now appear not as mere waystations but as vibrant hubs of political organising and cultural production, generating new forms of victim agency. Recent research reveals how profoundly the Holocaust’s legal and memorial legacies shaped European and global norms of justice, even as these processes often marginalised the very people they claimed to honour. The continuities are striking: wartime hierarchies bled into restitution bureaucracies; survivor suffering met with administrative indifference; and the politics of recognition became another arena of exclusion. In sum, the Holocaust has become both a global moral lodestar and a tool of political instrumentalisation – a duality sharpened after 1991 by post-Soviet memory wars and the ongoing, fraught debates sparked by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. To study the Holocaust today, then, is to trace not only how genocide unfolded but also how Europe – violently and unevenly – stitched itself together from its own ruins.Footnote ²⁴

The fourth shift occurred in methodology itself, with an explosion of topics and, no less critically, a proliferation of analytical tools. The cultural turn has placed everyday life, rumour and perception at the centre of analysis, while gender studies has moved subjects like same-sex sexuality, transactional intimacy and sexual violence from the margins to the forefront. Breaking long-standing taboos has yielded critical insights into coercion, visibility and the social meanings of sex work, both during the war and in its archival representation. In striving for non-redemptive, non-normative histories, such scholarship represents an ongoing reckoning with inclusion and the historian’s responsibility to listen across silence.Footnote ²⁵ Alongside this thematic expansion has come a new methodological toolkit, drawing on forensic archaeology, visual studies, material culture, digital humanities and GIS modelling. These technologies map unmarked graves, reconstruct killing sites and trace deportation routes down to the bend of a road.Footnote ²⁶ Comparative genocide studies, especially in dialogue with histories of colonial violence, have deepened understandings of Nazi rule, even as scholars caution against flattening critical differences.Footnote ²⁷ Social-scientific approaches – from psychology and sociology to comparative politics – have also entered the field with growing confidence, offering meso-level analyses that bridge grand narrative and micro-history.Footnote ²⁸ To study the Holocaust in 2025, therefore, means working within a field as analytically innovative as it is ethically self-aware – a field contending with archival asymmetry, nationalist backlash, global memory wars and the challenges of generative AI.

The Exhaustion of Existing Frameworks

The CHH offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of what Holocaust historiography has achieved over the past three decades – archival abundance, thematic diversity and methodological innovation. Yet it also crystallises the field’s central tension: deep fragmentation. While the CHH gestures towards European histories of the Holocaust, it stops short of furnishing a shared language to connect its constituent parts. By moving decisively beyond older approaches – Berlin-centrism, occupation chronology, the nation-state, micro-history and the model of ‘integrated history’ – it makes visible the need for a new connective method.

First and foremost, the CHH abandons the Berlin-centric model, which long anchored Holocaust historiography in a vertical flow of power. In this view, Nazi ideologues and bureaucrats determined the rhythm and reach of genocide, a vision given its most enduring articulation in Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).Footnote ²⁹ Here, history moved vertically, from Nazi orders to local implementation, from ideology to atrocity and from policy to mass death.Footnote ³⁰ Closely tied to this framing was what one could call the ‘march-of-occupation’ narrative, in which Nazi annihilation unfolded in lockstep with territorial expansion – into Poland, then Western Europe, then the Soviet Union. The rightly celebrated works of Richard J. Evans and the late David Cesarani structured their narratives around central decision points in Nazi planning. Global in ambition, these rich accounts nonetheless cast local contexts as stages for a tragedy scripted in Berlin.Footnote ³¹

In the CHH, these two models no longer hold sway. Volume II, in particular, recasts decision-making as one node within a far larger network of contingency. Orders from Berlin mattered profoundly, but they travelled through a fog of paperwork and the friction of local realities: logistical bottlenecks, institutional rivalries and pre-war legacies – so that implementation unfolded in parallel and often contradictory ways.Footnote ³² Violence against Jewish and non-Jewish populations was woven into the occupation’s very fabric. To follow only the top-down march of conquest is to miss the volatile churn of society underneath. The CHH historicises the limits of these older models, refusing to let the chronology of conquest alone dictate causality. It demonstrates conclusively just how much Holocaust history has become a study of local agency and reactivity.

