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Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler; How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold
In Selling the Holocaust, Tim Cole examines three of the Holocaust's most emblematic figures–Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, and Oskar Schindler–and three of the Holocaust's most visited sites–Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum–to show us how the Holocaust has become a mass-marketed production. Now with a new introduction by the author that examines recent phenomena like Life is Beautiful and The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, this groundbreaking book shows us how the Holocaust is being bought, packaged, and sold.
Tim Cole is a professor of history at the University of Bristol. He was formerly the Paul Resnick Resident Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Tim Cole is a professor of history at the University of Bristol. He was formerly the Paul Resnick Resident Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
234 pages, Paperback
First published August 26, 1999
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About the author
Tim Cole
5 books6 followersProfessor Tim Cole is the head of the history department at Bristol University and the author of over 30 journal articles. He has published three major works on the Holocaust and has edited two academic collections. His first book, Images of the Holocaust, was awarded the Longman History Today Prize in 1999. In 2003 he published Holocaust City with Routledge, and in 2011 Traces of the Holocaust: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 16, 2021
A very interesting insight into the development of the Holocaust Myth in popular culture, and the growth of Holocaust tourism. Well-written and researched (really specific cases and examples & good bibliography).
April 16, 2012
Tim Cole’s Selling the Holocaust is an examination of “Shoah business” (a pun he makes perhaps a few times too often), which refers to the ways that the Holocaust is marketed through plays, movies, trials, and museums. Cole is trying to study the business of the “myth of the Holocaust.” The word “myth” does not mean that Cole denies the historical reality of the event of the Holocaust, but instead means “a story that evokes strong sentiments, transmits and reinforces basic societal values.” (4) Cole is thus trying to make it clear that, despite the historical fact of the Holocaust, he is examining the ways that this story has been used by societies in different times and places to say things not about the Holocaust itself, but about the society producing the account. Cole illustrates this claim through six examples; the first three are of people, whereas the last three are of museums.
The three people that Cole uses as examples are Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, and Oskar Schindler. Cole uses these examples to track the creation of the myth of the Holocaust through popular conceptions of victims and perpetrators across time and space. Cole uses the case of Anne Frank to exhibit the earliest stages in the Holocaust myth. Cole likens the immediate post-war period to a period of “ambivalence” about the Holocaust, or a period in which, at least in America, “the myth of the ‘Holocaust’ had not yet emerged.” (33) It was difficult, for example, for Otto Frank to get Anne’s diaries published. When they were, however, and the subsequent play was written, the diaries were used to make universalist claims for the sake of liberalism in a Cold-War climate. The play, for example, ends on a highly out-of-context quote from Anne’s diary that “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” and does not mention her death in Bergen-Belsen or the fact that she was murdered particularly because she was a Jew, thus attempting to universalize her position. (35) In fact, Cole points out that it is precisely because Anne was a young, middle-class, highly-assimilated Jew, that her story became popular in the first place. Only in subsequent years, because of the popularity, has Anne’s story actually come to represent the historical truth more accurately.
Cole uses the Eichmann trial to exhibit how the myths of the Holocaust were further created. He points out, as we learned last week, that the trial was the moment in which the silence about the Holocaust as a particularly Jewish phenomenon was broken, when survivors testified in the trial. This was felt in a particularly poignant fashion in Israel, in which 1961 was “the year of the Eichmann trial.” (62) It was also the moment when Israel decided it would become the voice for the victims. This phenomenon was not the same in America, where the emphasis, thanks in part to Hannah Arendt, was focused moreso on “Eichmann himself and the psychic components of evil.” (68) The moment for America’s attempt to contend with the perpetrators comes later. Cole emphasizes Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the Academy Award-winning film, has played in the creation of the myth of the Holocaust in American culture. This film, according to Cole, depicts Jews as “feminized” victims completely devoid of agency, who must be saved by Oskar Schindler. He is attempting to defend the Jews against Goeth. Cole points out that Goeth is the perfect sadistic Nazi villain, who “unlike Eichmann, shoots Jews from his balcony before breakfast.” (83) Thus, identification with him, as a perpetrator, becomes impossible. Cole also points out that the ending is a completely happy one, with Schindler saving all of “his” Jews, who then happily go to Israel in a message of pro-Zionism, and Goeth being executed. Cole has significant problems with this, however, because the Holocaust was inherently not a historical moment of happy endings, and it did not, as the film makes it seem, “simply bring out our better natures.”(85) This formulation of the myth of the Holocaust encourages individuals to indiscriminately bond with the victims (which strips the victims of their specificity) while immediately “othering” the perpetrators, again turning the Holocaust into a “universalized” tale for Americans.
