history article

On 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 [End Page 107]

France—the IMT indicted a cross section of Nazi Germany’s political, military,

diplomatic, and economic leadership on charges of crimes against peace, war

crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy 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 Rudolf 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 responsibility 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 tribunal’s rules allowed only four

official languages—English, Russian, German, and French—and the court lacked

suitable interpreters.3 Beyond silencing the language of millions of Jewish victims,

the need to describe his traumatic experiences in a foreign language proved

inhibiting 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 [End Page 108] 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 tensions 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 significance 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 considerable attention. Historians are nevertheless

divided in their assessment 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 presentation of the Nazi genocide of European Jews

was far less complex, nuanced, 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,

illustrated by graphic documentary evidence, permeated the entire proceedings.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 attention 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 extermination of the Jews … instead focused on the

accuseds’ roles in [End Page 109] launching and waging an aggressive war.” Yet,

as Douglas further remarks, “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

observers in the immediate postwar years had to say about the representation 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 records, 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 subjects or participants. With no official Jewish

representation at the Nuremberg tribunal, the few individual Jewish witnesses who

appeared 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 occupied 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 “invisibility” at

the Nuremberg tribunal, Jews undertook considerable efforts (some dating back into

the war years) to participate in the prosecution of the Nazi perpetrators. These

largely unexplored efforts and sources can help historians better comprehend the

roles Jews played in war-crime trials and how they assessed the representation 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 aftermath, which have emerged as a rapidly growing international

research field over the past decade.10

This essay uses the contemporary impressions of some Jewish observers to

explore the roles and functions that Jews, Holocaust survivors or [End Page 110]

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 prosecuting Nazi war criminals.

Founded in August 1936 in Geneva as a voluntary 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, economic

relief, and educational and cultural work; assisting in Jewish migration; and

promoting Jewish unity.11 As news of German atrocities against the Jewish

populations in Nazi Germany and its conquered territories multiplied, the WJC

increasingly concerned itself with collecting 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 received 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 populations.

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

Germany was pursuing a systematic campaign against the entire Jewish population

of Europe, its lobbying efforts increasingly stressed the distinct nature of the crimes

committed against Jews and pushed to ensure that prosecutable “war crimes”

include actions committed before the outbreak of the war and against German and

other Axis nationals. [End Page 111] 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, encouraged

the congress to supply evidence of the crimes committed against the Jews of

Nazi-occupied countries to the governments that, as commission members, would

handle Jewish claims. He insisted, however, that expanding the concept of war

crimes was beyond the competence of the UNWCC—a government-constituted

body—and he undermined 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 Conference 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 governments 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 destruction of an

entire people: the Jews of Europe. This crime … was the result of a carefully

prepared and openly avowed policy. First in Germany and then in the successively

occupied territories, the Jews were systematically degraded, deprived of their

means of livelihood, segregated in overcrowded ghettos and camps, subjected to a

system of planned starvation and forced labor. The reduction of the Jewish

population as a result 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 consider 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 [End Page 112] investigation and

prosecution teams and that the WJC receive an official representation as amicus

curiae (friend of the court); third, that adequate 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 encouraging adventurers in

the postwar world to use anti-Semitism as a means of obtaining power to destroy

democracy and to prepare the aggressive 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, deliberately plotted and

meticulously carried out conspiracy.”19

Robinson’s use of the term conspiracy in addressing Jackson is striking. 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 European 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 ft

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 [End Page 113]

Robinson further argued that because Jews as a collective had suffered from the

Nazi conspiracy of systematic annihilation, they deserved 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 absolute number

of its casualties (the Soviet Union has a larger total), certainly 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 indictment for the crime

committed against our people will clear the atmosphere 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 rehabilitation of

survivors and the rebuilding of Jewish life in postwar Europe. 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 participation 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 spokesman of those who perished as well as of the living.

