UK museum doubles down on disputed claim Nazis targeted observant Jews - JNS Staff

 

by JNS Staff

The Imperial War Museum's information board on the Nuremberg Laws falsely implied the Germans had targeted observant Jews in particular, critics argue.

 

Visitor exit the Imperial War Museum in London, the U.K. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

The Imperial War Museum, a British national institution tasked with recording all the United Kingdom’s military conflicts since 1914, has doubled down on an information board that according to critics falsely suggested that the Nazis targeted observant Jews and their descendants in particular, The Guardian reported last week.

The information board refers to the Nuremberg race laws passed by the Nazi regime in Germany in 1935, which included a definition of who was Jewish. Under these laws, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew, and anyone with one or two Jewish grandparents was Mischlinge, or mixed race.

The information board stated that, under the law, “a person was defined as Jewish based on how many observant Jewish grandparents they had.”

Whereas the law did not mention observance as such, it did say that a grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. “Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion (Judaism), and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews,” according to the Washington D.C.-based museum.

But by noting “observance,” the Imperial War Museum implied an inaccurate description of the reality of the Nuremberg Laws, a former academic told The Guardian for an article the paper published on Aug. 14. The “wording referring to observant Jewish grandparents with its lack of historical accuracy must be changed,” she wrote to the museum, according to the paper. She asked not to be named, according to the report.

“I know that ‘observant’ Jewish grandparents just made no sense. It disregards the vast majority of the Jewish population who are not observant,” she told The Guardian. “This is such a misleading impression of the Nazi outlook that for me it’s reprehensible that it stays in the public domain.”

Yet Caro Howell, the Imperial War Museum’s director general, told the former academic that “full and sincere consideration” had been given to the points she had raised, “but we stand by the curatorial choices that we have made and that our expert advisers have reviewed,” he said.

In an email seen by The Guardian, Howell said the integrity of his museum would be undermined if it made changes every time “questions of interpretative nuance” were raised.

The Guardian quoted Christopher Browning, who has written numerous books on the Holocaust and was an expert witness in the David Irving libel trial in 2000, as saying on the matter: “The issue was not whether the grandparent was observant but whether his or her birth had been registered with the Jewish community. The grandparent could later even have converted to Christianity but if the grandparent had been registered as Jewish at birth, that for the Nazis was the deciding factor.”

The newspaper also presented an opinion on the issue by Timothy Snyder, who has also written extensively about the Nazis. “It did not matter whether the grandparents were observant … No one was saved from persecution, as the wording incorrectly implies, by having grandparents who were not observant,” he was quoted as saying.

He added: “As worded, the suggestion is that ‘bad Jews’, i.e. those with a secular (or even Reform) background, might have been spared from the persecutions that preceded the Holocaust, whereas ‘good Jews’, those with religious (or Orthodox) backgrounds, were the victims. This is nonsense.” 

JNS Staff

Source: https://www.jns.org/uk-museum-doubles-down-on-disputed-claim-nazis-targeted-observant-jews/

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