Lest we forget (4)

Rudolf Höss, the former commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, proved to be a valuable witness in the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war crimes.

Höss claimed he had been summoned to Berlin in the summer of 1941, and was told then of the order for the "Final Solution" to be carried out at Auschwitz.

The testimony was shattering, as the defense well knew.

It shifted attention oddly to the witness Hoss — a dull, unimpressive, but methodical officer of the sort that had staffed the numerous offices and positions involved in the murder of European Jews.

Höss' account offered evidence of the timing and the chain of decision-making for the "Final Solution," however, these were not questions that were picked up at the time and have only since become matters of intense interest and debate.

How much did the defendants know about the murders in the East, the "Final Solution," the concentration camps, or Auschwitz?

Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi official tried at Nuremberg, insisted that he did not know, and probably neither did Hitler, about the Final Solution.

He would not even allow those atrocities to have occurred systematically; the most that he would concede was that there might have been "isolated cases" of liquidations.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS in Austria, who sometime after Reinhard Heydrich's assassination had taken over the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, maintained that he had not known of the "Final Solution" before 1943.

"Immediately after receiving the knowledge of this fact," he reported, "I fought, just as I had done previously, not only against the Final Solution but also against this type of treatment of the Jewish problem."

What did Kaltenbrunner do? He "protested to Hitler and the next day to Himmler," he maintained.

At various points in the trial, one would have to conclude that other defendants indicated that they had helped Jews at times — Schacht, Ribbentrop, Papen, Schirach, Funk, Seyss-Inquart and Speer.

The Jews, according to this testimony, had plenty of friends in high places, particularly toward the end of the war.

There was some contrition at Nuremberg, although few noteworthy instances.

Hans Frank, wartime master of the Generalgouvernment, the part of Poland captured in 1939 and not incorporated into the Reich, handed over to the Americans his voluminous diary of the days when he ruled in splendor from Krakow, and claimed in prison to have committed himself anew to Catholicism.

Reichsbank president Walter Funk was accused of having received deposits of gold taken from the teeth of gassed Jewish victims, "probably the most ghoulish collateral in banking history."

Most of the accused gave more articulate reasons why they should not be convicted on the count of crimes against humanity, or why history should look kindly upon them.

Not surprisingly, the judges and lawyers did not get it all right in 1945-46. They made mistakes in detail and wider conception, and they left much work to be done to understand what we have come to call the Holocaust. But they built a good foundation for, including the murder of European Jews in an understanding of Nazism and World War II.

The evidence of Nazi atrocities, including visual evidence on film, was so shattering that the image of transgression presented during the trial long outlasted and had a far greater impact than the restrictive legal arguments made by the prosecutors.

Likely, the trial of Hamas terrorists that will come after the smoke of war in Gaza clears will also provide the evidence to hold accountable all those responsible for the tragic 7 October massacre, which is already being referred to as Holocaust 2.