From this perspective, the CHH does not stand apart from earlier debates but invites us to revisit them – especially the major attempts to reconcile vertical structures with local experience. The most ambitious and elegant attempt to bridge the vertical and the local came with Saul Friedländer’s ‘integrated history’.Footnote ³³ In two landmark volumes (1997 and 2007), he braided the machinery of genocide with testimonies of Jewish victims. Personal accounts were no longer anecdotal but epistemological, puncturing the chronology from within and embedding disorientation and terror into the narrative of Nazi decision-making. Yet, when measured against the CHH, we see that this model remains fundamentally vertical. Its coherence relies on juxtaposing policy with perception, and the victim voices most seamlessly integrated are those of German Jews and culturally prominent survivors. Volume III’s sprawling focus on victim worlds largely supersedes this frame, treating testimony as both narrative and analysis across a constellation of distinct but connected settings. Monumental at the time, Friedländer’s methodological refusal to let the architecture of atrocity eclipse human anguish remains indispensable today.Footnote ³⁴ Yet his model presumes that a final integration is possible. The sheer productivity of the field – the local studies, the various turns, comparative genocide – has revealed incoherence as not only a wartime reality but also a fundamental condition of research today.

If the vertical and chronological models have largely been set aside, the nation-state container continues to exert a quiet but powerful gravity across the four volumes – a gravity that not only obscures transnational phenomena but also inadvertently sustains the very nationalist memory politics we now confront. Inherited from Cold War geography and methodological nationalism, Holocaust history remains largely organised along national and linguistic lines.Footnote ³⁵ Case studies within nations have proliferated, each with its own distinct debates, reckonings and chronologies of persecution, resistance and survival. Landmark works such as Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews (1981 and 2019) demonstrated how much antisemitic policies were also homegrown.Footnote ³⁶ In Eastern Europe, books like Yitzhak Arad’s The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (2009) offered an equally exhaustive but spatially fixed account.Footnote ³⁷ Within these national frames, micro-historical approaches have flourished, replacing top-down scripts with granular analyses of neighbour-on-neighbour violence.Footnote ³⁸ Bookended by Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors (2001) and Michael David-Fox’s study of Smolensk (2025), this scholarship has moved the field towards the granular study of social interactions.Footnote ³⁹ Yet for all their brilliance and narrative power, these studies remain bounded by national, if not regional, borders. The CHH reflects this persistence: its thematic chapters are rich in case studies that rarely cross linguistic divides. The same is true for widely cited edited volumes that present a patchwork of national or regional studies.Footnote ⁴⁰ To be sure, the nation-state offers a solution for managing a multiplicity of languages and archives. But this very pragmatism obscures dynamics that are as readily found in Norway as in Estonia or Greece.Footnote ⁴¹ If the nation-state offers too much of a container, then micro-history, for all its virtues, provides too little structure. The pieces accumulate, but the overarching pattern threatens to vanish in the detail.

A final group of works – what might be called hybrids – have edged towards a new approach without fully committing to the leap. In different ways, they signal the exhaustion of nation-bound frames, the rigidity of vertical syntheses and the insufficiency of explanatory closure that the CHH so clearly exposes. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (2010) offered one of the most visible attempts to break the national silo, framing a swath of Eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics – as a zone of convergent Nazi and Soviet violence. Snyder’s ambition was remarkable: he placed Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian suffering within a single analytical field, demonstrating how successive waves of occupation, starvation, deportation and mass murder cannot be understood in isolation. Yet the book’s vast geographical sweep risked essentialising the region itself. In his framing, Poland appears as a martyred middle ground between two empires, its internal social actors muted, with death serving as the primary unifying narrative. Bloodlands powerfully pointed to the necessity of entanglement but stopped short of tackling the social and emotional contexts that produced and sustained violence. It remains an evocative geography in search of a method.Footnote ⁴²

In a different register, Christian Gerlach’s The Extermination of the European Jews (2016) rejected both Berlin-centrism and national silos, analysing the Holocaust through overlapping economic, military and administrative systems. Proceeding thematically, he dissected cumulative radicalisation as a Europe-wide process driven by local actors. His narrative brilliantly mapped the macro-level flows of people, resources and decisions, but offered little of the relational texture, emotional life and testimony-driven scaffolding that defines the CHH’s approach to victim worlds.Footnote ⁴³ Where Gerlach worked through continental structures, others turned to the fine grain of communal life. In Intimate Violence (2018), political scientists Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg employed comparative methods to understand why pogroms erupted in some Polish towns and not others. For them, violence was profoundly contingent and local, shaped less by abstract ideology than by ethnic defection, local nation-building and expectations of impunity. Their study advanced an entangled micro-history waiting to be applied across contexts.Footnote ⁴⁴ Finally, Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023) dissolved any aspiration to national models or seamless integration. His narrative was intentionally fractured and dispersed – a constellation of ideological excess, settler colonialism and social implosion. To impose narrative coherence, Stone rightly argued, is to level what was, in reality, a continental and asynchronous disintegration.Footnote ⁴⁵ Stone, an editor of the CHH’s first volume, issues a direct challenge with his methodology: to hold fragments and ambiguities together while resisting the impulse towards closure.

