Lesson 17
Lesson Objectives:
As a result of this lesson, students will:
Key Glossary Terms:
The following glossary terms are used in Lesson 17.
Instructional Materials:
Teaching Sequence:
Homework Assignment:
Discussion: Reading 16D, “Aftermath and Liberation” (15 minutes)
Reading: Reading 17A, “Bringing the Perpetrators to Justice” (30 minutes)
Have students:
Question: What do you think are four of the main points in the reading “Aftermath and Liberation”?
Suggested Answers: Several points from this reading might be stressed.
The Allies liberated different camps in different ways. The Russians, hurrying to get to Berlin, entered Auschwitz and then moved on. They enlisted those who wanted or were able to fight and sent others either to hospitals or further into Russia.
The British and American troops were completely unprepared for what they found in the camps. As the quoted liberator says: “It simply boggles the mind.”
The Germans continued the murder of the Jews until the last possible moment. Jews were forced to march from Auschwitz and other Polish camps to concentration camps inside Germany. These forced marches became known as the Death Marches. From a military or practical point of view, the Death Marches made no sense. Thousands of Jews died during the marches – they froze, starved or were shot to death.
Still in the midst of the war, the liberators could only treat the victims quickly and in ways that reminded them of how they had been treated when they first arrived as prisoners of the Germans.
The ordeals of the Holocaust were not over after the camps were liberated, DP camps, while nothing like concentration or death camps, were nevertheless, unpleasant. Many who returned to their homes found they were not wanted and were subjected to violence at the hands of their former neighbors.
The remnants of European Jewry returned from concentration, labor and death camps or from hiding to discover that their families, their way of life, their institutions, their traditions, their culture, all had been destroyed. The comment from the survivor is a typical one: “What was there to live for?” Survivors were faced with the frightening task of starting “new lives” because the continuity of their lives was gone. To start over, now without parents or siblings, without communities or leaders, seemed to be an overwhelming task. Could they reconstruct their religious and social traditions, their culture, from scratch? Would they be able to do those things in strange lands?
Questions for Reading 17A
Do you think justice was achieved by the Nuremberg Trials? Should there have been other defendants? Suggestions for discussion: There have been those beginning with Goering but including some anti-Nazi legal scholars, who have argued that the trials were conducted by the victors and therefore lost their moral power. Goering insisted that he be tried on the basis of German laws of the 1930s. Some legal scholars wish that the Allies had searched for neutral judges – those who had not been involved with the war such as people from Switzerland or Sweden. Given the vast involvement of European bureaucrats, professionals, laborers, clergymen, etc. that this curriculum has discussed, it might have made more sense to indict organizations like medical associations, the German travel agencies and even the railways. In 1945 and 1946, those who were preparing the trials were not aware of the nature of the destruction process, or they were overwhelmed by the prospect of having to indict tens of thousands of people.
Do you agree with Chief Justice Jackson’s statements about not interfering in the laws and practices of other governments? Suggestions for discussion: The Nuremberg trials upheld the view that each country’s laws and internal affairs must be respected above any other consideration. Only where Germans interfered with other countries or where they imprisoned, enslaved or killed foreign nationals who were brought into Germany, like Polish slave laborers, were they found guilty. Thus, anti-Jewish laws passed against German Jews from 1933 to 1944 were not subject to the trials; imprisonment of German Jews in German concentration camps were not subject to the trials; deportations of German Jews were not subject the trials. If the International Tribunal had decided that German laws in Germany were subject to their judgment, that would have opened up the possibility of any country interfering in the affairs of another country simply because they found it unjust or in some other way offensive. It would have set a dangerous precedent of interference, allowing legal intervention on the basis of Nuremberg Trials.
Should there have been a separate category for crimes committed against the Jews? Suggestions for discussion: Only the Jews were killed as Jews; they were not killed because they were members of a national group, a military or political opponent. Only the Jews were to be completely annihilated – at least up to 1945. There were plans already being carried out in 1934 and 1944 for the similar murder of Poles, and the same policy was followed against the Gypsies. If the purpose of the Nuremberg Trails was to see justice done, it might have been made more sense to create a separate category called “crimes against the Jews,” or, as one historian has written, “crimes against the human status perpetrated on the body of the Jews.”