Nuremberg Trials, c. 1945-1946. Photo: Flickr.
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials organized by the four Allied powers (Britain, France, the US, and the Soviet Union) to hold senior Nazis accountable for waging war and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II.
During the initial trials (1945-46), 19 of 22 Nazis on trial were found guilty and sentenced to either death by hanging or lengthy prison terms.
It was from recently watching an engrossing and very moving documentary called Black Honey: The Life and Art of Abraham Sutzkever that I learned, to my dismay, that only one Jewish Holocaust survivor testified at the Trials. The film, produced in Israel and narrated, in part, by the American Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse, follows Sutzkever's incredible journey; from the Yiddish literary circles of inter-war Poland, to the Vilna (Vilnius) ghetto during World War II, where his mother and child were murdered, to living with partisans in the forests near Vilna. (Released in 2018, the film is freely available on You Tube.)
Sutzkever and his wife were rescued during the war by Stalin, in response to the urgings of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization created to influence international public opinion in support of the Soviet struggle with Nazi Germany.
After the war, Sutzkever was one of eight Soviet witnesses, and, as mentioned above, the only Jewish Holocaust survivor, to testify at Nuremberg.
Sutzkever and his wife made their way to Mandatory Palestine in 1947, where he resumed his literary career, founding the Yiddish literary magazine Di goldene keyt (The Golden Chain), a leading Yiddish language literary journal of the post-war period. Sutzkever was awarded the Israel Prize in 1985 for his contributions to Yiddish Literature.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Sutzkever testified about Nazi atrocities in Vilna and nearby Ponari for five hours, refusing to sit, as though reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Sutzkever asked to address the tribunal in Yiddish, but the Soviets insisted that he testify in Russian.
I wondered how a major post-war trial of leading Nazis, some directly responsible for the murder of two thirds of European Jewry, could be so uninterested in hearing about Jewish suffering. So I typed the following question into my smartphone: Why did only one Jewish Holocaust survivor testify at Nuremberg?
The answer, provided by Google AI, pointed out that the prosecution case was centered on the use of captured German documentation to prove Nazi guilt, rather than focusing on victim testimony, which may have raised issues of bias or faulty memory.
The last point, about witness reliability, raised a further concern in my mind. After all, the central feature of the 1961 Eichmann Trial in Israel was the testimony of over 100 eyewitnesses.
I discovered that I wasn't the only one asking such questions. Laura Jokusch, a professor at Brandeis University, also wondered about the lack of Jewish Holocaust witnesses at Nuremberg.
In an article (Jewish Social Studies, 2012) called “Justice at Nuremberg?â€, Jokusch noted the Allies treated the persecution and murder of European Jewry as a subset of other crimes. They were reluctant to give the Jewish victims central billing. The Americans did not want to contribute to the impression they had been fighting the war for the Jews, the British were wary of encouraging Jewish Zionist aims in Palestine, the French were keen on minimizing the Vichy collaborationist role during the war, and the Soviets preferred to avoid highlighting Jewish ethnicity and victimhood. In fact, Jokusch suggests this may explain why the Soviet prosecutors prevented Sutzkever's use of Yiddish at the Trials.
Most importantly, Nuremberg demonstrated the essential role of a Jewish state in ensuring Jewish survival. For without a state to intervene in an international legal system based on state representation, a multinational group such as the Jews had no voice.
The scarcity of Jewish Holocaust testimony at the Nuremberg Trials is an important reminder of Jewish powerlessness in the absence of a Jewish state.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
