Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials

Chapter Six: Understanding England’s Holocaust Memories

6 Understanding England’s Holocaust Memories A A A A “[T]he reality of the Holocaust, which is overwhelmingly documented, doesn’t hinge on the outcome of this trial.” —Walter Reich, “The Stakes in the Holocaust Trial” “During the 1930s and World War II,” argues Tony Kushner, “the British government and its apparatus” often “downplayed the fate of the Jews under Nazi control.”1 British nationalists like to remember that they provided a haven for political refugees during this conflict, but these same mythic tales glossed over some of the political ambiguities that surrounded the Allied responses to the Judeocide. After the war, Britain was considered to be one of the victorious “liberators” of the concentration camps, but in recent years this image has been tarnished by those who contend that the British could have done more either to prevent the “Final Solution” or to aid the victims of the catastrophe.2 In this chapter, I analyze some of the rhetorics surrounding several key British Holocaust trials and review how some communities within the United Kingdom have reacted to the Sawoniuk (1999)3 and Irving (2000) trials.4 I begin by writing about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and contemporary commentaries on British attitudes toward war crimes trials. 133 Bergen-Belsen and British Postwar Forgetfulness As World War II progressed, governments in exile continued to push for war crimes proceedings, but it would be the massive press coverage that followed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau that would galvanize public opinion against the Nazis. For example, after Winston Churchill received a letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower describing some of the camps, he announced that a parliamentary delegation was going across the Channel so that they “might have ocular and first-hand proof of the atrocities.”5 On April 15, 1945, the British liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, and Raymond Phillips would write that Belsen “became the archetype of the rest; and a proof that it was not an imaginary evil which the Allies had been fighting for almost six years.”6 After a lengthy trial, Belsen’s former commandant and several other Germans would be hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences. Unfortunately, these types of cases had the unintended effect of blurring the perceptual lines that separated death camps from concentration camps. For the next half-century, there would be relatively few British trials that touched on questions involving Holocaust memories.7 While the Americans conducted dozens of trials that tried to extend some of the Nuremberg “principles,” the British tried “lesser” war criminals, and they quickly phased out some of these programs.8 Postwar England should have been an inhospitable place for former enemies , but this may not have been the case. Jon Silverman noted that when “it comes to dealing with the greatest act of mass-murder [in] this century, the Holocaust, English justice has not exactly distinguished itself .”9 In the aftermath of the postwar Nuremberg trials, many politicians and civil servants in Great Britain “insisted that no war criminals had entered the United Kingdom.”10 By the 1980s, things were beginning to change as a number of organizations began sending the British government lists of alleged war criminals. England’s Sir Thomas Hetherington and Scotland’s Thomas Chambers were asked to review the existing British laws on war crimes,11 and their committee determined that investigators needed to “mount a number of criminal prosecutions for clear violations of long-standing international law.”12 The British Report of the War Crimes Inquiry stated that it was “a generally recognized principle of international law that belligerent and neutral states have a right to exercise jurisdiction in respect of war crimes since they are 134 Chapter Six crimes ex jure genium.”13 This meant that any citizen or resident of the United Kingdom should face criminal charges on the basis of having violated international laws or customs of war.14 The commission’s findings helped usher in debates over the legitimacy of the British War Crimes Act. Geoffrey Howe asked how courts were going to sift through evidence that came from witnesses and defendants “who were already in the twilight of their lives.”15 One journalist complained that the act was not being considered to “redress an injustice in any ordinary sense of the word” but was being used “to assuage a political appetite.”16 The debates over the War Crimes...