The VE Day celebrations are already under way for the 80th time, but the other day I read – right here on Substack – somebody undermining the truth of the Nazi holocaust.
They claimed the holocaust stories only started emerging in the 1960s. And without being specific, they implied the stories might be exaggerated or even made up.
So here is the truth they are denying – right here in these pages from LIFE magazine of May 7th, 1945 which show that the whole free world knew the facts and saw evidence in the popular media in real time.
Because what really ended 80 years ago this week was not just a war, but a regimen of total barbarism, of unspeakable, inhuman behaviour.
I was still furious about the denials I had been reading when I walked into the Technical Museum of Vienna this morning. And right there in the Media Gallery, in a section devoted to photo-journalism, were these pages from LIFE magazine.
I am not Jewish, but I do have a family perspective on these horrors. My father worked at the War Trials in Germany when the horrors of Belsen and other extermination camps were clinically unfolded for the world to see – and remember. He was a tiny cog in the machine of justice, a communications clerk feeding journalist reports back to Fleet Street. He sometimes sat in the body of the court, face-to-face with the Nazi murderers and I have his letters home to his girlfriend – my mother – describing the trials.
So maybe I am just a little more sensitive to the revisionists than some.
There is no hiding from the truth of the Holocaust. For me denial – or even attempting to mitigate what was done – is conspiracy with the perpetrators of one of the filthiest acts of human history.
Only repeating the truth can prevent it happening again.
