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History (2013) - Pictures of Peace and Justice from Nuremberg to the Holocaust

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Abstract

The present article examines three ‘missing’ films and their significance for memory and historiography of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust: Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today , Memory of the Camps and Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe . Between them, the three ‘missing’ films contain material that is absent from collective memory and, in some regards, scholarship. The ‘missing’ films reflect the ‘missing’ message of the ‘real’ Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s. They offer the material that, with wider circulation, might have adjusted the character and compound fallacies of collective memory, and filled a ‘gap’ in that memory. The article contributes to the historiographies of film, Nuremberg and the Holocaust in three ways. First, we offer the first scholarly treatment of the document and film Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today . Secondly, we offer the first examination of film and the IMT beyond the courtroom. Finally, we bring together the little‐known and little‐registered Soviet‐Polish material of Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe , which captures the apparatus of the Nazi extermination camps, in a unified analysis with the more familiar western Allies’ film and the Nuremberg narrative, which, uniquely for its time, clearly identified J ews as the primary victims of the Nazis. In doing so, we show that both film evidence of those camps and a focus on J ews as primary victims could have emerged far earlier had these film documents not been suppressed, unfinished or overlooked.

Article

Pictures of Peace and Justice from Nuremberg to the Holocaust: Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, Memory of the Camps, and Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe – Missing Films, Memory Gaps and the Impact beyond the Courtroom of Visual Material in War Crimes Prosecutions

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today is a film made in the wake of the prosecution and conviction, or acquittal, of twenty-two major Nazi war criminals at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945–6.1 Memory of the Camps is a film that was being made prior to that prosecution as a record of the conditions found as the Allies liberated Nazi concentration camps. Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe (also known as Vernichtungslager Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy) was made and shown already in Soviet liberated Poland in 1944. All three films were consciously conceived, as the Memory of the Camps narration puts it, as a 'document for our collective memory'. Yet, all three have lingered in obscurity for most of the subsequent sixty years. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today has not received academic attention. Memory of the Camps has been the subject of only one article and some passing references,2 as has Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe.3 These film documents have been completely, or largely, overlooked in their own right, as part of the historiography of film of Nuremberg and the Holocaust, and as part of the general memory of Nuremberg and the Holocaust (discrete, but linked, phenomena, as these are). Addressing these 'missing' films in this article has broader importance than merely completing the record. They are significant for the memory and understanding of both Nuremberg and the Holocaust. These 'missing' films reflect the missing memory of something that might be dubbed the 'real' Holocaust in the 1940s and 1950s. (We discuss this use of 'real' Holocaust below.) The material in these films is, in a sense, the missing link that allowed the fallacious compound memory, noted in different ways by Lawrence Douglas and Donald Bloxham,4 to be formed in which Nuremberg was about the Holocaust, which it was not, and the images of the western camps shown at Nuremberg are taken to be images of the 'real' Holocaust, which they were not.

The present article contributes to the historiographies of film, Nuremberg and the Holocaust in three ways. First, we offer the first scholarly treatment of the document and film that is Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today and show how it clearly identifies the Jews as the primary victims of the extermination campaign, unlike other films, or histories of the time. Secondly, we offer the first examination of film and the IMT beyond the Courtroom – past analysis has treated use in the courtroom at Nuremberg,5 or there and in other courtrooms,6 or in passing.7 Finally, we present the first analysis to bring together the little known and little registered Soviet-Polish material of Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe, which captures the apparatus of the extermination camps, in a unified analysis with the more familiar western Allies' film of the western concentration camps. In doing so, we show that both film evidence of those camps and a focus on Jews as primary victims could have emerged far earlier had these film documents not been suppressed, unfinished or overlooked.

The article proceeds in five sections. First, we consider the American film used at the IMT to support charges of waging aggressive war and how this was subsequently taken as evidence of the Holocaust against European Jewry, as that phenomenon came to be recognized in its own right, identifying a 'gap' in collective memory.8 Secondly, we introduce the film documents Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today and Memory of the Camps. Thirdly, we introduce Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe and link it to the extermination camp 'gap' in both the other films and collective memory. Finally, we turn to integrated analysis of the three films, showing that, between them, their content embraces material that, had they been widely available, could have shaped memory and historiography in different ways.

On Day 8 of the IMT, the US prosecution took the somewhat radical step of introducing film as evidence at the trial, showing Nazi Concentration Camps, a film compiled especial...

