WEEK 10 Aftermath: Dealing with the Consequences of the … · WEEK 10 Aftermath: Dealing with the...

WEEK 10 Aftermath:

Dealing with the Consequences of the Holocaust Prepared by Tony Joel and Mathew Turner

Week 10 Unit Learning Outcomes ULO 1. evaluate in a reflective and critical manner the consequences of racism and prejudice

Introduction For anyone involved — individual survivors, perpetrators, beneficiary bystanders etc. plus the states directly implicated — the Holocaust did not suddenly end with Nazi Germany’s defeat in May 1945. Rather, the Holocaust’s manifest legacies started to unravel in the immediate postwar period and continue to do so to this day. Survivors were forced to adjust to a new postwar world order in which many if not all of their loved ones had been killed during the war, and they no longer felt safe in Europe. Out of the ashes of the Holocaust the modern state of Israel was established. With it, a new set of international tensions and rising antisemitism in the Middle East emerged. Justice for Holocaust victims, pursued through criminal and civil proceedings, proved difficult and uneven. These are some of the most prominent issues that materialised in the “aftermath of the Holocaust,” which is our theme for this week as we move our gaze beyond the historical event and explore its consequences.

Section 1 examines the situation survivors faced following their liberation at war’s end. Learning of their family’s fate and facing the decision whether to remain in Europe or seek a new life elsewhere was a common experience. Section 2 traces the evolution of the concept of genocide, coined by Raphael Lemkin. Section 3 explores the ways in which justice for Nazi crimes has been sought through criminal proceedings — most notably at Nuremberg immediately after the war. It questions whether justice can ever be served for crimes as horrific as those committed during the Holocaust. Section 4 outlines what has led to arguably the most challenging ongoing historical legacy of the Holocaust: the formation of the modern political state of Israel in 1947. Finally, section 5 investigates the contentious topic of reparations, paid to victims of the Holocaust by the German government and various organisations.

In completing this module you will evaluate, in a reflective and critical manner, the reverberating consequences of racism and prejudice.

LEARNING MODULE 10. Section 2. Raphael Lemkin and conceptualising Genocide 2

Section 1. Survivors: Liberation, DP Camps, Resettlement Liberation from Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war ostensibly signalled the end of the Holocaust. For those who survived, however, it was far from over. Most immediately, discovering that few, if any, family members had survived could be an even worse experience than the persecution they suffered during the war. Furthermore, some survivors throughout central and eastern Europe — especially in Poland — were subjected to violent persecution in the immediate aftermath of the war. Jews who fled Europe faced the challenge of establishing a new life, adjusting to a new country with different cultures, customs, language, and laws etc. The difficulties in overcoming their wartime experiences while also attempting to establish a new postwar life led many Holocaust survivors to endure feelings of isolation, separation, guilt, depression, and suicide.

For many European Jews, the hope of being reunited with their families helped to sustain them during their persecution during the war. Consequently, for some survivors the postwar discovery that their entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust shattered the only hope that previously had kept them alive. Take, for instance, the case of “Masha” who eventually relocated to Melbourne after surviving the Holocaust. As Masha explains in her videotestimony given at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC), even while enduring terrible deprivations when hiding with partisans in the forests of Byelorussia,

she always had hope.1 Once Masha returned to her hometown and discovered that her entire family had been killed, however, Masha wanted to drown herself. Despite surviving the Holocaust, Masha initially felt as though there was no reason to continue living. It was a common mindset that needed to be overcome with time.

Map showing the location of DP camps for Jews in Germany and Austria, 1945-46.

Source: “Camps for Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria,” Jewish Virtual Library. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/camps-for-displaced-persons-in-germany-and-austria [Accessed 11 May 2017] 1 “Masha,” Videotestimony no. 325, Holocaust Testimony Project, Jewish Holocaust Centre, Melbourne.


(l) A child eating at a DP camp in Germany following WWII. (r) Group shot taken at the DP camp at Hamburg-Fischbeck.

Sources: Yad Vashem. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/item.asp?GATE=Z&list_type=1-

13&TYPE_ID=2&TOTAL=N&pn=9&title= “Post-War, Daily Life, Recovery & Reconstruction,”Histomil.

http://histomil.com/viewtopic.php?t=21251&start=40 [Accessed 11 May 2017]

Ceremony to celebrate the 50,000th displaced person bound for the United States from the Bremenhaven DP Camp, July 1949.