Cole finds parallels to the previously shown myths of the Holocaust in the three Holocaust sites of Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Museum. Cole repeatedly refers to Auschwitz as “Auschwitz-land,” and in his discussion of the site expresses what seems to be the thesis of his book. Cole says that the issue with Auschwitz (and thus presumably also Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum) is that the entire site, even as it is the exact location of the events that took place, is still incredibly contrived. First and foremost, the emphasis on Auschwitz as the Holocaust site, rather than, say, Bergen-Belsen which had formerly been the most famous thanks to Anne Frank, is a result of several moves that have little to do with its prominence in history. Its positioning was due both to bureaucratic decisions from the Soviet government (who did not, for instance, want to use more eastern concentration camps as they themselves have used them for prison camps in the postwar period), and its having been mentioned by Sylvia Plath and Theodor Adorno. Cole is incredibly critical of the buildings and reconstructions there, claiming:
as we walk through Auschwitz-land, we do not see an authentic past, preserved carefully for the present. We don’t experience the past as it really was, but experience a mediated past which has been carefully created for our viewing. And the end result is that ‘the greater the intervention in historic places, the greater the manipulation. And the greater the manipulation, the greater the contrivance.’ (111)
Cole has a particular problem with presenting relics as if they are the proof of the event, because it implies that physical remains are necessary for proving the Holocaust happened. While many elements of the site at Auschwitz did, initially, provide proof of the Holocaust, actions to preserve them have wiped this evidence away. For instance, the human hair on exhibit at Auschwitz did have traces of cyanide prior to it having been protected against moths. Thus, to tell audiences that the physical remains are the proof they need is fundamentally problematic, and leads to cases where individuals look to something like the inaccuracies in a modern reconstruction of a gas chamber to prove that gas chambers did not actually exist.
Cole takes his criticism of Holocaust museums to a greater extreme in his criticisms of Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum. He claims that the memorial has reflected a Holocaust myth that has changed over time. During the period prior to 1973 and the heavy losses of the Yom Kippur War, Cole claims that Yad Vashem, with its emphasis on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a key component of its exhibits, presented a Holocaust in which heroic resistance “rises physically and metaphorically above the destruction of ‘Auschwitz.’ (125) This was to provide much-needed public symbols of heroes to a fledgling nation. Only after the Yom Kippur War is there a shift in the buildings that no longer emphasized heroism but instead a more universalized tale of redemption after destruction. Cole says that this change reflects the ways that the Holocaust came to be used politically after the war, with conservatives in Israel emphasizing its nationalistic uses, while left-leaning politicians drew universal lessons from the Holocaust.
As far as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Cole claims that the museum presents a narrative that is confusing in its choices of identification. On one hand, with its initial images upon entering the museum, it is clear that the story is presented as focusing on a uniquely European event in which the Americans are the liberators, and the visitors are supposed to identify as Americans. On the other hand, visitors are given a card with a victim’s name that is supposed to allow you to identify with a Holocaust victim. (Not that about half of these victims survive; much higher odds than in actuality.) Thus, visitors are to be both “victim and victor at once.” (163) The important factor, however, is that one is never to identify with the perpetrators. They remain the “other.” Moreover, Cole claims that the museum is to some extent an anti-museum, in that its message is one describing everything that Americans do not stand for, and in doing so presents America as the hopeful antithesis to the Holocaust.
