Responding to the Holocaust

Holocaust historiography has broadly fallen into the study of three main categories: perpetrator, victim and bystander. It is the last of these categories, that of the bystander, that this chapter charts. It is generally argued that the response of bystander countries such as Britain and the US, identified by Tony Kushner as ‘liberal democracies’,¹ failed to produce an effective response to the Holocaust. Into the mid-2000s, reviews of the literature on the British and American responses, led mainly by Kushner, contended that more nuance was still needed.² While reviewing the developments of the bystander historiography to date, this chapter will also suggest an area for further investigation which illuminates the subtleties of assessment still needed in bystander studies: the colonial response to the refugee crisis and the Holocaust.