How Post-war Britain Reflected on the Nazi Persecution and Mass Murder of Europe's Jews: A Reassessment of Early Responses

Abstract

During the 1990s historians began paying attention to how societies in the postwar era reflected on the destruction of Europe's Jews between 1933 and 1945 and soon a consensus evolved that there had been a brief burst of media coverage and outrage related to the liberation of the concentration camps and war crimes trials in 1945–46 which soon faded. However, from 1999 a number of historians looking at the USA and other countries went beyond the identification of a postwar ‘silence’. They argued that it was broken by a deliberate effort of Jewish organisations, mainly in America, for the purpose of creating sympathy for Israel and the Jews more generally. This contribution re-assesses recent trends in the scholarship concerning post-war responses in Britain to the Jewish catastrophe of 1933–45. It argues that we are mistaken if we look in the past for representations of what we recognise today as ‘the Holocaust’ or if we treat the apparent marginalisation of the Jewish experience as a sign of malevolence or indifference. It concludes by suggesting that if during the 1950s there was a dropping off of publications about the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews, this may have been because the market was satiated.