oa Berichten over de Holocaust

Reporting the Holocaust. The media wars around Jews, 1940-1945

This article focuses on the ways in which Dutch media presented the persecution of Jews during the Second World War. Considering both allied and German propaganda, it offers a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of newspapers and radio. It shows that the Holocaust was presented in the traditional, detached, and unemotional manner common to journalistic discourse on the aims and causes of the war. The German-controlled media repeated national socialist stereotypes of Jews as war mongers, bolshevists, and a threat to civilization. Allied narratives stressed the need to destroy national socialism and restore peace in Europe. Where in the German narrative till 1942 Jews got a special position, in the allied narrative especially after 1942 Jews were denied a special position. In allied media the genocide was modestly described in a mostly factual and unemotional manner. The phenomenon that in current historiography is called ‘the Holocaust’ was ‘buried in time’ and can be seen as an example of the mediatisation of reality.