Source: “We Remember the Displaced Persons (DP),” Zchor. http://www.zchor.org/bruk/shika.htm [Accessed 11 May 2017]


According to Doris Bergen, approximately 10 million refugees fled into western Germany at the end of the war, including 150,000 Jews in Displaced Persons (DP) camps within the United States zone of newly occupied Germany alone.2 Many Jews saw reason to fear returning to their previous places of residence. In fact, a number of Jewish survivors who returned to their homes in Poland were attacked by local Christian Poles — in other words, their former neighbours. (For a couple of reasons why such scenes unfolded, reflect on our previous coverage of: religious-based “traditional” antisemitism and Poland being a staunchly Catholic nation; and “beneficiary bystanders” who would not have welcomed back Jews because it threatened them.) The periods March-August 1945 and February-July 1946 were marked in particular by both a surge in Jewish returnees to Poland and acts of violence against them. By July 1946, the total number of Jews in Poland had risen to 200,000 as many returned from DP camps in Germany and Austria, were repatriated from the Soviet Union, or came out of hiding from throughout central and eastern Europe.3 In tragic scenes, some Jews who had survived the Holocaust subsequently died during the sporadic assaults in the immediate aftermath of the war’s end.

(l) An emissary from Palestine recruiting immigrants in the Bavarian town on Feldafing, Germany.

(r) Jewish DP camp in the Baltic States serving as a transit camp for relocating to Palestine.

Sources: Yad Vashem. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/item.asp?GATE=Z&list_type=3-

0&TYPE_ID=101&TOTAL=&pn=4&title=Israel,%20Erez%20Israel

“Baltic DP Camp,” Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto. http://www.vilnaghetto.com/gallery2/v/lithuania/Baltic_DP_Camp.jpg.html [Accessed 11 May 2017]

The absence of individual families and of a broader Jewish community, the physical destruction of cities and towns as a result of the war, plus the communist takeover of eastern Europe (which many returnees felt threatened their opportunities to resume their normal lives and businesses), meant that large numbers of Holocaust survivors found

2 Doris Bergen, War & Genocide. (Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2009). p. 239.

3 David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944-1946,” Shoah Resource Center, Yad Vashem, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203128.pdf p. 34.


themselves living in DP camps for many months or even a couple of years until they could migrate outside of Europe. In a rather perverse twist borne by pragmatism, typically these DP camps were located on the sites of the former Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Austria (the barracks could be used to house large number of DPs). It meant that tens of thousands of Jews were nurtured back to health and kept alive in the very camps where

so many (Jewish and non-Jewish) victims of Nazism had perished in previous years.

For Holocaust survivors, of course, it was not simply a case of overcoming their wartime experiences within the first few years afterwards. Rather, coming to terms with how the Holocaust would shape the reminder of their lives was an issue with which they needed to grapple for decades. What stands out in all these cases is the “impossibility” of reaching closure in relation to the Holocaust. For survivors, and their ancestors, the legacy is open-ended.

See, for example, this documentary extract.

PRESCRIBED TEXT: Please read Beth B. Cohen’s chapter entitled “America’s Incomprehension,” pp. 789-99.

Cohen’s reading focuses on the emigration of displaced persons/Holocaust survivors to the United States, and their experiences. Supported by various agencies, Cohen argues that survivors endured the “constant companionship” of their Holocaust experiences. Suffering from depression and survivor guilt, the rudimentary psychological and psychiatric services available were unable to assist. For Cohen, the reality of survivors’ post-liberation experiences of resettlement, though painted as a successful and triumphant story, was marked by ongoing difficulties. Initially survivors were not encouraged to speak about their experiences, and the prevailing belief that they were not able or willing to do so,


according to Cohen, is inaccurate. “The survivors had much to say,” Cohen states, “but their listeners were deaf to what the survivors had to tell them.”

Section 2. Raphael Lemkin and conceptualising Genocide The concept of genocide was developed by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust.4 Struck particularly by the massacre of Armenians at Turkish hands in 1915, Lemkin observed that laws existed for cases in which one person is murdered, but not when many are murdered. In other words, the deliberate massacre of a group of people effectively was a “crime without a name.” Practising as the Deputy Prosecutor of Warsaw at the time, Lemkin sent a memo to a meeting of the League of Nations in Madrid in 1933 for the codification of a law against what he called “acts of barbarity”: actions committed against a group, including bodily harm and acts of vandalism. Since under Lemkin’s definition “acts of barbarity” had to be intentional and directed towards a group, it can be seen as the embryonic beginnings of the concept of genocide. In Lemkin’s mind, genocide could take place in war or peace, within or beyond state borders, and be committed by individuals as well as state leaders (unlike the existing concept of crimes against humanity). In his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin coined the word genocide as a new word “to denote an old practice in its modern development.” A polyglot, Lemkin formed his new term by combining the ancient Greek word genos (meaning race or tribe) and the Latin suffix cide (meaning to kill, as often used in terms such as pesticide, homicide, suicide and so on).

