History Flows Through Us

Published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2023, Volume 92, Number 3.

History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy. Edited by Roger Frie. New York: Routledge, 2018. 194 pp.

“The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering ... I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower

As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower was uniquely positioned to understand the German enemy, but even Eisenhower was unprepared for what he encountered during the liberation of the German concentration camp of Ohrdruf in April of 1945. There, he found bodies piled high on top of one another and living skeletons struggling to survive. Even as the Allies continued to fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. It was this concern that inspired him to require Germans living in the surrounding towns to walk through the camp and witness the atrocities for themselves. Three days later, he wrote General George C. Marshall a letter that expressed his concerns about the potential for future generations to dismiss the existence of the extermination camps, relegating them merely to propaganda.

To read more, click here