Eva G. Reichmann and Holocaust Scholarship

1 Introduction

German-British Jewish refugee historian and sociologist, Dr Eva Gabriele Reichmann (1897–1998), made significant contributions to the postwar historiography of the Holocaust, well before ‘Holocaust studies’ was established as a distinct field. She was a prolific author on the history of antisemitism, German Jewish emancipation, and National Socialism; an early documenter of experiences of Holocaust refugees, victims, and survivors; and a German Jewish community activist both within Germany during the rise of the Nazis and after her compulsory migration to England. Forced to leave Berlin in 1939 for London prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Reichmann’s experiences as a German Jewish refugee devoted to communal defense, Jewish diaspora ‘as task,’ and interfaith dialogue shaped her work and intellectual legacy. An academic who worked outside the academy in part due to the circumstances of forced migration and her decision to focus on community activism, she nevertheless contributed significant scholarship on the history of antisemitism and the German Jewish experience. Although she described her relationship to Germany as ‘complicated,’ Reichmann staunchly retained her German language, identity, and commitment to German Jewish culture during her wartime and postwar life in Britain, where she became a citizen in 1945. Although remaining in Britain, Reichmann returned to West Germany many times after the Second World War to support so-called reconciliation efforts and interfaith dialogue (Heinsohn 2019, 2021). Despite her many publications and contributions to multiple fields, and although a contemporary of the renowned German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, her work as a producer of Holocaust-related knowledge has been neglected. This is due in part to her gender, her work outside the traditional academic path, as well as the enduring split between German (and German Jewish) historiography and Holocaust historiography. Yet her contributions not only to scholarship on the political and cultural identity of German Jewry and National Socialist antisemitism but also postwar Holocaust-related archives-building solidify her rightful place in the historiography of the Holocaust.

This essay briefly recounts Eva Reichmann’s biography, which shaped her life’s work as one of the first generation of researchers on the Nazi period, as well as her scholarly contributions to the history of antisemitism and the experiences of German Jews, particularly after the Holocaust. This essay will also explore Reichmann’s significant contributions to recording and shaping Holocaust research in the postwar era within early documentation and research centres, including the Wiener Library and Leo Baeck Institute in London. Finally, the essay will close with a consideration of the marginalisation of Reichmann’s work in relation to her position as a historian working outside the academy and ‘behind the scenes’ as a documenter and supporter of postwar Holocaust-related archives and institutions.

Eva Reichmann (née Jungmann) was born in 1897 in Lublinitz (now Lubliniec) in Silesia and raised with her two siblings in Oppeln (now Opole) in a middle class Jewish acculturated, religious household, her family close friends with Rabbi Leo Baeck. Her father, Adolf Jungmann, was a lawyer, and her mother, Agnes (née Roth), was later killed in the Theresienstadt ghetto during the Holocaust. Prior to her flight to Britain in 1939, Reichmann had studied economics and sociology and earned her first doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1921, which was among the first universities to admit women for study from 1900, with a second doctorate to follow after her emigration. She had joined the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, or CV, founded in 1893), an important organisation that fought for the rightful place of German Jews within German society, the civil rights of German Jews, and against rising antisemitism. Although she was sympathetic to Zionism and the intellectual challenges it held for German Jewry, Reichmann firmly believed in the importance of the Jewish diaspora as a legitimate and positive ‘Jewish path,’ one that she saw not in a negative light or as a sign of the decline of Judaism, but that had value and purpose in its own right (Heinsohn 2009).

From 1933 she became the chief co-editor of Der Morgen, a monthly cultural periodical that focused on a range of issues of Jewish interest, especially German Jewish life under the Nazis. These included short biographies, including on Leo Baeck (Der Morgen, 13 Jg., Heft 10, January 1938); obituaries and essays, some of which have been republished in a collection of her writings (E. Reichmann 1974). Her activities for Der Morgen and especially the CV not only shaped her professional life but also her personal circumstances: at the CV, she worked on cultural policy and public debate, and she met the barrister Hans Reichmann (1900–1964), who became her husband. Eva Reichmann also worked for the Jewish Agency in Berlin as well as the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), led by Leo Baeck, which served as an umbrella organisation to coordinate Jewish groups in Germany from 1933. Her commitment to remaining in Germany was shaken with Hans’ arrest during Kristallnacht, after which he was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (H. Reichmann 1998). After she arranged his release on condition that the couple would emigrate, they settled in London, and became embedded within the refugee German Jewish community, continuing their activist work. Hans was temporarily interned on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’. For her part, she began to work for the BBC Monitoring Service as a translator, briefly becoming the main breadwinner of the couple as did many other middle class Jewish refugee women who adapted to their new living situations. Like many Jewish refugees who remained in Britain, in 1945, she became a British citizen. Although she travelled to West Germany several times after the end of hostilities, returning there to live permanently again was out of the question. As she wrote in one of her infrequently published personal accounts in 1970:

