Today’s idea: The Holocaust needs a major reassessment, a historian argues, because the symbolic power of Auschwitz obscures the Nazis’ mass shootings and other atrocities in the East early in the war.
book review staff

Associated Press

Much more to it than Auschwitz. History | Auschwitz and its gas chambers distort our vision of the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder of Yale says in a lecture adapted for the New York Review of Books. His reasoning: Since it was a “labor camp as well as a death factory” largely for West European Jews later in the war, Auschwitz’s liberation at war’s end yielded numerous survivors free to recount their experiences. Not so Holocaust victims caught behind the Iron Curtain.

Most of the killing of Jews had been carried out much earlier, Snyder says. “An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history,” he says, including the horrors of the death camps Treblinka, Sobibor and Be zec — the latter of which, “though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known.”

more.