Daniel Blatman

Blatman was born in 1953.[1] His family history was deeply affected by the Holocaust: his Polish-born Zionist father left for Israel in 1936, returned to Warsaw for a visit in 1938, and never saw his parents again; they probably died in the Warsaw Ghetto.[3] Nine of his father’s brothers and one sister died at Treblinka.[3] Blatman described his father’s experiences as leaving him with a sense of a “black hole.”[3]

He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a B.A. in history and education and an M.A. in contemporary Jewry.[4] He completed his doctorate, summa cum laude, at the university’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry.[4]

Blatman directed the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry and its Center for the Study of the History and Culture of Polish Jewry.[2] During his 2006 fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he was a senior lecturer at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry; he subsequently held the Max and Rita Haber professorship and became professor emeritus.[4][2] He also held visiting professorships at Tel Aviv University, New York University, and Georgetown University, and co-taught a 2005 workshop on the Holocaust in Poland at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.[4]

His research on the Jewish labor movement includes For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labor Bund, 1939–1949, published by Yad Vashem in 1996 and translated into English and French.[4] An English edition appeared in London and Portland in 2003.[5] The study examined Bund members’ resistance in Poland, the reorganization of party institutions during the war, participation in ghetto life, and the organization’s complex leadership.[6] Its research drew on Bund materials in the archives of the former Polish Communist Party in Warsaw.[6]

Blatman also wrote the encyclopedia article “Bund,” tracing the organization from its founding in Vilna in 1897 through its postwar activities.[5] The article examines the encounter between Jewish workers and young Jewish intellectuals influenced by Marxism and socialism, and follows the Bund’s political, labor, educational, and cultural work.[5]

His scholarship on Jewish life under occupation includes Reportage from the Ghetto: The Jewish Underground Press in Warsaw, 1939–1945, published by Yad Vashem in 2002 and also issued in French.[4] With Renée Poznanski, he co-authored “Jews and Their Social Environment: Perspectives from the Underground Press in Poland and France,” a peer-reviewed chapter published in Facing the Catastrophe: Jews and Non-Jews in Europe during World War II in 2011, on pages 159–228.[7] Other publications include the articles “A Hesitant Partnership: The Bund and Polish Socialists during the Holocaust” and “The Polish Street Fell Short in Its Relations with the Jews,” as well as Conflicting Histories and Coexistence: New Perspectives on the Jewish–Polish Encounters.[4][2]

Polish–Jewish historical memory is another strand of his work.[2] His Hebrew-language article “Polish Self Examination and the Jewish Perspective” appeared in Bishvil Hazikaron, issue 43, in 2001, on pages 12–16.[8] In “Were These Ordinary Poles?,” published in Yad Vashem Studies, volume 30, in 2002, he described Jan Błoński’s essay as “a landmark in the examination of Polish-Jewish relations.”[9]

A four-year Israel Science Foundation grant supported Blatman’s research project “The Death Marches and the Evacuation of the Concentration Camps, January–May 1945.”[4] During his museum fellowship, he studied the April 1945 massacre near Gardelegen of approximately 1,400 Jewish survivors of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, examining social and political conditions in Germany’s final weeks of war and the motivations of local residents involved in the killing.[4] The project sought to connect the social history of Nazi perpetrators with theories of genocide and genocidal massacre.[4]

This research culminated in The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, published in English by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011.[1] Translated from Hebrew, the English volume contains 561 pages and illustrated plates.[1] It combines close studies of particular massacres with an examination of the collapse of the Nazi regime; its subjects include camp evacuation, administrative chaos, Gardelegen, and the perpetrators.[1]

The study draws on testimony from victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, alongside archival material gathered internationally.[1] It examines the relationship between the last phase of Nazi killing and earlier concentration-camp murders, focusing on how the chaos surrounding the Third Reich’s collapse enabled further mass killing.[1] Approximately 250,000 inmates died on death marches and in associated massacres from January 1945 onward.[1]

Blatman placed the beginning of the evacuation marches in late 1944, when German authorities sought to remove prisoners from advancing fronts and prevent their capture.[10] He estimated that approximately 720,000 people began evacuation marches, roughly one-third of them Jewish, and that about 250,000 were murdered within a few months.[10] His account identified a “decentralization of the killing apparatus”: as the bureaucracy of murder collapsed, prisoners became subject to guards’ arbitrary, unplanned, and uncontrolled decisions.[10]

