Nuremberg Trials Research Articles

Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research

While both science and research have very long and detailed histories, the formal history of medical ethics is short. The discipline’s foundation arises from the medical atrocities performed in the name of science by a cadre of Nazi doctors during World War II. The actions were so despicable that 20 physicians were put on trial in Nuremberg for violation of the Hippocratic Oath and behaviour incompatible with their education and profession. A result of this 1946 trial was the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics (1). Last year, Ian Mosby, a food historian and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario), revealed details of highly unethical nutrition experiments performed on Canadian Aboriginal children at six residential schools between 1942 and 1952 (2) – our own medical atrocities. The experiments were performed by the Department of Indian Affairs of Canada under the direction of two physicians: Dr Percy Moore, the Indian Affairs Branch Superintendent of Medical Services, and Dr Frederick Tisdall, a famed nutritionist, a former president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and one of three paediatricians at The Hospital for Sick Children (Toronto, Ontario) who developed Pablum infant cereal in the 1930s. In these experiments, parents were not informed, nor were consents obtained. Even as children died, the experiments continued. Even after the recommendations from the Nuremberg trial, these experiments continued. In these experiments, control and treatment groups of mal-nourished children were denied adequate nutrition. In one experiment, the treatment group received supplements of riboflavin, thiamine and/or ascorbic acid supplements to determine whether these mitigated the problems – they did not. In another, children were given a flour mix containing added thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and bone meal. Rather than improving nutrition, the children became more anemic, likely contributing to more deaths and certainly impacting development. In these experiments, efforts were made to control as many factors as possible, even when they harmed the research subjects. For example, previously available dental care was denied in some settings because the researchers wanted to observe the state of dental caries and gingivitis with malnutrition. How could we have let this happen? Why did we not know about this long before now? Why did these experiments not stop when the Nuremberg Code was put forward? Similar to the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskeegee (3) – which, in 1932, set out with the “best of intentions” to learn about the natural history of syphilis among black men in hopes of justifying a treatment program for them – Canadian researchers used Aboriginal children in residential schools to learn about malnutrition. The problem in Tuskeegee (Alabama) was that the natural history observations continued long after penicillin became available to treat syphilis. In Canada’s case, the basics of alleviating malnutrition (adequate food) were well known even before these experiments began. The most striking fact is that both studies were performed among individuals who were already marginalized and vulnerable. No one was looking out for the best interests of these research subjects. They had no voice. While many changes and improvements have been made in the area of ethical health research since the 1940s, Aboriginal children and youth remain a highly vulnerable population. Extra care must be taken. The current issue of Paediatrics & Child Health includes a Canadian Paediatric Society position statement entitled ‘Health research involving First Nations, Inuit and Metis children and their communities’, (4) with recommendations on Aboriginal community ownership of research projects, one measure that can help to ensure the potential for research abuse is minimized. Other measures, such as data safety review committees as well as rigorous research ethics board review, are also critical. It behooves all of us who care for children and youth to ensure that research abuse and other potential opportunities for abuse are minimized by being vigilant, thoughtful and introspective.

Prosecutor v. Charles Ghankay Taylor (SCSL)

On September 26, 2013, the Appeals Chamber for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court) unanimously upheld the Trial Chamber’s conviction of Charles Ghankay Taylor, the former President of Liberia, and affirmed his fifty-year sentence for aiding and abetting rebel forces in Sierra Leone that perpetrated brutal crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The Appeals Chamber’s judgment followed an almost four-year trial that included testimony from 115 witnesses, including Taylor himself—who testified in his defense for seven months—and celebrities such as British model Naomi Campbell and U.S. actress Mia Farrow, who the Prosecution called to show that Taylor knowingly handled blood diamonds. Taylor is the first head of state that an international or hybrid tribunal has convicted since the Nuremberg trials.

