Making photographs historic: The use of historical black-and-white stills in NBC’s fictional miniseries Holocaust

Abstract

“It is only a story. But it really happened," says the voice-over at the beginning of NBC’s TV miniseries Holocaust, 1 which aired in the United States in April 1978. These first sentences are emblematic of the miniseries, which was an attempt to shed light on the entire history of the Holocaust by telling the story of two fictional families from Germany, one Jewish and one non-Jewish. Scholarly literature has tended to describe Holocaust as a watershed production that informed a rather uninformed public about the Holocaust thus helping to integrate it within the collective memory of the United States. Nearly 120 million people watched it in the United States alone, making it to one of the biggest TV events ever. At the same time, critics have harshly criticized the miniseries and accused it of trivializing the Holocaust and turning the event into a soap opera.