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Thank you for listening to we have ways of making you talk Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well, plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com we haveways. Hi there, it's Al Murray here, co host of WW2 pod. We have ways of making you talk. Did you miss out on our incredible fifth weekend festival of Premium War Waffle in September? Perhaps you were there but couldn't get to every talk you wanted to hear. Well, here at we have Ways hq, we are hard at work sorting out this FOMO problem, putting up all the talks on our Patreon page in a collection just for subscribers. We've just uploaded a fantastic array of talks from Saturday's Briefing tent with some of the world's most engaging historians on topics as diverse as SOE spies, the end of the war in 1945, and men ogling their favorite tanks. Now is a great time to listen to Weightman Wadebourne and Alex Moore's powerful talk on the role and power of memory in Holocaust education in the UK and internationally. So go to patreon.com we haveways to listen to the full lecture.

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We're going to talk about something today that I think is really, really important, really interesting. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about Holocaust memory and remembrance. How is it remembered, forgotten, presented in lots of different places. So what the plan is is that I'm going to Talk for about 15 minutes or so about memory in general, as well as a couple countries in Europe, how they have dealt with the Holocaust. And then my great guests colleague here, Alex, is going to talk about specifically the UK and how the UK has engaged with or failed to engage with the Holocaust and Holocaust memory. And then we're going to open it up to questions after a short chat because for me, honestly, I'd rather just be able to say here's my topic and then have questions for 45 minutes or an hour. But it is what it is. There we go. So what is memory? Right? You're doing it right now. You are part of memory. You are creating memory. Memory is, it's an academic word that we talk about. Oh, you know, in the halls of academia, but really it's how do we make meaning of our past in our current time? What does it mean to us? What does it say to us? And that also tells us a lot about who we are in this particular moment in time. And so Memory and remembrance, we can argue about if those things are the same or if they're different concepts. It comes from lots of different places. And then some of the examples are up here. So some of it comes from official institutions like museums that sort of frame the memory physically and literally for you. You walk in and they tell you what they think is important. And something I always say is, as a former director for a museum, is the museums have a thesis. They're making an argument to you. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but they have a point. They're trying to tell you, and that's a way of shaping memory. So is law and trials. So a lot of things you're going to see or we're going to talk about have to do with coming to terms with the legal repercussions of the Holocaust and who is to blame. Legally. Trials are a huge part of our cultural meaning making when it comes to thinking about what the past means to us. Because in some way, it's not only the perpetrator that's on trial, but what we think about the event, what the event means to us as a society, et cetera. Commemoration, obviously is part of it. Right, so ceremonies, the Cenotaph, for example. Right. All of these things, how we approach those events, who gets to come, how do they behave, what is expected of institutions and governments is all part of it. And of course, popular culture, let's not forget that movies, music, writing, fiction, all this kind of stuff both influences how we see the past. And it is a representation of how someone thinks about the past and what they think is important and not important. So I'm going to go now and talk a little bit about some important moments. Right. I don't expect you to read all of these things, but I just wanted to. I put. I wanted to make this timeline just to kind of show the variety of things that are really important. And some of them may be obvious, and some of them may not be so obvious. You may not know that, for example, in 1946 already there was a person going to Europe and systematically interviewing Holocaust survivors. A lot of times we think of that as something that takes place much, much later. But David Boder is doing this in 46. Of course, the Nuremberg trials are going to be very important, certainly in defining who we think are perpetrators. For example, the SS at Nuremberg is deemed a criminal organization, meaning that everybody who is a member of it by dint of the very membership, is considered a perpetrator. Whereas things for me, like the Wehrmacht There are Wehrmacht generals that are on trial, but Wehrmacht as an organization is not deemed a criminal organization. Of course, this is going to have repercussions for some people. A lot of Germans. I'll talk about this in a minute. They kind of want to draw a line into the Holocaust after the Nuremberg trials, sort of say, done that. Cool. We prosecuted the bad guys and let's move on. And forgetting is actually a part of memory too, Right? A lot of nations and people, part of the memory work is actually them trying to forget or wanting to forget or shape what's happened to them. I'm not going to do all these things. Obviously, the Eichmann trial is super important. It's the first time that really sort of, in a mass media sense, a perpetrator has been put on trial. And in many ways, the Eichmann trial is not so much about prosecuting Eichmann as it's an attempt by Israelis and other folks to really put the Holocaust on trial. There are lots of witnesses at the Eichmann trial, like Leon Wells, for example. If you were here last year, and Leon Wells is a survivor from the Inosca camp, Eichmann never did anything to him directly. Right. He's there to testify about his experience during the Holocaust. And in a certain sense, Eichmann for Israel is standing in for all the perpetrators that they were unable to get ahold of. Right. Again, ways of focusing memory. I'll just highlight a couple others here briefly. You may not know about the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, but in 1977, a group of neo Nazis decided they