Language:
English
Year of publication:
2008
Titel der Quelle:
Holocaust Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
14,1 (2008) 61-92
Keywords:
Dimbleby, Richard
;
Moorehead, Alan,
;
Bogarde, Dirk,
;
Bergen-Belsen (Concentration camp)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Mass media
Abstract:
The liberation of Nazi camps, particularly Bergen-Belsen, in 1945 made Britain a liberating nation, and this perceived role has shaped British responses to the Holocaust ever since. Moreover, it has brought about the reconsideration of British identity as in opposition to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Examines responses to the encounter with Belsen by the war correspondent Alan Moorehead; the journalist and broadcaster Richard Dimbleby; and the soldier, and later actor and writer, Dirk Bogarde. In their immediate accounts on Belsen, all three focused on the perpetrators, whom they construed as the Germans in general, not specifically the Nazis. They were less concerned, or not concerned at all as in the case of Moorehead, with the victims. British readers of their accounts did not realize that most of Belsen's victims were Jewish. Bogarde, who was shocked by British postwar antisemitism, only made the victims' identities clear in his writings in the 1980s. Argues that the liberation of Bergen-Belsen made the British people reconsider the narratives of national identity, and forged a continuing connection between Britain and the Holocaust that cannot be constrained by the term "bystander".
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