The first comprehensive account of Jewish acts of retribution after the Holocaust - and an answer to the question of why there were so few of them.
As a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Achim Doerfer sets out in search of an emotion that remained oddly subdued – and not just in his family – after the end of the Nazi regime and its colossal crimes: the desire for retribution, for revenge.
It’s not by chance that the premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds in Tel Aviv was met with great cheering: finally an artistic fantasy that portrayed Jews as powerful. Yet resistance and acts of revenge did happen in reality as well: in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, in Jewish partisan groups, among the British Army’s Jewish Brigade. But, considering the vast mass murder committed by the Nazis, there should have been many more.
Achim Doerfer traces these stories of resistance and revenge to counter a culture of remembrance and commemoration that has cemented the status of Jews as victims in all our minds. Especially since the failure of German justice after 1945 was no less colossal: Doerfer meticulously enumerates how the perpetrators were systematically spared and millions of victims never received any justice.
This brilliant, angry, and thought-provoking book comes to the bitter realization that, because of the mass reintegration of the perpetrators, the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, much invoked and acclaimed by mainstream society, remains a shameful charade to this day.
