Mid-April news reports confirmed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued directives (in response to President Trump’s Executive Orders) leading to a purge of 381 books from the Naval Academy’s Library at Annapolis. The now banished volumes, from Maya Angelou’s autobiography to academic studies on race, gender, and sexual orientation, allegedly promoted DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) priorities. One of the purged books is titled Memorializing the Holocaust. Yet Hitler’s Mein Kampf (translation: My Struggle) remains on the shelf, as we mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.
In April 1945, General Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and future two-term (1953–1961) American president, wrote to his wife, Mamie: “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality and savagery could really exist in this world.” Ike was referring to what he’d seen, smelled, and heard while touring Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald.
Ohrdruf was the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American GIs; the camp was found by elements of the Fourth Armored Division, on April 4, 1945. After visiting Ohrdruf (with fellow Army generals George Patton and Omar Bradley), Ike urgently cabled his superior in Washington, D.C. He implored Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to dispatch overseas, as quickly as possible, delegations of clergy, educators, journalists, and varied members of Congress to bear witness to what the Allies had discovered at more than 100 camps throughout Germany.
By the time of the first Nuremberg Trials, between November 1945 and October 1946, Americans were so war-weary that interest in the overseas tribunals and their focus on “crimes against humanity” was anemic, at best.
Eisenhower was old enough to recall how the reports of atrocities during World War I, about the rampaging brutalities by German soldiers toward Belgian civilians (and the Turkish genocide against the Armenians), were consigned to oblivion, partly due to a paucity of eyewitness testimony. Determined to avoid this, Ike vowed to have the liberated Nazi camps in 1945 seen, heard, photographed, and filmed by unimpeachable eyewitnesses.
Inexplicably, 80 years after American GIs liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Dachau, Nordhausen, Mauthausen, and other Nazi concentration camps, the new administration under Donald Trump is also deleting from the Pentagon’s web pages and other federally funded sites the filmed evidence, eyewitness testimony, and graphic photographic history that General Eisenhower mandated.
Just as inexplicably, in the decade that followed 1945, such historical amnesia prevailed in the milieu of New York publishing.
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Mario Puzo’s first novel, The Dark Arena, was published by Random House in 1955, exactly 10 years after World War II ended. The book dramatizes a scabrous, corrupt underworld of jaded American soldiers on bitter occupation duty in postwar West Germany. In that era, one wartime subject was largely taboo: Although many films, books, and articles about the war in Europe were widely seen or read in the decade following the conflict, very few confronted the calamity of the Holocaust, which would not generally be referred to by that term until years later. So, it was audacious of Puzo (a veteran of the Fourth Armored Division) to present a character named Leo in The Dark Arena. He’s a secondary player in the novel, but in certain chapters and critical scenes, his presence is vital. And his words are crucial: “The next week I leave for Nuremberg,” [Leo] said. “They want me to testify about those people who were guards and officials at Buchenwald. At first I said no, but then they told me a certain doctor was among the defendants. He is the one who used to tell us, ‘I am not here to cure your aches and pains. I am not even here to keep you alive. My job is to see that you are able every day to work.’ That bastard I will testify against.”
Leo is a survivor of Buchenwald, open to answering rudimentary questions about the concentration camps when he’s conversing with protagonist Walter Mosca or the cadre of GIs with whom Mosca surrounds himself. Buchenwald was one of the camps American soldiers liberated in April 1945, and its name and a surfeit of newsreel images briefly infiltrated the American psyche. Legendary radio newsman Edward R. Murrow witnessed Buchenwald right after its liberation, on April 11, 1945, and broadcast a special program heard nationwide, describing in detail the ghastly netherworld discovered by the GIs.
On Eisenhower’s orders, the U.S. Army Signal Corps then filmed a vomitous array of what was found at Buchenwald (and other camps): the famished skeletal survivors in unspeakable distress, the corpses piled high and not yet incinerated, the crematoria. Those newsreels shocked homefront moviegoers throughout the latter half of 1945. Stunning photos were taken in the camps by war correspondents Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, and other staffers for Time and Life magazines. Those publications had millions of subscribers all across America.