The doing of the little righteousness – the on-going search for justice after the TRC

Taking as point of departure, South African theologian Dirkie Smit’s theological oeuvre, particularly his theological reflections on issues such as politics, justice, peace and reconciliation, the essay moves on to focus on Mahmood Mamdani’s view of the differences between the Nuremberg trials, South Africa’s political negotiations held in Kempton Park and the TRC and his critique of the latter. This once again raises the matter of justice, different forms of justice – especially as either “victor justice” or “survivor justice” and the consequences of this for the TRC and for christians in the call for the doing of justice. With reference to the views of Desmond Tutu (especially his understanding of the concept of ubuntu), it is suggested that the TRC’s only choice was not just between retributive and restorative justice, revenge and forgiveness, but that it was incumbent upon it to advance the gains made at Kempton Park and to move from victim’s justice to survivor’s justice and from the foundation of political justice to social justice which it did not do.

British Justice in Western Germany, 1949-55

Britain did not release its final two prisoners from the prison it administered in West Germany until July 1957, eight years after the formation of the Federal Republic and the formal ending of its military rule. By 1949, Germany, once the enemy of Europe assumed greater strategic significance in the minds of western politicians seeking its reintegration within a new European family of nations to forestall fears of Soviet hegemony, not least because it now wanted to re-arm West Germany. The continuing incarceration of German war criminals had become a lesser priority in the battleground of Cold War ideologies. The Adenauer government pressurised Britain to honour its pledge to review the sentences for the hundreds of detainees who remained in custody following the Nuremberg trials. Britain’s moral mandate to govern Germany from 1945 was underpinned by its claims to be exporting democratic liberal values but, as this article explains, was exposed in its illiberal handling of the war criminals issue which ran counter to the new moves towards reconciliation.

The essence of informed consent

According to Beauchamp and Childress, the term “/INS;informed consent”/INS; did not appear until a decade after the Nuremberg trials, almost 70years ago. There are three critical elements to the concept, as explicated by Bernat: adequate information, presented in terminology the patient can understand; competence on the part of the patient, to understand and accept or refuse what is proposed; and free choice, without coercion. But what is the essence of this concept for a neurologist, in this day and age of information explosion; limited time to spend with individual patients; and increasing pressure to “/INS;get the job done”/INS;, most efficiently and in the shortest time possible? A controlled clinical trial of therapeutic plasma exchange in 200 consecutive patients with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis afforded the opportunity to explore the meaning of this concept in practice.

Prosecuting genocide before the Genocide Convention: Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949

Between 1945 and 1949, American, British, French and Soviet prosecutors, indicted and tried approximately 207 former Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity in what has come to be called collectively, ‘The Nuremberg Trials’. This article explores the place of genocide in these trials. It examines the extent to which Raphael Lemkin influenced the Nuremberg prosecutors to incorporate genocide into the indictments, how the crime was prosecuted in the courtroom and, ultimately, how it was understood by the court in their judgments. Although there were thirteen separate trials at Nuremberg, this article focuses mainly on one of these, the SS–Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947–48, in which twenty-two high-ranking SS officers were tried for crimes against humanity. The SS–Einsatzgruppen were the vanguard of the ‘Final Solution’. As ideological soldiers of the Third Reich they had killed one million civilians, mainly Jews, between June 1941 and July 1943, clear evidence of genocide according to Lemkin's definition of the crime that was circulating in Nuremberg at the time. Even though ‘genocide’ had been articulated when this trial began, the Nuremberg prosecutors did not fully employ it at trial. Ultimately, this article explores the tension between the meaning of genocide and its practical application in the post-war courtrooms of Nuremberg.

Significance of Nuremberg Trial in the Development of International Humanitarian Law

War had always been a part of human history. History had witnessed countless wars often fought for territory, wealth, pleasure and power. But no war had been so devastating as the 2nd world war. Millions of people were killed, be it combatants or civilians. Violation of human rights was rampant before and during the war. Finally, when the war was over, a new concept arose to those involved in such violation. Thus in the initiation of allied forces a tribunal in Nuremberg was formed for the trial of Nazi war criminals. The Nuremberg trial was formed to prosecute Nazi war criminals, which later on proved to be one of the most significant step in the development of international humanitarian law.

