 Good evening, everyone. I'm Ellen Umanski, the Carl and Dorothy Bennett professor of Judaic Studies at Fairfield University, and the founding director of the University's Bennett Center for Judaic Studies now in its 28th year. Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the major war criminals trial in Nuremberg, Germany. To mark that anniversary, to look at its historical and legal significance, and to examine that trial and other Holocaust trials, we are privileged to have with us Lawrence Douglas, the James J. Grossfeld Professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College, a graduate of Brown University, Columbia University and Yale Law School. He's the author of seven books, including The Memory of Judgment, Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, and The Right Wrong Man, John Demianouk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, which was a New York Times editor's choice and an inspiration for the Netflix documentary series, The Devil Next Door, which you can still watch on Netflix. In addition, Professor Douglas has published two novels, The Catastrophist, A Kirkus Best Books of the Year, and The Vices, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Prize. His commentary and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Los Angeles Times. And he's a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian, for which he's a contributing opinion editor, sorry, contributing opinion writer. The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and the Carnegie Foundation. Lawrence Douglas is the recipient of a 2022 Berlin Prize from the American Academy. He has lectured throughout the United States in more than a dozen countries and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt University to Berlin. His most recent book, Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020, published by 12 Hatchet in late May 2020, received widespread praise and extensive national and international attention, including lead reviews in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He has made dozens of media appearances in countries around the globe. My thanks this evening to Jennifer Hanos, Program Manager of the Bennett Center, and Anthony Santora in Fairfield University's Media Center for helping to make the details of this evening possible. My thanks as well to my colleague and friend, Dr. Gabrielle Rosenfeld, who will be joining me for a brief discussion with Professor Douglas after his lecture. And of course, my deepest thanks to Lawrence Douglas for accepting my invitation to be with us. At any time during his talk, feel free to type in a question in the Q&A box and we'll be answering or he'll be answering the questions following a brief discussion with Professor Douglas by Gav Rosenfeld and me. And now please join me in virtually welcoming Professor Lawrence Douglas, who will be speaking tonight on the topic, A History of Holocaust Trials from Nuremberg to Jim Yanuk and back again. Lawrence Douglas. So first of all, let me start, Ellen, by thank you for the both for the very, very generous introduction and also for the incredibly kind invitation for which I am most grateful. And I'd also like to thank Gabrielle for joining us in the panel discussion to follow. And I also wanted to join you in thanking Jennifer Hanoes for helpfully working out some of the logistical issues with my appearance with you tonight. I'm going to start my lecture tonight with a story about memory. And it comes from Hamburg in the mid 1970s. And in the mid 1970s in Hamburg, German prosecutors tried a number of SS officials who had run a camp called Trinicki. The Trinicki camp had been an SS facility that was located near Lublin in Poland. And during the Holocaust, the SS had recruited about 5000 Eastern Europeans, mostly Ukrainians not exclusively, but mostly Ukrainians who had first been taken as POWs by the Germans, and then had trained these select Eastern Europeans to become death camp guards. And a famous Trinicki alumnus was John Damianuk, about whom you'll all hear more in a bit. So in 1975, in Hamburg, German prosecutors tried a handful of SS men who had run this Trinicki training camp. And the trial, as I said, was held in Hamburg. And a Jewish survivor of a Trinicki who had since immigrated to the United States, she returned to Germany for the purposes of testifying in the trial. And I just want to go to us. And the survivor recalled, she recalled that one of the worst SS men at Trinicki had been an Obersturmbahnführer named Klink. Now, the only problem with her identifying this Obersturmbahnführer Klink was that the German prosecutors had actually never encountered the record of a Lieutenant Colonel Klink at Trinicki. And they were also perplexed by the name, because it sounds like a German name, but it actually is not. And it came out in the course of the trial that this Jewish survivor had apparently confused her Trinicki tormentor with another man. Now, those of a certain age will recognize this man as the bungling, monopold Colonel who presided over the fictitious Stalag 13 in the American sitcom Hogan's Heroes. And in the survivor's mind, the Colonel Klink of TV became associated with the Lieutenant Colonel of Trinicki. And she insisted that the two had looked a great deal alike. And I begin with the story, because far from idiosyncratic, I believe it signals a central question that trials of the