"Seeking Justice for the Holocaust: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert C. Pell, and the Limits of International Law"

Dr. Graham Cox, Lecturer in the History Department at UNT, will discuss the debate among the Allies over the creation of an international legal protocol to prosecute Nazi officials at Nuremberg following the close of World War II. U.S. policymakers were able to limit the scope of new international law seeking justice for the Holocaust to avoid creating precedents that – so they thought – might boomerang on the United States itself because of its own policy of racial segregation. By linking “crimes against humanity” with “aggressive war” and “conspiracy” to protect American sovereignty against accusations about its own unequal social order, US policymakers simultaneously and hypocritically proclaimed the United States as the moral leader of the postwar new world order.