Chapter 2 investigates the development of a transnational Allied culture of rehabilitation that underwrote local and national efforts to rehabilitate the war disabled. Military and government officials, social reformers, philanthropists, and medical authorities contributed, throughout the war, to a robust, multi-directional campaign that championed the virtues of rehabilitation and solicited support for programmes that aimed to fit the war disabled into post-war society. Such literature became, itself, a way to imagine the contours of the post-war world with respect to hierarchies of gender and class and the roles of religion, science, rights, and internationalism. The co-constructed nature of the wartime culture of rehabilitation, in which images and rhetoric were frequently borrowed and re-circulated amongst nations, served to harmonise – though not entirely homogenise – Allied visions for rehabilitation and for social rights and welfare, more broadly.

Chapter 5 highlights the role of disabled veterans in establishing rehabilitation rights at both the national and international levels. It examines, particularly, the involvement of ex-servicemen in the work of the Disablement Branch of the International Labour Organization. Moreover, it answers the question posed by government, military and medical authorities, reformers, and the public-at-large about what was to become of the rehabilitation programmes and technological advances that the war had wrought. The Allied culture of rehabilitation provided the framework for disabled civilian workers and their advocates to lobby for an extension of rehabilitation rights to the industrially disabled, yet, in the end, the expansion of soldiers’ rehabilitation programmes to the civilian body remained largely elusive until the Second World War. Attempts to capitalise on the popular zeal for rehabilitation collapsed as gendered comparisons between soldiers and labourers fell short of their aims, patriotism and wartime collectivist sentiment lost their coercive force, and the political climate turned, bringing the reform era that had launched rehabilitation to a close.

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural materials aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. It considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers’ rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. In recognising rehabilitation systems as complex and multi-faceted sociocultural constructions, it sheds light on the ways in which they became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging. Internal to such systems, the book argues, were the limits of expansion of services to the industrially disabled. In interrogating the post-war quest to extend rehabilitation rights to civilians, the book provides insight into the development of social rights and statist welfarism and the evolution of ideas about the means, ends, and objects of humanitarianism.

Sofia, December 26, 1944. Meeting Protocol, Secretariat of the Central Committee of the (Communist) Bulgarian Workers’ Party.

Agenda: The progress of the People’s Court and measures for eliminating its documented shortcomings.

In the geopolitical matrix of the Second World War, Bulgaria occupied a unique position. Although it was a member of the Tripartite Pact (March 1, 1941) and an ally to Nazi Germany, the country refused to declare war on the USSR and send troops to fight on the Eastern front. Meanwhile, from April 1941 until October 1944, the country ruled by King Boris III occupied large segments of the kingdoms of Yugoslavia (most of Vardar Macedonia and the Serb region of Pirot) and Greece (Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia). In March 1943, following bilateral negotiations with the Germans, the Bulgarian authorities rounded up and deported an estimated 11,343 Jews— that is, nearly all the Jewish population residing in these territories—to Treblinka, where they were exterminated.

During the 1970s, West German society was aroused by the campaigns of a group of French activists led by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld who called former Nazi perpetrators to accountability. With spectacular actions, they exposed the identity of three former SS officers who had taken part in the decisionmaking and organization of the deportations of Jews from France to the Nazi extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. Because the majority of West Germany’s political and juridical elites, as well as society in general, continued to turn a blind eye to Nazi crimes and the presence among them of former Nazi officials, it took nearly a decade of campaigning before these three former SS officers who had served in occupied France—Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn—were finally taken to court in Cologne in October 1979.

This chapter examines the significant role that Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, together with a group of Holocaust survivors and their relatives, played in the transformation of the political-legal and public discourses in West Germany concerning the accountability of SS officials who had commanded and organized the deportations of Jews from France. The activists first organized themselves under the title “Militants de la Memoire,” thus pointing to the idea of social movements that during that time had an important impact on democratization processes. Later, in the run-up to the trial, the French-Jewish group used the self-designation Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France (Sons and daughters of Jews deported from France, or FFDJF) in its public appearance, which called closer attention to processes of Jewish identity formation and the transgenerational legacies of the Holocaust. In order to expose the three SS officials as being responsible for the deportations from France, the group organized several demonstrations in their hometowns, principally Cologne and Warstein (North Rhine–Westphalia), and in Burgstadt (Miltenberg District, Bavaria). Additional action took place with the aim of overcoming the legal barriers fixed in the so-called Transition Agreement (Überleitungsvertrag) between the governments of France and West Germany. A central paragraph in this treaty prohibited Germany from charging war criminals in West Germany who had previously been judged in absentia in France.

In November 1945, the Moscow Central Documentary Film Studio (CSDF; hereafter “the Studio”) sent its operators to Nuremberg to film the trial of the major Nazi criminals. At the end of the eleven-month trial, the feature film Sud Narodov (The judgment of the peoples) was released first, in 1946, on Soviet and then on American screens (The Nuremberg Trial, 1947). About one hour long, this documentary was meant to serve as an educational and political reflection on the participation of the USSR in the trial. The film’s production process met the needs of a key historiographical moment for Soviet state news. According to Roman Karmen, the film’s shooting manager, director, and editor, the documentary brought to a close the cycle of films that retold the story of the “Great Patriotic War,” which had begun to be elaborated by historians and Party officials beginning in 1941. For Karmen, the national and international ambitions of the “great topic on punishment” involved the opportunity to settle accounts with the fascist enemy, but also to draw the world’s attention to the tribute paid by his country. The film was intended to communicate the “lessons” of a Soviet Nuremberg.

