Why was the Holocaust not mentioned until decades after WW2?

 

Though some references to the Holocaust were made during and just following World War II, this recognition of it as a separate systematic genocide grew over time. The broader acknowledgment and understanding of the Holocaust were delayed by several key factors:

1 So the immediate post-war concern: immediately after World War II, one was dealing with reconstruction in Europe and all of this kind of stuff. Although the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 ultimately did lead to a posthumous conviction for Hitler, and addressed crimes against humanity (e.g. terming Holocaust), it was primarily concerned with more general war crimes committed by the Nazi regime+

2. **Survivors' Trauma and Silence**: Most of the survivors of the holocaust were affected in so many ways and many of them could hardly talk of their ordeal. The scale of the event was usually difficult to grasp, even for people who were directly affected by it since it was so overwhelming. This made some survivors to keep off from media and there was a period of silence to the shocks.

3. **Political Context**: The onset of the Cold War caused the focus of the world rivalries to transform from the geographical political division of Europe into the geopolitical contest between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. This overshadowed the story of the holocaust for a while.


4. **Lack of Documentation and Understanding**: First of all, there are historical gaps in documenting, and understanding about the Holocaust’s full-scale and systematization process. First, historians and scholars had the chance to collect, put together and then study the fairly enormous amount of materials.


5. **Cultural and Societal Factors**: This made people in many countries avoid facing the true horror of holocaust because it pointed fingers not only at Germans but also collaborators and people in the different occupied nations. This made the subject difficult for the pupils to handle and was associated with politics.

6. **Emergence of Holocaust Studies**: Holocaust studies existed as a field of study in a restricted sense, and more so only in the early part of the 1960s and 1970s. Other activities like the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and the publication of Elie Wiesel’s, “Night” however brought the holocaust in to focus again.

7. **Public Awareness and Media**: Other media such as television helped bring the holocaust into the public domain more prominently. Documentaries, films and televised trials helped to raise awareness and share the history of the genocide with other people.

As the above factors changed gradually, the holocaust started gaining attention and understanding and was accepted as one of the infamous genocide in human history.