justice at nuremberg? jewish responses to nazi war-crime

Justice at Nuremberg? Jewish Responses to Nazi War-Crime Trials in Allied-Occupied Germany

Laura Jockusch

AbstrAct

This article examines the multifaceted ways in which Jews reacted to the trial against Nazi Germany’s “major war criminals,” which the governments of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France held at the International Military Tri-bunal at Nuremberg in the years 1945–46. Though the history of war-crime trials in postwar Germany and the representation of the Holocaust in Allied proceedings cur-rently find widespread interest among historians, the roles that Jews played in and around the Nuremberg tribunal have largely been neglected. This article explores the problem of Jewish representation at Nuremberg and analyzes the attempts by Jewish individuals and organizations to intervene on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust. Moreover, it explores contemporaneous Jewish debates over German guilt, the agency and involvement of survivors in the fight for legal redress, and the possibilities for post-Holocaust justice in the framework of an international military trial.

Key words: Jewish responses to the Holocaust, Jewish displaced persons, Allied post-war justice, Nazi war-crime trials

O n February 22, 1946, the Lithuanian-born Jewish poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever arrived in Nuremberg to testify before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The first

and only Nazi war-crime trial held jointly by the four victorious Allies—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and

Laura Jockusch, “Justice at Nuremberg? Jewish Responses to Nazi War-Crime Trials in Allied-Occupied Germany,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 19, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 107–47

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France—the IMT indicted a cross section of Nazi Germany’s politi-cal, military, diplomatic, and economic leadership on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and con-spiracy to wage aggressive war. Sutzkever had flown from Vilna via Moscow, Minsk, and Berlin along with eight other witnesses, all of them non-Jews, who would testify for the Soviet prosecution against the 22 “major war criminals,” among them Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, Alfred Rosenberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Ru-dolf Hess, in addition to Martin Bormann in absentia. Sutzkever found great meaning in his court appearance as a survivor of the German genocide of European Jews. “I feel a tremendous responsi-bility and I pray that the souls of the martyrs will lament from my words,” he noted in his diary upon arrival in Nuremberg, adding: “I want to speak in Yiddish . . . in the language of the nation whom the men in the dock tried to extinguish. . . . Our mother tongue must be heard. . . . It shall triumph in Nuremberg as a symbol of our immortality.”1

His testimony on the morning of February 27, 1946, described how the Germans had murdered his baby boy in the infants’ ward of the Jewish hospital in the Vilna ghetto and detailed the mass shootings of 60,000 Jews at Ponary. Sutzkever twice refused a request to sit down from the presiding judge, British chief justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence. “I spoke standing as if I was saying kaddish for the dead,”2 he remarked after his testimony, confiding in his diary his one grievance: he had not been allowed to speak Yiddish but had to testify in Russian. Sutzkever’s interrogator, Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov, explained that the tribu-nal’s rules allowed only four official languages—English, Russian, Ger-man, and French—and the court lacked suitable interpreters.3 Beyond silencing the language of millions of Jewish victims, the need to de-scribe his traumatic experiences in a foreign language proved inhibit-ing for Sutzkever: “I am not that strong in the Russian language that I could transmit the quivers of my soul.”4

This episode raises a number of important issues, beginning with the roles and representation of Holocaust survivors in Allied war-crime trials and specifically at Nuremberg. How can it be that the first international court to prosecute “crimes against humanity,” in a monumental 11-month trial that is now widely remembered as the birthplace of “Holocaust consciousness,” lacked Yiddish translators? And why did the 94 witnesses who spoke in the courtroom—30 of them also testifying on crimes against Jews—include only three Jews? What roles did Jewish individuals and organizations play at the

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tribunal? What position did the Jews as a transnational victim group not represented by a single government have in an international legal system that was based on state representation? To what extent was the Allied military court at Nuremberg an effective tool for advancing Jewish security and equality in the postwar era? What were the ten-sions and the overlaps between Jewish concerns with retribution after 1945 and the legal preoccupations of the Allied powers?

Sutzkever’s appearance in Nuremberg also raises questions as to how Jews—survivors and nonsurvivors—related to the tribunal at the time. For example, what does Sutzkever’s equation of his testimony with the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning tell us about the IMT’s sig-nificance for Jews in the immediate aftermath of World War II? What roles did Jews envision for themselves in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, what expectations and apprehensions did they bring to the trial, and how did they evaluate the Allies’ treatment of the Jewish fate?

In the ever-growing body of literature on the IMT and other war-crime tribunals in postwar Germany, the ways in which the Allies treated the crimes that we now call the Holocaust have received consid-erable attention. Historians are nevertheless divided in their assess-ment of the Allied representation of the Jewish tragedy at Nuremberg. Some argue that the international trial, which lasted from November 1945 through October 1946, was a milestone in understanding the unprecedented magnitude of the catastrophe visited upon European Jews. As Michael R. Marrus has shown, although the IMT’s presenta-tion of the Nazi genocide of European Jews was far less complex, nu-anced, and historically accurate than it would be today, the trial still provided the first comprehensive account before an international body of the development and extent of the systematic mass murder of two-thirds of European Jewry. The indictment mentioned crimes against Jews under all four counts—crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and plan or conspiracy to wage aggressive war—and references to persecution and mass murder of Jews, illus-trated by graphic documentary evidence, permeated the entire pro-ceedings.5 Other scholars, Donald Bloxham in particular, tend to emphasize the shortcomings of the IMT and other Allied war-crime tribunals, specifically noting that the Allies failed to pay due atten-tion to the genocide of European Jews and that their own respective biases and political interests colored their historical understanding of the event.6 However, as Lawrence Douglas rightly observes, the IMT was not actually a “Holocaust trial”: the prosecution, rather than being “primarily occupied with trying the defendants for the exter-mination of the Jews . . . instead focused on the accuseds’ roles in

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launching and waging an aggressive war.” Yet, as Douglas further re-marks, “the extermination of the Jews was importantly explored and condemned at Nuremberg, especially as it was filtered through the freshly minted legal category of crimes against humanity.”7

Regardless of which position one might take in this debate, it is a striking fact that so far historians of Allied postwar justice have mainly focused on Jews as the Nazis’ murdered victims. As Holocaust survivors, actors, and agents, Jews have received little to no attention in the scholarship on Nuremberg.8 Questions as to what Jewish observ-ers in the immediate postwar years had to say about the representa-tion of the Jewish catastrophe in Allied war-crime trials and what roles Jews played in and around these tribunals have hardly been raised. This is largely the result of the kinds of historical sources that have so far informed the historiography on Nuremberg: tribunal re-cords, trial proceedings, official correspondence, personal papers, and (published) memoirs of members of the Allied prosecution teams, along with the German and international press. If at all, Jews figure as casualties in these records but remain invisible as active sub-jects or participants. With no official Jewish representation at the Nuremberg tribunal, the few individual Jewish witnesses who ap-peared in court presented what Donald Bloxham called “a tale of Jewish absence.”9

By contrast, Jewish sources from the immediate postwar years—such as the Jewish press in Germany and beyond, along with archival records from Jewish individuals and organizations present in occu-pied Germany—allow us to draw a different picture. They suggest that the postwar Allied trials found widespread interest among Jews in Europe, the Americas, and Palestine/Israel and even stood at the center of public discourse in those communities. Despite their “invis-ibility” at the Nuremberg tribunal, Jews undertook considerable ef-forts (some dating back into the war years) to participate in the prosecution of the Nazi perpetrators. These largely unexplored ef-forts and sources can help historians better comprehend the roles Jews played in war-crime trials and how they assessed the representa-tion of their fate by the Allies, issues that are critical to the dynamics of Jewish reconstruction in postwar Europe and the complexity of post-Holocaust justice. They also add to our understanding of the multifaceted Jewish responses to the Holocaust in its immediate af-termath, which have emerged as a rapidly growing international re-search field over the past decade.10

This essay uses the contemporary impressions of some Jewish observ-ers to explore the roles and functions that Jews, Holocaust survivors or

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not, played in and around the first, iconic trial against the “major war criminals.” It also analyzes the trial’s extensive press coverage in a major Yiddish-language newspaper published by survivors—in this case, Jewish displaced persons temporarily residing in the American zone of occupied Germany.

Jewish Presence and Absence at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

During the war, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) had already begun a persistent quest for direct and official Jewish participation in prosecut-ing Nazi war criminals. Founded in August 1936 in Geneva as a volun-tary representative body of Jewish organizations and communities throughout the world, the congress understood itself to represent the interests and needs of the Jewish collective in the Diaspora. Its primary tasks included safeguarding Jewish rights; providing social aid, eco-nomic relief, and educational and cultural work; assisting in Jewish mi-gration; and promoting Jewish unity.11 As news of German atrocities against the Jewish populations in Nazi Germany and its conquered ter-ritories multiplied, the WJC increasingly concerned itself with collect-ing information to serve as potential evidence in future war-crime trials. For that purpose, in February 1941 it established the Institute of Jewish Affairs, a New York–based research branch under the auspices of Jacob Robinson. A Lithuanian-born international lawyer, Robinson had escaped Lithuania in May 1940 and reached the United States in December of that year via the Soviet Union, Romania, Yugoslavia, France, and Portugal.12 From summer 1942—when the WJC had re-ceived irrefutable evidence that Nazi Germany was using poison gas to systematically murder the Jews inside its orbit of power—until the end of the war, the WJC lobbied various governments in exile in London to call their attention to Germany’s crimes against these Jewish popula-tions. After the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) began its work in fall 1943 (one year after its formal establishment), the WJC sought futilely to gain a seat in that American-led international body, whose role was to investigate allegations of Axis war crimes against Allied nationals. As the WJC came to understand that Nazi Ger-many was pursuing a systematic campaign against the entire Jewish population of Europe, its lobbying efforts increasingly stressed the dis-tinct nature of the crimes committed against Jews and pushed to en-sure that prosecutable “war crimes” include actions committed before the outbreak of the war and against German and other Axis nationals.

