The Forgetting of the Holocaust

Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West - Explaining the last three years as the diminishing cultural salience of the Holocaust, Pt 3.

Series notes

Comments on this series will be occasionally pruned for uninterestingness or evident failure to read and reply to the thesis itself. (Anything heavily centered on Jewish “machinations” in modern cultural and political affairs will probably merit removal on those grounds.)

Continued from Part 1, which clarifies my position on Holocaust “Denialism” (I do not deny the Holocaust, but I insist that my understanding of what it was be based on normal historiographical standards, grounded in evidence and open to revisionism; anyone should do the same, the Holocaust should not be understood with a “special kind of history” the way children are given special scissors lest they harm themselves):

Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West: 1

And part 2, which is an overview and introduction to the era of American history which will be discussed in this post:

Introduction to the post-60s Holocaust Revival

Disclaimer: “Holocaustianity” and originality

This part of the series depicts the rise of a cultural-religious phenomenon in America. Others have researched and written on this topic before, and the term which describes it pre-exists my work. While as a late-comer to this subject I expect to repeat many of the same points, it is nonetheless the case that unless cited otherwise, everything here was based on direct research of primary and secondary sources from before 1990 and is not a repackaging of someone else’s work.

1945-1967: Holocaust forgotten

The absence of serious historical study of the Holocaust in 1960

(To repeat, this continues from the overview and introduction to this era given here.)

The story of forgetting is best begun by emphasizing, again, how completely it took place. Before we ask why the post-War West, citizen and scholar alike, forgot the Holocaust, we prove that this is absolutely what they did.

Here the resource par excellence is Leon A. Jick’s essay from 1981, “The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public.”¹

Jick was a rabbi and history professor who, in the 40s, interrupted his studies to serve in the US Army Air Force, spent some post-War years working with displaced persons in Marseilles and teaching in newly-formed Israel, and returned to the United States to write his rabbinic thesis on “the relationship of German industrialists to the Nazi extermination policy” in 1954.² In short he made an effort to keep the candle burning when only a handful of others in the world were still paying attention (he opened a course on the Holocaust at Brandeis in the late 70s, by which point many others were doing the same), and is unlikely to have missed anything relevant in his “oft-cited” retrospective from 1981.

I will merely quote the picture he paints, with added headings and emphasis:

“A barely remembered, rarely mentioned event” in 1959

In 1959, a book called Holocaust was published in New York. It was written by a Boston journalist and dealt with a 1942 night club fire in that city in which some hundreds died. The appearance of this title indicates that at that time, fourteen years after the end of World War II, the term “holocaust” was not linked with the destruction of European Jewry and that there was little likelihood that a book with this title would be associated with the Nazi period or the Jewish tragedy.

As a matter of fact little was then being published in the United States which dealt with this subject under any name. The destruction of European Jewry seemed to be a barely remembered, rarely mentioned event, of interest only to a limited circle of survivors…

Holocaust issues “removed from public and scholarly agendas”:

Indeed after the conclusion of the major [Nuremberg] trials, the issues which had been raised where speedily removed from public and scholarly agendas. The volumes of documents which were collected and published were relegated to the back shelves of libraries. Issues of specific Jewish concern were generally ignored…

Jewish Holocaust “research” scarce and informal in 1949:

In 1949 the Conference on Jewish Relations convened a meeting on “Problems of Research in the Study of the Jewish Catastrophe 1939-1945”. Philip Friedman described what he called “the Khurbn literature” as follows:

The bulk of it consists of personal records, memoirs, chronicles of events, pathetic accusations, etc. Few books have been written by scholarly or literary trained writers… In effect, we have an incredible vulgarization and shallow banalization of the scholarly (or pseudo-scholarly) and pseudo-literary production in this field. The flood of inferior production is overshadowing the worth-while material and is bringing much harm, causing miscredit and distrust to our whole Khurbn literature and to the results of serious research.[…]

Jewish scholars and historical societies have paid too little attention to this new field of research.

