A Nazi Rescuer? Fritz Schellhorn and the Contested Memory of the Holocaust in Romania

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This study addresses the role of Fritz Schellhorn, the German consul in Cernăuţi (Czernowitz), Romania before and during World War II. Recently Schellhorn has been presented as a rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust. Based largely on Schellhorn's papers in the German Foreign Office Archives, some have argued that it was not, as previously believed, the wartime mayor and Righteous Among the Nations Traian Popovici, but Schellhorn, who prevented the deportation of 20,000 of Cernăuţi's Jews by the Romanians during World War II. The following suggests that Schellhorn occupied a more ambivalent position. First, it argues that his actions should be considered in light of power and interethnic relations in the region. Second, it shows that Schellhorn's legacy includes a decades-long struggle to obstruct the compensation of many Romanian Holocaust survivors by West Germany. Emphasizing Romania's sole responsibility for the crimes, Schellhorn engaged in a range of postwar interactions—sometimes public, sometimes hostile—with Jewish survivors he had helped and others he had not. The article thus examines Schellhorn's wartime and postwar activities anew. For one thing, it places these against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Romania's particular dynamics and contested aftermath. But beyond this, it contributes to the debate over the static labels used to categorize people's behaviors during the Holocaust and thereby explores the wider and complex links between history, memory, and reckoning.