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ABSTRACT
This article traces how the Holocaust has been responded to at a political level in Britain from 1945 to the present. It includes key moments such as the liberation of the camps in 1945, the Eichmann Trial in 1961, compensation schemes from the mid-1960s, and more recent forms of pedagogic and memorialization issues since the 1990s, ending with the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission (2014 onwards). While the focus is on the official sphere, attention is given throughout to wider cultural and social trends and contexts for the whole period. It emphasizes the contrasting meanings and politics associated with British confrontations with the Holocaust in the postwar era, using for the more recent period especially the 2016 UCL survey What Do Students Know and Understand about the Holocaust?
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Tony Kushner is Marcus Sieff Professor of the History of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He is the author of eight monographs, and a leading authority on the history of Holocaust history and memory in Britain. He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and deputy editor of Jewish Culture and History.
Notes
1. Freeman, “Boris is Blond.”
2. Johnson, interviewed in the Sunday Telegraph, 15 May 2016.
3. Freeman, “Boris is Blond.” On the Vel’d’Hiv roundup of May 1941 and more generally, see Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II.
4. Interview in the Spectator, 13 July 1990. See Guardian, 13 July 1990 for details of the political fallout of these comments.
5. In a BBC Radio London interview, 28 April 2016, reported in Evening Standard, 28 April 2016.
6. Ibid.
7. Livingstone, reported in the Guardian, 30 April 2016; Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.
8. Freeman, “Boris is Blond.”
9. Freeman, “Nobody Wants to Be the Bad Guy.”
10. Johnson, The Churchill Factor.
11. Spectator, 13 July 1990.
12. Foster et al., What Do Students Know.
13. Ibid., 2.
14. For wider exploration of this relationship, see Bunting, “Britain and the Holocaust.”
15. Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap, xv.
16. On the liberation, see Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp; Shepherd, After Daybreak; and Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap. On its memory, see Reilly et al., Belsen in History and Memory; and Bardgett and Cesarani, Belsen 1945.
17. Churchill, in Hansard HC vol. 410, cols. 389–90, 19 April 1945.
18. Ibid., and Chuter Ede diaries, 19 and 20 April 1945 in MS 59700, British Library.
19. Buchenwald: The Report of a Parliamentary Delegation, 3,7.
20. Eisenhower, letter to George Marshall, text reproduced on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, “Holocaust Encyclopedia,” under Ohrsdruf. https://www.ushmm.org/. Accessed 22 May 2016.
21. Haggith, “The 1945 Documentary,” 181–97. See also National Archives, INF 1/636.
22. Sontag, On Photography, 19–20.
23. Richmond, “Diary.” Richmond was in the circle of the Regal Cinema, High Street, Sidcup, Kent.
24. Sillitoe, Memoirs of a Philo-Semite, based on the Parkes Centenary Lecture, “Jewish Influences on My Writing,” 6 March 1996.
25. Frederic Raphael, “The Worst of Times,” Independent, 2 March 1993.
26. Mass-Observation Archive, The Keep (hereafter M-O A), D5270, 21 April 1945.
27. M-O A, File Report 2248 on German atrocities.
28. “The Edge of the Ceiling,” in Garner, The Voice That Thunders. For comment on these memories for one born a generation later, see the chapter by writer Ali Smith in Wagner, First Light.
29. “One Pair of Eyes: All Systems Go – Alan Garner,” BBC, 1972, director Lawrence Moore, in BFI DVD, Red Shift with notes by Paul Vanezis.
30. Frank Davey, “Children from Belsen Have London Feast,” News Chronicle, 6 December 1945. See similarly, “Children from Belsen,” Southern Daily Echo, 31 October 1945.
31. “Belsen Orphans in England,” Jewish Chronicle, 2 November 1945.
32. Panter-Downes, “A Quiet Life in Hampshire.”
33. Ibid., and see also Panter-Downes, “In an English Country Mansion Live the Children Who Don’t Trust Anybody,” Sunday Dispatch, 7 April 1946.
34. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 195.
35. “Mockery of Belsen,” People, 7 October 1945.
36. H.H. Prestige, minute 30 October 1945, National Archives, HO 213/618.
37. T.H. Tilling, letter to Miss Markham, 25 March 1946, National Archives, HO 213/695.
38. Ibid.
39. Sunday Express, 6 January 1946.
40. Tilling to Markham, 25 March 1946, National Archives, HO 213/695.
41. A. Judge, memorandum, 21 May 1946, in National Archives, HO 213/695.
42. The files on this murder are closed until 2022 and 2044 respectively. See National Archives, ASSI 13/124 and ASS1 88/20.
