Abstract
During World War II, Auschwitz was not solely a death camp; it had multiple functions as a concentration, labor, and extermination camp, and its victims included Jews (as the majority) and non-Jews alike. Yet, in the course of time it has come to serve as a metonym for the Holocaust and for genocide. Examines the three postwar trials at which Auschwitz emerged as the paramount symbol of the Holocaust: the Lüneburg trial (also known as "the Belsen trial" or "Kramer trial"), conducted by the British Military Tribunal in September-November 1945; the Höss trial, held in Poland in March 1947; and the Auschwitz trial of 1963-65, held in West Germany. In Lüneburg, many of the defendants had served at Auschwitz before they were transferred to Bergen-Belsen; thus, the tribunal had to consider also the crimes perpetrated in that camp. Although the tribunal was most concerned with crimes perpetrated against British and Allied nationals, and showed much distrust of Jewish witnesses, Jews constituted the majority of witnesses for the prosecution and attested that the fate of Jews in Auschwitz was different from the fate of non-Jews there, and that the Nazis carried out a genocide of Jews. At Höss's trial, the Polish judiciary tried to consider the Nazi genocide of Jews on a par with the mass murder of Slavs, "second in turn" after the Jews. At the Auschwitz trial, much attention was drawn to the murder of political prisoners. However, both the Poles in 1947 and the West Germans in the 1960s focused on the murder of Jews as a distinct element within the panoply of Nazi atrocities.