Holocaust have had to deal with. And that question is what role, what role should survivor testimony play in such cases? Now, this is an image from the Nuremberg trial. What we see here is the 21 defendants who were physically in the dock at Nuremberg. These were leading functionaries of the Nazi state and the military leadership. Over here, you don't get a good side of him, but here is Hermann Göring, who at one point was the heir apparent, Hitler's self-selected heir. Over here, we can see Joachim Rippentopf, who was the former foreign minister of Germany. So these are very high ranking functionaries who were tried at Nuremberg. Nuremberg, however, was not in the first instance a trial about the Holocaust. It was the very first international criminal trial in human history, but the center of the prosecution's case focused not on the atrocities that the Germans had committed against the Jewish population of Europe, but rather it focused on what they called crimes of war or crimes against peace, I should say. And I just want to show you this thing. This is the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Recall it was international in as much as it represented a collaborative exercise bringing together prosecutorial teams from the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France, and judges from the same four allied countries. And the substance of charges that were brought against the 21 Nazis who were physically in the dock at Nuremberg are enumerated right here. And we see that the first charge is this crimes against peace. And that was this idea that the Nazis had launched a war of aggression in violation of international law. At the same time, though, Nuremberg conferred judicial recognition on what it called, and we see here, crimes against humanity. And this was the term that was introduced at Nuremberg, really kind of pioneered at Nuremberg for the purposes of describing state-sponsored atrocity. And it was through this new legal category of crimes against humanity that the prosecutors did really a pretty impressive job, not an entirely successful one, but really a pretty impressive job of documenting the Nazis extermination of the Jews of Europe. And yet the prosecution's shortcoming, and yet the prosecution's case did suffer from shortcomings, though I would say these shortcomings had less to do with what the prosecution said about extermination and Nazi crimes than how it went about saying it. Now this picture is also from the Nuremberg trial, and it's certainly far less famous than the first image that I showed you of the 21 defendants in the dock at Nuremberg. But in some ways, this image is actually even more revealing than the first. To prove the guilt of the accused, Nuremberg prosecutors consciously chose to largely avoid relying on eyewitnesses to Nazi atrocities. Prosecutors were worried that Nazi crimes were so extreme, so astonishing, that survivor testimony would be dismissed as perhaps exaggerated as the product of trauma or perhaps even as fabricated outright. So instead prosecutors very consciously structured their case around captured Nazi documents. These captured Nazi documents were considered harder, more reliable evidence and eyewitness testimony. And as a consequence of that, Nuremberg turned into what I call here a trial by document. That is a trial that unfolded largely absent the lived memory of eyewitnesses. And this photo makes very clear the veritable sea of documents that the allies had to wait through in preparing their cases. And these are largely, this is kind of a gendered photograph as well, and these are largely secretarial help for the prosecutors preparing the documentary case. And so again, on a deeper level, this image I think captures the very nature of the Allied prosecution, which sought to condemn the Nazis with documents of their own making. And yet the photo also hints at an unfortunate and inadvertent consequence of this trial by document. The Nuremberg trial, there are many prominent journalists covered the Nuremberg trial. One of them was the novelist and journalist, Dame Rebecca West, who was covering Nuremberg for the Daily Telegraph in England. And Rebecca West memorably described Nuremberg as quote, a citadel of boredom. And West went out of the way to point out that this wasn't just run of the mill dullness. West said that this was boredom on a grand historical scale. Now this might seem deeply paradoxical to us, because after all, as I mentioned, this is the first international criminal trial in human history. There are notorious and very well known defendants on the stand and they're being accused of spectacular allegations. And yet the trial proved exceptionally dull. And I think the dullness was the inadvertent consequence of this trial by document. Because as a result of this prosecutorial approach, most of the court's time became devoted to prosecutors simply reading aloud thousands and thousands of documents into the official record. And worse yet, I suppose we could point out that they had to read slowly, slowly. And that was because the simultaneous interpreters who were operating through a very kind of ingenious device that IBM had devised for the trial, these simultaneous interpreters had to hear these documents and then to then translate them into either French or Russian, sometimes German, sometimes English, depending on what language the original document was