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It also demanded that the WJC be allowed to present the Jewish case before the commission and even become affiliated more permanently with that body.13 Sir Cecil Hurst, the UNWCC’s chairman, encour-aged the congress to supply evidence of the crimes committed against the Jews of Nazi-occupied countries to the governments that, as com-mission members, would handle Jewish claims. He insisted, however, that expanding the concept of war crimes was beyond the compe-tence of the UNWCC—a government-constituted body—and he un-dermined the WJC’s request for a hearing and possible affiliation with the commission.14

Jewish “Friends of the Court”? The Question of Jewish Representation

In November 1944, the WJC held its five-day War Emergency Confer-ence in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in which 269 delegates from 40 states participated. The meeting passed a “Statement and Resolution on the Punishment of War Criminals,” which addressed the govern-ments of the United Nations. It was the product of several months of intensive internal debates among various legal experts working for the WJC in New York and London.15 The statement argued that the criminality of the Axis powers lay in their unprecedented forms of warfare against targeted ethnic groups:

The most monstrous of these crimes has had as its purpose the destruc-tion of an entire people: the Jews of Europe. This crime . . . was the re-sult of a carefully prepared and openly avowed policy. First in Germany and then in the successively occupied territories, the Jews were system-atically degraded, deprived of their means of livelihood, segregated in overcrowded ghettos and camps, subjected to a system of planned star-vation and forced labor. The reduction of the Jewish population as a re-sult of the appalling losses which this policy assured did not prove rapid enough to satisfy Nazi designs. The Nazis and their satellites therefore resorted to the methods of wholesale deportation and mass murder.16

The eleven points resolved included four central demands: first, that future national and international tribunals not only prosecute “war crimes” in the narrow sense—here meaning the misuse of the rules of warfare against Allied nationals and in Allied territory—but also con-sider Axis territory and prosecute “all forms of persecution of racial, religious, and political minorities committed since January 30, 1933 in the course of and incidental or preparatory to the war by the enemy and their satellites and collaborators”;17 second, that future war-crime tribunals include representatives of the Jewish communities in the

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investigation and prosecution teams and that the WJC receive an offi-cial representation as amicus curiae (friend of the court); third, that ad-equate attention be given to the Jewish case both in safeguarding evidence and in the rigor with which those responsible be extradited, indicted, and punished; and fourth, that crimes committed against Jewish nationals of Germany or other Axis powers be brought before United Nations tribunals rather than be left to the mercy of the courts of Germany and her allies. The statement concluded with a cogent call:

If those who are guilty of monstrous crimes against the Jewish people are allowed to escape punishment, it cannot but have the effect of en-couraging adventurers in the postwar world to use anti-Semitism as a means of obtaining power to destroy democracy and to prepare the ag-gressive instruments for another World War.18

Six months later, in the summer of 1945, Jacob Robinson and other WJC representatives established contact with Robert H. Jackson, U.S. chief of counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, in hopes of furthering previous demands to which the U.N. governments had not responded. In a 90-minute meeting with Jackson on June 12, 1945, Robinson continued the previous line of argument while also making new demands. Referring to Jews as a people rather than a religious group, he argued that the Jews had suffered a crime sui generis—that of systematic extermination—that was “the result of a well conceived, de-liberately plotted and meticulously carried out conspiracy.”19

Robinson’s use of the term conspiracy in addressing Jackson is strik-ing. Although the meeting took place before the Potsdam Conference (which laid out the principles of the Allied postwar order in Germany and agreed on the joint prosecution of the “major” war criminals) or the charter of the IMT and the completion of its indictment, Robinson seems to have understood that the legal concept of conspiracy—the agreement of two or more people to commit a criminal act—would likely play a central role in the Anglo-American case against the Nazi war criminals.20 Describing the Third Reich’s mass murder of Euro-pean Jews as effectively a conspiracy was therefore a conscious step in convincing Jackson that the American prosecution would benefit from paying major attention to the fate of the Jews. But it also fit Robinson’s own understanding of the Final Solution as a plot, a scheme, and an ideologically motivated agreement among numerous individuals and Nazi agencies to annihilate the Jews as a collective, which Nazi Germany had implemented through systematic steps from Hitler’s rise to power until Germany’s unconditional surrender.21

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Robinson further argued that because Jews as a collective had suf-fered from the Nazi conspiracy of systematic annihilation, they de-served to play a central role in the prosecution of the perpetrators. What shape or form that role might take seems to have been vague at this point, but Robinson suggested two possible scenarios. For the first, he proposed a separate Jewish indictment:

The Jewish people is the greatest sufferer of this war, if not in the abso-lute number of its casualties (the Soviet Union has a larger total), cer-tainly in relative numbers (the ratio of surviving Jews . . . to their pre-war total in some areas). It therefore has a case of its own against the . . . Nazi war criminals.22

To further justify his demand, he argued:

The Nazis have not only exterminated two-thirds of European Jewry, but have infested the continent with anti-Jewish feeling, that makes the life of Jews in liberated Europe insecure. We believe that a specific in-dictment for the crime committed against our people will clear the at-mosphere in Europe and make it easier for the survivors to reestablish themselves there.23

Such a Jewish indictment, in other words, was necessary for the reha-bilitation of survivors and the rebuilding of Jewish life in postwar Eu-rope. Yet Robinson left open what a “Jewish indictment” might mean. Did he envision a separate trial that focused only on crimes against Jews? Did he wish to press Jackson to include third-party prosecutors? Or did he perhaps even envision a separate count of “crimes against the Jewish people”?

In Robinson’s second proposed scenario, a Jewish delegation with the status of amicus curiae would ensure independent Jewish partici-pation in the tribunal. At a time when a sovereign Jewish state was still a far-fetched political goal, the WJC would perform this task. As amicus curiae, rather than as a party to the case, the WJC would lack the power to indict but would assist the court by providing relevant information in the form of evidence or expert testimony. In sum, Robinson sought to convince Jackson that “the Jewish survivors are entitled to have someone represent them at the trials, as the spokes-man of those who perished as well as of the living. Such representa-tion would bring to the fore more clearly the moral implications of punishing the conspirators against an entire people.”24

Although either route to a separate Jewish case would have satisfied Robinson and his colleagues, Jackson immediately rejected the idea:

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there would be one military trial, in which the Jewish indictment would have its place. He feared that other—unspecified—victim groups might make similar demands, further complicating the already-intri-cate task of bringing the central figures of the Nazi regime to justice.25 But other factors certainly contributed to rendering Jewish representa-tion unviable in Jackson’s eyes: Robinson and his entourage represented a nongovernmental organization claiming to be a quasi-diplomatic arm of a stateless “Jewish collective” whose members disagreed whether that collectivity was constituted by peoplehood, ethnicity, culture, or creed. Who could guarantee that the WJC indeed spoke for all Jews in the world? Were other Jewish factions holding conflicting views not likely to approach Jackson with separate demands?

An official Jewish delegation was a nonstarter; yet Jackson was will-ing to let Chaim Weizmann, the 70-year-old head of the World Zion-ist Organization, appear for the prosecution as an expert witness on crimes against Jews.26 In view of Weizmann’s age, there was some hesi-tation on the Jewish side as to whether he was the right candidate for this task, in which he was likely to undergo cross-examination.27 Whereas Weizmann himself had misgivings because he would have to read a previously approved statement of 15,000 words, the British opposed the idea out of concern that Weizmann would use his plat-form to promote Zionist claims to statehood, thus shedding negative light on Britain’s Palestine policies.28 Eventually, the tribunal had no amici curiae and neither the WJC nor any other Jewish group received official status at Nuremberg.

Ironically, although the WJC failed to get permission to send an official Jewish delegation to the IMT, it made an impact behind the scenes during preparations for the trial. Between June and Decem-ber 1945, Robinson and his colleagues at the Institute of Jewish Af-fairs in New York closely collaborated with the American prosecution team, both helping to draft those passages in the indictment relating to Jews and supplying documentation on the toll suffered by Jews under the Nazis.29 For example, the number of 5.7 million Jewish vic-tims mentioned in Jackson’s powerful opening speech of November 21, 1945, was based on statistics assembled by the Institute of Jewish Affairs.30 Moreover, Jackson adopted the idea that the Nazis had in-deed deliberately planned the “destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, as an end in itself,”31 which the WJC had publicly expressed as early as November 1944. During a 10-day stay in Nuremberg during the first two weeks of the trial in late November 1945, Robinson as-sisted Major William F. Walsh, assistant trial counsel for the United States, in preparing Walsh’s mid-December presentation of evidence

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on the persecution of the Jews under counts 1 and 4 of the indict-ment. In his two-session-long brief presented December 13 and 14, 1945, Walsh apparently followed Robinson’s advice in linking the pre-1939 Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Germany to the Reich’s prepa-rations for war, thereby turning the court’s attention to crimes that otherwise would not have been considered under the narrow reading of crimes against humanity.32 This category, which according to article 6 (c) of the IMT charter of August 1945 included “murder, extermi-nation, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts commit-ted against any civilian population before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds,” was a novelty in international law created for the purpose of holding a sovereign government legally responsible for mistreating and murdering its own civilians even if domestic law did not criminalize those acts. Yet fearing the revolutionary potential of this new legal category—which by disputing the principle of state sovereignty could have repercus-sions for the Allied nations themselves—the Nuremberg tribunal re-stricted its application by linking it to the other three counts of the indictment. To be considered crimes against humanity, actions had to be connected to crimes against peace, war crimes, and the con-spiracy to wage a war of aggression, thus reducing the Final Solution to a subset of other Nazi transgressions.33 Ultimately, Walsh’s strategy failed to affect the final verdict, as the court declared that these pre-war atrocities had not qualified as crimes against humanity within the meaning of the charter.34

Back in New York at the beginning of December, in a closed-door meeting of the WJC, Robinson made contradictory statements re-garding the success of his mission. He was dissatisfied by the tribu-nal’s treatment of the Jewish tragedy in the context of other crimes rather than as a separate entity and by its failure to emphasize that the specific nature of the Final Solution had been not in its number of victims but rather in its ideological underpinning of murdering a distinct kind of human being.35 Yet he reported to his colleagues with some satisfaction that evidence on Jewish casualties presented by the WJC had nevertheless contributed to some measure of public recog-nition of the Jews as a collective. “It is always the same struggle for the recognition necessary to call a Jew a Jew. Only in Nuremberg did we attain this end—for dead Jews.”36

With some irony, Robinson admitted that although “[f]ar away from Nuremberg, the idea of our ‘representation’ and ‘observers’ being offi-cially admitted to the trial sounded like a good idea,” he now realized that the representatives of numerous governments that had endorsed

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the IMT had no role in the trial and had “nothing to observe.”37 Never theless, he agonized over the fact that those with expert knowl-edge of the Jewish tragedy, such as he and his colleagues, were “on the outside” of the trial, whereas “those . . . on the inside [i.e., the Allied judges and prosecutors] are incompetent,” lacking knowledge in Jew-ish matters.38

Even if Jews did not share in the limelight at Nuremberg, Robinson sensed a strong behind-the-scenes Jewish presence, especially in the American prosecution team.39 Donald Bloxham has noted that Jus-tice Jackson was “happy to have Jewish lawyers on his team, as long as they were not involved in presenting the Jewish case.”40 At least one prominent non-Jewish member of Jackson’s staff, Thomas J. Dodd, executive trial counsel of the office of the U.S. chief of counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, questioned the presence of so many Jews at the tribunal. In one of his private letters from Nurem-berg he voiced his concern that the U.S. contingent of the IMT staff was “seventy-five-percent Jewish,” although in fact “the Jews should stay away from this trial—for their own sake.” Dodd emphasized his own hatred of antisemitism and other forms of ethnic and religious prejudice, but he feared that a prominent role at the trial would not be in the interest of the Jews themselves. Dodd observed,

the charge “a war for the Jews” is still being made and in the postwar years it will be made again and again. The too large percentages of Jew-ish men and women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Some-times it seems that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on bringing new difficulties down on their heads. . . . They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other and with everybody else.41

Although Dodd’s assessment of the Jewish presence at the IMT was not only exaggerated but certainly also biased, there were indeed doz-ens of Jewish lawyers and officials who assisted in the preparation of the trial, as for example Murray C. Bernays, Benjamin Kaplan, David “Mickey” Marcus, and Hersh Lauterpacht on the British side, among many others. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist and “father” of the term genocide, who had reached the United States in April 1941 after an odyssey through Sweden, the Soviet Union, and Japan, attended the Nuremberg trial as a consultant to the American team from May 1946 until the end of the trial. Though Lemkin managed to have his neolo-gism mentioned in the 65-page indictment, he futilely tried to convince the IMT to pay more attention to the concept of genocide.42

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Jewish chief prosecutors led two of the 12 trials before American military tribunals that followed the IMT: Benjamin B. Ferencz (Ein-satzgruppen case, against heads of the mobile killing squads of the SS, July 3, 1947–April 10, 1948) and Robert M. W. Kempner (Wilhelm-straße or Ministries case, November 4, 1947–April 13, 1949). In addi-tion, the prosecutorial team under General Telford Taylor as chief counsel included several other high-level Jewish attorneys, among them Cecilia Goetz, associate trial counsel in the Krupp case (August 16, 1947–July 31, 1948) and Ralph S. Goodman, associate trial coun-sel in the Flick (February 8–December 22, 1947) and Einsatzgruppen trials and assistant trial counsel in the Ministries case.

