Demjanjuk in Munich: War Crimes Trials in Historical PerspectiveFeatured Speaker
Lawrence Douglas, James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College
Professor Douglas will discuss the recent trial of John Demjanjuk in Germany, which found him guilty of serving as an accessory to the murder of almost 28,000 Jews in the Sobibor killing center in Nazi-occupied Poland. Examining the Demjanjuk proceeding from the vantage point of an observer at the trial in Munich, he will explore the 65-year history of national and international criminal prosecutions in the wake of the Holocaust.
Professor Douglas is the author of the forthcoming Reflections on the Glass Booth: A Jurisprudence of Atrocity and The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (2001).
A reception follows the lecture. Reservations are requested; RSVP today.
The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture honors excellence in research on the Holocaust and fosters dissemination of important, new Holocaust scholarship. Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff of Baltimore, Maryland, were active philanthropists in the United States and abroad, focusing especially on Jewish learning and scholarship, music, the arts, and humanitarian causes. Their children, Eleanor Katz and Harvey M. Meyerhoff, member and Chairman Emeritus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, have endowed this lecture.