The Historiography of the Holocaust

258 Tony Kushner
comes back to Europe.’ 23 The power of the emotional and ethical engagement
with the Holocaust has led, as will emerge, to ongoing difficulties within historiography,
especially in developing one that is neither accusatory nor defensive
nor simplistic in outlining motives for action or inaction. The specific historiography
itself, however, developed slowly and unevenly in Britain and the US.
During the war a group of dedicated campaigners in Britain, especially the
MP Eleanor Rathbone and the publisher Victor Gollancz, attempted to mobilize
public opinion in Britain to force the government and international bodies to
recognize and publicize the plight of European Jewry and from there to take
whatever action was possible to help rescue the ‘victims of Nazi terror’. Their
campaigns and proposals for action were influential on Jewish and non-Jewish
activists in the US. 24 Although campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic were
prolific, their work and writings were largely forgotten in the immediate postwar
period; they themselves rarely referred to their activities. Outside Zionist
circles both within and without Palestine, for whom Britain was now ‘enemy
number 1’, there was no mention of the campaigners and the embarrassing
issues they had raised in the war. In the newly independent state of Israel the
indifference and antipathy of the Anglo-American world to the fate of the Jews
became part of national mythology. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s response
to the call for restraint from leading left-wingers in Britain at the time of the
Suez Crisis in 1956 makes this clear:
We still recall that there were leaders of the Labour Party who did not take
seriously Hitler’s threat physically to exterminate the Jewish race until it was
too late. Six million Jews perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi dictator.
I am sorry that you do not see the danger of the Fascist dictator of Egypt. 25
In contrast, in Britain and the US, a more comfortable counter-mythology
developed that nothing was known and that only with the liberation of the
camps did knowledge become available. Ironically, the liberation of the western
camps, rather than prompting questions of what could have been done to stop
them, was more often than not used to show the moral certainty of the British
and American war effort. Images from the camps were ‘proof positive’ that it
had indeed been a ‘just war’, most famously summarized by the remarks
of General Dwight Eisenhower when entering Ohrdruf concentration camp on
12 April 1945: ‘We are told that the American soldier does not know what he
was fighting for. Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against.’ These
words are given prominence at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
accompanying images of the camp liberations; indeed, Philip Gourevitch has
commented that ‘Ike’s remarks could serve as the museum’s motto’. 26
In the early historiography of the Holocaust, in works such as Gerald Reitlinger’s
The Final Solution (1953), the only major mention of the western allies was in