The IMT staff included the American Jewish psychologists Gustav Mark Gilbert and Leon Goldensohn;43 numerous Jews, many of them German and Austrian émigrés, applied their language skills as inter-rogators, translators, and secretaries, as did the interpreters Richard W. Sonnenfeldt and Siegfried Ramler at the IMT, Hannah Warten-berg in the Justice case (January 4–December 4, 1947), and Hedy Ep-stein in the Doctors trial (October 25, 1946–August 20, 1947).44 In addition, Jewish servicemen in the Allied armies served as staff in the press room and the canteen and as guards in the Palace of Justice.

Not least, Jewish researchers worked in the tribunal archives. The WJC was not the only Jewish body to supply documentary evidence. The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC), a Paris-based Jewish documentation center first set up by Holocaust survi-vors during the war, provided the French delegation with documents from its own collections and also sent two envoys, the survivors Léon Poliakov and Joseph Billig, to work in the tribunal’s archive. Another close affiliate of the documentation center, the German Jewish émi-gré lawyer Henri Monneray (Heinrich Meierhof), was a member of the French delegation. In 1947 and 1949, the CDJC also pioneered the publication of two volumes of documents from the IMT archives on the mass murder of European Jews.45 Likewise, the Central Jewish Historical Commission, a documentation center established in 1944 by Polish Jews in Lublin, closely collaborated with the Polish delega-tion and sent its director, the Jewish historian Dr. Philip Friedman, to visit the tribunal in the summer of 1946.46

Photographers—notably the chief photographer of the Soviet dele-gation, Ivgeny Chaldej—further augmented the Jewish presence at Nuremberg, as did such journalists as the German Zionist Robert Weltsch, who reported for the Tel Aviv–based Hebrew daily Haaretz, and writer Alfred Döblin, who (under the pseudonym Hans Fiedeler) ob-served the trial as a cultural officer with the French military government

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in Baden-Baden.47 The Soviet Jewish writer and journalist Ilya Ehren-burg of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had supplied the So-viet prosecution with evidence and procured Jewish witnesses, also visited the tribunal as an observer. In addition, numerous journalists who had survived the Holocaust in eastern Europe and temporarily lived in Germany as Jewish displaced persons followed the trial as cor-respondents for the local Jewish press.

Although some of these individuals might have identified with their Jewish backgrounds, most were not acting as Jews or represent-ing Jewish organizations or pursuing any distinctly Jewish interests; rather, they primarily served the tribunal in various capacities and as employees and citizens of their respective states.48 Though some Jews focused on general issues of Nazi crimes, others emphasized the spe-cifics of the Jewish catastrophe, and their varying standpoints ac-count for Jewish pluralism and diversity. The presence of the Jewish actors at the Palace of Justice clearly complicates the claim of Jewish absence and marginality at Nuremberg, and their respective roles, responses, and influences still need to be fully explored.

Speaking in the Name of the Dead: The Jewish Witnesses

The Nuremberg trial gave a small number of survivors an interna-tional platform from which to bear witness to their horrific experi-ences. Avrom Sutzkever’s testimony on February 27, 1946, about the extermination of the Vilna ghetto population at Ponary was part of the Soviet presentation on “crimes against humanity” in eastern Eu-rope. He read and submitted to the court a document he had found after the liberation in the office building of German district commis-sar Franz Murer that specified the Germans’ reuse of the clothing of Jews they had executed at Ponary.49 After fleeing the ghetto with the United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, FPO) in September 1943, Sutzkever and his wife joined a Jewish parti-san unit under Soviet command in the forests around Vilna. The fol-lowing spring, a Soviet military airlift brought the couple to Moscow at the request of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, through a Lithuanian courier, knew of Sutzkever’s poems on Nazi atrocities in the Vilna ghetto.50 Founded in 1942 by a group of Soviet Jewish intel-lectuals as a vehicle for carrying out Stalin’s wish to incite anti-Ger-man sentiment and resistance, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee documented German crimes against the Jews in eastern Europe. In 1943, under the auspices of the journalists Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, the committee had begun to prepare The Black Book, a

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document collection on the murder of Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory (Soviet censorship prevented the book’s publication in the Soviet Union).51 Ehrenburg arranged for Sutzkever’s turn as a witness for the Soviet prosecution because the partisan poet embodied not only Jewish victimization but also, and more important, anti-Fascist struggle. According to Ehrenburg, Sutzkever had initially planned to bring a revolver to the courtroom to shoot Göring, but the journalist convinced him that testifying was a better revenge.52 “The words which I cried out to the entire world and the coming generation still burn on my lips,” Sutzkever noted in his diary after appearing in the witness stand, which he described as “no doubt the strongest experi-ence I have made in my thirty years.”53

The second Jewish witness for the Soviet prosecution appeared several hours after Sutzkever, in the afternoon session of February 27, 1946. Szmuel Rajzman, a Polish national born in 1902 in Vengrov and trained as an accountant, spoke in Polish with the help of an inter-preter. His testimony described firsthand German extermination practices at Treblinka, where he had been deported from the Warsaw ghetto in August 1942. During his year at Treblinka, Rajzman served in a special unit of Jewish prisoners assigned to load the clothes of the murdered onto trains. Along with seeing his mother, sister, and two brothers arrive and go to the gas chambers, he suffered the trauma of finding a photograph of his wife and child among the clothing he sorted one day. “That is all I have left of my family,” he told the court, “only a photograph.”54

Five months after Rajzman’s testimony, on August 7, 1946, Izrael Ei-zenberg, a Polish Jew who at the time of the trial lived in Stuttgart, took the witness stand as the third and last Jewish witness. He had earlier given the British prosecution an affidavit on SS involvement in the mur-der of the Jewish population of the Lublin district in the years 1941–42. He had witnessed and survived the murder campaign while working as an expert on electro-mechanical jobs for several high-ranking SS offi-cers in Lublin, among them SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocznik. At Nuremberg, Major F. Elwyn Jones, junior counsel for the United King-dom, asked Eizenberg to tell the court how he had received a scar on his left cheek—a reminder of his survival of the mass execution of approxi-mately one thousand Jews in October 1942 in a field near Majdanek. Horst Pelckmann, counsel for the SS, then asked the witness to identify the ranks of different SS officers in a number of photographs, unsuc-cessfully seeking to convince the court that the witness was lying.55

A handful of Jews gave written affidavits but did not appear person-ally in court. Some were “ordinary” survivors who had witnessed and

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survived atrocities against Jews under the Nazi regime.56 But two affi-davits on the destruction of Hungarian Jews came from Rudolph Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist leader who had negotiated with Adolf Eichmann’s men in Hungary—Dieter Wisliceny and Kurt Becher—over trading the lives of one million Jews for goods (had Al-lied opposition not foiled this deal, it might have saved the majority of Hungarian Jewry).57 Other affidavits came from individuals of Jew-ish backgrounds affiliated with the prosecution teams, such as the law-yers Robert M. W. Kempner and Henri Monneray, and from the Austrian-born émigré psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim. After 11 months of incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939, Bettelheim had reached the United States and was appointed professor of psychology at the University of Chicago in 1944, provid-ing Jackson and his team a source of valuable information on the German concentration-camp system, although Bettelheim did not mention his Jewish origin in his affidavit.58

Crucial and historically significant testimony on the crimes of the Final Solution mainly came from non-Jews, including key Nazi officials in Allied custody. As Lawrence Douglas observed, the IMT followed an “evidentiary logic which assumed that proof of extreme crimes became less credible and more impeachable as one moved from perpetrator to bystander to victim.”59 For example, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, who appeared as a prosecution witness against Reich Security Main Office chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, coldly reported that his unit had murdered 90,000 Jew-ish men, women, and children in southern Ukraine and the Crimea in 1941 and 1942. Rudolph Höss—appearing in Kaltenbrunner’s de-fense—prided himself that 2.5 million Jews had been murdered in Aus-chwitz-Birkenau during his term as camp commander in 1940–43.60 Non-Jewish political prisoners provided some of the most excruciating details on the mass murder of European Jews. Notable examples included the Polish Auschwitz inmate Severina Shmaglevskaya, who testified about the murder of Jewish women and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau,61 and the French journalist Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who had been arrested and imprisoned for her work in the resistance movement. Based on her year and a half in Auschwitz and nine months in Ravensbrück, the journalist’s extensive, elaborate testimony in French exposed gruesome details of the medical experiments and gas-sings of Jewish women and children at Birkenau. Her report also in-criminated the Wehrmacht for having assisted the SS in perpetrating those crimes and demonstrated that large circles of German society knew about and were directly involved in the genocide. At a time when

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France sought to stress its heroic opposition to the Nazis and downplay Vichy’s complicity in solving France’s “Jewish question,” the French prosecution team had a vested interest in having a decorated resistance fighter—who was also a member of the French Constituent Assembly—testify, rather than a Jewish deportee.62

But it would be misleading to attribute the limited number of Jewish witnesses solely to such political concerns. Distinctly anti-Jewish preju-dice also played a role. As Donald Bloxham observed, Jackson was not alone in thinking that Jewish witnesses might be more vengeful and less reliable than others, thus providing more harm than benefit. Be-lieving that “Jews could not be allowed to be seen to describe the fate of their kin,” Jackson left the task to evidence from the perpetrators and to “universal opinion” represented by Jackson himself.63 Yet the small number of Jewish witnesses exemplifies the legal culture in which the IMT took place and reflects the basic nature and purpose of the trial for the four nations that sat in judgment. It focused not on victims and their narratives of persecution, suffering, and genocide but rather on the central figures of the Nazi regime, whose crimes had no specific lo-cation and whose guilt the Allied prosecutors sought to prove by means of the Germans’ own documents. Individual victims from the periph-ery of the regime thus had limited value; indeed, the prosecutors feared that their horrifying stories of human tragedy might be a dis-traction. Consequently, the IMT proceedings mainly relied on docu-ments rather than witness testimony.64

