Aftermath of the Holocaust

The Holocaust had a deep effect on society both in Europe and the rest of the world, and today its consequences are still being felt, both by children and adults whose ancestors were victims of this genocide.

German society largely responded to the enormity of the evidence for and the horror of the Holocaust with an attitude of self-justification and a practice of keeping quiet.

In May 2006, a 20-year effort by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum led to the announcement that 30–50 million pages would be made available to survivors, historians and others.

[2] The Holocaust and its aftermath left millions of refugees, including many Jews who had lost most or all of their family members and possessions, and often faced persistent antisemitism in their home countries.

Many American-run DP camps had horrific conditions, with inmates living under armed guard, as revealed in the Harrison Report.

[3][4][5] With most displaced persons being unable or unwilling to return to their former homes in Europe, and with restrictions to immigration to many western countries remaining in place, the British Mandate of Palestine became the primary destination for many Jewish refugees.

However, as local Arabs opposed their immigration, the United Kingdom refused to allow Jewish refugees into the Mandate territory.

Żydokomuna was one of the causes that led to an intensification of Polish antisemitism in 1945–48, which some have argued was worse than prior to 1939; hundreds of Jews were killed in anti-Jewish violence.

Even in Poland, where harsh discrimination left the Jews as a cohesive ethnic group, Yiddish was rapidly declining in favour of Polonization.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have traditionally taught that God is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all-good) in nature.

For a creation will never be able to fully grasp the creator, just as a child in an operating theater can not fathom why people are cutting up a live person's body.

As the Lubavitcher Rebbe once told Elie Wiesel, after witnessing the Holocaust and realizing how low human beings can stoop, who can we trust, if not God?

[23] Theodor Adorno commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,"[24] and the Holocaust has indeed had a profound impact on art and literature, for both Jews and non-Jews.

Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Viktor Frankl and Anne Frank, but there is a substantial body of literature and art in many languages.

The historic tale of the Danish Jews fleeing to Sweden by fishing boat is recounted in an award-winning American children's novel.

The highest-profile legal cases arising from this issue are the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) and Germany v. Philipp (2021).

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the Jewish Agency led by Chaim Weizmann submitted to the Allies a memorandum demanding reparations to Jews by Germany but it received no answer.

After negotiations, the claim was reduced to a sum of $845 million direct and indirect compensations to be installed in a period of 14 years.

[33] In 1999, many German industries such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens or BMW faced lawsuits for their role in the forced labour during World War II.

In order to dismiss these lawsuits, Germany agreed to raise $5 billion of which Jewish forced laborers still alive could apply to receive a lump sum payment of between $2,500 and $7,500.

[34] In 2014, the SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, was compelled to allocate $60 million to American Jewish Holocaust survivors for its role in the transport of deportees to Germany.

[39] The United Nations General Assembly voted on November 1, 2005, to designate January 27 as the "International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust."

Key elements of this claim are the rejection of the following: that the Nazi government had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews and people of Jewish ancestry for extermination as a people; that between five and seven million Jews[41] were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies; and that genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.

[48] The methods of Holocaust deniers are often criticized as based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary.

45% of adults and 49% of millennials were unable to name a single Nazi concentration camp or ghetto in German-occupied Europe during the Holocaust.