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Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 pp 1–18Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

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Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

Abstract

An estimated 5.7 million Jews were killed between 1939 and 1945 by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The greatest mass murder in history — the Holocaust — was also a media event.1 From 1933, when Hitler seized power in Germany and swiftly introduced anti-Jewish measures, the European media followed the ‘cumulative radicalisation’ of Germany’s racial malevolence — from the exclusion of the Jews from Germany’s social, political and economic life to the campaign of extermination. In late 1942 The Daily Telegraph, like many other papers, wrote that over one million Jews had already been killed in Europe, adding that Germany’s goal was a total extermination of the race in Europe.2 In September 1942, Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading newspaper, wrote in its editorial that Germany’s aim was ‘physical annihilation of the Jews’.3 In Finland, news of the Jewish genocide was censored although foreign papers, especially Swedish ones, were obtainable, so there were some chances to encounter the Holocaust. Also when Danish Jewry was threatened by deportations to concentration camps in 1943, the Finnish press broke the silence, infuriating the Germans.4

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Notes

  1. The Daily Telegraph, 30 June 1942. See, for example, Richard Bolchover, British Jewry and the Holocaust (Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003), p. 8.

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  2. For example, Uusi Suomi, 5 October 1943; Arbetarbladet, 5 October 1943. See also Taimi Torvinen, Pakolaiset Suomessa Hitlerin Valtakaudella (Helsinki: Otava, 1984), pp. 247–9.

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  3. For a problem of knowing and believing the news, see, for example, Bolchover, British Jewry, pp. 7–20; Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 330–40.

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  4. Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 3. For the USA, Peter Novick remarks: ‘By the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, talk of the Holocaust was something of an embarrassment in American public life.’ See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), p. 85.

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  5. Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 157.

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  6. Michael Marrus, ‘The Holocaust at Nuremberg’, Yad Vashem Studies, 26 (1998), pp. 40–1. See also Lawrence Baron, ‘The Holocaust and American Public Memory’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17:1 (2003), p. 66.

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  7. The category of ‘bystander’ in itself is highly problematic. According to Deborah Lipstadt, it includes ‘neutral governments and agencies, Jews living in relative safety, occupied countries, ordinary Germans, and above all, the Allied governments’. See Deborah Lipstadt, ‘The Failure to Rescue and Contemporary American Jewish Historiography of the Holocaust: Judging from a Distance’, in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds), The Bombing of Auschwitz (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 228. This definition is highly unsatisfactory as it fails to recognise the huge differences between various types of bystanders as Tony Kushner, among others, have noted. Most importantly, by talking about bystanders, perspective is crucial. For bystanders in countries like Great Britain, Sweden or Finland taking action on behalf of Europe’s Jewry was unlikely to make any real difference to the lives of persecuted. What is more, the price to pay was low, ‘a postage stamp or an hour of leisure’. When one considers this vis-à-vis a Polish non-Jewish ‘bystander’ and his options in helping a Jew with risking the lives of them both, the problem of bystanders begins to emerge in a different light. See Tony Kushner, ‘The Bystanders: Towards a More Sophisticated Historiography’, in Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 177.

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  8. These standard works in this period include Andrew Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); A. J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and refugees from the Third Reich (London: Elek, 1973); Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Michael Joseph, 1981). For Sweden, see Hans Lindberg, Svensk flyktingpolitik under internationellt tryck 1936–1941 (Stockholm: Allmänna förl, 1973); Steven Koblik, The Stones Cry Out: Sweden’s Response to the Persecution of Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1988); Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1945, 2nd revised edition (Uppsala: Studia Historica Uppsaliensia 178, 1998). For Finland, see Elina Suominen, Kuolemanlaiva S/S Hohenhörn. Juutalaispakolaisten Kohtalo Suomessa (Porvoo: WSOY, 1979);Torvinen, Pakolaiset Suomessa Hitlerin Valtakaudella; and Hannu Rautkallio, Finland and the Holocaust. The Rescue of Finland’s Jews (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987).

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  9. Robert Cherry, ‘Holocaust Historiography: The Role of the Cold War’, Science & Society, 63: 4 (1999–2000), pp. 459–77.

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  10. Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, The American Historical Review, 101: 4 (1996), pp. 1012–13. See also Dan Stone, ‘Making Memory Work, or Gedächtnis macht frei’, Patterns of Prejudice, 37:1 (2003), pp. 87–98.

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  11. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), particularly Chapter 7.

