Historiography of the Holocaust: Early Developments

doi:10.1017/9781108913614.004

1 - Historiography of the Holocaust: Early Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025

Boaz Cohen

Edited by

Mark Roseman and

Dan Stone

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Mark Roseman: Affiliation:
Indiana University
Dan Stone: Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London

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Summary

This chapter explores how the Holocaust came into focus in historiography, beginning with efforts to write the Holocaust’s history while it happened, and looking both at the early postwar Jewish historiography and at the first initiatives at writing about the Holocaust in Western historical scholarship. It discusses the impact of the Nuremberg Trials on postwar scholarship, and the challenge this presented to those who wished to capture the victims’ perspective. It concludes in the early 1960s with the publication of Raul Hilberg’s monumental work in the English language, and with new initiatives in Israeli scholarship. A central theme of the essay is the tension between the victim-centered approaches in the early Jewish historiography and the more perpetrator- and policy-related orientation of the Western scholarship in the 1960s.

Keywords

Early historiography of the Holocaust victim testimony Jewish history writing Jewish Historical Commissions Khurbn Shoah displaced persons camps perpetrator history versus victim history

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the Holocaust , pp. 20 - 39

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913614.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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