Le Procés Eichmann, 1961 by Annette Wieviorka

Raphael Lemkin, Hannah Arendt, and Bruno Bettelheim all referred to these trials to conceive the moral affront of genocide.

This recent witness figure symbolizes the culmination of a long-term process through which Western European and American publics came to conceive mass atrocities not only as unconscionable, reparable, and at worst regrettable forms of barbarism, but also as constitutive and permanent features of modern political formations. The witness to genocide warns of the destruction of human life if no action is taken to punish the perpetrators, appealing instead to a potentially sympathetic but just as likely indifferent audience, one that may well need convincing. In the nineteenth century, such witnesses testified to the plight of persecuted peoples, spoke movingly about their injuries, and appealed to audiences’ sympathy for suffering humanity, on whose behalf publics were presumed to feel aggrieved and wish to act. The moral witness testifies to human suffering as if conveying God’s word, and false testimony is a sacrilege 2. Like witnesses from earlier periods, including abolitionists fighting slavery, Jews condemning pogroms, and humanitarians denouncing mass atrocities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the witness to genocide adapts a biblical representation of the witness.

The article makes several additional points: the Jewish Holocaust survivor is one, albeit the most powerful, among multiple figures of the witness to genocide who emerge in the course of twentieth-century trials beginning in the interwar period and the pervasive use of “witnesses” and “bearing witness” now refers to a wide array of people from human rights workers to exhibit-goers, a phenomenon that represents a new development that should be differentiated from the emergence of Holocaust witnesses to genocide. The essay revisits the Eichmann trial to understand its contribution not simply to bringing the world's attention to the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, but also to understanding how the trial shaped the pervasive figure of the Jewish 'witness' who marked the Holocaust as a caesura in human history.

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem laid the foundation for a fragile Western moral consensus around the Holocaust whose symbol, the “survivor” became an image of human conscience and an icon of human suffering after the 1970s, especially in the United States. This essay addresses how “bearing witness to genocide” became a central trope of contemporary Western moral culture.

Le Procés Eichmann, 1961 by Annette Wieviorka