Only one English-language text before 1961:

Throughout the 1950’s, only one comprehensive work on the Nazi treatment of the Jews appeared in English. In 1953 Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution was published in England. The work received scant notice in the United States…

Little mention in WWII literature:

General works dealing with the Second World War either ignored the Jews altogether or made brief and passing reference to Nazi anti-Semitism. Even a volume devoted to “Nazi resettlement and population policy” published in 1957 dealt only marginally with the impact of these policies on the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.

It should be mentioned regarding The Final Solution, that Reitlinger is no towering figure in historical literature; he was an art historian with meagre output. Even more to the point, The Final Solution does not purport to substantiate some of the claims that were central to the “Comic-Book” version of the Holocaust that ascended to the fore after 1961; at the least, Reitlinger disputes the notion that 4,000,000 prisoners were somehow killed at Auschwitz, whereas mainstream Holocaustiography asserted this outlandish figure until it was conspicuously revised downward in 1992.³ Therefor, between the years of 1953 and 1992, The Final Solution would have been considered a Denialist text in this respect. Moreover, it does not appear to be widely cited or read after the 1950s.

And so just how can there be “revisionism” of a historical record that does not exist?

The dearth of anything like rigorous research on the Holocaust before 1961 should inform a modern appraisal of both mainstream and “revisionist” Holocaust historiography.

Just what were the earliest mainstream tomes, appearing in the 1960s, based on? Jick’s survey illustrates that only one answer should be considered satisfactory: Direct appraisal of primary evidence. Nothing else was reliable, i.e. knowably accurate.

Seemingly hundreds of accounts of witness and Army liberator testimony were rushed to the newspaper page after the capture of Buchenwald in late-April, 1945, and these purport to substantiate many of the claims that later serve as the hallmarks of the West’s collective understanding of what took place. These newspaper reports were based on US Army record-taking, Army-mediated tours of camps by journalists and Congressmen, or random and unvetted written accounts; all of them should be regarded just as skeptically as whatever would have been written in German papers if the shoe were on the other foot. (At the same time, many claims could now be regarded as sacrilege in the hyper-defensive, mainstream Holocaust account, such as that typhus was rampant and responsible for many deaths in the western camps, or that an alleged mass-killing of 120 political prisoners by the Nazis as Americans were entering Leipzig should be considered “one of the war’s worst atrocities,” etc.⁴)

The testimony of vanquished Nazis at Nuremberg and other trials should likewise be regarded with a measure of prima facie skepticism, unless our position is that it is impossible that three of the most powerful governments of the world (the UK, the US, and the USSR) would conspire to conquer their only rivals, declare themselves and their satellites an international body capable of independently assessing the guilt of captured enemy officers, and force those same officers to claim falsehoods (in order, for example, to serve domestic and geopolitical agendas, if not merely to retroactively affirm casus belli). Rather than being impossible, it has to be wondered why such a thing would not take place.

This is all perspective to keep in mind when discussing the mainstream treatment of the Holocaust as emerges in the era after the 1950s. Not only was the Holocaust (as well as the experience of political prisoners in Nazi camps) quickly forgotten, but as a scholarly project these events were never rigorously examined to begin with.

As no particular conclusions should have been pre-packaged into the first attempts to do so, nor should any first attempts have immediately been considered authoritative, it beggars understanding how there could be a distinction between mainstream and “revisionist” history of the Holocaust, unless the former neglected to construct its account from primary sources.

Additionally, and as we shall see, the interference of a newly-arisen political and existential concern - namely the long-term survival of Israel after the Six-Day War - should lead us to wonder whether the early mainstream revisitations of the Holocaust (besides Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jews, published in 1961 but written years before) were influenced by a new round of propaganda efforts.

