Gaming the Holocaust Paradigm?

In the counterfactual game set in the s after the Nazis have won wwii , Wolfenstein hero Blazkowicz infiltrates a Nazi camp to liberate a brilliant Jewish scientist. Critics and gamers have identified a number of reasons for the Holocaust gaming taboo. Mainstream games with attractive graphics are expensive and therefore game developers tend to copy and fine-tune previously successful formats rather than launching radically new aesthetics and content matter. Moreover, a lot of fast-paced, action-oriented video game violence thrives on simple plot structures that seem to preclude the kind of complex narrative explanations scholars use to account for events like the Final Solution.

Finally, the gaming industry lacks auteur figures such as Lanzmann, Spielberg or Tarantino who can more easily transgress limits of historical taste. Given the cultural prominence of video games in general and games with historical themes in particular it amounts to a strange case of Holocaust denial in reverse that no sophisticated game about the topic yet exists. And that intimate knowledge of past actors, may they be victims, perpetrators or bystanders, offers in principle great potential for self-critical memory politics. The gaming industry, focused on a few particularly profitable markets and dominated by two dozen companies, clearly belongs to the regimented memory culture.

In the world of Tencent, Sony and Microsoft, the formal regimes of oblivion and containment, translated into effective processes of self-censorship, are clearly still functioning. That raises intriguing questions about digital Holocaust memory in the more fluid and flexible cultural digital contexts of social media and academia.

In crafting an identity for itself, the emerging field of digital memory studies follows in the footsteps of other academic disciplines. The proponents of the new field highlight historical developments that cannot be successfully studied by existing scholarly strategies — namely the digital revolution with the instruments of traditional memory studies — and showcase a new set of intellectual tools better suited for the job at hand. In the post-broadcast era there is no collective to speak of, at least not in the way in which television used to aggregate consumers into audiences through narratives and media events.

For the same reason, there are also no clearly identifiable private or public spheres. That job requires an intimate, affective, and symbiotic relationship to digital technology and it is often the machine that dictates the rhythm of communication. Since transhuman selves are immersed in expansive networks always in the state of becoming, digital memory also obliterates the conventional differentiation between archives and lived historical culture with serious consequences for the social construction of time.

It might take forceful memorial anachronisms such as cosmopolitan memory with its fictions of righteous permanence to launch effective challenges of existing memory regimes. However, for those questions to become relevant Holocaust memory would first have to leave the confines of formalised, institutionalized and regimented digital memory. Given the prominence of the education theme in Holocaust memory it is not surprising that websites of applicable institutions abound with teaching guidelines, online courses and lessons plans adapted to all kinds of curricular contexts.

Most of the established institutions provide teaching resources that are conservative, predictable and uninspiring in content and form.


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There are exceptions — some problematic, others truly innovative. Yet the platform does present a wealth of visual and historical information in an accessible albeit only rudimentary interactive format. As Yad Vashem points out: In this specific case, it is not the laudable search for the new digital teaching tools which constitutes a problem, but the troublesome race to the bottom of the teaching pyramid that seeks to expand the realm of Holocaust memory by enlisting younger and younger captive audiences, for instance by way of digital technology deemed particularly attractive to children.

Faced with the self-fabricated dilemma of either falsifying history or traumatizing children, silence could be an excellent temporary option. A second exception is the pathbreaking IWitness initiative of the usc Shoah Foundation. The students are furthermore encouraged to enter their films in the yearly IWitness Video competition.

The winning entries of powerfully demonstrate that the students, giving the choice, are ready to leave behind the history of the Holocaust. Time and again, the films take a short clip from survivor testimony out of its historical context and use it as a jumping off point to engage with pressing present-day concerns such as poverty, homelessness, mental illness, animal rights, self-help and human solidarity. They represent an interesting hybrid: The results indicate that, in an appropriate communicative-didactive setting, handing over interpretive power to transhuman memory amateurs should give less cause for ethical concern than, for example, encouraging designated memory experts to craft Holocaust curricula for young children.

At the same time, the Shoah Foundation has pursued ambitious transhuman experiments designed to retain power of interpretation for the institution. For a number of years, the most digitally advanced institution of Holocaust memory has been tinkering with Holocaust holograms. The developers combine visual testimony of survivors of the Shoah, taped over the last few decades, with highly sophisticated computer software. At some point during the communicative process, the ingenious hybrid of dialogical questions and monological answers breaks down.