The twelve so-called Nuremberg successor trials, held before the American Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) from October 1946 through April 1949, which tried 185 “minor war criminals” (accord-ing to their position in the Third Reich but not the nature of their crimes), did not significantly change the focus of these trials toward the victims. In early 1947, Raphael Lemkin unsuccessfully sought to convince chief counsel Telford Taylor to initiate a case that exclu-sively considered the mass murder of European Jews. The problem for the American prosecutors was the number of possible defendants who both held central positions in the Nazi regime’s hierarchy and had significantly participated in the genocide.65 In November 1947, having understood that the Americans would not hold a separate trial for crimes against Jews, Stephen S. Wise, president of the WJC, petitioned to have three Nazi officials who had participated in the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, and who were currently in American custody, included in the upcoming Ministries trial. Wise hoped that the inclusion of the three defendants and the use of the recently discovered Wannsee Conference protocol (written by Adolf

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Eichmann) as key evidence would allow the court to examine the Nazi scheme for pan-European annihilation of the Jews and high-light the complicity of various Nazi agencies.66 Taylor assured Wise that he shared the view that “the crimes committed by the Third Reich against the Jewish people must not be condoned, and therefore those guilty of these crimes must be brought to justice,” and he stressed that “crimes against the Jewish people have formed a very important part of the charges” brought against Nazi elites in the 12 Nuremberg successor trials. He noted, however, that it was “quite im-possible for the Nurnberg Tribunals to try all Germans against whom there are serious charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity” and that the “number of charges which can be heard and determined at Nurnberg is necessarily limited by available funds and personnel, the size of court rooms, and other similar factors.”67

In the end, the Einsatzgruppen trial, case number 9 of the successor trials, held from September 29, 1947, to April 9, 1948, most closely re-sembled the separate Jewish case suggested by Lemkin and by Jacob Robinson and the WJC. This proceeding, whose defendants were 24 high-ranking members of the SS who had been instrumental in com-manding the mobile killing units that murdered about one million civilians behind the eastern front, was distinctly concerned with crimes against Jews. Although the Americans had not initially planned a separate prosecution of the Einsatzgruppen leaders, Tel-ford Taylor changed his mind after an American officer working under Benjamin Ferencz, the young Jewish investigator who headed the Berlin branch of the office of chief of counsel for war crimes, came across Einsatzgruppen reports in 1946. At age 27, Ferencz be-came chief prosecutor of the resulting case against the units’ leaders. Yet, although the trial dealt primarily with crimes against Jews, it in-volved no Jewish witnesses but rather drew its evidence mainly from the official Einsatzgruppen reports.68

Some of the trials in the respective Allied occupation zones that fo-cused on particular camps and crimes with specific locations had a much higher representation of Jewish witnesses. In one proceeding, the trial of Josef Kramer—the last commandant of Bergen-Belsen—and 44 other defendants from that camp and Auschwitz-Birkenau, con-ducted at the British military tribunal in Lüneburg from September 17, 1945, to November 17, 1945, 19 of the 35 prosecution witnesses who ap-peared in court were Jews. In addition, 60 of the 113 affidavits cited were openly identified as being from Jews.69 Several Jewish witnesses also appeared in the 460 trials against 1,676 “minor war criminals,” known as the “Dachau series” because most of the proceedings took

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place at the site of the former Dachau concentration camp between No-vember 1945 and August 1948. As in the British Bergen-Belsen trial, al-though prosecutors neither treated Jews as a separate group of victims nor attached any specific significance to their suffering, the Jewish wit-nesses themselves called attention to their Jewishness and stressed that they had been persecuted solely because of their ethnic background.70 The more local a trial’s focus, the more room it allowed for Jewish wit-nesses—although the Allies did not always identify them as Jews and indeed primarily treated them as Allied nationals, refraining from ad-dressing the distinct circumstances of their victimization as Jews—whereas Jewish participation was limited at the trials at Nuremberg against the major and minor war criminals of the Nazi regime.

Jewish Voices from the Courtroom: The International Military Tribunal in the Yiddish Survivor Press

Jews in Germany and around the world played an active role as observ-ers, if not as witnesses, at the IMT trial. Describing, commenting on, criticizing, and at times ridiculing the proceedings were common pastimes among the 250,000–300,000 mostly eastern European Jewish survivors in temporary displaced-person camps in Germany, mainly in the American zone. As they awaited their departure for new lives over-seas, the displaced persons established social, political, and cultural institutions that shaped their self-understanding as a national entity and helped them reclaim agency over their lives. Among matters of re-lief and rehabilitation, emigration, the quest for political sovereignty in Palestine, the search for missing relatives, and the commemoration of the recent tragedy, punishment of the perpetrators dominated the public discourse of the “surviving remnant,” sheerit ha-peletah.71 Between 1945 and 1950, more than one hundred Jewish periodicals appeared in Germany on a regular basis, most of them in Yiddish, exemplifying both the vibrant cultural activity of the Jewish displaced persons and their hunger for reading materials and information from the outside world after years of deprivation.72 The larger newspapers assigned reg-ular correspondents to Nuremberg. Their reports and opinion pieces meticulously covered the proceedings for the wider public of survivors. This study uses coverage by the biweekly American zone–wide newspa-per Undzer veg, the official organ of the Central Committee of Liber-ated Jews in the American Zone, with a circulation of 20,000 copies, to highlight some of the central themes of the contemporary Jewish dis-course about the IMT trial.73

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Expectations and Disappointments

Many of the Jewish displaced-person journalists commented on the symbolism of Nuremberg as the site of the tribunal and its specific meaning for Jews. The journalist Shabse Klugman (later also known as Shabtai Keshev), a survivor of the Kovno ghetto who had left Po-land for Germany in the summer of 1945, served as Undzer veg’s per-manent correspondent at the Palace of Justice. He covered the IMT and most of the successor trials (until his departure for Israel in 1948) in a weekly or fortnightly column titled “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat” (“the place of evil is the place of justice”)—a para-phrase of Ecclesiastes 3:16: “And moreover I saw under the sun, in the place of justice, that wickedness was there; and in the place of righ-teousness, that wickedness was there.” Klugman, an emotional and at times polemical writer, thus expressed some hope that the Nurem-berg tribunal would rectify the city’s more recent history.

In the weeks before the opening of the IMT trial, Undzer veg re-counted Nuremberg’s associations with Nazi party rallies and the promulgation of notorious anti-Jewish laws. As a symbol of the viola-tion of the principles of the constitutional state, Nuremberg was the “city of murderers, the well of misery.”74 The Allies’ choice of this city for this historical tribunal was, then, a source of satisfaction. At the same time, it imposed on the trial a daunting responsibility: to “reha-bilitate” the city and teach humankind a lesson that would safeguard Jewish rights and prevent future genocides. “The Nuremberg laws were our death sentence,” wrote the Lithuanian Jewish physician Zalman Grinberg, a member of the newly founded Central Committee of Lib-erated Jews in the American Zone, on the first day of the trial: “From the Nuremberg Trial we await the proclamation of our rights and the vindication of our claim to free and equal rights as individuals and as a people in a world of peace and humanity.”75

On November 20, 1945, the opening day of the trial, Undzer veg’s Russian-born writer and editor Levi Shalitan remarked in a front-page editorial that the trial’s significance was not as a vehicle for judging 22 defendants whose guilt did not really need to be proven and who were but a symbolic handful of a much larger group of perpetrators of the Reich’s crimes. Writing in English as if to address the Allied judges di-rectly, he stressed that the trial’s real importance and weight lay in its moral-ethical message to the world: “This trial shall be the last warn-ing. It must be proved that there is order and justice in our world. No one can again presume a world without justice and without judges.”76 Indeed, “the entire future peace of the world rests upon the judgment

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of this Nuremberg court.”77 The Allies now had a chance, he argued further, to compensate for their moral failure in having tolerated Hit-ler’s rise to power and failed to protect European Jews from the catas-trophe. This meant that the special needs of the survivors must be considered, including a viable long-term settlement for Jews: “Just as we have suffered the most under the system represented by the former Nuremberg, so do we now expect and await the largest measure of repa-ration from the Nuremberg of today.”78 Finally, Shalitan pronounced:

The fate of humanity is dependent upon whether or no[t] we are granted justice. For the Jew is the barometer which gauges the peace of the universe. Should the world by-pass the Jew and his problems and go on to concern itself with supposedly greater issues, like a moral atom bomb, the barometer will explode and again will Humanity come to grips with death.79

When the trial began, many correspondents voiced positive views of the Allies, trusting that the liberators would act on the Jews’ behalf when prosecuting their murderers. Indeed, Undzer veg’s summary of the indictment gave readers the impression that its core was the mass murder of European Jews.80 This optimism soon yielded to funda-mental disappointment. Nine days into the trial, Shabse Klugman observed: “Oceans of our blood were squeezed into a little frame en-titled ‘crimes against humanity.’ There we have a special place enti-tled ‘crimes against the Jews.’”81 He acknowledged that Robert H. Jackson had found true and humane words for the fate of the Jews in his opening speech on November 21, 1945, when he said:

The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodi-cally and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collabora-tors. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 per-cent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which they for-merly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.82

But Klugman could not help thinking that the Allies generally had only a vague understanding of the specific nature of the European

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Jewish catastrophe, not only mingling but also subordinating Jews to other victims of political and religious persecution, thus downplaying the fact that Jews had been murdered for no other reason than their Jewishness: “Call me a pessimist, a troublemaker—if only I shall be proven wrong—but I believe all this is no accident.”83 By the twentieth day of the trial Klugman despaired:

Where is our cause, our enormous tragedy at this trial? This devastating issue ought not to be touched upon. . . . Yes, not only we, the survivors, are a disagreeable commodity in the big democratic postwar world, it is not only for us that this world can only spare hollow phrases, also our dead have no better lot. The entire “Jewish part” of the trial is treated like a step-child, everyone is pushing it around but no one wants to shel-ter it.84

The Authority of Victims

The Jewish victims’ feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, which characterized displaced persons’ reporting on the IMT, funda-mentally contradicted the moral authority that the correspondents, and many other survivors, derived from their firsthand experiences with the Nazi regime. In their view, the murder of European Jewry was the central crime of the Third Reich, which had served no other purpose than solving Nazi Germany’s self-declared “Jewish prob-lem.”85 As victims and historical witnesses, they saw themselves as morally entitled to play a leading role in the prosecution of the per-petrators. Zalman Grinberg had already voiced this claim at the be-ginning of the trial:

We, the surviving remnant of European Jewry, though we have not been called to the prosecutors table, are convinced that we are the ones who should point an accusing finger. It is our voice, we know, that should be the first to be lifted against those who stand accused. Not being called, we exploit this opportunity to express our feelings and make our de-mands. Feelings and demands that should be supported by a humane and moral world.86

Consequently, some of the displaced-person reporters declared that the Allies possessed political power but no moral authority to judge the perpetrators. They held the British and the Americans in espe-cially low regard because, unlike the French and the Soviets, they did not fight German occupation in their territories. Klugman criticized the lack of empathy for the victims, the rationalized abstractions, and

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the lawyerly professionalism with which the Allied prosecutors treated the crimes of the Final Solution. Indeed, he said, the Allied judges “only talk about history and humankind from the perspective of eternity,”87 not from human experience.