Therefore, for Cole, the problem with the myth of the Holocaust is that to some extent, in all of its iterations it becomes a message of hope that denies the historical facts of the horrific suffering that occurred in the Holocaust, and likewise forgets the lesson that can be learned about the ordinariness of the perpetrators. Moreover, the history is twisted to modern ends. Seeing this, it seemed to me that Cole was perhaps an advocate of perfect preservation of various museum sites. As he has stated, however, the act of preserving the sites is a lost one, as preservation only serves to harm. Instead, Cole’s suggestion is that old and new productions of memory should stand side-by-side. At the time of writing, the 2001 Yad Vashem plans were still under consideration. Cole contends that the older Yad Vashem should remain, while a newer, more modern version should be constructed alongside it, allowing visitors to juxtapose the two and question why the differences are there. Thus, for Cole, there is no escape from constructed public history presentations of the Holocaust, but instead the only outlet is to highlight this constructed nature. This conclusion is strange to me. Cole obviously believes that there is some truth to more academic historical accounts that can take the “true” events into consideration, which seems to discount the idea that history as a whole is simply a construction. Therefore, I am unsure why he demands more obviously constructed public history sites rather than more accurate ones. Conversely, if he does not believe in a truer historical account, it is unclear why the constructed nature of the public sites matters so much, even if it is used to modern ends. Moreover, I am still left concerned about where survivors fit into Cole’s account. He admits that often times, the museums are funded by survivors or the families of victims. If they approve of these sites, even if not for the messages that Cole reads into them, does that give extra weight to what should be done? Ultimately, while I think Cole makes many excellent criticisms of current sites, I am unsure how to move beyond his criticisms in a more satisfying way.
The three people that Cole uses as examples are Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, and Oskar Schindler. Cole uses these examples to track the creation of the myth of the Holocaust through popular conceptions of victims and perpetrators across time and space. Cole uses the case of Anne Frank to exhibit the earliest stages in the Holocaust myth. Cole likens the immediate post-war period to a period of “ambivalence” about the Holocaust, or a period in which, at least in America, “the myth of the ‘Holocaust’ had not yet emerged.” (33) It was difficult, for example, for Otto Frank to get Anne’s diaries published. When they were, however, and the subsequent play was written, the diaries were used to make universalist claims for the sake of liberalism in a Cold-War climate. The play, for example, ends on a highly out-of-context quote from Anne’s diary that “in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” and does not mention her death in Bergen-Belsen or the fact that she was murdered particularly because she was a Jew, thus attempting to universalize her position. (35) In fact, Cole points out that it is precisely because Anne was a young, middle-class, highly-assimilated Jew, that her story became popular in the first place. Only in subsequent years, because of the popularity, has Anne’s story actually come to represent the historical truth more accurately.
Cole uses the Eichmann trial to exhibit how the myths of the Holocaust were further created. He points out, as we learned last week, that the trial was the moment in which the silence about the Holocaust as a particularly Jewish phenomenon was broken, when survivors testified in the trial. This was felt in a particularly poignant fashion in Israel, in which 1961 was “the year of the Eichmann trial.” (62) It was also the moment when Israel decided it would become the voice for the victims. This phenomenon was not the same in America, where the emphasis, thanks in part to Hannah Arendt, was focused moreso on “Eichmann himself and the psychic components of evil.” (68) The moment for America’s attempt to contend with the perpetrators comes later. Cole emphasizes Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the Academy Award-winning film, has played in the creation of the myth of the Holocaust in American culture. This film, according to Cole, depicts Jews as “feminized” victims completely devoid of agency, who must be saved by Oskar Schindler. He is attempting to defend the Jews against Goeth. Cole points out that Goeth is the perfect sadistic Nazi villain, who “unlike Eichmann, shoots Jews from his balcony before breakfast.” (83) Thus, identification with him, as a perpetrator, becomes impossible. Cole also points out that the ending is a completely happy one, with Schindler saving all of “his” Jews, who then happily go to Israel in a message of pro-Zionism, and Goeth being executed. Cole has significant problems with this, however, because the Holocaust was inherently not a historical moment of happy endings, and it did not, as the film makes it seem, “simply bring out our better natures.”(85) This formulation of the myth of the Holocaust encourages individuals to indiscriminately bond with the victims (which strips the victims of their specificity) while immediately “othering” the perpetrators, again turning the Holocaust into a “universalized” tale for Americans.
