The End of the Holocaust

By Alvin H. Rosenfeld

“An illuminating exploration that offers a worried look at Holocaust representation in contemporary culture and politics.” —H-Holocaust

In this provocative work, Alvin H. Rosenfeld contends that the proliferation of books, films, television programs, museums, and public commemorations related to the Holocaust has, perversely, brought about a diminution of its meaning and a denigration of its memory. Investigating a wide range of events and cultural phenomena, such as Ronald Reagan’s 1985 visit to the German cemetery at Bitburg, the distortions of Anne Frank’s story, and the ways in which the Holocaust has been depicted by such artists and filmmakers as Judy Chicago and Steven Spielberg, Rosenfeld charts the cultural forces that have minimized the Holocaust in popular perceptions. He contrasts these with sobering representations by Holocaust witnesses such as Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Imre Kertész. The book concludes with a powerful warning about the possible consequences of “the end of the Holocaust” in public consciousness.

“Forcefully written, as always, his new volume honors his entire life as teacher and writer attached to the principles of intellectual integrity and moral responsibility. Here, too, he demonstrates erudition and knowledge, a gift for analysis and astonishing insight. Teachers and students alike will find this book to be a great gift.” —Elie Wiesel

“This remarkable new work of scholarship—written in accessible language and not in obscure academese—is exactly the Holocaust book the world needs now.” —Bill’s Faith Matters Blog

“This book has monumental importance in Holocaust studies because it demands answers to the question how our culture is inscribing the Holocaust in its history and memory.” —Arcadia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9780253000927

Book preview

Introduction

This is a book about victims and survivors of the Holocaust. It reflects some of the ways we have come to think about such people and also about ourselves in relationship to them. Above and beyond these matters, my concern is with changing perceptions of the Holocaust within contemporary culture and with the impact of certain cultural pressures and values on our sense of this particular past. It is a gruesome past, yet also an unavoidable one. Unavoidable is not the same as acceptable, however; and, as I shall argue, the history of the Holocaust becomes broadly acceptable only as its basic narrative undergoes change of a kind that enables large numbers of people to identify with it. At the core of this process of transformation and identification lies the fate of the victims and survivors—their memories, stories, and future status as imagined figures within a continually evolving narrative of the Nazi crimes against the Jews.

By referring to the victims and survivors as imagined figures, I am aware that I run the risk of being misunderstood. Obviously, such people were and are real people, who were forced to undergo real and terrible suffering. None of that is at issue here. What is at issue are the sources of our knowledge of their suffering. In looking at these sources, especially in their more popular forms, attention inevitably is directed to the narrative potency of literature and other forms of cultural representation as readily as it is drawn to the documentary sources of most history writing. The emphasis on narrative—on the telling as much as on what is being told—is here by design, for only by acknowledging it can we hope to understand how the past reaches most of us at all. History, in this sense of it, therefore, implicates both the event and its representation. And its representation, as Yosef Yerushalmi has put it, is being shaped not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.¹ The historian’s role is and will remain crucial to uncovering the past, yet historical memory broadly conceived may depend less on the record of events drawn up by scholars than on the projection of these events by writers, filmmakers, artists, and others. Here is how Raul Hilberg, a scholar distinguished by his insistence on mastery of the essential historical documents, has described the situation I am seeking to clarify: To portray the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann once said to me, one has to create a work of art. … The artist usurps the actuality, substituting a text for a reality that is fast fading. The words that are thus written take the place of the past; these words, rather than the events themselves, will be remembered.² Imre Kertész, the Hungarian-Jewish writer and Nobel Prize winner, who personally suffered the events that Hilberg refers to, agrees: The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality. (Not even—or, rather, least of all—when we have directly experienced it).³