Lemkin fled Europe during the Second World War and moved to the United States where he worked for the War Department. After the war, Lemkin became an advisor to Nuremberg Trial Chief Counsel for the United States Robert H. Jackson. Despite this prominent position and his best endeavours, Lemkin failed to have his concept of genocide incorporated into the trial indictment at Nuremberg.

Still, Lemkin wielded some influence, including on the lead British prosecutor Hartley Shawcross. Both Shawcross and his American colleague Jackson, however, interpreted Lemkin’s new concept of genocide in quite different ways. As Alexa Stiller notes, Shawcross’ approach was extremely broad, in which genocide was interpreted as “consisting of physical, biological, cultural, political and economical persecution and extermination of population.”5 In his closing speech, moreover, Shawcross attempted to argue that the Nazi extermination of Jews, as well as what could be viewed as deliberate attempts to restrict birth rates in occupied countries of Western Europe, both constituted genocide in accordance with Lemkin’s definition.6 Jackson, according to Stiller, “explicitly stressed the annihilation of the

4 For a detailed account of Lemkin’s life, see his autobiography, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze, Totally

Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. (Yale University Press, 2013) 5 Alexa Stiller, “Semantics of Extermination: The Use of the New Term of Genocide in the Nuremberg Trials and

the Genesis of a Master Narrative,” in Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller (eds.), Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transnational Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography. (Berghahn, London, 2012). pp. 124-25.

6 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention. (Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, 2008). pp. 71-72.


Jewish people and called the Nazi persecution of the Jews the most terrible racial crime in history.”7 Thus, the interpretations of Lemkin’s concept of genocide, within the Nuremberg courtroom, were quite different. Lemkin, for his part, lamented the result at Nuremberg. When the judgement was handed down Lemkin called it “the blackest day” of his life, since the findings were limited to “wartime genocide” rather than also enveloping “peacetime genocide.”8 The difficulties around interpreting genocide — a very new concept despite it being an age-old phenomenon — should not be surprising. Furthermore, widespread recognition that atrocities against Jews were of a different nature and scope to those committed by the Nazis against other victim groups did not emerge until the 1960s. It is not surprising, then, that the prosecutors at Nuremberg — working in 1945-46 — could not grasp the distinction. “War crimes,” not “crimes against humanity,” were the primary concern of the first Nuremberg trial.

These issues notwithstanding, Lemkin’s tireless efforts finally proved successful at an international level when, on 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One Polish Jew, initially inspired by the case of the Armenians during the First World War, and who personally lost so many family members during the Holocaust and subsequently devoted his life to this cause, proved instrumental in the international community officially recognising what hitherto had remained the “crime without a name.”

Raphael Lemkin originally was inspired by what occurred to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. (l) Armenian deportees forced to march under the hot sun across the

Syrian desert in 1915. The woman in the foreground is carrying a child wrapped in a shawl. (r) Turkish soldiers pose with the decapitated heads of Armenian victims.

Sources: “Armenian Genocide was also a Jihad,” Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/04/14/armenian-genocide-was-also-jihad/Aq1zTutJ73IJWRnlG8V6lN/story.html “Armenia 1915,” Peace Pledge Union.

http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_armenia2.html [Accessed 11 May 2017] 7 Stiller, “Semantics of Extermination.” p. 125. 8 William A. Schabas, “From the Holocaust to Genocide Convention: A Human Rights Learning Process,”

Conference Presentation, 20 November 2008. Text quoted is William Korey, An Epitaph for Raphael Lemkin. (Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, New York, 2001). p. 25.

