Reporting on the Holocaust in South Africa: An Examination of Press Coverage and Memorialization in the Aftermath of World War II

Abrahams, Dmitri

Reporting on the Holocaust in South Africa: An Examination of Press Coverage and Memorialization in the Aftermath of World War II

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape town

Department

Department of Historical Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Until recently, little scholarly work has focused on the development of Holocaust memory in South Africa, particularly regarding the extent to which the Holocaust has been ‘domesticated' – refracted through a local lens – in this country. This dissertation seeks to add to a broader scholarly effort to explain how a country with its own fraught racial politics engaged with the Nazi past. This study provides a detailed analysis of how different newspapers in South Africa reacted, transmitted, and engaged with the news of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration camps, the subsequent Belsen Trial, and the International Military Tribunal. It also uncovers how the Jewish community established commemorative practices and disseminated knowledge of the Holocaust between 1945 and 1960. This is achieved by examining the most widely circulated newspapers marketed towards different segments of South African society, as well as Jewish community records, and archival material. Newspaper coverage of the Holocaust in South Africa reflected the ethos of each publication and their stance on the war. How these publications reacted to and reported on the Holocaust greatly influenced how they engaged with and understood the Belsen Trial and the International Military Tribunal. Early Jewish commemoration of the Shoah reflected the community's need to rebuild its communal identity in the wake of social and political upheaval both locally and abroad.

Keywords

Historical Studies

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