Cole finds parallels to the previously shown myths of the Holocaust in the three Holocaust sites of Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and the United States Holocaust Museum. Cole repeatedly refers to Auschwitz as “Auschwitz-land,” and in his discussion of the site expresses what seems to be the thesis of his book. Cole says that the issue with Auschwitz (and thus presumably also Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum) is that the entire site, even as it is the exact location of the events that took place, is still incredibly contrived. First and foremost, the emphasis on Auschwitz as the Holocaust site, rather than, say, Bergen-Belsen which had formerly been the most famous thanks to Anne Frank, is a result of several moves that have little to do with its prominence in history. Its positioning was due both to bureaucratic decisions from the Soviet government (who did not, for instance, want to use more eastern concentration camps as they themselves have used them for prison camps in the postwar period), and its having been mentioned by Sylvia Plath and Theodor Adorno. Cole is incredibly critical of the buildings and reconstructions there, claiming:
as we walk through Auschwitz-land, we do not see an authentic past, preserved carefully for the present. We don’t experience the past as it really was, but experience a mediated past which has been carefully created for our viewing. And the end result is that ‘the greater the intervention in historic places, the greater the manipulation. And the greater the manipulation, the greater the contrivance.’ (111)
Cole has a particular problem with presenting relics as if they are the proof of the event, because it implies that physical remains are necessary for proving the Holocaust happened. While many elements of the site at Auschwitz did, initially, provide proof of the Holocaust, actions to preserve them have wiped this evidence away. For instance, the human hair on exhibit at Auschwitz did have traces of cyanide prior to it having been protected against moths. Thus, to tell audiences that the physical remains are the proof they need is fundamentally problematic, and leads to cases where individuals look to something like the inaccuracies in a modern reconstruction of a gas chamber to prove that gas chambers did not actually exist.
Cole takes his criticism of Holocaust museums to a greater extreme in his criticisms of Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum. He claims that the memorial has reflected a Holocaust myth that has changed over time. During the period prior to 1973 and the heavy losses of the Yom Kippur War, Cole claims that Yad Vashem, with its emphasis on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a key component of its exhibits, presented a Holocaust in which heroic resistance “rises physically and metaphorically above the destruction of ‘Auschwitz.’ (125) This was to provide much-needed public symbols of heroes to a fledgling nation. Only after the Yom Kippur War is there a shift in the buildings that no longer emphasized heroism but instead a more universalized tale of redemption after destruction. Cole says that this change reflects the ways that the Holocaust came to be used politically after the war, with conservatives in Israel emphasizing its nationalistic uses, while left-leaning politicians drew universal lessons from the Holocaust.
As far as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Cole claims that the museum presents a narrative that is confusing in its choices of identification. On one hand, with its initial images upon entering the museum, it is clear that the story is presented as focusing on a uniquely European event in which the Americans are the liberators, and the visitors are supposed to identify as Americans. On the other hand, visitors are given a card with a victim’s name that is supposed to allow you to identify with a Holocaust victim. (Not that about half of these victims survive; much higher odds than in actuality.) Thus, visitors are to be both “victim and victor at once.” (163) The important factor, however, is that one is never to identify with the perpetrators. They remain the “other.” Moreover, Cole claims that the museum is to some extent an anti-museum, in that its message is one describing everything that Americans do not stand for, and in doing so presents America as the hopeful antithesis to the Holocaust.