When it aired in 1946–47, and despite some critical success across the Atlantic, the film aroused uncomfortable reactions. In the United States, while the trade press deplored an absence of any national competitor for the theme, a journalist from the New York Times expressed confusion about the film’s discourse of victimization as well as its political aims. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, apart from the self-promotion campaign led by Karmen and his friends, the response was scarcely more enthusiastic. Critics remained content to salute the work of the filmmakers and the film’s “historical significance.” The Kremlin reversed its policy on the heels of the revelations of the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1946, subsequently resolving to keep its distance from media coverage of events. After a few weeks of modest release, the film left theaters, only to be updated and reissued in 1962 as part of an anti-American campaign.

In April 1945, the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, and France agreed on the principle of an international trial to judge the major Nazi war criminals. On May 2, President Harry Truman appointed Robert Jackson to lead the American public prosecution. At only fifty-three, the associate justice of the Supreme Court would make the most of his new role following this auspicious appointment. While the four-party talks in London on the status of the future tribunal were still under way, the US chief prosecutor took it upon himself to move forward with the court preparations, thus becoming the trials’ main architect and the event’s staging director.

Jackson had previously served as attorney general in the Roosevelt administration, where he demonstrated a high regard for justice and a strong commitment to the principle of fairness of trial. In June 1945, Jackson impressed on President Truman the need to “punish only the right men and for the right reasons.” Jackson was also acutely aware that the scope of these tri- als would extend well beyond the mere fate of the individuals being prosecuted and would serve political, historical, educational, and moral functions. The prosecutor believed the Nuremberg judgments would be instrumental in promoting the values and ideals of American democracy and reforming international law in the service of peace. For this “romantic of the Law,” the need to deal with these past crimes went hand in hand with a strong desire to create a legal precedent that would end “illegitimate wars of aggression.”

Jackson, who sought to elicit support from world opinion for his vision of the trials, entrusted Lt. Gordon Dean—a law graduate who had been his press secretary and spokesperson during his tenure at the Justice Department—with the responsibility of managing the US prosecution’s public relations.

The chief prosecutor was also assisted in the trial preparation by Gen. William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence agency he had founded during the war. This brilliant and controversial man enlisted many talented recruits who had worked in various fields: espionage, military operations, research, and propaganda.

From December 1963 to August 1965, the so-called first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial took place, the first major trial in the second wave of Nazi crimes trials in West Germany. It was an exceptional case in several respects and has gained some prominence over the years. After a hesitant start, prosecutors pursued very extensive investigations. The attorney general of the state of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, wanted this trial to provide a comprehensive legal and historical clarification of the Auschwitz crime complex. He commissioned young public prosecutors with no professional roots in the National Socialist era for this task. More than two hundred Auschwitz survivors testified as witnesses in the courtroom—something that had never before happened on this scale in West Germany. The four historical reports commissioned by Bauer were for a long time the standard works of West German historians on Nazi crimes and their organizational preconditions. The response from the West German public and the media was tremendous. For many years, this trial was regarded as a kind of turning point, when the general public finally began to recognize the crimes of the Germans against the Jews and in the East European territories occupied by Germany, and when the judicial system began taking decisive steps against the perpetrators. This perception of the Auschwitz trial as a cathartic moment in West Germany’s postwar history is now rightly being called into question. The judgment was groundbreaking in its depictions of historical events, but ultimately disappointing in the judicial consequences. In the end, not much had changed in the judiciary (if at all, rather for the worse), and public attention to Nazi-era crimes soon decreased again.

What is certain, however, is that the Auschwitz survivors themselves, their organizations, and also the international Jewish and victims’ associations reacted vigorously to the investigations and participated in a unique way in the preparations for this trial. The mobilization of this large number of witnesses from numerous countries and from almost all prisoner groups was principally the consequence of the work of former Nazi persecutees and their organizations. The same applies to other aspects of the trial that were particularly important for the investigations or that attracted significant public attention: access to documents from East European archives, the large number of coplaintiffs (Nebenkläger), and the visit of the court to the Auschwitz crime scene.

Nikolaj Leont’ev was one of the witnesses whom internationally known Soviet writer, journalist, and critic Lev Ginzburg congratulated in 1965 for the courage of his testimony at the trial that June of six mass murderers in Krasnodar. The defendants, like Leont’ev, had been Red Army prisoners of war who, in the fall of 1941, entered the SS and police guard forces (Wachmannschaften) and served in the Nazi German extermination centers in occupied Poland in 1942–44. Leont’ev (and key witnesses like him) were free to testify against the defendants as direct participants in the killing only because no one had accused him also of participation. Leont’ev had told the court about the crime scene—the Bełżec extermination center in the General Government. The six were convicted and executed on October 7–8, 1965. Leont’ev’s prewar biography was indistinguishable from the lives of most Red Army men in 1941. His life had also been indistinguishable from the defendants’ lives in another way: together with them, he surrendered to German forces in the summer of 1941, then was recruited by the SS training camp in Trawniki (near Lublin in the General Government) to perform armed service for the SS and police. They had served as guards in the liquidation of the Lublin Jewish ghetto and at the Bełżec extermination center. His biography diverged from that of the defendants, however, because he had deserted to the partisans in early 1943 and ended the war “on the right side.” Their biographies converged again: all were arrested and tried for treason during the immediate postwar years and sentenced to long terms in labor camps, then amnestied after Stalin’s death.

To Soviet security authorities, Trawniki-trained men like Leont’ev were undoubtedly traitors: they had surrendered to the Germans and sworn an oath to serve Nazi authorities loyally. They were subjected to the rightly notorious justice of Article 58 simply by virtue of having served the Germans. Some, however, had also been accomplices in Nazi-led mass state crimes. The Soviet security apparatus uncovered who the Trawniki men were—the two thousand Red Army men that surrendered and another two thousand western Ukrainian civilian recruits.