Such representation 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: [End Page 114] 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-intricate task of bringing the central figures of the Nazi

regime to justice.25 But other factors certainly contributed to rendering Jewish

representation 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 willing to let

Chaim Weizmann, the 70-year-old head of the World Zionist Organization, appear

for the prosecution as an expert witness on crimes against Jews.26 In view of

Weizmann’s age, there was some hesitation 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 platform 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 December 1945, Robinson and his colleagues at the

Institute of Jewish Affairs 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 victims 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 indeed 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 assisted Major William F. Walsh, assistant

trial counsel for the United States, in preparing Walsh’s mid-December presentation

of evidence [End Page 115] on the persecution of the Jews under counts 1 and 4 of

the indictment. 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 preparations 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, extermination,

enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed 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 repercussions for the Allied nations themselves—the

Nuremberg tribunal restricted 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 conspiracy 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 prewar 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 regarding the success of his

mission. He was dissatisfied by the tribunal’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 recognition 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 officially admitted to the trial

sounded like a good idea,” he now realized that the representatives of numerous

governments that had endorsed [End Page 116] the IMT had no role in the trial and

had “nothing to observe.”37 Nevertheless, he agonized over the fact that those with

expert knowledge 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 Jewish 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.39Donald Bloxham has noted that Justice 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 Nuremberg 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 Jewish men and women

here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes 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 dozens 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 neologism mentioned in the 65-page

indictment, he futilely tried to convince the IMT to pay more attention to the concept

of genocide.42 [End Page 117]

Jewish chief prosecutors led two of the 12 trials before American military tribunals

that followed the IMT: Benjamin B. Ferencz (Einsatzgruppen case, against heads of

the mobile killing squads of the SS, July 3, 1947–April 10, 1948) and Robert M. W.

Kempner (Wilhelmstraße or Ministries case, November 4, 1947–April 13, 1949). In

addition, 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 counsel 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 interrogators, translators, and secretaries,

as did the interpreters Richard W. Sonnenfeldt and Siegfried Ramler at the IMT,

Hannah Wartenberg in the Justice case (January 4–December 4, 1947), and Hedy

Epstein 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 survivors 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 émigré 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 delegation 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 delegation, 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) observed the trial as a cultural officer with the French

military government [End Page 118] in Baden-Baden.47 The Soviet Jewish writer

and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had

supplied the Soviet 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 correspondents for the local Jewish

press.

Although some of these individuals might have identified with their Jewish

backgrounds, most were not acting as Jews or representing 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 specifics of the Jewish catastrophe, and their varying standpoints account 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 international platform from

which to bear witness to their horrific experiences. 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 Europe.

He read and submitted to the court a document he had found after the liberation in

the office building of German district commissar 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

partisan unit under Soviet command in the forests around Vilna. The following

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.50Founded in 1942 by a

group of Soviet Jewish intellectuals as a vehicle for carrying out Stalin’s wish to

incite anti-German 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 [End Page 119] 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 experience 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 interpreter. 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 Eizenberg, 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 murder 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 officers in

Lublin, among them SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocznik. At Nuremberg, Major F.

Elwyn Jones, junior counsel for the United Kingdom, 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 approximately 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, unsuccessfully seeking

to convince the court that the witness was lying.55

A handful of Jews gave written affidavits but did not appear personally in court.

Some were “ordinary” survivors who had witnessed and [End Page 120] survived

atrocities against Jews under the Nazi regime.56 But two affidavits 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 Allied opposition

not foiled this deal, it might have saved the majority of Hungarian Jewry).57 Other

affidavits came from individuals of Jewish backgrounds affiliated with the prosecution

teams, such as the lawyers 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, providing 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 Jewish men, women, and children in southern

Ukraine and the Crimea in 1941 and 1942. Rudolph Höss—appearing in

Kaltenbrunner’s defense—prided himself that 2.5 million Jews had been murdered in

Auschwitz-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 gassings of Jewish women and

children at Birkenau. Her report also incriminated 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 [End

Page 121] 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 prejudice 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. Believing 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 location and whose guilt the Allied prosecutors sought to prove by means of

the Germans’ own documents. Individual victims from the periphery of the regime

thus had limited value; indeed, the prosecutors feared that their horrifying stories of

human tragedy might be a distraction. Consequently, the IMT proceedings mainly

relied on documents 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” (according 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 exclusively 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 [End Page

