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On Fe
uary 22, 1946, the Lithuanian-born Jewish poet and partisan Avrom
Sutzkever a
ived 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, wa
crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Sutzkeve
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
Kalten
unner, Hans Frank, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, Alfred Rosenberg,
Joachim von Ri
entrop, 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 a
ival 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
e heard. … It shall triumph in Nuremberg as a symbol of our immortality.”1
His testimony on the morning of Fe
uary 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
efused a request to sit down from the presiding judge, British chief justice Si
Geoffrey Lawrence. “I spoke standing as if I was saying kaddish for the dead,”2 he
emarked after his testimony, confiding in his diary his one grievance: he had not
een allowed to speak Yiddish but had to testify in Russian. Sutzkever’s inte
ogator,
Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov, explained that the tribunal’s rules allowed only fou
official languages—English, Russian, German, and French—and the court lacked
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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
epresentation 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
etween 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
ing 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
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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 Novembe
1945 through October 1946, was a milestone in understanding the unprecedented
magnitude of the catastrophe visited upon European Jews. As Michael R. Ma
us
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
espective 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
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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 co
espondence, 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
ut remain invisible as active subjects or participants. With no official Jewish
epresentation 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
oles 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
econstruction 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
esearch field over the past decade.10
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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
elief, 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 te
itories multiplied, the WJC
increasingly concerned itself with collecting information to serve as potential
evidence in future war-crime trials. For that purpose, in Fe
uary 1941 it established
the Institute of Jewish Affairs, a New York–based research
anch 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 i
efutable evidence that Nazi Germany
was using poison gas to systematically murder the Jews inside its o
it of
power—until the end of the war, the WJC lo
ied various governments in exile in
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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 lo
ying 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 out
eak 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