In May 1964, Herman Arthur, a teacher at New York City’s High School of Fashion Industries, bristled at an article he had read in the January edition of Strengthening Democracy, a NYC School Board newsletter for educators. The piece in question had reported on students’ experiences in a program called The Panel of Americans. In it, five young adults from diverse backgrounds—Black, Puerto Rican, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—spoke to students about their personal experiences. The intent of the panel was to help the audience see “people as individuals rather than stereotypes” and to lead them to “analyze their own attitudes.” In addition to the young adult panel, the authors of the article reported on a project taken in some classes which saw students create their own “Panel of Americans.” One Chinese student described the prejudice she faced and her exclusion from groups of white students. A Catholic boy spoke excitedly of his experience of attending a bar mitzvah and how they had helped him understand his Jewish neighbors and classmates better. Students also enjoyed speaking of traditions particular to their own cultural.

Yet, it was the discussion surrounding the remarks of a young Jewish girl which sparked Herman Arthur to object in his letter to the editor in May of 1964. The girl explained that her mother had lived in German concentration camps and had “seen her family and her husband’s family exterminated.” Thus, the girl stated, her mother had raised her to hate all Germans. The students challenged the condemnation of an entire nationality. They asked if she knew that not all Germans had supported the Nazis. They argued that some Germans had opposed Hitler. She remained unswayed. Then, one student asked for her thoughts regarding recent events in Birmingham, Alabama—notably a church bombing which had left four young black girls dead and the famous marches which had seen demonstrators attacked by police dogs, arrested, and sprayed with fire hoses. She responded with anger at what had happened. The student then asked her how she thought other nations felt about Americans due to these events. They asked if she felt that she should be included as responsible for charges of barbarity made against Americans. She responded that “Of course not. I wouldn’t have anything to do with anything like that.” Soon, the authors reported, the girl was wondering how she would respond when she met a German.

Herman Arthur rejected the equation of the events of Birmingham with the “slaughter of the Jews.” He argued that “while they were both manifestations of hate and prejudice, there are enormous differences of both degree and kind involved.” He continued by pointing out that “in one instance, the mistreatment was the product of a deliberate, government-invoked policy carried out at all levels by an elaborate bureaucratic machinery which involved civil servants, special police forces, the German Army, and large numbers of civilians. In the second instance, the mistreatment reflected defiance of the established law of the land and the courts by one small segment of the population.” He suggested that “The Nazi regime in Germany is such a terrifying historical fact that if the panelists were at all aware of it (as they should be) they might wind up sharing the Jewish panelist’s feelings and agreeing with these feelings as being fully justified, until we have better evidence of genuine remorse emerging from that country.” Arthur clearly differentiated the murder of the Jews from other events involving prejudice and felt that the uneducated use of the Nazi genocide as an analogy had clear, negative repercussions (in this case the unconsidered “forgiveness” and trust of Germany).

Moreover, for our purposes, Arthur’s letter to Strengthening Democracy, reveals insights into how American educators engaged with the murder of the Jews and into the beginnings of the cultural memory of what is now called the Holocaust. The teacher’s letter represents the first statement in an official NYC BoE document—including curricula, letters, and publications—which differentiated the Nazi assault on the Jews from the persecution of others under German domination. This event demonstrates the beginnings of a change in American perceptions of the murder of Europe’s Jews and speaks to the issue of trivialization.

Representations of the Murder of the Jews, 1945-1960

First, Arthur’s 1964 letter came at a time when Americans had first begun categorizing the murder of the Jews as a particular event—the Holocaust—rather than as part of a more general or universal one. To be clearer, prior to ~1961 (with the Eichmann Trial) most Americans saw the assault on the Jews as a part of a broad set of Nazi attacks on individuals, democracy, and human rights. The clearest example of this might be that in Edward Morrow’s famous description of Buchenwald, he never mentions the Jews. In other accounts, victims are listed as coming from across the nation’s of Europe. The Nuremberg Trials included genocide but did so under the listing of “War Crimes” and included “Jews, Poles, G------ and others.” In other words, the attempted extermination of the Jews fell within categories that included other Nazi atrocities. For more information on the liberation of the camps, Morrow’s broadcast, etc., see my askhistorians post here.

So how did Americans talk about the assault on the Jews? When they discussed the plight of the Jews in Europe, they often did so in the context of other categories of Nazi policy and actions. For example, when speaking about Nazi propaganda, American educators might mention anti-Jewish curricula and lessons in German schools. In discussing camps, they would often note Jewish prisoners alongside others—here they would usually be depicted as part of an assault on particular democratic principles. Often, textbooks would note that communists and Jews lost their rights under the Nazis, signifying the attack on political freedoms (and yes, many textbooks failed to note that Jews were FALSELY accused of being communists by the Nazis). In other cases, they would state that Jews and Priests were incarcerated in camps as part of the Nazi’s areligious stance (again a misattribution as the Nazis had significant Christian support and, in part, derived from Western Christian principles). The main idea here, however, is that there was no single, cohesive categorization of what happened to the Jews apart from tying their plight to the treatment of others. This had the effect of presenting the Nazi attempt to exterminate all Jews as simply a forecast to a similar assault on any number of people, for political, racial, or religious reasons.

This had a twofold effect. First, it meant that, prior to the 1960s, Americans never really discussed the significance of Nazi racial policy as the motivational factor—particularly historically developed antisemitism—and specific trajectory and timeline of the assault on the Jews. Instead, the millions dead were the result of propaganda, Nazi rejection of science, political centralization, or whatever other category educators discussed. Second, educators associated the murder of the Jews with various policies and actions, even if they used the Jews as a cypher for the likely outcome for a number of peoples. Thus, Americans developed a cultural propensity to attribute genocidal outcomes to almost every aspect and policy of the Nazis.

Hence, Arthur’s letter signifies a growing understanding and call to recognize the murder of the Jews separately from other Nazi atrocities. Arthur specifically limits his discussion to the assault on the Jews. He disassociates it from other acts of “racism” and denoted the various groups which participated in the so-called Final Solution.

All of this answers the question of regarding when “trivialization of the Holocaust” began. One way to answer the question is to say that it began in 1933, even before the events implementation of the Final Solution, when Americans first started using the plight of the Jews as an expression of anti-democracy rather than antisemitism or Nazi racial policy. However, you can also answer the question by saying, there was no Holocaust to trivialize because Americans simply did not have the category for conceiving of the murder of the Jews as a singular, contained event. In fact, the Holocaust as a name for the genocide of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their allies did not gain traction until the 1960s. The lack of terminology limited the conceptual space for discussion.

The fullest answer would be that the ways that Americans discussed the murder of the Jews up to the 1960s tied that even to a number of aspects of the Nazi regime. This resulted in Americans seeing the extermination camps as the natural or likely outcome of any number of Nazi policies—state centralization and planning, the politics of racial antagonism, propagandized schooling, etc.