Seeking Justice for the Holocaust

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial has become a symbol of justice, the pivotal moment when the civilized world stood up for Europe’s Jews and, ultimately, for human rights. Yet the world, represented at the time by the Allied powers, almost did not stand up despite the magnitude of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Seeking justice for the Holocaust had not been an automatic—or an obvious—mission for the Allies to pursue. In this book, Graham Cox recounts the remarkable negotiations and calculations that brought the United States and its allies to this point.

At the center of this story is the collaboration between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert C. Pell, Roosevelt’s appointee as U.S. representative to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, in creating an international legal protocol to prosecute Nazi officials for war crimes and genocide. Pell emerges here as an unheralded force in pursuing justice and in framing human rights as an international concern. The book also enlarges our perspective on Roosevelt’s policies regarding European Jews by revealing the depth of his commitment to postwar justice in the face of staunch opposition, even from some within his administration.

What made the international effort especially contentious was a debate over its focus—how to punish for aggressive warfare and crimes against humanity. Cox exposes the internal contradictions and contortions behind the U.S. position and the maneuverings of numerous officials negotiating the legal parameters of the trials. Most telling perhaps were the efforts of Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, to circumscribe the scope of new international law—for fear of setting precedents that might boomerang on the United States because of its own racial segregation practices.

With its broad new examination of the background and context of the Nuremberg trials, and its expanded view of the roles played by Roosevelt and his unlikely deputy Pell, Seeking Justice for the Holocaust offers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how the Allies came to hold Nazis accountable for their crimes against humanity.