Beyond Truth & Punishment in Transitional Justice

Many societies have reckoned with how to deal with issues of and following a period of massive human rights violations. Yet, almost 70 years since the Nuremberg trials and 20 years since the commission in South Africa, there is little clarity on how each mechanism contributes towards its objectives and in which transitional contexts. This paper evaluates the search for justice in the aftermath of atrocities in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia by examining each country’s approach to truth-telling and punishment. Scholars and practitioners often claim that commissions and courts contribute to a host of justice-promoting goals despite their varying levels of success in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. This paper uses data gathered from field research to assess the contribution of these mechanisms to their stated objectives from the perspectives of victims and the affected societies. It demonstrates that commissions have less perceived success meeting their stated objectives in post-conflict versus post authoritarian societies due to the relative size of victim and perpetrator classes and the weakness of state institutions. It finds that commissions can have more perceived success in post-conflict contexts when combined with a court because of mutually-reinforcing effects. This paper argues that it is critical to limit the number of goals that commissions and trials can reasonably be expected to contribute to as opposed to burdening them with multiple objectives, which create unattainable expectations. It questions the reflexive use of commissions and trials in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies and concludes that neither truth nor punishment is sufficient.

Agresija u međunarodnom krivičnom pravu

Ever since the term “aggression” appeared as a legal term, for several decades there has been an academic fight where scientists, attempting to decipher its real meaning and purpose, have been exchanging different views and arguments. On the other hand, problems in defining aggression arise from the fact that there has been a number of different approaches to this term, taken by various states, so that, in defining aggression, some states have seen a sign of salvation against anyone’s interference with their internal problems, whereas other states have seen it as a limiting factor for realising their pretensions. Yet, even in these circumstances, progress has been inevitable. Taking a path being difficult and hard but successful, the term „aggression“ has evolved from an ordinary clause prohibiting aggression through the international crime up to the clear system of individual guilt before the International Criminal Tribunal. In this regard, the important steps have been made, including the Treaty of Versailles, the Kellogg–Briand Pact, the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, the Charter of the United Nations, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and, finally, the Kampala Review Conference. Is the step taken in Kampala the last one? Though the solution reached in Kampala may have hitherto been the greatest victory in defining aggression, it also has a flaw: its applicability is of a conditional nature.

The Nature of Law

This Article aims to examine the true nature and origin of law and rights from two perspectives, positive law and natural law. The primary question that this work aims to answer is whether laws and rights are man-made or transcendent. The article refers to the Nuremberg trials and the minority opinion of Justice HR Khanna in the judgment of ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla during Indian emergency to address the above question. The article also refers to the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ascertain the question of the nature and origin of laws and rights.

Genocide, Press Freedom, and the Case of Hassan Ngeze

This essay was written under contract with the United Nations to serve as background for my testimony as an expert witness in behalf of Hassen Ngeze in his prosecution before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. (On motion of the prosecutor, the Court excluded this essay - or report - and the offer of my testimony.) In The Prosecutor v. Ngeze, the prosecution charged Ngeze with direct and public incitement to genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide almost entirely on the basis of his publication of a newspaper, Kangura, one of many newspapers being published in Rwanda during the period before the genocide, although not one of largest papers by circulation and not one still being published at the time the genocide began. The Essay begins by describing the essential role of a free press for democracy and for broader economic and social development and justice, with the essay emphasizing its particular importance for less developed countries. It then argues that in interpreting international criminal law standards, special efforts should be made to avoid interpretations that would make illegal any activities whose protection at least some clearly democratic countries consider fundamental to democracy. That is, international criminal law should try to avoid making democracy, as understood by significant democratic countries, illegal. With this background, different sections look at the precedent of the Nuremberg Trials, an earlier decision on direct and public incitement to genocide by the ICTR, and at the protection given the press by the European Court of Human Rights and the United States Constitution, with some emphasis on explaining the logic of the latter. The Essay provides a more exhaustive examination of the hundreds of pages of the reports of the prosecutions experts. These reports provide massive numbers of excerpts from Kangura that embody the heart of the prosecution's case. The Essay concludes that under all the precedents examined, ranging from Nuremberg to the recent ICTR case and under the constitutional approach of the United States or the human rights approach of the ECHR, there is absolutely no basis for a conviction in this case. Moreover, the Essay suggests that a conviction would create a tragic precedent given the democratic and developmental needs of countries such as Rwanda. NOTE: This was written 10 months before the ICTR reached a decision, issuing an opinion, finding Ngeze guilty of most charges, and sentencing him to life imprisonment. This paper will be revised in the future in light of this decision.