The illusion of always knowing

In other words, the purpose of piercing the “illusion of always knowing” that pervades the collectively-understood Comic-Book version of the Holocaust is to be aware of how suddenly this illusion could have, indeed must have replaced the prevailing mindset of forgetting. As a preview, we can consider a galling example from the educational lobbying efforts of ADL director Theodore Freedman in 1977, who chastises Omaha school officials with the claim that,

The Nazi holocaust in which six million Jews were killed… seems to be losing its significance and weight on young persons⁵

As recently as ten years before those words, “The Holocaust” was still a racing boat recently sold to a Texas enthusiast.⁶ To suggest to teachers (many probably born after 1945) that something was newly “losing significance” would require (or create) an illusion that it had been remembered to begin with, and such an illusion could leave the listener prone to further suggestions of certainty and authority where they did not prevail.⁷

Could the first historians to write about the Holocaust have been similarly confused into thinking that the events in question had been always well-remembered? And how could this have influenced their ability to discern the real story - to distinguish valid evidence from the propaganda output of two different wars?

If the Holocaust was real (again, I believe it was), our belief that it was real still could not with confidence be based on some notion that it is impossible that someone after 1945 just rediscovered a War-era government lie, and everyone on Earth just imagined “always knowing” the lie was true. It is all-too-possible.

Having examined thoroughly the extent and implications of the forgetting of the Holocaust, we may review the factors that might have brought it about.

The forgetting of the Holocaust

1) Why not forget?

If a realist definition of the Holocaust is simply “the violent, abrupt displacement of many of Europe’s Jews by years of legally-sanctioned pogroms, as well as German killing squads in the East,” one may ask, why shouldn’t America forget it? As long as Americans are also indifferent to tragedies before and after, what is either “unfair” about forgetting it or “fair” about so particularly remembering it?

Of course, there are political answers one could supply here, e.g. everything along the lines of the Holocaust stemming from a set of ideas that require continual vigilance to suppress from re-exerting influence on human minds and the violence of the state.

But those concerns notwithstanding, I merely wish to frame the post-War era of forgetting in a context where it is understood that no special “motivations” for the forgetting of the Holocaust are required. Such motivations may have existed, and may have exerted substantial influence on human minds, and we will examine them below — but we need not obsess over them as some sort of special force that overcomes some “intrinsic unforgettableness of the Holocaust.”

America is a land of forgetters; as are other lands. What do today’s young Vietnamese say of the Vietnam War? Nothing:

No one our age talks about it… Most young people nowadays don’t really care about what happened. They just want to have fun.”⁸

Eventually humans must either forget the past — which is to say, “memories” of things not experienced — or render it mythical, a part of the cultural story of the present; there is no middle-ground.

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2) The Cold War heats up

Still, and to repeat, there were probably contributing motivators when it came to the forgetting of the Holocaust. Forgetting appears to have arisen as a geopolitical priority even before the Nuremberg trials were underway, thanks to the rapid precipitation of the US-Soviet rivalry during Germany’s destruction, and this seems to have exerted influence on cultural priorities as well.

Jick offers the same explanation in his essay:

More likely, the most significant factor at work [in forgetting the Holocaust] was the onset of the Cold War in the late 40’s and early 50’s and the concurrent rehabilitation of Germany as an ally of the United States.⁹

Likewise, Cold War priorities “bury” the memory of the Nuremberg trial in the retrospective opinion of the journalists conferring in Warsaw in 1966 to bemoan the West’s amnesia:

The next few speakers swung back to Nuremberg. “The cold war,” said a Pole, “buried the guilt of the Nazis.”¹⁰

Examining the United States’ primary records of the pillage of Germany, this shift appears to take place months before Nuremberg. While in February (at Yalta), before the fall of Berlin, the tone is collegial and cooperative, and the US ultimately indulges British and Soviet bloodlust for plunder by agreeing to the creation of a “Commission for Compensation” (with an apparently last-minute reduction in scope),¹¹ by July (at Potsdam) the Americans’ priorities and perspective are distinctly more anti-Soviet.

Delegation memos from Potsdam record flat-footed observations of the unilateral plunder of industrial machinery from co-occupied Berlin by the Soviets¹² and the unsubtle ploy by the Yankees to cower Stalin with the awesome details of the Trinity nuclear test on the 16th¹³ - the Soviets are now clearly regarded by the US as a rival sharing the table of victory, and a threat to be contained.

