The Documentary and Didactic Functions Sample Clauses

The Documentary and Didactic Functions. Xxxxxx agreed with the judges that it was critically important for “just punishment [to] be imposed on the guilty.”7 But he made clear in the opening minutes of the Medical trial that he had far greater ambitions for the trials: The mere punishment of the defendants, or even of thousands of others equally guilty, can never redress the terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples. For them it is far more important that these incredible events be established by clear and public proof, so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable… It is our deep obligation to all peoples of the world to show why and how these things happened.8 This statement articulated two different but interrelated goals. The first was documentary: creating a historical record of the Nazis’ atrocities. The second was didactic: educating a still-skeptical public about those atrocities. By any standard, the documentary goal was a spectacular success. As noted in the Introduction, more than 1,300 witnesses testified during the trials, the parties introduced more than 30,000 documents into evidence, and the judgments run more than 3,800 pages. In the aftermath of the trials, only the most committed apologist could maintain that the Holocaust – and the Nazis’ other crimes beyond number – were “fable, not fact.”