Following Yerushalmi, Hilberg, and Kertész, it is clear that anyone who writes about the Holocaust today, more than sixty-five years after the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi death camps, is likely to soon find himself pondering questions of a literary and cultural nature along with questions of a more purely historical kind. It is not that we know all that we need and want to know about the catastrophe itself. Far from it. Rather, because we have become acutely aware that knowledge of this past is transmitted to us by such a large and diverse body of materials, it is necessary to think about the nature and function of these forms of mediation as well as about the kinds of historical information and interpretation they convey. For this reason, studies of the literary representation of the past have come prominently to the fore in recent years as an essential part of study of the Holocaust. For this reason as well, some are tempted to place in quotation marks the very term that is commonly used to designate the Nazis’ genocidal crimes against the Jews—Holocaust instead of Holocaust—to indicate how essential it is to comprehend the constructed story of the event if one has any hopes of preserving its history and memory in responsible ways. For most people, in fact, the event is simply not accessible apart from its representations. Because the latter have become so numerous and so varied, it is important that one attend to how the story of the Holocaust has been conveyed, who is conveying it, how and by whom it is being received, within what particular cultural contexts, with what degree of measurable impact on individual and collective awareness, with what consequences for cultural memory, and so forth. These are complex matters, but they require attention if we are to understand the place of this traumatic past within our lives today and the shapes it may assume in the lives of those in generations to come. In the chapters that follow, therefore, my primary aim will be to chart the evolving terms of the Holocaust story rather than contribute anything significantly new to the history of the event as such.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was commonly understood that this story was comprised of three main groups—the victims, their murderers, and the great majority of people in the surrounding societies who looked on or looked away as the crime unfolded. The chief victims, most everyone knew (even if not everyone was prepared to acknowledge it), were the European Jews, although it has long been recognized that other groups of people—including large numbers of Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped, homosexuals, and certain political and religious groups—had also been targeted by the Nazis for mistreatment, subjugation, enslavement, and, in some cases, death. Nevertheless, it was generally recognized that Hitler’s obsessive fixation on the Jews was at the core of the cruelest and most broadly encompassing crimes of the Third Reich and that the Jews and the Jews alone had been singled out for total annihilation. That the genocide did not completely succeed was more a function of events outside of the perpetrators’ control than outside of their murderous designs. To represent the extent of their gruesome achievement, the canonical number Six Million has been generally adopted to signify that the Jews, persecuted and slaughtered en masse, were the primary victims of the Holocaust.

As for the victimizers, or perpetrators, their identity was clear right from the start: they were the German followers of Hitler, both military and civilian, as well as members of other European groups who aided the Nazis in implementing their infamous Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. The trials of the postwar period exhibited to the public at large the names, faces, and alibis of a small number of the leading perpetrators. Some of the most notorious of the murderers, including Hitler himself, escaped justice through suicide, concealment, or escape to foreign countries. Most others remained in Germany, Austria, or their home countries elsewhere in Europe, chose to keep silent about their participation in the crimes of the Third Reich, and often faded into the obscurity of generally colorless, bourgeois lives. Nevertheless, while most of the names and specific deeds of the individual perpetrators were lost to public awareness, their collective identity as Nazi murderers remained firm and was reinforced from time to time by certain sensational acts of public exposure, such as the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann and the search for, and trials of, other Nazi criminals.

As for the people in the surrounding societies—now commonly called the bystanders—they were those who did little to either help or hinder the Final Solution and instead chose to remain passive witnesses to it, thereby enabling it in some measure to proceed without check. This is a category that embraces broad and variegated populations of people, including the common citizenry of most of the countries of Nazi-occupied Europe and also major European institutions, such as the Christian churches, the Red Cross, universities, sections of commerce, industry, labor, law, the civil service, etc. In Raul Hilberg’s formulation, the bystanders were those who were not ‘involved,’ not willing to hurt the victims and not wishing to be hurt by the perpetrators.⁴ Although some profited from the plight and disappearance of the Jews, most were guilty of no specific crimes; and while some aided their Jewish neighbors through small acts of decency and kindness, most won no honor for themselves through the commission of especially meritorious deeds. Neither heroes nor criminals, they were ordinary people who lived through hard times and looked on as others among them experienced even harder and much crueler times. In moral terms, the passivity of the bystanders came to be understood as a form of silent complicity, but their role was a muted one and evoked no feelings comparable to either the pity and horror evoked by the lot of the victims or the contempt, outrage, and revulsion awakened by the deeds of the perpetrators.