LEARNING MODULE 10. Section 3. Nuremberg and Beyond: Perpetrators on Trial 8

Section 3. Nuremberg and Beyond: Perpetrators on Trial As outlined above, Lemkin and others recognised that Nazi crimes had been committed on a different scale from past atrocities, and with genocidal intent. Consequently, any attempts to prosecute Nazi leaders required that the charges reflect the brutality and intention of the acts. Though problematic, “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” served this purpose in the International Military Tribunal (IMT) or Trial of Major War Criminals, held in the German city of Nuremberg, from 1945 to 1946. Subsequent trials held in Israel, West Germany, and elsewhere brought Nazi crimes against Jews into sharper focus, even as the limits of conventional domestic and international law in the punishment of atrocities similarly came into full view.

a) The International Military Tribunal (IMT), Nuremberg Even while the war against Hitler still was in progress, the Allies had indicated that they would punish perpetrators of atrocities. Encountering countless scenes of unfathomable hell during the liberation of camps added impetus to their desire to punish the Nazi régime and its accomplices.

The major Allied powers established the International Military Tribunal (IMT) comprising representatives from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Meeting in London in August 1945, a charter was decreed that set out the laws under which major Nazi war criminals would be put on trial at the impending process scheduled to be conducted in Nuremberg. (Consequently, whereas some scholars more accurately refer to it as the London Charter, others prefer the popularised version the Nuremberg Charter. Either way, it is the same charter.)

Article 6 of the Charter was pivotal in outlining the general principles underlying the prosecution of these “major war criminals.” In accordance with Article 6, defendants could be charged with conspiring to commit one or more of the following:

a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or


religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.9

Only “crimes against humanity” could be construed as relevant to the Holocaust, but even here there was a tendency not to differentiate between the persecution of Jews and Nazi crimes committed against any civilians from across war-torn Europe. “Crimes against humanity” has been regarded as paving the way for the Genocide Convention but, as the following reading from Michael Marrus suggests, there was much confusion during the Nuremberg process about the distinction between “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.” (This was especially the case for events relating to the Eastern Front, for as you know from earlier weekly topics the Nazis approached Operation Barbarossa very differently to the way they conducted war against western European nations, and consequently the lines became very blurred if not wholly erased.)

Some of the major war criminals in the dock during the IMT trial at Nuremberg.

Reichstag president, Luftwaffe commander, and leading Nazi Hermann Göring is on the far left. Next to him is Rudolf Heß, who had been Hitler’s deputy 1933-41. The Third Reich’s former foreign minister

Joachim von Ribbentrop is in the middle. Next to him is the former chief of the Wehrmacht Wilhelm Keitel. On the far right is the Austrian SS officer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who assumed Reinhard Heydrich’s position

following his death in 1942 (making Kaltenbrunner intimately involved in the “Final Solution”). Source: “World War II History: Axis Military Leaders,” History.com.

http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history/pictures/axis-military-leaders/defendants-at-nuremberg-trials [Accessed 11 May 2017]

9 “Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1. Charter of the International Military Tribunal: Article 6.” The Avalon

Project: Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp#art6 [Accessed 11 May 2017]


The mimeograph room in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg in 1948—i.e. two years after the trial had concluded. Documents for the IMT trial often had to be translated and reproduced in four languages

(English, French, Russian, and German).

Source: “International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,” USHMM. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/gallery.php?ModuleId=10007983&MediaType=ph

[Accessed 11 May 2017]

READING EXCERPT: Please read Michael Marrus’ piece entitled "Crimes against Humanity."

Marrus points out that, for all the limitations of the IMT trial, one important legacy of the Nuremberg process was that it inspired a gradual recognition of the concept of “crimes against humanity.” Even so, its more universalistic understanding evolved somewhat unintentionally.

An innovative, indeed unprecedented, feature of the first Nuremberg trial was the showing of a film featuring a compilation of footage from the liberation of several concentration camps located in Germany. These were the camps where inmates from camps throughout Europe were herded during the final weeks and months of the war, including Jewish inmates forced on the so-called “death marches” we covered in Week 8. Nonetheless, most of the liberated prisoners filmed in these camps were not Jews. As you know from previous weekly topics, furthermore, although many victims succumbed to the absolutely horrific conditions in these concentration camps, they were not the actual extermination camps in which millions of Jews had been systematically murdered in gas chambers as part of the “Final Solution.”


READING EXCERPT: Lawrence Douglas, in his piece "The Film Nazi Concentration Camps at the Nuremberg Trial," explores the implications of the confusion about the actual nature of the camps.

(t) American soldiers photographing and filming the bodies of camp inmates after liberation,

Ohrdruf, Germany. (b) Local German civilians being forced to assist in the removal of corpses following the camp’s liberation, Ohrdruf, Germany.

