At the end of World War II concerns about the defeat of Hitler quickly shifted to control and defeat of the communist threat. In the context of the cold war, normalizing relations with Germany, exorcising the Nazi evil through the Nuremburg show trials, simplifying wartime experiences through history and film, and getting on with the future took priority. Individuals who wanted to understand the what and how of the destruction of Europe's Jews were broadly ignored. Although studies of the Holocaust surfaced quickly after the war, the topic was ignored by most European scholars and university courses well into the 1980s. In the past decade, the scholarly debate about the relevance of the Holocaust within the discipline of history has been overwhelmed by a cultural fascination with the Holocaust experience.

The current cultural fascination with the Holocaust, including the crowds at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the popularity of Spielberg's Schindler's List, and the recent willingness of a commercial sponsor to run the film without interruption on national commercial TV, cannot simply be explained by interest in or sympathy for persecution of the Jews during the Nazi era. I am tempted to observe that in an age of "victimization," wartime persecution of the Jews has become a symbol for "everyone as victim." Somehow the Holocaust has been appropriated as a general phenomenon and is easily extrapolated to other circumstances.

The combination of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, our sympathies with certain victims of injustice, and our own historical ignorance is leading us to reexamine the past. Known facts are being portrayed as news. My favorite was a recent newspaper story on a 1945 U.S. memorandum on an unexploded German missile found in Belgium that had parts stamped "Made in Sweden." The author concluded that this information proved Swedish "collaboration" with Germany. One wonders if the reporter was aware that 20 percent of all German steel production depended on Swedish iron ore, or that Sweden provided large amounts of ball bearings to Germany, or that Allied strategic bombing targeted as its highest priority German ball-bearing production, which led to American threats to bomb neutral Sweden if it did not stop trading with Germany?

While I am pleased to see interest in the role of neutrals during the war, so far journalists have shown virtually no real interest in putting the facts in historical context. The neutrals themselves are only slowly willing to open archives to scholarly examination. It would be well to remember that neutrality meant several things: by tradition, by international law, and by realpolitik--politics based on practical and material factors rather than on theoretical or ethical objectives. It certainly did not mean neutral in spirit and in deed, nor that a given neutral avoided contact and trade with one or all of the belligerent countries. These small European countries faced tough choices and had to have more than a little luck and geography to maintain even a modicum of independence. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway (all were declared neutrals in 1939-40) stood in harm's way and suffered accordingly. To see the past in simplistic terms as so much of our popular journalism does is to misunderstand history as well as the past's best values.

What we have been witnessing vis-a-vis the neutrals and the Holocaust is only the beginning of our reinterpretation of wartime and postwar experience. Far more painful will be the "exposure" of Allied "collaboration" with the Nazis. The general reader needs to exercise sound critical skills and try to keep an open mind as to the past and its meaning. For me, the Holocaust needs to be understood within its broadest context--attitudes toward Jews in nations and cultures dominated by Christianity--not simply as a product of a rogue state and a rogue regime.

Steven S. Koblik, Reed College president, is an internationally recognized scholar on modern Sweden. He is the author of The Stones Cry Out--Sweden's Response to the Persecution of the Jews, Holocaust Library, New York, 1988.