The Holocaust did not end when the camps were liberated. The killing stopped, gradually, between January and May 1945. The consequences continued to play out over decades. They are still playing out today. The Aftermath section covers the immediate post-war period and the longer arc that followed: what the survivors did with their lives, what the perpetrators did with theirs, what the world made of the evidence, and how the killing of European Jewry shaped the politics, the law and the moral language of the second half of the twentieth century.
Some of the aftermath material has its own dedicated sections elsewhere on this site. The Trials covers the post-war prosecutions, from Nuremberg through the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965 and the Eichmann Trial of 1961, plus the long tail of late-twentieth-century war crimes prosecutions. The Deniers covers Holocaust denial as a phenomenon and the rebuttals to specific denial claims. The Victims includes a Legacy section covering memorialisation, Holocaust education, and the contemporary politics of Holocaust memory. The pages here cover the topics that did not fit into those sections.
What is here
Displacement and the Founding of Israel covers the most consequential single political outcome of the Holocaust: the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the role that Holocaust survivors and the broader Jewish refugee question played in the international debate that produced it. The relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel is contested in modern political argument; this page sets out what the historical record actually shows.
What the Allies Knew and When covers the question of Allied knowledge of the killing programme during the war years, when the information became available, and what the Allied governments did with it. The question is sometimes approached as a moral indictment of Allied governments and sometimes as an exoneration; the page tries to set out what the documents show without pre-judging the conclusion.
The Language of the Holocaust covers the bureaucratic vocabulary the regime developed to describe and conceal what it was doing. The euphemisms, the technical terms, the deliberately abstract phrases that softened or hid the killing, are part of how the Holocaust was administered and how its perpetrators spoke about themselves. Understanding the language is part of understanding the operation.
What is not here
The post-war prosecutions of the perpetrators are in The Trials section. The continuing post-war argument over Holocaust denial is in The Deniers section. The Victims section covers Holocaust education, memorialisation and the contemporary politics of memory. The various individual figures of post-war Holocaust history, including writers, witnesses, prosecutors, perpetrators and historians, are covered on individual pages across the site.
The pages in this section are about the wider arc: the political and intellectual aftermath of the Holocaust, in the years and decades that followed, and the ways the killing of European Jewry has continued to shape what came next.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995