Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50 (review)

Antero Holmila’s book, Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50, considers one of the earliest manifestations of Holocaust representation: newspaper depictions in the years immediately following the war. Holmila explores “the ways in which collective memories of the Jewish tragedy were forged in the public sphere” (p. 6), with a particular eye to the marginalization of Jewish suffering.

In analyzing newspaper accounts, Holmila makes wise methodological choices. First, he focuses on relatively discreet events, particularly on the liberation of the concentration camps and on the Nuremberg trial of top German leaders. Less defined issues, such as the problem of displaced persons, the founding of the state of Israel, and the effects of the Cold War, are explored through specific incidents. The 1945 Harrison Report on camp conditions and the 1947 saga of the Exodus, for example, form the backbone of Holmila’s discussion of the DPs. Analyzing particular episodes rather than amorphous topics makes possible Holmila’s second smart methodological move: adopting a narrative approach rather than quantitative content analysis. For each event, Holmila tells the story of what happened, providing background, explaining the context, and offering pointed quotations. He thus conveys nuances of press-portrayal without getting bogged down. Holmila’s last methodological choice is his most important: he examines newspaper coverage in three countries that assumed different postures vis-à-vis Germany during the war. This comparative analysis generates his overarching thesis. Holmila concludes that Jewish suffering was indeed downplayed in the immediate postwar years—albeit less than previously assumed—but that it was nationalistic imperatives, more than liberal ideology, that led to this marginalization.

In reporting the liberation of the camps, the British press focused on the German perpetrators rather than the Jewish victims. For the British, who had endured nearly six years of war, the atrocity revelations demonstrated Germans’ essential bestiality and vindicated the decision to wage war against them. By contrast, the Swedes, who were officially neutral during the war, concentrated on the victims. Unlike the British, the Swedish press identified Jewish camp survivors as Jews and told their particularized story. Sweden’s wartime rescue operations and interest in Scandinavian Jews had already sensitized many in the country to the Jews’ plight, Holmila argues; the presence of 15,000 camp survivors in the country after the war furthered the victim narrative. The Finns, who had been allied with Germany during the war, focused on neither the perpetrators nor the victims. The Finnish press simply ignored the liberated camps. That Finnish journalists did not go to any partly explains this silence, as does Finland’s complicated attitude toward its own German “alliance.”

The Nuremberg trial also generated varying coverage. British newspapers mentioned the extermination of the Jews only briefly and on inside pages, highlighting instead the German defendants and the need to re-educate a still Nazified Germany. As in its liberation coverage, the Swedish press grasped the uniqueness and significance of the Holocaust in its description of the trial’s purpose, yet more pressing current news pushed the story off the front pages. The Finnish press treated the genocide as major news. Again, nationalistic needs influenced this coverage. By emphasizing the Holocaust’s role in the trial of German officials, the Finnish press drew a contrast with the ongoing trial of its own wartime leaders for waging war against the Soviet Union. The extermination of the Jews made clear that the Germans were the true war criminals; the Finnish trial was merely political punishment.

Different attitudes toward the future framed the coverage of other postwar Jewish issues. How the Jews ended up as displaced persons or why they needed a homeland did not figure in much reportage; instead, where the DPs would go and what type of nation theirs might be dominated coverage. Not surprisingly, the British press portrayed the Jews negatively, both those in the camps demanding to...