And so regarding Germany herself, who in February all parties agreed must be materially rendered “never again able to disturb the peace of the world,” what is the US delegation’s attitude in July? Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (for whom, as much as for FDR, WWII had been his war; and who was largely responsible for the legal formality of the Nuremberg design, as opposed to Soviet-style show trials or British summary executions¹⁴) writes to the politically-besieged Truman:

We have immediate interests in a return to stable conditions…

One hope for the future is the restoration of stable conditions in Europe, for only thus can concepts of individual liberty, free thought and free speech be nurtured. Under famine, disease and distress conditions, no territory or people will be concerned about concepts of free speech, individual liberty, and free political action. All the opposite concepts flourish in such an atmosphere. If democratic interests are not given an opportunity to grow in western and middle Europe, there is little possibility they will ever be planted in Russian minds.

I therefore urge that the principles stated in my paper to you on the administration of Germany of 16 July be kept in mind, which recommends that Germany shall be given an opportunity to live and work…¹⁵

The final, cosigned Potsdam protocol does nonetheless reify Soviet aims, enshrining the economic program of managed-mediocrity of standard-of-living that would define East Germany, with a percentile of reparations to yet-be delivered from the direction of the Rhine; but America’s West Germany would clearly flout this punitive design in the years to come.

Aber, was passiert mit den Kriegsverbrechen?

At neither conference is there much wrangling over the particulars of justice for Nazi crimes (though in February, Roosevelt invites Stalin to re-propose a toast to the “execution of 50,000 German officers,” to express the excitement the conquest of Nazi Europe has induced in America’s wheelchair-bound Caesar¹⁶). The particular schema of “righteous retribution” is wholly sidelined throughout every cranny of negotiation at Yalta and Potsdam; what the three powers will divvy of Jerry’s fertile land, machines, minds,¹⁷ and bodies, is all that matters.

All of this grown-up-table wrangling, this total indifference to the moral dimension of the War, is out of sync with the record of local American sentiment in 1945, as whipped up by the hyper-pornographic media-firestorm of Eisenhower’s Buchenwald tours (the corpse-piles! the lampshades!), and likewise with the summer and autumn machinations of vestigial FDR propagandists,¹⁸ the nascent United Nations’ dispatches from San Francisco, and the shadowy British crafters of the Nuremberg charter; seemingly everyone on Earth but the heads of state are aflame with the concentration camps scandal; but this dissonance must simply be set aside as a chorus of parochial outbursts.¹⁹ The courtroom-theatre of Nuremberg may have been in the future; but reintegrating and rebuilding fertile West Germany into an American Pax Romana was the future.

Even if it took until Russia’s arrival at the nuclear table and Sputnik, American media and popular understanding were sure to embrace this new geopolitical framework, and forget anything of Nazi war crimes. We need not worry about the transition period overmuch.

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3) Resentment? Forgetting in West Germany

The Cold War explains the geopolitical motivation for forgetting. Culturally, we have seen that in post-War West Germany forgetting was motivated by resentment of the special humiliation of Nuremberg, and a desire to reassert the local political formulations of the Nazi party, as Victor H. Bernstein describes in his 1966 visit:²⁰

On our way to Warsaw, my wife and I stopped at Nuremberg. I had not been there since the trial, and I wanted to see whether Nuremberg’s memory was any better than ours in America. From tourist pamphlets picked up in our hotel lobby I learned that Nuremberg is 900 years old; that during World War II Allied bombers destroyed 45.6 per cent of all homes and heavily damaged another 14.5 per cent; that the people of Nuremberg had rebuilt these structures and added more; and that parts of the old town had been rebuilt with exact fidelity to the originals. But of Julius Streicher and the Party days, the Nuremberg Laws and the trial — nothing.

I mentioned the omissions to a local journalist — a young, well-informed German of liberal leanings. “We don’t like to be reminded of our guilt,” he said. “When Speer and von Shirach were released from prison a few weeks ago, some German papers gave it a big play; the Nuremberg papers buried in a paragraph or so on an inside page.”

