The Inquiring Mind; Memory and Forgetting: America Confronts the Holocast

from the center for telecommunication services the university of texas at austin this is inquiring mind produced by public station kqed fm in association with the news and information service at ut austin these discussions examining ideas and activities of a major university community yes your producer cathy cover how does one describe the un describable the living writers and journalists who first lead the german concentration camps of world war two had that task to deal with have these people express to an unbelieving america the extent of the holocaust my guest is studying that point dr robert and served as an assistant professor of history at the university of texas at austin he's working on a book entitled memory and forgetting america confronts the holocaust nineteen forty five to nineteen fifty doctor adds that despite the many things that have

been written about world war two isis that your focus is a little bit different and if you're dealing with perceptions and an indigenous how she became involved and would seem to me that if you took an important group of events that we've called the holocaust the slaughter of millions and millions of people today we have a pretty fixed image tom a set of symbols a set of assumptions a set of ideas even characters one thinks of anne frank when things as sophie one thinks of literary motion pictures literary figures motion pictures whatever art and what i was curious about and it's more than curious what i thought was a compelling problem in history and especially in modern history was how those sorts of images become created after all if six million jews and six or seven million others who perished in the holocaust there

were eleven twelve thirteen million stories there are various aspects of the implementation of the hearth whatever how does it get now road into a set of images of a myth else in fact in the best sense not in the sense that it wasn't true but in the sense of the way cultures remember and so i thought what i would do was go back to the time when no one had any image to pin on what is now called the holocaust nineteen forty five forty six forty seven in the wake of the liberation of the camps of the actual discovery that these things went on and to do that are you looking at newspapers or talking to people who actually witnessed and how have you start well ice and i'm doing all of what you mentioned and more i began by reading newspaper accounts yes and also photographs of the council began looking at

there some famous photographers who were at the camps margaret for quite is for a perhaps the most famous of her photographs of broken bow where an enormous impact up published in life magazine in may of five april an eight nineteen forty five but i'm interested in the whole variety of reactions at the moment of liberation and so i very quickly so it was necessary to go to the us troops who were there at the time and as a historian the first place i turned to was the national archives looking actually at unit records of the army units involved in the liberation reports combat interviews i looked in our files of shea supreme headquarters allied expeditionary forces they made for allied army organizing an organization out what reports they were getting and then i decided i would embark on a program of interviewing i'm surviving

vibrators men who are now in their late fifties and early sixties but were at the camps and they are late teens or early twenties some of them are twenty five or thirty in the us army and what they could tell me about their reactions how they've lived with these memories for the last jump almost forty years so i began doing that omelet their heart some other collections of oral interviews that i've consulted with especially there's a marvelous collection of oral interviews liberate years at emory university that i've used extensively i mean also in the process of looking at manuscript collections of congressman journalists and others who visit the camps in the days after the vibrations is it hard to account for the fact that we have such as a longtime spain to deal with you were mentioning a beginning hal difficult it isn't we have seen images nail over the four years or whatever we had images

to hold onto that those people would have had right at the very end of the war as people began to be aware of what the concentration camps were lied how do you account for the fact that you know when your eye witnesses a long time to change your perceptions or another is how to like how are correct for that fed maybe a year well actually it's not so much of that part of what i'm interested in our as a cultural historian i'm not so much a military historian what i am what i find compelling is the way in which these images develop the way in which the vision of reality develops and so the fact that a liberator they have said one thing in a letter or a diary or a report in nineteen forty five and may now have a much fuller image of what he saw and embellished with what he's learned since then armed really only illustrates a kind of

process to me rather it's less something that i another words when i talked to somebody i fully understand that what they're telling me now is at what actually happened in some way some basic way it's what they remember happened and what they took away from that experience as being important it's this is an everyday experience of all of us from and you know what we take away from every day or every year and find important well that's part of what i'm looking for and how they sort through their experiences and and come up with a current image for what must've been a whole and our key of experience at the very moment unpack but what i'm finding is that these man in nineteen forty five are dumbstruck are often wordless they break down in tears they don't know what is going on around them on by nineteen eighty two or three or four when i've

