The Holocaust

     David Wingeate Pike, often mentioned here, has been sent by the Mellon Foundation to spend a week at Stanford studying new techniques in the teaching of history. David has two books in press now: The Closing of the Second World War: Twilight of a Totalitarianism. The other concerns the concentration camp at Mauthausen, Austria, to which almost all the Spanish Republican prisoners were sent. When I visited it, our guide was Manuel García, a Spaniard who had survived. At the camp itself there is a museum, but its archives are in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and elsewhere. The result a book Spaniards in the Holocaust, which should appear in time for May 5, the 55th anniversary of the liberation of the very last SS camp. It will be a big event, with the Vienna Philharmonic playing Beethoven´s Ninth Symphony. It is a coincidence that this is taking place while the new Austrian government is being charged with Nazi sympathies.

Ronald Hilton - 3/29/00