Only a handful of books dealt with it, and those that did, with rare exceptions like The Diary of Anne Frank, had few readers.! The two his- torical accounts of the Holocaust available in the United States during that time were both imports from abroad, and neither attracted much attention. Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution was distributed in this country by an obscure publisher, and so far as I can tell was never re- viewed in the general-circulation press. The same was true of Léon Po- liakov’s Bréviaire de la haine, it was translated into English, as Harvest of Hate, thanks to a subsidy by a Jewish businessman, but sold only a few hundred copies. Neither Reitlinger’s nor Poliakov’s book was noted by the major historical journals. Treatment of the Holocaust in high school and college history textbooks was extremely skimpy — indeed, often nonexistent. Mention of the Holocaust in other than Jewish newspapers and magazines was rare and usually perfunctory.

The Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick, 2000