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Holocaust Home Truths

Writer's picture: Michael BakerMichael Baker

As we approach Holocaust Day and the 80th anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few thoughts come to mind about this subject, which is at once hugely familiar to most of us and yet widely simplified and misunderstood. In the first place, what we now call 'The Holocaust' did not emerge as a specific term to signify the extermination of the European Jews during World War Two, certainly not in public discourse, until at least the late 1970s and early '80s. Before then, the subject was the preserve of scholars and academics, in particular (though not wholly) Jewish scholars. Indeed, it's a surprise to learn that the stories told by the survivors of the death camps did not really have a proper hearing until, firstly, the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961 (where survivor testimony from 100 witnesses was a critical part of the proceedings), and then at the so-called Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in Germany between 1963 and 1965, which in total heard from 181 survivors of the notorious death camp. In striking contrast, the Nuremburg trials of 1945-46 heard from hardly any survivors, focusing instead largely on the crimes of the Nazi leadership. If you might have thought that the survivors' stories would have compelled attention at the point of liberation, you would be wrong: the simple fact was that at the war's end in 1945, there were so many millions of victims of all kinds and such widespread devastation that the tragedy of the Jews of Europe (even if fully understood as such at the time) was just one among countless others. People simply didn't want to know: they were anxious to forget the war and move on with their lives (as indeed were many Jewish survivors too, who migrated as soon as possible to the new state of Israel after 1948). So the singular and shocking nature of the Jews' fate only emerged slowly into the second half of the 20th century. Given this context, the centrality of Auschwitz to the present-day Holocaust narrative is perhaps understandable: it had repeatedly stood out in surviving testimony, much of it from the survivors of over 434, 000 Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 (that is, late in the war) - the largest national group to be sent to the camp, of whom 80% were gassed on arrival, leaving 20% (most assigned as slave labour) to live to tell the tale. But Hungarian Jewish survivors, like their French, German and Dutch counterparts, reflected the more affluent, educated and cosmopolitan Jewish communities from which they sprang. They had little in common with poorer Jewish communities, mainly scattered across Soviet territories to the east of Europe, who were religiously orthodox and mainly spoke Yiddish. It was these Jews who, after June 1941, bore the brunt of Operation Barbarossa and who were killed in far greater numbers, mostly by shootings, than those who died in the death camps. Indeed, three-quarters of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were already dead by the time an ever expanding death camp at Auschwitz came into full operation in the summer of 1943. Today we associate the Holocaust almost exclusively with Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, but the truth is that the vast majority of Jews killed never set foot in a concentration camp - and most camp victims were not Jews.

Listen to Episode 5 of Unknown Warriors to find out more about how today's historians have established a much more nuanced and complex Holocaust narrative.

If you think you know about WW2, it's time to think again.



An Understanding History Podcast

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