To attempt to explain why only so few of us preferred to return to our former homeland would be to reveal the darkest and at the same time most sensitive secrets of what had haunted our souls during those years. ‘Haunted’ [‘Heim-gesucht’] – the word is more powerful than the restraint appropriate here would permit. But that home [Heimat] no longer existed. Those who might still have dreamt of it, even in the pain of deprivation of rights and persecution, buried that dream when the certainty of the deaths of our dearest ones inexorably forced us away from it (E. Reichmann 1970, 157, 1989).

In exile Reichmann maintained a significant intellectual link to German scholarship. She earned a second doctorate at the London School of Economics (then in Cambridge), which resulted in her monograph, Hostages of Civilisation, published in English by Victor Gollancz in 1950; it was published in German in 1956 as Die Flucht in den Hass: Die Ursachen der deutschen Judenkatastrophe (E. Reichmann 1950, 1956). Commentators were impressed by the fact that someone who had survived Nazi persecution, whose husband had been in a concentration camp, and whose mother had died in Theresienstadt, was able to write with ‘amazing detachment’ about the history of antisemitism and the rise of Nazism (Becker 1953). In Hostages, Reichmann analysed what she saw as the ‘objective’ (problems associated with integrating a minority group into a majority) versus the ‘subjective’ causes (the breakdown of and lack of value for democracy, and aggression toward Jews as scapegoat) of antisemitism, while rejecting the idea that Jewish emancipation had failed. She reinforced that despite the mass destruction of Jewry, Jews could and did live successfully in Germany without losing their distinct characteristics and identities as Jews. As she wrote, somewhat obliquely, ‘Contemporary literature on the Jewish question … has answered the challenge of Nazism with discouragement and – at least theoretically – has advocated that emancipation should be finally considered as a failure.’ Without referring explicitly to Zionism, although what she meant would have been unmistakable in 1950, she went on: ‘Intelligible though this attitude is as a psychical reaction to the profound disillusionment caused by the destruction of Eastern and Central European Jewry, it can be neither scientifically upheld nor politically justified’ (Reichmann 1950, 21). She combined mixed historical and sociological methods, Freudian-based theory and psychology, as well as a careful reading of texts and ‘objective’ reading of social reality derived from the Wissenschaft des Judentums (‘science’ of Jewish studies) and modern social history. Reichmann argued, in the vein of Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), that the Nazis used antisemitism as a way of diverting the masses from recognising their real interests: ‘By choosing to establish this sham unity through an alleged Jewish world conspiracy, they applied a pure propaganda device which no longer had anything to do with the original mass desires ’ (Reichmann 1950, 220; Neumann 1942). But she also drew attention to the psychological centralising power of antisemitism, noting its powerful attraction. Preempting the work of Marxist scholars such as Moishe Postone, Reichmann went on to indicate that there was a ‘real’ social question but that if the Nazis had identified the symptom, they had misidentified the cause. To win over the different, competing interest groups in Germany (workers, big business, etc.), they promised that laying the country’s ills at the feet of the Jews would bring about Germany’s ‘absolution’: ‘Their previous sins were washed away en masse as having been the consequence of their “systematic hybridisation” by Jews. Thus all conflicting interests creating a social question were reconciled at the cost of the Jews (Reichmann 1950, 221).’ Here she also prefigured work on Nazism as a ‘political religion’ which, although noticed by authors such as Eric Voegelin in the 1930s, became mainstream in political science and history in the 1990s with the work of scholars such as Emilio Gentile (Voegelin 1939; Gentile 2006).

