Richard Evans reviews a half-dozen new books about Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust, some of which help to clear up lingering popular misconceptions. One such book, Evans writes, is Dan Stone’s The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath:

As Stone notes in his engrossing and illuminating book—the first full and comparative study of the subject—the fact that the extermination camps were located in the East for a long time skewed public perceptions in the West. When the Soviets liberated the major death camps, they found relatively few inmates left, either because they were dead or because they had already been evacuated by the Nazis. Thus the great majority of survivors were in camps liberated by the western Allies, and it was their stories that created the image by which the camps were long after known. The Soviet regime did not encourage its troops to talk openly about what they found, and it presented Nazi atrocities as crimes against the citizens of Eastern Europe, not specifically against Jews. In the immediate postwar years the extermination camps and the genocide against the Jews were generally pushed to the margin of public consciousness.

Stone usefully points out that liberation was not always a matter of Allied troops arriving at camp gates to be greeted by cheering inmates; there were many more prosaic encounters, particularly away from the main centers, when prisoners simply walked away, while in some places German prisoners were rearrested by suspicious Allied soldiers on their arrival. Liberation was also a gradual process, as survivors readjusted to normal life, were transferred to displaced persons camps, or decided what to do with the rest of their lives. Many were unable to recover despite the efforts of Allied medical personnel. Others felt guilt and shame at having survived, or began a desperate search for missing relatives who in all likelihood had perished.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.