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Footnotes

  1. We are grateful to many people for their support in conducting the research for this project and, especially, in preparing this article. Among them are Omer Bartov, who set it going, Sandra Schulberg, Jeremy Hicks, Toby Haggith, Kevin Reynolds, Ben O'Loughlin and Evelyn Welch, who chaired the first presentation of what became this article and who was director of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Beyond Text Programme, which funded this project and of which it was a part. Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Pictures of Peace and Justice: Documentation, Evident and Impact of Visual Material in Relation to International War Crimes Prosecutions’, Beyond Text Programme, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Award AH/H015566/1 [hereafter PPJ].
  2. Elizabeth Sussex, ‘The Fate of F3080’, Sight and Sound, April 1984 [hereafter Sussex, ‘The Fate of F3080']; Christian Delages La Vérité par l'image: De Nuremberg au procès Milosevic (Paris, 2006) [hereafter Delages, L'Image].
  3. Stuart Liebmann, ‘Documenting the Liberation of the Camps: The Case of Aleksander Ford's Vernichtungslager Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy (1944)’ [hereafter Liebmann, ‘Documenting'], in Lessons and Legacies, vii: the Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Chicago, 2006), pp. 333–351.
  4. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgement: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001) [hereafter Douglas, Memory]; Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001) [hereafter Bloxham, Genocide on Trial].
  5. Delages, L'Image; Susan Twist, ‘Evidence Of Atrocities or Atrocious Use of Evidence: The Controversial Use of Atrocity Film at Nuremberg’, Liverpool Law Review, xxvi (2005), 267–302.
  6. Douglas, Memory.
  7. Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial with a New Foreword (New York, 2010), pp. 160–161 and 169–70; Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: a Personal Memoir (New York, 1993), pp. 186, 200, 316; Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg (New York, 1994), p. 143; Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 82.
  8. Collective memory involves ‘the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often pushing aside accuracy and authenticity so as to accommodate broader issues of identity formation, power and authority, and political affiliation’ (Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998) [hereafter Zelizer, Remembering], p. 3). It is the product of absorbing certain elements of the past into received frames in, or for, the present.
  9. Harry W. Mazal MBE, ‘The Dachau Gas Chambers’, last modified 11 Dec. 2010, The Holocaust History Project, available at www.holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/, last accessed 24 March 2011; Affidavit of Franz Blaham Nurneberg, Germany, 9 Jan. 1946, in Richard Overy, Interrogations: Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite (2001) [hereafter Overy, Interrogations], p. 379.
  10. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 11.
  11. Delages, L‘Image, p. 148.
  12. Douglas, Memory, p. 63.
  13. Sources of the Holocaust, ed. Steve Hochstadt (Basingstoke, 2004), p. 260.
  14. Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg (1977), pp. xiv–xv.
  15. Omer Bartov, ‘Locating the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, xiii (2011), 120–129, at p. 123.
  16. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961).
  17. Bartov, Locating, p. 121.
  18. Fr. Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York, 2008).
  19. See Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford, 2009), p. 251; Philip Spencer, Genocide after 1945 (New York, 2012), p. 1.
  20. Time, 21 Aug. 1944, contained what was probably the first published use of this term in the west, as the title for a piece about the liberation of Majdanek by the Soviets. There is no reference to Jews or anything Jewish in the report. The term was also used as the title of a report by Konstantin Simonov, Das Vernichtungslager (Moscow, 1944). Although the term was not used in official designations, the clearest confirmation that the distinction existed and was understood by those responsible for the killing camps is the clarification offered by one of Adolf Eichmann's deputies, Dieter Wisliciny, as cited by Richard Overy, who reports his being asked to identify the ‘extermination’ (‘vernichtungs’) camps, which he did, including Auschwitz and Majdanek, before clarifying that camps such as Belsen, Dachau and Mauthausen were ‘normal concentration camps from the point of view of the department of Eichmann’. ‘Extract from the Interrogation of Dieter Wisliceny, taken at Nuremberg on 15 November 1945 by. Lt. Col. Smith W. Brookhard and Mre Sender Jaari’, in Overy, Interrogations, pp. 356–7.
  21. ‘Killing sites’ is the term used by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organization and centre in Israel, although some of the places covered by this label are sometimes referred to as ‘minor camps’ in other places. A cartographic typology and taxonomy of camps and sites, and classification of locations, including the six death camps, can be found at http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/learning_environments/sites_map.asp.
  22. Omer Bartov, ‘Genocide and the Holocaust: What Are We Arguing About?’, Conference Paper, ‘The Holocaust and Modern Genocide’, organized by the Wiener Library and the Helen Bamber Centre, Kingston University, The British Academy, 11 June 2010.