Source: Yad Vashem. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/item.asp?GATE=Z&list_type=2-

60&type_id=2&total=N&title=The%20Free%20World%20and%20the%20Holocaust%20Survivors%20-%20Photographs [Accessed 11 May 2017]


Because the court relied on documentary evidence, rather than on personal testimony, the emotional impact of the film was heightened. In evidentiary terms, no direct relationship was established between the events depicted in the film and the defendants in this particular trial. It was not until later trials that the focus shifted to the crimes specifically committed against Jews. Still, the tremendous amounts of documentary evidence marshalled for the trial of major war criminals at Nuremberg allowed historians in the postwar period to begin examining questions about Nazism and the Nazi state — at least for those historians granted access to the material.

Prosecutors at the IMT trial such as Telford Taylor and Robert Kempner (assistants to American and Chief Counsel Robert Jackson) recognised the weight of this evidence and urged historians to engage with it.10 Some of the early accounts that followed — even before Hilberg’s magisterial 1961 multi-volume work The Destruction of the European Jews, which relied heavily on the evidence gathered for Nuremberg — represented the earliest scholarly analyses of the Holocaust.11

Before moving on to later trials, you may wish to view the film that was shown in the IMT trial at Nuremberg.

b) Later Trials Although the Nuremberg trial of “major” Nazi war criminals may be the best known, perpetrators were tried in a number of different contexts: • additional war criminals were tried by the United States (as distinct from under

international jurisdiction) in a series of further trials conducted between December 1946 and April 1949. This series of trials also were conducted in Nuremberg, which was located in the American Zone of Occupation, and so they subsequently became known as the “zonal trials” (to distinguish these trials conducted exclusively by the Americans from the earlier IMT trial under the joint lead of the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union).

10 Jonathan A. Bush, “Raul Hilberg (1926-2007): In Memoriam,” Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 100, no. 4, Fall

2010. pp. 661-88. Here p. 668. This article refers to: Telford Taylor, “An Outline of the Research and Publication Possibilities of the War Crimes Trials,” Louisiana Law Review, vol. 9, 1949, pp. 496-508; Robert M. W. Kempner, “The Nuremberg Trials as Sources of Recent German Political and Historical Materials,” American Political Science Review, vol. 44, no. 2, 1950. pp. 447-59.

11 These works include Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe, trans. Martin Greenberg. (Syracuse, New York, 1954). Poliakov was a French Jew and his book was first published in French in 1951; Gerlad Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. (New York, 1953)


o for example, the first American “zonal trial,” the Doctors Trial, was staged in Nuremberg between December 1946 and August 1947. For more information, see the online exhibition of the Nazi Doctors Trial, including indictments and testimony. One of the later American “zonal trials” focused on the Einsatzgruppen.

(t) Hitler’s personal physician Dr Karl Brandt (who oversaw Aktion-T4) hears the verdict that he found

guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership of a criminal organisation and sentenced to death by hanging, the Doctors Trial, August 1947. Dr Brandt was executed in June 1948.

(b) Defendant Dr Otto Ohlendorf (former chief of Einsatzgruppe D) testifying on his own behalf at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, conducted by the Americans in Nuremberg from September 1947 to April 1948.

Ohlendorf was sentenced to death and hanged in June 1951. Sources: “The Doctors Trial,” Jewish Virtual Library.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-doctors-war-crimes-trial “The Nuremberg Trial: Otto Ohlendorf and the Einsatzgruppen Face Judgement,” Warfare History Network.

http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/the-nuremberg-tribunal-otto-ohlendorf-and-the-einsatzgruppen-face-judgment/ [Accessed 11 May 2017]


• from 1957 onwards, trials were initiated by the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). In other words, Germans started to take responsibility for identifying and prosecuting alleged German perpetrators.

o most notably, these West German trials included the Auschwitz trial held in Frankfurt-am-Main in the early 1960s, multiple trials conducted in Düsseldorf in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s concerning Treblinka and Majdanek personnel, and trials of Einsatzgruppen members.

• Internationally, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which followed his kidnapping by Mossad agents and subsequent relocation from hiding in South America to Israel in 1960-61 o unlike the earlier Nuremberg trials, Eichmann’s prosecution emphasised the

importance of witness testimony. n.b. It was witness testimony, as distinct from eyewitness testimony, because the witnesses who gave evidence never actually came into direct contact with Eichmann. Rather, in a general sense they experienced the repercussions of his bureaucratic actions. Although the witnesses’ evidence personalised the impact of the Holocaust on victims, curiously little attempt was made to link their testimony directly to Eichmann’s activities.

