Laura Jockusch

Prompted by recent historiographical debates between Polish and German historians over the roles that citizens of countries occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany played in the Holocaust, this chapter explores how Jewish and German historians have written about the complex division of labour between German and local perpetrators. It shows that while Jewish historians—building on their own experiences of persecution—strongly advocated the study of local perpetrators alongside Nazi perpetrators, German historians have long ignored the subject as they focused on German perpetrators, institutions, and sources. Finally it examines how Saul Friedländer’s concept of ‘integrated history’ and the turn to wartime and post-war Jewish sources prepared the ground for a transnational history of the Holocaust that integrates the roles of non-German perpetrators into the historical narrative.

In August 1944 the Central Jewish Historical Commission was established in newly liberated Lublin. This commission, headed by Philip Friedman and staffed mainly by survivors who had had no historical training before the war, succeeded in collecting over 3,000 survivor testimonies and thousands of pages of Nazi documents, along with diaries, memoirs, photographs, etc. In October 1947 the Polish authorities disbanded the Commission, and its initiative was continued by the Central Historical Commission, established in Munich in November 1945. The latter also amassed many testimonies and documents which, after the Commission was closed in January 1949, were shipped to Yad Vashem. Over the years, study of the Holocaust passed to professional historians in Israel, Poland, Germany, and elsewhere, who denigrated the non-academic methods of the Commissions and viewed the accounts of the former victims with suspicion; the founders of both Commissions did not educate a second generation of scholars who could have continued their approach and methodology. It is due to these factors that the huge amount of materials collected by the Commissions have been neglected by scholars. Only in the 1990s did historians begin to write scholarly accounts of the Holocaust that considered both perpetrator and victim perspectives and acknowledged the value of the work that had been done by the two Commissions.

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.

This article examines the multifaceted ways in which Jews reacted to the trial against Nazi Germany's “major war criminals,” which the governments of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France held at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in the years 1945–46. Though the history of war-crime trials in postwar Germany and the representation of the Holocaust in Allied proceedings currently find widespread interest among historians, the roles that Jews played in and around the Nuremberg tribunal have largely been neglected. This article explores the problem of Jewish representation at Nuremberg and analyzes the attempts by Jewish individuals and organizations to intervene on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust. Moreover, it explores contemporaneous Jewish debates over German guilt, the agency and involvement of survivors in the fight for legal redress, and the possibilities for post-Holocaust justice in the framework of an international military trial.