The holograms are a fantastic attempt to stem the tide of history and decelerate the historicization of Holocaust memory. The culturally constructed aura of the Holocaust survivors has been a crucial component of Holocaust education in the past decades. The holograms embody the insight that Holocaust survivors as we encountered them on tv or in video testimonies represent a media figure which should, in principle, be able to survive the biological deaths of the actual survivors.

It will be interesting to follow the careers of the holograms. If their developers and the protagonists of digital memory studies read contemporary culture correctly the holograms could become exoskeletal media stars. But it is also possible that the figure of the survivor, in its new digital disguise, does not attain the same media success that its analogue predecessor enjoyed on the tv screens over several decades. In the past, the aura of the survivors depended on a specific media effect. The viewers had to be able to entertain the illusion that they could meet the survivors in their everyday lives and talk to them about the extraordinary past.

Through small, seemingly insignificant markers such as clothing, speech, body language, lighting and background, the coverage conveyed a powerful sense of historical simultaneity. The words and images on the screen created an atmosphere of co-presence, placing survivor and viewer in the same time frame and social universe. Despite their technological sophistication, the holograms cannot be effectively and continuously brought up to date; they might always carry small, yet pervasive markers of historical non-simultaneity.

Therefore, they are perhaps unable to fulfil the shuttling-service between past and present that the mediated survivors of the tv coverage of the s and s accomplished on a regular basis. In the era of analogue and electronic media, nobody managed to invent media aesthetics that could prevent their own historicization, but perhaps that rule no longer applies in an age of hyperconnectivity.

Either way, the holograms only amount to a clever simulation of true digital interactivity. The tension between regimented and emergent digital memories, i. In August , the ushmm took the Olympic Games in Brazil as an opportunity to enlighten its , followers via Facebook about the Berlin Olympics, reporting in a series of 15 entries about the partial exclusion of Jews and the denigration of black athletes by Nazi authorities. The posts generally elicited hundreds of likes, several dozen shares and a handful of comments each.

Occasionally, the coverage was interrupted by more current concerns. The ushmm pr officers had more luck with an entry on 11 August, deploring the suffering of civilians in the besieged city of Aleppo, Syria. The lively comments are particularly intriguing, documenting multi-directional memory in action as commentators addressed the important questions of who is to be blamed for and what is to be done about the war crimes in Syria.

Many users voiced massive frustration with government variously highlighting the failure of local and regional leadership in the Middle East, the flawed foreign policy of the us , and, more specifically, the particular responsibility of the Obama administration. In this context, commentators also discussed immigration, offered prayers and time and again deplored the suffering of innocent children. It was a lively, at times contentious discussion containing hardly any comments dealing with Holocaust history. The successful entry about Syria raises interesting questions about the relevance of historical precedent in political communication and the role of Holocaust institutions in shaping communicative memory.

The subscribers of the ushmm feed and their Facebook friends probably share a relatively strong interest in history, but the explicit historical references included in the comments deal with the very recent past; only two commentators create analogies to wwii history. The Nazi past does not appear to resonate strongly with ushmm followers trying to make sense of the war in Syria. Moreover and more important for our purposes, having successfully triggered a debate, the ushmm stays completely silent during subsequent discussions.

Throughout the month of August , ushmm only once responded to a commentator providing specific historical information. Otherwise it stayed above the Facebook flow and fray even when specifically prompted by its Facebook friends to respond or take a position. Put into more abstract terms, the Facebook feed of the ushmm is the place where the carefully balanced, politically correct cosmopolitan Holocaust memory comes in direct, dysfunctional contact with the kinds of antagonistic and agonistic memories that pervade everyday life.

The communication strategy of the ushmm makes perfect sense. Like their professional colleagues across the globe in the business of Holocaust memory, the managers at the ushmm are heavily dependent on government subsidies and private philanthropy. They have a lot to lose and nothing to gain by politicizing their activities, because negative press coverage would alienate sponsors, endanger their business model and jeopardize the value of their brands.

But the purposeful depolitization of genocide memory has important negative consequences. Rather, the activities are fabulously well suited for preventing the kind of black hole of Holocaust memory that existed roughly between and Unfortunately, these efforts do not seem to accomplish the desired results. They often had a propaganda or mobilizing motive, and usually remained generalized.