122] Eichmann) as key evidence would allow the court to examine the Nazi scheme

for pan-European annihilation of the Jews and highlight 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 impossible 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 resembled 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 commanding 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, Telford 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 became chief prosecutor

of the resulting case against the units’ leaders. Yet, although the trial dealt primarily

with crimes against Jews, it involved 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 focused 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, conducted at the British military tribunal in

Lüneburg from September 17, 1945, to November 17, 1945, 19 of the 35

prosecution witnesses who appeared 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 [End Page 123] place

at the site of the former Dachau concentration camp between November 1945 and

August 1948. As in the British Bergen-Belsen trial, although prosecutors neither

treated Jews as a separate group of victims nor attached any specific significance to

their suffering, the Jewish witnesses 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

witnesses—although the Allies did not always identify them as Jews and indeed

primarily treated them as Allied nationals, refraining from addressing 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 observers, 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

overseas, 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 relief 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

regular 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 newspaper Undzer veg, the official organ of

the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Zone, with a circulation of

20,000 copies, to highlight some of the central themes of the contemporary Jewish

discourse about the IMT trial.73 [End Page 124]

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 Poland for Germany in the summer of 1945, served as

Undzer veg’s permanent 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 paraphrase 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 righteousness, that wickedness was there.” Klugman, an emotional and at

times polemical writer, thus expressed some hope that the Nuremberg tribunal would

rectify the city’s more recent history.

In the weeks before the opening of the IMT trial, Undzer veg recounted

Nuremberg’s associations with Nazi party rallies and the promulgation of notorious

anti-Jewish laws. As a symbol of the violation 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 “rehabilitate” 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 Liberated 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 directly, 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 warning. 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.”76Indeed, “the entire future peace of the

world rests upon the judgment [End Page 125] of this Nuremberg court.”77 The

Allies now had a chance, he argued further, to compensate for their moral failure in

having tolerated Hitler’s rise to power and failed to protect European Jews from the

catastrophe. 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 reparation from the Nuremberg of today.”78Finally,

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 fundamental disappointment. Nine days into the trial, Shabse

Klugman observed: “Oceans of our blood were squeezed into a little frame entitled

‘crimes against humanity.’ There we have a special place entitled ‘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 methodically 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 collaborators. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in

Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished.

Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which

they formerly 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 [End Page 126] 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 shelter it.84

The Authority of Victims

The Jewish victims’ feelings of marginalization and powerlessness, which

characterized displaced persons’ reporting on the IMT, fundamentally 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 problem.”85 As victims

and historical witnesses, they saw themselves as morally entitled to play a leading

role in the prosecution of the perpetrators. Zalman Grinberg had already voiced this

claim at the beginning 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 demands. 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 especially 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 [End

Page 127] 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 documentary Nazi Concentration

Camps on the eighth day of the trial provoked any emotional reactions by the

defendants, prosecutors, or others in the courtroom, a fact that shocked him more

than the repugnant 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.” Klugman 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 transmitting 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 Treblinka, 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 itself: the world is tired and wants to forget.89

Eye-to-Eye with the Perpetrators

The Yiddish-language reports from the courtroom—which, as Klugman predicted,

would one day become a tourist attraction and the subject of

dissertations90—document that the survivors’ confrontation, from a distance of only a

few meters, with defendants whom they perceived 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 described: “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 [End Page 128] 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 answer to the tormenting question

“why?”91

During the presentation by Lieutenant Colonel Griffith-Jones, junior counsel for the

United Kingdom, against Julius Streicher in January 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 suffering, overwhelmed by anguish and humiliation and every

pore of one’s soul cries for justice.”93It 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 witnesses but

also because those who did take the witness stand appeared 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

because 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

extermination to the last man among the Jewish population of the world,”97 indeed

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, “especially Russians, Ukrainians, Bielorussians,

Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Slovenes, Jews,”98 were “subjected to merciless

persecution and mass [End Page 129] extermination.”99 Similarly, in his opening

statement on Nazi “crimes against humanity” in western Europe, French chief

prosecutor François de Menthon failed to mention Jews in arguing that these acts

were in fact an attack against the “human status [la condition humaine].”100 In a

subsequent statement, Edgar Faure, deputy chief prosecutor 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 reporting 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 officials and military officers whose

authority and accountability the Allies 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 annihilation of European Jews.102 The broad

mass of Germans had followed 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 observed, the men in

the dock appeared to him like “ordinary Germans,” 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 suggested, “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 [End Page 130] have an able-bodied defense.

