ABSTRACT
The Holocaust left an immediate, and quite profound, historical legacy. As the international world had to negotiate the after-effects of World War II and the Nazi genocide – the economic and social ravages of war, political negotiations and realignments of state forces and allegiances, displaced Jewish persons and other refugees, barely alive liberated camp survivors – the Holocaust began to seep into world consciousness. At first, this did not happen through popular culture, but rather through law. The Nuremberg Trials, for example, opened the way for the development of international war tribunals and, eventually, the International Criminal Court (ICC). Wherever and whenever after the Nuremberg Trials a Holocaust related law has had to be adapted because of having to deal with repercussions of the Holocaust, rather than the Holocaust itself, anxieties over this necessary transfer have been voiced. In Israel, the Law against Genocide and the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law (1950) led the Knesset into moral and historical reflections on the ontological character of the Holocaust and the lessons to be learned from it. The historian Tom Segev (1991) quotes a Knesset member:
Although the Knesset member claims universal relevance of the Holocaust for ‘mankind’, he wants to preserve clear boundaries between the Holocaust and other events.