Heidegger, Arendt, and Eichmann in Jerusalem

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt aims to secure a more adequate understanding of the new crime of genocide so that it can be prosecuted in a manner that better serves justice. She criticizes the Nuremberg Trials (1945) and, to a lesser extent, the Jerusalem trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (1961) for miscasting this unprecedented crime in terms of familiar concepts and thereby obscuring it. Arendt claims that this atrocity, instead, demanded original thinking that emanated from a closer grappling with these new experiences. I argue that her criticism reflects Heideggerian phenomenology. This approach questions absolute concepts from a position more consciously planted in the world, which Heidegger considers the source of original thinking. However, Arendt extends this approach to the domain of ethics and law and confronts genocide instead of aligning with those who perpetrated it.

Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes

AbstractSince the 1990s, transitional justice has become almost synonymous with the concern for the rights of victims. Compared with the Nuremberg Trials – in which victims did not even appear as witnesses – this is a major change and one for which an explanation will be sought here with recourse to neo-institutional research perspective. The core argument put forward in this article is that the change in transitional justice towards a stronger inclusion of victims could be explained as the result of the expansion of a rationalist world culture in which a model of victimhood is created and diffused worldwide, primarily through international organizations and NGOs. This notion of global victimhood developed only after World War II, following the global diffusion of human rights, the change in academic conceptions of traumatic experiences and the advocacy of International NGOs, so that the development of normative pressure on national transitional justice processes placed victims at the centre of processes dealing with the past.

HISTORIA ROZWOJU TŁUMACZENIA USTNEGO W JAPONII NA PRZYKŁADZIE TRYBUNAŁU TOKIJSKIEGO

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the so called Tokyo Trial is the international trial of the war criminals who led the Japanese government and military during the Second World War. The trial began on 3rd of May 1946 and closed on 11th of November 1984. Around the same time in Europe the Nuremberg Trial of Nazi war crimes was conducted. In both trials the role of the interpreter was essential, for example, in the Nuremberg Tribunal the simultaneous interpreting in English, German, French and Russian was applied. On the other hand in the Tokyo Trial, though the Japanese, the English and other languages as the Chinese were used during the trial, the position of the interpreters was not emphasized enough. The aim of this paper is to analyze the basic theory of interpreting in comparison with the interpreters’ role in both trials.

History and Importance of Informed Consent in Health Care

The notion of formal informed consent in healthcare is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, when patients accessed medical treatment, they expected to be relieved of their illness by physicians who are sworn to protect their health and wellbeing. They also accepted the unequal relationship they were entering into. Without patients submitting to treatment, physicians, typically, cannot administer treatment. This paper traces the modern history of informed consent to the Nuremberg trial where the elements that make up informed consent were articulated, albeit, in a research setting. This historical account brings into focus the factual basis for informed consent. It reinforces the importance of informed consent by highlighting the possibility of abuse by physicians, of their privileged position. It traces how the consent elements were expanded, reinterpreted and extended, in the form they currently are, to the clinical setting, and the role played by the courts. It concludes that autonomy through informed consent is very important in modern bioethics and deserves protection.

Conceptualizing Christianity and Christian Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials

