Kylmän sodan Suomi, suomalaiset ja suomettuminen

The Holocaust, the Founding of Israel and the Arab-Israeli War in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press

The fact that the gap between the founding of the state of Israel and the end of the Holocaust was only three years (almost to date), creates, at least in retrospect, a strong link between the two events. Articulating this view, Walter Harrelson has written that ‘[A] shamed world was certainly ready, after the Holocaust and the struggle of Jews from Europe to get to Israel, to support the Partition Plan that led to the establishment of the state.’1 Yehuda Bauer has argued that the birth of a nation ‘bridges the gap between an unconquered past tragedy and the hope for the resurrection of an almost mortally wounded people’.2 Peter Novick also agrees that the link exists, although in less cert…

Tiedonvälitys sivistysmissiosta uutisiin

Responding to the Nazi Crimes: The British Press and the Nuremberg Trial

Ever since the news of the liberated concentration camps had filled the pages of British newspapers, the majority attitude of the press was that Nazi criminality, including the Final Solution, had to be recorded and remembered. Throughout the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies were wrestling with the question of how the unbelievable scenes, exposed by advancing Allied armies who liberated concentration camps, and the criminality of the Nazi regime that had made them possible, should be investigated.

Race, Environment, and Crisis : Hurricane Camille and the Politics of Southern Segregation

In August 1969 Hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast. We argue that the disaster caused by the Hurricane was an outcome of the entanglement between human and non-human agents. As a non-human agent, Hurricane Camille thrust the prevailing socio-economic situation in the segregationist South into the spotlight, with all its political and cultural ramifications – much to the annoyance of the local political elite that had long sought to isolate southern politics from civil rights and the desegregation agenda. Consequently, it (re)invigorated and furnished the civil rights movement and the politics defining that era with new arguments and approaches that would have been impossible to dev…

The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939-1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Yosef Gorny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 294 pp., hardcover $90.00, e-book available

Chris Coulter. Being a Bush Wife. Women's lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone

Victors, Vanquished and Neutrals: The Swedish Press and the Nuremberg Trial

After the shock of the ghastly revelations from the liberated concentration camps began to wane in late spring 1945, there was little written on the Nazi genocide in the Swedish press until autumn 1945. As elsewhere, the attention and energies of the newspaper media were directed to covering other tumultuous events of the world. For example, the Swedish press followed closely the developments in its neighbouring countries — not least Finland, which seemed to be on the verge of a Soviet-instigated coup, and therefore caused a lot of anxiety and discussion in the Swedish press. In line with the concept of Nordic Brotherhood, as discussed in Chapter 3, the Swedish press functioned as a channel…

‘A Hellish Nightmare’: The Swedish Press and the Construction of Early Holocaust Narratives, 1945–1950

This study examines how the Swedish press responded to and portrayed the Holocaust immediately after the war. The liberation of the camps, the role and guilt of ordinary Germans, the Nuremberg trials and the ongoing problem of Jewish DPs in Europe were the most important issues on the basis of which the Swedish press had shaped the early post-war view of the Holocaust. Moreover, the fate of the Jews under Nazi Germany formed an important element of such reporting. The author argues that, contrary to the dominant Anglo-American historiography, which holds that the first post-war decades were marked by silence surrounding the German genocide, the Swedish press wrote about the Holocaust often …

The Swedish Press and the Liberation of the Camps

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war on the USA, American correspondents remaining in German-controlled Europe were either forced to leave or incarcerated.1 For the world’s liberal press this turn of events meant that Sweden and Switzerland became ‘listening posts for news from Germany and its satellites’.2 For the Swedish press this meant that it was in a unique position because it could still cover Axis Europe from inside, making Swedish journalists among the very few sources of news from German-occupied areas that were independent from German propaganda.3

The Problem of Displaced Jews and the Holocaust

So far we have discussed how the Holocaust was portrayed as part of the discourse on the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trial. The last part of this book takes on a theme that runs parallel to, sometimes converging with, the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’. As Suomen Kuvalehti pointed out in 1945: ‘The Nazi war of extermination against the Jews did not resolve the Jewish question. On the contrary, the persecution has made the agenda more complicated than ever before.’1 Therefore, an examination of the press discourse on Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs), the creation of Israel and the emergence of the Cold War is necessary. However, it makes sense to deal with these topics separately in ord…

The Nuremberg Trial in the Finnish Press Discourse

The opening of the Nuremberg Trial was widely reported in Finland, as in other countries examined here. Like the reportage from the liberated concentration camps, the Finnish press was not represented on the spot although it had a quota for one journalist. However, the trial was a much-awaited event in Finland. The Belsen Trial (the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others), which had ended on 17 November 1945, was duly reported in Finland, and in part indicated that the interest in Nazi criminality was running high.1

Parliament and the Press : Forging the United Nations in Wartime Britain, 1939–45

During the Second World War, not only the United States but also Great Britain played a leading role in planning and establishing the United Nations (UN) as a new international organisation to replace the League of Nations. While scholarship on post‐war planning is extensive, relatively little exists on how the planning process was discussed and depicted publicly in Britain. The purpose of this article is to fill such lacunae by examining the two most important domains for public discussion at the time, the press and parliament. It will argue, first, that the League of Nations’ experience – its inability to use collective force and its optimistically democratic structure – overwhelmingly sh…

Michael Fleming.Auschwitz, the Allies and Censorship of the Holocaust.

