6. Long-Term Legacies

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this final lecture, we consider the longer-term legacies of the Holocaust, both within and beyond Europe. However, our primary focus is a consideration of why post-war governments were so reluctant to acknowledge the fate of the Jews in their country. A key part of the answer lies in the financial assets expropriated from the Jews in the Holocaust by individuals, communities and state authorities alike, none of whom were willing to take responsibility for what amounted to wholesale state-sanctioned robbery. The other side of the coin remainf that ongoing question of asylum. A sense that Germany and Austria at least have learnt something from the Holocaust is suggested in the way they have been much more receptive to more recent influxes of refugees. Other countries however remain extraordinarily ambivalent even today in acknowledging their wartime participation in Jewish destruction.

Course

In this course, Dr Mark Levene (University of Southampton) considers the Holocaust through a pan-European perspective. In particular, he argues that while Hitler and the Nazis were the primary driving force determining the fate of European Jewry, without considering the role of other Europeans we lack a sufficient explanation. European anti-Semitism had deep, primarily Christian roots and we need to understand something of why this was still active, indeed virulent in increasingly secular 20th century societies. He goes on to consider the nature of anti-Jewish hostility in specific countries, with Romania one key example, and how this helped shape cases of active and autonomous Jewish extermination regardless of any direct German diktat. He also considers the ambivalent role of liberal states such as France, Britain and the United States who certainly failed, possibly wilfully, to engage with an emerging Jewish refugee crisis before the Second World War. It is the issue of refugees - and the abiding problem of what happens when one country, then another, passes the buck - which is the warning note upon which course ends, seeking as it does to consider not just Jewish but universal legacies of the modern world's most all-encompassing genocide to date.

Lecturer

Dr Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at the University of Southampton, and in the Parkes Centre for Jewish/non-Jewish relations. His writing ranges across genocide, Jewish history and environmental and peace issues especially focusing on anthropogenic climate change. His most recent work includes the two volume The Crisis of Genocide : The European Rimlands, 1912 -1953 (Oxford, 2013) which won the Institute of Genocide Studies Lemkin award in 2015, and, with Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts (eds.), History at the end of the world? History, climate change and the possibility of closure (Penrith, 2010). He is co-founder of Crisis Forum (http://www.crisis-forum.org.uk) and founder of the Rescue!History (http://www.rescue-history.org.uk/), independent academic networks.