„Someone had to punish the perpetrators“

It was not without reason that there was great jubilation at the Tel Aviv premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s film „Inglourious Basterds“ : finally an artistic fantasy that portrayed Jews as powerful. But there was also resistance and acts of revenge in reality: in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, among the Jewish partisan groups, in the Jewish brigade of the British army.

Even if there should have been many more in view of the gigantic mass murder committed by the Nazis: Achim Doerfer traces these stories of resistance and revenge in order to counter a culture of remembrance and commemoration that cements the victim status of Jews in the minds of us all. Especially as the failure of German justice after 1945 was no less gigantic: Doerfer meticulously lists how the perpetrators were systematically spared, millions of victims were not given any justice – and thus ultimately no social perspective in post-war Germany, neither in the FRG nor in the GDR. The bitter realisation of this brilliant, angry and thought-provoking book is that, with the mass reintegration of the perpetrators, the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, which was much invoked and celebrated by the majority of society, has remained an unworthy theatre of remembrance to this day.

Achim Doerfer, born in Göttingen in 1965, studied law and philosophy and works as a lawyer. His grandmother and mother are among the few who survived the Holocaust in Germany and remained in Germany after 1945. His brother emigrated to Israel in 1999 and is now a rabbi there.

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