Yet when those defendants were Nazis, such a defense confirmed Levi Shalitan’s

fear, voiced at the beginning of the trial, that the cynicism and falsehoods of these

war criminals 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.”110The 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 sentence,” a moral condemnation of the entire German people.111

Marathon of Monotony

Disillusioned by the daily courtroom routine, with its floods of documents and tedious

legal rituals, the Jewish reporters described the bulk of IMT proceedings as

unbearably repetitive and boring. In this regard, they found widespread agreement

from other journalists. Rebecca 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 courtroom.113 Jacob Robinson had remarked

after his visit to Nuremberg that “many people are more interested in the American

PX [Post Exchange, 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 because “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 Geoffrey Lawrence called for discipline, although, as Klugman

believed, laughter was a “natural reaction to such levels of fabrication and

fatuousness.”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 [End Page 131]

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 disappointed by the marginal role accorded to Jews at

the trial—both as victims of the Nazi genocide and as a living nation—it was

nonetheless a pivotal event for Jews. Their investment in the institution of the IMT

and the legal norms it helped to establish did not go unrecognized. 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, petitioning, 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 recognition as victims of a

special kind of crime and official representation 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

antisemitism, they detected direct continuity from the Allies’ wartime inattention 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 retributive justice mattered to Jews;

they also constitute yet another example of the widespread and multifaceted Jewish

responses to the Holocaust in the immediate postwar years. Further, they refute the

claim of survivors’ silence and the absence of the Jewish tragedy from public

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 [End Page 132] 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 Nuremberg 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 offenses. To Jewish observers, it was a crime unprecedented and

specific 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 persecution 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

consequences. The Allies saw the Nazi persecution and murder of European 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, religious, or racial groups was simply not in the interest

of Allied prosecutors, 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

understand 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 American military tribunal, “I myself did not

become aware of the Holocaust until my exposure to the relevant documents and

witnesses at Nuremberg.”120 That is to say, the Allied prosecutors and judges had

detailed knowledgeof the Holocaust, but their understanding of the distinct 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 Nuremberg, 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 [End Page 133] acceptance and political clout among the Jewish public. It

had particular 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 demands 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 language. Yet these demands occurred at a time when the

Americans, British, 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 acknowledged no

differences between the persecution of different victim groups. Largely due to a

critical report by Earl G. Harrison on the situation of displaced persons under

American military government, submitted to President Truman in August 1945, the

American occupying forces were the first to recognize Jews as a separate nation

with a historical link to Palestine. The American authorities drew practical

conclusions 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 “Jewish 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 criticism 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-universalist impulses, the Soviets focused on the anti-Fascist fight, ignoring

differences in the persecution of different ethnic groups. Stalin, moreover, was about

to launch a relentless fight against “Jewish cosmopolitanism,” which would lead to

the destruction of Jewish national cultural 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 remains doubtful

that they would have had greater recognition at the [End Page 134] 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 populations (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 international criminal

trial. For many Jewish observers, Nuremberg had demonstrated 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 legitimization from the legal

prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

Another point of divergence between Jews and Allies was the Jewish demand for

a victim-centered trial. As Deborah E. Lipstadt observed 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

absence 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 criminals, was at odds with the IMT’s legal culture; the Nuremberg prosecutors

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 concerns 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 [End Page 135]

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 perpetrators, 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 revolutionary and

far-sighted even by today’s standards.

Laura Jockusch

Laura Jockusch is Martin Buber Society Fellow in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of

Jerusalem ([email protected]). She is the author of Collect and Record! Jewish

Holocaust Documentation in Postwar Europe (2012). Her current research explores Jewish

conceptions of retributive justice in postwar Germany.

