17
World War II has captured the artistic imagination for more than eighty years. As time has passed, artists’ and audiences’ relationships to the atrocities of combat and the Holocaust have evolved through countless songs, paintings, poems, and movies. In cinema alone, half of the highest-grossing war movies have taken place during World War II1. Steven Spielberg, the highest-grossing filmmaker in history, has directed ten different movies set in the period2, and eight films about the war or Holocaust have won the Academy Award for Best Picture3.
While these works have run the thematic gamut of war, violence, tragedy, and redemption, a common theme is complicity. To what extent did figures outside traditional political and military actors play roles in harmdoing and heroism alike during World War II and the Holocaust? As the period pulled unprecedented numbers of noncombatants into conflict, the role of everyday people regularly features in these films. Inside and outside Hollywood, our interpretation of civilian involvement and possible complicity has evolved over time. For example, in academic genocide studies, debate has pushed the traditional three-category framework (victims, perpetrators, bystanders) to account for more “outsider” roles (including profiteers and helpers)4. Meanwhile, national debates over perpetration and victimhood during World War II and the Holocaust continue to affect politics and society in countries such as Germany and Poland5.
This analysis will examine the interpretation of business professionals and their professional complicity in the Holocaust through an examination of three decades of film, represented by three movies released from 1993 to 2023.
Why films from this timeframe? As we discussed during our FASPE trip, much of the post-WWII 20th century was defined by collective, willful ignorance, and it wasn’t until the 1980s with the “Dig Where you Stand” and other largely student- and youth-led movements that Nazi misdeeds stood front and center6. At the same time, the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) brought debates around the question of German responsibility in the Holocaust to the forefront of the national mind7. Similarly, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“struggle of overcoming the past”) flared during the years leading up to and following German reunification8. Thus, the 1990s give the sense of the first modern decade of collective reappraisal, where Westerners began coming to terms with the Holocaust and its connection to the Nazi mission and World War II more broadly.
The Professional as Hero: Schindler’s List
It would be impossible to begin an analysis of the filmic perspective on professional complicity in the Holocaust with anything but Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster hit Schindler’s List.
The film opens with a Kiddush spoken as candles burn down to nubs in 1939 Poland. As Jews gather in a town square, their names recorded on Nazi officials’ typewriters, we watch a man get dressed in fine clothes, adorn himself with a swastika pin, and head to a fancy club. His presence and comportment are noticeably different than those of his Nazi peers at the club; as they shout at cabaret performers, overeat, and share grotesque stories about Jews, he’s gentlemanly, refined, and transparently less nationalistic. It isn’t until the man has won over all his comrades and is the centerpiece of the revelry that we learn, in hushed tones between SS officers, that he’s none other than the Oskar Schindler, a wealthy German businessman.
Schindler’s status precedes him. The next day, he cuts a seemingly endless line at the
6. Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, Cambridge University Press, August 2017.
7. Michael Rothberg, “Lived multidirectionality: ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’ and the politics of Holocaust memory”, Memory Studies, November 30, 2022.
8. Vicki Lawrence, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past”, AGNI, 1998.
World War II has captured the artistic imagination for more than eighty years. As time has passed, artists’ and audiences’ relationships to the atrocities of combat and the Holocaust have evolved through countless songs, paintings, poems, and movies. In cinema alone, half of the highest-grossing war movies have taken place during World War II1. Steven Spielberg, the highest-grossing filmmaker in history, has directed ten different movies set in the period2, and eight films about the war or Holocaust have won the Academy Award for Best Picture3.
While these works have run the thematic gamut of war, violence, tragedy, and redemption, a common theme is complicity. To what extent did figures outside traditional political and military actors play roles in harmdoing and heroism alike during World War II and the Holocaust? As the period pulled unprecedented numbers of noncombatants into conflict, the role of everyday people regularly features in these films. Inside and outside Hollywood, our interpretation of civilian involvement and possible complicity has evolved over time. For example, in academic genocide studies, debate has pushed the traditional three-category framework (victims, perpetrators, bystanders) to account for more “outsider” roles (including profiteers and helpers)4. Meanwhile, national debates over perpetration and victimhood during World War II and the Holocaust continue to affect politics and society in countries such as Germany and Poland5.
This analysis will examine the interpretation of business professionals and their professional complicity in the Holocaust through an examination of three decades of film, represented by three movies released from 1993 to 2023.
Why films from this timeframe? As we discussed during our FASPE trip, much of the post-WWII 20th century was defined by collective, willful ignorance, and it wasn’t until the 1980s with the “Dig Where you Stand” and other largely student- and youth-led movements that Nazi misdeeds stood front and center6. At the same time, the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) brought debates around the question of German responsibility in the Holocaust to the forefront of the national mind7. Similarly, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“struggle of overcoming the past”) flared during the years leading up to and following German reunification8. Thus, the 1990s give the sense of the first modern decade of collective reappraisal, where Westerners began coming to terms with the Holocaust and its connection to the Nazi mission and World War II more broadly.
The Professional as Hero: Schindler’s List
It would be impossible to begin an analysis of the filmic perspective on professional complicity in the Holocaust with anything but Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster hit Schindler’s List.
The film opens with a Kiddush spoken as candles burn down to nubs in 1939 Poland. As Jews gather in a town square, their names recorded on Nazi officials’ typewriters, we watch a man get dressed in fine clothes, adorn himself with a swastika pin, and head to a fancy club. His presence and comportment are noticeably different than those of his Nazi peers at the club; as they shout at cabaret performers, overeat, and share grotesque stories about Jews, he’s gentlemanly, refined, and transparently less nationalistic. It isn’t until the man has won over all his comrades and is the centerpiece of the revelry that we learn, in hushed tones between SS officers, that he’s none other than the Oskar Schindler, a wealthy German businessman.
Schindler’s status precedes him. The next day, he cuts a seemingly endless line at the