Photos in the May 7, 1945, edition of Life (in sync with Victory in Europe Day), were graphic in unprecedented ways: wraith-like survivors, starved and dazed, seen against a disorienting background phantasmagoria akin to Dante’s inferno; innumerable naked bodies piled in stacks outside lice-ridden, disease-plagued barracks; gargantuan mass graves filled with colossal numbers of women and children in addition to men, all of them dehumanized and hopelessly abandoned in hellish contortions. Life’s photographs of degradation, human suffering, and grotesque abuse illustrated how Hitler’s minions destroyed human bodies and desecrated human souls with systemic, pathological vigilance.
That name, Buchenwald, had come to symbolize the unspeakable for many Americans. It’s now quite impossible to convey how quickly the topic of the camps was erased from the public’s mind in the years after the war.
Nonetheless, by the time of the first Nuremberg Trials, between November 1945 and October 1946, Americans were so war-weary that interest in the overseas tribunals and their focus on “crimes against humanity” was anemic, at best. The mass media and the public at large had buried the revelatory issues of Life and the newsreels from 1945. A pattern of willful amnesia was invoked, not a formal policy but a species of denial reinforced by the media’s need to focus on relentless global crises in the immediate aftermath of the war and through the early 1950s: the Iron Curtain and the new Cold War tensions, the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), the controversies surrounding the establishment of Israel, the French going to war against the Viet Minh in Indochina, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift, and then the triumph of the Chinese Communist revolution, Russia detonating its own atomic bomb, and the Korean War. On top of all this, McCarthyism and the Red Scare metastasized. By 1955, the glow of 1945’s victory had faded.
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Buchenwald’s lengthy history is deftly alluded to in Mario Puzo’s novel, when his protagonist, Walter Mosca, and Leo himself remind others that the camp survivor had spent eight years incarcerated there. The “eight years” emphasized in the book align with the chronological history of Buchenwald, which operated near Weimar between 1937 and 1945, in full view of the local townspeople, five miles away. Leo is introduced in Chapter Six: “In the billet, the room next to Mosca’s was occupied by a short, heavy-framed civilian wearing the usual olive-green uniform. But on it was a blue-and-white patch stitched with the letters AJDC … for the American Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief organization. The initials were also painted on his jeep in great white letters.” In casual conversation, simply by answering questions, Leo shares his history. He describes his job with the relief organization serving Displaced Persons camps, providing “supplies to the Jews who are in the camps waiting to leave Germany. I was myself eight years in Buchenwald … I went in when I was thirteen … My father was in camp with me; he was a German, by the way, my mother was a Jew. My father was a political prisoner … He died a few years before the camp was liberated … I was a German, of course, but Jews cannot any longer be Germans.”
Buchenwald began in 1937 as a grim labor camp for those deemed incompatible with the Third Reich: Communists, Social Democrats, the so-called “a-socials” (prostitutes, unemployed vagrants), gays, Roma, and anti-Hitler individuals ranging from Jehovah’s Witnesses to common criminals. Buchenwald then slowly evolved, much like Dachau, into a nefarious abyss of torture, slave labor, gross medical experiments, and, by the time the war peaked, between 1943 and 1945, a charnel house of organized, mechanized murder.