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Even so, Kershaw remains adamant that Hitler's role was decisive and indispensable in the unfolding of the "Final Solution. In a letter dated Hitler mentions that part of the ultimate aim of a strong national government must "unshakably be the removal of the Jews". Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows.

Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews. We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November The day of reckoning has come. And we say that the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.

If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.

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In the following widely cited speech made on 30 January , Hitler says to the Reichstag:. I want to be a prophet again today: According to historian Klaus Hildebrand, moral responsibility for the Holocaust resides with Hitler and was nothing less than the culmination of his pathological hatred of the Jews, which for all intents and purposes formed the basis of Nazi genocide and drove the regime to pursue its racial-eliminationist goals.

This led to the Wannsee Conference held on 20 January , where Heydrich formally announced that genocide of the Jews of Europe was now official Reich policy.


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  • Although the Nazi regime is often depicted as a super-centralized vertically hierarchical state, individual initiative was an important element in how Nazi Germany functioned. This was a coordinated effort among the SS and its sprawling police apparatus with the Reich ministries and the national railways, all under the supervision of the Nazi Party. The extent to which the officers of the regular German military knew of the Final Solution has been much debated.

    Political imperatives in postwar Germany led to the army being generally absolved from responsibility, apart from the handful of "Nazi generals" such as Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel who were tried and hanged at Nuremberg. The Crimes of the Wehrmacht" [k] showed the extent to which the military was involved in the Holocaust. It was particularly difficult for commanders on the eastern front to avoid knowing what was happening in the areas behind the front.

    Many individual soldiers photographed the massacres of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen. Other front-line officers went through the war without coming into direct contact with the machinery of extermination, choosing to focus narrowly on their duties and not noticing the wider context of the war. Although the Holocaust was planned and directed by Germans, the Nazi regime found willing collaborators in other countries, both those allied to Germany and those under German occupation and by , the atrocities across the continent became a "pan-European program.

    Bulgaria refused to co-operate, and all 50, Bulgarian Jews survived though most lost their possessions and many were imprisoned , but thousands of Greek and Yugoslavian Jews were deported from the Bulgarian-occupied territories. The Nazis sought to enlist support for their programs in all the countries they occupied, although their recruitment methods differed in various countries according to Nazi racial theories. In the "Nordic" countries of Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, and Estonia they tried to recruit young men into the Waffen-SS , with sufficient success to create the "Wiking" SS division on the Eastern Front, many of whose members fought for Germany with great fanaticism until the end of the war.

    In recent years, the extent of local collaboration with the Nazis in Eastern Europe has become more apparent. Historian Alan Bullock writes: Historian Dieter Pohl has estimated that more than , non-Germans "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder"; that is about the same number as Germans and Austrians. In Belgium the state has been accused of having actively collaborated with Nazi Germany.

    An official report commissioned by the Belgian senate concluded that the Belgians were indeed complicit for participating in the Holocaust. According to the report, the Belgian authorities "adopted a docile attitude providing collaboration unworthy of a democracy in its treatment of Jews. This was only the first of such actions as the deportations to the east continued resulting in the death of some 25, people; [] and 3 At the end of , the Belgian state officials decided that its authorities bore no legal responsibility for the persecution of the Jews, even though many Belgian police officers participated in the rounding up and deportation of Jews.

    However, collaboration is not the whole story. While there is little doubt that there were strong antisemitic feelings in Belgium, after November , the German roundups became less successful as large-scale rescue operations were carried out by ordinary Belgians.

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    This resulted in the survival of about 25, Jews from Belgium. Roughly 60 percent of Belgium's Jews, who were there at the start of the war, survived the Final Solution. Bulgaria , mainly through the influence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church , saved nearly all of its indigenous Jewish population from deportation and certain death.

    This is not to imply that Bulgaria was entirely blameless, as they passed specials laws to confiscate Jewish property and remove them from public service in early Channel Islands police collaborated with the Nazis deporting local Jews, some of whom were sent to Auschwitz in , others were deported in as retaliation for the British commando raid on the small Channel Island of Sark, when most of the Jews were shipped to internment camps in France and Germany.

