By now it has become a truism in many public and academic communities that societies need to maintain a healthy balance between remembering and forgetting, but given the symbolic rewards and costs that are attached to our recollections of select artifacts, people, events, dates, and places, this is no easy task. In concrete situations, rhetors and their audiences have to make choices about what will be recalled and what will become oblivious. If some individuals or collectives try to bury the past, they will be accused of using the “dubious coin of denial and amnesia,” while too much congratulatory remembering...

As I noted in chapter 1, it is crucial that scholars begin their analyses of Holocaust trials by looking at a wide range of representations of the Judeocide, so it is fitting that I start my own narration of these events by taking us back to some of the contested World War II legal and public memories. Today, the growing popularity of “memory” studies in many academic cultures has paralleled the political interest that various publics have in the preservation of Holocaust remembrances,¹ but this has not always been the case. Earlier generations have often recalled the feelings of relief...

“Since the 1960s,” argued Nancy Wood, the confusion between “the politics ofAufarbeitung(‘coming to terms with the past’)” andVergangenheitsbewältigung(‘mastering’ or ‘overcoming’ the past) have been a constant feature in the German political and cultural landscape.”¹ In the minds of many observers who hold this view, a society may indeed share some type of exculpatory consensus that allows members of a community to go on with their lives in spite of some troubled past, but the strategic use of the rhetorical vectors that carry markers of evasions, denials, moral equivalencies, or minimalizations are not good indicators that some...

In this chapter, I study the circulation of Holocaust remembrances in Israeli judicial proceedings. By reviewing some of the rhetorical dimensions of the Kastner, Eichmann, and Demjanjuk cases, I hope to provide a rhetorical analysis that explicates some of the legal complications that attend the politics of nationalistic remembering and forgetting. As I noted in chapter 1, many observers are convinced that governmental authorities have to be active agents in the preservation of genocidal memories, and they are bothered when certain vectors of memory tell tales that exclude their versions of the truth. As Shoshana Felman observed inThe Juridical...

The Canadian Jewish Congress once reported that about 10 percent of the more than 300,000 Jews living in Canada were Holocaust survivors, and many critics were convinced that some 3,000 Nazi war criminals¹ fled to Canada after the end of World War II.² Many of the diffuse vectors of memory that resonated with these audiences dealt with a number of issues—the mythic Canadian “haven” for fleeing war criminals, protecting the nation’s multicultural heritage from the ravages of Holocaust revisionionism, and the preservation of Judeocide memories.

What made all of this very complicated for Canadian officials is the fact that...

“During the 1930s and World War II,” argues Tony Kushner, “the British government and its apparatus” often “downplayed the fate of the Jews under Nazi control.”¹ British nationalists like to remember that they provided a haven for political refugees during this conflict, but these same mythic tales glossed over some of the political ambiguities that surrounded the Allied responses to the Judeocide. After the war, Britain was considered to be one of the victorious “liberators” of the concentration camps, but in recent years this image has been tarnished by those who contend that the British could have done more either...

As David Cesarani has recently observed, during the last quarter of the last century, war “crimes investigations into Nazi collaborators” were “commenced on a large scale in the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain,” and the “opening of archive collections” shed new “light on Nazi occupation policy, [and] ousted Eichmann from preeminence and replaced him with theEinsatzgruppenkiller, the East European auxiliary and the reserve policeman.”¹ As he opened the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals, Robert Jackson had hoped that the “record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge...