Interesting Facts of the Day from My Dis

I thought I'd share.

First off, a dissertation is an enormous research project. By now, I've looked at political speeches, political cartoons, wartime posters, and all manner of World War II propaganda films and news footage--as well as documentaries, history books, yadda yadda yadda.

So, here's the interesting fact. When the concentration camps were liberated by Americans, they were filmed. The films acted as newsreel footage. Moreover, the films often did not mention Jews specifically, and when they were mentioned, mentioned them in a list of prisoners in which they generally appeared somewhere near the bottom. The end result of this is that the American public who learned about the Holocaust through newsreel footage were at odds to think of it as a crime committed primarilly against Jews.

Oh crap...I mentioned the Holocaust on my blog. Oh well, here come the Neo-Nazis, I'm sure. Keep in mind, I have to okay commentary and I don't okay fascists. Sorry, free country (still). You can start your own blog if you want and block my comments.

I should point out that the reason that Jews were not mentioned as primary victims in the crime had to do with America's anti-German propaganda which concentrated on the Nazi's imperialism, not their racism. Americans were ill prepared for what they found in the camps and as a result, fit what they saw into the story they'd been telling themselves all along about why they fought. Thus, the prisoners were seen as military and political enemies--not innocents that had been rounded up.