The aftermath
Although the Germans killed victims from several groups, the Holocaust is primarily associated with the murder of the Jews. Only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation, and their elimination was central to Hitler’s vision of the “New Germany.” The intensity of the Nazi campaign against the Jews continued unabated to the very end of the war and at points even took priority over German military efforts.
When the war ended, Allied armies found between seven and nine million displaced persons living outside their own countries. More than six million people returned to their native lands, but more than one million refused repatriation. Some had collaborated with the Nazis and feared retaliation. Others feared persecution under the new communist regimes. For the Jews, the situation was different. They had no homes to return to. Their communities had been shattered, their homes destroyed or occupied by strangers, and their families decimated and dispersed. First came the often long and difficult physical recuperation from starvation and malnutrition, then the search for loved ones lost or missing, and finally the question of the future.
Many Jews lived in displaced-persons camps. At first they were forced to dwell among their killers because the Allies did not differentiate on the basis of religion, merely by nationality. Their presence on European soil and the absence of a country willing to receive them increased the pressure on Britain to resolve the issue of a Jewish homeland in British-administered Palestine. Both well-publicized and clandestine efforts were made to bring Jews to Palestine. In fact, it was not until after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the liberalization of American immigration laws in 1948 and 1949 (allowing the admission of refugees from Europe) that the problem of finding homes for the survivors was solved.
Upon liberating the camps, many Allied units were so shocked by what they saw that they meted out spontaneous punishment to some of the remaining SS personnel. Others were arrested and held for trial. The most famous of the postwar trials occurred in 1945–46 at Nürnberg, the former site of Nazi Party rallies. There, the International Military Tribunal tried 22 major Nazi officials for war crimes, crimes against the peace, and a new category of crimes: crimes against humanity. This new category encompassed “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population…persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds…whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.” After the first trials, 185 defendants were divided into 12 groups, including physicians responsible for medical experimentation (but not so-called euthanasia), judges who preserved the facade of legality for Nazi crimes, Einsatzgruppe leaders, commandants of concentration camps, German generals, and business leaders who profited from slave labour. The defendants made up, however, a miniscule fraction of those who had perpetrated the crimes. In the eyes of many, their trials were a desperate, inadequate, but necessary effort to restore a semblance of justice in the aftermath of so great a crime. The Nürnberg trials established the precedent, later enshrined by international convention, that crimes against humanity are punishable by an international tribunal.
Over the ensuing half-century, additional trials further documented the nature of the crimes and had a public as well as a judicial impact. The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the deportations of Jews to the death camps, not only brought him to justice but made a new generation of Israelis keenly aware of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, between 1963 and 1976 increased the German public’s knowledge of the killing and its pervasiveness. The trials in France of Klaus Barbie (1987) and Maurice Papon (1996–98) and the revelations of Franƈois Mitterrand in 1994 concerning his indifference toward Vichy France’s anti-Jewish policy called into question the notion of French resistance and forced the French to deal with the issue of collaboration. These trials also became precedents as world leaders considered responses to other crimes against humanity in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda.
The defeat of Nazi Germany left a bitter legacy for the German leadership and people. Germans had committed crimes in the name of the German people. German culture and the German leadership—political, intellectual, social, and religious—had participated or been complicit in the Nazi crimes or been ineffective in opposing them. In an effort to rehabilitate the good name of the German people, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) firmly established a democracy that protected the human rights of all its citizens and made financial reparations to the Jewish people in an agreement passed by parliament in 1953. West German democratic leaders made special efforts to achieve friendly relations with Israel. In the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the communist leaders attempted to absolve their population of responsibility for the crimes, portraying themselves as the victims of the Nazis, and Nazism as a manifestation of capitalism. The first gesture of the postcommunist parliament of East Germany, however, was an apology to the Jewish people. At one of its first meetings in the newly renovated Reichstag building in 1999, the German parliament voted to erect a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The first state visitor to Berlin after its reestablishment as capital of a united Germany was Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the history of the Holocaust continued to be unsettling. The Swiss government and its bankers had to confront their role as bankers to the Nazis and in recycling gold and valuables taken from the victims. Under the leadership of German prime minister Gerhard Schröder, German corporations and the German government established a fund to compensate Jews and non-Jews who worked in German slave labour and forced labour programs during the war. Insurance companies were negotiating over claims from descendants of policyholders killed during the war—claims that the companies denied immediately after the war by imposing prohibitive conditions, such as the presentation of a death certificate specifying the time and place of death of the insured. In several eastern European countries, negotiations addressed Jewish property that the Nazis had confiscated during the war but that could not be returned under the region’s communist governments. Artworks stolen during the war and later sold on the basis of dubious records were the subject of legal struggles to secure their return to the original owners or to their heirs. The German government continued to pay reparations—first awarded in 1953—to individual Jews and the Jewish people to acknowledge responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of the German people.