Memory, Responsibility, and Today
What happened after 1945: liberation, the trials, the reckoning, and the long work of memory.
After the camps were liberated, survivors searched for missing family. They lived for years in displaced-persons camps, rebuilt shattered communities, sought justice in courtrooms, and fought to recover lives, property, and dignity. At the same time, governments, religious institutions, museums, scholars, and educators faced a different task: how to document, remember, and teach the Holocaust.
Chapters in this Unit
Nine Chapters follow what came after the killing stopped. They take up care for survivors, justice in court, restitution, and a changed relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people. They also take up the interpretation of what happened, the architecture of memory, the defense of the record against denial, the old carvings still on church walls, and the antisemitism that outlived the war. Full Table of Contents →
Liberation and the Displaced Persons
When the camps were liberated, the survivors’ ordeal was not over. More than 250,000 Jewish survivors lived for years as “displaced persons,” uprooted and unable to go home. The last Jewish DP camp did not close until 1957.
Read the Chapter →The Postwar Trials
From the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal of 1945–46 to the prosecution of elderly camp guards in the 2020s, the trials assembled much of the documentary record historians rely on. The Nuremberg Charter ruled out “following orders” as a defense. The Chapter also follows the perpetrators who escaped abroad.
Read the Chapter →Hannah Arendt
A German Jewish political thinker who fled the Nazis and, from the United States, wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, the book behind the still-argued phrase “the banality of evil.”
Read the Chapter →Postwar Restitution
The decades-long effort to return what was stolen (property, art, bank accounts, and the wages of forced labor) and to compensate survivors. The effort is incomplete and still continues.
Read the Chapter →The Memory Architecture
How the world built its memory of the Holocaust: the days of remembrance and the network of museums and memorials across dozens of countries, from Yad Vashem to Washington. Laws in many U.S. states now require it to be taught in schools.
Read the Chapter →Nostra Aetate
On October 28, 1965, the Catholic Church formally rejected the charge that the Jewish people were collectively guilty for the death of Jesus. It reversed teachings about the Jewish people that had run through its preaching and instruction for most of two thousand years and opened a new relationship with the Jewish people.
Read the Chapter →Holocaust Denial and the Response
Denial began with the perpetrators, who burned the evidence, and grew after the war into organized movements and, in Iran, a government position. The answer has come from survivors, historians, courts, and archives.
Read the Chapter →The Afterlife of the Image
Medieval churches in Germany and neighboring countries still carry carvings made to degrade Jews. Courts and communities have argued over whether to remove them, and over what to do with monuments a later age comes to find shameful.
Read the Chapter →The Hatred That Outlived the War
Antisemitism outlived the Nazi regime: in postwar Poland and the Soviet Union, in Nazi propaganda that had reached the Middle East, in the forged Protocols, and in the record since October 7, 2023.
Read the Chapter →Last updated: November 2026.