Untitled document 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...

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Untitled document 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 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f01 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f02 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 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f03 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f04 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 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f05 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f06 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f07 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f08 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 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f09 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f10 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 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f11 https://muse-jhu-edu.ez.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/article/524058#f12 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
Answered Same DayNov 24, 2021

Answer To: Untitled document On February 22, 1946, the Lithuanian-born Jewish poet and partisan Avrom Sutzkever...

Rudrakshi answered on Nov 25 2021
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SUMMARY OF PAPER
An examination of the many-faceted Jews responses to the prosecution of Nazi Germany's "top international military tribunal" by the government of the Union, United Kingdom, the Union o
f Soviet Socialist Republics, and Germany at the Commission on Human rights at Nürnberg is the subject of this article. Period 1945 to 1946. When it comes to wartime German crimes against humanity prosecutions, as well as the portrayal of the Atrocities in Allies tribunals, researchers have recently begun to pay more attention to the importance played by Jews at the Nuremberg Tribunal and then in the surrounding area[footnoteRef:1]. [1: Henry Korn. "International Military Tribunals' Genesis, WWII Experience, and Future Relevance." Utah L. Rev. (2017): 731]
An examination of the topic of Jewish involvement at Nuremberg, as well as efforts by Jewish people and groups to interfere in order to safeguard Holocaust survivors, is the subject of this article[footnoteRef:2]. Also covered are modern Jewish disputes over Germany's responsibility, witnesses' involvement in compensation movements, and the potential of comment retribution via worldwide arbitral commissions. Following World War II, Sutzkever's story highlights some of the difficulties Jewish had in portraying and conveying their recollections of discrimination. Although Sutzkever was one of those Jewish refugees called to testify at Nuremberg, he has been denied the right to present his formal comments in his own tongue[footnoteRef:3]. [2: Liu, Fang, Yanjun Yin, Alice HD Chan, Virginia Yip, and Patrick CM Wong. "Individuals with congenital amusia do not show context-dependent perception of tonal categories." Brain and Language 215 (2021): 104908] [3: David Fraser. "(De) constructing the Nazi state: criminal organizations and the constitutional theory of the international military tribunal." Loy. LA Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 39 (2017): 117]
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