in. And so this whole process of reading had to go about very slowly to give the interpreters an opportunity to work alongside. Our next image, this next image comes from the trial of Alf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, a Lieutenant Colonel in the SS. Eichmann had served as the logistical mastermind of the deportation of European Jews to a number of killing centers in the East. And after the war, as many of you might know, Eichmann fled to Argentina. He was ultimately captured by agents of Mossad and he was brought back to Israel to stand trial. This is an image of Eichmann in this glass booth. And the glass booth and this image, I suppose, of Eichmann in the glass booth is probably one of the most famous images that's associated with Holocaust trials. The Israelis constructed this glass booth as a security protection for the defendant, that is, to safeguard and to protect Eichmann from possible assassination attempts. But the photo, and if you've studied or read about the Eichmann trial, the glass booth almost turned Eichmann into a specimen to be observed. And we almost see that here in this image. It looks less as if, looks less that the glass booth is designed to protect Eichmann from the trial spectators as much as it looks the other way around. It looks almost like a shield to protect the courtroom from the accused. And the glass booth, in a certain way, it kind of transformed Eichmann into a specimen to be studied and observed, almost like a creature from a radically different moral universe. And yet, what emerged from the trial was that far from a sociopath or really a creature from a different moral universe, Eichmann was, if anything, terrifyingly normal. In fact, the Israeli psychiatrist who interviewed Eichmann described Eichmann precisely in those terms as terrifyingly normal, or as he said, he's more normal than I am after having spoken to him. And in that way, Eichmann famously became a exemplar of what the great political thinker Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, that this was a man who saw the performance of his job as his highest ethical duty and calling, even when that job required the performance of morally heinous acts. Now here's another pretty famous image from the Eichmann trial, though this one requires some explaining. The Eichmann prosecution was determined, they're determined not to repeat the errors associated with Nuremberg's documentary approach. And to this end, the Eichmann prosecution consciously, consciously organized its case around the testimony of Holocaust survivors. And by telling Holocaust history through the lived memory of a survivor testimony, Israeli Attorney General and Chief Prosecutor Gideon Hausner, he sought to make the trial into what he called a gripping living record of the Holocaust. And this approach of Hausner and the prosecution, this testimonial approach, it actually succeeded in a manner that frankly astonished Hausner and other Israeli officials. They expected the trial to kind of rivet the public in Israel, which it certainly did. But they had underestimated the capacity of the trial to also really rivet an international audience, particularly in the United States and West Germany, where the trial really attracted a huge following. One of, in addition to Hannah Arendt, who famously wrote about the Eichmann trial, originally for the New Yorker, another famous writer who covered the trial was a Dutch writer named Harry Mulesh. And Mulesh described the power of telling Holocaust history through survivor testimony in the following words, he said, as a quote from Mulesh. As the witnesses spoke about events from their past, this history became real and alive to those who listened. And I think that's precisely what we see here. It's the past made present, the power of the memories of the witness. We don't see the witness in this image. We simply see the power of the witness's words etched on the face of a spectator at the trial. The Eichmann trial then dramatically showcased the power of organizing a Holocaust trial around the lived memory of survivors. The dangers though, the dangers of basing a trial on survivor testimony were exposed in the other great Holocaust trial that was staged in Israel. And that was the trial of John Yvonne Damianuk that began in Jerusalem in 1987, that is roughly a quarter century after Eichmann's trial and then execution. Damianuk, here we see him pictured in his Jerusalem trial. Damianuk was a native Ukrainian. After the Second World War, Damianuk had emigrated to the United States and he'd become a naturalized US citizen in the late 1950s. He settled in suburban Cleveland. He went to work as a machinist at Ford and life in America was pretty good to John Damianuk. Until the mid 1970s. And that was when American investigators came to identify Damianuk as a former death camp guard and actually not just as any guard. Damianuk was alleged to have been Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. And this was a guard who was notorious for his sociopathic cruelty as a guard at the Treblinka Killing Center. For technical jurisdictional reasons, American prosecutors could not try Damianuk domestically for after all, his crimes had not taken place in the United States. He at the time was not an American citizen and the victims of his crimes were not Americans. So there was no jurisdictional basis for trying Damianuk in the United