Britain and Holocaust Consciousness in the 1960s

Dan Stone, Johannes-Dieter Steinert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350443969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Until now, in the scholarly literature on the development of 'Holocaust consciousness' in the UK, the 1960s has been a missing decade. This book brings together an impressive cast of expert scholars to provide a much-needed corrective to the situation. It ranges widely across disciplines and cultural spheres, as well as the nations and regions of the UK, to reveal that what we now call 'Holocaust consciousness' was decisively created in the UK the 1960s.

Britain and Holocaust Consciousness in the 1960s sheds light – remarkably for the first time – on British reactions to the 1961 Eichmann Trial. It considers as well the 1964 Dering v Uris libel trial in London, at the heart of which were horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz and which was covered extensively by the British press at the time. The book also covers key sites of Holocaust consciousness such as the Wiener Library and the Columbus Centre, a wealth of British cultural responses to the Holocaust from the period, including memoir literature, cinema, television, art and music, and incorporates vital material on refugees, survivors, gender and religion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Holocaust consciousness in Britain in the 1960s Dan Stone
• 1 Murder for the masses: The Holocaust in paperback in the long sixties Mark Donnelly
• 2 Kitty Hart-Moxon’s I Am Alive (1961) and British Holocaust consciousness Sue Vice
• 3 ‘Every time they start singing about “up the chimney”, that’s my parents they’re talking about’: British antifascism and Holocaust memory in the 1960s Joshua Cohen
• 4 Refugees, survivors, archives: The Wiener Library in 1960s Britain Christine Schmidt
• 5 ‘It will be no bad thing to have the memory refreshed’: The Eichmann trial, the press and frameworks of understanding Andy Pearce
• 6 Auschwitz, Mr Brown and James Bond: The British press, Holocaust trials in the early 1960s and the role of Holocaust survivors as witnesses Johannes-Dieter Steinert
• 7 Female inmate-physicians of Block 10 at Auschwitz as witnesses at the Dering v. Uris libel trial: The testimony of survival Dan Stone
• 8 ‘A worthy monument to the memory of the six million’: David Astor and the psychological understanding of the Holocaust in the 1960s Danae Karydaki
• 9 Idyll and industry in Wales and beyond: A portrait of the life and work of refugee artist Heinz Koppel and his family Andrea Hammel
• 10 Echoes of the Holocaust in 1960s Scotland: Commemoration and continuity in Glasgow’s Jewish Echo Mia Spiro and Cian Pappenheim
• 11 The shared lives and art of Alice Berger Hammerschlag and Helen Lewis in pre-Troubles Northern Ireland Pamela Linden Aveyard
• 12 ‘Where are the Gypsies? Gone’: The development of Roma genocide consciousness in 1960s Britain Roxy Moore and Becky Taylor
• 13 An unexpected feeling of guilt: Conscience, trauma and the rise of Holocaust consciousness on British television in the 1960s James Jordan
• 14 Not five million years to Warsaw: Encountering the ‘alien’ Holocaust in 1960s British SF-horror cinema Barry Langford
• 15 A theology of Auschwitz: British Christians confront the Holocaust in the long 1960s Andrew Chandler
• 16 Holocaust memory and British Jews in the 1960s David Feldman
• Index