This talk will introduce the remarkable story of a previously unknown German group, “The Bund. League of Socialist Life,” that aided Jews under Nazi rule. The Bund (nothing to do with the more well-known Polish Bund) was in some ways highly unusual, but the presentation will use them also to draw more general lessons about rescue in the Holocaust. Above all, the unique archive that this group left behind allows us to observe its actions before, during and after the war, and thus to see how the experience of life under Nazi rule later became memory.
Mark Roseman is a Professor of History and the Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University. He is a historian of modern Europe, with particular interests in the History of the Holocaust and in modern German history. His publications have covered a wide range of topics in German, European and Jewish history, including life-reform and protest in 1920s and 1930s Germany; Holocaust survival and memory; Nazi policy and perpetrators; the social impact of total war; post-1945 German and European reconstruction; generation conflict and youth rebellion; Jewish and other minorities in modern German history. His current research projects include rethinking the meaning and role of race und Nazi rule, German Jewish experience of Nazi persecution, a history of resistance and rescue und Nazi rule, and a critical synthesis of recent work on Nazi perpetrators.