    Due in part to the fact that the Germans were dependent upon an "uninterrupted supply of Danish agricultural products to the Reich" they tolerated the status quo of 6, Jews living unmolested in Denmark. Most of the Danish Jews were rescued by the unwillingness of the Danish government and people to acquiesce to the demands of the occupying forces and through their concerted efforts to ferry Danish Jews to Sweden during October Despite being at times a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany, Finland remained independent and its leadership flatly refused to cooperate with Heinrich Himmler's request to relinquish its 2, Jews.

    Anti-Semitism, as the Dreyfus Affair had shown at the end of the 19th century, was widespread in France, especially among anti-republican sympathizers. Approximately 50, were refugees fleeing Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, while another 25, came to France from Belgium and Holland; the remaining Jews were arrivals to France in the s and 30s from Eastern Europe. Once the Germans invaded, many Jews fled away from the advancing forces but France's rapid collapse both militarily and politically, the armistice, and the speed at which everything happened trapped many of them in southern France.

    By the end of , more Jews were arrested in Vichy France than in the German occupied region of the country. The Greek governor, Vasilis Simonides, cooperated with the Nazi authorities and supplied local police forces to aide in deporting 48, Jews from Salonika to Auschwitz-Birkenau during March to August Upwards of 2, Jews from Corfu and another 2, from Rhodes were transported to concentration camps in June Approximately 90, Jews and their family members who relied on their support upwards of , people lost their means of economic survival and when the third anti-Jewish law went into effect, it nearly mirrored the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.

    Due to this order as many as 50, Jews worked in forced labor companies starting in the spring of through During parts of May through June , some 10, Hungarian Jews were gassed on a daily basis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a pace with which the crematoria could not maintain, so many of the bodies were burned in open pits. Nearly one-tenth of the Holocaust's Jewish victims were Hungarian Jews, accounting for a total of over , deaths; some 64, Jews were killed prior to the German occupation of Hungary.

    Among Germany's allies, Italy was not known for its anti-Semitism and had a relatively well assimilated Jewish population and its policies were essentially about domination as opposed to "destruction. This effectively reduced the country's Jews to second-class status, though the Italians never made it official policy to deport Jews to concentration camps. Edging closer towards Germany, the Italian Ministry of the Interior established 43 camps where enemy "aliens" to include Jews were detained—these camps were not pleasant but they were "a far cry from the Nazi concentration camps.

    After the fall of Benito Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic , Jews started being deported to German camps by the Italian puppet regime, which issued a police order to that effect on 30 November Before the war over 93, Jews resided in Latvia, comprising less than 5 percent of the country's population.

    Only a handful of Jews lived in the small neutral state of Liechtenstein at the outbreak of the Second World War. Liechtenstein's royal family also rented inmates from Strasshoff concentration camp near Vienna, where they employed forced labor on nearby royal estates. Nearly 7 percent of Lithuania's population was Jewish, totaling approximately , persons. Just seven-weeks later however, the Nazis invaded and were greeted as liberators. Subsequent blame for the ill-fortune that befell the Lithuanians under the Soviets landed on the Jews, which started even before the Germans had finished conquering the country; [] Lithuanians carried out pogroms in at least 40 different places, where Jews were raped, severely injured, and killed.

    On 25 June Nazi forces arrived in Kaunas, where they witnessed local Lithuanians drag about 50 male Jews into the center of the city while one Lithuanian man beat them to death with a crowbar cheered on by spectators in a public display of brutality that shocked many Germans. Once the Jews were all dead, the man who had beaten them to death, climbed atop their corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. While estimates vary, the number of Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust is assessed to be between , and , Additionally, Lithuanian auxiliary police troops assisted in killing Jews in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.

    Known prior to the war for racial and religious tolerance, the Netherlands had taken in Jews since the 16th century, many of whom had found refuge there after fleeing Spain. From there, most Dutch Jews were first sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. From the summer of forward, upwards of , Dutch Jews were deported and killed—much of which was made possible by the "cooperation and efficiency of the Dutch civil service and police" who willingly served the Germans.

    Amid a prewar population of 3 million, there were only 2, Jews living there, the largest contingency residing in Oslo. Many Jews and other people were saved by the actions of Norwegians, including Norwegian police. The largest of which was the 13th "Handschar" division. Polish Jews comprised roughly 10 percent of the country's population at upwards of 3.