Conceptualizing Christianity and Christian Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials Michael Lackey (bio) In the 2008 study The Aryan Jesus, Susannah Heschel does a first-rate analysis of the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, the Nazi-era think tank of the German Christian movement, which had a cozy relationship with the theology faculty at the University of Jena. Striking is the degree to which the institute’s Christian theology aligned with the Nazis’ political objectives, as Heschel so skillfully demonstrates. Through brief biographical sketches of institute leaders and members, careful analyses of the institute’s official program and conference proceedings, and insightful discussions of key publications and doctoral dissertations, Heschel gives readers a comprehensive and nuanced sense of the institute and its mission. And her conclusions are staggering. Put succinctly, the institute members were doing in the realm of the religious what the Nazis were doing in the realm of the political, which took the form of linking “the theological anti-Judaism that had long pervaded German Protestantism with the racist antisemitism promoted by the Nazis” (166). Despite the superior quality of Heschel’s research, striking is her failure to cite point 24 of the Nazi Party Program, which reads: “The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us” (qtd. in Steigmann-Gall, 14).1 Notice how the Nazis define their Christian agenda in opposition to Jewish materialism. The implication is this: the Nazis’ version of Christianity can only be realized insofar as it purges itself internally and externally of all that is Jewish (“Sie [the Party] bekämpft den jüdisch-materialistischen Geist in und außer uns”), a formulation that is similar [End Page 101] to the institute’s official mission statement, which is contained in the Godesberg Declaration. As Heschel claims, the centerpiece of the declaration is articulated through a question and answer: “‘Is Christianity derived from Judaism and is it its continuation and completion, or does Christianity stand in opposition to Judaism? We answer this question: Christianity is the unbridgeable religious opposition to Judaism’” (81). So that the institute’s theology reinforces the Nazis’ political agenda, the framers of the document define their objectives in a way that unmistakably echoes point 24: “‘The National Socialist worldview fights with all relentlessness against the political and spiritual influence of the Jewish race on our völkisch life’” (86). That these objectives in official programs are stunningly similar poses a significant challenge to one of the central claims of The Aryan Jesus, for according to Heschel, “Institute-sponsored research, by describing Jesus’s goal as the eradication of Judaism, effectively reframed Nazism as the very fulfillment of Christianity” (17). The implication is that the Nazis’ anti-Jewish agenda was not Christian in nature, which is why the institute’s Christian anti-Semitism is a reframing of Nazism. But given that the Nazi Party Program was penned in 1920 and that the Godesberg Declaration was written in 1939, it would make more sense to say that the institute was merely adopting the Nazis’ official version of Christianity rather than reframing Nazism as the fulfillment of Christianity. Indeed, many prominent Nazis argued that National Socialism was a decidedly Christian party well before the founding of the institute, as Richard Steigmann-Gall, Robert Michael, and I have demonstrated. How, then, are we to explain Heschel’s misstep? The answer, I contend, is certainly not shoddy scholarship. Her study of the institute is a model of intellectual precision and scholarly rigor. Rather, it has something to do with a conceptual framework regarding Christianity and the Nazis that has dominated since the Nuremberg Trials, specifically the trial of Julius Streicher, who likened himself at the trial to Martin Luther. In the following pages, I examine the conceptual framework that has led lawyers, judges, theologians, and scholars to dismiss the Nazis’ claims to be Christian as irrelevant or to overlook them altogether. To illustrate my point, I draw a clear line of connection between the approaches used at the Streicher Nuremberg Trial and in Heschel’s book...

Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: transitional justice, trial narratives, and historiography

List of Figures List of Abbreviations Foreword Michael Marrus Introduction: Nuremberg's Narratives - Revising the Legacy of the Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller Chapter 1.The Trials of Robert Kempner. From Stateless Immigrant to Prosecutor of the Foreign Office Dirk Poppmann Chapter 2. A Judge, a Prosecutor and a Mass Murderer: Courtroom Dynamics in the SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial Hilary Earl Chapter 3. Victims, Witnesses and the Ethical Legacy of the Nuremberg Medical Trial Paul Weindling Chapter 4. Semantics of Extermination: The Use of the New Term of Genocide in the Nuremberg Trials and the Genesis of a Master Narrative Alexa Stiller Chapter 5. The SS as the 'Alibi of a Nation'? Narrative Continuities from the Nuremberg Trials to the 1960s Jan Erik Schulte Chapter 6. Tales of Totalitarianism. Conflicting Narratives in the Industrialist Cases at Nuremberg Kim C. Priemel Chapter 7. From Clean Hands to Vernichtungskrieg: How the High Command Case Shaped the Image of the Wehrmacht Valerie Hebert Chapter 8. The Power of Images: Real and Fictional Roles of Atrocity Film Footage at Nuremberg Ulrike Weckel Chapter 9. The Fate of Nuremberg: The Legacy and Impact of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in Postwar Germany Devin Pendas Chapter 10. From IMT to NMT: The Emergence of a Jurisprudence of Atrocity Lawrence Douglas Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Simpliciana Bellica: Grimmelshausens Kriegsdarstellung und ihre Rezeption 1667–2006