There are others who also fall within the compass of this story—most notably, those who actively fought against the Nazis and their allies and those who willingly and courageously helped to safeguard or rescue the Jews who had been targeted as victims; nevertheless, in the main, it has generally been understood that the story of the Holocaust is the story of the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. In the years following the defeat of Nazi Germany and for a number of years thereafter, the core of the Holocaust narrative, comprised of these three groups, remained pretty clear; and, at least among the majority of those who thought and wrote about these events in a serious way, there has been a high degree of consensus about the nature of the catastrophe, even if not a full understanding of the motives of those who were responsible for creating it. Why genocide became a part of European history in the middle of the twentieth century is a question not easily answered, but that it occurred, how it occurred, who brought it about, and who its primary victims were—these have not been matters at issue.

For the most part, the major lines of the story sketched out above remain in place among serious students of the Nazi era. Over time, and in subtle and less subtle ways, however, there have been shifts of both definition and priority within the principal categories of the Holocaust narrative. Depending on a number of variables, the contours and meaning of the Holocaust have been susceptible to change. As a consequence of such change, for instance, the category of the victims is in the process of being enlarged to encompass people other than just the Jews; depending on certain readings, the category of the perpetrators may either minimize or elevate the role of ordinary Germans and, in certain extreme cases, may even include Jews themselves; and the bystanders, some argue, should include not only the multitude of onlookers within the European countries under Nazi domination but the organizational elites of American and British Jewry as well as the political leadership of pre-state Palestine. Thus, while the principal actors in the Holocaust story remain the same—victims, perpetrators, bystanders—the categories themselves have taken on a new elasticity and may now embrace individuals and types not previously housed within them. In addition, some of those who had occupied relatively minor roles in this drama in the past—most notably, survivors and rescuers—have been repositioned within it and today enjoy a substantially heightened profile. There are others as well—types that have newly emerged, or are trying to emerge, or are being kept from emerging as part of the essential narrative. Within Germany, resisters to the tyranny of Fascist rule are being promoted by some, as are German victims of allied bombings, Soviet army pillages, rapes, expulsions, and the like. In Poland, martyrs of the Polish nation are prominently honored. In Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, a new prominence, and also a new equivalence, is being given to the national victims of the Double Genocide, honoring the martyrs of Soviet Communism together with (and in some cases instead of) the Jewish victims of Nazi tyranny. Within France, the Netherlands, and other West European countries, there is an ongoing struggle over the role of collaborators. In Israel, Jewish heroes have long been honored by the nation at large, and within certain circles there is also an incipient interest in Jewish avengers. In the United States, much public attention is bestowed upon survivors and liberators. Throughout much of the Muslim world, the Nazi Holocaust is either denied altogether as a genocidal crime against the Jews or, through radical acts of distortion and inversion, is appropriated and reconfigured to indict Israeli Jews as Nazis guilty of genocidal crimes against Palestinian Arabs. Precisely how all of this typological ferment, competition, and change will sort itself out and how, over time, it may newly shape our sense of the past is impossible to say with any certainty, but I shall attempt to describe those changes that are already evident and explain some of their cultural causes and consequences.

At the least, I intend to show that the Holocaust story, far from being fixed once and for all, is, in fact, very much in flux. Certainly on the popular level of mass culture, and, to some extent, also within the academic study of the subject, the Holocaust has become a volatile area of contending images, interpretations, historical claims and counter-claims. Some proponents of genocide studies, for instance, decry ongoing attention to the Holocaust as being too narrow, or too parochial, and argue that it is time to insert study of the Nazi crimes against the Jews into the broader comparative framework of their discipline. Others argue that Holocaust studies, by awarding supreme victim status to the Jews, deny it to other victim groups and thereby assign a permanent privilege to the Jews alone. Some even claim that such maneuvers are part of a Zionist scheme to make Israel the beneficiary of universal sympathy through an exclusive concentration on Jewish suffering during the Nazi era. In these and other cases, hermeneutical disputes about how the story should be told or not told, even about whose story it is and who, therefore, has the right to tell it, are not arcane matters but, in fact, issues of considerable cultural, political, and even national consequence. They tie in intimately with questions of personal and group identity; national responsibility, honor, and shame; religious and moral integrity; and fundamental political values. In all of these respects and others, the Holocaust solicits a kind of passionate attention that surpasses the attention evoked by most other events of the past century. Its representation now constitutes a language of its own, which is in wide circulation across all levels of our culture and is used and misused in manifold ways. While there is still much that we do not understand about the Holocaust in its time, there is no escaping its imaginative afterlife, or rhetorical presence, in our time. In the pages that follow, I hope to clarify some of the ways in which this presence—made manifest in the still developing story of the event—is kept alive before a large and receptive audience, which in some manner is changed by it and also changes it in turn. For reasons that will soon become clear, I will focus predominantly on images of victims and survivors, the two groups that have received the most attention in recent years, although I will make more than passing allusion as well to perpetrators, rescuers, and others.

