Why didn’t the superheroes liberate Auschwitz?

Captain America Comics, Vol. 1 #1, cover of Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Marvel, March 1941.

As early as 1941, superheroes were confronted with the Nazi concentration camps. But why didn’t they free them? Around this question arise those of the superpower and the apparent passivity of the Allies in the face of the Holocaust.

With the exceptional presence of Chris Claremont.

Chris Claremont © Beth Fleisher.

Chris Claremont, the man who turned Magneto into a Holocaust survivor.

Interview collected by Philippe Guedj. Full text available in the catalog Shoah et bande dessinée, 2017 © Mémorial de la Shoah / Denoël Graphic.

A legendary writer of the comic book X-Men between 1975 and 1991, Chris Claremont brought the title into adulthood by attributing to the bad mutant Magneto a tragic past directly related to the Holocaust. In the preamble of his visit to Paris in January 2017, the brilliant author has kindly delivered some keys to his inspiration.

Did your stay in a kibbutz in 1970 lay the foundation for your future reflection on the Jewish origins of Magneto?

It was indeed an experience that deeply affected me. It was 1970, I was 20 years old, America was stuck up to its neck in Vietnam, where I had no desire to go fight. I was a student at a small left-wing university where one of the professors of political theory was Hannah Arendt’s husband. In January and February, the school closed to encourage us to go on a field internship complementary to our theoretical studies.  The year before, I had done my internship at Marvel and I really wanted to find something related to political theory, a subject that fascinated me. An ad in The Village Voice mentioned the possibility of making an aliyah in a kibbutz in Israel [...]. In January, I left for Tel Aviv via Paris and spent two months working on a kibbutz in the Elah valley near the Jordanian border where, I was told, David had fought Goliath [...].