Therefore, for Cole, the problem with the myth of the Holocaust is that to some extent, in all of its iterations it becomes a message of hope that denies the historical facts of the horrific suffering that occurred in the Holocaust, and likewise forgets the lesson that can be learned about the ordinariness of the perpetrators. Moreover, the history is twisted to modern ends. Seeing this, it seemed to me that Cole was perhaps an advocate of perfect preservation of various museum sites. As he has stated, however, the act of preserving the sites is a lost one, as preservation only serves to harm. Instead, Cole’s suggestion is that old and new productions of memory should stand side-by-side. At the time of writing, the 2001 Yad Vashem plans were still under consideration. Cole contends that the older Yad Vashem should remain, while a newer, more modern version should be constructed alongside it, allowing visitors to juxtapose the two and question why the differences are there. Thus, for Cole, there is no escape from constructed public history presentations of the Holocaust, but instead the only outlet is to highlight this constructed nature. This conclusion is strange to me. Cole obviously believes that there is some truth to more academic historical accounts that can take the “true” events into consideration, which seems to discount the idea that history as a whole is simply a construction. Therefore, I am unsure why he demands more obviously constructed public history sites rather than more accurate ones. Conversely, if he does not believe in a truer historical account, it is unclear why the constructed nature of the public sites matters so much, even if it is used to modern ends. Moreover, I am still left concerned about where survivors fit into Cole’s account. He admits that often times, the museums are funded by survivors or the families of victims. If they approve of these sites, even if not for the messages that Cole reads into them, does that give extra weight to what should be done? Ultimately, while I think Cole makes many excellent criticisms of current sites, I am unsure how to move beyond his criticisms in a more satisfying way.
November 4, 2025
The author is completely right that the representation of the Holocaust has changed through space and time. He does a good job describing these changes and provides interesting analysis. This is the reason I forced myself to read the book despite my aversion to the authors overall view of the memory of the Holocaust.
Already the title is provocative. The book goes on over 188 pages to criticize, denounce, and disgusted any and all examples of the remembrance to the Holocaust. The author sets up a false thesis of the “Holocaust myth” versus “Holocaust reality.” It is not clear how the author would represent the Holocaust in its reality? The only solution the author offers is NOT to remember the Holocaust, not to have any museums, films, etc. I, as a child of two Holocaust survivors could not disagree more. I believe the total opposite; any education about the Holocaust, any remembrance is useful and a must have. The greatest crime is to forget it, to erase the Holocaust from History, to forget my own family’s history.
Already the title is provocative. The book goes on over 188 pages to criticize, denounce, and disgusted any and all examples of the remembrance to the Holocaust. The author sets up a false thesis of the “Holocaust myth” versus “Holocaust reality.” It is not clear how the author would represent the Holocaust in its reality? The only solution the author offers is NOT to remember the Holocaust, not to have any museums, films, etc. I, as a child of two Holocaust survivors could not disagree more. I believe the total opposite; any education about the Holocaust, any remembrance is useful and a must have. The greatest crime is to forget it, to erase the Holocaust from History, to forget my own family’s history.
December 16, 2025
this puts so so much into perspective about how media changes how we see major world events
September 6, 2014
Good companion to Virtually Jewish for learning about the difference between the destruction of european Jewry and "the Holocaust" as a consumable narrative... and the author is appropriately clear about the difference between this critique and bullshit denialism. Cole talks about Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler (and the movie), Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, Eichmann, and the US Holocaust History Museum as examples of the difference between history and the presentation of history for mass audiences... most often the difference is about the creation of a happy/victorious/humanity is good ending being added to a story that is not actually appropriate or reflective of reality. And hey, if you like this kind of thing the fictional/farce version is called "My Holocaust: A Novel" by Tova Reich.
September 22, 2016
This book was really interesting. I never considered before just how each Holocaust museum, movie, and historical site presents the killing of over 6 million European Jews in a way that best fits its audience and country.
August 28, 2007
Tim Cole is my friend! Of course I think the book is fabulous and recommend highly!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews