VWI invites/goes to...
Cycle of VWI Fellows’ Colloquia
The VWI fellows present their intermediary research results in the context of colloquia which are announced to a small audience and are open to a public audience with an academic and topical interest. The lectures are complemented by a response or commentary by an expert in the given field and are discussed with the other fellows.
Due to the previous lack of an appropriate space, the colloquia were held at other Viennese research and cultural institutions with a topical or regional connection to the given subject. From this circumstance was born the “VWI goes to …” format.
With the move to a new institute building at Rabensteig 3, the spatial circumstances have changed, so that the VWI is now happily able to invite other research and cultural institutions. Therefore, the VWI is now conducting its colloquia both externally and within its own building, in the framework of continued co-operation with other institutions.
The new cycle of fellows’ colloquia “VWI invites/goes to …” is not only able to reach a broader circle of interested persons, but moreover integrates the VWI further into the Viennese scholarly establishment, perhaps even crossing borders into the greater regional research landscape.
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| VWI invites/goes to... | |||
| Sari J. Siegel: Changing Circumstances, Shifting Approaches: Jewish Prisoner-Physicians in Nazi Concentration and Forced Labour Camps | |||
Wednesday, 20. May 2015, 15:00 - 16:30 Josephinum, 1090 Wien, Währinger Straße 25
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VWI goes to the Josephinum
Although they are relatively absent from Holocaust historiography, Jewish prisoner-physicians served as functionaries at Auschwitz-Birkenau and concentration and forced labour camps throughout the "Greater German Reich," thereby playing a significant yet under-researched role in the Nazis' exploitation and attempted annihilation of European Jewry between 1938 and 1945. These Jewish men and women who utilised their medical training in camps' Häftlings-krankenbauten and Reviere facilitated Nazi goals to varying extents and in a multitude of ways.
Bringing together findings from eight months of archival research in Austria, Germany, and Poland, this presentation offers insight into the Jewish prisoner-physicians' activities and their attempts to preserve their own lives while honouring their oath to do no harm. It draws particular attention to behavioural shifts in response to dynamic contexts—on both immediate and more distant levels. The former category includes fluctuations in the availability of medicines, medical supplies, and food, as well as in the severity and nature of epidemics, while the latter highlights variables such as the German war economy and the Third Reich's military fortunes on the battlefield.
Such dynamic factors reveal the limitations of Primo Levi's "grey zone" model for prisoner-functionary behaviour and demand, instead, a coercion-resistance spectrum—a model that emphasises changes in behaviour and thus encourages us to contemplate fluctuations in conditions, which are, despite their being central aspects of life (and death) in the camps, often overlooked.
Comments by Herwig Czech
Herwig Czech is Research Fellow at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW).
In cooperation with:
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