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Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and Its Historical Examination in route into History(*)
The premise of this paper is as obvious as the passage of time itself and can be condensed into a simple statement: the contemporaries of National Socialism are gradually departing from the scene. Of course, this is not a new process that has begun only now, half a century after the end of the Third Reich, but it is becoming increasingly significant, as was strikingly demonstrated at a major conference held in Weimar in the fall of 1995, devoted to surveying historical research on the Nazi concentration camps.(1) The opening address was to have been delivered by Hermann Langbein, who had intended to focus on the relationship between witnesses and contemporary historians of the Nazi period, a relationship that Langbein himself considered on the whole fruitful but often strained. However, this address was never given: a couple of weeks before the conference Langbein died in Vienna at the age of eightythree.
As a young communist, Hermann Langbein had fled Austria after the "Anschluss" and joined the International Brigades in Spain. Following the defeat of the Republican side, he was interned in France in February 1939, handed over to the Gestapo from the Pyrenean camp at Gurs in spring 1941 and subsequently deported to Dachau. In summer 1942, Langbein was transferred to Auschwitz, where he survived by working as the filing clerk responsible for the killing records of the main camp register in the SS precinct.(2) Throughout his "camp career" -- as we historians are wont to call this fate -- which ended in Neuengamme, Langbein was active in the prisoners' resistance. Elected secretary of the International Auschwitz Committee after the War, he eventually became, particularly after his expulsion from the Austrian Communist Party in 1958, a tireless campaigner for judicial retribution and thorough historical investigation of the atrocities carried out at Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1963 came about largely as a result of his unflagging efforts, and it was Langbein who ultimately documented the trial in two important volumes.(3) Moreover, convinced that historical education must begin in the schools, he committed himself to this goal until his last days.
If, as happened at...