    Far right-wing party members in Poland saw the deportation of the Jews in a favorable light, but for the majority of Poles, their thoughts on the matter were far more complex. The extent of local collaboration in these massacres is a controversial issue, as is the pivotal role of the Einsatzgruppe Zichenau-Schroettersburg under Hermann Schaper. There were multiple occurrences of individual Volksdeutsche turning in, chasing down, or blackmailing Jews; such people were condemned as collaborators and under threat of execution by the Polish resistance.

    Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote that he saw Polish Blue Police beating Jews and that they participated in street rounds up. They [the Polish Blue Police] could not join the Germans in major operations against Jews or Polish resistors, lest they be considered traitors by virtually every Polish onlooker. There also were no Polish SS battalions, though there were SS volunteer battalions from almost all of the German-occupied countries. Attempts to organize Polish SS battalions resulted in immediate, large-scale desertions, and so these attempts were abandoned.

    Nonetheless, due to its European centrality, available rail networks, and proximity to Nazi avenues of control, Poland was the nation where German persecution policies against the Jews were played out in full. Assimilation was common for Jews in Romania, where some , of them lived but not necessarily in total peace there.

    Following the First World War, attacks against Jews intensified, as many Jews were stripped of citizenship. According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, economic discrimination as well as violent anti-Semitism was present in Romania concomitant with Germany. The fascist Alexandru Razmerita advocated imprisoning the Jews in concentration camps and working them to death, while a Romanian Orthodox priest suggested drowning them all in the Black Sea. The Romanian Antonescu regime was responsible for the deaths of approximately , Jews according to historian Yehuda Bauer.

    The Commission concludes, together with the large majority of bona fide researchers in this field, that the Romanian authorities were the main perpetrators of this Holocaust, in both its planning and implementation. This encompasses the systematic deportation and extermination of nearly all the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina as well some Jews from other parts of Romania to Transnistria, the mass killings of Romanian and local Jews in Transnistria, the massive execution of Jews during the Iasi pogrom; the systematic discrimination and degradation applied to Romanian Jews during the Antonescu administration — including the expropriation of assets, dismissal from jobs, the forced evacuation from rural areas and concentration in district capitals and camps, and the massive utilization of Jews as forced laborers under the same administration.

    Jews were degraded solely on account of their Jewish origin, losing the protection of the state and becoming its victims. A portion of the Roma population of Romania was also subjected to deportation and death in Transnistria. In cooperation with German Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian auxiliaries, Romanian troops killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Bessarabia , northern Bukovina , and Transnistria ; some of the larger massacres of Jews occurred at Bogdanovka , a Romanian concentration camp along the Bug River in Transnistria , between 21 and 30 December Jean Ancel , who headed the commission along with Elie Wiesel , spent his entire life researching Romania's treatment of Jews.

    In his book he provides a confirmation using Romania's own archives, made available in —95 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with Nazi documents, survivor testimonies, war crimes trial transcripts, that Romania not only participated in but independently implemented its own autonomous genocide of Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and in Ukraine—the only Nazi ally to do so during the war. The protests of various public, political and religious figures, including Prince Constantin Karadja , against the deportation of the Jews from the Romanian Kingdom contributed to the change of policy toward the Jews starting with October Before the First World War, Serbia existed as an independent country before being incorporated into Yugoslavia in Approximately 16, Jews resided there.

    Sometimes the Serbian authorities cooperated with the Germans as matter of course, whereas others took individual initiative; some Serbian military commanders rounded-up Gypsies so they could be concentrated in one area, where they were shot. In approximately , Jews resided in Slovakia, around 40, of them lived in Ruthenia and Subcarpathia, areas previously ceded to Hungary; most of whom, led good lives despite the presence of anti-Semitism among the peasant population of Slovakia.

    Nonetheless, the restrictions against Jews proceeded accordingly, blocking them from various professions, which was accompanied by violence against the Jews from the indigenous Hlinka Guard. Despite this action, approximately 12, Slovak Jews were still sent to Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps in Germany before the deportations ceased. Around half of them were killed in concentration camps. As early as , Vladimir Lenin had already formulated a Communist ideology about the Jews, who he avowed, were not a nation since they did not possess any specified territory; this position was shared by Stalin and in the s as many as , Soviet Jews were considered lishentsy non-citizens.

