The Historiography of the Holocaust

Britain, the United States and the Holocaust 271
20 An early example was H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). From the late 1980s there has been a flood of
books using the Holocaust to explore the nature of humanity and morality in the
modern world written by those with both expertise and little knowledge of the subject
matter. See, for example, R.C. Baum, ‘Holocaust: Moral Indifference as the Form of
Modern Evil’, in Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time,
ed. A. Rosenberg and G. Meyers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988),
pp. 53–90; Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989);
B. Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
S. Friedländer, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1993); O. Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust,
Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
M. Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); N. Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy
after the Holocaust (London: Verso, 1998); J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the
Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); D. Blumenthal, The Banality of
Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and the Jewish Tradition (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999); and for an overview R. Bernstein, Radical
Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
21 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 122.
22 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 207.
23 Gryn, ‘A Spiritual and Moral Index’.
24 E. Rathbone, Rescue the Perishing (London: National Committee for Rescue from Nazi
Terror, 1943); V. Gollancz, Let My People Go (London: Gollancz, 1943). See Kushner,
The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Part II, and T. Kushner and K. Knox, Refugees
in an Age of Genocide: Global, National and Local Perspectives During the Twentieth
Century (London: Frank Cass, 1999), chapter 6 for an analysis of these activists, their
writings and their impact on state and society.
25 Ben-Gurion, quoted by J. Adams, Tony Benn (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 122.
26 Kushner, ‘The Memory of Belsen’, pp. 181–205; E. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The
Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (London and New York: Viking, 1995),
pp. 90–1; Berenbaum, The World Must Know, pp. 8–9; Philip Gourevitch, ‘Nightmare
on 15th Street’, The Guardian, 4 December 1999.
27 G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1953), pp. 406–7, 463–9.
28 L. Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. in French, 1951]), p. 245.
29 Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p. 193; Berenbaum, The World Must Know; Gourevitch,
‘Nightmare on 15th Street’; on the Imperial War Museum see D. Bloxham and
T. Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Racism: Cultural Imperialism, Genocide and Representation’,
Rethinking History, 2, 3 (1998), 353–6; and Kushner, ‘Oral History’.
30 For example, A. Morse, While Six Million Died (New York: Random House, 1968) and
A. Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (London: Institute of Race Relations/
Oxford University Press, 1964).
31 D. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–1941 (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) represented the first account based on
detailed, scholarly research; Sharf, The British Press and Jews Under Nazi Rule.
32 Morse, While Six Million Died (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), front cover.
33 For recent British press coverage, see D. Staunton, ‘Whitehall Sat on 1942 Goebbels
Genocide Speech’, Observer, 21 November 1993; M. Dynes, ‘Nazis Wanted British
Troops as Guards at Death Camps’, The Times, 27 November 1993, partly relating to
the release of material in PRO HW 1/929; T. Rayment, ‘Britain Barred Rescue Plan for