Language Use by Victims, Perpetrators, and Observers at the 1945 Belsen Trial: Confronting and Encoding the Holocaust

This article examines the use of language during one of the earliest moments of postwar scrutiny of and reflection on the Holocaust, namely the Belsen trial. The linguistic expression of the Holocaust by those who experienced it firsthand—primarily as victims but also as perpetrators—is compared with the linguistic expression of a set of secondhand observers of the Holocaust, namely British military legal personnel. As a case study, this article takes the way SS personnel and prisoners with supervisory or leadership responsibilities are referred to in affidavits prepared before the trial and during the trial itself. There are notable differences between the language used by such observers to describe the Holocaust and the language used by those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand. British military personnel with no direct experience of the Holocaust make substantial use of code-switching into German, not only using but also adapting terminology that can be classed as Nazi German. This adaptation is viewed here as a parallel to the failure by the British at the trial to adequately understand camp society. Victims and perpetrators used a more varied set of linguistic expressions, making use of their own phraseology and colloquialisms in English, French, German, and Polish, which evidence individual priorities and perspectives. It is argued that differences in language use represent a linguistic parallel to, and indeed expression of, other differences between postwar observers and Holocaust victims and perpetrators themselves, and that the language used before and during the Belsen trial is a valuable lesson in the importance, and indeed the challenge of, paying careful attention to testimony.