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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The British Press Responds to the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

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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 chapter will show why it is important to consider not only liberalism, but also nationalism as the key tenet in shaping the press’s attitude to the liberation discourse. Essentially, to what extent the responses to the tragedy were shaped by national experiences of the war in general and different countries’ relationship to Germany in particular will be probed here, as well as in the following two chapters.2 The posing of this question may sound obvious, but because of the strength of the liberal imagination as the dominant explanatory frame, other pressing issues have received less attention.