Seeking Justice, Finding Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe

Contested Knowledge, the Politics of Memory, and the Armenian Genocide

“…He maintains that the many and various trials of Germans for Holocaust crimes, starting with Nuremberg, forced the Germans into a stance of acknowledgment and made any concerted effort at denial impossible. This is a generous reading of the history of Nazi trials, whose impact I have argued was more ambiguous (Pendas, 2006(Pendas, , 2020; see also Bloxham 2001;Frei 2002). While it is true that the efforts to bring Nazis to justice for their crimes were vast (Pendas 2009), many Germans rejected the moral and political lessons on offer in such trials.…”

“…This is a generous reading of the history of Nazi trials, whose impact I have argued was more ambiguous (Pendas, 2006(Pendas, , 2020; see also Bloxham 2001;Frei 2002). While it is true that the efforts to bring Nazis to justice for their crimes were vast (Pendas 2009), many Germans rejected the moral and political lessons on offer in such trials. For instance, in German circles, the arguments put forth by the defense counsel in the Nuremberg Trials resonated far more strongly than did those of the prosecution (Pendas 2020), helping symbolically transform Germans from perpetrators into victims.…”