Holocaust historiography now stands at a critical threshold. The CHH and recent landmark works reveal a shared orientation that resists grand narrative arcs and national containers, foregrounds local contingency and treats Europe as a fragmented landscape. Their cumulative insight is unequivocal: the Holocaust cannot be understood through vertical scale alone. The most compelling new scholarship searches for social processes by shifting scale laterally – sliding across regions to trace how genocide unfolded through local communities. The result is a dazzling mosaic, evidence of a field at the height of its maturity – but one that risks total disintegration.Footnote ⁴⁶ Without a framework to reconnect proliferating micro-histories and disciplinary silos to the Europe-wide programme of Nazi genocide, the field’s explanatory power will erode. We have successfully moved beyond the old scaffolds but have not yet managed to hold these pluralities together. The CHH gives us the pieces, the comparisons and the friction – but not yet a connective method.

Relational Europeanism as a Connective Method

This is where relational Europeanism begins – as a comparative and situational method. It is less a repudiation of earlier models than a response to their empirical exhaustion. The nation-state, the vertical axis and the quest for seamless integration obscure the radical fragmentation of experience, the profound unevenness of persecution and the impossibility of a single narrative stretching from Bayonne to Moscow. Rather than fixing on one point along the scale – a village, a ghetto, a nation – relational Europeanism seeks to combine and compare scales without collapsing their differences. It captures the shift towards a horizontal, connective and multi-scalar approach: zooming in on local contexts and tracing how pre-war prejudice, wartime contingency and post-war silence echo one another across borders. It is, fundamentally, the deliberate choice to write chapters, design research projects and create databases that force connections – in and around not only Berlin but also the neighbourhoods, markets and margins across Nazi-occupied territory where people bartered, feared, hid or denounced. It asks not only what people knew but also how, when and from whom they came to know it; what pressures and obligations shaped their actions; and why similar dynamics yielded starkly different outcomes across space.Footnote ⁴⁷ If Friedländer composed the Holocaust as an integrated event aspiring to polyphony, relational Europeanism orchestrates entanglement from the bottom up. Europe, in this frame, is not a backdrop – it is the very weave.

To be clear, this is not a call to abandon national historiographies or micro-studies, but to embed them within collaborative, comparative and transnational frameworks. The linguistic and archival barriers that once fortified methodological nationalism are rapidly eroding. AI-assisted tools – handwriting recognition, machine translation, spatial mapping and semantic analysis – together with large-scale digitisation projects such as the Arolsen archives and international research consortia now make transregional work imperative.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet these gains sit alongside shrinking language infrastructures, compressed PhD programmes and the austerity that hollow out the very capacities – time, languages, archives – on which transregional scholarship depends. It is precisely these tensions that make a connective method like relational Europeanism necessary. The approach grows from a foundation of national expertise that now requires wider contextualisation, and from micro-history that requires assembly rather than mere juxtaposition. Older models treated national borders as analytical containers; here, they are understood as one consequential layer among many. The nation remains essential as a site of legal regimes, bureaucratic structures and cultural imaginaries – but it no longer defines the explanation. The CHH already points in this direction: it avoids typological comparisons (‘France vs. Poland’) and reveals relational differences instead – illustrating how pre-war encounters, hiding, deportation or forced labour unfolded in locally specific ways while still forming part of a pan-European logic.Footnote ⁴⁹

Many fields of modern European history – migration, state formation, imperial afterlives, wartime societies – grapple with the same fragmentation, uneven scales of analysis and difficulty in connecting local experience to Europe-wide structures.Footnote ⁵⁰ Arguably, Holocaust studies has carried these tensions farther than most because its sources have always been continental. What follows are thus three principles for a connective method: to prioritise interaction over a static focus on location; to analyse proximity over a rigid category; and to practice entanglement. Drawn from examples in the CHH, recent works and my own interests, they are offered as practical tools for integrating and navigating a vast and brilliant, yet fragmented, historiography.