interviewed them think put stuff together that that's the way a coach who puts things together that's where corporate history and that's part of what fascinates me are you going so far as to even study the words that are used to use dual language studies for us army it's one of the farm that's again one of the facets of the story that i think is crucial the vocabulary that is used to describe the germans the nazis or the prisoners are people good and being descriptive that seems like it's so horrible that you might run a word additives in a hurry i think that's right there what one often finds is that they say the scene i saw was indescribable and then they'll write or talk for our you know writers in some way could talk at some length about that in this global scene attempted to describe it but there are important for patients i've already on given up a paper relating to one of them if you look at the

language for instance of the way some the raiders anyway but that he described the prisoners they had liberated with the greatest amount of sympathy and in an attempt to plead their case two others or whatever and reports they often resort to describing the prisoners in subhuman terms they use animal images they use more dead than alive kinds of images armed which soon enough become to double edged swords some of these people didn't seem like people anymore i think the point that's the point of the descriptions now i think what it is is what were talking about here is less government human feeling and more the limits of language however what gets preserved of the language and not that the feelings are fleeting and the language is what is preserved and one

often remembers the language so that law some very interesting and i'm chilling ambiguities come out of the official report for instance can you give an example well for instance general patton to get to state extreme that well known generation example but at least using a well known figure when he first goes out when he sees his first half which his order the first camp actually that the us army and covers and now in east germany he so sickened by the sides that he actually goes behind one of the barracks and vomit for ten or fifteen minutes of just sick physically ill and talks about how how could these german so and so's we love well that those are patton's words but in any case was clear the sympathy and clear the anger alm in his

mind at the same time arm he seems to have a great deal of sympathy for the survivors however if you look at patterns actions old just four or five months later when he's in charge of peace time affairs in germany in one part of your of aria his actions for displaced persons the very prisoners who we liberated arm or rather mean spirited and informed by law not only anti semitism but anti polish feelings whatever pomp and he uses to justify them in the tree animal like imagery imagery animal a stick imagery to paint them as subhuman the very same sort of imagery that is used im very sympathetic church by those who open up the cans other words it's very hard for a lot of people on the scene to imagine what these people were like

six months before you before five years before when they were just normal citizens aoun the words what they had become what the nazis had made them aren't determined in a way how people whether sympathetically were not so sympathetically would treat them ah and it's a very safe a very curious in a very chilling and a phenomenal something that i found rather interesting and his daily into this a little bit of defense of the nile in the united states the people just did not believe it how we can't forget i mean it seems like they must have known even with this little information perhaps that might've been available during the war that you usually reason not to believe it when the report are coming back with the obviously true well i think there are a lot of reasons number one i think is that there was basically orion and our most americans certainly got it they did not have direct relation to

the countries involved that they were not polish americans or jewish americans the way many people tend to be about events in latin america or southeast asia today our monday note things are going on and then but what's the importance of that day are that's one thing and also in the midst of a war where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed monthly i have thirty forty million people died in world war to calm the bees even those small reports of atrocities kind of get lost in the major battle which are bloody enough but in addition there's a tradition that is it working in during world war two that also adds to denial of that two people not really believing even the the small reports of concentration camps arm and massacred that are coming out of especially eastern europe the nineteen forty one two three four and that is that arm in world war one

the british and the americans became rather adept at the what later turned out to be highly overblown across the propaganda war propaganda against the german army and after all why would not this material be in the same league in other words americans agree to certain generation fully expected that the government would exaggerate lie to them even about the events that were going on to stir up war feeling and i think there's one other point on this is such an important point that shouldn't be forgotten either and that simply that there were no precedent for the mechanistic ellington and people harm if one looks at the jews of poland for instance or what we know about what they even believe when they heard about these camps in the small villages i'm they naturally sides that this situation compared to others in their history they thought oh well the germans are passing through they'll kill a few of us

what we all pogroms in russia and elliott i turned out not to be so another reason for their imaginations to be your american imagination to be any better armed there is one there's an example of that what then working with just recently that may make a point rather vividly when the us army moved into france right up to the rhine river and night late nineteen forty four they are they went through some areas where the germans had had a couple of concentration camp this is one of the slower and this gospel and m near the german border one of the camps not far is in the closed mouth and beautiful beautiful resort skiing areas but it was also near some red granite and the germans wanted to dig granted for monuments of the city a concentration camp there in

