Economic trends certainly played into things. World War I ended in 1918 and the Great Depression hit in 1929. Although it may seem ludicrous today, there were a lot of people across the whole political spectrum who imagined that World War II would be followed even more swiftly by a return to an economic depression. The metaphysical sense in the years 1914-45 was that European civilization was going through a final fatal crisis. That's the view which you get from Oswald Spengler and Leon Trotsky alike. From Right to Left this idea was very strong.
In that context, it made a lot of sense for most organized Jewish groups to play things soft when talking about the war in general, and Jewish experiences in particular. During the 1930s, magazines such as The Nation and The Progressive had helped to give publicity to people like Harry Elmer Barnes and other critics of the US involvement in the war. This sentiment was very much linked with the Depression and the feeling that the War to End All Wars had failed in its promises.
Imagine if Jewish groups had given extensive to every story of Jewish conflict with Hitler for a decade after 1945. The picture the Great Crash of 1956 occurring, when suddenly everyone is jobless and looking for an explanation. That may sound silly today. But it was a real consideration back then.
By the time stagflation hit the US in around 1971, it was obvious that the US had gone through an unparalleled economic boom for a quarter-century after World War II. At this point, there was much more readiness to reminisce over the good old days of the postwar era. From then on, films and books about Jewish experiences in the war sold very well. It all seemed to fit with a general sense that something great and righteous must have led to that economic boom.
Today, anyone born in 1971 will be about 52. There's no reason for most people now to have any reminiscences over the 1945-70 era. And no reason to project those reminiscences back on the war itself. If anything, that just seems like Boomer-hype.
Possibly part of an explanation lies in the fact that the prestigious US space program initially relied on German rocket engineers brought to the US in Operation Paperclip, some of whom were ex Nazis like Werner von Braun. Once the Shuttle program got under way in the early 80s then the silence over the inconvenient truth of the Holocaust could be broken.
Also, something that's fairly tangential but may help understand the post war American mood might be Erin Mercers excellent thesis, 'Repression and Realism in Post War American Literature':
It definitely was an odd time, the threat of the A-bomb, McCarthyism, the Vietnam war vs Billy Graham and a rekindling of interest in the the optimistic literature of the 30s with Norman Vincent Peales 'The Power of Positive Thinking' (the researching of these led me to the above thesis)
And something else that turns up some interesting info is a google search on 'Reagan and The Holocaust' since he was elected in a landslide in 1980
Does show that a great number of alternate histories seem possible. The real course of events seems less complicated, as I may or may not convincingly show in the next posts. Cold war yes, but it might have been superfluous to other factors including generic tendency to move on and forget. Nuremberg seems to be an anomaly, I haven't found a convincing account for why in the context of 1945 geopolitical priorities it actually even happened.
In the old Catholic liturgy in Latin until Vatican Ii, in each Mass, the Holocaust was mentioned as the self sacrifice of Christ, Christ being a victim, in the Eucharist. After Vatican II, there only was mention of the Last supper, the meal aspect of the Eucharist. No more clear indication of transsubstantiation and especially no more mention of the full sacrifice, holocaust which came from the Old Testament. In 1978, when the Holocaust tv series started, that Holocaust was the only meaning people were confronted with. No more holocaust in Church every Sunday.
That's not quite true. There is still clear doctrine of transubstantiation. The term Holocaust with the "H" is used for the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, and others. Lower case "h" is still understood as the Christ's sacrifice.
Regardless of doctrine, in the new mass a lot of text in that regard remains unspoken. Only in the Latin mass, people are confronted with the term holocaust, it's for instance in the phrase "oblationes et holocausta" in a psalm, where I noticed it during mass. I have looked again re regular Latin mass text and have found that there, the usual term is oblatio, so, apologies because I misremembered about the specific place in the mass liturgy where holocaustum is mentioned: It is in the variable part, in psalms, HOWEVER, I was not as wrong as I had momentarily believed, also in the OFFERTORIUM for instance on 7th Sunday after Pentecost, "Sicut in holocaustis arietum et taurorum"! not in the fixed part and this means it's not true after all that it is mentioned categorically in each and every mass. BUT indeed every now and then and not only in psalms! - The word holocaust is indeed in lower case. I wasn't aware of a differentiation regarding upper of lower case. In Latin it's always lower case and in the various translations, the word itself would not be used, but translated. But the point is, it is not translated because these parts have been taken out.
"For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism."
By far the most appalling aspect of the Nazi Holocaust is that it does not stand alone as a 20th century examplar of man's inhumanity to man, but that there have been numerous such barbarities before and since--the genocidal persecutions of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the genocide of the Uyghurs in China are but the latest exemplars of this evil.
It is worth noting that the USC Shoah Foundation seeks to move the conversation beyond just the Nazi Holocaust, and has documented the experiences and witness testimonies from contemporaneous instances of genocide that are taking place even now.
The TV show was very powerful. It and Roots really affected me.
Economic trends certainly played into things. World War I ended in 1918 and the Great Depression hit in 1929. Although it may seem ludicrous today, there were a lot of people across the whole political spectrum who imagined that World War II would be followed even more swiftly by a return to an economic depression. The metaphysical sense in the years 1914-45 was that European civilization was going through a final fatal crisis. That's the view which you get from Oswald Spengler and Leon Trotsky alike. From Right to Left this idea was very strong.