But how could the experiences of the victims be transmitted? As Klugman noted with indignation, not even the screening of the doc-umentary Nazi Concentration Camps on the eighth day of the trial pro-voked any emotional reactions by the defendants, prosecutors, or others in the courtroom, a fact that shocked him more than the re-pugnant and horrific images of emaciated and mutilated inmates, disfigured human remains, or piles of corpses.88 As the film showed brutality of the kind that “human language is too feeble to describe,” all the spectators “remained detached. No uncontrollable clamor, no hysterical crying, not even a sigh was heard in the courtroom.” Klug-man described his own reaction to the film: “I sat there and saw these pictures, taken after the fact [i.e., during and after the liberation by Allied troops] and I thought: it wasn’t even quite like that.” He doubted that the cinematic medium was at all capable of transmit-ting the cruel reality of camp life to those who had not lived through the horrors themselves:

What will the spectators ever know about the “path of no return” in Tre-blinka, where millions were abducted and driven to their deaths by dogs? What will they know from such an image, taken on one day in this super-hell of Auschwitz, when the smoke and the heat of the crematoria ovens reached into the sky? What will they ever really know about the smoke and the heat of the crematoria ovens? They will never know. And even worse: they do not even want to know. An old game is repeating it-self: the world is tired and wants to forget.89

Eye-to-Eye with the Perpetrators

The Yiddish-language reports from the courtroom—which, as Klug-man predicted, would one day become a tourist attraction and the sub-ject of dissertations90—document that the survivors’ confrontation, from a distance of only a few meters, with defendants whom they per-ceived as well fed, well dressed, and well rested was a taxing experience and a psychological challenge. Many a survivor in the visitors’ gallery must have experienced physical reactions similar to those Klugman de-scribed: “I hear the charges. . . . I listen and I am absent,” he wrote.

I look at the ignoble faces of the “master race” and I tremble. I feel as if present at a horrible gigantic funeral service for all our fathers and

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children, wives and mothers, as always I have a feeling that the souls of all our martyrs are hovering here in the courtroom and demand an an-swer to the tormenting question “why?”91

During the presentation by Lieutenant Colonel Griffith-Jones, ju-nior counsel for the United Kingdom, against Julius Streicher in Jan-uary 1946, Klugman reported that he had to cope with his physical revulsion against the “effluvium of prostitution, sadism and moral and physical squalidness”92 spread by the Nazi propagandist. In March 1946 he wrote that the only fitting behavior in the courtroom would be “to wear sackcloth and ashes, to throw oneself to the floor and . . . say laments for the baseness of humankind. . . . One sits in the courtroom, drunk with blood and tears, jaded with pain and suf-fering, overwhelmed by anguish and humiliation and every pore of one’s soul cries for justice.”93 It was only with great difficulty that Klugman managed to leave the sessions and return to the quotidian chores of a “normal life” outside of the Palace of Justice.94

Jewish Witnesses and the Specifics of Jewish Suffering

Undzer veg criticized the IMT not only for calling only a few Jewish wit-nesses but also because those who did take the witness stand ap-peared not primarily as Jews but rather as Allied nationals. Klugman noted indignantly that the Soviet prosecution used mass shootings and extermination camps whose victims were murdered solely be-cause of their Jewish origin as evidence for Nazi crimes against the “Soviet people.” Those who brought to the trial no “‘knowledge from ‘home,’” he complained, “will think that ‘Soviet’ children were thrown into the fire, [or that] peaceful ‘Soviet’ townswomen were hanged in the streets of Lemberg,” adding with bitter irony, “yes, we are equal.”95 After the testimony by Sutzkever—who was introduced as a “Soviet citizen”—Klugman remarked in despair, “Tragic is our lot: our enemies murder us because we are Jews, and our ‘good friends’ are so ashamed of us that they at best have the courage to put up an anonymous gravestone for us.”96 Even Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko, who charged that the Nazis had “planned the extermina-tion to the last man among the Jewish population of the world,”97 in-deed had systematically implemented their murderous conspiracy from 1933 onward, nonetheless emphasized that the Jewish fate was part of a larger tragedy, in which all eastern European peoples, “espe-cially Russians, Ukrainians, Bielorussians, Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Slovenes, Jews,”98 were “subjected to merciless persecution and mass

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extermination.”99 Similarly, in his opening statement on Nazi “crimes against humanity” in western Europe, French chief prosecutor Fran-çois de Menthon failed to mention Jews in arguing that these acts were in fact an attack against the “human status [la condition hu-maine].”100 In a subsequent statement, Edgar Faure, deputy chief pros-ecutor for the French Republic, subsumed crimes against Jews under crimes against French citizens.101

The Guilt of “Ordinary Germans”

The assumption of German collective guilt became a prominent motif in Jewish reporting from Nuremberg. In this respect, the re-porting followed a widespread conviction among Jewish displaced persons, who blamed the entire German people for the calamities they had suffered. The prosecutors, however, placed responsibility for the Nazi regime and its crimes on the shoulders of a select group of “major war criminals”: high-ranking party and government offi-cials and military officers whose authority and accountability the Al-lies carefully established over the course of months. For Klugman, Shalitan, and other Jewish observers, this meticulous effort to prove what was to them the self-evident guilt of two dozen top Nazis was a reason to criticize the tribunal, when the entirety of German society, down to the “little man,” had participated in the persecution and an-nihilation of European Jews.102 The broad mass of Germans had fol-lowed an unscrupulous opportunism, and systematic indoctrination had educated German youth in hatred.103 Thus a trial of barely two dozen of the regime’s leaders fell short. Indeed, as Klugman ob-served, the men in the dock appeared to him like “ordinary Ger-mans,” while the “ordinary Germans” he encountered in the streets of Nuremberg looked like “Görings and Rosenbergs.”104 Similarly, lodging on his way to Nuremberg at an inn managed by a German named Schulze, Avrom Sutzkever agonized over the question of “how many Jewish children might have been murdered . . . with the help of the smaller and the bigger Schulzes.”105

In the courtroom, the defendants’ consistent denial of their guilt and long-winded pleas of innocence—as though, Klugman sug-gested, “SA meant ‘Salvation Army’ and SS ‘Social Security’”106—filled the Jewish correspondents with disgust.107 Hermann Göring, in particular, appeared as “the personification of a lie,”108 turning all arguments against him in his favor and playing the “prima donna” with elegance and repartee.109 Undzer veg acknowledged that a fair trial—as opposed to a Nazi show trial—required that defendants

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have an able-bodied defense. Yet when those defendants were Nazis, such a defense confirmed Levi Shalitan’s fear, voiced at the begin-ning of the trial, that the cynicism and falsehoods of these war crimi-nals knew no limits. Those who had committed crimes “which even the devil has not known previously” pursued only one goal: “to save their dirty lives and seek shelter under the symbols of democracy.”110 The correspondents of Undzer veg firmly advocated the death penalty for these defendants. Even this punishment, however, was inadequate to the crime. Therefore, they also pleaded for a “moral death sen-tence,” a moral condemnation of the entire German people.111

Marathon of Monotony

Disillusioned by the daily courtroom routine, with its floods of docu-ments and tedious legal rituals, the Jewish reporters described the bulk of IMT proceedings as unbearably repetitive and boring. In this re-gard, they found widespread agreement from other journalists. Re-becca West, for example, who covered the trial for the New Yorker, called the Nuremberg proceedings a “citadel of boredom,” where dullness reached “a huge historic scale.”112 Compared to the Nazis, Klugman jeered, the Allies were poor actors, directors, and stage setters, and after a few weeks a general trial fatigue took possession of the court-room.113 Jacob Robinson had remarked after his visit to Nuremberg that “many people are more interested in the American PX [Post Ex-change, a kind of department store at American military bases] than in the proceedings of the court.”114 In a similar vein, Shalitan spoke of a “chewing gum trial,” not only because of habitual gum chewing by both the defendants and the courtroom security personnel but also be-cause “chewing gum itself best characterizes the trial: the hint of sweet bitterness of the menthol has faded away long ago, and all that remains in one’s mouth is a dull stretching and sucking.”115

Only the defense brought new life into the trial, adding absurdity and humor, and, in Klugman’s eyes, turning “the greatest tragedy into a cheap comedy.”116 The resulting murmurs and laughter in the audience so disturbed the proceedings that presiding judge Sir Geof-frey Lawrence called for discipline, although, as Klugman believed, laughter was a “natural reaction to such levels of fabrication and fatu-ousness.”117 Regarding the trial’s organizational problems, Klugman acknowledged that this tribunal was a complete novelty in the history of international law, though he added with a touch of cynicism: “So God willing, at the next trial, after the third world war, they’ll do much better.”118

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Conclusion

Many Jewish observers deemed the mere fact that key figures of the Nazi regime stood trial at Nuremberg to be a triumph over Nazism and to indicate some measure of historical justice. Although disap-pointed by the marginal role accorded to Jews at the trial—both as victims of the Nazi genocide and as a living nation—it was nonethe-less a pivotal event for Jews. Their investment in the institution of the IMT and the legal norms it helped to establish did not go unrecog-nized. Jacob Robinson and his colleagues at the WJC saw the trial—and especially its legal innovation of “crimes against humanity”—as a crucial tool for gaining Jewish rights and a precondition for postwar security for Jews. They were less satisfied with the ways in which the Allies used the newly created legal concept in their treatment of the Jewish case, and they were dismayed that the crimes of the Holocaust were parceled out among several trials rather than being gathered in one proceeding that judged the Nazi Final Solution in its entirety. Though the WJC continued to use the strategies of lobbying, peti-tioning, and information gathering that it had used in the interwar years when fighting for Jewish minority rights in the international diplomatic arena, it demanded that Jews be accorded collective rec-ognition as victims of a special kind of crime and official representa-tion in retributive measures against those who had perpetrated it.119

By contrast, the Jewish displaced persons waiting to leave Germany and begin rebuilding their lives, for whom Nuremberg was equally meaningful, did not consider the IMT and other Allied war-crime courts to be effective tools for advancing Jewish security and equality. Seeing this new institution of justice as itself infected by antisemi-tism, they detected direct continuity from the Allies’ wartime inatten-tion to information on the German atrocities against Jews to the marginalization of the Holocaust and its survivors at the trial.

Ultimately, these different Jewish reactions, perspectives, and (perceived and actual) roles at Nuremberg not only show that retribu-tive justice mattered to Jews; they also constitute yet another example of the widespread and multifaceted Jewish responses to the Holo-caust in the immediate postwar years. Further, they refute the claim of survivors’ silence and the absence of the Jewish tragedy from pub-lic discourse in Europe and beyond.