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  12. Pieter Lagrou, ‘Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1945–1965’, Past and Present, 154 (1997), pp. 181–222. See also his The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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  13. For example, Dan Stone has argued that ‘in the creation of collective memory, the most extreme and challenging events are likely to be filtered out … [w]hat is more surprising is that this “writing-out” of extremity [in Great Britain] took place in spite of considerable awareness of the real situation’. See, Dan Stone, ‘The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945–6’, Patterns of Prejudice, 33: 2 (1999), p. 19.

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  14. Tom Lawson, ‘Constructing a Christian History of Nazism. Anglicanism and the Memory of the Holocaust’, History and Memory, 16: 1 (2004), p. 165. For a full-length development of his argument, see his The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006).

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  15. Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3.

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  16. For collective memory and the past, see, for example, Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation.

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  17. Novick, The Holocaust, p. 85. See also Jon Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps (London: Batsford, 1990). On p. 34 he argues that ‘[i]n all the contemporary accounts of the Bergen-Belsen liberation there are remarkably few references to the Jews’, thereby postulating a view that has long dominated our historical understanding of the topic — the extreme fate of the Jews remained obscure and hidden.

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  18. For a critical examination of Novick’s argument, see Baron, ‘The Holocaust and American Public Memory’; Rona Sheramy, ‘“Resistance and War”: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education, 1945–1960’, American Jewish History, 91: 2 (2003), pp. 287–313.

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  19. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001); Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–46. A Documentary History (Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martins Press, 1997); Erich Haberer, ‘History and Justice: Paradigms of the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 19:3 (2005), pp. 487–519; Michael Salter, US Intelligence, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials: Seeking Accountability for Genocide and Cultural Plunder (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

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  20. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial. For example, Bloxham, a student of Kushner’s, argues that ‘British liberalism did not permit the murder of the Jews to be given any specific consideration even within legal constraints’. Genocide on Trial, p. 225. See also Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). For a ‘middle road account’, see Douglas, The Memory of Judgment.

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  21. Jürgen Wilke et al., Holocaust und NS-Prozesse (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995).

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  22. For example, David Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) is a collection of 21 essays on different countries and the United Nations, yet no Nordic countries are included. Similarly, R. M. Shapiro (ed.), Why Didn’t the Press Shout? American and International Journalism during the Holocaust ( Jersey City, NJ: Yeshiva University Press, 2003) examines the silence of international journalism during Hitler’s rule. It includes, for example, seven articles on the USA and the Holocaust, two on Britain, three on Germany and Italy, one about the Hebrew/Jewish press and numerous articles concerning East European countries, their newspaper media and the Holocaust. In contrast, no Scandinavian countries have been included.

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  23. Harald Runblom, ‘Sweden and the Holocaust from an International Perspective’, in Stig Ekman and Clas Åmark (eds), Sweden’s Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2003), p. 218. Currently, the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication at Stockholm University is conducting a research programme about Swedish freedom of the press and the Holocaust before, during and after the Second World War. In addition, the Uppsala Programme for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in cooperation with the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Copenhagen and the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo held a conference in Uppsala in June 2008, addressing various aspects of the Holocaust in postwar Scandinavia.

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  24. Allan Bell, ‘News Stories as Narratives’, in Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland (eds), The Discourse Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 236.

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  25. Shapiro, Why Didn’t the Press Shout?; Sharf, The British Press; Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986).

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  26. Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, The American Historical Review, 102: 5 (1997), pp. 1386–403, esp. 1389–91. See also Robert S. C. Gordon, ‘Holocaust Writing in Context: Italy 1945–47’, in Andrew Leak and George Paizis (eds), The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), p. 32.

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  27. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 12.

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  28. Eoin Devereux, Understanding the Media (London: Sage, 2003), p. 116.

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  29. David Deacon et al. (eds), Researching Communications (London: Arnold, 1999), p. 150.

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  30. Teun van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage, 1988), p. 6. Emphasis in original.

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  31. For a good example of discourse analysis approach, see Teun van Dijk, Racism and the Press (London: Sage, 1991).

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  32. See, for example, Mary Hilson, Political Change and the Rise of Labour in Comparative Perspective: Britain and Sweden 1890–1920 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), p. 18.

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  33. Susan R. Grayzel, ‘Across Battle Fronts: Gender and the Comparative Cultural History of Modern European War’, in Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 72 and 81.

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  34. Paul Levine, ‘Attitudes and Action: Comparing the Responses of Mid-level Bureaucrats to the Holocaust’, in David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine (eds), Bystanders to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation (London: Frank Cass, 2002), p. 215.

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  35. For the Swedish case, Karin Kvist Geverts’ recent work is an excellent example of this. See Karin Kvist Geverts, Ett Främmande Element i Nationen. Svensk Flyktingpolitik och de Judiska Flyktingarna 1938–1944 (Uppsala: Studia Historica Uppsaliensia 233, 2008).

