Judgment
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 9
In the spring of 1945, as the war finally came to an end, the world at last confronted the atrocities the Nazis had committed. Benjamin Ferencz, a young American lawyer assigned to investigate those atrocities, recalls:
It was a grisly assignment. Among my duties, I had to dig up bodies of young American flyers who had parachuted or crashed, and were beaten to death by enraged German mobs or murdered by local Gestapo officials. This, however, was merely the initiation of horrors yet to come. It was not until I joined the American troops advancing toward German concentration camps that I realized the full extent of the
Nazi terror...
It was often impossible to tell whether the skeleton-like inmates lying near-naked in the dust were dead or alive. Those who could walk had been whisked away by panic-stricken SS guards. Their flight was made visible only by the trail of dead bodies strewn along the road. The bedraggled prisoners who could not keep pace with the retreat were shot on the spot and left dead or dying. I helped to uncover many
mass graves where innocent victims had been massacred. I had peered into hell.1
Alan Moorehead, a British journalist, had a similar reaction to his first glimpse of Bergen-Belsen that same spring. “With all one’s soul, one felt: ‘This is not war. Nor is it anything to do with here and now, with this one place at this one moment. This is timeless and all mankind is involved in it. This touches me and I am responsible. Why has it happened? How did we let it happen?’”
Earlier chapters considered how and why the Holocaust happened. Chapter 9 focuses
on questions related to personal responsibility not only for the Holocaust but also for the
war itself and the way that war was fought. It therefore raises such questions as:
- Should those who participated in the atrocities committed during the war bepunished? If so, who ought be held accountable?
- Should those individuals be tried before a court of law? What is the purpose of a trial? Is it to punish evil-doing? Or is to set a precedent for the future?
- Who should be tried? Are individuals responsible for their crimes if they have obeyed the laws of their nation? Or are there higher laws? If so, what are those laws?
- How does one determine punishment? Is everyone equally guilty? Or do some bear more responsibility than others? Can an entire nation be guilty?
Chapter 9 explores these questions by focusing on the international trials held after
the war. John Fried, the Special Legal Consultant to the United States War Crimes
Tribunals at Nuremberg, Germany, from 1947 to 1949, explained the purpose of those
trials:
The awesome, unprecedented nature of the Nazi war crimes demanded a response from the victorious Allies after World War II. That response, embodying the shock and outrage of mankind, was the Nuremberg Tribunals, in which the Nazi leadership was tried for its crimes. The Allied judges sought...to decide...if the Nazi civilian and military leaders had instigated a war of aggression and then pursued that war by unacceptable means and in violation of normal stands [and] to determine an individual’s responsibility for crimes which could not be disputed. No one, that is, could deny the reality of Dachau
and the mass slaughter of civilians; the question to be answered was: who was responsible?2
Between 1945 and 1950, the fate of 199 individuals was decided in thirteen separate trials held in Nuremberg. Those trials established important precedents that have become “part of the unwritten laws of nations in the years since.” After 1950, similar trials for war crimes were held not only in Europe but also in Asia. Hannah Arendt attended one of those trials – the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann. She found that it raised important questions about good and evil. In her view, thinking is the urgent work of a species that is
responsible for its own survival. She therefore wondered if the habit of “examining
whatever comes to pass can be among the considerations that make men abstain from
evil-doing or even actually condition them against it.”3
Download Chapter 9 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Benjamin Ferencz, Planethood (Vision Books, 1988), 14-16.
2 John Fried, Trial at Nuretnberg: Freedom and Responsibility (National Project Center for Film and
Humanities and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, copyright 1973).
3 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (Harcourt, 1977), 5.