States. But what American prosecutors could do, what they could do, is they could charge him with lying on his citizenship application and then strip him of his citizenship and then send him to a country that could try him. And after a rather long and drawn out legal process, Damianuk was denaturalized, that is, he was stripped of his citizenship and he was extradited from the United States to Israel and there beginning, as we see here in 1987, he stood trial as Ivan Grozny, the Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. And in a way similar to the Iceman trial, the Damianuk trial was based on survivor testimony. In fact, if you really want one step further, the prosecution's case against Damianuk in Jerusalem was based almost exclusively, almost exclusively on the eyewitness testimony of several Treblinka survivors. And these survivors took the stand in Jerusalem and all swore with absolute certainty that Damianuk was none other than Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny, the former guard at Treblinka. And this is probably the most famous photo associated with Damianuk's Israeli trial. It captures a very dramatic moment, probably the most dramatic moment in the trial. And this is when a Treblinka survivor named Eliyahu Rosenberg identified the defendant. And here you can see the defendant right here. So Rosenberg was testifying for the prosecution and the prosecutor asked Rosenberg if he could positively identify the defendant. And Rosenberg said, I would like to see his eyes more closely. And so to inspect Damianuk more closely, Rosenberg actually got up from the stand and walked over to the dock where the defendant was sitting and declared, this is what he said, I say, unhesitatingly and without the slightest doubt, this is Ivan from the gas chambers. I see his eyes, those murderous eyes. After 18 months of trial, Damianuk was convicted and he was sentenced to death. And if he had been executed, he would have joined Eiffman as the only criminal convict to be executed in Israeli history. But in cases, in capital cases in Israel, the appellate process is automatic. There has to be appeals in capital cases. So it's automatic. And while this conviction was on appeal, it became clear, it became clear that Eliyahu Rosenberg and the other survivors of Treblinka that they had identified the wrong man, that Ivan the terrible it turned out had been one Ivan Marchenko, who also was a Ukrainian. And I suppose we could say that this Marchenko bore a small, but maybe not entirely negligible, similarity to Damianuk. And it also emerged that apparently this Marchenko had died fighting in the Balkans at the end of the war, so he never survived the end of the war. The photo then of that we see here, of Rosenberg peering into Damianuk's murderous eyes, now then has a very different meaning from when it was first made and circulated. At the time, it was an image that signaled the power, the power of indelible memory to serve as a means of legal evidence and reckoning. And now, sadly, it stands as an emblem of the slippages of memory and of the undependability of eyewitness testimony, even testimony about the most extreme traumas. One thing that made the Damianuk case utterly bizarre is that even though the Israelis on appeal received evidence that appeared to conclusively clear Damianuk of being Treblinka's Ivan the terrible, the evidence that the Israelis got an appeal was not entirely expulatory and by expulatory I mean it was not entirely supportive of a claim of innocence by Damianuk. Indeed, it showed that Damianuk had indeed served as a death camp guard, only at Sobobor, a smaller killing center and not at Treblinka. Now this put the Israelis in a very difficult position, the Israeli court that is, because the Israelis had tried Damianuk as Ivan the terrible of Treblinka. They had not tried him as, you know, what we could say almost like as Ivan the not so hot of Sobobor. And so in 1993, in a brave and necessary step, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Damianuk's conviction. And thereafter in the whole story is really quite complicated and a circuitous for a period of time Damianuk actually returned to the United States for complicated reasons. He actually briefly had his American citizenship reinstated. This led to a new second long drawn out denaturalization proceeding based no longer on the Treblinka evidence, but now on the Sobobor evidence. And this resulted in Damianuk earning the dubious distinction, the dubious distinction of being the only person in American history to be stripped of his citizenship, not once, but twice. After yet even more delay, Damianuk was finally deported from the United States to Germany. And there in Munich, now we're in November 2009, he was tried again, but this time for his service at Sobobor. He was convicted in 2011. And he actually died a year later 2012, while his case was being appealed. So I actually was given a journalistic assignment. I wrote a story for for Harper's magazine about Damianuk's Munich trial, which I then expanded into a book. And this is an image that was taken from the very first day of the trial. So this is again, this is from November 2009. And what we see here is the 89 year old defendant lying flat on his back. And as far as we can tell, he seems to be dead. The photo suggests a very disturbing story. The Germans have put a corpse on trial. Now I should