Notes

. I wish to thank Jon Bush, Gali Drucker Bar-Am, Elisabeth Gallas, Amy Hackett, Zeev

Mankowitz, Douglas Morris, Gulie Ne’eman-Arad, the participants 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

comments 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 History (Boston, 1997),

65 and 70, and idem, “The Holocaust at Nuremberg,” 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 article by Devin O. Pendas, “Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi

Trials in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81 (June 2009): 347–68. Although 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,

[End Page 136] 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.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/abstract=1694855; Shlomo Aronson, “Preparations for the

Nuremberg Trial: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide

Studies12, 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 Elusive 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 Congress 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, “Organizing 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 Cesarani 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 Germany (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. [End Page 137]

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 General 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 Federal 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 citizen of Lithuanian Jewish origin

responsible as of July 1944 for investigating 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 perpetrated

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 convincingly argued, the conspiracy idea was not an

Anglo-American [End Page 138] invention but was also discussed by Soviet jurists. Jackson and

his team were well aware that the Soviet prosecution also supported the conspiracy idea. See

Francine Hirsch, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of

the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review113 (June 2008): 701–30, here 707–8.

21. “Minutes of a meeting with Justice Robert H. Jackson,” 1–3, and “Report 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 “Statistics on Jewish

Casualties During Axis Domination,” Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, June

1945, Truman Library. See the letter from Jacob Robinson to William F. Walsh, Nov. 21, 1945,

Truman Library; “Report from Jacob Robinson to the World Jewish Congress”; “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 Criminals 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 Meeting,” 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 Kerstin von Lingen, “‘Crimes Against Humanity’: Eine

umstrittene Universalie im Völkerrecht des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 8, no.

3 (2011): 373–93. [End Page 139]

34. See Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 77–94, and the IMT judgment, section “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 Rebirth: Twentieth Century Intellectuals in Hard

Times, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Richard Cohen, and Arie Dubnov (New York, forthcoming). On

Lemkin 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 backgrounds or whether the defendants were aware of their Jewishness.

44. Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg: The Chief American Interpreter 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 professor Hersch

Lauterpacht, who in spring 1944 assisted the British Section 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 [End Page 140]

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 Taylor, 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

experience 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 Encyclopedia 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 Council in Jerusalem; and the American Committee of Jewish

Writers, Artists, and Scientists in New York. The Soviet government systematically curtailed the

Anti-Fascist Committee’s autonomy, especially after the foundation of the State of Israel. In

November 1948, it confiscated its archives and dissolved the organization. Over a dozen of its

members were arrested, put on trial in 1952, and executed for treason, espionage, and

imperialism. 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

Europe17, 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 Rubenstein 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 victims 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. [End Page 141]

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 Archives 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

Conspiracy 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, document

D-953, exhibit GB-566, in United States Office of Chief of Counsel, 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 Prosecution of Axis Criminality, ed.,

Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 12 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946–48), 5: 313–26. Kasztner

appeared as a defense 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 attention of the U.S. military,

which sought insights into dealing with former inmates whom they would encounter when

liberating Germany. See especially Bettelheim’s 1943 essay, “Individual and Mass Behavior in

Extreme Situations,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 38, no. 4 (1943): 417–52;

Bettelheim’s affidavit (a shorter version of his 1943 essay), [End Page 142] 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 Criminals, 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 Conspiracy 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 Ministry 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: Atrocity, 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 Criminals: 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 Konzentrationslager 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 [End Page 143] der Gerechtigkeit: Die Dachauer

Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, 1945–1948 (Frankfurt am Main, 1992); and on the Mauthausen trial

of the Dachau series, see Tomaz Jardim, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in

Germany(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 Germany (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, Displaced Poets: Jiddische

Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 1945–1951 (Göttingen, 2008).

73. The 15,000–30,000 German Jews who had survived the war in Germany 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, “Bashuldigungsakt 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 evidence at Nuremberg, see

Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 11–37, 57–59, and Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan, The Shaping of the

Holocaust Visual Image by [End Page 144] 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 [End Page 145] Jewish displaced-person

journalists, this contradiction between boredom and emotional distress remained unresolved. In

general the emotional 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 Streicher 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, Germans, and Allies;

Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope; and Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland:

Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath 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 historical 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 Holocaust history. Saul

Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New

York, 1997), and idem, Nazi Germany 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). [End Page 146]

127. See, for example, Marie-Bérénice Dembour and Emily Haslam, “Silencing 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 Criminal

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). [End Page 147]