Michael Bazyler, Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law: A Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World

Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law: A Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World proposes to fill what Bazyler observes as a gap in Holocaust scholarship: it is ‘rarely examined through the prism of the law’ (p xxiv). It does so from two perspectives. First, it ‘describe[s] and analyse[s] the legal aspects of the Holocaust and its aftermath’ (p xxiv). Secondly, it aims ‘to show how various areas of law have developed as a direct response to the Holocaust’. These developments, Bazyler claims, have engendered ‘a discrete body of law’ to which he refers as ‘post-Holocaust law’ (PHL) (p xix). The first part is an especially painful read for lawyers. It demonstrates how the institution of law was put to catastrophic use and that lawyers were unable (or unwilling) to prevent this from happening. Bazyler exhaustively maps out the intersections between law and the horrors of the Holocaust, showing clearly how the Holocaust may be understood as a ‘legal event’ (p xxiv). Chapter one’s stomach-turning list of legal measures taken by the German government to facilitate the Holocaust illustrates that ‘the groundwork for the murder of six million Jews and other persecuted minorities was established almost entirely within the legal framework of German law’ (p xxv). As a warning never to forget that dark realities may lurk behind the neutral language of the law, we are told how the Nazi government and its jurists corrupted existing legal terminology or couched their policies in euphemistic legal neologisms (p 21). This leads Bazyler to the sobering conclusion that ‘without law and lawyers, the Holocaust would not have occurred’ (p xxv).