(l) Adolf Eichmann, inside a box of bullet-proof glass, during his trial in Jerusalem.

(r) Former Jewish partisan leader Abba Kovner testifies at the Eichmann trial, May 1961.

Sources: “Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth,” The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/21/arendt-eichmann-new-truth/

“Eichmann Trial,” USHMM. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005179 [Accessed 11 May 2017]

• attempts — mainly unsuccessful — have been made to try alleged perpetrators in

non-European countries such as Canada and here in Australia where many emigrated and concealed their pasts.

o in Australia, the most notorious of alleged perpetrators was Konrad Kalejs (a Latvian suspected of collaborating with the Nazis to commit Holocaust crimes) who ultimately escaped prosecution. For further information see the


transcript of the ABC’s Four Corners episode that aired in February 2000 entitled “War Crimes: Calling Australia Home.”

In many trials, the prosecution encountered difficulty finding direct evidence linking particular individuals to specific crimes. The more time that had elapsed between the events under investigation a trial, the more difficult it became to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Even when found guilty, especially in West German trials, perpetrators received relatively light sentences. Indeed, many defendants in West German courts were convicted of murder (though more commonly, manslaughter) of hundreds of thousands of people within extermination centres, and yet received sentences usually of less than ten years. Consequently, it has been pointed out that those found to have committed murder received on average “3 minutes of imprisonment” per killing. Moreover, the peculiarities of West German law and its strict definition of murder meant that perpetrators needed to have not only killed, but in so doing demonstrated particular brutality or “base motive.”12 In practice, this led to the perverse situation in which former extermination camp personnel (even if they had been responsible for herding thousands of people into gas chambers) could not be found to have committed murder if they fulfilled their duty without “excessive” brutality — despite the fact that their deliberate actions clearly contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Nonetheless, trials conducted by the Allies and (West) Germans themselves heightened both public and scholarly awareness of Nazi crimes. The horrific acts committed by the Einsatzgruppen, and details of the Nazi “euthanasia” program, were laid bare in court and in popular newspapers around the globe. Eichmann’s trial in 1960-61 received international attention and, through the use of new technology in the form of satellite, news coverage could be beamed into televisions around the world within hours of it taking place in the courtroom in Jerusalem. For West Germans, the word “Auschwitz” meant little until the camp’s former personnel were put on trial in Frankfurt in the 1960s.13 Given their complexities these trials often required the expertise of historians to provide the court with historical context, further advancing historical knowledge in the process. For West German historians in particular, these opportunities became some of their first substantial engagements with the topic of Nazi crimes against Jews, and led to the publication of ground-breaking historical research.14 Knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust was significantly increased as a result, not only at the time of these trials but also in the ensuing decades.

12 Helga Grabitz, “Die Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und in der

DDR,” in Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider and Winfried R. Garscha (eds.), Keine “Abrechnung”: NS Verbrechen, Justiz und Gesellschaft in Europa nach 1945. (Leipzig-Vienna, 1998). pp. 144-79.

13 Devin O. Pendas, “‘I didn’t know what Auschwitz was’: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and the German Press, 1963-1965,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, vol. 397, 2000.

14 The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, for example, saw the engagement of four historians as expert witnesses, and the post-trial publication of this research in the form of an influential book, Anatomy of the SS State. For a compact account, see Mathew Turner, Experts’ History: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and Anatomie des SS-Staates, PhD Thesis, Deakin University, 2016.

LEARNING MODULE 10. Section 4. Modern Israel 16

Trials of Holocaust perpetrators have continued even more than 70 years after the war’s end and the liberation of Nazi camps, invariably rousing public discussion. The conviction of former Auschwitz guards Oskar Gröning in 2014 and Reinhold Hanning in 2016 — when aged 93 and 94 years respectively — serve as recent examples. Both men were charged as accessories to the murder of hundreds of thousands of victims. Though they were stationed at Auschwitz and thus at the very least indirectly contributed to many Jewish deaths, neither Gröning nor Hanning personally killed anyone. Gröning, for example, described himself as “a small cog in the gears” of Auschwitz.

