Postwar

416

Giuliana Tedeschi is quoted by Nicola Caracciolo in Uncertain Refuge: Italy and the Jews During the Holocaust (University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 121.

417

In post-war Britain, an unusually thin or sickly person might be described as looking ‘like something out of Belsen’. In France, fairground chambers of horror were labelled ‘Buchenwalds’—as an inducement to voyeuristic trade.

418

See The Times Literary Supplement for October 4th 1996. Jews were not the first people in Britain to opt for discretion where the Holocaust was concerned. The wartime government under Churchill chose not to deploy information about the death camps in its propaganda against Germany lest this incite an increase in anti-Semitic feelings—already quite high in some parts of London, as wartime intelligence reports had noted.

419

Especially in America. In 1950 the Displaced Persons’ Commission of the US Congress stated that ‘The Baltic Waffen SS units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities and qualifications from the German SS. Therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States’. The Baltic Waffen SS had been among the most brutal and enthusiastic when it came to torturing and killing Jews on the Eastern Front; but in the novel circumstances of the Cold War they were of course ‘our’ Nazis. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Cohen of Rice University for this information.

420

Except of course in Israel.

421

In October 1991, following the desecration of tombs in Vienna’s Jewish cemetery, Gallup polled Austrians on their attitude to Jews: 20 percent thought ‘positions of authority’ should be closed to Jews; 31 percent declared that they ‘would not want a Jew as a neighbour’; fully 50 percent were ready to agree with the proposition that ‘Jews are responsible for their past persecution’.

422

The Poles happily agreed—for these purposes Warsaw saw no impediment to defining Jews as Poles…

423

Ondergang was published in English in 1968 as The Destruction of the Dutch Jews.

424

See Sonia Combe, Archives interdites: Les peurs francaises face a l’histoire contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), p. 14.

425

Professor Paxton of Columbia University, who had initiated historical investigation into Vichy’s crimes nearly a quarter of a century earlier (when most of his French colleagues were otherwise engaged), took a less monastic view of his professional calling and gave important testimony.

426

When US President Ronald Reagan, on a visit to West Germany in 1985, was advised to avoid the military cemetery at Bitburg (site of a number of SS graves) and pay his respects at a concentration camp instead, Chancellor Kohl wrote to warn him that this ‘would have a serious psychological effect on the friendly sentiments of the German people for the United States of America.’ The Americans duly capitulated; Reagan visited Belsen and Bitburg…

427

Quoted by Ian Buruma in ‘Buchenwald’, Granta 42, 1992.

428