43. Paytress, Bolan, chapter 1.
44. Britain’s Promise to Remember.
45. David Cameron, ITV News, 30 July 2015. For favorable comment, see Daily Mail, 31 July 2015, and for Harriet Harman’s critique, see the Guardian, 31 July 2015.
46. Britain’s Promise to Remember, 5 reported by Mick Davis from the first meeting of the Holocaust Commission in January 2014.
47. Ibid., 9.
48. Ibid.
49. Cesarani, “How Post-War Britain Reflected,” 101. This article builds on studies such as Baron, “The Holocaust and American Public Memory.”
50. Cesarani, “How Post-War Britain Reflected,” 118; Lord Russell of Liverpool, Scourge of the Swastika. The publisher’s comments are from the 1958 edition.
51. Reitlinger, The Final Solution. Review in the Manchester Guardian. For a summary of the reviews, see Wiener Library Bulletin, May–August 1953.
52. Cook, We Followed Our Stars.
53. Cook, Safe Passage, foreword by Anne Sebba.
54. Smith, Heroes of the Holocaust, 69–84.
55. Castle, The Password is Courage. See also Kushner, “Loose Connections?” 56–7.
56. James Jordan is carrying out extensive research on the BBC and the Holocaust as part of wider work on the BBC and the Jews. “This Is Your Life” is an important element of this project. Ida Cook’s program was broadcast on 11 March 1956 and Charles Coward’s on 24 October 1960. See Jordan, “And the Trouble is Where to Begin,” 90–114.
57. Rathbone, Rescue the Perishing; Gollancz, Let My People Go; James Parkes, “The Massacre of the Jews: Future Vengeance or Present Help?”, January 1943, unpublished article in University of Southampton archives, MS 60/9/5/1.
58. Gollancz, Let My People Go, 32.
59. Gollancz, “Nowhere to Lay Their Heads”, 1.
60. Broadcast from Exodus 1947, National Archives, CO 537/2400.
61. Memorandum, 11 August 1946, National Archives, CO 537/1797.
62. Cabinet meeting, 23 August 1961, CAB 21/5589.
63. Hansard HC vol. 642, cols. 202–3, 13 June 1961.
64. Macmillan draft letter to Henderson, June 1941, and Woods letter to Mason, 29 June 1961, CAB 21/5589.
65. G.F. Hiller draft memorandum, “Aid to Jews in German-occupied Europe During the War Years” (June/July 1961), in National Archives, CAB 21/5589. See also Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue.
66. Sharf, The British Press.
67. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe; London, Whitehall and the Jews.
68. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 183, 208.
69. Schrafstetter, “Gentlemen, the Cheese Is All Gone!” 28.
70. I. Vair-Turnbull of the Foreign Office to W. Macpherson, 1 September 1964, National Archives, FO 950/1261.
71. See FCO 64/56.
72. This is summed up in National Archives, PREM 13/2274.
73. Schrafstetter, “Gentlemen, the Cheese Is All Gone!” 42.
74. National Archives, FO 950/1100.
75. Evidence given on the fourth day of the trial, 20 September 1945. For transcripts, see http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Contents.html. Accessed 7 June 2016. See also National Archives, WO 235/24 for his evidence.
76. For a thorough and thoughtful overview, see Pearce, Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain.
77. Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust.
78. Ibid., 2.
79. Britain’s Promise to Remember, 21.
80. Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust, passim.
81. Britain’s Promise to Remember, 9.
82. See, for example, the debate on Channel 4 news, 4 May 2016, between former Kind, Helena Pick, and Conservative Sir Edward Leigh.
83. Jewish Chronicle, 1 February 2002.
84. Foster et al., What Do Students Know, 53–4.
85. Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust, 11–14.
86. Britain’s Promise to Remember, 9; Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust, 16.
87. Petersen, “How British Television Inserted the Holocaust into Britain’s War Memory.”
88. Cesarani, Britain and the Holocaust, 15–16. For MI5 reports, see National Archives, KV 4/78 and HO 45/22399.
89. Olusoga, “Why Has a Memorial.”
90. This reality challenges the optimism, however well meaning, in Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory.
91. Britain’s Promise to Remember, 23.
92. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 505.