In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

92 4 “Crimes against the Human Status” Nuremberg and the Image of Evil We saw in chapter 1 that the Eichmann trial was made to bear a host of burdens well beyond the otherwise highly choreographed spectacle of criminal prosecution . Whether by chance, opportunity, or design, the proceedings were put in the service of a number of consequentially distinct agendas for regionally distinct audiences, with the focal point throughout being the “story of the great destruction.”1 In the presence of the world and the one man said to have been responsible for overseeing the whole monstrous affair, this brutal story was rehearsed to shame, educate, and inspire. Its telling was also finally to correct the legal record, to set right what some insisted were the glaring inadequacies, misconceptions, and misrepresentations of the Allied case against prominent members of the Nazi leadership in the initial postwar trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. For while the accomplishments of the tribunal may initially have appeared considerable in terms of establishing a detailed, more or less coherent and (therefore) plausible account of National Socialist criminality, the “authoritative and impartial” record that emerged was later said to have ignored or simply marginalized the systematic mass murder of European Jewry. And it was not simply a matter of the record being incomplete . If one takes, as the Jerusalem court and countless commentators since have taken, the annihilation of European Jewry to have been the principal aim, indeed the definitive crime, of the Nazi regime—for which the waging of war was merely a pretense—the stark omissions of the narrative produced at Nuremberg meant that the full magnitude and significance of Nazi criminality remained entirely outside the legal frame. As legal scholar Mark Osiel observes, “Historians and political analysts have been dismayed . . . that the Nuremberg Court would subsume the most unparalleled features of the defendants’ wrongs under longstanding doctrines in the law of war, reducing the Holocaust merely to one among several methods employed for the ‘waging of aggressive war.’”2 And in basic agreement with Osiel, political scientist Gary Jonathan Bass writes that while the establishment of an International Tribunal reflected the Allies’ shared desire for justice, it is often forgotten that [their] efforts to punish Germany were undertaken mostly out of anger at the Nazi instigation of World War II. One of the great ironies of 93 “Crimes against the Human Status” Nuremberg’s legacy is that the tribunal is remembered as a product of Allied horror at the Holocaust, when in fact America and Britain, the two liberal countries that played major roles in deciding what Nuremberg would be, actually focused far more on the criminality of Nazi aggression than on the Holocaust. Nuremberg was self-serving in ways that are usually forgotten today.3 With the bringing to justice of Adolf Eichmann, therefore, the marginalized and silenced were said to have been allowed, at long last, to emerge centrally, not only to rewrite a legal history, but also to become “the speaking [and acting] subjects of [their own] history.”4 In words echoed repeatedly by lead prosecutor and general attorney, Gideon Hausner, throughout the Jerusalem proceedings, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion elaborates: This is not an ordinary trial nor only a trial. Here for the first time in Jewish history, historical justice is being done by the sovereign Jewish people. For many generations it was we who suffered, who were tortured, were killed—and we who were judged. Our adversaries and our murderers were also our judges. For the first time Israel is judging the murderers of the Jewish people. It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone but anti-Semitism throughout history. The judges whose business is the law and who may be trusted to adhere to it will judge Eichmann the man for his horrible crimes, but responsible public opinion in the world will be judging anti-Semitism which paved the way for this most atrocious crime in the history of mankind. And let us bear in mind that only the independence of Israel could create the necessary conditions for this historic act of justice.5 I. In this chapter, I want to take a closer look at the Nuremberg proceedings. Like the Eichmann trial, these proceedings entailed a certain performance of law; they staged a judicial purging broadcast twice daily on German radio that made possible, as Tony Judt puts it, the distilling of...

Share