Jewish wishes for retribution for the historical wrongs suffered by the Jews of Europe and the legal preoccupations of the four Allied powers offered few points of agreement but considerable sources of tension. In hindsight, the expectations of some Jewish observers and

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participants at Nuremberg appear to have been unrealistic and in some respects inappropriate to the circumstances. The incompatible views, goals, and demands of Jewish observers and Allied prosecutors made the disappointment of survivors over the IMT’s treatment of the Holocaust almost inevitable.

The WJC’s lobbying efforts for official representation at Nurem-berg and the Jewish press’s coverage of the IMT trial as exemplified here by Undzer veg made clear that Jews understood the Final Solution as a crime sui generis and the central event of the Nazi regime’s of-fenses. To Jewish observers, it was a crime unprecedented and spe-cific not in terms of the quantity of its victims but rather as judged by the substance of the murder’s ideological motivation, geographical scope, and method. Yet for all the consideration accorded the perse-cution and extermination of the Jews, it was treated as a subsidiary event at the IMT. Jackson’s reference in his opening statement to the destruction of European Jews as “an end in itself” had no conse-quences. The Allies saw the Nazi persecution and murder of Euro-pean Jews as an extreme example of the unprecedented nature of Nazi criminality but treated these actions as a subset of other crimes. Isolating offenses against Jews from those against other political, reli-gious, or racial groups was simply not in the interest of Allied prose-cutors, whose major focus remained on war crimes and Germany’s conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Partly political in its rationale, this strategy accounts for a conscious downplaying of the Jewish case. More significant, however, was that Allied prosecutors and judges simply did not initially grasp the immense centrality of the racial crimes; only in the course of the trial itself did they come to under-stand their unprecedented weight. As Telford Taylor admitted when reflecting on his experiences as assistant to Jackson at the IMT and then as chief prosecutor of the twelve subsequent trials at the Ameri-can military tribunal, “I myself did not become aware of the Holo-caust until my exposure to the relevant documents and witnesses at Nuremberg.”120 That is to say, the Allied prosecutors and judges had detailed knowledge of the Holocaust, but their understanding of the dis-tinct nature and meaning of the event only emerged in the course of the trial, or even much later.

Allies and Jews were also divided over the demand to recognize the Jews as a collective or nation. Many Jewish observers at Nurem-berg, especially the Jewish displaced persons, viewed themselves as members of their own nation, with a claim to a particular territory in the Middle East. Although this model of Jewish identification reached back to the late nineteenth century, the Holocaust brought it broad

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acceptance and political clout among the Jewish public. It had par-ticular resonance for those who, like the Jewish displaced persons, through force or choice were exiles from their home countries and saw no future for themselves in Europe.121

The plea for recognition of the Jews as a nation underlay the de-mands for an official delegation at Nuremberg, a more concentrated presentation of the suffering of the Jewish people and its distinct case against the men in the dock, and the wish to testify in a Jewish lan-guage. Yet these demands occurred at a time when the Americans, Brit-ish, Soviets, and French, for various political reasons, chose to recognize Jews as a religious but not as a national group. The Americans, British, and French shared a liberal-universalist philosophy of equality that ac-knowledged no differences between the persecution of different victim groups. Largely due to a critical report by Earl G. Harrison on the situ-ation of displaced persons under American military government, sub-mitted to President Truman in August 1945, the American occupying forces were the first to recognize Jews as a separate nation with a histori-cal link to Palestine. The American authorities drew practical conclu-sions by creating separate Jewish camps in the American zone and granting their internees a degree of autonomy. This recognition did not, however, filter into the American prosecutions at Nuremberg or into later legal proceedings. With an eye to domestic antisemitism, the Americans were eager not to give the impression of fighting for a “Jew-ish cause” or to give the impression that the trial represented “Jewish revenge.” For their part, the British feared that recognition of Jews as a nation would aid Zionist demands for statehood and strengthen criti-cism of British policies toward Jews in Palestine. Similarly, the weight of what Henry Rousso called the “Vichy-syndrome” and the related desire to avoid the taint of French collaboration with the German occupiers led the French at Nuremberg to concentrate mainly on the survivors of political persecution and resistance fighters and disregard victims of racial persecution and extermination. Unburdened by any liberal-uni-versalist impulses, the Soviets focused on the anti-Fascist fight, ignor-ing differences in the persecution of different ethnic groups. Stalin, moreover, was about to launch a relentless fight against “Jewish cosmo-politanism,” which would lead to the destruction of Jewish national cul-tural autonomy and which also might explain why Soviet prosecutors prevented their Jewish witnesses from using Yiddish or identifying themselves as members of a Jewish nation with a distinct narrative of victimhood.122

But even had the Allies recognized Jews as a national group, it re-mains doubtful that they would have had greater recognition at the

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trial. Jews were simply not among the belligerent states; hence they had no place among the victors of the recent war, who alone claimed the right and privilege of bringing the Nazi culprits to justice.

Though the IMT contributed to the notion that states should be held accountable for their crimes against other states and civilian pop-ulations (both their own and those of their allies), it also demonstrated the intrinsic connection between legal redress for German crimes against Jews and the issue of Jewish statelessness. The WJC had futilely demanded recognition for the Jews as a people without a state and had pushed for the representation of this nonstate entity in an interna-tional criminal trial. For many Jewish observers, Nuremberg had dem-onstrated that a transnational victim group not represented by a single government had no voice, not to mention a means of intervention in an international legal system that was based on state representation. Many concluded that Jews needed a government that could make claims in their names and give them a share in the jurisdiction over Nazi war criminals. Thus the quest for sovereignty, which in the years between 1945 and 1948 moved from utopia to reality, received further legitimi-zation from the legal prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

Another point of divergence between Jews and Allies was the Jew-ish demand for a victim-centered trial. As Deborah E. Lipstadt ob-served recently, with perpetrators and their documents at the center and victims relegated to the margins, survivors had no authority at Nuremberg; thus “contemporary analysts did not consider their ab-sence to have compromised the proceedings.”123 This view clearly does not apply to some of the Jewish observers of Nuremberg whose views have been examined here. Their demands for a more victim-centered trial, indeed their claims that personal suffering conferred moral authority and jurisdictional entitlement over Nazi war crimi-nals, was at odds with the IMT’s legal culture; the Nuremberg prose-cutors and judges clearly attributed a higher value to German documents than to victim testimony.124 As representatives of the states fighting Nazi Germany, the Allied prosecution teams’ primary con-cerns were the conspiracy to wage aggressive war, war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against civilian populations. Because the Nazi regime was on trial, they focused on the Nazi leadership elites in the party, ministries, police apparatus, and Wehrmacht, rather than on every individual murderer, much less on the victims of the Nazi extermination machinery on the Reich’s periphery.125 Survivors’ pleas for the moral authority of victims and witnesses preceded the “era of the witness,” to use Annette Wieviorka’s famous term, by over two decades.126

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Although victims have gradually received attention in public and scholarly discourse since the 1960s, debates over the role of victims in the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity continue. Criminal cases, by their nature, remain largely focused on perpetra-tors, and only very recently have victims’ narratives assumed a greater weight in criminal law.127 Early postwar Jewish demands for the active role of victims of mass atrocities and the participation of nonstate entities in international criminal trials therefore remain revolution-ary and far-sighted even by today’s standards.

Notes

I wish to thank Jon Bush, Gali Drucker Bar-Am, Elisabeth Gallas, Amy Hackett, Zeev Mankowitz, Douglas Morris, Gulie Ne’eman-Arad, the partici-pants of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 2011 Summer Research Workshop for Scholars on Jews and the law in modern Europe, and Tel Aviv University’s Law and History Workshop for helpful suggestions and com-ments on this project. I am equally indebted to the anonymous reader of this article. All translations from Yiddish are my own.

1 Avrom Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes zogn in Nirnberg,” Di goldene keyt 54 (1966): 6.

2 Ibid., 14. 3 Ibid. It should be noted that Polish and other witnesses who did not

speak an official language did testify in their own tongues, with the help of an interpreter.

4 Ibid. 5 Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial: A Documentary His-

tory (Boston, 1997), 65 and 70, and idem, “The Holocaust at Nurem-berg,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 5–41.

6 Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (New York, 2001).

7 Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001), 6.

8 The vast literature on the Nuremberg trials usually looks at the German defendants and the Allied personnel along with public opinion about the trial in Germany and abroad; see for example the insightful review ar-ticle by Devin O. Pendas, “Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81 (June 2009): 347–68. Al-though the Holocaust often plays a central role, the literature rarely raises questions as to either the roles of Jews at the tribunal or public opinion in the Jewish community in Germany and abroad. Recently,

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some scholars have looked at individual Jewish figures active in and around Nuremberg, as, for example, Diane Marie Amann, “Cecelia Goetz, Woman at Nuremberg,” International Criminal Law Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 607–20, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1694855; Shlomo Aronson, “Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 257–81; idem, “Israel Kasztner: Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Europe; Prosecutor in Nuremberg and Accused at Home,” in The Holocaust: The Unique and the Universal; Essays Presented in Honor of Yehuda Bauer, ed. Shmuel Almog et al. (Jerusalem, 2005 [1st ed. Jerusalem, 2001]), 1–47; Donald Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses in War Crimes Trials of the Postwar Era,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2008), 539–53; Boaz Cohen, “Dr. Jacob Robinson, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, and the Elu-sive Jewish Voice in Nuremberg,” in Holocaust and Justice: Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 2010), 81–100; Omry Kaplan-Feuereisen, “Im Dienste der jüdischen Nation: Jacob Robinson und das Völkerrecht,” Osteuropa 8–10 (2008): 279–94; Mark A. Lewis, “The World Jewish Con-gress and the Institute of Jewish Affairs at Nuremberg: Ideas, Strategies, and Political Goals, 1942–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 1 (2008): 181–210; Michael R. Marrus, “A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945–46,” Cardozo Law Review 27, no. 4 (2006): 1651–65. During a 2005 conference, Natalia Aleksiun delivered a paper on the responses of the Jewish leadership in Poland to the IMT trial. I thank Natalia Aleksiun for sharing her lecture manuscript, “Orga-nizing for Justice: Jewish Leadership in Poland and the Trial of the Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg” (paper presented at the conference “The Nuremberg Trials: A Reappraisal and Their Legacy, On the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Trials,” Benjamin N. Cordozo Law School, Yeshiva University, New York City, Mar. 2005).

9 Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses,” 540. 10 A few recent examples of scholarship that takes issue with previously

held claims of a postwar Jewish silence on the Holocaust are David Ce-sarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London, 2011); Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York, 2009); Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz, eds., “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Ger-many (Detroit, 2010); and Dina Porat, Israeli Society, the Holocaust and Its Survivors (London, 2008).

11 A history of the institute is still needed; on the WJC more generally, see Leon Arie Kubowitzki, Unity in Dispersion: A History of the World Jewish Congress (New York, 1948).

