Nuremberg Reconsidered: Conot's "Justice at Nuremberg"

Abstract

Two generations have been born and have grown to maturity since the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunal sifted evidence and rendered judgment in 1945 and 1946. Are we in danger of forgetting the unforgettable? Given the world's continuing fascination with National Socialism, it seems unlikely that the Nazis will be forgotten. But if there is no danger of forgetting the unforgettable, something much worse may be happening. The world may be starting to think the unthinkable. As Robert Conot puts it in the introduction to Justice at Nuremberg: "A world-wide cult has arisen claiming that the Holocaust never happened. A hundred books, booklets, and pamphlets have been printed alleging that the slaughter was imaginary or exaggerated, and is but a Jewish invention" (at xii). Compounding the problem, according to Conot, is that the "trial [of the Nazi war criminals] has never been fully explored" (at xi). He proposes to "make the facts accessible" (at xiii) to expose such distortions of history as the claims that the Jews who died during World War II were victims of the general food shortage and that Zyklon B was simply a disinfectant. Conot does not, in fact, have the field quite so much to himself. Such recent works as Bradley Smith's The Road to Nuremberg' and Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg2 come to mind, as does the reissue of Victor Bernstein's 1947 account of the trials, The Holocaust-Final Judgment3 (originally pub-