27 Spring 2026 he Nuremberg Trials, in which 22 members of the senior Nazi leadership were put on trial, began in November 1945, 80 years ago. The crimes adjudicated by the International Military Tribunal (IMT), established by the victorious Allied powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France—were crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, war crimes, and conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Holocaust was not defined as a crime in its own right requiring a separate trial and punishment. It was mentioned in the opening statement and later during the discussions of the four principal crimes, but no one was tried or punished for perpetrating the Holocaust itself. Why? The following text is an attempt to answer this painful question and to present the response of one Jewish group — the Abba Kovner Avengers group — which vehemently rose against the absence of the Holocaust as a clearly defined crime in the trials. This group, numbering 50 young men and women, the overwhelming majority of them partisans, ghetto fighters, or members of underground movements, was founded by the poet and partisan from the Vilna Ghetto and the nearby Rudniki forests, Abba Kovner. They set for themselves the goal of taking revenge on the German people by killing six million of them -- revenge on a scale that would correspond to the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered; revenge that would constitute a national response of a people that had been murdered against a people that had murdered; revenge that the entire world would know about; revenge that would serve as a warning, so that those who might plot further evil against the Jewish People would take it into account and fear for their lives.1 This act of revenge without trial seemed to them correct and necessary, because after experiencing firsthand the cruelty of the Germans and their allies, they believed that the laws in force before the Holocaust, both in the various countries and in international law, did not provide an adequate response to the unprecedented crimes committed during World War II. The legislation that prevailed before the war suited the reality that had existed beforehand; it offered no answer to crimes of this kind and on such a scale, since earlier lawmakers had not conceived of them. Therefore, different legislation and a different judicial system were required. It was clear to them that a long time would pass before it was decided who would establish appropriate legislation, additional time until it would be enacted, and still more time before trials could be conducted on the basis of the new laws. Another decisive question concerned the identity of the judges who would sit in judgment, and whether they could withstand such a burden. The members of the group had no doubt that these judges would be individuals who most likely had not seen with their own eyes what had occurred during the war, and that they would almost certainly not be Jews who had personally experienced the Holocaust. They might struggle to understand the suffering endured by the Jewish People, but they would not be able to imagine the reality emerging from the testimonies and documents presented to them, and therefore would not render just judgment. Meanwhile, much time would pass, and who knew how, or whether, the Holocaust would be remembered if a clear and decisive act were not carried out to prevent forgetting? Moreover, as the Avengers group sat and discussed these questions of judicial deficiency, its members remembered very well the Nazi legislative system that had destroyed their lives: a complete system that arose ex nihilo, with all its details, regulations, and judges, after it had eliminated the judicial system that had been in force during the Weimar Republic. The Nazi system was guided by the racial theory, founded on the principle of inequality among human beings, and it determined who would live and who would die, and how. They also remembered vividly their The Nuremberg Trials, the Holocaust and Revenge Dina Porat 1. For the story of the group see Dina Porat, NAKAM – THE HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS WHO SOUGHT FULL-SCALE REVENGE, (Stanford University Press 2023). T
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