Aftermath of the Holocaust: The Nuremberg Trials

 



Aftermath of the Holocaust: The Nuremberg Trials

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The invasion of France by the Allied forces in June 6, 1944 by the Allied forces marked the quest to end Hitler’s rule. This was a mission sparked by the extermination of over six million Jews by Hitler’s regime.  Majdanek in Poland was the first concentration camp to be freed by the Russian forces. The experience by the troops is vividly recorded in History as one of a Kind. It was followed by a year of unimaginable horror as the other camps were liberated one by one. The survivors of the Holocaust were left to deal with severe psychological issues due to the kind of terror they endured during the genocide. Disease in camps, anti-Semitism and the ruin of families and communities was common in each of the concentration camps. 
The end of Hitler’s era necessitated the creation of a Jewish state hence the birth of Israel as a nation in May of 1948.  With the end of the Holocaust, the next step was strategizing on punishing the criminal who had actualized the worst genocide in History hence the Nuremberg Trial. This paper seeks to investigate the kind of life the survivors of the Holocaust had to come to terms with. The paper will extensively address the causes and the effects of the Holocaust. It will further inform on the methods used to try the criminals in the Nuremberg trials. “The battle of the Bulge was Hitler’s desperate attempt to defeat the Allied forces. It was a fierce and bloody battle where Hitler attempted to drive a wedge between the British and the American armies. 
As fate would have it there was no clear victor in world war two most fierce battles.  Hitler however, accumulated heavy losses that were irreconcilable.” ² This led to Nazi attempting to move the Jews to some of the central camps like Belsaen, while at it they also tried to cover what they had done. In January, camp Auschwitz was abandoned with many prisoners in it. “This period was marked by more deaths as some were struck by strays of allied bombs or caught in crossfire between the two sides and others were killed by the Nazis if they didn’t have the strength to move at their pace.” ³ The liberation efforts were chaotic and bloody and by April 1944 there was light at the end of the tunnel as Adolf Hitler and some of his trusted men went into hiding. The Nazi leaders also started fleeing Berlin as the Allied forces were surrounding the city. Hitler shot himself on April 30 and as per his own orders, his body burned.
It is worth noting that during the Holocaust the Jews were not the only victims rather cruelty of the Nazi was felt in every locality they ruled. Their rule was characterised by torture and unwarranted killings.  Unarmed civilians were shot at their pleasure while starvation was used to kill several million Russian prisoners of war. It was a regime that had no respect to diversity and basic human rights. The available statistics indicate that beside the Jews nearly 250,000 gypsies, thousands of mentally and physically handicapped people and even homosexuals were not spared their life. During this period, living to see another day was a luxury so hard to come by as the Nazi used the entire state machinery to implement its obscenity.  The culture and the rules to live by were formulated and enforced by the same callous regime. Those who went contrary to the rules received the Nazi justice, which was an end to their life. Families were disintegrated and children left to fend for themselves in the concentration camps. The situation at the concentration camps is alleged to have been worse than that found in most of Africa’s slum dwelling areas.
The Aftermath
“On December 17, 1942 it was agreed by eleven allied governments that the perpetrators of the mass killings of the Jews would be brought to book and hence justice for the survivors.” 6 Even though justice seemed simple, it required that people be punished as per the extent of their crime. This then became a contentious issue as the Nazi had committed the crimes in history, while some alluded to exodus 21:23-24 where penalty was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth  others thought justice in this case could not be simplified like that. The Nuremberg courts had to struggle with the kind of punishment to give the Nazis. Even the though the law states life for life no two lives are the same. As such the court had the task of identifying a middle ground between simple and legal justice. “The court was made up of four judges and four teams of attorneys from all the Allied nations, which were France, Britain, and the United States.”7 The complexity of the trial was indeed one that demanded so many considerations. The first major task at Nuremberg was determining who should be tried and who should not. Hitler would have been first on trial but he had taken his own life this left the court with the top Nazi leaders who had been captured by