French communist Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, on Jan. 28, 1946, delivered gruesome testimony before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. One year and one day had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz, one of several camps where the journalist was imprisoned for her participation in the French Resistance.
An impassioned Vaillant-Couturier told of the Nazis’ inhumane treatment, including forced sterilizations and abortions, dangerous and unexplained medical testing, crowding, overwork, and diseases resulting from inadequate clothing, food, and sanitation. She recalled watching Jewish families separated on arrival at Auschwitz, with more than three-quarters of the new arrivals sent straight to the camp’s gas chambers.
Vaillant-Couturier described how some laborers were forced to undress babies before they were gassed, while others searched dead bodies for gold teeth or hidden valuables. She described the cremation pits where humans were burned by the thousands when Auschwitz’s crematoria became “insufficient” to keep up with the camp’s dead.
She also shared the following horror: “One night, we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the following day … that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive.”
However compelling Vaillant-Couturier’s recollections, the British, French, Soviet, and American judges at Nuremberg would not be relying on firsthand testimony in their trial of 22 high-ranking Nazis, who were indicted on charges of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the conspiracy to commit the aforementioned crimes.
As Justice Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. chief of counsel, explained, “There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records … [these men] arranged frequently to be photographed in action. You will see in their own conduct and hear their own voices as these defendants reenact for you some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.”
The Nazis were such prolific documentarians that over 3,000 tons of documentary evidence would be collected for the first Nuremberg trial, which lasted 11 months. Other jaw-dropping tangibles were also discovered, such as the “7.7 tons of human hair, 370,000 men’s suits, and 837,000 women’s dresses” found in storerooms at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Because of the swift pursuit of justice, the world possesses vast quantities of proof that the Nazis, in a deliberate attempt to rid the world of those populations that they considered “undesirable,” exterminated 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews.
Unfortunately, although we have the information available, we are collectively forgetting the Holocaust.
On today’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anti-Semitism that motivated the Third Reich lives on. Just as Jackson portended, the Nazis on trial “represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.”
Along with older forms of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial (the belief that the Holocaust was a hoax or that the atrocities have been greatly exaggerated) thrives today. Deniers seize on our willingness to forget a past that is difficult to confront. They rely on our ignorance to perpetuate their lies and inculcate anti-Semitism in new and younger segments of society.
At a time when Holocaust education and understanding are already poor and anti-Semitic hate is raging, emanating from the far Left and the far Right, as well as from fringe and everyday elements of society, we desperately need to revive our understanding of what occurred at the hands of the Nazis.
I suggest that we dedicate 2021 as the “Year of Evidence” to honor those who took on the monumental and hellish task of proving the Nazis’ crimes three-quarters of a century ago at Nuremberg.
The means of educating ourselves are quite available. Trial testimony and video exhibits from the International Military Tribunal are available through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Beyond that, the work of Courtroom 600 makes knowledge about the Nuremberg Trials even more accessible.
Courtroom 600
Laurie Pasler’s father was in the hospice when she was given a wealth of documents about his post-war work at the Nuremberg trials. He had never spoken of Nuremberg, and unfortunately for Pasler, it was too late to ask for details.
The resources Pasler found while trying to understand her father’s role in the proceedings were colorless and dated. To bring the important history of the trials to modern audiences, she created a nonprofit organization that would transport teachers, students, and interested citizens to Courtroom 600, the room in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice where the trials took place.
Courtroom 600’s pilot site delves into the Nazi defendants, the process of creating a trial in the devastated landscape of post-war Nuremberg, and the work of handing down just sentences to the architects of genocide. Its four educational modules, based on the four indictments filed against the first 22 Nuremberg defendants, will be rich with primary source materials and photographs.
Unite in Defiance of Evil
“For months, for years, we had one wish only,” Vaillant-Couturier said in her trial testimony, “the wish that some of us would escape alive in order to tell the world what the Nazi convict prisons were like everywhere.”
After leaving the stand, she walked by the gallery of Nazi defendants, staring down Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, as she passed.
Vaillant-Couturier got her wish. The world knows the atrocities that the Nazis committed. The paperwork created during the first Nuremberg trial alone, if stacked, would reach 47 miles into the air, and more than 50,000 have testified to witnessing the Holocaust. Mountains of undeniable physical evidence have been (and continue to be) located.
Meanwhile, in the shadows, and in the open, the acolytes of Goering and Hitler continue to operate, spreading their untruthful, discordant messages.
In honor of the dead, and of those who testified to the unthinkable to prevent its recurrence, we must unite throughout the world, across political parties, religions, and other self-identified barriers, to spread truth courageously and drown the falsehoods of hate in an echoing chorus of love and remembrance.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
