Following the devastation and carnage of the Second World War, the world faced many critical and momentous issues. One of these was the treatment of the ex-Nazi officials who had committed some of the most monstrous crimes in history. In the aftermath of the war, many of these officials were rounded up and put on trial in Nuremberg. However, Adolf Eichmann, the designer of the Final Solution responsible for the systematic murder of millions of Jews, managed to escape. Hence, although the Nuremberg Trials condemned the Third Reich and punished culpable Nazi officials for crimes against humanity, it was not until Adolf Eichmann’s capture, trial, and sentencing that Jews gained a personal sense of closure and justice. The multitude of horrifying testimonies and exposing documents presented during the trial confronted the entire world with the full scope of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
As World War Two drew to a close, the allied forces were faced with the decision of how to deal with the defeated Nazi leaders. Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were of the opinion that all high-ranking Nazi officials be executed without trial. However, the United States steadfastly called for an international war crimes trial to apply law to genocide and recognize crimes against humanity. The Allies, the USSR, USA, Britain, and France, agreed and created an International Military Tribunal.
During the trials, now known as the Nuremberg Trials, each Ally presented and prosecuted one count; the United Stated: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, Britain: crimes against peace, and France and the USSR jointly: war crimes and crimes against humanity. By the end of the war many top off...
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... while the Holocaust represented the Jews under the cruel thumb of tyrannical anti-Semitism, the Eichmann saga symbolized the Jew’s newfound autonomy and audacity in their Jewish State. The fact that Israel, the new Jewish State, succeeded in hunting down, capturing, trying, and executing the man who orchestrated the final solution displayed its power and strength over those who had attempted to eradicate all Jews from the earth, and showed the world that Israel will never allow the Holocaust to be forgotten or justice to go unfulfilled. Israel proved it could go head to head with the UN Security Council and showcased the Mossad’s ability to shrewdly execute incredible undercover operations. Jews were finally in charge of their own destiny, and nothing symbolized that more than the death of Adolf Eichmann, the man who had sought to destroy the Jewish Nation forever.
The Nuremberg Trials was unethically run and violated the rights of the Nazi leaders who were convicted of committing crimes against humanity. Primarily because the Allies sought to use the trials as a way to remind the Germans, who won the war ‘again’. Thus making it similar to the Treaty of Versailles in (19- ), through implying this notion of “Victors’ Justice”. Nevertheless, the Allies did to an extent ‘try’ to make the tribunal as ethical as possible,
Adolf Eichmann was a high-ranking German officer who was one of a few top-ranking officials responsible for the "legal work" of the extermination of millions of Jews. He was a wanted Nazi war criminal because he escaped just before the end of World War II. He was not immediately captured and thus evaded the Nuremberg Trials as he fled to the country of Argentina where he attempted to fade into history. Israeli secret service agents somehow managed to track Eichmann down, kidnap him, and bring him back to Israel to face the consequences of his past. Throughout the trial, Eichmann's defense was simply that he was basically a puppet of Nazi Germany saying that he was "a tool in the hands of superior powers and authorities."
Murders inflicted upon the Jewish population during the Holocaust are often considered the largest mass murders of innocent people, that some have yet to accept as true. The mentality of the Jewish prisoners as well as the officers during the early 1940’s transformed from an ordinary way of thinking to an abnormal twisted headache. In the books Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and Ordinary men by Christopher R. Browning we will examine the alterations that the Jewish prisoners as well as the police officers behaviors and qualities changed.
If you have been in a History class you have probably heard of an event that happened after World War Two called the Nuremberg Trials. These trials were conducted by the United States. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was appointed to lead the trials (Berenbaum). During these trials they charged with Crimes against the Peace, War crimes and Crimes against Humanity (Berenbaum). Many major Nazi leaders committed suicide before officials could hang them or before even being caught. The famous Doctor Goebbels killed his children then him and his wife committed suicide (Berenbaum). Only twelve out of the twenty-two who stood trial were hanged, twelve, while the rest just got prison time. Besides major Nazi officials, Physicians were put on trial, the people who were part of the mobile killing squads, Concentration camp officials, Judges and Executives who sold concentration camps Zyklon B. You can expect that they had many excuses, but m...
Some will say that the Jewish people cannot be held responsible for the crimes committed, because they are the victims. This is not the case, however; the Jewish people could have prevented a great deal of pain and suffering that they experienced. Elie wrote “And thus my elders concerned themselves with all manners of things - strategy, diplomacy,politics, and Zionism - but not with their own fate” (8). The Jewish people had heard of what the Nazis had done to the foreign Jews of Sighet, their town; a Jew had returned and told them, but they refused to listen; they ignored his warnings. Furthermore, the Jewish people had many chances at this time to escape; most notably emigration to another country. The Jewish people ignored the warnings they had received, and their chance to escape; for this reason, they bear a certain degree of responsibility for what
For many educated people learning about the Holocaust can send them feelings of sorrow or deep remource. Not only for the meaning of the word, but why it is called that. The pure evil of the final solution created thought of and created by none other than Adolf Hitler will never stop haunting people more than half a decade later. One of the prominat things that everyone missed in his highly sold auto-biography "My struggle". The thought of solid hatrid found within the cover of the horiable book will always burn in the souls that it harmed from the day it began till the dawn of today.
