Vietnam, the New Left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War Changed Discourse on Genocide

The years 1945 and 1989 were crucial for the genesis of the social-scientific conceptualization of memory as we know it today. During these two periods of upheaval, the content and political meaning of ‘memory’ was shaped by specific social phenomena, particularly the experience of repression. In 1945, the victorious Allies began to understand the full extent of the Holocaust in the liberated concentration and extermination camps: the most systematic genocide in world history had been carried out in the very region that presented itself as the centre of civilization, progress and enlightenment. In the late 1940s, the first conclusions drawn from this experience, in the form of the statutes and judgements of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, became the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. Those agreements subsequently formed an ethical reference point for a new system of international relations.