Law & the Holocaust

1 unit

The Holocaust — the systematic persecution and murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators — was not only a historical atrocity but a legal one. This course examines how law enabled persecution and genocide in Nazi Germany. Beginning with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the Reichstag Fire, and the Enabling Act of 1933, the course explores how law legitimized dictatorship and exclusion of Jews through the Nuremberg Race Laws and related decrees. Students will study both the Years of Persecution (1933–1939) and the Years of Extermination (1939–1945), including the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the Einsatzgruppen, and the concentration and extermination camps, to understand how bureaucratic and legal mechanisms facilitated genocide. The course also will examine judicial complicity, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. It will conclude with Raphael Lemkin, the Genocide Convention, and assessing how the legacy of the Holocaust and Nuremberg continues to shape memory, law, and international justice today.