Interaction

Relational Europeanism shifts the analytical emphasis from where something happened to how and why it unfolded – a focus encapsulated by my first principle: interaction. As the CHH amply demonstrates, Nazi rule was mediated through a constant flux of barter, suspicion and improvisation. Local decisions – by all actors – were never purely local: they were shaped by pressures that cut across borders, from the demands of occupation personnel to grain shortages and simmering grievances. Persecution, in this view, becomes a process of interactions moving through overlapping communities and institutions.Footnote ⁵¹ The Holocaust can only gain its continental coherence when we trace the everyday social worlds in which violence became ordinary, both over time and across space.

First and foremost, this requires bringing the pre-war period into sharper focus as a web of everyday encounters. In recent decades, starting points have shifted towards 1941, reflecting a field preoccupied with the escalation of genocide rather than the rise of Nazism and the less-studied dynamics beyond Germany – polarisation, exclusion and everyday brutalisation. If the Holocaust was conditioned by the breakdown of social ties, then we must study the worlds that long predated the arrival of Nazi troops. The CHH makes clear how little we still know about this comparative social topography. Testimonies evoke these shifts with emotional precision – a shopkeeper’s glance curdling into silence and familiar greetings withering away.Footnote ⁵² What remains largely to be written is a fine-grained history of the erosion of that social fabric: the polarisation fuelled by anti-Jewish campaigns across Europe, the seductive appeal of new power and the reactivation of old resentments under new constraints, including Soviet rule between 1939 and 1941.Footnote ⁵³ Recent work on wartime Poland demonstrates the crucial importance of pre-war factors – migration, discrimination, disillusionment and state-sponsored exclusion in the 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similar granular analysis is urgently needed across the Balkans, the Baltics, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Inter-war life should no longer be framed in binary terms of continuity or rupture, cast as either a reservoir of latent antisemitism or a coexistence shattered by Nazi violence – a framing that would inadvertently revive the old march-of-occupation narrative. Scholars such as Evgeny Finkel and Jeffrey Koerber have instead shown how much pre-war regimes shaped Jewish embeddedness and survival strategies, but their explanations remain anchored in regime types and social structures before 1939.Footnote ⁵⁵ The next step, powered by tens of thousands of video testimonies, is a comparative mapping of how interactions frayed unevenly, and at times reversibly, under the pressures of scarcity, propaganda and uncertainty across inter-war Europe.

Consequently, the war did not erupt onto a blank social field, as earlier narratives often implied; it contracted, intensified and distorted pre-existing routines. We must therefore look beyond the archetypes of betrayal and rescue to two crucially neglected dynamics: economic exchanges and the social meaning of inaction. Across all four CHH volumes, the centrality of economic factors and social class is palpable, yet the field still lacks a sustained analysis of these grassroots economies.Footnote ⁵⁶ Cold War priorities, public memory taboos, disciplinary silos and the long dominance of ideological explanations have all contributed to this gap. And yet, recent work – on small-town dispossession, barter systems and black markets – reveals neighbours as auctioneers, ration-card traders or officials signing away Jewish homes.Footnote ⁵⁷ We will need both large-scale and micro-level studies of environments where coercion, calculation and incentive collided.Footnote ⁵⁸ Crucially, bribes, looting, extortion and informal economies reshuffled class and economic ties not only between Jews and non-Jews but also, and perhaps more strikingly, within non-Jewish populations themselves. This involved the pauperisation of many and the enrichment of a few at kitchen tables, market stalls and municipal offices. In the General Government alone, 112,000 shops and 115,000 workshops were ‘Aryanised’ between 1939 and 1942 – a scale of transfer that demands systematic comparative research across Europe.Footnote ⁵⁹ Alongside these economic exchanges, inaction, too, mattered. The silence of a neighbour or the withholding of help were proper choices that must be probed and compared across specific localities. Mass digitisation of archives, searchable testimony databases and mapping projects now provide the tools to trace these patterns.Footnote ⁶⁰ Economic exchange, strategic silence and deliberate inaction form an intricate web of wartime interaction that relational Europeanism is poised to map.

