The Historiography of the Holocaust

274 Tony Kushner
69 Laqueur, The Terrible Secret; D. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming
of the Holocaust 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986). For an alternative approach,
see Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, chapter 4.
70 M. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Michael Joseph, 1981), p. 92 and elsewhere
repeats the phrase. The television documentary version directed by Rex
Bloomstein in 1982 stresses the elusive nature of Auschwitz even further, and B. Rogers,
‘Auschwitz and the British’ continues this tradition. For a critique see D. Engel, In the
Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
71 Sharf and Lipstadt, for example, relied on press cuttings. For a social history approach,
see T. Kushner, ‘Different Worlds: British Perceptions of the Final Solution during the
Second World War’, in The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, ed. D. Cesarani
(London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 246–67.
72 Beller, ‘“Your Mark is Our Disgrace”’, 218–21; M. Burleigh, ‘Synonymous with
Murder’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 March 1995.
73 M. Smith, Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1999), the paperback edition of which announced that it was ‘the book that
uncovered Britain’s Schindler’. The phrase was used earlier on ‘Today’, BBC Radio 4,
26 February 1999. On the book’s immense success, see Jewish Chronicle, 23 July and
19 November 1999. Foley was later granted status by Yad Vashem as a ‘Righteous
Among Nations’. See Jewish Chronicle, 22 October 1999. On Nicholas Winton, see
‘Britain’s Schindler’, BBC Radio 4, 7 June 1999, written and presented by myself.
Both the producer and I objected to the title, which was overruled by the BBC.
The account of Winton and of British refugee policy was more complex than the
title suggested; A. Karpf, ‘The Future Prospects for Remembering the Past’, Jewish
Chronicle, 2 July 1999. Winton was subsequently knighted. See The Guardian, 1 January
2003.
74 Levine, ‘From Indifference to Activism’, passim.
75 Smith, Foley, pp. vi, 169; Jewish Chronicle, 23 July 1999: ‘The saintly spy of Berlin’.
76 D. Cesarani, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Towards a Taxonomy of Rescuers in a
“Bystander” Country: Britain 1933–45’, in ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust, ed. Cesarani
and Levine, pp. 28–56.
77 Jewish Chronicle, 18 June 1999.
78 Kushner and Knox, Refugees in an Age of Genocide, pp. 154–7.
79 Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue.
80 In the new introduction to the paperback edition (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1.
Rubinstein comments himself how ‘It sharply divided critics, and I became used to
reading reviews consisting of either fulsome praise or venomous hostility’. David
Cesarani has commented on the division representing also those who have and have
not carried out archive work on the subject. On ‘Lateline’, Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, 20 July 1997.
81 Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex: Summer Directive 2000, ‘Coming to
Britain’.
82 N. Stone, ‘Could the Allies Have Saved Them?’, The Guardian, 3 July 1997.
83 For the increasing fascination in relation to the historiography of the Allies and the
Holocaust, see R. Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British
and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), a book that has received
widespread attention and popular success. See also the second edition of Wasserstein,
Britain and the Jews of Europe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999) which includes
newly available intelligence material.