In his interpretation, the perpetrators increasingly included party functionaries, local militias, Hitler Youth members, and civilians alongside camp guards.[10] He described a new “community of murderers,” arguing that fears of revenge and concern for family and community could drive participation in violence, rather than participation necessarily arising directly from the Final Solution or antisemitic Nazi ideology.[10] His analysis nevertheless connected guards’ supposedly practical decisions to a genocidal mentality formed in an antisemitic environment.[11]

Blatman also examined the tension between evacuation orders and the disintegration of central authority.[10] He argued that Himmler wanted prisoners removed both to prevent them from revealing conditions in the camps and to preserve Jewish prisoners as potential bargaining leverage with Western powers.[10] Those calculations broke down as Germany’s military position deteriorated and communication with central decision-makers failed.[10]

In 2018, Blatman became chief historian of the planned Warsaw Ghetto Museum.[3] His proposed approach used the Warsaw Ghetto to present Jewish life and death under Nazi occupation while also including the experiences of Jews in other Polish ghettos.[3] He wanted the museum to place the fate of Polish Jews within both Jewish and Polish history and connect the ghetto’s history to the wider history of occupied Warsaw.[3]

His museum plans called for coverage of Jewish resistance in different forms, including people who fought the Nazis without sharing Mordechai Anielewicz’s ideology.[12] He also advocated substantial attention to ultra-Orthodox Jews’ experiences and inner lives under occupation, extending beyond accounts concerned only with efforts to observe the Sabbath.[12]

Blatman shared the first Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research with Christopher R. Browning, receiving recognition for The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide.[13] The prize recognized a study of the 1944–45 marches based on archives in eight countries, testimonies, memoirs, and postwar trial files.[13] His other honors include the Jacob Buchman Memorial Prize, the Pridan Prize for Studies in East European Jewish History, and recognition as a National Jewish Book Award finalist.[2][4]

His work on the Bund addressed subjects previously neglected in Holocaust and Hebrew-language historiography, particularly the organization’s wartime institutions, resistance, and place in ghetto society.[6] His death-march research brought together detailed accounts of massacres and a broader analysis of the Nazi regime’s collapse, examining the connections between institutional disintegration, local perpetrators, and mass murder.[1]

Blatman’s academic work also included doctoral supervision and teaching.[14] A dissertation on German economic policy and Jewish forced labor acknowledges him as its supervisor at the Hebrew University and credits his courses with contributing to the author’s understanding of the Holocaust and its surrounding processes.[14] Leah Prais completed a doctorate under Blatman’s supervision on the impact of refugees on Jewish communal life in Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto between September 1939 and July 1942; her book on the subject appeared in English through Yad Vashem in 2015.[15]

Blatman’s appointment to the Warsaw Ghetto Museum provoked criticism from those who feared that the project would rewrite history or whitewash Poland’s past.[12] He maintained that the undertaking was historically sensitive rather than political and promised that there would be no censorship or distortion of history.[12] Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer also criticized his museum role.[16] Blatman separately criticized Yad Vashem in an article titled “Yad Vashem teaches the Holocaust the way totalitarian countries teach history.”[16]

His contributions to debates about Holocaust education include the 1995 Hebrew-language article “On post-Zionism and the blurring of memory,” published in Bishvil Hazikaron, issue 7, pages 15–16.[17] His work was cited among research associating educational trips to Poland with heightened nationalistic emotions and values at odds with humanist, universal values; other studies in the same discussion found no significant difference in Holocaust awareness between participants and nonparticipants.[17]

Blatman also disagreed with Benny Morris over Morris’s review of Adel Manna’s Nakba and Survival, arguing that Morris’s statements about 1948 contradicted his earlier interpretations and findings.[18] The counterargument held that Morris had consistently rejected a general preplanned expulsion policy.[18] Blatman was also listed among the authors of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism in 2021.[19]

In a co-authored Haaretz article, Amos Goldberg and Blatman wrote that what happened in Gaza “will stain Jewish history from now on and forever” and added, “We will need to face the reality and understand the depth of the horror we have inflicted.”[20] Francesca Albanese quoted the passage in February 2025.[20]