Abstract
Ever since the news of the liberated concentration camps had filled the pages of British newspapers, the majority attitude of the press was that Nazi criminality, including the Final Solution, had to be recorded and remembered. Throughout the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies were wrestling with the question of how the unbelievable scenes, exposed by advancing Allied armies who liberated concentration camps, and the criminality of the Nazi regime that had made them possible, should be investigated.
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Notes
For example, see Bradley E. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (London: André Deutsch, 1977), pp. 46–73. Sidney Alderman, while meriting the negotiations as successful, commented that the Russians ‘would agree to a matter one day and repudiate the agreement the next’. See Sidney S. Alderman, ‘Negotiating on War Crimes Prosecutions, 1945’, in Raymond Dennett and Joseph E. Johnson (eds), Negotiating with the Russians (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1951), p. 53.
For the four-power negotiations that finally culminated in the Charter, see, for example, Ann and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (New York: Atheneum, 1986), pp. 50–90; Smith, Reaching Judgment, esp. Chapters 2 and 3; Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, pp. 18–70; and Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, esp. pp. 17–28.
International Military Tribunal (hereafter IMT), Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg 14 November 1945–1 October 1942, 42 vols (Nuremberg: International Military Tribunal, 1947), 1, pp. 10–16.
At the beginning of his opening speech, Jackson argued that ‘civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored [crimes of the Nazis], because it cannot survive their being repeated’. IMT 2, p. 99. For a similar point made in the Nordic press, see Antero Holmila, ‘Portraying Genocide: The Nuremberg Trial, the Press in Finland and Sweden and the Holocaust, 1945–46’, Acta Societatis Martensis, 1 (2006), p. 209.
Leon Poliakov, Le Procès de Nuremberg (Paris: Julliárd, 1971), p. 209 cited in Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, p. 192.
For the role of legal processes as didactic and historical instrument, see Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Between Impunity and Show Trials’, Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law, Yearbook, 6 (2002), pp. 1–35.
The opening of the Nuremberg trial was reported by about 250 journalists from 11 different countries. See Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 95 and Robert Siegel, Im intresse der Gerechtigkeit. Die Dachauer Kriegsverbrecherprozesse 1945–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1992), p. 41.
Gustav M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), pp. 30–1.
R. W. Cooper, The Nuremberg Trial (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1947), p. 175.
Richard Overy, Interrogations. The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London and New York: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2001), p. 149. For an Allied interest in him, see esp. pp. 143–53.
See also Hilary Earl, ‘Scales of Justice: History, Testimony and the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg’, in Jeffry Diefendorf (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. 325–51.
See also Bloxham, ‘The missing camps of Aktion Reinhard’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 118–31.
Stig Dagerman, Tysk Höst (Stockholm: P.A. Nordstedt & Söners Förlag, 1947).
Stig Dagerman, German Autumn (London: Quartet Books, 1988), p. 13.
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© 2011 Antero Holmila
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Holmila, A. (2011). Responding to the Nazi Crimes: The British Press and the Nuremberg Trial. In: Reporting the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945–50. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305861_5
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