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Essay on FDR's Holocaust
Holocaust was the nearly absolute destruction of Jews in Europe by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II (1939-1945). The management of Germany’s Nazi Party ordered the annihilation of 5.6 million to 5.9 million Jews. Jews time and again refer to the Holocaust as Shoah (from the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” or “total destruction”). The word holocaust derives from the Greek holo (whole) and caustos (burned) and originally referred to a burnt offering, or a religious sacrifice that is totally consumed by fire. During the last decade of the twentieth century, interest in the nature and scope of Holocaust remembrances became a major American and international pre-occupation.
Tens of millions of tourists, foreign dignitaries, and interdisciplinary scholars have visited such places as the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the British Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibit. At the same time, countless viewers are encouraged to "never forget" and to vicariously engage in acts of remembrance by watching popular films such as Spielberg's Schindler's List. As many researchers have pointed out, this revival of interest in trying to comprehend both the universal and unique features of the Holocaust has intrigued both scholars and lay persons-and created a number of socially constructed "rescue" rhetoric’s that are worthy of analysis.
Unfortunately, this renascent interest in understanding the many facets of Hitler's Final Solution has been a mixed blessing, because we have witnessed the arrival of several other trends; the blurring of the lines between academic standards of historicism and popular notions of historical memory, the appearance of divisive debates about the relative importance of witness testimony and archival documentation, and the collapse of the modernist distinctions between fact and fiction. These various trends have also contributed to situations where "there is a strong tendency in historical writing on bystanders to the Holocaust to condemn, rather than to explain......