He thought a moment. “During the campaign before our last municipal election, the neo-Nazis were very active. My newspaper attacked them violently. But they won 5 per cent of the vote, and for the first time since the war won seats on the city legislature. Our editors decided that we had given them too much publicity and that henceforth we would ignore them.” Ignoring them didn’t help either: in the recent elections, Nuremberg gave the National Democratic party 13 per cent of the city’s total vote — more than any other large German community…

“Oh yes, I remember the trial of the war criminals,” [a middle-aged local] said spitefully. “Look how many wars there have been since! And have there been any more Nuremberg trials? Why did everybody pick on us?”

Like in America, West German forgetting was not limited to informal media and politics, but reinforced in formal texts. A Polish journalist at the Nuremberg anniversary-conference remarks (emphasis added):

The next speaker, a Pole, picked up the problem of re-educating the world about Nuremberg. He had made a “superficial” study of the treatment given by the trial by various encyclopedias, and he was not happy.

His chief criticism was leveled at Brockhaus, the standard encyclopedia in West Germany [and the oldest and largest German-language encyclopedia], which he contrasted with Meyers, common in East Germany…

Brockhaus, on the other hand, he found “emotionally uncommitted” in its treatment [of Nuremberg]. It pedantically lists what it calls the “deficiencies” of the war crimes trials, neglects to say that at Nuremberg all but one of the defendants were found guilty of crimes against humanity as well as other war crimes, and barely mentions the extermination of the Jewry. “Without doubt,” Brockhaus notes, “Some of the war crimes trials [implication: not all] were concerned with real crimes.” This is the closest the encyclopedia comes to expressing an editorial point of view.

(That the omerta of War-era Germans on the Holocaust was the subject of later resentment by late-70’s German youth is something I recall reading elsewhere; it may even have a term, which I have forgotten.)

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4) Trauma? Assimilation? Forgetting in American Jewry

When the Holocaust later emerged as both an “industry” of American social and political cachet and the “paramount symbol of what it means to be a Jew,”²¹ it was naturally imperative to examine why American Jewry were so eager to forget the issue after World War II. And if this demographic’s dismissal of the Holocaust can be demonstrated, noting extra is required to account for why atomic-era American Catholics and Protestants were unconcerned with the Nazi nightmare. On this topic, Jick writes (emphasis added):²²

In 1954 America Jewry celebrated its tercentenary—the three hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the first group of Jews in America. Every Jewish publication was full of self-congratulation and of pietistic praise of “our ancestors.” No mention of the recent fate of the closer relatives was allowed to mark the festivities…

During this period, a graduate student interested in pursuing research on the Nazi period was advised by a distinguished American Jewish historian to give up the work because “no one is interested in Hitler.” American Jewry sought to forget…

Regarding the motivations:

On a deeper psychological level, it is likely that American Jewry desired to separate itself from the experience of abuse and suffering and from the sense of shame which victims of crimes often feel. Numerous studies have shown that a victim often feels as though he himself is to blame for his suffering. American Jewry in the 1950’s, striving to enter the mainstream of American society, was reluctant to identify itself with this ultimate experience of victimization. Compounding this reluctance was the lingering sense of guilt, of not having done enough, of not having been responsive. American Jewry did not want to be confronted with its culpability in not responding to the catastrophe or with the possible implications of the experience for the future.

Christian America in the post-War era was a cultural hothouse of nuclear-family conformity, and American Jews in the post-War era, prioritizing physical security via political inconspicuousness, took vigorously to assimilation with this same homogenized, commodified standard.

Atomic-age America forgets Naziism. Photo from 1967; VW from 1950. shorpy.com

Still, in the wake of the Holocaust revival in the 1970s, the pragmatic realpolitik of post-War American Jews came to seem insufficient, and there was a search for deeper psychological explanations for ignoring the Holocaust. A recurring explanation is that post-War Jews were “too close” to the trauma of the Holocaust to process the horror; it is only with distance that the “new breed” of Jews could appropriately attach significance to the events that transpired three decades before. Of course, one could just as plausibly propose that the deprivations of poverty from the Great Depression, or trauma experienced on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, promoted the American Jewry’s materialist turn after 1945.

No firm motive needs to be assigned here, between assimilation and trauma. Merely observing that American Jews in the post-War era were more concerned with conformity, material security, and prosperity than in processing the moral and spiritual significance of the Holocaust, is sufficient to grant pardon to white, Christian mindset during the same epoch.