Cases such as Gröning and Hanning, however, raise questions as to whether the passing of so much time and the advanced age of alleged perpetrators should prevent the ongoing prosecution of Holocaust criminals. Having lived peaceful and law-abiding lives for seven decades following the war’s end and the defeat of Nazism, should former perpetrators now face justice and spend their remaining years behind bars? Is it right that the hunt for Holocaust perpetrators continued unabated, irrespective of a suspect’s age and circumstances? Or should there have been a statute of limitations imposed on Holocaust crimes? Is there virtue in the argument, as mounted in 2012 by historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, that those accused of Holocaust crimes are “just as guilty today as the day they committed their crime — and they do not deserve a prize for eluding justice for so long”?15

Section 4. Modern Israel The foundations of the modern state of Israel were laid in the late nineteenth century in Europe. At the same time that Jews were facing persecution and victimisation as a result of heightened European nationalism and other prevailing antisemitic prejudices, Jewish intellectuals (led by the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl after he was sent to Paris to cover the Dreyfus Affair) began to canvass the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in the ancient biblical lands of Israel. The end of the First World War left this territory in British control (known as the British Mandate for Palestine). During the world wars interregnum, rising Jewish sentiment within the British Mandate and increasing antisemitism in Europe led to a growth in the local Jewish population (known in Hebrew as the Yishuv) within this territory, from 10 per cent in 1918 to around one-third by 1936.

The desire for a Jewish homeland that offered a “safe haven” culminated in the founding of the modern state of Israel via a partition of what previously had been the British Mandate for Palestine in 1947. Holocaust survivors were actively encouraged to leave Europe and resettle in Israel. Indeed, comparatively few survivors remained in Europe, and in addition to Palestine/Israel many Jews emigrated to the United States, which, after initial hostility to Jewish refugees, recognised their plight and loosened immigration restrictions. US president Harry Truman was instrumental in furthering

15 Efraim Zuroff, “Opinion: Why Nazi Hunting is still a Worthy Pursuit,” CNN website,

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/24/opinion/zuroff-nazi-hunting, 25 September 2012 [Accessed 11 May 2017]

LEARNING MODULE 10. Section 4. Modern Israel 17

the cause of Jewish displaced persons. Australia, too, was a prominent resettlement destination — perhaps not least because many survivors simply wanted to get as far away from Europe as possible!

PRESCRIBED TEXT: Please read Mark Wyman’s chapter entitled “Survivors,” pp. 757-71.

Curiously, Wyman makes the point that the Allies were loath to categorise Jews as a separate people, since this is precisely what the Nazis had done, and it went against the sense of belonging as nationals of European states that many Jews felt, at least before the war. Wyman also notes the irony that, by treating Jews as a single people, the Nazis helped to create a stronger sense of collective identity. Zionism, which argued for the re-establishment of a Jewish nation, acted to overcome divisions between European Jews, at least temporarily. Jews who had lost their entire families and possessions during the Holocaust, and who were looking for a new beginning, could be persuaded by Zionist advocates that Jews would only be safe within their own state. As Wyman notes, for many Jews “Europe had become the graveyard of their people” and the appeal of a new homeland proved too great. By 1951, over 330,000 European Jews had emigrated. For Jews (and non-Jews), the Holocaust may be seen, and has been used, as a justification and powerful moral argument for the creation of the modern state of Israel.

Section 5. Reparations and ongoing Financial Legacies Within Nazi-occupied Europe, the German army committed large-scale theft of valuables including cash, gold, buildings, jewellery, artwork, furniture, and even food. Jews suffered particularly harsh treatment, though the plunder of Europe at German hands was widespread. In postwar West Germany, a federal law introduced in 1952 gave individual victims of Nazism a legal right to seek financial restitution on the basis of their persecution and loss during the Nazi period. Additionally, in 1953 the governments of West Germany and Israel signed an agreement for restitution or Wiedergutmachung (“making good again”). Via these agreements, in the half-century between the early 1950s and early 2000s Germany (including West Germany until 1990) paid over US$50 billion to Holocaust survivors.16

16 Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford, “Introduction,” in Bazyler and Alford (eds.), Holocaust Restitution:

Perspectives on the Litigation and its Legacy. (New York University Press, New York, 2006). pp. 1-14. Here p. 2.

LEARNING MODULE 10. Section 5. Reparations and ongoing Financial Legacies 18

PRESCRIBED TEXT: Please read Michael Marrus’ chapter entitled “Restitution and Its Discontents” (from the subheading “Claimants and History”), pp. 855-59.