Hostages of Civilisation, Reichmann’s only monograph, was published before Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, but it is seen as belonging to a cohort of ‘path-breaking’ early studies researched and published immediately after the war through the mid-1960s, embryonic research on the history of antisemitism, its relationship to National Socialism, and explanations for the Nazi destruction of the Jews by Arendt. In addition to Arendt’s work, Shulamit Volkov places Reichmann’s Hostages of Civilisation alongside Paul Massing’s Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949), Eleonore Sterling’s Er ist wie Du: Aus der Frühgeschichte des Antisemitismus in Deutschland 1815–1848 (1956), Peter Pulzer’s The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria 1964), and Martin Broszat’s doctoral dissertation completed in 1952 (Volkov 2023, 233). It was positively, though critically, reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Sociology, International Affairs, Commentary, and the American Historical Review (by Sterling), with the most challenging response by Oscar Janowsky in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Becker 1953; Janowsky 1951; Parkes 1950; Gould 1951; Muhlen 1951; Sterling 1952). Reviews of Hostages of Civilisation reveal the rather close-knit circle of German Jewish exile intellectuals, which included many prominent women scholars, in the post-war period, their exchange of ideas, and attempts to re-organise and re-establish German Jewish scholarship, networks and institutions (Villette-Dalby 2005).

Reichmann’s professional affiliations also shaped her contributions to postwar scholarship and knowledge production about the Holocaust and to the fledging field of contemporary history. From 1945, she worked for the Wiener Library as its first Director of Research, joining her former CV colleague and German Jewish scholar, Alfred Wiener, the Library’s founder and namesake. Wiener, Reichmann, and other German Jewish colleagues endeavoured to build a research institution based on pre-war and wartime collecting efforts and networks developed by the predecessor organisation to the Wiener Library, the Jewish Central Information Office (JCIO). Wiener had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and carried on collecting and disseminating information from the Netherlands before moving to London in 1939, and the institution continued to provide evidence during and after the war, including to support evidence-gathering for war crimes trials and to promote new research on the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust (Barkow 1997). With the appointment of Eva Reichmann as research director, several initiatives emerged that solidified the institution as an important early documentation centre.

One key Wiener Library project, led by Reichmann, was the initiative to record eyewitness accounts from former refugees and survivors of the Holocaust. Funded by the Jewish Conference on Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) and implemented through a (rather fraught) partnership with the newly formed Yad Vashem in Israel, the Eyewitness Accounts project (EWA) resulted in the creation of an archival collection of more than 1200 written accounts (including letters, poems, songs, and other written materials predominantly recorded in or translated from German and other languages) gathered from refugees and survivors in the UK, Europe, and beyond, beginning in the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, extending after Reichmann left the institution in 1959 (Schmidt 2020; Wiener Holocaust Library, Testifying to the Truth). Influenced by her training as a historian and sociologist with a firm commitment to ‘scientific’ methodology, Reichmann aimed to fill gaps she perceived in the evidentiary record, particularly with regard to the voices of the victims (Schmidt 2025; Martínez and Schmidt 2026). She emphasised the uniqueness of each account for building as complete a record as possible of Nazi persecution; at the same time, the reports were usually written by the interviewers, generally not in first-person by the interviewee (with some exceptions) on the basis of what the latter said during interviews coordinated by the team Reichmann recruited, including many women interviewers and staff who copied, indexed, and catalogued the accounts. The interviewees often then signed off the account, after Reichmann edited and corrected the submission to ensure that the witness remained ‘credible’. She was not driven by a need to record everyone, even though the collection included accounts of so-called ‘mixed marriages’, instances of ‘privilege,’ and accounts by Roma and Sinti survivors (Schmidt 2025, 2026).

