Silence at the Nuremberg Trials: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and Sexual Crimes against Women in the Holocaust

Abstract

Sexual crimes in general and specifically sexual crimes against women were excluded from Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This striking disregard of such abhorrent conduct requires a thorough examination of the legal, historical, and sociological factors that generated it. In this paper, we consider the reasons for the Tribunal’s disregard of sexual crimes against women in the Holocaust. First, we analyze the historical procedures leading to the establishment of this Tribunal, and rethink some of the public myths about its goals and about the trial itself. We turn to a feminist analysis of the historical and legal background of WWII, focusing on the development of the legal concepts of sexual assault on women in international criminal law. In the following section we discuss the general marginalization of women in that era and draw parallels to women’s suffering in Germany during and after WWII. We then examine sexual assaults of women during the Holocaust committed by Nazis and their collaborators; and finally, we examine and suggest an explanation for the Tribunal’s non-account of these acts.

Keywords: sexual crimes, World War II, Nuremberg military tribunal, holocaust