immediately mention that this photo was carefully staged by the defense. The defense sought to attack the legitimacy of the trial by presenting Damianuk as a frail, sickly old man, really as a scapegoat. The prosecutors immediately intervened. Again, this is the first day of the trial. These are the first minutes of the trial, really. The prosecutors immediately asked the court whether there was any medical need, whether there's any medical necessity for Damianuk to be displayed in this corpse-like fashion. And this turned into a vehement argument between the defense and the prosecution, not about any piece of evidence to be submitted before the court, but about how the defendant would appear in court. And ultimately, the court arrived at somewhat of a Solomonic outcome. It decided that Damianuk would be allowed to remain on this hospital-like gurney, but would be propped up at a 45 degree angle. And I think one of the things that's very important about this image is it reminds us that in today's media-saturated world, that in this world, these high-profile atrocity trials inevitably become competitions over images. That as much as anything that happens in the court, it's these images that will serve to define collective memories of a trial and a legal proceeding. This is a photo taken towards the end of Damianuk's trial. And this is shortly before his conviction in 2011. And he was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 28,000 Jews during his service as guard at Sobobor. And I think it's fair to say that in this image, we see a very different picture of the defendant. So gone is the corpse-like display of the first day of the trial. And now we see a far more characteristic expression. Damianuk is actually sitting up. He looks detached. He looks emotionless. And I would even say he looks vaguely defiant. And I think it also delivers a kind of powerful emblematic image of the remorseless, unapologetic collaborator in Nazi crimes. But let's turn a little bit more to the legal profile of the case. I just mentioned that Damianuk was convicted as an accessory to murder. And that requires a little bit of comment, why he was being tried as an accessory to murder. The crimes of the Holocaust gave rise to two novel categories of criminal activity, or what we might call incriminations, these categories of wrongdoing. And these are categories that became embedded in international law. These categories are crimes against humanity on the one hand and genocide on the other. Now, I've already mentioned that crimes against humanity were first successfully prosecuted at Nuremberg. Genocide is the term coined in 1944 by Ralfiel Lemkin. And here we see a picture of Lemkin over here. And at the time that he coined the term genocide, Lemkin was a Polish Jewish refugee who was working as an advisor to the U.S. War Department. And he coined the term genocide to describe something a bit different from crimes against humanity. Crimes against humanity, if we went back to that definition that we saw in the international, the Nuremberg Charter, crimes against humanity at their heart refer to systematic attacks on civilian populations, systematic attacks on civilian populations. Lemkin thought that that failed to get to the heart of what was happening to Jews in occupied Europe. And what genocide meant to denote was the attempt to destroy a group, a people as that group, that is to really target them as a group. And that's why he coined this new term of genocide. Genocide was not part of the charging statute at Nuremberg because it was, again, just a really relatively recent coinage. But genocide became recognized as its own separate crime in international law in 1948 with the framing of the UN Genocide Convention. And this is what we see here. We actually see Lemkin's identity passed to the genocide convention, which elevated the term genocide into its own separate legal category of wrongdoing. These two categories, crimes against humanity on the one hand and genocide on the other, they supplied the charging instruments in many successful trials dealing with Nazi atrocities starting all the way back with the use of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Crimes against humanity was also used as a charging statute in the French trial of Klaus Barbi, the so-called Butcher of Lyon, a very famous trial that took place in France, also beginning in 1987, same time that Dominique Israeli trial started. And a variation on the definition of genocide was part of the, what basically supplied the charging instrument in the Israeli prosecution of Eichmann. But in Germany, and by Germany, I mean the Federal Republic, and kind of, and I'm leaving out what used to be called East Germany for the moment, Germany insisted that crimes against humanity and genocide could not be used, that German domestic prosecutors could not use those incriminations to bring charges against former Nazis. And the question is why not? Well, the German jurists concluded that because crimes against humanity were only first recognized at Nuremberg in 1945. And because genocide only became recognized as an international crime in 1948, that using those incriminations to try former perpetrators and collaborators in Germany, that that would result in a violation of the bar against retroactivity. Again, the bar of retroactivity is this idea that is familiar, I think to the American audience in the