Little has been written about Reichmann’s contributions to postwar collecting, in part because the Library’s work itself has not been extensively covered within the literature on postwar documentation efforts, but also due to gendered notions of authority, expertise, and the subordination of archival work to scholarship within the frame of knowledge production, in other words, the ‘behind-the-scenes’ labour that supported the ingestion and preservation of evidence after the Holocaust. The archival work performed to make evidence accessible to researchers means that appraisal, conservation, cataloguing, and indexing is indispensable (and by far, not neutral) work that has undergirded the study of the Holocaust as an academic discipline – including in its embryonic stages as developed through the study of German history, antisemitism, and fascism–and one that had its own intellectual foundations and legacies. As various studies have shown, survivor historical commissions of the postwar period were dominated at the highest ranks by men, among them historians and other academics (Jockusch 2012). Women, on the other hand, were more numerous than men but less likely to hold high-profile positions in the commissions and were less often professional historians or academics in other fields. The archival and administrative work they conducted was the lifeblood of the commissions, however, and included conducting interviews, collecting material, and working as archivists and secretaries. In general, women’s contributions to the survivor historical commissions have been therefore under-analyzed, especially in comparison with men’s contributions (Geva 2015). This devaluation can be further understood within the framework, as Michelle Caswell has convincingly argued, of ‘the construction of archival labor as a feminine service industry and archival studies (if it is ever acknowledged as existing) as imparting merely practical skills (Caswell 2016; Lapp 2019). Even in instances where women occupied high-profile positions for long periods – such as was the case with Reichmann, or Rachel Auerbach and Miriam Novitch – the significance of their work with survivor historical commissions has been long ignored. The EWA project was a led by a German Jewish woman scholar, whose work was later subsumed by a male-dominated field that shifted focused to other debates, such as the decision-making process for the ‘Final Solution;’ the history of the SS and the concentration camps; and resistance (especially German resistance) to the Nazis. As Hannah Villette-Dalby has argued, Reichmann was ‘neither [a] member[] of the male guild of historians nor working within mainstream German historical studies (Villette-Dalby 2005, 15).’

Through the end of her life, Reichmann remained active in London’s German-speaking Jewish community. She was a member of the Belsize Square synagogue, a largely German-speaking Reform Jewish congregation in London, and she and Hans were both members of the Association of Jewish Refugees, Britain’s largest social welfare organisation for refugees and survivors. She was also the first woman to serve as a trustee of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) in London upon her husband’s death (ostensibly because married couples could not serve together on the Board). Although she had been active in the institution’s work and a friend of Leo Baeck, Reichmann was only permitted to join in place of Hans. According to Pauline Paucker, the wife of Leo Baeck Institute-London director Arnold Paucker, ‘the early activities of the LBI were conducted by a group already active in Jewish life in Germany, mostly men; their attitudes to women remained much the same in later life…That there were formidable German Jewish women was acknowledged but they were considered exceptions – honorary men, in fact (as cited in Hoffmann 2005, 84).’ As was the institutional structure at the time, women were often relegated to supporting roles through a ‘benevolent sexism’ and their work was not valued in the same way as men’s (Leo Baeck Institute 2024; Hoffmann 2005, 84; Jones et al. 2014; Martínez 2025).

Indeed, Christhard Hoffmann too has cited the ‘widespread neglect of [Eva Reichmann’s] life and work,’ in his history of the Leo Baeck Institute, although her contributions to its work were significant (Hoffmann 2005, 84). Her work has been relegated as secondary due to her gender, but also likely because of the enduring split between German (and specifically German-Jewish) historiography, Jewish studies and Holocaust studies (Engel 2010). Guy Miron has traced the history of German Jewish historiography in relation to history of the LBI, in particular its Jerusalem branch, as a response to Hannah Arendt’s criticism of German Jewish leadership in the 1960s (the Reichsvertretung and the CV), that is, as an attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ it. As he argues, some strands of the LBI’s work – and this might also be extended to the leadership of the Wiener Library and Reichmann’s scholarship – were ‘identified with the non-Zionist, liberal version of German-Jewish historiography on the Nazi era’ (Miron 2008, 315). Therefore, a variety of complex gendered, social, and political reasons help explain why Reichmann’s work has been recognised to some extent by scholars of German Jewish history and antisemitism, and why it has not penetrated more widely in Holocaust studies (Bergen 2019, 18). This is exacerbated by the fact that not many of her essays, both for Der Morgen, the CV-Zeitung, or those published after the war, have been translated into English. In spite of this, Reichmann’s life’s work was recognised through many awards, including the Bundesverdienstkreuz First Class in 1969, the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 1970, the Moses Mendelssohn Prize in 1982 and, in 1983, the Grosse Bundesverdienstkreuz.