to the victims of the Nazi atrocities. Every year a theme is chosen, and synagogues and community centers throughout the United States host commemorative services—not only to remember the lost, but also to remind the living to be vigilant against evil.


Tis year’s theme designated by the USHMM for the 2011 observance is Justice and Accountability in the Face of Genocide: What Have We Learned?


Why must we remember?


responsibility for their actions.


Aſter Nuremberg, a new understanding of international responsibility for human rights emerged, as the world began to fully understand the events we now call the Holocaust, creating a new legal vehicle that criminal- ized atempts to destroy any entire group of people— the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Preven- tion and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.


The Holocaust teaches us that inaction can be deadly.


Counterintuitive to human nature, following the inconceivable brutality and mass extermination that was revealed at the conclusion of World War II, justice rather than vengeance was sought through the strin- gent principle of law, which helped liſt humanity out of chaos and degradation.


In commemoration of this loſty principle, USHMM is marking the 65th anniversary of the verdicts at the first Nuremberg trial, a watershed moment in international justice, and the 50th anniversary of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious postwar accounts of Nazi genocide and a landmark in public awareness of the Holocaust.


Criminalizing Genocide: Nuremberg & Beyond Te International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945 held 22 top Nazi leaders accountable for atrocities they commanded and perpetrated. Subsequent pro- ceedings between 1946 and 1949 prosecuted another 183 persons. Although this represented only a fraction of those responsible for the Holocaust, it established an important precedent: Who was prosecuted was more im- portant than how many stood trial. No one, regardless of official position, was above the law. Te argument that someone had just been following orders was no longer considered a valid defense. Not only were the shoot- ers at mass executions and the guards at gas chambers tried, but physicians and business leaders, government officials, and civil servants also were required to take


Adolf Eichmann would come to personify Nazi war crimes. A midlevel SS officer central to the planning and implementation of the “Final Solution,” Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents while hiding in Argentina in 1960 and brought to Israel for what would become known then as the “trial of the century.”


Trough Eichmann’s televised trial, all atention was riveted on the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Whereas the Nuremberg trials relied heavily on docu- mentary evidence, the Eichmann trial featured eyewit- ness testimony by Holocaust survivors speaking out in a way they never had before, which allowed the world to put a face not only on the perpetrators, such as Eich- mann, but also on the millions of victims and survivors.


What Have We Learned? Tese anniversaries come at a time when some of the last living survivors of the Nazi atrocities are witnessing the rise of new “Hitlers,” a serious rise of global anti- Semitism and anti-Israelism, and a continual barrage of Holocaust deniers.


Events in Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial will for- ever teach us about our international responsibility to defend any human life at risk.


Why must we remember? Te Holocaust teaches us that inaction can be deadly. Actions, even small ones, can make all the difference for those whose lives are in jeopardy now and in the future.


Jewish Voice Today 19


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