Filming The End of the Holocaust

Front matter

WAR, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

John J. Michalczyk

Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments

Introduction Prelude to Nuremberg: The Allies Seek Justice

2 The US Signal Corps Encounters Atrocities

Foreword

Raymond G. Helmick, S.J.

This book, a culmination of what John Michalczyk has done over several decades about the Holocaust, much of it in films and publications, deals in the most practical way with the effect of the film medium in dealing with this horror. The Allies employed film at the end of World War II as they sought a process to come to terms with the mass killings. The International Military Tribunal, which they established well before the end of 1945 to conduct the trials at Nuremberg, made extensive use of evidentiary film, and since then that same film has held the attention of interpreters and commentators. The screening of these films has played a key role in shaping public response to the Holocaust, in the United States, Germany and elsewhere.

As a Jesuit who did his theology studies in Germany somewhat later, 1960-4, I can attest myself to the impact the raw data that films of which you will read in this book made on my fellow students. Attending the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial (1963-5) I witnessed that the Holocaust was still most relevant. Frequent occasions were also still found to show films about the concentration camps to remind Germans of this tragedy. When I reflect now on the study by Donald Shriver’ on the ways today’s German culture embodies remembrance of Nazi crimes, I am reminded how these films will have been shown, throughout their education, to generations of younger Germans.

Eventually the images of the atrocities and serious violations of human rights worked their way into such films as Schindler's List, Amen., and The Pianist, which have made this fearful chapter of our history intelligible to the people of more recent times. But their most important impact originally was as direct visual evidence against the Third Reich during the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-6 to reinforce the countless records and other National Socialist Party documents produced by the leaders. The attitudes of the three commanding powers toward the Nuremberg Trials differed enormously. The British would have been happier simply to execute the foremost Nazi leaders out of hand, reminiscent perhaps of the way they had confronted colonial uprisings. It was for the Americans, eventually Roosevelt at Yalta and then Truman, to insist that there must be trials and a legal process for judgment on the perpetrators of these staggering crimes. The Soviets

Foreword xi agreed casually because, like the Nazis themselves, they were thoroughly cognizant of the uses of show trials. They approached the International Military Tribunal as simply a pretense for executions that would be a foregone conclusion.

This mindset affected the quality of the films that were shown during the trials. They were offered as both pedagogical and evidentiary. While it was easy enough to edit film at that time, there were not the sophisticated ways of manipulating images that are familiar to filmmakers today. Chief Justice Robert H. Jackson of the United States Supreme Court, who would be the leading figure in the court, insisted on the use of authenticated film, features as well as documentaries produced by the Nazi Party. Jackson, asked by Truman to accept the role of US Chief of Counsel, had become familiar with the work of Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation—Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress, and his striking new term to describe these crimes as “genocide.” Jackson was fully aware of the dangers of instituting a mere instrument of victors’ justice, of which these trials would be suspect since they would institute new international laws in the aftermath of victory. He would not yet have been aware of the observation by Guy Liddell, head of counter-intelligence in Britains MI5, that the Soviets, who would sit in judgment on the Nazis, had been doing the same things for twenty-eight years that the Nazis had done for fourteen.

What sort of films, then, had Jackson and the other masters of the proceedings to work with prior to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal? The Nazis themselves, in their meticulous way, had preserved scenes of episodes of the brutality of the camps, as well as the Warsaw Ghetto, and show trials like that of the July 20 plotters in the assassination attempt against Hitler. Much of the material, unfortunately for the prosecution, was later destroyed by the Nazis in order to eliminate traces of their evil deeds. The Allies, as they liberated one death camp after another, had filmed extensively the handiwork of the perpetrators, including the famous spectacle of dead bodies being bulldozed, tumbling one over the other, into mass graves at Bergen-Belsen. Scenes of decomposing bodies so horrified General Dwight D. Eisenhower that he wanted the civilized world to know about it, as will later be discussed in detail. These images would eventually become the climactic horror in countless films on the Holocaust. The films of liberation were crucial as visual testimony and were not to be tampered with in any way. The Soviets had similar experience, with their master filmmaker Roman Karmen recording every detail of Nazi atrocities, and each film carried a sworn affidavit of authenticity. The Soviet film in the eyes of the West, however, had to be treated generally with the suspicion that it had been edited in the ways familiar for show trials and so reduced to propaganda.

xii Foreword

Propaganda use of such film footage was and remains a constant hazard. The Nazis themselves had known how to use film as propaganda for their campaign against the Jews, especially with The Eternal Jew and Jud Siiss, both released in 1940. The brilliant films of Leni Riefenstahl had been staples of the Nazi presentation of themselves as icons of Germany’s rebirth after the humiliations of World War I and the Versailles Treaty. Riefenstahl’s films, considered as art, historical documentation, and/or propaganda, were produced hand-in-hand with the political planning of the various National Socialist congress rallies. Given this close rapport of Riefenstahl with the Nazi hierarchy, Budd Schulberg would eventually consult Riefenstahl herself as he prepared his historical film presentation on The Nazi Plan for the trial. Even the showing of the short film, That Justice be Done, an abbreviated form of the lengthy The Nazi Plan and Nazi Concentration Camps to the American public on the very eve of the trial, would in our own time be seen as a prejudicial preparation of the public for a guilty verdict.

Raphael Lemkin’s influence would strongly affect the trials themselves. This dedicated Polish activist had devoted a lifetime to his effort to concentrate the forces of the law and public opinion on the crimes against humanity that had characterized much of the twentieth century. His invention of the new term, “genocide,” a neologism which combined the Greek root term for a people, genos (genoj) and the Latin for to kill, occidere, for the extermination of a whole people, provided an intelligible name for this crime no one knew how to designate or deal with in assessing its horror.