These interactions did not cease with a gunshot or an official liberation; they extended into the post-war world, embedded in testimony, restitution claims and legal reckonings. Reparations processes became new scenes of negotiation – between survivors and clerks, between personal loss and bureaucratic categories of eligibility. Who was believed, who was included and who could narrate their suffering within officially sanctioned frameworks – all this reflected continuities with wartime relationships and pre-war hierarchies, resurfacing in DP camps, courtrooms, reparation boards and commemorative debates. The emotional debris of the Holocaust – mistrust, gratitude, competition, vengeance, shame – demands more serious consideration, whether in the context of Tehran, Shanghai or Paris. In its most elemental sense, interaction is the medium through which this past remains present: in acts of recognition, rejection and the fragile, ongoing work of repair. This extends beyond traditional studies of denazification, which focus largely on legal and administrative procedures, by foregrounding the everyday encounters and uneven social reckonings through which communities negotiated the aftermath of violence. Relational Europeanism can thus extend beyond the wartime moment to trace these afterlives, recognising that the ‘post-war’ was itself a profoundly uneven condition.Footnote ⁶¹

In summary, what is now needed is a European cartography stretching from the inter-war years to the war’s afterlife – one that charts how such encounters were brokered through whispered exchanges, material channels and the choreography of shared space. Thinking relationally and temporally will allow us to trace interactions as continuous, evolving and recursive, rather than fixed to a single wartime moment, behaviour and national frame. Relational Europeanism links pre-war social economies to post-war mnemonic structures, revealing shrinking social worlds in which formal nationhood often mattered less than the door left ajar, the bribe quietly arranged or the silence offered at a critical moment. Mapping these trajectories across borders and archives will give the field what it now lacks: a connective framework for understanding how Europe’s social fabric was stretched, torn and, in rare instances, rewoven. To achieve this, however, requires a deeper understanding of the specific proximities – social, spatial, economic – that made these interactions possible.

Proximity

The Holocaust was not only a history of what people did, but of whom they did it near and under what conditions of nearness. With the dismantling of rigid binaries, future studies can begin where any typology ends: with the neighbour in Marseille who denounced a family, the employer in Minsk who kept a strategic silence and the clerk in Zagreb who processed papers once, then again, then daily as extraordinary acts slowly hardened into routine. As the CHH makes clear, from French villages to Bulgarian forests, social roles under Nazi rule were fluid, reactive and often contradictory. What mattered was less a fixed identity than a reversible position shaped by time and space. As a second lens, proximity grasps Nazi rule as a process unfolding simultaneously at local, regional and continental scales. The anthropologist Jean-Philippe Belleau recently warned that common terms like ‘neighbour’ and ‘intimacy’ are often overused in our studies – evoking moral shock without clarifying the specific nature of these relationships. Vicinity, he reminds us, does not guarantee sociality.Footnote ⁶² The task ahead, then, is to restore concrete, empirical meaning to these relationships from the pre-war period to the post-war, across villages, towns and regions. Pre-war voting patterns, economic interdependence, religious confession and ethnic demographics – all defined what proximity meant in practice. Across Europe, social class and power also distorted these proximities before, during and after the war.

The challenge is to map the shifting contexts in which proximity became the raw material for wartime behaviours. Two lines of inquiry can help meet this challenge: visibility and performance. Both emerge from recent work on Poland. Tomasz Frydel’s studies of the Dębica region invite us to rethink the ‘neighbour’ as a functionary operating within what he calls a ‘village security system’ built on rumour, suspicion, fear and collective liability.Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, Elżbieta Janicka’s concept of ‘participant-observers’ (obserwatorzy uczestniczący) captures individuals caught between silence, complicity and retaliation – a proximity to not only victims but also the gaze and actions of one another.Footnote ⁶⁴ Too often, the historiography of occupied Poland still treats proximity as a dyad – Jews and non-Jews – while the occupier recedes from view. Yet spatial and hierarchical proximity to Nazi authority, whether through public displays of violence or direct contact, was a constitutive part of this triangular dynamic. Future research can reconstruct how proximity to power shaped ordinary participation or inaction across Europe: how ethnic Germans – an understudied group – moved through Reich peripheries, or how local women, from the same communities as their victims, cooked for or typed lists for killers, their integration into the machinery of death normalised by the routines of employment and domesticity.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, men often enforced policy not solely from ideological conviction, but because the war taught them that domination was a permissible reward.Footnote ⁶⁶ In much of Eastern Europe, contact with occupiers was direct and unavoidable; in regions like the Belgian Ardennes or rural France, locals saw German soldiers only once – or never.Footnote ⁶⁷ A critical task is now to understand how small-town officials, farmers or schoolchildren became temporary actors – not always because they believed Nazi ideology, but because they sought to secure their place within a reordered community.

