8. Enquêtes sur les crimes nazis dans la zone d’occupation soviétique et la RDA

Abstract

Although the vast majority of an estimated 13,000 East German Nazi trials, conducted between 1947 and 1989, was not widely reported in the East German media, the Communist party leadership was nevertheless always eager to shore up the GDR’s self-proclaimed image as a guardian of a “Nuremberg” spirit on local, national, and international levels. Unlike the Federal Republic, who until the early 1950s had buried most of Nuremberg’s unpopular legacy under a self-serving rhetoric of “war-convicted” and “Christian charity,” GDR authorities pursued a different approach. On the one hand, the Nuremberg body of law was instrumentalized in “show trials” against “counter-revolutionaries” and other “enemies” of the working class, and as a vehicle for the “Sovietization” and “Stalinization” of the police and judiciary apparatus. On the other hand, public images of Nuremberg and other postwar war crimes trials were conveyed in the East German mass media and in selected trials in order to advertise the GDR’s anti-Western and anti-Imperial understanding of human rights and international criminal law and to buttress its anti-Fascist version of WWII history and the Shoah. In the long run, an ideologically driven internationalization approach would cause some unexpected tensions and side-effects inside and outside the Socialist camp. Based on my previous research on the transnational aspects of the GDR’s official juridical antifascism and on a new body of scholarship that emphasizes the manifold sociocultural, mnemonic, and symbolic ramifications of postwar war crimes policies, this paper will discuss why the—still under-investigated—East German war crimes trials program can be interpreted as the paradoxical attempt to benefit from the growing popularity of human rights and international criminal law and a multidirectional Holocaust consciousness (Michael Rothberg) in the international realm, while trying to contain its unforeseen repercussions on the national level.