Summer 2012

Remembering the Holocaust

by Walter Reich

THE END OF THE HOLOCAUST.
By Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Indiana Univ. Press.
310 pp. $29.95

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany fought two wars. One was a war of conquest against armed countries. The other was a war of annihilation against Jews. It lost the first war. In the main, it won the second. To be sure, not all of Europe’s Jews were murdered; the Allied victory stopped Germany from being able to find and kill all of them.

We still remember the first war. As for the second, we failed to recognize its goal while it was being waged, for decades ignored it, and began to understand its focus and magnitude only in the 1970s, in large measure because of the popular NBC television miniseries The Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep. It was seen by many tens of millions of people in the United States and abroad, and magnified popular awareness of the Holocaust.

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Walter Reich, who holds the Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Chair in International Affairs, Ethics, and Human Behavior at George Washington University, is a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a contributing editor of The Wilson Quarterly.
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