Re-thinking Nicholas J. Spykman : from historical sociology to balance of power

This article examines Nicholas J. Spykman’s scholarship beyond geopolitics and International Relations (IR). Because his works have mainly been studied through these prisms, I argue that we have overlooked the most important underlying current of his work: historical sociology. As a result, the prevailing view of him is overtly narrow. When Spykman’s scholarly output is examined from the 1920s to 1940s, an entirely different view of Spykman emerges. Essentially, his fundamental understanding of world affairs derived from the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s theories. In the 1920s and 1930s, Spykman transmuted these underpinnings into IR that later in the 1940s guided his two major works: A…

The Finnish Press and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

Finland’s response to the liberation of the concentration camps was considerably different from the British and Swedish responses; the Finnish press wrote far less about the liberations than their British and Swedish counterparts; the event hardly sparked any public discussions in Finland; and there was almost no pictorial record of the atrocities to accompany the news. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to establish what the Finnish press wrote about the liberation of the camps — to investigate what type of discourses the Finnish press subscribed to; and second, to analyse why they wrote in the way they did — to understand why the news was framed in certain ways.

Forgetting to Remember: The Press Discourse, the Cold War and Conjunctures of Remembrance

The first ‘memory wave’ of the Holocaust, largely based on the depictions of the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trial, was coming to an end in the late 1940s.1 This period, sometimes called the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’,2 was also shaped by discussion relating to the Jewish DPs, the creation of Israel and its aftermath, as this this book has shown. As the Palestine issue became less acute and faded from daily news, talk of the Holocaust also vanished from the public domain. Consequently, the disappearance of the Holocaust from the public eye marked the beginning of a cultural amnesia that lasted, as the dominant historical wisdom now has it, until the 1960s.3 On the other hand, it …

Nationalism and Internationalism Reconciled : British Concepts for a New World Order during and after the World Wars

The carnage of World War I gave rise to liberal visions for a new world order with democratized foreign policy and informed international public opinion. Conservatives emphasized continuity in national sovereignty, while socialists focused on the interests of the working class. While British diplomacy in the construction of the League of Nations has been widely discussed, we focus on contemporary uses of nationalism and internationalism in parliamentary and press debates that are more ideological. We also examine how failed internationalist visions influenced uses of these concepts during World War II, supporting alternative organizational solutions, caution with the rhetoric of democracy a…

Melbournen verikylpy : Unkarin kansannousu, olympialiike ja lehdistö

One of the best known Cold War era conflict in the sporting field – or in this case in the pool – was the Melbourne games’ water polo semifinal between Hungary and the USSR, played on 6 December. In international sports literature the event is known as the “blood in the water” match. The Hungarian uprising which had begun in October and was still continuing when the semifinalists met formed the background context for the bloody match which the Hungarians won 4–0. Given the background events, the Hungarian uprising and escalating Cold War mentality in the Olympics, the match was evidently more about politics than sports in itself. In historiography which examines the collision between Olympi…

Olympialiikkeen kriisi(t) ja muodonmuutos 1970-luvulla

1970-luvulla olympialiike ajautui kriisiin, jossa se joutui määrittelemään toimintansa ehdot uudelleen. Toisen maailmansodan jälkeinen voimakas talouskehitys, kulutusyhteiskunnan nopea kasvu, teknologinen muutos sekä näiden johdannaisena seurannut urheilun voimakas kaupallistuminen, ammatillistuminen ja viihteellistyminen haastoivat Pierre de Coubertinin luoman ”olympismin” ideaalin. Luonteeltaan 1970-luvun kriisi oli sekä materiaalinen että ideologinen, jonka hallintaa ei helpottanut se, että Kansainvälisen olympiakomitean (KOK) ydinryhmä liikkeen puheenjohtajan Avery Brundagen johdolla oli pitänyt sitkeästi kiinni 1800- ja 1900-lukujen vaihteen olympismista samalla ummistaen silmänsä ympä…

Finland and the Holocaust: A Reassessment

A reconsideration of Finland’s relationship with the Holocaust is needed for two reasons. First, the country has recently witnessed a debate over its role in the Holocaust, stimulating new academic research. Second, the standard reference work on the subject, an article published in this journal in 1995 and subsequently condensed in Walter Laqueur and Judith Baumel’s Holocaust Encyclopedia , is outdated. By shedding light on a well-known episode in which Finland transferred eight foreign Jews to German control, the following article reframes the question of whether Finland was victim, bystander, or perpetrator during the Nazis’ genocide.

The British Press Responds to the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

Following the liberation of Western concentration camps, especially Buchenwald (11 April) and Bergen-Belsen (15 April), newspapers in Europe reported a story of cruelty that seemed to surpass every other atrocity story they had told before. This chapter will examine how the liberation news was published in the mainstream British papers. It is now well known that the liberation of the camps hardly helped the British public to comprehend the true nature of the Nazi genocide.1 However, what concerns us here is to go beyond the argument according to which the dominant liberal discourse in Britain was principally responsible for influencing British understanding of the Holocaust. Instead, this c…

Kiistanalainen SS-palapeli

Debating Internationalisms : Contexts, Concepts and Historiography

The Holocaust and the birth of Israel in British, Swedish and Finnish press discourse, 1947–1948

This article examines the way in which the Holocaust was linked to the process of the birth of Israel between 1947 and 1948 in the mainstream British, Swedish and Finnish press. By utilising a framework of comparative cultural history, this essay seeks to understand why different countries responded to the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War in such diverse ways. This essay also seeks to question the popular belief that the two events were intimately linked, and that the link was recognised in a straightforward manner. Hence, the study argues that although the press coverage sometimes managed to establish the connection between the two events, more typically the news was domes…