Michael Marrus

"The Holocaust at Nuremberg"

Marrus's research casts new light on the Jewish aspect of the Nuremberg trials. Although Jews and non-Jews had a common interest in submerging the subject of the Holocaust among the topics deliberated by the court, the Nuremberg trials nevertheless constituted the first setting where Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish policy was exposed and discussed openly and uninhibitedly. The author investigates the manner in which the theme was handled by the prosecutors during their examination of witnesses, and the various presentations of their findings to the judges. At the same time some of the defendants are described, as well as their reactions to the indictments against them.

Despite the fact that the court discounted the persecution of the Jews prior to 1939 and failed to draw the necessary conclusions with respect to a number of Holocaust-related issues, nevertheless "the murder of European Jewry could be authoritatively pointed to as an established fact of great historical importance," and its exposure to the world "began the removal of the Jewish catastrophe from the wartime Jewish isolation of inner Jewish suffering, of lobbying and beseeching the wider society to recognize, to intervene, to rescue, to acknowledge the Jews' private agony."