The Historiography of the Holocaust

198 Jürgen Matthäus
guilt, military tribunals were established. 2 While the notion of German collective
guilt never guided the Allies’ adjudication of Nazi crimes, the International
Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg introduced conspiracy and membership
in a criminal organization as charges that transcended individual involvement
by what could be seen as ‘guilt by association’. In the minds of their American
authors, one of the main purposes of these charges was to find a legal basis for
coming to grips with what the Nuremberg chief prosecutor Telford Taylor
called ‘a ghoulish embarras de richesse’: the large number of perpetrators –
estimated at the time at hundreds of thousands – in numerous branches of the
German executive, bureaucratic and economic apparatus. 3
The Nuremberg proceedings and the definition of charges were based on the
assumption that proper judgment could be accomplished only by integrating
individual crimes into their political, ideological and institutional context –
which explains why a man like Julius Streicher, the editor of Stürmer, was sentenced
to death based on his pivotal role in preparing the ground for murder
through his antisemitic propaganda. The crimes of those directly and personally
involved in the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children appeared not
just as isolated actions, but as part of state-sponsored policy. Consequently, the
assessment of personal guilt required a clear perception of Nazi Germany’s
internal structure. Despite the broad definition of what was understood as
a perpetrator, the Nuremberg court proceedings reinforced the notion that the
organized mass murder of innocent civilians, including children and old
people, on such an unprecedented scale was the direct result of Hitler’s intervention,
or more precisely some kind of superior order. Prior to the demise of the
Third Reich, propaganda on both sides had presented the Führer as being in full
control of affairs in Germany as well as in the occupied territories. Germany, it
was assumed, had been run like an army, thoroughly organized, hierarchically
structured and based on the rigid mechanics of order and compliance. German
defendants supported this assumption by insisting that decisions were made by
the top leadership and the top leadership only. Accepted by the court as an
established fact though not necessarily as a mitigating circumstance, in the
minds of the accused the myth of ‘superior orders’ reduced personal responsibility
to the point where individual guilt evaporated altogether.
For the victors it was clear that their judicial efforts could not cover the full
range of German crimes and that ultimately the Germans themselves would have
to deal with the issue; indeed, courts in the occupied zones started soon after
the end of the war to charge those Germans who had committed crimes against
their countrymen. Almost unnoticed by a larger audience and soon forgotten,
these early trials targeted lower-ranking perpetrators who had been involved,
often as early as 1933, in everyday violence against Jews, communists and
other ‘enemies of the Reich’. 4 Public attention focused on Allied judicial efforts
that were viewed by most Germans not only ‘with fear and suspicion’, 5 but