Hilary Earl

Nipissing University, History, Faculty Member

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I am an historian of the Holocaust and I'm mostly interested in perpetrator testimony and the tensions between what they say and what they did.
Phone: (705) 474-3450 x. 4476
Address: Department of History
Nipissing University
100 College Drive, box 5002
North Bay, Ontario
P1B 8L7
Canada

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Books by Hilary Earl

Front matter and table of contents

by Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl

A Companion to the Holocaust , 2020

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The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History

Hitler caused the Holocaust, that much we know (no Hitler, no Holocaust). But did he directly ord... more

Papers by Hilary Earl

The Anatomy of the Holocaust: Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship. By Raul Hilberg. Edited by Walter H. Pehle and René Schlott. Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Edited by Jonathan D. Huener, Francis R. Nicosia, Susanna Schrafstetter, and Alan Steinweis. New York: Berghahn ...

The Journal of Modern History, Dec 1, 2021

Next to barbed wire, the Auschwitz train station and rail lines are perhaps the most iconic and e... more Next to barbed wire, the Auschwitz train station and rail lines are perhaps the most iconic and easily recognizable symbols of the Holocaust today. The cattle car is also an important item in the collection of many Holocaust museums, including the main exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and there is scarcely a survival story that does not include some horrific memory of the train journey. Recalling most vividly a terrible thirst, survivor Primo Levi wrote about his train journey, noting "at every stop we clamoured for water, or even a handful of snow. .. two young mothers, nursing their children, groaned night and day, begging for water." In tightly packed cattle cars, with no place to sit, no place to stand, and no place to take care of basic human needs, the train journey was an assault on the human senses. For many survivors the journey seemed to take an eternity and then, as Levi describes in the opening pages of his memoir, it suddenly came to an abrupt and confusing end. Of the 650 people in his transport, fewer than one-fifth were alive two days after arriving at Auschwitz. Levi's was not an unusual story. Between October 1941 and November 1944, Jews from across Europe were transported to the five death camps in Poland-Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vast majority of these people did not return. Ninety percent of Poland's 3.3 million Jews were killed in the death camps that opened in the spring and summer of 1942 and most of them were transported from the ghetto to the camp by train. In fact, more than half of all those deliberately murdered by the Germans during World War II went to their deaths on a train transport. The train marks an important moment in the history of the "Final Solution." Before the death camps of Poland were fully operational in the summer of 1942, mobile-SS and police units traveled in motorized vehicles over huge swaths of land in the occupied Soviet Union from the Baltic states to the Crimea to identify, round up, and kill their victims in open-air shootings. With the help of local militia and some civilians, German SS troops and police killed more than a million innocent people a few dozen at a time. In the summer of 1942, the train transformed and rationalized the killing process. No longer did perpetrators have to traverse the land seeking out their victims; they could now transport them in large numbers directly to stationary camps where they would be killed upon arrival en masse. Despite the central role of the railway system in this process, not a single railway employee, manager, scheduler, mechanic, or conductor was prosecuted by the Allies or Germans after the war.

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Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II By Francine Hirsch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 542. Cloth $34.95. ISBN: 978-0199377930

Central European History

A companion to the Holocaust

Wiley Balckwell, 2020

Chapter 2 A Judge, a Prosecutor, and a Mass Murderer. Courtroom Dynamics in the SSEinsatzgruppen Trial

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

Chapter 10 CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHIES AND BIOGRAPHIES OF CRIMINALS Understanding the History of War Crimes Trials and Perpetrator “Routes to Crime” using Biographical Method

Biography Between Structure and Agency

Holocaust and Justice: Representation & Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials

Global War Studies, 2012

Scales of Justice

Front matter and Table of Contents

Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2013

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Prosecuting genocide before the Genocide Convention: Raphael Lemkin and the Nuremberg Trials, 1945–1949

