A former student and lecturer at Yale University has taken to task the faculty and students of his alma mater for neglecting the case of Vladimir Samarin, an accused Nazi war criminal and former lecturer at Yale.
A member of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale for 17 years, from 1959 to 1976, Samarin, also known as Sokolov, is accused by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of concealing his collaboration with the Nazi occupiers of the Soviet Union during World War II. According to the 1982 OSI complaint against Samarin, he “publicly advocated the persecution of Jews … (and) urged that all Jews be physically persecuted and completely annihilated.”
Bob Lamm, in an article entitled “The Silence Over Samarin, ” in the summer 1983 premier issue of “A Jewish Journal at Yale,” writes that although Samarin was at Yale for 17 years “students have never heard of him; faculty members prefer to forget that he ever existed.”
EXAMPLE OF UNIVERSITY’S ‘INSENSITIVITY’
When Samarin resigned from Yale in 1976 amid allegations of Nazi collaboration, he was allowed to elect early retirement. The university even paid his salary at least until December, 1976, six months after he stopped teaching there.
Lamm, now a free-lance writer, describes as “typical of Yale’s insensitivity” then university president Kingman Brewster’s statement in the “Yale Alumni Journal” that, “a kind of sadness was the appropriate feeling” to have for Samarin. Lamm also reviews the 1976 reactions of such Samarin supporters as Prof. Alexander Schenker, a member of the Slavic department who is “of Russian Jewish background, ” and of the “Yale Daily News, ” which had “a significant number of Jews in editorial positions.”
In contrast, Lamm mentions four members of the Yale Slavic Department who is September, 1976 wrote to that newspaper accusing Samarin of collaboration.
SAMARIN’S ROLE RECOUNTED
During the Nazi occupation of the Orel region of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, Samarin was assistant editor-in-chief of “Rech ” (Speech), a Russian-language Nazi propaganda newspaper, Lamm pointed out. Samarin’s by-lined pieces and signed columns contained such statements as:
“Whenever I see a kike’s family name, I immediately see large yellow rats with protruding mugs ….” “For 25 years the kike hit us …. ripped the Russian people …. Finished! Never again will their feet trod upon our soil … In this struggle kikedom will be destroyed finally and forever.”
Lamm cites Nazi war criminal expert Charles Allen, Jr. ‘s work on Samarin, which reported that in 1941 the population of the Orel region was 114,000, but less than 30,000 when the Nazi occupation ended. During 20 months, 30,000 residents were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, 30,000 were shipped to slave labor camps, and 15,000 died as a result of deliberate neglect during the winter famine of 1942, according to Allen. “It is in this context that we must view Samarin’s writings for Rech,” Lamm says.
Although Samarin’s legal fate will be decided by the courts, Lamm believes that Yale should “end its silence and publicly face the moral issues raised by the Samarin case.”
In addition to the Lamm article, “A Jewish Journal at Yale,” edited by Janina Frankel, contains articles on literature, and poetry and fiction with Jewish themes.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
