Elective Course
European Legal Systems and the Holocaust
This course examines the role played by law in the gradual progression towards genocide during the years 1933-45 in Europe. We then study the response to those events in post-War courtrooms, from Nuremberg to American federal courts, where victims of the Holocaust have been seeking a measure of justice. The focus is on the Third Reich and on Vichy France, where two sophisticated but highly different legal systems pursued, isolated, robbed, and eventually annihilated people on the basis of a carefully defined ethnic and religious status. (Other countries in Hitler's Europe will receive briefer coverage.) Then, the post-War analysis will largely concern civil litigation designed to afford restitution to survivors or their heirs for massive (and legalized) looting of their property throughout wartime Europe.
Prerequisite: None