Constitution's Bar against Exposed Factor Law, and the idea is that it is fundamentally unfair to try someone for conduct, which was not criminal at the time that they engaged in it. So that's what the Germans concluded about using crimes against humanity and genocide as charging statutes. Now, I'm not going to go into how German jurists arrived at what I believe is a very, very problematic and flawed conclusion. And I should mention just very briefly that no other European nation shared the conclusion of German jurists. They didn't find any problem, any retroactivity problem using crimes against humanity or genocide for the purposes of post-war prosecutions. But as a practical matter, it isn't much as Germany reached that conclusion. To the extent that Germany reached that conclusion, it meant that the very charging instruments that were designed that were designed for prosecuting Nazi exterminators and collaborators, again, crimes against humanity, genocide, that these charging instruments were for German prosecutors, well, they were just off the table. So then what could German prosecutors use? Well, what German prosecutors ended up using was the ordinary murder statute. And the ordinary German murder statute became the basis for all Holocaust trials before German courts. And in that sense, basically, they had to treat the Holocaust as not dissimilar from a convenience store killing. They're basically using the same kind of ordinary statute to deal with both mass exterminatory acts and ones that you might say is again kind of like a kind of, you know, your classic convenience store murder. And unfortunately, the need to pigeonhole Nazi mass atrocities into this ordinary statutory definition of murder, it created huge complications for German prosecutors. And I suppose we don't need to be too cynical to say that sort of was the point. So for one thing, this the German law of murder held that in order to convict an SS man as a perpetrator, or even as an accessory, even as an accessory to murder, the state basically had to prove that the SS man had directly engaged in an act of killing. That is had more or less kind of killed with his own hands. And in cases in which a, in which an individual act of hands on killing could not be proved, if it could not be proved, then successful prosecution was basically impossible. So let's just think about this. Needless to say, the very efficiency of the SS is killing operations guaranteed that they were very few survivors. And the very few survivors that there were, it would be very difficult to find one who was able to testify in detail about, excuse me, in detail about a specific act of hands on killing by a specific SS man on a specific day. And this then, this requirement that you'd basically have to show a direct implication in an act of killing. This basically made German post war prostitutions of thousands of guards virtually impossible. Demjanuk's Munich trial marked a historic, though I think we could all agree belated a break with this case law. The prosecution in Munich, remember again, this trial didn't start until 2009. The prosecution in Munich faced the same problem that had disabled thousands of earlier German cases. That is, the prosecution had very clear proof that Demjanuk had served as a guard at the sober war killing center. It really had, there's no doubt that he had served at the sober war killing center. The problem was, it had no evidence whatsoever that Demjanuk had killed with his own hands. Now, the prosecution in this case got around what would have been a major obstacle to prosecute in earlier cases. It got around this obstacle by developing a pretty brilliant theory that was tailored to the reality of sober war and that bypassed reliant on the memory of survivors altogether and instead turned on the testimony of professional historians. And the argument and the kind of the structure of the prosecution's argument, I kind of had the simplicity of a logical proof. So it went like this. It went that the prosecution argued all sober war guards participated in the killing process. Demjanuk was a sober war guard. Therefore, Demjanuk necessarily participated in the killing process and therefore he could be convicted as an accessory to murder. Now, the beauty of the argument lay in its insistence that the court could convict Demjanuk as an accessory to murder, even in the absence of any evidence that Demjanuk had killed with his own hand. So let's see again, how this then worked out at the trial. So the first premise, the first premise that Demjanuk had served as a guarded sober war, this is, I've just said, this was solidly established with documents. So this is really kind of beyond any reasonable doubt. So let's look at the second premise. The second premise was all sober war guards participated in the killing process. Now, that might sound like a pretty straightforward proposition, but it is when you really think about it, it is in its essence a historical claim that could be only proved by a comprehensive historical understanding of how a camp like sober war operated and what its guards actually did, what functions they performed. And this is where the Munich trial turned into a trial by professional historians, because these historians who were called as expert witnesses, they established two critical facts. First, they established that sober war was a death camp, that is, was a killing