Marrus notes some of the difficulties that come with inviting Holocaust survivors to seek compensation. Survivors themselves have disagreed as to who is entitled to what and how much. An informal hierarchy of suffering emerged, in which some survivors have argued that those who escaped the Holocaust through emigration, or successfully hid themselves and evaded capture by the Nazis, should be entitled only to a small share of restitution compared to those who survived for years in ghettos and camps. Postwar fortune and economic prosperity also entered the discussion, with contemporary financial circumstances and not past suffering argued as the appropriate determinants for compensation.

As we discover next week, the seeking of compensation on an ongoing basis has left many Jews vulnerable to claims made by Holocaust deniers and other antisemites that they have unduly “benefited” from their experiences. At worst, Jews have been accused of inventing their stories, and proceeding to “extort” billions from the German state. Michael Berenbaum, who reflects on the point that the current state of Jewish restitution may have contributed to an upsurge in antisemitic sentiment in Europe, observes that “there is a risk that the final word of the Holocaust will not be justice, nor education, nor remembrance, but money.”17 This is a point that Marrus, too, reflects on in your reading. Yet, Berenbaum also stresses that were it not for the ongoing struggle to seek reparations, many banks, insurers, and art dealers “would have been the permanent beneficiaries of their ill-gotten gains had not the political-judicial processes intervened.”18 Whether Holocaust restitution is about money or victims remains a contentious issue. As Marrus notes in his conclusion, though, the dwindling of Holocaust survivors, as well as the deaths of any remaining perpetrators, means the question of seeking justice or restitution for Jews is finally drawing to an end — even as historians continue to discover more about the Holocaust.

17 Michael Berenbaum, “Confronting History: Restitution and the Historians,” in Michael Bazyler and

Roger Alford (eds.), Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and its Legacy. (New York University Press, New York, 2006). p. 48.

18 ibid. p. 44.

LEARNING MODULE 10. Conclusion 19

Conclusion For Jews who survived the Holocaust, the liberation of Nazi camps and the end of Hitler’s Germany in May 1945 signalled both an end and a beginning. It was the end of their ordeal as captives or targets of Nazi extermination. Whatever the future held, they would no longer need to fear the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and elsewhere. Liberation heralded a new beginning and marked the end of a story of survival. But it came at a cost. Many Jews survived the Nazi era only to discover that their entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust. On returning to their previous homes, some Jews (particularly in Poland) learnt that their property had been seized. Tragically some Jews, having survived extermination camps, were murdered in their home towns during antisemitic purges upon their return. With a new beginning came much uncertainty, and the question of whether to start a new life elsewhere. For many Jews, Europe was seen to offer nothing but memories of a life lost, and fears of a dangerous future. The moral argument — that the systematic extermination of millions of Jews in Europe compelled the international community to recognise Jewish rights to a homeland in the state of Israel — ultimately prevailed. Israel, at the time of its establishment in 1947, and in the decades since, has been at the centre of regional and international conflict, and it represents an ongoing legacy of the Holocaust. Irrespective of the setting, in embarking on their new lives Holocaust survivors faced the common experiences of isolation, guilt, nightmares, depression, and even thoughts of suicide. Some did not wish to speak of their experiences, whereas others did but struggled to find anyone who could help them, along with any sense of closure.

For those seeking to prosecute and prevent a repeat of the Holocaust, new language and laws were needed in its wake. The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin, and it has wielded influence in international law ever since — despite the full-blown genocides and many other events with genocidal elements that have been committed since the Holocaust. Attempts to seek justice also have revealed the limits of the law in both international tribunals and domestic courtrooms. In many cases, individuals charged as accomplices to the murder of hundreds of thousands have spent mere minutes behind bars for each of their victims. Moreover, the ongoing prosecution of elderly perpetrators has led to questions as to whether justice should continue to be sought for Holocaust victims, and even whether punishment can be appropriately meted. The shortcomings of Holocaust perpetrator trials notwithstanding, proceedings such as those conducted in Nuremberg and other (West) German cities, as well as the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, increased public and scholarly awareness of the Holocaust, and deepened historical knowledge.

Finally, we broached the contentious issue of reparations, made both to the state of Israel and to individual Holocaust victims. The extent to which payments assist survivors, and the disputes that may arise within and without survivor circles, also suggests a fear that, ultimately, the Holocaust will be remembered for money, rather than victims, justice, or education. In a future without survivors, moreover, the task of remembering the Holocaust and honouring its victims will face additional challenges.

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