12 See Kubowitzki, Unity in Dispersion, 134–51; on Robinson, see Kaplan-Feuereisen, “Im Dienste der Nation,” 289–91.

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13 Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 184–91; Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), 139–44, 151.

14 See the protocols of the meetings of the WJC representatives with Gen-eral de Baer, a Belgian member of the U.N. War Crimes Commission, and Sir Cecil Hurst, its chairman: “Minutes of the meeting January 5, 1944,” World Jewish Congress Collection (WJC), C118/5, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio; “Note of Conversation between Sir Cecil Hurst and a Delegation of the World Jewish Congress,” July 20, 1944, WJC, C118/7; and “Note of Conference between Representatives of the United Nations’ Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and the World Jewish Congress in London,” Aug. 2, 1944, WJC, C118/7.

15 See Kubowitzki, Unity in Dispersion, 221–35. See the various preparatory drafts: “Memo to the members of the Retribution Committee from Dr. Robinson,” Apr. 13, 1944, WJC, C118/2; “Memo to the members of the Office Committee from Dr. Robinson,” May 22, 1944, WJC C118/2; “Statement on Retribution,” June 2, 1944, WJC, C118/2; “Punishment of War Criminals: A Statement by the World Jewish Congress,” June 14, 1944, WJC, C118/2; “Draft of a Letter to be sent to the British Section re: War Crimes,” Aug. 17, 1944, WJC, C118/7.

16 World Jewish Congress, “Statement and Resolution on the Punishment of War Criminals,” War Emergency Conference, Nov. 26–30, 1944, WJC, C125/10, 1.

17 Ibid., 2. 18 Ibid., 3. 19 “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson, held at the Fed-

eral Court House, N.Y.C., Tuesday June 12, 1945, from 10 to 11:30 A.M.,” Truman Library website (hereafter Truman Library), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs, WJC, 1.

20 See, for example, Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York, 1977), 18–19. It was Lt. Col. Murray C. Bernays, an American citi-zen of Lithuanian Jewish origin responsible as of July 1944 for investigat-ing Nazi crimes against U.S. servicemen, who in mid-September 1944 drafted a memorandum for the War Department outlining a future trial against Nazi war criminals, thus rejecting the option of summary executions that was still being discussed among the British, Americans, and Soviets at the time. His outline presumed that it was not enough to punish individual Nazi leaders but that the Nazi regime itself had per-petrated a conspiracy against humanity that must be brought to justice. Knowing of the demands of American Jewish organizations, Bernays also envisioned the conspiracy idea as a way to include prewar offenses in a war-crime trial. See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York, 1992), 35–39, and Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (New York, 2011), 54–57. As Francine Hirsch has con-vincingly argued, the conspiracy idea was not an Anglo-American

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invention but was also discussed by Soviet jurists. Jackson and his team were well aware that the Soviet prosecution also supported the con-spiracy idea. See Francine Hirsch, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: Interna-tional Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 701–30, here 707–8.

21 “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson,” 1–3, and “Re-port from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Congress,” Dec. 6, 1945, Truman Library, 1–15.

22 “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson,” 1. 23 Ibid., 5. 24 Ibid. 25 Robinson himself had argued that other victim groups should have the

same right to make their cases; rather than fearing competition among groups, he thought that all groups would benefit, without diminishing the magnitude of the Jewish case. “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson,” 5–6.

26 Ibid., 5. 27 Marrus, “Jewish Lobby,” 1655–56. 28 Marrus, “Holocaust at Nuremberg,” 8–9; Bloxham, Genocide on Trial,

67; Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 78. It remains unclear whether the WJC considered an alternative Jewish expert witness less tied to the Zionist organization.

29 Aronson, “Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial,” 264–68, and Lewis, “World Jewish Congress,” 195–200.

30 “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson,” 3. See also “Sta-tistics on Jewish Casualties During Axis Domination,” Institute of Jew-ish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, June 1945, Truman Library. See the letter from Jacob Robinson to William F. Walsh, Nov. 21, 1945, Tru-man Library; “Report from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Con-gress”; “Minutes of Office Committee Meeting, World Jewish Congress,” Dec. 10, 1945, Truman Library.

31 Jackson’s opening speech, Nov. 21, 1945, in Trial of the Major War Crimi-nals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946, 42 vols., ed. International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg, 1947–49), 2: 119.

32 See Walsh’s Jewish brief (Dec. 13–14, 1945), in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 3: 519–72; see also “Report from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Congress,” 7–8, 13; “Minutes of Office Committee Meet-ing,” 2.

33 See Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 38–64; Arie J. Kochavi, “The Role of the Genocide of European Jewry in the Preparations of the Nuremberg Trials,” in Bankier and Michman, Holocaust and Justice, 59–80; and Ker-stin von Lingen, “‘Crimes Against Humanity’: Eine umstrittene Univer-salie im Völkerrecht des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 8, no. 3 (2011): 373–93.

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34 See Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 77–94, and the IMT judgment, sec-tion “Persecution of the Jews,” in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 22: 491–96.

35 “Minutes of Office Committee Meeting,” 2. 36 Ibid., 5. 37 “Report from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Congress,” 6–7. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 “Minutes of Office Committee Meeting,” 3. 40 Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 67–68. 41 Thomas J. Dodd to his wife, Sept. 20, 1945, in Letters from Nuremberg: My

Father’s Narrative of a Quest for Justice, ed. Christopher J. Dodd and Lary Bloom (New York, 2007), 135–36.

42 See Michael R. Marrus, “Three Jewish Émigrés at Nuremberg: Hersh Lauterpacht, Jacob Robinson, and Raphael Lemkin,” in Crisis and Re-birth: Twentieth Century Intellectuals in Hard Times, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Richard Cohen, and Arie Dubnov (New York, forthcoming). On Lem-kin at Nuremberg and his deep disappointment that his neologism was included in the indictment and occasionally used in the proceedings but did not make it into the verdict, see Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, 2007), 47–50, and Anson Rabinbach, “The Challenge of the Unprecedented: Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 397–420, esp. 409–10.

43 Gustave Mark Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (Boston, Mass., 1995 [1st ed., New York, 1947]); Leon Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses (New York, 2004). Neither Gilbert nor Goldensohn reflect on their own Jewish back-grounds or whether the defendants were aware of their Jewishness.

44 Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg: The Chief American Inter-preter at the War Crime Trials (New York, 2002), and Siegfried Ramler, Die Nürnberger Prozesse: Erinnerungen des Simultanübersetzers Siegfried Ramler (Munich 2010).

45 Henri Monneray, ed., La persécution des Juifs en France et dans les autres pays de l’Ouest presentée par la France à Nuremberg (Paris, 1947), and idem, ed., La persécution des Juifs dans les pays de l’Est presentée à Nuremberg (Paris, 1949).

46 On these institutions, see Laura Jockusch, “Khurbn-Forshung: Jewish Historical Commissions in Europe, 1945–1949,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 441–73, and idem, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York, 2012), 46–120.

47 His reports were published as Hans Fiedeler, Der Nürnberger Lehrprozess (Baden-Baden, 1946).

48 For example, as one WJC affiliate noted, Cambridge University law pro-fessor Hersch Lauterpacht, who in spring 1944 assisted the British Sec-tion of the WJC in formulating a memorandum to press the UNWCC for the inclusion of prewar crimes against Jews in the definition of war crimes, had “refused to accept any money for this work which

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he considers as his Jewish duty.” See Arieh Tartakower, “Note on my Conference with Professor Lauterpacht at Cambridge,” Mar. 4, 1944, WJC, C118/7, 2. Mickey Marcus, a committed Zionist in private life, would later volunteer and fall in Israel’s War of Independence. See Tay-lor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, 289–91. Raphael Lemkin’s quest to find a legal concept that criminalized and thus prevented the murder of distinct ethnic groups, not just Jews, derived from his own experi-ence as a refugee and constituted an attempt to come to terms with the murder of 49 members of his family whom he had left behind when escaping Poland in 1939. See Power, Problem from Hell, 17–60, and Dan Stone, “Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 539–50, here 546.

49 Avrom Sutzkever, testimony, Feb. 27, 1946, in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 8: 301–8. The document that Sutzkever handed to the court became an official court document identified as USSR-2444.

50 On Sutzkever, see Ruth R. Wisse, “Sutzkever, Avrom,” in YIVO Encyclope-dia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2 vols., ed. Gershon D. Hundert (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 2: 1815–16. See also Joseph Leftwich, Abraham Sutzkever: Partisan Poet (New York, 1971).

51 It appeared in the United States in 1946 in the name of the Jewish Black Book Committee, comprising the World Jewish Congress in New York; the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow; the Jewish National Coun-cil in Jerusalem; and the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists in New York. The Soviet government systematically cur-tailed the Anti-Fascist Committee’s autonomy, especially after the foun-dation of the State of Israel. In November 1948, it confiscated its archives and dissolved the organization. Over a dozen of its members were ar-rested, put on trial in 1952, and executed for treason, espionage, and im-perialism. See Mordechai Altshuler and Sima Ycikas, “Were There Two Black Books about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union?,” in Jews and Jewish Topics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe 17, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 37–55; Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, Colo., 1982); idem, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg, 1995); Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York, 1996); Joshua Ru-benstein and Vladimir Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, 2001).

52 Joshua Rubenstein, “The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front,” in The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Territories, ed. Ilya Altman and Joshua Rubenstein (Bloomington, Ind., 2008), 32 n. 101. Apparently other survivors, for example a group called Nakam (“revenge”) that sought extralegal measures to avenge the vic-tims of the Holocaust, also considered shooting the defendants at Nuremberg, which, however, remained a fantasy. See Jim G. Tobias and Peter Zinke, Nakam: Jüdische Rache an NS-Tätern (Hamburg, 2000), 43.

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53 Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes zogn,” 13. 54 Szmuel Rajzman, testimony, Feb. 27, 1946, in IMT, Trial of the Major War

Criminals, 8: 323–28, here 327. See also his testimony, Yad Vashem Ar-chives O.3, folder 561, Jerusalem, Israel.

55 On Izrael Eizenberg’s court appearance, see IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 20: 484–85, and his affidavit, document D-939, exhibit GB-563, which was read in court on Aug. 6, 1946, in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, ed., Nazi Con-spiracy and Aggression: Supplements A–B, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1947–48), 1: 1138–39. See also his testimony, Yad Vashem Archives, M.1.E, folder 220.

56 For example, Franz Wolff, a German Jew and former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung whose affidavit was read on July 12, 1946, document PS-3954, exhibit USA-377, published in United States Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Supplements A–B, 1: 683–86; David Wajnapel, on the ghetto of Radom, Aug. 6, 1946, docu-ment D-953, exhibit GB-566, in United States Office of Chief of Coun-sel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Supplements A–B, 1: 1145–47; and Mojÿesz Goldberg on Lemberg, Aug. 6, 1946, document D-955, exhibit GB-56, in United States Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression: Supplements A–B, 1: 1154–55.

