Political Impact

The political abuse of the Holocaust started almost immediately after the troops of the Allied nations, which defeated Adolf Hitler's Germany, liberated the Nazi extermination and concentration camps. The first few attempts to misuse the Holocaust were more sins of omission rather than commission, efforts to cover up inconvenient facts by pretending that the Nazis, and they alone, were responsible for the erection of the gas chambers and crematoria, for elevating mass murder to the status of an industry.

In narrow practical terms, that was, of course, true: the "Final Solution" and the entire infrastructure of murder was conceived, constructed and controlled by Nazi Germany. But many of the Jews were sent to their deaths by Germany's other willing European collaborators.

Still, as time went by and the initial pain and shock of the Holocaust subsided, the event returned to being used as a political pawn by politicians and governments. Some of the attempted uses of the Holocaust were from the best of intentions: a desire of other nations to highlight their own suffering, alongside that of the Jews.