The memory of judgment : making law and history in the trials of the holocaust / Lawrence Douglas.

This book offers the first detailed examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. In offers a fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings-the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk, the French trial of Kla...

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Online Access: Full Text (via ProQuest)
Main Author: Douglas, Lawrence
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: New Haven [CT] : Yale University Press, ©2001.
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Summary:This book offers the first detailed examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. In offers a fascinating study of five exemplary proceedings-the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk, the French trial of Klaus Barbie, and the Canadian trial of Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. These trials, the book argues, were 'show trials' in the broadest sense: they aimed to do justice both to the defendants and to the history and memory of the Holocaust. Douglas explores how prosecutors and jurors struggled to submit unprecedented crimes to legal judgment, and in so doing, to reconcile the interests of justice and pedagogy. Against the attacks of such critics as Hannah Arendt, Douglas defends the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials as imaginative, if flawed, responses to extreme crimes. By contrast, he shows how the Demjanjuk and Zundel trials turned into disasters of didactic legality, obfuscating the very history they were intended to illuminate. In their successes and shortcomings, Douglas contends, these proceedings changed our understandings of both the Holocaust and the legal process-revealing the value and limits of the criminal trial as a didactic tool.
Physical Description:1 online resource (xiii, 318 pages) : illustrations.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-306) and index.
ISBN:9780300133738
0300133731
9780300084368
0300084366