In this sense, proximity was not only physical but inherently hierarchical: to be near power – or to be perceived as such – was both a strategic choice and a profound constraint. People often acted less in direct response to orders than in anticipation of the occupier’s gaze. Frequently, it was the fear of punishment, more than its consistent application, that seems to have dictated action or inaction. In Poland, the death penalty for rescuing Jews was widely feared, but perhaps less often enforced.Footnote ⁶⁸ In other regions, similar laws existed but were perhaps less internalised, their impact mediated by pre-war social norms, wartime inertia or a less pervasive ambient threat. Such contrasts now demand careful comparative inquiry. This also means that a focus on ideological belief carries us only so far. Antisemitism was one mutable factor among others – past experiences, peer pressure, state terror, local networks – that shaped participation. Interdisciplinary frameworks are essential here. Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical theory, for instance, reminds us that public behaviour rarely mirrors private belief; it is a performance staged for an audience, cued by context and driven by strategies of self-preservation.Footnote ⁶⁹ The toolkits of psychology, sociology and political science all offer cogent ways to map these transnational patterns without sacrificing local contexts. Amos Goldberg’s recent warning is apt: the war in Gaza risks dragging Holocaust and genocide studies back into a narrow, legalistic focus on proving or disproving ‘intent’. This underscores a profound danger: all nuance is lost when analysis retreats into a single causal lens, just as it is when complex social processes are flattened back into fixed typologies.Footnote ⁷⁰

Similarly, sociological and anthropological insights demand that we disaggregate proximity as a spectrum of relations that grew strong or weak, visible or invisible, supportive or antagonistic. Under Nazi occupation, visibility and performance were structured by fear, surveillance and the constant, silent expectation of judgement. While Poland stands out for the intensity of scholarly scrutiny – owing to its centrality in the Nazi project, the location of the killing centres and Polish Jews comprising over half of all Jewish victims – we also need comparative micro-histories of social roles for other regions in Eastern Europe, and for neglected areas in Western, Northern and South-eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷¹ A central question for such studies is to explain how an individual became or remained socially liable to others – and how quickly that sense of mutual obligation could vanish within a shifting architecture of watchers, whisperers and the watched. New digital tools now allow historians to move beyond plotting locations and to model the lived experience of space – analysing the density, direction and quality of social ties, and how these relationships were navigated, experienced and remembered.Footnote ⁷²

This focus on proximity also opens a largely neglected field of inquiry: the history of emotions. Across much of Europe, what is often labelled ‘intimate violence’ may, in fact, have unfolded in an emotional vacuum created by thin social ties and mere physical nearness – shared buildings, overlapping routines, but little genuine connection.Footnote ⁷³ Across the CHH, ‘fear’ recurs with striking frequency – thirty-one times in Vol. I and thirty-six in Vol. II alone – underscoring how much emotions were central drivers of behaviour: envy, guilt, love, hope and despair.Footnote ⁷⁴ Studying their evolution across the pre-war, wartime and post-war periods will allow us to better make sense of actions across groups usually analysed in isolation. Policies of ethnic homogenisation and cleansing in Eastern Europe, for instance, might be read as forms of proximity management.Footnote ⁷⁵ Recent work on sex work and gendered perpetration – involving secretaries, landladies and caregivers – further invites us to analyse proximity as classed, gendered and deeply affective.Footnote ⁷⁶ These forms of closeness could reinforce one another or diverge sharply, shaped significantly by urban–rural contrasts that demand systematic comparison. The now-flourishing history of emotions should be integrated into Holocaust historiography, for genocide was not only administered from above – it was felt into being.

Entanglement

Having established interaction as the dynamic and proximity as the medium, we are left with a fragmented picture. Entanglement is the practice that binds them – the essential method of relational Europeanism. It traces how micro-level realities braided together into a continent-wide crime, revealing the very connections nationalist narratives now seek to sever. As the field moves beyond older binaries, it needs a grammar capable of writing the Holocaust as both irreducibly local and profoundly transnational. Entanglement offers that grammar: weaving interactions and proximities into a single fabric, it shows how violence, survival and complicity emerged from their layered convergences across space, time and social boundaries. Three promising avenues come to my mind: the internal dynamics of victim worlds; comparative histories among victimised groups; and the parallel, yet distinct, implementation of Nazi policy across different spaces.

