The Holocaust ended in 1945. Its consequences did not. The pages in this section address what the Holocaust has continued to mean across the eight decades since the camps were liberated: how it has been remembered and memorialised, how it has been taught and re-taught to successive generations, how the surviving victims and their descendants were compensated and how that compensation fell short of what was owed, and how the same patterns of antisemitism that produced the Holocaust have re-emerged in different forms in the contemporary world. The legacy is the proper subject of historical inquiry in its own right.
The four clusters in this section
Why It Still Matters addresses the contemporary case for sustained engagement with the Holocaust. The case has changed shape over the decades. In the immediate post-war period it was a case for international law and against impunity. By the 1960s it was a case for the survivors’ testimony before the witnesses began to die. In the 2020s it is a case against the social-media-driven distortion of the documentary record and against the political reuse of Holocaust imagery. The pages in this cluster address each of these as the contemporary forms of an older question.
Reparations and Restitution addresses the documented record of post-war compensation. The Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 between West Germany and Israel, the West German Wiedergutmachung programme that paid pensions and lump sums to surviving victims, the Swiss banking and insurance settlements of the 1990s, the Foundation EVZ that paid surviving slave labourers from 2000 onwards: these are the principal documented payment programmes. The cluster also addresses what the programmes did not pay for, where the documentary record of unpaid claims has been preserved, and what the deniers have made of the reparations question.
Education and Remembrance addresses what is now done in schools, in formal commemorative events, and in the technologies that have been built to preserve survivor testimony for the period after the survivors are gone. The USC Shoah Foundation’s archive of around 55,000 recorded testimonies, the Yad Vashem Names Database, the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the patchy national records of how Holocaust education is actually taught in schools across the democracies are the documented infrastructure on which the cluster reports.
Modern Antisemitism and Denial addresses what has happened to antisemitism since 1945. The cluster does not duplicate the dedicated denial section of the site (which addresses the specific claims of the deniers in detail). It addresses the wider phenomenon: the patterns of antisemitic violence and rhetoric that have re-emerged in the post-war democracies, the role of social media platforms in their re-emergence, the political and legal responses, and the question of how the post-war assumption that antisemitism had been defeated by 1945 has held up against the documented record of the years since.
Why this section sits where it does
The Victims section of this site is the section that documents who was killed, who they had been, what they had built, and what was lost. The Legacy cluster sits at the end of that section because the question of what the killing has continued to mean is part of what the killing was. The events themselves are documented elsewhere on the site. This section addresses the conversation those events have produced in the eighty years since.