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  36. Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews, 1933–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11–12.

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  37. Hannu Rautkallio, Holokaustilta pelastetut (Helsinki: WSOY, 2004), p. 453.

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  38. For Great Britain, see, for example, Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 183–228; for Sweden, for example, Joseph Zitomersky, ‘Ambiguous Integration: The Historical Position of the Jews in Swedish Society, 1780s–1980s’, in Kerstin Nyström (ed.), Ingår i: Judarna i det Svenska Samhället (Lund: Lund University Press, 1991), pp. 79–112.

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  39. Swedish ‘neutrality’ is a contested area and in many ways a misleading approach to Sweden’s involvement in the Second World War. Swedish policy was flexible and intimately connected to the course of the war. For example, in the beginning of the war Sweden’s main concern was to remain neutral at any cost. Yet towards the end of the war, when German power and influence was waning, Sweden saw itself as a humanitarian rescuer of persecuted people (including the Jews), actively engaging itself in anti-Nazi policy. See Levine, From Indifference to Activism, esp. pp. 229–78. See also Paul Levine, ‘Swedish Neutrality During the Second World War: Tactical Success or Moral Compromise?’, in Neville Wylie (ed.), European Neutrals and Non-belligerents during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 304–30.

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  40. In recent years, this has caused a heated debate in Finland. For a reevaluation of Finland’s participation in the Holocaust, see Antero Holmila, ‘Finland and the Holocaust: a Reassessment’, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 23:3 (2009), pp. 413–40.

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  41. For example, see Madeleine Bunting, The Model Occupation. The Channel Islands under German Rule 1940–1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1995) and Fredrick E. Cohen, The Jews in the Channel Islands during the German Occupation (London: The Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library in association with the Jersey Jewish Congregation, 1998).

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  42. For example, see Mary Luckhurst’s article ‘The Case of Theresa: Guernsey, The Holocaust and Theatre Censorship in the 1990s’, European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics, 17 (2001), pp. 255–67.

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  43. Taimi Torvinen, Kadimah: Suomen juutalaisten historia (Helsinki: Otava, 1989), pp. 170–1.

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  44. The Front Karolina magazine, cited in Rony Smolar, Setä Stiller: Valpon ja Gestapon Välissä (Helsinki: Tammi, 2003), p. 322.

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  45. Hannu Rautkallio, ‘Cast into the Lion’s Den: Finnish Jewish Soldiers in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29:1 (1994), p. 53.

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  46. Finnish censorship, which was political by nature, avoided making any virulent comments about foreign countries (read Germany and the USSR) that might have endangered its political situation. Thus after the Winter War (1939–40), and even before Finland aligned itself with Germany, the talk about the persecution of the Jews had become a topic under censorship limitations. See Esko Salminen, Aselevosta kaappaushankkeeseen: sensuuri ja itsesensuuri Suomen lehdistössä 1944–1948 (Helsinki: Otava, 1979), p. 19.

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  47. Touko Perko, Aseveljen Kuva. Suhtautuminen Saksaan jatkosodan Suomessa 1941–1944 (Porvoo: WSOY, 1971), p. 32.

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  48. Ibid., p. 25.

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  49. See Mark Mazower, The Dark Continent, Europe’s Twentieth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). Additionally, Dan Stone has shown the uneasiness with which the West has treated Nazism. See his Constructing the Holocaust, esp. Chapters 2 and 3, pp. 52–130.

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  50. Colin-Seymour-Ure, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 28–9, table 3.2. The circulation of the top ten national papers was 12,575,000. My selection covers 8,336,000, which is 66 per cent.

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  51. For example, see Bo Präntare et al., Lehdistö Pohjoismaissa (Porvoo: WSOY, 1982), p. 137.

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  52. For more details, see Appendix A. For figures of circulation in Britain, see Seymour-Ure, British Press and Broadcasting since 1945; for Sweden, Lars-Åke Engblom et al. (eds), Svenska Pressens Historia IV (Stockholm: Ekerlids Förlag, 2002), pp. 45–109; for Finland, Päiviö Tommila et al. (eds), Suomen Lehdistön Historia 3 (Kuopio: Kustannuskiila, 1988), pp. 78–9.

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  53. For example, Donald Bloxham, ‘From Streicher to Sawoniuk: the Holocaust in the courtroom’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 410.

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  54. Olli Vehviläinen, Finland in the Second World War. Between Germany and Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 157.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

    Antero Holmila (Post-Doctoral Researcher)

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© 2011 Antero Holmila

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Holmila, A. (2011). Introduction. In: Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305861_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305861_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31106-4

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