    During the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Jews were unaware of the Nazi anti-Jewish policies, partly as a result of Soviet silence about the matter. Practically all of these units participated in the round-ups and mass-shootings. The overwhelming majority were recruited in the western USSR and the Baltic region, areas recently occupied by the Soviets where the Jews were typically scapegoated, which exacerbated pre-Nazi antisemitic attitudes.

    German Einsatzgruppen units, members of the Wehrmacht, Order Police, and auxiliary units mostly from Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine were already engaged in killing operations in the summer of and by July of that year, they had helped kill 39, Ukrainian Jews, and another 26, Jews in Belarus. Franco was known to harbor virulent anti-Semitic beliefs and agreed with Hitler that Judaism, Communism, and cosmopolitanism were related threats to European society.

    Trudy Alexy refers to the "absurdity" and "paradox of refugees fleeing the Nazis' Final Solution to seek asylum in a country where no Jews had been allowed to live openly as Jews for over four centuries. Diplomats discussed the possibility of Spain as a route to a containment camp for Jewish refugees near Casablanca , but it came to nothing due to lack of Free French and British support.

    Almost all of them survived the war. In , a document was found in Spanish archives, which revealed that Franco's government gave a main architect of the Nazi " Final Solution ", Heinrich Himmler, a list of six thousand Jews living in Spain, upon his request. Jose Maria Finat y Escriva de Romani , Franco's chief of security issued an official order dated 13 May to all provincial governors requesting a list of all Jews, both local and foreign, present in their districts.

    After the list was compiled, Romani was appointed Spain's ambassador to Germany, enabling him to deliver the list to Himmler. Following the defeat of Germany in , the Spanish government attempted to destroy all evidence of cooperation with the Nazis, but this official order survived. Spanish diplomats did save thousands of Jews, but it was done on their personal initiative.

    Before the onset of the Second World War, approximately 7, Jews resided in Sweden, most of whom lived in Stockholm. During , the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg traveled to Budapest and negotiated for the release of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Proximity to Nazi Germany as a bordering nation made the Swiss government very tentative about dealing with the Jews. However, from that date, restrictions were intensified, particularly towards Jews. As part of that policy, the Swiss government requested that the German government mark the passports of German Jews with a "J" as they were not ready to grant asylum on the grounds of racial persecution.

    By late October , news of the Jewish catastrophe had reached Switzerland. Furthermore, between and November , around 14, applications for entry visas submitted by hopeful emigrants to the Swiss diplomatic missions abroad were refused.

    Transnational Holocaust Memory, Digital Culture and the End of Reception Studies

    According to The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust , the U. In , the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27, Louis , a ship loaded with passengers. Almost all passengers aboard the vessel were Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany. Most were German citizens, some were from Eastern Europe, and a few were officially "stateless.

    The ship continued to the U. Some passengers on the St. Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded, though he could have issued an executive order to admit the St. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must "await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States. On 17 December , the United States finally issued a statement condemning the Nazi extermination program, but this turned out to be a meaningless gesture as did the follow-on Bermuda Conference of April McCloy were "especially culpable" for their roles in "downplaying" evidence of the camps and for "incorrectly asserting that heavy bombers either could not reach camps like Auschwitz or could not be diverted from more important missions.

    The juridical notion of crimes against humanity was developed following the Holocaust. The sheer number of people murdered and the transnational nature of the mass killing shattered any notion of national sovereignty taking precedence over international law when prosecuting these crimes. There were a number of legal efforts established to bring Nazis and their collaborators to justice.

    Some of the higher-ranking Nazi officials were tried as part of the Nuremberg Trials , presided over by an Allied court; the first international tribunal of its kind. Other trials were conducted in the countries in which the defendants were citizens — in West Germany and Austria, many Nazis were let off with light sentences, with the claim of " following orders " ruled a mitigating circumstance, and many returned to society soon afterwards.

    An ongoing effort to pursue Nazis and collaborators resulted, famously, in the capture of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina an operation led by Rafi Eitan and to his subsequent trial in Israel in Some former Nazis escaped any charges. For example, Reinhard Gehlen , a former intelligence officer of the Wehrmacht, managed to turn around and work for the CIA , and created what informally became known as the Gehlen Organization.

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations. Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps. Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations. Examines the changes in representing collaboration, especially in the destruction of European Jewry, in the public discourse and the historiography of various countries In Europe. This book shows how representations and responses have been conditioned by national and political trends and constraints.

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