A word needs to be said about the nature of my engagement with these issues. As I understand the drift of change with respect to an evolving public memory of the Holocaust, especially within American culture, we may soon reach a point of surfeit regarding serious, ongoing attention to the Nazi assault against the Jews. In fact, in certain circles such a point has already been reached. With victims of new atrocities filling the news each day and only so much sympathy to go around, there are people who simply do not want to hear anymore about the Jews and their sorrows. There are other dead to be buried, they say, other losses to mourn. Enough, therefore, about Auschwitz and Treblinka. Elsewhere attention persists, but it can take odd forms, turning the murder of millions into programs of popular entertainment, political action strategies, new forms of theological and liturgical expression, or well-intended but often banal platforms for civic and moral education. If some of these tendencies continue, and it is likely that they will, one can imagine a time when the memory of the Jewish catastrophe under Hitler will be reduced to the status of a grisly horror show or a modern-day passion play, the immense historical and moral weight of the Nazi crimes whittled down into the familiar categories of a Sunday school sermon or conventional box-office spectacle. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, we are already in such a time, with everything that says about the diminution of historical memory and the coarsening of any moral sense that depends upon maintaining a clear-eyed view of the past.

It is this realization that accounts for the note of skepticism in the title of this book: The End of the Holocaust. Why, some will ask, call into question the vitality of a cultural phenomenon whose energy and reach are greater than ever? Each year, after all, witnesses the publication of new books and articles on the Holocaust, the production of new films and television programs, the establishment of new museums and resource centers, the development and implementation of new school curricula, the convening of more classes, conferences, public commemorative events, and so forth. The Association of Holocaust Organizations 2010 Directory, for instance, runs to 272 pages and lists some 250 institutions and organizations world-wide that, in one way or another, provide services, assemble resources, and conduct programs related to the Holocaust. With so much ongoing activity, the evidence clearly points in the opposite direction—to more and not less attention focused on the Holocaust. Why, then, speak about its end?

What I have in mind in employing this term will become clear as the chapters of this book unfold. My overall argument is more about the changing character of historical awareness and its attenuation than about historical periodization and precise moments of ending. It makes sense, for instance, to say that World War II in Europe ended in the spring of 1945, but it would not be sensible to say that the Holocaust also came to closure at the same time. For many survivors, indeed, the Holocaust has never ended and never will end until they themselves expire. At least its anguish is felt as never-ending. I think of Primo Levi, for instance, whose writings make painfully clear the continuing nature of what he called, with grace and characteristic understatement, the offense. Liberated from Auschwitz, Levi returned to his native Italy only to find that the sufferings he had undergone in Auschwitz remained with him. He was home, surrounded by family and friends, but his dreams took him elsewhere: Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager.⁵ For Levi and for countless others like him who had been incarcerated in the Nazi camps, the nightmare is a recurring one, and closure is out of the question. For them, the Holocaust, far from ever reaching its end, was and remains a continuing trauma.

