Delbo did not mean to suggest that post-Holocaust life is necessarily hopeless. "Useless" though her knowledge might be in one sense, Delbo used it to show how dangerous it would be to forget that there was a time when Auschwitz was "the largest station in the world for arrivals and for departures." Scholar Lawrence L. Langer, too, does not say that knowledge of the Holocaust is simply useless. To the contrary, he argues that to encounter the Holocaust through serious study is as important as it is difficult, for such work, he says, "gives us access to the central event of our time, and perhaps of the modern era."

Even before the celebration of Victory in Europe Day, tensions were escalating between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. The division of Europe into "spheres of influence" exacerbated the rivalry, leading to decades of "Cold War."

The race to create powerful nuclear weapons, enter space, and ensure the success of postwar economies at times outpaced the quest for justice. Some executives of I.G. Farben, tried as war criminals but seen as integral to West German economic success, received only short prison sentences, even though I.G. Farben had been the biggest wartime employer of concentration-camp labor at Auschwitz. Friedrich Flick (pictured), head of the conglomerate Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke, a coal and steel producer that had made extensive use of slave labor during the war, served only a few years in prison before resuming a career so successful that he became the richest man in Germany.

Scientists whose expertise was judged vital to the space program or the nuclear arms race were not held responsible for the use of slave labor in their wartime projects; NASA moon-rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun was one of these. In the postwar world, the quest for justice was tempered by the overarching desire to win the Cold War.
Photo: Bundesarchiv / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive