David Irving’s Action Report On-line (12 July 1999)

today’s AR-online The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick , Eric Chinski (Editor) List Price: .00 • Our Price: .90 at a glance You Save: .10 (30%) Hardcover – 320 pages (June 1999) Houghton Mifflin Co (Trd); ISBN: 0395840090 Review July 12, 1999 Holocaust Creationism By Jon Wiener BETWEEN 1945 and 1947 the United States underwent perhaps the most breathtaking ideological transformation in its history.

“The Good War,” which had united America with Russia to save Western civilization from Nazi barbarism, ended, and within two years the incarnation of evil had been relocated: Germany was suddenly our ally in defending freedom from the USSR. This astonishing ideological shift was accomplished by invoking the theory of totalitarianism, which held that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were “essentially alike.”

Whatever the intellectual strengths or weaknesses of the theory, it served to marginalize talk about what we today call the Holocaust: The suggestion that the destruction of European Jewry was the defining feature of the Nazi regime undermined the logic of the cold war by denying the essential similarity of Hitler and Stalin . The dizzying reversal redefined discussion of German war crimes as evidence of disloyalty to the “free world.”

A riveting new book by historian Peter Novick describes how “the Holocaust” as we speak of it today–a singular event–barely existed in Jewish consciousness or anybody else’s at the end of World War II and for many years afterward. American Jews had learned by 1945 about the fate of “the 6 million.” But for Jews and non-Jews alike, it was the overall course of the war and the deaths of 50 million people that were the dominant facts.

Jews understood themselves to be one group among many that suffered immense and heartbreaking losses. During the fifties, Novick shows, the Holocaust was not held up as a source of historical lessons but rather as something terrible that had ended. The principal instruction the public took from the war arose not from Hitler but from Hiroshima–an urgent theme underscored by civil defense drills and bomb-shelter hysteria.

Since Americans were both the perpetrators of atomic bombing and potential victims, it made sense that nuclear anxieties should dominate public consciousness about world politics. So Jews in the fifties weren’t talking about the Holocaust or defining themselves in primary terms as the victims of Hitler. They sought integration into American society and culture; they embraced the fifties liberal “family of man” ethos.

Now, Novick poses a simple question: How, then, did consciousness of the Holocaust, evident most recently in the enormous triumph of Schindler’s List, become so pervasive in American culture? Novick, a University of Chicago professor who previously wrote a prizewinning study of the history profession, also examines what is most puzzling to him about this consciousness: The Holocaust didn’t happen here, and survivors and their descendants make up but a tiny proportion of the Jewish population.

Novick’s contention is that “the Holocaust” was constructed twenty-five years after the war in a way that would not have been recognizable to Jews or gentiles in 1945. Indeed, Novick shows that while the Holocaust as such was hardly talked about from 1945 to 1965, from the seventies on it became increasingly central to Jewish self-consciousness.

Despite the fact that after World War II Jews became the best-educated, most politically effective and wealthiest ethnic group in American society, official Judaism since the seventies has increasingly drawn on the Holocaust to portray Jews as victims, pitting them against other groups seeking redress–especially through affirmative action–for their own victimization.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington becomes one of Novick’s biggest concerns in this regard. “There surely isn’t going to be a second Jewish institution on the Mall, presenting an alternative image of the Jew,” he writes. The official American representation, the most expensive and best Jewish museum in the world, portrays Jews as victims and gentiles as either persecutors or guilty bystanders. Novick has to ask the irresistible question: Is it good for the Jews?

And is it good for anybody else? Novick begins with an analysis of wartime policy. During the war, Jews eagerly embraced the Allies’ ideological claim that Nazi Germany was the enemy not just of them but of “free men everywhere.” Jews understood that throughout their long history, tyrants had periodically arisen who persecuted and killed them; but Jewish life would survive Hitler the way it had survived all his predecessors.

For those concerned with world Jewish issues, working for the creation of a Jewish state took precedence over the rescue of Europe’s Jews. American Jews accepted David Ben-Gurion ‘s belief that creation of a Jewish state was the best way to make future tragedies impossible. In this context, Jews supported FDR’s conduct of the European war with enthusiasm and gratitude. This strand of Novick’s argument runs against David Wyman ‘s important and well-known book The Abandonment of the Jews.

Wyman argues that the Roosevelt Administration willfully disregarded rescue opportunities that could have succeeded, that anti-Semitism was the main problem and that inaction by American Jews also played a role. The “failure of rescue” is also a prominent theme in the Holocaust museum on the Mall.

Novick presents a strong case, however, that rescue efforts wouldn’t have worked, and that trying to bomb the Auschwitz gas chambers (much discussed by historians today) would have been a bad idea because precision bombing was a myth; nobody wanted to be blamed for bombing tens of thousands of Jews at Auschwitz–what could be regarded as helping Hitler kill Jews.

In Novick’s judgment, rescue efforts might have saved 1 to 2 percent of Jews from the ovens–“a worthwhile achievement indeed”–but he relentlessly documents the fact that rescue was barely mentioned by Jewish organizations. “Abandonment of the Jews,” he concludes, would have been an incomprehensible phrase at the time, because no one believed rescue of foreign civilian populations was an obligation for the Allies.

With only a few exceptions, Jews concurred with the goal of the Roosevelt Administration and its allies: to force the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. That was the best way to help the European Jews who were still alive. All other objectives, including rescue, had to be subordinated to it. Novick then provides a fascinating picture of the differences between postwar Jewish culture in America and that of today.

Talk about the Holocaust during the early postwar years was “something of an embarrassment,” indeed something seen as inconsistent with American ideals. Only the Communists worked to keep alive the memory of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate the Jews–part of their fight against German rearmament. Official Jewish thinking in that era was evident in the response to proposals for a Holocaust memorial in New York City made in the late forties by prominent Jewish individuals.

The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League , the American Jewish Congress and other official voices all agreed: Such a monument would be “a perpetual memorial to the weakness and defenselessness of the Jewish people” and thus “not in the best interests of Jewry.”

Jews’ desire to escape from the “victim” schema was perhaps best dramatized by an incident from the grotesque daytime TV show Queen for a Day, in which contestants competed for the most miserable story: A Birkenau survivor said, “Each time I look down at my left arm and see my tattoo I am reminded of my terrible past.If only my tattoo could be removed!” The audience, Novick reports, voted enthusiastically in favor of an award of cosmetic surgery.

There was, of course, one monument of nascent Holocaust consciousness in the fifties: The Diary of Anne Frank, brought to the stage in 1955 and the screen in 1959. But those productions emphasized Anne’s “universalism” and upbeat optimism and played down her Jewishness. Onstage and onscreen, Anne proclaimed, “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer…sometimes one race…sometimes another.” At the time this was precisely the way American Jews wanted their story told.

But with the rise of Holocaust consciousness since the eighties, those productions have come under brutal attack. Cynthia Ozick wrote in The New Yorker in 1997 that the universalizing of Anne’s story had gone too far, so that it might have been better if the diary had been “burned, vanished, lost.” The story of such a monumental reversal in official Jewish thinking occupies the second part of Novick’s book. Where did the concept of “the Holocaust” as a distinct entity come from?

Novick’s answer is that it derives from the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the first time the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews was presented to the public as distinct from Nazi barbarism in general. Israeli tactics in kidnapping Eichmann and bringing him to Israel for trial had initially aroused considerable opposition: The New Republic recommended that Israel “confess error and hand Eichmann