What happens to such sufferings, though, when they are treated in less serious ways, exploited for political or commercial gain, turned into something that resembles their opposite? What happens to our sense of this horrific past when it is reprogrammed to suit popular tastes and made into award-winning entertainments about life being nothing short of beautiful? What happens when others lay claim to the language of the Holocaust, and the sorrows of the Jews become contested by other sorrows and embattled in ugly disputes about comparative victimization? What happens to public awareness about the past when the emphasis of concern suddenly shifts from reflections on the Nazi crimes to legal battles about Nazi gold? Or when some take pleasure in denying the historical basis of these crimes entirely and seek to convince the public that the Holocaust is nothing more than an elaborate hoax designed by Jewish or Zionist interests? What stage of historical consciousness have we reached when, as one is amazed to learn, children of Holocaust survivors can bring themselves to crack jokes like the following: Why did Hitler commit suicide? Because he got the gas bill. What’s the difference between a loaf of bread and a Jew? A loaf of bread doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.⁶

What happens in the light of such developments is fairly predictable: as the mass murder of millions of innocent people is trivialized and vulgarized, a catastrophic history, bloody to its core, is lightened of its historical burden and gives up the sense of scandal that necessarily should attend it. The very success of the Holocaust’s wide dissemination in the public sphere can work to undermine its gravity and render it a more familiar thing. The more successfully it enters the cultural mainstream, the more commonplace it becomes. A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge—still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently, easier to bear. Made increasingly familiar through repetition, it becomes normalized. And, before long, it turns into something else—a repository of lessons about man’s inhumanity to man, a metaphor for victimization in general, a rhetoric for partisan politics, a cinematic backdrop for domestic melodramas. In observing Hitler’s war against the Jews undergo such transformations, one can, with good reason, grow properly skeptical and begin to anticipate something like an approaching end of the Holocaust. To be sure, books, films, television programs, popular plays, commemorative services, and the like will continue to keep stories and images of the Nazi crimes before a vast and receptive public, but this wide exposure itself hardly guarantees the perpetuation of a historical memory of the Holocaust that will be faithful to the past and representative of its worst excesses. It is more likely, in fact, that the steady domestication of the Holocaust will blunt the horrors of this history and, over time, render them less outrageous, and, ultimately, less knowable. Imre Kertész captures the essence of this seeming paradox precisely: The Holocaust appears to be ever more unintelligible the more people talk about it. … [It] recedes ever more into the distance, into history, the more memorials to it we construct. … The unbearable burden of the Holocaust has over time given rise to forms of language that appear to talk about the Holocaust, while never even touching the reality of it.⁷

To look on as these developments unfold is not easy, and to write about them dispassionately even less so. Nevertheless, I have tried to be both restrained and clarifying in my descriptions and analysis of the phenomena I address. Whether I have always succeeded is another matter. As will no doubt be apparent, there are certain tamperings with the memory of the dead that I find simply intolerable, and I feel compelled to say as much. At the same time, I do not favor overdramatizing this subject or writing about it in a hectoring prose style. Especially in considering authors who are themselves Holocaust survivors, I have tried to be as sober-minded as possible, for only in such a way can one come close to gleaning the important truths to which these writers dedicated themselves. One of these truths, memorably formulated by Jean Améry, sets a tone and a direction that I find inspiring and have tried to follow over the course of this book:

It is certainly true that moral indignation cannot hold its ground against the silently erosive and transformative effects of time. It is hopeless, even if not entirely unjustified, to demand that National Socialism be felt as an outrage with the same emotional intensity as in the years immediately following the Second World War. No doubt there exists something like historical entropy: the historical ‘heat gradient’ disappears. … But in viewing historical processes we should not foster this entropy; on the contrary, we should resist it with all our power.⁸

In tribute to the moral witness of Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Elie Wiesel, and others, I would like to think that, at least in a small way, this book might contribute to keeping some portion of the outrage alive.

ONE

Popular Culture and the Politics of Memory

Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith: they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion. No one will rectify wrongs; all wrongs will be forgotten.

—MILAN KUNDERA

We say Holocaust as if there were an established consensus on the full range of historical meanings and associations that this term is meant to designate. In fact, no such consensus exists. The image of the Holocaust is a changing one, and just how it is changing, who is changing it, and what the consequences of such change may be are matters that need to be carefully and continually pondered. Such reflection will be undertaken here on the basis of the following assumptions:

1. It is not primarily from the work of historians that most people gain whatever knowledge they may acquire of the Third Reich and the Nazi crimes against the Jews but rather from that of novelists, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, television program writers and producers, museum exhibits, popular newspapers and magazines, internet web sites, the speeches and ritual performances of political figures and other public personalities, and the like.

