1960 was the year that William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was published, selling 2 million copies in hardback and paperback in the US, and reaching an even wider audience through magazine serialisation and later television adaptation. It is interesting to note that Shirer (reflecting wider society at this time) did not use the term ‘the Holocaust’ in this book to refer to the extermination of the Jews – instead he used the phrase ‘the final solution’. But it wasn’t until Raul Hilberg’s monumental opus The Destruction of the European Jews came out in 1961 that the world had a defintive work of history which attempted a truly systemic analysis of the genocide. Although this was hugely influential among historians, the detail and length of the book (in three volumes – totalling over 1,300 pages) militated against a mass audience.
However, the televising of Eichmann’s trial in the same year, and Hannah Arendt’s brilliant study of that event and its wider meaning – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) – brought knowledge of the genocide to a far wider audience. It also refocussed attention on the perpetrators, but unlike Nuremberg, which had put the infamous Nazi leaders in the spotlight, Eichmann’s trial explored the lethality of what could be termed ‘the cogs in the machine’, the armies of lower-ranking functionaries, bureaucrats and planners, all needed to enable the ‘final solution’ to be carried out.
Concurrent with this trial, and directly influenced by it, Stanley Milgram began the famous experiments into ordinary people’s obedience to authority, which gave a strong, contemporary resonance to the way that people judged the Holocaust and particularly its perpetrators – bureaucrats in suits and ties could murder as easily as SS men with skulls on their uniforms. 1961 should be seen as a watershed year in how our societies began to change in relationship to the question of the Holocaust, for, in addition to the above developments, it was also the year that the greatest of all survivors’ accounts suddenly found a large readership. Just as Eichmann’s trial began, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man was finally translated into German and French, and began to sell in great quantities – fifteen years after Levi had written it, and fourteen years after its publication (with a print run of only 2,500 copies) by the small Italian press De Silva, the failure of which had led Levi to turn his back on writing, and return to his life as an industrial chemist.
The early and mid-1960s saw an enormous upsurge of interest in what was increasingly becoming known as ‘the Holocaust’, witnessed by a renewed desire to bring perpetrators to justice – evidenced by a series of new trials in Germany, such as the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which which took place between December 1963 and August 1965, and the first Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf between October 1964 and September 1965. Simon Wiesenthal had been working since the end of the war attempting to locate Nazi perpetrators and bring them to justice, and in 1961 he was able to establish the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna, which gave him greater resources. In France, at the same time, Beate and Serge Klarsfeld also began to campaign for Nazi and Vichy perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Albert Speer’s release from Spandau prison in 1966 and the publication of his Inside the Third Reich in 1970 generated huge media coverage, and put the spotlight back on the Nazi leadership. A quieter, though equally significant, development of the 1960s was that this was the decade that survivors of the Holocaust began to find their voices. Or rather, as we’ve already seen in Primo Levi’s case, these voices finally started to find publishers and a receptive audience – another example being Jean Améry’s searing work At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, published in 1966. Yad Vashem had recorded only seventeen survivor memoirs published up until 1960; ten years later this figure had leapt to 267 published testimonies.
The 1960s and early 1970s were also the decades which saw a dramatic increase in both the quantity and quality of historians’ analyses of the Holocaust; this was the era when notable works were published by Yehuda Bauer, Martin Broszat, Saul Friedländer, Hans Mommsen and Lucy Dawidowicz among others. It is also intriguing at this time to see a move towards more focussed studies on specific institutions in relation to the Holocaust – for instance, Friedländer publishing his work on the Catholic Church in the war years, Pie XII et le IIIe Reich, Documents in 1964, Mommsen writing about The Civil Service in the Third Reich in 1966, and Broszat and Helmut Krausnick writing a pioneering study of the SS – Anatomy of the SS State – in 1970. George Steiner also published two extraordinary and influential collections of essays around this time – Language and Silence (1967) and In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) – which looked at the wider cultural implications of the Holocaust, taking up Adorno’s famous question of whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz.fn6 By the late 1960s, ‘the Holocaust’ had begun to establish itself as the most widely used term to refer to the genocide, as can be seen in the title of Nora Levin’s book published in 1968 – The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 – and a New York Times article by Eliot Fremont-Smith from the same year called ‘Books of the Times: Moral Trauma and the Holocaust’.
Over the last forty years there has been an exponential growth in the cultural visibility of the Holocaust, across all media – so much so, that to attempt to track the key works out of thousands of books and articles and films is almost impossible.fn7 But one striking development over the last decades has been the way that representations through television and film have brought it into the cultural mainstream, in a way that simply wasn’t the case in the 1950s and 60s – a transition that has taken us from the pages of history books to the local multiplex. And though many were, rightly, critical of the historical inaccuracies of the 1978 TV series Holocaust starring Meryl Streep, the impact of such a series – especially in America and Germany – was considerable. In a similar way, with all its limitations the film of Schindler’s List fifteen years later also brought a younger, mass audience to the subject for the first time. And for anyone who felt film treatments of the subject were inherently problematic, in 1985 Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah was released, bringing together interviews with survivors, perpetrators and witnesses in a way that had never been done before, and has never been done since.
The 1990s and 2000s witnessed what could be called the ‘institutionalising’ of the Holocaust, particularly through education programmes and memorialisation. In 1994, the Shoah Foundation was established by Steven Spielberg to document all possible survivor testimony on film before it was too late – 52,000 video testimonies with survivors were recorded between 1994 and 1999. The vast growth in interest of the previous decades became formalised through the establishment of many new museums focussing on the Holocaust throughout the world, the following list of which are just a sample of the most significant:
1992: the Sydney Jewish Museum opens in Australia
1993: Yad Vashem establishes its International School for Holocaust Studies
1993: the United States Holocuast Memorial Museum opens in Washington DC
1996: the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance opens in Mechelen, Belgium (later renamed the Kazerne Dossin)