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5 - Perpetrators on Trial: The Transnational History of Holocaust Trials

from Part I - History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2025

By
Devin O. Pendas
Edited by
Laura Jockusch  and
Devin O. Pendas
Laura Jockusch
Affiliation:
Brandeis University, Massachusetts
Devin O. Pendas
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Summary

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.

Keywords

HolocaustWar Crimes TrialsTrials (Genocide)Nuremberg TrialsTransitional JusticeGermanyPoland

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Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Holocaust , pp. 121 - 141
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

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