The memory of judgment : making law and history in the trials of the Holocaust / Lawrence Douglas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Douglas, Lawrence.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War crime trials.

World War, 1939-1945--Atrocities.

World War, 1939-1945.

Atrocities.

Physical Description:

xiii, 318 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2001]

Summary:

This powerful book offers the first detailed examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. It provides a vivid, fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings -- the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk, the French trial of Klaus Barbie, and the Canadian trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. These trials, the book argues, were "show trials" in the broadest sense: they aimed to do justice both to the defendants and to the history and memory of the Holocaust.

Lawrence Douglas explores how prosecutors and jurors struggled to submit unprecedented crimes to legal judgment, and in so doing, to reconcile the interests of justice and pedagogy. Against the attacks of such critics as Hannah Arendt, Douglas defends the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials as imaginative, if flawed, responses to extreme crimes. By contrast, he shows how the Demjanjuk and Zundel trials turned into disasters of didactic legality, obfuscating the very history they were intended to illuminate.

In their successes and shortcomings, Douglas contends, these proceedings changed our understanding of both the Holocaust and the legal process -- revealing the value and limits of the criminal trial as a didactic tool.

Contents:

Part 1 Nuremberg

1 Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps Before the Nuremberg Tribunal 11

2 The Idiom of Judgment: Crimes Against Humanity 38

3 The Father Pointed to the Sky: Legitimacy and Tortured History 65

Part 2 Eichmann

4 Ada Lichtmann on the Stand 97

5 The Court vs. the Prosecution: Policing Survivor Testimony 123

6 Didactic Legality and Heroic Memory 150

Part 3 Zundel

7 Retrials and Precursors: Klaus Barbie and John Demjanjuk 185

8 "Did Six Million Really Die?": Holocaust Denial and the Law 212

9 Historians and Hearsay: The Denial Trials of Ernst Zundel 226

10 The Legal Imagination and Traumatic History 257

Appendix Nuremberg Defendants 263.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [265]-306) and index.

ISBN:

0300084366

OCLC:

45064704