were going to go on a march in little town of Skokie, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, which has a massive Jewish population. And this really caused a great uproar amongst not only Jewish population, but also most liberal progressive Americans. There was a big court case about whether or not they had the free speech to have this march. But it started a grassroots movement that in particular created an organization called the Holocaust Education foundation because it was to respond to this, how do we teach about this? And it led to the development of lots of university courses about the Holocaust, which again, was not something that was taught in university until the 70s, really, particularly not as its own sort of subject. And again, education is another way of shaping memory. Right. Those of you who have kids, you know, ask your kids what they've learned about World War II in class or what they've learned about history of the UK or whatever, right? And that is going to be one symbol or evidence of the memory that they're getting a couple other things really quickly. The Holocaust miniseries. Anybody seen the Holocaust miniseries? Yeah. I mean, that was massively important. You know, it played in Germany to sort of wide popular, you know, attention again. It was sort of, you know, very famous actors and actresses of the time are portraying the events of the Holocaust in a mass media, popular culture form. And again, it raises awareness and Schindler's List as well. I'll talk about the Wehrmacht exhibition a little bit later. The collapse of the Soviet Union. Right. Also has a really big influence because a lot of the documents, many of the documents that I've used, but a lot of documents that many others have used, are locked behind the Iron Curtain and they're available then later. Okay, I love this. So this word is a fantastic German word, Verganheits Beweltegung. And it's one of these great German words because there's no great American or English definition for it. It means coming to terms with the past. And I think that's a fantastic summation of what memory work really is. Right. And so I'm going to talk a little about Germany here. One of the key moments that I mentioned is the visit of Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of Germany, to Warsaw in 1970. Of course, Warsaw is in Poland. It is also Communist Warsaw, Soviet Warsaw. Behind Diane Curtin, he visits the Warsaw Ghetto fighters memorial. And then he sort of, as he said it, and he sort of spontaneously falls to his knees in front of it. And the Communists are kind of surprised at this. Nobody had formed them. This is a thing that was going to happen. And it sort of begins to represent for Germany its national official acceptance of its guilt in the Holocaust. Of course, Germany is officially and publicly left of no, no doubts about its guilt. It's occupied by the Allies. It's very clear it's lost the war. The Allies often force German civilians to go through the camps. They, in every theater they play sort of Holocaust clips before the main film. So as a nation, Germany is well educated for the fact that it was guilty and responsible. And this is sort of often seen as an official act. And then from a memory perspective, it's really cool because there's also a Willy bronze square in Warsaw with its own plaque. So it's like memory within memory here. But that's the national perspective. And of course, memory and how we remember events works on many different levels simultaneously. Right. So while Germany as a nation is sort of officially ready to sort of absolutely admit that we were guilty of the Holocaust, we pared it out, we supported The Nazis, et cetera. Things become a little bit different when you talk about families. And so I put this book up here because it's one of my favorites by a guy named Harold Beltze and Sabina Muller and Carolina Zuckenhall, who was also. They're sociologists. And what they did was they interviewed families together, different generations. And what they discovered was that the children of the wartime generation were relatively freely admitting that, yeah, their parents might have been complicit or been Nazis or whatever, but that the grandchildren continually tried to rewrite that narrative and say, well, but Grandpa, didn't you help a Jew on your street? Or weren't you opposed to Nazis? Right. So even within families, people begin to sort of edit what the memory looks like. And of course, for my purposes, right, because I wrote in the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust for my first book. The Wehrmacht exhibition, which started in 1995, was also a critical event for Germany in forcing Germans to confront their everyday participation in the Holocaust and what it means. It was an exhibition full of letters and diaries and photographs and things from German soldiers, showing what German soldiers did during the Holocaust as well as their knowledge of the Holocaust and their complicity, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, it generated responses on both sides. And to give you a sense that again, memory is not just sort of some academic thing that we sort of debate in universities. It's something that's very important to everybody, including the right wing extremists that bombed the exhibition. It was that important to them to sort of get rid of it and what it was saying and how it was confronting, in this case, the myth of the clean Wermach, that it hadn't been involved in atrocities. And they saw this often as a direct attack on their own families. Okay, let me go to the Soviet bloc here in the next couple of minutes. Interestingly, the Soviets were some of the first person to first persons to investigate the Holocaust. Already during the war, they established the Extraordinary State Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Violent Crime, et cetera, et cetera. And this goes around as Soviet Union is liberated and takes stock of everything the Nazis have done. And some of their early work is actually quite good. It interviews Holocaust survivors in detail, you know, months after liberation, which is great. But the Soviet policy in terms of how do we remember or place the Holocaust within our own national narrative is something quite different. Their policy is what they refer to as we don't divide the dead. Right. Because the Soviet Union is of course, a communist country. It's under the Marxist ideology where class is the factor. And we're all