center. Now, this was hardly headline news, but in a moment, I think we'll see its relevance. As a second matter, the historians testified that all guards at sober war had been, this is important, that all the guards had been generalists. Now, sober war had been a small camp. So this is just a schematic of the sober war camp. And I used the only reason I used the Dutch version was because most of the victims at sober war at the time that Demjanuk was a guard there were from the Netherlands. So I decided just to use the Dutch map, just kind of as an homage to the victims. What I think this image makes clear is that sober war really was a very small camp. The entire supervisory force consisted of only 15 to 20 SS men and another 100 to 120 of these Trinicki trained guards like Demjanuk. So sober war was something of the bare bones operation. And one of the things that the historians were able to testify was that all the guards, all the guards were mobilized when train ludes of Jews arrived, that some served guard tower duty to make sure that there are no escapes, while others man the train ramp, and they oversaw the well rehearsed process of destruction. Now this historical testimony, again, it was essential because any suggestion that some guards worked, for example, let's say exclusively as cooks, evidence that they had worked exclusively as cooks might have fetally weakened the prosecution's argument, because again, the indictment turned not on what Demjanuk did personally, that is what evidence we had of what he personally did, but on the function he must have performed by virtue of having been a guard at sober war. And here that there was a comparison that withdrawn to Auschwitz. So here we see an image of this is just an image of Auschwitz Birkenau. This is not an image of the Auschwitz one camp. And one of the things that we know about Auschwitz, besides that as this image suggests, it was gigantic compared to sober war is that Auschwitz was a hybrid facility. It was part killing center, but it was also part slave labor camp. And there are about 1.2 million people overwhelmingly Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. And of the 1.2 million who were deported to Auschwitz, there were about 100,000 survivors. Now, we've all been thinking over the last, you know, close to two years now in terms of lethality of disease. And if we think about Auschwitz as a disease, I mean, you're talking about an astonishing leaf, astonishingly lethal place in which, again, only 100,000 out of 1.2 million people survive. So astonishingly lethal. But even so, even so compare that to the approximately 1.7 million Jews who were sent to the pure extermination facilities of Treblinka, Belzech, and Sobobor. Of those 1.7 million Jews, no more than 125 survived, one to five, the total number of survivors. So in the case of Auschwitz, it was argued that it was at least theoretically possible that some of the 6,000 or so guards there had not directly participated in the exterminatory process. In the case of Sobobor, it was argued it was impossible. Sobobor was so small and the guards, the guard force was so small that all the guards necessarily were implicated in the murder of Jews because that was the function of the camp. So that by establishing that Sobobor was a killing center and that all the guards participated in the killing process, whether or not they killed with their own hands, the court was able to conclude that Demianic must have participated in the killing process and so had been an accessory to murder. And the Mina court then convicted Demianic and sentenced him to five months in prison and he was actually released and died in a nursing home while his appeal was pending. His conviction nevertheless marked an important, as I've said, an important, if belated, correction to German case law dealing with Holocaust crimes. And after decades of legal missteps, the court in Munich had finally reached the insight that when it comes to state-sponsored atrocity, guilt really follows function. And really that was, I think, the simple and the great insight of the Auschwitz conviction. Armed with this belated precedent, German prosecutors and investigators then began reopening files, re-opening files searching for SS men whom this old and flawed jurisprudence had essentially shielded from prosecution. And this search, as some of you might know, this search has led to the conviction of Oscar Gröning, the so-called bookkeeper of Auschwitz. He was convicted. It also led to the conviction of Reinholt Honegg, also a former SS guard at Auschwitz. Those of you who follow the news might also know that the 96-year-old Imgaard Fischner, the so-called Secretary of Evil, is presently on trial in Germany for serving as a stenographer and secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof camp near Gdansk in Poland. And what's remarkable is, if we kind of return to Ellen's introduction, is we see that a full 75 years, three quarters of a century after the end of the Nuremberg trial, the effort to hold perpetrators and collaborators of the Holocaust, it continues. Now, I suppose compared to the high-profile functionaries whom we saw tried at Nuremberg, or the logistical mastermind, Eichmann, who's tried in Jerusalem, these more recent defendants, Damianje, Gröning, Honegg, another name Bruno Day, these are admittedly small fish. And some may legitimately question the wisdom