"While fighting for victory the German soldier will observe the rules for chivalrous warfare. Cruelties and senseless destruction are below his standard" , or so the commandment printed in every German Soldiers paybook would have us believe. Yet during the Second World War thousands of Jews were victims of war crimes committed by Nazi's, whose actions subverted the code of conduct they claimed to uphold and contravened legislation outlined in the Geneva Convention. It is this legislature that has paved the way for the Jewish community and political leaders to attempt to redress the Nazi's violation, by prosecuting individuals allegedly responsible. Convicting Nazi criminals is an implicit declaration by post-World War II society that the Nazi regime's extermination of over five million Jews won't go unnoticed.
...one of the darkest periods of history, filled with madness and murder. Following the war many people asked why the Jews succumbed to the Nazis like “Lamb at the slaughter”. One cannot forget or ignore the many shows of resistance amongst the Jews such as the Jews who fought in the forest of Eastern Europe and also the Jews who started the uprising in ghettos and in concentration camps. One result of the Holocaust is that the state of Israel was no doubt established because of the Holocaust. As a result of the great catastrophe which occurred to the Jewish people many nations realized that establishing a state was a necessary step for the protection of Jews. With the end of the war and the unconditional surrender, international courts were set up for the quick trials and sentencing of the Nazis for their war crimes against the Jewish people and against all humanity.
Eichmann was a simple man that thought of himself as always being the law-abiding citizen. Eichmann stated in court that he had always tried to abide by Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative (Arendt,135). Arendt argues that Eichmann had essentially taken the wrong lesson from Kant. Kant’s moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man’s faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience. Knowing this, we learn that Eichmann could not have just been going along with the Nazis without knowing anything that was going on or the consequences. Eichmann had not recognized the ‘golden rule’ and principle of reciprocity implicit in the categorical imperative, but had only understood the concept of one man's actions coinciding with general law. Eichmann attempted to follow the spirit of the laws he carried out, as if the legislator himself would approve. In Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative, the legislator is the moral self and all men are legislators. In other words, we are all taking on the roll of the leader. In Eichmann's formulation, the legislator was Hitler. Eichmann claimed this changed when he was charged with carrying out the Final Solution, at which point Arendt claims "he had ceased to live according to Kantian principles, that he had known it, and that he had consoled himself with the thoughts that he no longer 'was master of ...
The Milgram experiment was designed and performed by Yale University social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. Milgram created this experiment predominately to determine what would have motivated Germans to so readily conform to the demands put forth by the Nazi party. Milgram wished to answer his question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (McLeod). At the time of these experiments, debates about the Nuremberg trials, particularly the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major perpetrators in the Holocaust, were still ongoing. At these trials, many Nazi party officials and military officers were put on trial for committing “crimes against humanity.” Although some defendants pleaded guilty, others claimed that they were innocent and only following orders that were given to them by a higher authority, Adolf Hitler. In the end, twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, three to life in prison, four to approximately fifteen year prison terms, and three were acquitted (“The Nuremberg Trials”)....
“The Holocaust is the most investigated crime in history, as has often been pointed out in response to deniers. Eichmann may be that crime’s most investigated criminal” (Sells, Michael A.). Adolf Eichmann was one of the head Nazis. He had a lot of authority in enacting what Hitler had told the Nazis to do. He was just about as responsible as Hitler was for killing all of those innocent
Following World War II, war trials convicted the criminals of their crimes. There were hundreds of trials that took place to punish the Nazi criminals. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “On December 17, 1942, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jews and resolving to prosecute those responsible for crimes against civilian populations.” The United Nations War Crimes Commission would be in charge of the trials. These trials took place all over Europe.Many of them were in Germany and were held by the country that was occupying Germany after the war. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “The IMT defined crimes against humanity as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation.” Most of the trials were with lower-level officials, and most of the first information we knew about concentration camps came from evidence and eyewitness accounts from these trials. Some of the specific trials were the Nuremberg trials, the Doctors trials, and the Auschwitz trials.
The thoughtlessness in which Eichmann embodied in the courtroom, along with the normalcy he possesses, aids in the development of the enigmatic structure of the trial. Arendt's battle to find middle-ground between the idea of Eichmann as a common man attempting to fulfill objectives and his connection to the Nazi regime is what defies original theories on evil. The guilt Eichmann carries is clearly much larger than the man himself, especially one so simplistic and thoughtless. Therefore, the evil presented in Eichma...
"The Nuremberg Laws: Background & Overview." Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2014. .
Prior to WWII any concept of international human rights would not have been able to be Kept. State sovereignty was still the norm leaders around the globe followed when it came to international relations. Of course that all changed after the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime in the Holocaust were exposed to the global community. After what had happen to the Jewish population in Europe at the hands of Hitler's army was reviled to the world, the international community realized that there was something to the whole idea of human rights that could quite possibly go beyond the recognizable sovereignty of independent states(Collaway, Harrelson-Stephens, 2007 p.4). December 17, 1942 was the date that leaders of the allied forces of WWII that included the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union came together and issued the first declaration that officially noted and acknowledged the mass murder of European Jews and settled to find a solution to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilians. Because of the type of acts that were committed some political leaders advocated for summary executions instead of trials (Collaway, Harrelson-Stephens, 2007). If you really think about it by doing this the allied forces would have been defeating the purpose of what they were trying to accomplish which was to make those responsible for the acts to pay but by giving them a f...