Forced, as a Jewish member of the army that attempted to defend Warsaw in 1939, to flee his native Poland before the conquering Nazis, Lemkin sought refuge in Sweden and eventually in the United States. In Poland, he had been a respected jurist, public prosecutor and secretary to the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Polish Republic. At a 1933 conference of the Legal Council of the League of Nations in Madrid, he presented a paper on Crimes of Barbarity as a theme for the development of international law. Here, with reference to the massacres in Armenia and elsewhere, was the germ of his genocide idea. Forced, because of his paper, to resign his position in Poland and return to private practice, he further pursued his idea of defending the peace through criminal law as a member of the Polish delegation to the Fourth Congress on Criminal Law in Paris in 1937.

Systematic extermination came quickly to the Jewish community in Poland with the 1939 Nazi invasion. Lemkin lost forty-nine members of his own family among the three million Polish and Lithuanian Jews murdered by the Nazi

Foreword xiii regime. Once in the United States, he taught at Duke University in North Carolina, lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia, and by 1943 became consultant to the US Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration. Later he served as a special adviser on foreign affairs to the US War Department due to his expertise in international law.

When his monumental work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was published in 1944, it included and defined his new term “genocide.” His idea of it as an offense against international law was so widely accepted by the international community that it eventually became one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials, although little referred to at that time. His work attracted the attention of Justice Robert H. Jackson, who made Lemkin adviser to the Supreme Court of the United States and to himself as Chief of Counsel at the International Military Trial in Nuremberg.

Lemkin proposed a Convention on Genocide to the Paris Peace Conference in 1945, without success. He pursued the idea with various countries, seeking their sponsorship for the resolution. In 1948, with the support of the United States, he was able to put it before the General Assembly of the United Nations, where it was formally proposed and adopted, as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, actually coming into force as treaty law after the twentieth country had ratified it in 1951.

Lemkin’s long battle, though, was only partially won. The Convention itself regarded only physical aspects of genocidal actions:

1. Killing members of a group.

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group.

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

This was at once too much and too little. Many actions covered by the Convention simply did not look like the horrors of the Holocaust, which was the prime analogate. The Convention carried an obligation, on the part of signatory nations, to act in prevention of an act of genocide, and the nations in fact scrambled to find excuses not to fulfill that obligation.

The crimes that could be prosecuted under the Convention were not only genocide itself, but conspiracy to commit it, direct and public incitement to xiv Foreword genocide, attempt to commit genocide or complicity in the crime. To Lemkin’s mind, the term genocide ought also to have covered other psychological aspects of the attack on peoples or groups in a society. In his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, he had defined it so:

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals.*

Lemkin also included among the techniques of genocide, political, social, cultural, economic, religious, and moral forms of oppression, besides the actual physical acts of endangering health or mass killing. This was a broad menu, lending itself easily to evasion of the obligations undertaken by signatory nations.

The United States, after supporting Lemkin in the presentation of the Convention to the General Assembly, was reluctant to ratify it for fear of its application to the cases of Native Americans and African slaves. The country agreed and signed the Convention only in 1986,* but then only with the proviso that no prosecution against it or its citizens could be made without its consent.

In the most flagrant cases when mass killings of whole ethnic groups were under way, those of Rwanda and the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the nations found a loophole to spare them their obligation to intervene: they invented the new designation, “ethnic cleansing,’ a term evoked even most recently in the ethnic tensions in the Central African Republic.” As the Rwanda genocide was actually taking place, the Security Council chamber of the United Nations rang with the denials by US Ambassador Madeleine Albright that this

Foreword XV was genocide, or that the international community had any obligation to respond to it. Only some years later did President William Clinton find himself required, on a visit to Rwanda, to offer his apology and recognize that this had indeed been genocide. The term “ethnic cleansing” has been used by choice, also, in the case of the Palestinians, if only because it would seem too rude, after the Holocaust, which indeed was more extreme, to use the term genocide to describe Israeli actions.

Where then do we stand now? In the face of mass killing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria, in Egypt, we hardly hear anyone invoking the term genocide or the Convention. Is it entirely forgotten? Nations, the “High Contracting Parties,’ which have, in some sense, formally ratified the Convention, are at least morally stirred, and have to make apologies, even to their own people, for their inaction.

Acknowledgments

Like many tributaries that merge into one larger river, the sources for this book are numerous. I am grateful to my Boston College colleagues, Maxim Shrayer for pointing me in the direction of Russian material that enlightened me significantly, and Devin O. Pendas who not only led me to fresh documentation on the Nuremberg Trials, but also thoroughly reviewed the manuscript. Raymond Helmick, S.J., my mentor since our conflict resolution film work in Northern Ireland in 1997, has always been a dedicated colleague, guiding me to new heights in the understanding of global issues. Jeffery Howe of the Fine Arts Department provided most practical technical support. The staff in the film areas of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Archives most generously assisted me with Holocaust-related visual material, as did Thomas W. Mills of the Cornell Law Library. At the O’Neill Library at Boston College Adeane Bregman, Lopamudra Williams, and Eugenie M’Polo provided me with films and texts that advanced my research in a major way.

Through the entire editorial process, Jeffrey Gutierrez faithfully checked every word, comma, and idea to keep me on track, and for this I remain very much indebted. Aiding me with further research Liliana Peraza and John Ellis developed supplementary material that has proved most useful for this work. Emily Sadeghian provided a final reading of the manuscript. I am also grateful to Amanda Ross, Tetyana Kloubert and Trenton Selness for reading the final proofs of the text.

As always, I am very much indebted to my family for allowing me to take precious time from them to commit to the research and writing of this text. Susan, John, Miriam, as well as Rachel and Ricky, have always been supportive of my work, and for this I express my gratitude.