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Explores the centrality of Holocaust footage to postwar practices of identity construction. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Anglo American occupation authorities proposed that Germans should be compelled to view footage from the newly liberated camps. This visceral confrontation with Nazi atrocities was intended to animate a sense of collective guilt among Germans, a prerequisite to Germany's regeneration as a pacific, liberal polity. But multiple complications confronted this attempt to employ concentration camp footage in a narrative of Germanic guilt. As Allied documentarists found, not only did the camps prove resistant to cinematic representation, but German audiences appeared disinclined to accept the victors' morality so forcibly enunciated by the films. Where the documentarists saw the footage as a mirror to German culpability, many German viewers regarded compulsory exposure as a screen behind which the war's victors sheltered from acknowledgment their own wartime actions. This fraught encounter provides an emblematic example of the ways in which the Holocaust has been used to establish relational identities of barbarism & civility. Adapted from the source document.

"Spaniards in Mauthausen is the first study of the cultural legacy of Spaniards imprisoned and killed during the Second World War in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen. By examining narratives about Spanish Mauthausen victims over the past seventy years, author Sara J. Brenneis provides a historical, critical, and chronological analysis of a virtually unknown body of work."--. - "Diverse accounts from survivors of Mauthausen, chronicled in letters, artwork, photographs, memoirs, fiction, film, theater, and new media, illustrate how Spaniards have become cognizant of the Spanish government's relationship to the Nazis and its role in the victimization of Spanish nationals in Mauthausen. As political prisoners, their numbers and experiences differ significantly from the millions of Jews exterminated by Hitler, yet the Spaniards in Mauthausen were nevertheless objects of Nazi violence and witnesses to the Holocaust."--