Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials

Chapter Seven: The Future of Legal Involvement in Holocaust Memories

7 The Future of Legal Involvement in Holocaust Memories A A A A Each trial will be a masterpiece, and masterpieces frequently take a long time to complete. In the meantime, the biological clock is ticking. —Sol Littman, Canadian representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles As David Cesarani has recently observed, during the last quarter of the last century, war “crimes investigations into Nazi collaborators” were “commenced on a large scale in the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain,” and the “opening of archive collections” shed new “light on Nazi occupation policy, [and] ousted Eichmann from preeminence and replaced him with the Einsatzgruppen killer, the East European auxiliary and the reserve policeman.”1 As he opened the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals, Robert Jackson had hoped that the “record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow ,”2 but some observers readily acknowledge that we are quickly losing our potential defendants as well as witnesses.3 Yet there are still those who keep track of global trends and the international pursuit of war criminals, and readers of the Jerusalem Post were told in April 2004 that the number of investigations that were opened in the preceding year increased by 20 percent. Incentive programs like Operation Last Chance provide awards of $10,000 or 10,000 Euros for information 155 that helps bring about the arrest and conviction of Nazi war criminals, and by the spring of 2003 Austria had opened up 60 new investigations.4 In some nine countries there were more than 160 ongoing investigations. The recent U.S. revocation of John Demjanjuk’s citizenship shows us that there is plenty of work for potential Nazi hunters.5 Moreover, there are still many scholars, politicians, and laypersons who willingly ask for more “monumental spectacles.”6 While some of the participants in the Nuremberg proceedings tried to avoid defining crimes “in terms of religion or nationality of the victim,”7 the inherent politicalization of these forums meant that we would be left with countless rhetorical figurations that would recirculate in many future vectors of memory. Given a host of presentist needs, the deaths of the last witnesses who lived through these horrors will not mean the end of clarion calls for vengeance,8 vicarious memory work, or legal remembrance. Marianne Hirsch’s notion of the “postmemory” captures the idea that second and third generations care about the transmission of key post-Holocaust histories and memories,9 and there are obviously many communities around the world who still want Holocaust trials. As we have seen in previous chapters, there are a host of reasons that are proffered by those who advocate the continued use of these Holocaust trials —observers write of the duty to remember, the importance of trauma or catharsis, the dispensation of retributive justice, and the deterrence of future war crimes.10 The rising influence of trauma studies, recovered memory investigations , and the victims’ rights movement are just some manifestations of much larger scholarly and societal shifts in the ways that we think about the balancing of formal and informal rights of defendants and victims. I tried to counter these types of arguments by underscoring the inherent problematic nature of these Holocaust trials, and my comparative approach has provided me with a synthetic view of some of the competing legal histories and memories that dot our rhetorical landscapes. I illustrated the repetitious nature of many of these arguments, as a way of critiquing the supposed pedagogical value of these trials. I purposely highlighted the partial and contingent nature of our nationalist memories. As Michael Schudson once averred in one of his studies of collective memories, “a way of seeing is not seeing, a way of remembering is a way of forgetting.”11 Oftentimes the use of key nationalistic forums has meant that a number of politically volatile choices had to be made in selecting venues, witnesses, relevant defenses, admissible evidence, and so forth. Formalistic-looking rules and principles are tied to hidden legal histories and collective memories, as various nations use these trials as a way of expiating guilt or 156 Chapter Seven apportioning blame. The popularity of many of these proceedings has meant that certain vectors of memory have been instantiated as shards in our collective legal remembrances. Note, for example, how the Kastner affair set the stage for the...