The Thirty Years War is still often referred to as the Urkatastrophe of German history, the tragic beginning of modern Germany. Few individuals have contributed more to that tradition than Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. His first novel Simplicissimus Teutsch of 1668/69 marked the beginning of a ten-volume cycle of works completed in 1675. Often read simply as a picaresque account of the war and its horrors, it is in fact an extremely complex work. […] Italo Michele Battafarano’s new study revisits this extraordinary work and explores its reception from the appearance of the first volume to 2006. The book is divided into three parts. The first part examines Grimmelshausen’s strategies as an author and puts his work in the context of other writings of the period, with particular reference to autobiographical elements and their relation to fictions and metafictions. The second part explores the relationship between key elements of Grimmelshausen’s depiction of the Thirty Years War and the reality of the war. […] The third part […], devoted to Grimmelshausen’s reception, contains material that is genuinely new. According to Battafarano, the reception of Grimmelshausen’s work really began with the publication of the first critical edition by Adelbert von Keller in 1854, and specifically with the re-evaluation of the Thirty Years War in the wake of German unification in 1871. […] Battafarano then traces the work’s subsequent reception in the First and Second World Wars, finding Grimmelshausen cited as a precursor of pan-Germanism, as well as a proponent of every conceivable pro- and anti-war view. Two particularly fascinating sections examine French views of Simplicissimus in the 1940s and references to the work at the Nuremberg Trials. Finally, Battafarano finds Grimmelshausen invoked again in Godard’s Finis Germaniae (1991), in the German discussion of the Second Gulf War (1991), and in Grass’s 2006 autobiography. These chapters of Battafarano’s book are fascinating: suitably extended, they would have made an excellent book on their own. (Joachim Whaley, Simpliciana Bellica : [review], in Modern Language Review (July 2013), vol. 108, pt. 3, p. 993-4)

The Irish Banning of Elie Aron Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp (1954)

The Irish Banning of Elie Aron Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp (1954) W. J. Mc Cormack (bio) Two historical phenomena that might appear to have a logical connection—anti-Semitism and political sympathy with Nazi Germany—do not in the Irish instance harmonize so predictably. Several reasons could be advanced, including the very small number of Jews living in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. A second reason—the persistence of anti-British feeling after the Irish Free State was established in 1922—all too easily morphed into the pseudoequation of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” There were, of course, moments when the two phenomena lined up neatly, but these rarely occurred within a framework of any cultural significance. In August 1954 the London firm of Cassell published The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been involved as a lawyer in the Nuremberg trials. Despite connections with the legal and military establishment, the author had been subject to considerable pressure from the British government to desist from publication. Instead, he chose to resign from his post as assistant judge advocate general. Whatever Russell’s motives in writing may have been, the clumsy effort at suppression gave the book added publicity, not least because it indicated the lengths Britain might go to in reshaping history for Cold War purposes. At stake, in the government’s view, was German rearmament. Two months later, the Irish Censorship Board banned a book on a related theme. This was Elie Cohen’s Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp, originally published in Dutch and then in English translation. The two books differ in several ways. Russell had been an official legal adviser in the British zone of defeated Germany; Cohen had been an inmate of Auschwitz and other camps. Russell was mainly concerned with the responsibility of Wehrmacht personnel for war crimes, Cohen with the treatment of prisoners by their SS captors. Though the lawyer enshrined a sensationalist element in the title of his book (and some readers thought the photos [End Page 318] voyeuristic), in contrast Elie Cohen’s almost technical representation of his subject matter accurately matched the scientific and objective nature of his inquiry, despite his own agonizing involvement in the sufferings recorded. Cohen was Jewish (needless to say) and, at the time of his arrest, a medical doctor, a general practitioner. After the war, he sought to understand both the victims and perpetrators of concentration-camp behavior through Freudian psychology. The book first appeared as a Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Utrecht. In keeping with continental practice, Het Duitse Concentratiekamp; een Medishe en Psychologische Studie was published in 1952 as a small, commercially available edition by the Amsterdam house of H. J. Paris. When translated by M. H. Braaksma for publication first in 1953 by W. W. Norton of New York, and then in 1954 by Jonathan Cape of London, the title dropped whatever emotive shimmer the term “Duitse” (German) had in the original, emphasizing instead the universal human dimension. Given these qualities, the question necessarily arises: why did the Irish state choose to prohibit its citizens from reading the book? Some recapitulation of Irish censorship history is unavoidable.1 First, it should be noted that the legislation made no allowance for piecemeal censorship of books—requiring a paragraph to be removed here, or an epithet modified there—but provided only for a total exclusion of a publication in its entirety from sale or distribution in the state.2 In practice, the vast majority of the examined books originated outside the republic (usually in England) and were thus beyond Irish intervention in the business of preparation by publisher or printer. Therefore the board implemented a simple Yes/No judgment in each case. In turn, a phrase, sentence, or clutch of pages could be cited as evidence justifying total prohibition of a lengthy book, however atypical the excerpt might be in the work as a whole. Unlike its somewhat less ugly sister, the Irish Film Censor’s Office, it dealt in absolutes of a minuscule quality.3 The board that banned Cohen’s book...