The 50s and early 60s were not an era of moral introspection, nor of great religious sentiment; one may in fact propose that this epoch was a “respite of the soul.”

Next in the series:

Also:

Part 1: Introduction; RE Holocaust “Denialism” ↗

Part 2: Introduction to the forgetting and rediscovery of the Holocaust ↗

Part 5: Background trends during the “Holocaustianity” era ↗

Part 6: The need for new sacrifices 2017-pres. ↗

1. Jick, Leon A. “The Holocaust: Its Use and Abuse Within the American Public”, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 14 (Jerusalem, 1981) At nli.org.il

2. Sarna, Jonathan D. “In Memoriam: Leon A. Jick (1924-2005)” American Jewish History; Baltimore Vol. 92, Iss. 2, (Jun 2004): 225-IV. At brandeis.edu (pdf)

3. This one is sourced by Ron Unz in his essay which, as previously mentioned, was the prompt for my series:

Stets, Dan. “Fixing the Numbers at Auschwitz.” [an unfortunate choice of words] (May 7, 1992.) chicagotribune.com

But gone now from the [19 concrete memorials at Auschwitz] are the 19 inscriptions that said in 19 languages that four million people died here.

The memorials are blank because they were wrong.

Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the four million cited [at Auschwitz] for four decades. The actual number was probably between 1.1 million and 1.5 million-and at least 90 percent of the victims were Jews.

The fiction that more than a million non-Jews died here was a myth created by Poland`s communist leaders.

It was only after the fall of the last communist government in 1989 that Polish historians were finally allowed to say what Franciszek Piper, manager of historical department at Auschwitz, says he had known for five years. Jewish scholars say they knew the truth for at least 10 years.

4. Various stories from St Louis Post-Dispatch (April 29, 1945.) At newspapers.com

I am not sure how well-substantiated the Leipzig massacre ended up being; I see other references to it, but without clear sourcing.

5. Cattau, Daniel. “The Holocaust: ‘A Zero’ for the Young.” Omaha World-Herald (Dec 3, 1977). p. 6. At newspapers.com

6. See references in Pt. 2.

7. This prevails in biology all the time, as with “Original Antigenic Sin,” and “Cytokine Storm” (as a condition responsible for severe Covid-19 pneumonia), two things that were never real and yet established themselves as eternally-known facts as soon as they were proposed.

8. “Hien, a recent university graduate from Hanoi,” quoted in Rosen, Elisabeth. “How Young Vietnamese View the Vietnam War.” The Atlantic. (April 30, 2015.)

9. (Jick, Leon A.)

10. Bernstein, Victor H. “Guilt: Second Look at Nuremberg — Where Aggression Was Tried.” Charleston Sunday Gazette-Mail. (January 29, 1967.) Reprinted from The Nation. At newspapers.com

11. Report of the Crimea Conference. history.state.gov

12. Russian Machinery Removals From Berlin. history.state.gov

13. Memorandum for the Secretary of War, July 18, 1945. history.state.gov

The Potsdam paperwork is surprisingly high-octane reading. Here, Lieutenant General Leslie Groves describes the “lighting effects” of the bomb:

The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.

14. Per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson

15. Henry L. Stimson. Memorandum for the President. July 22, 1945. history.state.gov

16. Bohlen Minutes — Roosevelt–Stalin meeting, February 4, 1945, 4 p.m., Livadia Palace history.state.gov

17. I found no reference to jet or rocket technology in the Potsdam paperwork, but machines and minds would cover these later ambitions, and would certainly explain a further desire to let the West’s public attention move on from German war crimes, though it seems unnecessary to explain the US position.

18. e.g. Lowell Mellet, who in the fall authored a defense of the unprecedented trial of German war crimes by insisting that America didn’t want war - newspapers.com

19. Though the influence and motivations of the British, whose actions in the German theatre were most outrageous, are interesting. This is a topic for another day.

20. (Bernstein, Victor H.)

21. See quotes and references in Pt 2.

22. (Jick, Leon A.)