Journal of Genocide Research, 2013

Between 1945 and 1949, American, British, French and Soviet prosecutors, indicted and tried appro... more Between 1945 and 1949, American, British, French and Soviet prosecutors, indicted and tried approximately 207 former Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity in what has come to be called collectively, ‘The Nuremberg Trials’. This article explores the place of genocide in these trials. It examines the extent to which Raphael Lemkin influenced the Nuremberg prosecutors to incorporate genocide into the indictments, how the crime was prosecuted in the courtroom and, ultimately, how it was understood by the court in their judgments. Although there were thirteen separate trials at Nuremberg, this article focuses mainly on one of these, the SS–Einsatzgruppen trial of 1947–48, in which twenty-two high-ranking SS officers were tried for crimes against humanity. The SS–Einsatzgruppen were the vanguard of the ‘Final Solution’. As ideological soldiers of the Third Reich they had killed one million civilians, mainly Jews, between June 1941 and July 1943, clear evidence of genocide according to Lemkin's definition of the crime that was circulating in Nuremberg at the time. Even though ‘genocide’ had been articulated when this trial began, the Nuremberg prosecutors did not fully employ it at trial. Ultimately, this article explores the tension between the meaning of genocide and its practical application in the post-war courtrooms of Nuremberg.

Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World

The Holocaust's Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education ed. by F.C. DeCoste, Bernard Schwartz (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2001

were guilty of anti-Semitic statements.= Further, he gave his assurance that if, in spite of his ... more were guilty of anti-Semitic statements.= Further, he gave his assurance that if, in spite of his repeated warnings to the contrary, >anti-Semitic utterances on the part of his membership were to continue, he would take whatever steps he possibly could in order to definitely squelch any anti-Semitic tendency.= The account of the conversation is revealing on two counts. First, Aberhart candidly admitted that certain Social Crediters were spouting anti-Semitism. Secondly, even though the premier failed to keep his promise to squelch the anti-Semitism among his followers, the Congress chose not to make the conversation public. As a result, an opportunity was lost to publicize Aberhart=s acknowledgment of the problem and his failure to do anything about it. Social Discredit is full of intriguing episodes, but typically the documentation is more complete on the Congress side than on the Social Credit side. In February 1947 two Congress officials held a two-hour meeting with three Socia...

Legacies of the Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial After 70 Years

Loyola of Los Angeles international and comparative law review, 2017

alongside the German army to kill the racial enemies of the Reich. It is estimated they deliberat... more alongside the German army to kill the racial enemies of the Reich. It is estimated they deliberately murdered between 1.1 and 1.5 million innocent Jewish men, women and children. The "Einsatzgruppen Reports," discovered in 1946, contained damning evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and in the summer of 1947, Telford Taylor-the head of the American Office of Chief of Counsel of War Crimes ("OCCWC")-indicted two dozen group leaders for crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in organizations declared criminal by the IMT. 1 These defendants were not tried for crimes against peace. In some ways, as Kim Priemel has noted, the Einsatzgruppen trial is not technically a "war crimes trial," but rather an atrocity trial. 2 Responsible for carrying out the Nazi policy for "extermination" in the east, many of these men were extremely well educated professionals who had come to the mobile killing units by way of the Security Service ("SD") offices. None of the defendants were rank-and-file members of the Einsatzgruppen. 3 Michael Musmanno, a judge in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania and a controversial figure at Nuremberg, presided over the court, which was in session for 138 days. Thousands of pieces of evidence were reviewed and every defendant testified about their behavior 1.

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Hilary Earl, “The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History”

Introduction 1. The United States and the origins of the subsequent Nuremberg trials 2. Otto Ohle... more

War, Atrocity, and Genocide

Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, by Richard Rhodes

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 348 pp. $27.50. Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of Richard Rhodes... more New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 348 pp. $27.50. Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher of Richard Rhodes, Masters of Death: The SS Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust, boldly asserts that the author "gives full weight, for the first time, to the part played by the Einsatzgruppen -- the professional killing squads deployed in Poland and the Soviet Union," in the murder of approximately 1.5 million innocent civilians -- mainly Soviet Jews -- "early in World War II." Furthermore, the publisher states, the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen "have been underestimated or overlooked by Holocaust historians." To prove his case Rhodes -- a Pulitzer Prize winning author -- utilizes Nuremberg Trial documents that have apparently "largely been ignored" until now. These claims are remarkable; surely a misprint. Any student of the Holocaust or Third Reich knows that a substantial body of literature exists on the role of the Einsatzgruppen in the murder of ...