2. Thus the history of the Holocaust that is made available to most people most of the time is largely a product of popular culture and does not always derive from or necessarily conform to the history of the Jews under Nazism that professional historians strive to establish. Indeed, in some ways the two might be seen as rival enterprises, and the contest between them regarded as a struggle between antithetical drives or ambitions.

3. The public at large remains readily drawn by the specter of the Holocaust and is, consequently, a receptive audience for stories and images of the Third Reich, yet one cannot assume that this popular fascination with extreme suffering and mass death is tantamount to a serious interest in Jewish fate during the Nazi period. Indeed, far from being an effective means of educating the public about the evils of Nazism and the catastrophe visited upon the Jews, a prolonged exposure to popular representations of the Holocaust may work in the opposite way. It can dull rather than sharpen moral sensibility and thereby inhibit a sober understanding of or sympathetic feeling for the victims of gross historical pain. Images of personal and collective suffering may awaken conscience, but they also have the power to perversely excite the imagination; and, depending on how they are presented and to whom, such images may evoke a broad range of responses, not all of them seemly or benign. A pornography of the Holocaust can accompany and undercut a didactics of the Holocaust.

4. In sum, the image of the Holocaust is continually being transfigured, and the several stages of its transfiguration, which one can trace throughout popular culture, may contribute to a fictional subversion of the historical sense rather than a firm consolidation of accurate, verifiable knowledge. One result of such a development may be an incipient rejection of the Holocaust as it actually was rather than its incorporation by and retention in historical memory.

This prospect and the subtle psychological, aesthetic, and cultural motives that underlie it are detectable in a broad range of cultural phenomena, many of which will be examined in the chapters of this book. As a start, let us consider a few noteworthy developments in political life and popular culture, primary sources for the dissemination of information in an age dominated by the mass media.

We can begin by acknowledging the obvious: most public acts of remembering cannot be understood apart from the political culture of the moment. As one American historian puts it, Remembering is never just about the past. It’s always about the present.¹ As a vivid illustration of the truth of this insight, it is helpful to recall a code name that is no longer in the news, although for several weeks in the mid-1980s, it fairly dominated it: Bitburg. Prior to the spring of 1985 it is doubtful that very many people outside of Germany had ever heard of this small Rhenisch town (and inside Germany almost its only resonant association was with a locally produced beer, Bit Bier). Within a very short time, however, Bitburg came to symbolize far more than just its place name and pointed to an extraordinary tension in historical awareness, moral evaluation, German-American political relations, and more. What came to the fore with Bitburg, in short, implicated a number of major and obviously unresolved issues rooted in the traumatic period of World War II and the still unassimilated history of Nazi crimes against the Jews and others. Bitburg, it became clear, set in motion a debate about some of the deepest values of Western culture. The imperatives of historical memory, national responsibility, forgiveness and justice, politics and morality—all of these were stirred up by Bitburg, albeit most often in inchoate and conflicting form.

How could so much of consequence emerge from what, on the face of it, started out to be little more than a ceremonial gesture between the heads of two allied governments? Newsweek, in a prominent story, summed up the matter as rooted in one of the deepest moral quandaries of modern times—the tension between world Judaism’s need to remember the crimes of the Holocaust and post-Nazi Germany’s need to forget.² While this formulation is simplistic, it is not altogether off the mark and comes close to expressing the popular sense of what Bitburg was all about. For a more precise sense of what was actually involved, it is helpful to recall the words of one of the major actors in the Bitburg affair, Ronald Reagan.

Here is some of what the president of the United States had to say at his revealing news conference of March 21, 1985, in reply to a reporter’s question about his reluctance to visit Dachau, the notorious Nazi camp located in a suburb of Munich:

Q. Mr. President, would you tell us [of] your decision not to visit a Nazi concentration camp site when you make your trip to Germany in May commemorating V-E Day?

A. Yes. I’ll tell you. I feel very strongly that this time, in commemorating the end of that great war, that instead of reawakening the memories and so forth, and the passions of the time, that maybe we should observe this day as the day when, 40 years ago, peace began and friendship, because we now find ourselves allied and friends of the countries that we once fought against, and