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Pictures of Peace and Justice from N uremberg to the H olocaust: N uremberg: Its Lesson for Today , Memory of the Camps , and Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe – Missing Films, Memory Gaps and the Impact beyond the Courtroom of Visual Material in War Crimes Prosecutions
Author(s) -
Gow James,
Michalski Milena,
Kerr Rachel
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/1468-229x.12028
Subject(s) - the holocaust , nazism , collective memory , tribunal , narrative , scholarship , historiography , history , nazi concentration camps , economic justice , sociology , literature , law , political science , art , archaeology , politics
The present article examines three ‘missing’ films and their significance for memory and historiography of the N uremberg International Military Tribunal and the H olocaust: N uremberg: Its Lesson for Today , Memory of the Camps and Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe . Between them, the three ‘missing’ films contain material that is absent from collective memory and, in some regards, scholarship. The ‘missing’ films reflect the ‘missing’ message of the ‘real’ H olocaust in the 1940s and 1950s. They offer the material that, with wider circulation, might have adjusted the character and compound fallacies of collective memory, and filled a ‘gap’ in that memory. The article contributes to the historiographies of film, N uremberg and the H olocaust in three ways. First, we offer the first scholarly treatment of the document and film N uremberg: Its Lesson for Today . Secondly, we offer the first examination of film and the IMT beyond the courtroom. Finally, we bring together the little‐known and little‐registered S oviet‐ P olish material of Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe , which captures the apparatus of the Nazi extermination camps, in a unified analysis with the more familiar western A llies’ film and the N uremberg narrative, which, uniquely for its time, clearly identified J ews as the primary victims of the Nazis. In doing so, we show that both film evidence of those camps and a focus on J ews as primary victims could have emerged far earlier had these film documents not been suppressed, unfinished or overlooked.