JUSTICE - No. 66

11 Spring 2021 n No sanctions were imposed on Germany before the U.S. finally entered the war (December 1941). n President Roosevelt had substantial evidence about the growing dimensions of the Holocaust, including a personal visit by the courageous Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who gave him and Justice Frankfurter his personal accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, but failed to act. Because of the high levels of antisemitism in America at the time, President Roosevelt did not want to make World War II seem like a war for the Jews. n Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the NewYork Times, gave his editors instructions to bury stories of the Holocaust, concerned his paper would be viewed as a Jewish newspaper. n Nor did the American Jewish leadership do all they should have done to pressure President Roosevelt to act more urgently on behalf of Europe’s beleaguered Jews, likewise because of the fear of raising antisemitic sentiments. In the immediate post-war days, upon the liberation of death camps, Nazi atrocities were revealed and filmed at the insistence of Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower. While Americans were shocked by newsreels of the death camps, the staggering dimensions of the Shoah were not understood. The Holocaust was quickly given a back seat, as the focus of the U.S. and the western world was the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Some examples to illustrate this follow: n There was little demand for justice beyond the Nuremberg trials of only a tiny fraction of the Nazi perpetrators. n Jewish survivors were often poorly treated: — Jews trying to reclaim their confiscated homes in Poland and Lithuania were killed, and post-war property restitution laws in countries like France, Austria and the Netherlands were unsatisfactory. — They lived in squalid displaced persons (DP) camps after the war. General George Patton, whose forces liberated concentration camps, ordered guards to monitor survivors as if they were prison inmates. President Truman’s representative on refugees, Earl Harrison, sent to the President a scathing report after visiting the DP camps: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is left to wonder whether the Germans seeing this are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.” — Great Britain kept 52,000 survivors trying to reach Palestine in squalid camps in Cyprus, some up to five years. — Survivors rarely told their stories because they wanted to shield their children from the horrors they had gone through and because they needed to focus on building a new life in the U.S., Israel, or Europe. — Elie Wiesel had difficulty finding a publisher for his book, Night , as did other authors with their books. In 1962, Rabbi Irving Greenberg was denied the opportunity to teach a course on the Holocaust at Yeshiva University in NewYork because it was not considered a proper topic for academic study. The monstrous dimensions of the Holocaust, however, could not be hidden, although action to deal with its origins and consequences was slow and painful. The 1961 trial and conviction in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, one of the central perpetrators of the Holocaust against the Jewish people — following his dramatic abduction from hiding in Argentina — on 13 counts of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, was broadcast on television around the world. The trial gave a human face to the brutality of the Nazis and helped present the dimensions of the massive killing and looting of Jewish property that had been missing from the Nuremberg trials. In 1968, Arthur Morse published a book, While Six Million Died , to shockingly describe what President Roosevelt knew about the genocide of the Jews and how he failed to act. Morse was a colleague on the Hubert Humphrey presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his revelations changed my life and committed me to a course of pursuing justice for Holocaust survivors and honoring the memory of those who perished. A whole genre of books followed – books written by eminent historians, and thus wider audiences were introduced to the Holocaust. Films followed, e.g., in 1978 NBC’s widely watched mini-series “Holocaust”; Meryl Streep’s film, “Sophie’s Choice” based on a novel by William Styron; Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 nine-hour documentary“Shoah”; and Stephen Spielberg’s academy award winning 1993“Schindler’s List.”While the Holocaust seemed at last to be firmly embedded in the public consciousness, over the past decades it has been slipping. The Legal Process Beyond books and movies, the Holocaust created for the first time in the history of warfare a legal process by which a country that had abused and murdered