When History Goes on Trial: Demjanjuk, Eichmann, and Justice After Atrocity
6/27/20261 hr 32 min
John Demjanjuk lived for decades as a retired autoworker in suburban Cleveland. Then investigators accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," one of the most notorious guards at Treblinka. What followed was one of the strangest and most troubling Nazi war-crimes cases of the postwar era: extradition, eyewitness testimony, a death sentence, a reversal, and a final prosecution many years later.
In this episode, Michael Shermer talks with Lawrence Douglas, professor at Amherst College and author of The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice, about Demjanjuk, Eichmann, Nuremberg, Holocaust denial, and the problem of proving atrocities decades after they happened.
How reliable is eyewitness memory after 40 or 50 years? What did Nuremberg actually establish? Was Eichmann really just a bureaucrat? And can a courtroom ever deliver justice for crimes almost too large to comprehend?
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His many books include The Right Wrong Man and The Memory of Judgment. His writing has appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. His new book is The Criminal State: War Atrocity and the Dream of International Justice.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Lawrence Douglas· Guest0:34
I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but there is a kind of violence that, you know, you look far enough back in the history and you often find some kind of connection between the development of a state and the suppression of a people. What protects us from violence in, you know, civil society? What protects us from the violence of our neighbors? And his argument is, it's the state. The state is the thing that pacifies us, and by pacifying us, it kind of makes possible for order, for security, and, you know, basically law itself, for kind of lawful existence. One of the things that really distinguishes a criminal state from just, like, a bad regime is basically that every state apparatus has been deformed. The military has been deformed to criminal ends, bureaucratic apparatus has been deformed for criminal ends, courts have been deformed for criminal ends, and you certainly can't make that claim about the United States today.
Michael Shermer· Host1:23
Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another