‘My Question Applies to this Country’: British Identities and the Holocaust

Abstract

Since 1933 Britain has been engaged in a relationship with the destruction of European Jewry that has forged a complex connection between the Holocaust and constructions of British national identity. In 1945 with the liberation of the western concentration camps, Britain became a liberating nation. That perceived role, it is argued, has shaped British responses to the Holocaust ever since. During the liberation year, three remarkable British individuals encountered Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp at the heart of Britain’s relationship with the Holocaust. This article explores the responses of war correspondent Alan Moorehead, journalist Richard Dimbleby and actor/writer Dirk Bogarde to Belsen. The richness and depth of their discourse on Belsen and the Holocaust reveals both the diversity of constructions of Britishness and Englishness and a continuing connection between Britain and the Holocaust that cannot be constrained by the term ‘bystander’.