Lawrence Douglas

The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg

OVERLOOKED IN THE CELEBRATIONS OF the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial, the most significant criminal action in history, was the proceedings great tedium. Rebecca West, who reported on the trial for the JNew iorker, described the courtroom as a citadel of boredom. The trial was long eleven months would pass from the reading of the indictment on 21 November 1945 until the tribunal pronounced judgment on 1 October 1946 though perhaps not inordinately so: the O.J. Simpson murder trial took nearly as long as the entire Nuremberg Trial, with its twenty-one defendants and complex indictment enumerating crimes committed over the course of a decade and the space of a continent. The savage impatience that the trial aroused in its spectators was less a function of duration than of how the prosecution chose to present its evidence. Following the strategy of the chief counsel for the United States, Robert H.Jackson (on leave from his position as associate justice of the Supreme Court), the prosecution structured its case around captured documentary evidence, material considered harder and more reliable than eyewitness testimony.4 As a result, much of the Nuremberg Trial was devoted to the numbing recitation of thousands of documents, a process less suited to highlighting the malignancy of the defendants than the ingenuity of IBM, whose translation machine, specially designed for the Nuremberg courtroom, permitted the four-way simultaneous interpretation of material read into the courts record. And so, a trial many had feared would devolve into sensationalism came to assume all the drama of antitrust litigation. But Nuremberg was not without its moments of spectacle. One of these came on 13 December 1945, near the end of the proceedings first month. Thomas J. Dodd, an assistant prosecutor (and future U.S. Senator) who had spent much of the afternoon reading affidavits about the deplorable conditions in the concentration camps, brought the courts attention to an unusual exhibit: We do not wish to dwell on this pathological phase of the Nazi culture, he announced, but we do feel compelled to offer one additional exhibit, which we offer as Exhibit Number