The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 61

he Nazi Holocaust and the
ession of Jewish Suffering
7
concentration and labor camps
in 1945 .... Pictures had been
printed in the United States and
Great Britain .... In an age when
newsreels and magazines like
Life provided the main visual impressions
of events, the pictures
of the camps brought reality to
the home front .... But somehow
these places seemed far away,
even if the numbers murdered in
them were [vast]. 29
When it came time for Allied authorities
to put the captured Nazis on trial at
Nuremberg, newsreel images proved to
be the final nail in the Nazi coffin.
The Soviets found their circumstances
improved. Not only did their
authorities view the trials as “an expression
of the ultimate triumph of the Soviet
Union over its bitter enemy, a source
of legitimate pride and inspiration,” 30
but the trials facilitated the execution of
a broader agenda:
From the Soviet perspective,
Nazism was not simply evil in
itself. It was part of a broader
phenomenon and a more lasting
enemy—capitalism and ‘capitalism’s
highest stage,’ imperialism.
Soviet ideologues conceived of
Nazism and fascism as systems
developed by the ruling capitalist
classes for the purpose of maintaining
their domination and alleviating
fundamental economic
and social problems of capitalism
through the use of violence,
nationalism, and aggression 31 ....
In 1945 Pravda’s chief editor
Petr Pospelov explained to Boris