  23. Zelizer, Remembering, p. 5.
  24. Ibid., pp. 10 and 13.
  25. In our research, this image of the Belsen bulldozer's pushing emaciated, typhoid-infected corpses into mass graves is a salient image. Older respondents, when invited openly to recall images they associated with ‘war crimes’, clearly recalled the images of Belsen and ‘horrendous, emaciated bodies being shoved into pits’ and of ‘dead bodies being pushed together with a machine and into a pit’. This memory serves as a symbol for the Holocaust, even though, as we note in the main article, neither it, nor the camp it represented, were part of the Holocaust, understood as the extermination of European Jews, particularly in specially created death camps. Thus, the key image in this collective memory is not that which it was believed to embody. PPJ, FG021.
  26. The following section is based on presentations by Sandra Schulberg in Toronto and London, as well as Sandra Schulberg, PPJ. Interview 11.
  27. Bernstein notes that Hitchcock, a friend, was ‘treatment advisor’. In effect, he was a consultant, whose two contributions were: first, the idea to draw circles around the map depicting the named concentration camp locations, so as to allow the suggestion that all the people in all the villages within the circle must have known about them (they were not abstractions from any real physical location); and, secondly, to use wide establishing shots to show that the events depicted in closer range could not have been staged. For more on the unfinished film's history, see Sussex, ‘The Fate of F3080’.
  28. Memory of the Camps’ Shooting Script, Imperial War Museum (IWM) London. The IWM holds the original print of the incomplete film, which, at the time of research and writing, was the subject of a project to restore and complete it. This emerged in our engagement with Toby Haggith at the Museum, in the context of our research on visual material and war crimes, where he facilitated our viewing the original shooting script and materials, as well as the additional material the Museum held that had been intended for the film. The additional material comprises a Soviet newsreel special report about the Majdanek camp and one shot of Auschwitz, which would have been taken by Roman Karmen's Soviet military film production unit and used in his film of Auschwitz. Liebmann refers to a newsreel scheduled for screening in New York, which he says no longer exists (‘Documenting’, p. 343). Given the eleven-minute length he cites, we judge that it is certain that the special report held by the IWM and containing the material to be used in completing Memory of the Camps is the same newsreel Liebmann reports as being advertised. We are, of course, grateful to Toby Haggith and the IWM for their cooperation with the research on which the present article is based, arranging viewing of the various film holdings and for facilitating our viewing the shooting script and other materials held by the Museum.
  29. The PBS version can be viewed universally at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/camp/, albeit with the first four minutes of images missing. In the missing part, the Memory of the Camps title appears on screen and then a title reporting ‘Narrated by Trevor Howard’, while the montage reflecting the Nazis’ rise to power and aggression in Europe familiar from The Nazi Plan are shown.
  30. Ian Buruma, ‘The Twisted Art of Documentary’, New York Review of Books, 25 Nov. 2010 [hereafter Buruma, ‘Twisted Art'].
  31. Sandra Schulberg, PPJ Interview 11; Introduction to screening of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, Richmond Hill, Toronto, 5 Nov. 2011; Buruma, ‘Twisted Art’. Certainly, the unsourced declaration about this kind of material in one source seems misplaced and clearly incorrect, given that material was accessible, if not generally distributed, viz.: ‘The footage that screened in 1945 was eventually confiscated by the US government and not seen again for several years’. Wilson and Crowder-Taroborelli, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
  32. http://nurembergfilm.org.
  33. The range of places to screen the film is available at http://nurembergfilm.org/index.shtml, accessed 30 June 2012.
  34. Buruma, ‘Twisted Art’.
  35. Liebmann, rightly, describes it as the ‘most important ever made about the Holocaust, not least because it has a legitimate claim to be the first such work’ (Liebmann, ‘Documenting’, p. 334).
  36. Douglas, for example, makes no reference to this film in Memory. Delages does, but only in the context of the courtroom and the defendants’ responses. (L'Image, p. 147) Jeremy Hicks shows awareness of it, but fails to register its significance. (Hicks, ‘Confronting the Holocaust: Mark Donskoi's The Unvanquished’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, iii (2009), 33–51, at p. 35.) The only developed academic account is Liebmann's ‘Documenting’.
  37. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York, 1947), p. 162.
  38. Anna Misiak, ‘Aleksander Ford and Film Censorship in Poland’, Kinema (Fall 2003), 19–31.
  39. The film used by the Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg also included some material relating to the Auschwitz camp, but this camp had been mostly destroyed before the Soviets reached it. One shot of a crematorium was the only key image of evidence relating to the gas chambers destined to be used in Memory of the Camps. Shooting Script, IWM.
  40. Liebmann, ‘Documenting’, p. 340.
  41. Ibid., p. 342.