Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Culture and History
Angaben zur Quelle:
12,1-2 (2010) 95-130
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
Abstract:
A widespread point of view in the scholarship concerning postwar responses in Britain to the Holocaust is that the Jewish catastrophe of 1933-45 was met with indifference and silence: the survivors did not want to talk about their experiences, and British society was reluctant to listen to them. Argues against such a stance: in the immediate postwar years, British society had plenty of information on Nazi anti-Jewish policies and the Jewish plight under Nazi rule. However, the reading public did not perceive them as the fully formed event which we now call "the Holocaust" and there was a tendency to universalize Jewish suffering. In 1945-53, dozens of reports on Nazi camps appeared in medical, psychological, and legal journals and books. Memoirs of camp survivors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as well as historical books discussing the Nazi mass murder system, were abundant. These books, albeit not always sympathetic toward Jews and sometimes blaming them for passivity, stressed nonetheless that the lot of Jews in the camps was especially hard and that the Jews were doomed. The perception of the Nazi wartime murder of Jews was slackened by the conflict between the Zionists and the British over Palestine. Suggests that if durung the 1950s there was a dropping off of publications on the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews, this may have been because the market was satiated and the reading public became fatigued from information on the Nazi system.
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