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Nazi Concentration Camps Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 July 2015. Copyright © 2000. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. While America Watches Televising the Holocaust ] effrey Shand/er New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1999 Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 July 2015. Copyright © 2000. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. one The Image as Witness During the final weeks of the war in Europe, most Americans learned about the events now known as the Holocaust fro1n newspapers, radio broad­ casts, and newsreels show11 in movie theaters. Television, hov.1ever, was not an early source of information on this subject. The nation's fledgling televi­ sion broadcasting industry of the late I 9 30s had been all but completely shut down once the United Stares entered the war and was not reestab­ lished until after the war's end. The Holocaust is part of the prehistory of television as a national broadcasting 1nediu1n. Now mostly consigned to libraries and archives, the first mediations of the Holocaust had a for1native influence on television's many presentations of the subject. The centerpiece of 1\mericans' initial encounter \vith the sub­ ject was film footage recorded by the United States Army Signal Corps, documenting the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration can1ps. The initial presentation of these images established their viewing as an exceptional, morally galvanizing experience. American television bas since perpetuated and expanded the significance of this footage. Besides transforming some of these in1ages into widely and swiftly recognized icons of the Nazi era, tele­ vision has reaffirmed their value as virtual witnesses of the Holocaust. Shortly before Germany's surrender in the spring of 1945, movie the­ aters across the United States showed millions of its citizens graphic evi­ dence of what were then referred to as "Nazi atrocities": sites of large-scale torture and killing of European civilians and A.Hied prisoners of war, emaci­ ated and feeble victims of abuse, piles of corpses, and mass graves. These images, recorded only days earlier, document a moment that is no\v widely regarded, in historian Robert Abzug's words, as "a turning point in West­ ern consciousness." Although the actual missions of liberating these camps during the final \veeks of the \var in Europe were not of strategic impor­ tance from a n1ilitary standpoint, Abzug noted that they proved to be of great symbolic significance. H e considered the direct encounters of Allied soldiers, journalists, governmental representatives, and others with the 5 Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 July 2015. Copyright © 2000. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 6 Creating the Viewer cam.ps as critical to the enduring recognition of the Holocaust. Had this not occurred, Abzug argued, the Holocaust might well have been "reported and put out of mind, known and dismissed, prey to every denial and charge of political manipulation."1 General D"vight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces in Europe, played a leading role in arranging these encounters. Moreover, he \Vas at the forefront of establishing the act of w itnessing the conditions of recently liberated ca1nps as a rnorally transformative experience. Within days of his first visits to liberated Nazi concentration camps at Ohrdruf (r 2 April r945) and Buchenwald (r3 April), Eisenhower began nlaking arrangements for iunerican soldiers stationed in the area to be brought to the camps, as well as for visits by an official congressional delegation and a group of editors of leading Arnerican newspapers. Al lied occupying forces also compelled local German civilians to \Vitness the conditions inside the camps and, in some cases, to participate in the burial of corpses or the care of surviving inmates. In his initial communications to other military leaders, Eisenhower com­ mented both on the enormity of what he had seen and on the im portance of serving as an eyewitness to scenes that "beggar description." 2 Later, he reit­ erated these senti1nents in Crusade in Europe, his memoir of World War II: I have never felt able to describe 1ny etnotional reactions when I first came face to face with iodisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disre­ gard of every shred of decency.. I visited every nook and cranny of the camp [at Oh.rdrufj because 1 felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these rhings in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propa­ ganda." . .. I felt that the evidence should be in1n1ediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cyni­ cal doubt.3 Eisenhower characterized the face-to-face encounter with " indisputa ble evidence" as a defining moment not only for himself but also for the Allied nations. Previous evidence - including military intelligence reports and civilian eyewitness testimony- had, Eisenhower implied, failed to convince the Allies that reports of Nazi atrocities were anything beyond mere "pro­ paganda." But Allied liberators were, in his vie\v, uniquely situated to ver­ ify the truth of what would otherv1ise leave room for "cynical doubt." Moreover, Eisenhower asserted that with this privilege the li berator bore a special obligation thereafter to offer testimony "at first hand." Eisenhower's command also oversa\V the filming of liberated concentra­ tion ca1nps by members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps and cameramen working for commercial newsreel production companies. The making of Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 July 2015. Copyright © 2000. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. The Image as Witness 7 _,,,-. - "~ -~ - ' A U.S. Army Signal Corps cameraman films evidence of Nazi atrocities at Kaufering IV, a concentration camp in Hurlach, Germany, on 29 April 194 5. (Hoover Institution Archives. ) these films was not simply a part of the liberation process. Camerarnen docu­ menting liberation became professional witnesses, as communications scholar Barbie Zel.izer has observed, "standing in for the witnessing activity of the general public. "4 Liberation footage came to be seen as extending this uniquely privileged mornent of witnessing and testifying "at first hand." The political, emotional, and moral investment in the power of liberation footage exemplifies the motion picture camera's profound impact on the aes­ thetics of representation, or mimesis, in the twentieth cenrury. Critic Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," published in 1936, offered telling insights into the mimetic power of film. Informed, perhaps, by hov.r the medium figured in the promo­ tion of Nazism, Benjamin's analysis presaged the strategic role that film would play in the defeat of the Axis po"vers. Arguing that the medium has revolutionized hutnan perception by creating an optical "unconscious," Benjamin suggested that film possesses the potential to transfornJ how peo­ ple perceive and, consequently, ho\.v they respond to the "vorld around thern, facilitating "an immense and unexpected field of action." 5 The transformative impact of vievving liberation footage relies on a valu­ ation of the films as authentic copies and as replications of actual encoun- Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches : Televising the Holocaust. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, 2000. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 1 July 2015. Copyright © 2000. Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 8 Creating the Viewer ters with the victims of Nazi persecution. These properties of "imitation" and "contact" are essential to the mimetic experience in any form, accord­ ing ro anthropologist Michael Taussig, as is a distinctive "flash of recogni­ tion," a shock that "alters the very percept of recognizing, entailing transformation of the recognizing self. " 6 There is, moreover, a particular onus in photography's mimesis, critic Luc Sante has argued, when it consti­ tutes a virtual encounter w ith death. Sante has suggested that pho­ tographed images of the dead offer vie'l.vers "an excruciatingly intimate sight" along with "the burden of this intimacy. .. The terrible gift that the dead rnake to the living is that of sight, "vhich is to say forekno'1vledge; in return, they demand memory, which is to say acknowledgment."7 Just as liberation footage became a virtual 'vitness of mass death, the act of wit­ nessing served as an organizing principle of the first presentations of these films to the American public and continues to be integrally linked to the images themselves. "Don't Turn Away-Look!": American Neiusreels For some individuals, the first public encounter in I 945 with the photo­ graphic record of liberated Nazi concentration camps endured as a thresh­ old event in their person.al development, and they linked their own loss of innocence \'Vith this historic moment of revelation. Literary critic Alfred Kazin concluded his coining-of-age 1nemoir, Starting Out in the Thirties, with an unsettling description of watching these images in a newsreel the­ ater in London, where he \'Vas stationed with the lJ.S. Army: On the screen, sticks in black-and-white prison garb leaned on a wire, staring dreamily at rhe can1era; other sticks shuffled about, or sat vaguely on the ground, next to an enorn1ous pile of bodies, piled up like cordwood, from which protruded legs, arn1s, heads. A few guards v.1ere collected sullenly in a corner, and for a moment a British Army bulldozer was shov•n digging an enormous hole in the ground. Then the sticks would come back on the screen, hanging on the wire, looking at us.
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