"Eichmann, the “Jewish Question”, and the Politics of (genocidal) Language at Nuremberg”

• In Event: Alternative “Solutions” to the Nazi “Jewish Question”? Revisiting Adolf Eichmann’s Judenfrage in the Context of Antisemitism, Colonialism, and Postwar Jurisprudence, 1933-1962

Abstract

When the Allied prosecution teams started to ponder over their list of defendants for the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (IMT), one name regularly came up: Adolf Eichmann, former head of the RSHA sub-department IV-B4. Based on information gathered and provided by the New York-based Institute of Jewish Affairs, he was seen as one of the masterminds and leading architects of what in the dehumanizing Nazi jargon had been labeled the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish Question”. By late Summer 1945, it finally dawned on Robert H. Jackson and his staff that Eichmann would not be included on that list. Intelligence agencies were either clueless about his whereabouts or considered him dead.

This absence notwithstanding, recent historiography on the treatment of the Holocaust at Nuremberg has demonstrated how Eichmann’s name, his ideas as well as his language reverberated in manifold ways in the IMT. His almost ghost-like presence in the interrogation and court room proceedings had some paradoxical effects. While many defendants and former colleagues tried to distance themselves from the ‘dead’ Eichmann by recounting the mass murder as a matter of second-hand knowledge, they also tended to couch the whole project in his bureaucratic language and coded terminologies. By claiming to have sought a “chivalrous solution” of the Judenfrage, it was implied that there had been only gradual differences between the National Socialist brand of antisemitism und anti-Jewish stereotypes elsewhere. Drawing on the epistemologies and frameworks of a politics of language, my paper aims, first, at elucidating how the judicial arena was used by different actors to redefine and reproduce a specific grammar of genocide. Secondly, it will interrogate how the continuous use of the vocabulary of a chief Nazi perpetrator contributed to a postwar understanding of the Holocaust that largely screened out its scope and murderous character.

Author

• Annette Weinke