One crucial locus of entanglement lies inside the home – the charged spaces where domesticity and persecution folded into one another. Now that Jews are considered historical agents, the next step will be to examine intra-Jewish entanglement: the shifting relations among individuals, families and communities that shaped choices, vulnerability and judgement. This encompasses the agonising dilemmas of Jewish councils and ghetto police, as well as the tensions of life under siege within communities.Footnote ⁷⁷ Bedrooms, stairwells and the so-called Judenhäuser (‘Jew houses’) all became testing grounds. Comparing such micro-studies will allow us to weave continuities of prejudice and adaptation into new narratives. This also requires a fully intersectional analysis – one that considers emotion, class, religious observance and gender.Footnote ⁷⁸ In Volume III of the CHH, for example, David Engel’s portrait of Jewish institutional myopia and strategic mis-recognition before the war offers a model for writing these histories of belief and class without the distortion of hindsight.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such perspectives can illuminate the layered processes of vulnerability after 1939, revealing victims who were not only disillusioned patriots but also fathers and daughters, caretakers and chroniclers of folk memory – their actions shaped as profoundly by Jewish history as by past state discrimination. Entanglement, in this regard, means weaving national histories more rigorously into the tapestry of Jewish life, thought and identities.Footnote ⁸⁰ This also moves us beyond the binaries of assimilation versus exclusion or local versus foreign, legacies of the nation-state that still dominate the historiography of Western Europe.Footnote ⁸¹ Doing so will shape how we understand Jewish life and decision-making under Nazi rule, however constrained, and how we write histories of suffering and care from the inside out.

To speak of entanglement is also to undertake comparison. With regional and group-specific studies now abundant, the field can sustain a more sophisticated comparative history of the victims of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners – one that preserves the specificity of the Jewish catastrophe while situating it within broader racial and colonial logics. Works like Alex J. Kay’s Empire of Destruction (2021) model this ambition, weaving together the fates of different victim groups into a cohesive narrative of Nazi mass killing. Kay’s book is comparative history at its best – an exercise to better understand each group by contextualising their singularities.Footnote ⁸² Such a method deepens our understanding of Jewish specificity by refusing to study it in a vacuum. Visibly, the same communal dynamics that structured Jewish suffering also shaped the fates of others, often within the same villages, prisons or refugee stations.Footnote ⁸³ Entanglement asks us to tackle these contradictions: anti-Roma violence was not less racial, but differently administered; the murder of Soviet POWs followed a logic of total war that sometimes converged with, and at other times diverged from, the Holocaust; East European civilians, queer people and political dissidents occupied shifting categories of victimhood.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the same vein, interethnic violence was deeply reactive and situational. We should see ethnic groups – Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian – as lines that repeatedly cross and collide at specific points of friction.Footnote ⁸⁵ This will be another core task of Holocaust historiography: to trace how betrayal, help, survival and violence were structured within shared terrains. Done rigorously, such comparative micro-histories will illuminate both local conditions and wider social conditions. Entanglement, in this sense, is also a public responsibility.

A third line of inquiry concerns simultaneity: how distinct killing methods – from deportation trains in Amsterdam to mass graves in Eastern Galicia – were forged through a shared infrastructural scaffolding, such as for local police forces. To continue reading Eastern and Western Europe as distinct spheres is to miss their profound entanglement.Footnote ⁸⁶ A particularly fertile terrain lies in the everyday practice of the state: the understudied role of the SA before 1939; station agents and registry clerks; welfare offices and auctioneers; or village schools and tax bureaus.Footnote ⁸⁷ These were the interfaces where abstract ideology met daily routine – and where the fate of individuals hinged on a moment’s hesitation or an unstamped form. Teachers, firefighters, landladies, Jewish council members and mid-level officials all operated in these pressured zones, which calls for comparative inquiry.Footnote ⁸⁸ The challenge is to reconstruct how different European administrative terrains – from the dense files of Utrecht to the prisons of Budapest – enabled genocide not despite their contradictions, but through them. Then can emerge a bottom-up history of the state itself: tracing how complicity was mediated through forms, how refusal required immense creativity and how private life was violently reshaped by state-sponsored tools, including identity papers, ration cards, work permits and coded threats.Footnote ⁸⁹ Entanglement’s challenge – and its promise – is to write the history of the Holocaust as Europe lived it: tangled, uneven, yet profoundly interconnected.