The most important aspect of Leo’s role in The Dark Arena is his discerning intelligence; he is admired for his ability and willingness to testify against former German officers at the Nuremberg trials. Leo is not presented as a stock sympathetic character nor as a pathetic victim, although it’s made clear that his experience sets him apart from all of the others. Sometimes, a wordless gesture speaks volumes: “He rolled up his sleeve and on his arm as if printed there with purple ink was a six-digit number with a smeared letter before it.”Although there are no in-depth flashbacks to the atrocities of the concentration camps, it’s made clear that even compared to the combat-hardened GIs, Leo’s wartime experience was extreme. One night, in the company of Walter Mosca and a few others (when the beer is flowing), there is a flash of anger when Mosca says, “The guy was in the camp for a long time. Don’t you know what that means, for Christ’s sake?” Leo explains that even within the hierarchy of prisoners at Buchenwald, repulsive cruelty occurred. He recalls, “ … many of the kapos, the trusties, were Communists. They were the first ones sent to the camps and naturally they had the good jobs. One, a kapo, had great pleasure beating old men to death. He did many other things I cannot say.…”
That name, Buchenwald, had come to symbolize the unspeakable for many Americans. It’s now quite impossible, though, to convey how quickly the topic of the camps was erased from the public’s mind in the years after the war. The vivid newsreels were archived. The magazines were bound and stacked on dusty library shelves. There was broad resistance in all of the media — films, books, radio, and plays — to any evocation of the memories sure to be revived by any story or image recalling the striped uniforms or the stacked corpses, the barbed wire, the ovens, and the smoking chimneys.
Perhaps most tellingly, in the early 1950s, The Diary of Anne Frank was rejected by America’s top publishers, all across the board, until Judith Jones, at Doubleday, saw its great value. The coming-of-age testimonial left behind by the teenage Jewish girl hiding in the attic — and doomed to be discovered by the Nazis, sent to Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where she died — was a story that other publishers refused outright. One senior editor at Vanguard summed up as follows: “Under the present frame of mind of the American public, you cannot publish a book with war as a background.”
Puzo’s first two literary novels deserve a far wider readership.
Another editor, at Alfred A. Knopf, rejected The Diary of Anne Frank with this obtuse brush-off: “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely … I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”
This postwar denial mentality and the suppression of war memories affected the career of esteemed author John Hersey (Hiroshima). Despite his Pulitzer Prize (for A Bell for Adano), The Wall, a new Hersey novel inspired by the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, wasn’t “doing as well as expected,” an editor noted in 1950. One of that editor’s colleagues articulated an industry-wide attitude, explaining that readers would “avert their eyes from so painful a story which would bring back to them all the evil events that occurred during the war.”
This makes the publication of Puzo’s debut novel even more admirable, and surprising, given the degree to which The Dark Arena recapitulated those “evil events that occurred during the war.”
Overcoming such resistance in New York publishing was no small feat for the author of a first book. The private thoughts and spoken words attributed to Leo in The Dark Arena testify not just to the serious talent of young Mario Puzo but to the damage inflicted by those “who had kept [Leo’s] youth behind barbed wire, burned a number into his arm that he would carry to his grave, killed his father, made his mother flee into the night thousands of miles away, robbing her mind of the co-ordination necessary to live so that finally a time had come when she had died because she could not sleep, literally could not sleep.”
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In real life, Puzo rarely slept with ease. An avowed insomniac who didn’t booze up as heavily as his peers Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, or James Jones, it was Mario Puzo’s late-night habit to read voraciously, edit his recent pages, and oftentimes stare into space while inner fictional visions congealed. Fame, fortune, and bestselling status came after his third novel, The Godfather, was a blockbuster success that evolved into a mythical cinematic triumph. Yet that didn’t alter Puzo’s solitary nightly routine.
Oddly, The Godfather and its global success never inspired readers to rediscover The Dark Arena, which, like Puzo’s second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, enjoyed much critical acclaim yet languished in the marketplace. Puzo’s first two literary novels deserve a far wider readership. The Dark Arena anticipated a proclamation made by Norman Mailer in 1957: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years…. The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.”
Mario Puzo looked unflinchingly. ❖
M. J. Moore is the author of a J. D. Salinger–related novel (For Paris — With Love & Squalor) and two nonfiction books, Star-Crossed Lovers: James Jones, Lowney Handy, and the Birth of “From Here to Eternity” and Mario Puzo — An American Writer’s Quest.