united. There's no such thing as nationalities. There's no such thing as ethnicities. And for them, recognizing any particularly Jewish suffering or the fact that Jews were disproportionately targeted or they were specially targeted by the Nazis challenges that Soviet narrative of what it means to be a Soviet citizen. And also anti Semitism. Right. Let's not forget there's anti Semitism deeply involved in this. Stalin is anti Semite and he is more anti Semitic the older he gets and sort of crazier he gets towards the end of his life. So again, some examples of this from just from my travels. This is in the town of Krupki, a very small village in Belarus, where around 2,000 Jews were murdered by the Einsatz group. And in 1941, with the intense collaboration of the Vermont, to include the Vermont shooting. And so this. There's an establishment here in undated, but probably in the, what, 50s, 60s of this memorial at the site. This is at the site of the actual killing by presumably Jewish victim survivors of the Holocaust. And you notice what the caption is. Nobody has forgotten. Nothing is forgotten. Okay, great. That's really, really vague. Right. Who are we talking about here? Well, there were two. There we go, two plaques. And again, this is small, so I'll read it. This is the first plaque here on the left and it says buried here are 1,975 Soviet civilians brutally murdered by the German fascist occupiers. No mention of the fact that they're Jewish. It's just they're subsumed in this larger number of Soviet victims of the Nazis. Right. And then later on, this plaque is removed in 2014 and replaced by one with a menorah on it as well as one that, that, that says to the victims of Nazism and identifies the victims here as Jewish. Right. So there's some, there is some movement here. But this is obviously very traumatic, for example, for, for Jews surviving in the Soviet Union. They have a difficult time talking about this in public. Babi Yar is a whole other thing. We could talk about that. But I'm going to move on a little bit to a country that is not a purely a victim country or purely a perpetrator country, and that's Poland. Really quickly, Poland has a very, very complex relationship with the Holocaust because on the one hand, they want to be seen and portrayed as a country that was victimized by the Nazis. And it's absolutely correct. They were thousands and thousands of millions of non Jewish Soviet Poles are Murdered by the Nazis, etc. But there are also lots of other Poles who at a minimum, made the country a very inhospitable place for Jews to include victimizing them themselves in various ways. And this, of course, is not something that non Jewish Poles want to commemorate or recognize or remember. And of course, the Jewish. The current Jewish population in Poland is very, very small. And so they are unable in some ways to present their story in the same way that non Jewish Poles are. And there's a great example of that here. This is the Pozov camp, which is the camp from Schindler's List, by the way. And there's really nothing there today. Local Poles will picnic there, run, you know, let their dogs run around, ride their bikes. This kind of stuff. It's. It's just a park for them. And this monument here is located about 50 meters from the main monument to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust at the site where they were murdered and their bodies were burned. And this memorial is to a number of Polish policemen who also were murdered by the Nazis, some of them at Plaszow. The problem is they're members of the Blue Police, which was really the only Polish collaborator organization with the Nazis. They're the ones that often guarded ghettos, often turned in Jews they caught in hiding, et cetera, et cetera. So we have this really strange moment where memorial culture, again, there's this monument. And note, this monument has already has a bow on it, right? And it. And the. There are very few things that are left at the Jewish monument, right? So again, different ways of countries dealing with this. And just as a follow up to that, again, official national memory, right here on the left we have the education minister, right. Of Poland. And there was a law that was passed that threatened prosecution for historians who really brought up the fact that there were polls that individually might have collaborated or individually chose to victimize Jews. And that's what this is talking about here. And actually there's a famous Polish Holocaust scholar named Jan Grabowski who has actually been brought to trial on these charges, right? And he, he won. But it happened, of course. I don't want to be all doom and gloom. And so on the right here is an image of my good friends Maciek and Tomek, who run the Auschwitz, the Auschwitzen Jewish Museum, which is in the only remaining synagogue in as Vincium, which is the town in which Auschwitz is located. And they run all kinds of really great programs, educating and that kind of stuff. So. And again, this is all memory work, right? Trying to educate the population, most of whom will never meet a Jewish person in their life about the Holocaust, about what Judaism is and this kind of thing. Okay, I'm going to finish because it wouldn't be fair if I didn't turn the. Turn the spotlight on myself and on the United States. And I'm not going to get into a great deal of detail because a lot of it maps onto other ways in which countries memorialize the Holocaust. I just have the image here of the Holocaust Museum itself was established in 1979. And then there's a commission to how we're going to build it, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason I've paired it with a slide, an image from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is to show you the difference in the time span when these museums are established. Right. We established a Holocaust museum, you know, roughly, what, 40 some years after the event, we established a museum to African American history roughly 300 years after African Americans come to the United States. Because in the American narrative of the Holocaust, we're the heroes, right? We're the liberators of the camps. We're the ones who fought the Nazis. This is great. We can show this museum. It's not really controversial. But of course, in the story of the United States and African American history, white Americans are not so much. This is not a comfortable topic for us. And so, again, the official memory work then reflects that.