Inventing Postwar Justice: Nuremberg and the Holocaust's Legal Legacy, 1945-1998

This dissertation examines how the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961) and the Frankfurt-Auschwitz Trial (1963-65) evolved the principles of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT, 1945-46) from a logic of retribution to an emphasis on the moral and historical roles of international criminal law. Though scholars of international law understand the Holocaust’s influence on international justice primarily through the impact of the IMT, this dissertation illustrates how the Eichmann and Auschwitz Trials reconstructed the legal and moral aspects of the Nuremberg precedent in the decades between the end of WWII and the international criminal trials of the 1990s. Though the IMT had laid out the principle of individual criminal accountability premised on punishing the Nazi elite, the instigators of the Eichmann and Auschwitz Trials initiated these trials with the intention of not just judicial punishment, but also the extra-legal aims of nation building, collective memory, and affirming the protection of human dignity. Their attempts to balance the demands of truth and justice created a new legal and moral language of a “just” response to mass atrocities that would define the contours of future legal responses to mass violence. When the world once again faced instances of genocide in the 1990s, international legal discourse would be shaped by how these trials answered the demands inherent in the promise of “never again.”