On Hicks’s <em>First Films of the Holocaust</em>: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

On Hicks’s First Films of the HolocaustSoviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 Marat Grinberg First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946. By Jeremy Hicks. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-822-96224-3 (pb). US $28.95. The title of Jeremy Hicks’s provocative new study, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946, invariably suggests to the reader that he or she will be introduced to a discussion of unknown films about the Holocaust. Based on the material he has researched and uncovered, Hicks’s aim, however, is more nuanced. He writes, “In analyzing Soviet wartime films, my purpose is to extract them from their initial Sovietizing drive not just to employ them as archive images illustrating an alternative narrative of the Holocaust but also to look for any personal testimony they incorporate. This means paying particular attention to the films’ silences, gaps, and ellipses as constituting attempts to bear witness to the Holocaust that were themselves silenced, erased, and ignored” (15). At the same time, he claims, “The neglected images—Soviet war films—are cinema’s attempts to represent the Holocaust . . . which may be seen as a cinematic equivalent of Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s Black Book of Russian Jewry, a compilation of documents on the Nazi extermination of Soviet Jews that was banned in 1946” (2, 7).1 Hicks’s argument is intricate and contains a puzzle. If the films he analyzes—newsreels about atrocities committed by the Nazis in the occupied Soviet [End Page 219] territories in 1941 and 1942, wartime documentaries, and documentaries presented by Soviets at the Nuremberg trials—are representations of the Holocaust, then they must have been consciously and artistically conceived of as films about the event, recognizing it as a separate and perhaps unique catastrophe. As Hicks’s own extensive examination reveals, this was not the case. The films speak about crimes committed against the Soviet population and deemphasize any ethnic or cultural specificity of the victims. Furthermore, as Hicks perceptively points out regarding a newsreel released in 1942, which contains a few explicit Jewish markers, “As is typical for Soviet newsreel films, identifying a personal vision, a political or aesthetic authoring of these images, poses insuperable difficulties. . . . Even when the cameramen’s personal investments as Jews suggest that they filmed the Jewish subjects, the footage was edited and a commentary added by someone else in Moscow” (58). It is evident then that the “silences, gaps, and ellipses” cannot be seen as parts of the artistic design, which reveal its creators’ doubts and ambivalences, generating in the process a subversive work, but rather should be seen as elements of the highly orchestrated script handed down by the regime. The Soviet decision to present the atrocities within such a framework is hardly surprising. Confronted with the dissolution of the myth of Soviet internationalism at the front, when, as the poet Boris Slutsky put it, “a military mixture of languages led to the reacquaintance of peoples—from ‘the Moldovan to the Finn’” (Pushkin) and an increase in popular anti-Semitism, Stalin reverted to stressing the unity of the Soviet nation, on the one hand, and glorifying the Russian national sentiment, on the other. While the Soviets were clearly aware of the disproportionate number of Jews among the victims and spoke about it intermittently and at times openly throughout the war and shortly thereafter, it is not at all clear to what extent they realized that the extermination of the Jews constituted Hitler’s separate and total war. In the newsreels and documentaries discussed by Hicks, the viewer indeed often sees the Jewish dead, but how that contributes to or changes our historical knowledge of the Holocaust or the history of visual Holocaust representation is the question that the book rightly raises but does not completely answer. The only group that was immediately conscious of the separateness of the Jewish catastrophe was of course the Jews themselves. Their artistic, journalistic, and indeed cinematic responses to it—especially in Yiddish but also in other languages, including Russian—were...