In that context, it made a lot of sense for most organized Jewish groups to play things soft when talking about the war in general, and Jewish experiences in particular. During the 1930s, magazines such as The Nation and The Progressive had helped to give publicity to people like Harry Elmer Barnes and other critics of the US involvement in the war. This sentiment was very much linked with the Depression and the feeling that the War to End All Wars had failed in its promises.
Imagine if Jewish groups had given extensive to every story of Jewish conflict with Hitler for a decade after 1945. The picture the Great Crash of 1956 occurring, when suddenly everyone is jobless and looking for an explanation. That may sound silly today. But it was a real consideration back then.
By the time stagflation hit the US in around 1971, it was obvious that the US had gone through an unparalleled economic boom for a quarter-century after World War II. At this point, there was much more readiness to reminisce over the good old days of the postwar era. From then on, films and books about Jewish experiences in the war sold very well. It all seemed to fit with a general sense that something great and righteous must have led to that economic boom.
Today, anyone born in 1971 will be about 52. There's no reason for most people now to have any reminiscences over the 1945-70 era. And no reason to project those reminiscences back on the war itself. If anything, that just seems like Boomer-hype.
Possibly part of an explanation lies in the fact that the prestigious US space program initially relied on German rocket engineers brought to the US in Operation Paperclip, some of whom were ex Nazis like Werner von Braun. Once the Shuttle program got under way in the early 80s then the silence over the inconvenient truth of the Holocaust could be broken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_aerospace_engineers_in_the_United_States
Also, something that's fairly tangential but may help understand the post war American mood might be Erin Mercers excellent thesis, 'Repression and Realism in Post War American Literature':
https://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/4419/thesis.pdf
It definitely was an odd time, the threat of the A-bomb, McCarthyism, the Vietnam war vs Billy Graham and a rekindling of interest in the the optimistic literature of the 30s with Norman Vincent Peales 'The Power of Positive Thinking' (the researching of these led me to the above thesis)
And something else that turns up some interesting info is a google search on 'Reagan and The Holocaust' since he was elected in a landslide in 1980
https://www.google.com/search?q=reagan+and+the+holocaust
Does show that a great number of alternate histories seem possible. The real course of events seems less complicated, as I may or may not convincingly show in the next posts. Cold war yes, but it might have been superfluous to other factors including generic tendency to move on and forget. Nuremberg seems to be an anomaly, I haven't found a convincing account for why in the context of 1945 geopolitical priorities it actually even happened.
In the old Catholic liturgy in Latin until Vatican Ii, in each Mass, the Holocaust was mentioned as the self sacrifice of Christ, Christ being a victim, in the Eucharist. After Vatican II, there only was mention of the Last supper, the meal aspect of the Eucharist. No more clear indication of transsubstantiation and especially no more mention of the full sacrifice, holocaust which came from the Old Testament. In 1978, when the Holocaust tv series started, that Holocaust was the only meaning people were confronted with. No more holocaust in Church every Sunday.
That's not quite true. There is still clear doctrine of transubstantiation. The term Holocaust with the "H" is used for the mass murder of Jews, gypsies, and others. Lower case "h" is still understood as the Christ's sacrifice.
Regardless of doctrine, in the new mass a lot of text in that regard remains unspoken. Only in the Latin mass, people are confronted with the term holocaust, it's for instance in the phrase "oblationes et holocausta" in a psalm, where I noticed it during mass. I have looked again re regular Latin mass text and have found that there, the usual term is oblatio, so, apologies because I misremembered about the specific place in the mass liturgy where holocaustum is mentioned: It is in the variable part, in psalms, HOWEVER, I was not as wrong as I had momentarily believed, also in the OFFERTORIUM for instance on 7th Sunday after Pentecost, "Sicut in holocaustis arietum et taurorum"! not in the fixed part and this means it's not true after all that it is mentioned categorically in each and every mass. BUT indeed every now and then and not only in psalms! - The word holocaust is indeed in lower case. I wasn't aware of a differentiation regarding upper of lower case. In Latin it's always lower case and in the various translations, the word itself would not be used, but translated. But the point is, it is not translated because these parts have been taken out.
What is the English word that is used in its place? Offering?
Hi Brian, brief comment. Your series reminds me of this article you might appreciate: The German Catechism https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/the-german-catechism/
"For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism."
We should remember the Nazi Holocaust. It was a genocide.
We should also remember the Soviet Holodomor in Ukraine, in which as many as 7 to 10 million people died. That, too, was a genocide.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/pdf3/2003/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_2003-46.pdf
We should also remember the Armenian Genocide of WW1.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Armenian-Genocide/Genocide
We should also remember the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the mid 1990s.
https://archive.is/20120525111049/http://www.worldlii.org/int/cases/ICTY/2001/8.html
By far the most appalling aspect of the Nazi Holocaust is that it does not stand alone as a 20th century examplar of man's inhumanity to man, but that there have been numerous such barbarities before and since--the genocidal persecutions of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the genocide of the Uyghurs in China are but the latest exemplars of this evil.
It is worth noting that the USC Shoah Foundation seeks to move the conversation beyond just the Nazi Holocaust, and has documented the experiences and witness testimonies from contemporaneous instances of genocide that are taking place even now.
https://sfi.usc.edu/what-we-do/collections
The horror of the Holocaust is that it was never an isolated moment of barbarism. It has been repeated since, and is being repeated now.
Have already pruned a spam comment. As it says at the top, be original or do not hit post.