57 One of Kasztner’s affidavits, which was read in court on Dec. 13, 1945, document 2605–PS, exhibit USA-242, in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 3: 501–2, was part of U.S. executive trial counsel Thomas J. Dodd’s presentation of a case on concentration camps. The affidavit was published in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Pros-ecution of Axis Criminality, ed., Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 12 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946–48), 5: 313–26. Kasztner appeared as a de-fense witness for SS Obersturmbannführer Kurt Becher. Thanks to Kasztner’s testimony on the Budapest negotiations, Becher escaped prosecution. See Aronson, “Israel Kasztner,” 1–47; Shoshana Barri ( Ishoni), “The Question of Kastner’s Testimonies on Behalf of Nazi War Criminals,” Journal of Israeli History 18, no. 2–3 (1997): 139–65; and Yechiam Weitz, The Man Who Was Murdered Twice: The Life, Trial and Death of Israel Kasztner (Jerusalem, 2011), 57–67.

58 Henri Monneray, Jan. 3, 1946, document PS-2519, exhibit USA-530, in United States Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 5: 256; Robert M. W. Kempner, Jan. 16, 1946, document PS-3355, exhibit USA-682, United States Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 8: 85. Bettelheim’s use of his experiences in the German camp system in a doctoral dissertation and scholarly articles came to the atten-tion of the U.S. military, which sought insights into dealing with former inmates whom they would encounter when liberating Germany. See es-pecially Bettelheim’s 1943 essay, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Ex-treme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 4 (1943): 417–52; Bettelheim’s affidavit (a shorter version of his 1943 essay),

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July 10, 1945, document L-73, exhibit USA-746, in United States Office of Chief of Counsel, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 7: 818–39. See Kim Wünschmann, “The ‘Scientification’ of the Concentration Camp: Early Theories of Terror and Their Reception by American Academia,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (forthcoming, 2013).

59 Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 78–79. 60 Ohlendorf testified on Jan. 3, 1946; see IMT, Trial of the Major War Crim-

inals, 4: 311–54; see also Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, 246–48. Höss testified on Apr. 15, 1946; see IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 11: 396–401.

61 Severina Shmaglevskaya, testimony (provided in Polish), Feb. 27, 1946, in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 8: 316–21.

62 Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, testimony (provided in French), Jan. 28, 1946, in IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 6: 202–30.

63 Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 68, and idem, “Jewish Witnesses,” 540–42. 64 See Jackson’s introduction in Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The

Evidence at Nuremberg (Dallas, 1999), xxxv–xxxvi. 65 See Jonathan A. Bush, “The Prehistory of Corporations and Conspir-

acy in International Law: What Nuremberg Really Said,” Columbia Law Review 109 (2009): 1178–88, 1262.

66 On the WJC’s efforts to push for the prosecution of some Wannsee Conference participants in the Ministries case, see Bush, “Prehistory of Corporations,” 1187–88, and Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 74–75. The defendants in question were Erich Neumann, state secretary of the Four Year Plan; Georg Leibbrandt, state secretary in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories; and Otto Hofmann, head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA). In the end, Neumann and Leibbrandt were never tried; Hofmann was included in the RuSHA Case. The Ministries case included only one defendant who had been present at the Wannsee Conference, state secretary of the Interior Min-istry Wilhelm Stuckart, who was eventually freed.

67 See also Telford Taylor’s letter to Stephen S. Wise, Dec. 27, 1947, WJC, C125/3, 1.

68 See Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atroc-ity, Law, and History (New York, 2009).

69 Auschwitz-Birkenau was included because in 1940 Kramer had served as Höss’s deputy and in 1944 as camp commander. On the trial, see U.N. War Crimes Commission, ed., Law Reports of Trials of War Crimi-nals: The Belsen Trial, 15 vols. (New York, 1983 [1st ed., London, 1947), vol. 2, and Raymond Phillips, ed., The Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial) (London, 1947); see also John Cramer, Belsen Trial 1945: Der Lüneburger Prozess gegen Wachpersonal der Konzentrationsla-ger Auschwitz und Bergen-Belsen (Göttingen, 2011), 158–74.

70 See Lisa Yavnai, Military Justice: The U.S. Army War Crimes Trials in Dachau, Germany, 1944–1948 (Ph.D. diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007), esp. 189, 204–6; Robert Siegel, Im Interesse

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der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, 1945–1948 (Frank-furt am Main, 1992); and on the Mauthausen trial of the Dachau series, see Tomaz Jardim, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Ger-many (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 141–45.

71 On the history of Jewish displaced persons in Germany, see Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Ger-many (Princeton, 2007); Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (New York, 2010); Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany (Evanston, Ill., 2001); and Zeev Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge, Engl., 2002).

72 On the Yiddish press in postwar Germany, see Tamar Lewinsky, Dis-placed Poets: Jiddische Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 1945–1951 (Göttingen, 2008).

73 The 15,000–30,000 German Jews who had survived the war in Ger-many or remigrated there also vividly debated the Nuremberg trial in their press, but analyzing the German Jewish press is beyond the scope of this article.

74 Leivy Shalitan, “We Accuse: A Word to the Judges in Nuremberg,” Undzer veg, Oct. 12, 1945.

75 Dr. Zalman Grünberg, “Nürnberg,” Undzer veg, Nov. 20, 1945. 76 Leivy Salitan [sic], “Will Nuremberg Make up for ‘Nuremberg’?,” Undzer

veg, Nov. 20, 1945. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 “Bashuldigungsakt fun Nirnberger protses,” Undzer veg, Oct. 26, 1945. 81 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 2,” Undzer veg,

Nov. 30, 1945. 82 Jackson’s opening speech, 119. 83 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 3,” Undzer veg,

Nov. 30, 1945. 84 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 5,” Undzer veg,

Dec. 14, 1945. 85 This becomes obvious in the interpretation of the indictment, “Bashul-

digungsakt fun Nirnberger protses.” 86 Grünberg, “Nürnberg.” 87 Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘, nr. 5.” 88 Ibid. According to American psychologist Gustav Mark Gilbert, who

had a close-up view during the screening, the film did evoke emotional responses from the defendants, albeit less vehement and noisy ones than Klugman would have liked. See Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 45–46. On the use of Nazi Concentration Camps and other film material as evi-dence at Nuremberg, see Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 11–37, 57–59, and Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, The Shaping of the Holocaust Visual Image by

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the Nuremberg Trials: The Impact of the Movie “Nazi Concentration Camps” (Jerusalem, 2006).

89 Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘, nr. 5.” 90 Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘, nr. 2.” 91 Ibid. Similarly, Sutzkever remarked in his diary that he suffered from

sleeplessness and nightmares before and after his appearance at the trial, seeing his mother running naked in the snowy fields, shot in the heart, her blood filling his room. See Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes zogn,” 14.

92 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 10,” Undzer veg, Feb. 8, 1946 (the report refers to the proceedings of Jan. 10, 1946; see IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 5: 91–130).

93 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 15,” Undzer veg, Mar. 8, 1946.

94 “Yidishe eydes oyfn Nirnberger protses,” Undzer veg, Mar. 3, 1946. 95 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 13,” Undzer veg,

Feb. 22, 1946. 96 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 14,” Undzer veg,

Mar. 1, 1946. 97 IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 7: 192. 98 Ibid., 7: 153. 99 Ibid., 7: 192. 100 Jan. 17, 1946, IMT, Trial of the Major War Criminals, 5: 406–8, 411. 101 Ibid., 7: 25, Feb. 5, 1946. 102 K. Yupiter [Shabse Klugman], “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat,

nr. 1,” and Levi Shalitan, “Vet ‘Nirenberg’ rehabilitirn Nirnberg?,” both in Undzer veg, Nov. 20, 1945.

103 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 23,” Undzer veg, June 7, 1946.

104 Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘, nr. 5.” 105 Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes zogn,” 7. 106 K. Shabtai, “Der firer iz avek – di partey iy geblibn, mekom ha-resha‘

– sham ha-mishpat, nr. 30,” Undzer veg, Aug. 30, 1946. 107 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 21,” Undzer veg,

May 24, 1946. 108 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 19,” Undzer veg,

April 15, 1946. 109 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 18,” Undzer veg,

April 5, 1946. 110 Salitan, “Will Nuremberg Make up for ‘Nuremberg’?” 111 Grünberg, “Nürnberg.” 112 Reprinted in Rebecca West, A Train to Power (New York, 1955), 3, 5, 11.

Boredom also affected some in attendance as legal professionals. For example, Judge Norman Birkett (British IMT alternate) noted: “When I consider the utter uselessness of acres of paper and thousands of words and that life is slipping away, I moan for this shocking waste of time.” Quoted after Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, 103. For the

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Jewish displaced-person journalists, this contradiction between bore-dom and emotional distress remained unresolved. In general the emo-tional unease waned while the sense of boredom grew stronger, yet the simultaneousness of both responses shows the deep-seated ambiguity with which displaced-person journalists responded to the trial.

113 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 7,” Undzer veg, Dec. 28, 1945.

114 “Report from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Congress,” 5. 115 Sh. Levi, “Der Chewing gum protses,” Undzer veg, Aug. 2, 1946. Similarly,

Avrom Sutzkever noted in his diary the resemblance between Julius St-reicher chewing gum and a frog. See Sutzkever, “Mayn eydes zogn,” 15.

116 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 17,” Undzer veg, Mar. 29, 1946.

117 Ibid. 118 K. Shabtai, “Mekom ha-resha‘ – sham ha-mishpat, nr. 4,” Undzer veg,

Dec. 7, 1945. 119 Kubowitzki, Unity in Dispersion, 83–102, and Philipp Graf, Die Bernheim-

Petition 1933: Jüdische Politik in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Göttingen, 2008). 120 Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, 26 n. 121 Historians continue to debate the issue of Zionism’s role in the lives of

Jewish displaced persons in postwar Germany. Though they tend to agree that most Jewish displaced persons actively turned to Zionism and emigrated to Israel, they disagree on the relative importance of ideological conviction versus pragmatism; cf. Grossmann, Jews, Ger-mans, and Allies; Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope; and Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the After-math of the Holocaust (Detroit, Mich., 2009).

122 See Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses,” 543–45; idem, Genocide on Trial, 66–67; and Marrus, “Holocaust at Nuremberg,” 16, 23. On France, see Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. 15–59.

123 Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial (New York, 2011), 192, 201. 124 Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses,” 540; Marrus, “Holocaust at Nuremberg,”

19. 125 This focus on the perpetrators also dominated academic Holocaust

research for decades. The integration of victim perspectives in the his-torical narrative began only at the end of the 1990s. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961), heavily based on the IMT archives, is a prominent example of a perpetrator-focused Holo-caust history. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997), and idem, Nazi Ger-many and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (New York, 2007) exemplifies the recent trend to integrate both victim and perpetrator perspectives and sources into the historical narrative.

126 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006).

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127 See, for example, Marie-Bérénice Dembour and Emily Haslam, “Si-lencing Hearings? Victim-Witnesses at War Crime Trials,” European Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (2004): 151–77, and Jacob Katz Cogan, “The Problem of Obtaining Evidence for International Crimi-nal Courts,” Human Rights Quarterly 22 (2000): 404–27. See also the articles in the volume Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (New Brunswick, N.J., 2010).

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