nineteen forty one well two american officers went out from strasbourg to not bother to look at the now abandoned camp the nazis you know as lee of the american army advance of the free french army advanced abandoned the camp they went there and they were given a tour of the camp by a free french soldier and they were shown what they called in their report allegedly allegedly gas chamber of so called crematorium are they were given another words everything was laid out for them they even saw a pile of women's hair a pile of shoes armed virtually a microcosm of the concentration camp system minded people ah they did send their report to the war crimes division of chafe however in their report they actually came to no conclusions as to what might've happened there tom

despite the fact that they actually sought a mechanism this was an event they were there this was an even more out of pressed record as it turned out from a war crimes trials in fact not father was a vicious have a labor camp but also in a very small way of extermination and one where a good many medical experiments were carried on carried out by the professors from the university of gospel but they had no a measure they lacked and all of the imagination to put two and two together because speaking so far beyond and record so far beyond what anybody of that experience you're listening to be inquiring mind my guest is dr robert an assistant professor of history at austin are talking about a book he is riding on how america came to grips with the holocaust akron is jiro period of a denial that there was the time frame

in wage and the reality of the holocaust kind of began to think in american retailing expecting in a short period time they take a long time i think from a case could be made that the process is very much going on and in fact could also be made that there are two phenomenal that go on the keep on going on and have gone on from nineteen forty five and that maybe the advance of knowledge isn't as great as we would like to thank them explain i think ever since the release of the newsreels in nineteen forty five the opening of the camp the horrific scenes that top talent who can volunteer and belton of piles of bodies in the end starting people walking around seemingly with no feeling and no harm their health care of pop what was happening and where they were on the last fall

ever since then anybody who follows scenes is surely should have accepted the company had gone on our with a war crimes trial the nuremberg and other places of the four story was revealed again in the press in the new wheel in popular magazines out in the nineteen fifty thousand one of the most popular and important work too talk about the holocaust or go in only indirectly with a reading and then later the conversion to play and then a movie of the diary of anne frank course it took place in an attic and not in a concentration camp but everybody sort of knew what had happened about and cry after she was captured the eichmann trial in jerusalem in the early nineteen fifties again brought the fact that arm and again with the holocaust mini series on nbc though it had promised for a great deal of criticism for

being crude corny whatever a great educational advice finally some level nonetheless with all the facts known with the theory and images that i talked about earlier barbed wire part of court gas chambers what ever one really wonders what people actually know what they could tell you about the holocaust they might know number six million jews that aren't they might harm no photograph can grab three o o our number one and real historical change the movement of populations the wiping out entire kocher the full dimension i don't think except in the minds of a minority of people and that this knowledge has really pumpkin and all

if it's almost too much to imagine and hold within one phone mind are you saying that that's perhaps why we see the holocaust of a thing it seemed to re emerge from time the conflict and several decades that thing and the path that reminded her bring out began immediately inquiry thought that all that we can yell i think for certain we have a result of that big generational thing of wealth i'm amazed when i teach courses on the holocaust your beauty that my experience i don't think an unusual approach colleagues in other universities on how little they're students know about the vote there and so there is a periodic it's kind of an idea that one can read at the very same time article saying are we publishing too many books were there too many movies have we

there's just too much material about the holocaust or you might read even on the next page a survey that you know seventy three percent of one public or another doesn't believe it really happened or isn't quite sure what that term mean for whatever i am and of course i had to do with an aisle who liked to keep in their minds that even the liberated one of the things they talk about with hal really wasn't until late fifties when they i guess when they sort of star of resolving or your shoes and a lot of the big events from a lot of them the memories you have a careful deliberate it came back to them and force they want to forget it so why not people who have left to forget this is part of a prominent trying to address you been dealing with authentic now for many married couple years back how you get through a nesting at how eu

the current thing over well i'm i can't keep from being overwhelmed periodically i am overwhelmed by the leave the material and play with my baby son or whatever something that's alive if it's terrible think that one never gets used to it and i think that's one that we had known to it i think you experience the material on your current level of compliance if anything i think i've become more so for instance when i was a memory left looking at this oral history collection of the emory library there was a oh i think it was fair oh i can't remember with the sponsoring organization that was an exhibit of photographs of the stores in cambodia and it seemed to me that by spurring the holocaust though struck me those moved me even more deeply than they might have because i had more personal insight into what lay behind those

simple photographs of bones and skulls we a lot i guess they got a writer and professor of history at often economic growth memory and forgetting america confront the holocaust i can't big lever for an inquiring mind no human being firing line programs about the members of the major university community their ideas and their opinions expressed in this programme do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin inquiring mind and on youtube

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