of trying persons who are now nearly 100 years old, who had performed really relatively minor roles in the larger sweep of Nazi atrocity. Yet I think these trials really do remind us of a crucial truth, and that is that state-sponsored atrocity is not, is not simply the work of statesmen like those who are tried at Nuremberg. It is a vast project, a vast project that requires the participation of thousands, even tens of thousands of persons from leaders of the state down to what we might call the lowly foot soldiers of extermination. And in this way, I think the present trials helpfully connect the dots from the high functionaries whom we saw on trial at Nuremberg to the lowly and yet essential operatives like Damianje. And finally, I think these trials play a symbolic role, as at least for the moment they keep alive the memory of the most spectacular episode of state-sponsored extermination in history. So thanks so much for your attention. I look forward to our discussion and to fielding whatever questions you might have for me. Thank you so much, Laura. It's really, before we engage in discussion, I mentioned at the beginning that Dr. Rosenfeld would be joining us. For those of you who came in a few seconds late, for those of you who don't know him, joining us is Dr. Gabriel Rosenfeld, who is professor of history at Fairfield University and who is an author and scholar of the history of modern Germany, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Gov, why don't I let you begin? Sure. I just introduced you, I think I should let you go. Yes, yes, yes. No, that's that's that's super. Lawrence, all kinds of things here that I'd love to engage in conversation with you about, of course, we also want to open it up to the general audience. But rather than ask you a seven-part question, how about I keep it to a two-part question to start, because I have about seven questions we probably won't get to all of them. One of my own interests at this point in my career is the field of counterfactual history. And one of the things that is always part of the historical evaluation process, the judgment of historical events is the question of alternatives and missed opportunities. And I was going to ask you a two-part question in the form of the following. If you look at the Nuremberg trials, if you look at the Demjanuk trial, if you look at the Auschwitz trials in the 60s, of course, there's a whole litany of trials one could focus on. Might there be anything you could pinpoint that's kind of light in your research over the years that kind of sticks out as one or two or three missed opportunities of ways, perhaps that the judicial process could have been advanced more effectively. Let's just say for the sake of achieving this amorphous concept that we call justice. And with one eye towards a concrete possibility in the legal sphere among historians of the law and so forth. And this is an international phenomenon of the last generation. There's a well-known distinction that you're obviously familiar with yourself between retributive justice and restorative justice. And while it might be a little anachronistic to claim that possibilities for restorative justice might have been available in the 40s, that's certainly not the case today, where if we imagine that rather than putting people on trial to punish them, we could approach it from a more of a truth and reconciliation commission perspective, say as what took place in South Africa. I'm wondering what you think about number one, just the generic question of missed opportunities and how things might have been done better and maybe whether this restorative justice model has any potential. Yeah, so I think that's a great question. I think my short answer is that, so these restorative justice techniques are often associated with this field that's called transitional justice. And transitional justice kind of refers to this idea of the way in which former authoritarian regimes can make a helpful transition to democratic rule. And what are the kind of legal or semi-legal devices that can help a authoritarian regime come to terms with its past in a way that smooths the way to a more positive democratic future. And as you mentioned, there are these various devices, these like Truth and Reconciliation very famously associated with South Africa. I actually am not all that much impressed with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions sound wonderful, but I think we need to bear a couple of things in mind. One, I think they work only if you're dealing with a constellation of crimes would do not rise to the level of mass extermination. I think once you're in the world of kind of mass exterminatory genocidal acts, they are not well suited for that because the idea that, hey, I'm going to kind of tell the truth about the things I did and now we're going to hug and now we're going to move on. I think that's kind of somewhat of a fanciful notion. And I think even some of these countries, like for example, South America that have relied on these Truth Commissions, they have found that the Truth Commissions can only work as a supplement to criminal trials, not as a replacement for them, that there seems to be always this need to engage in some kind of retributive response when you're dealing with pretty substantial atrocities. So that's one thing that I would say. But the other thing I think I would say is that, and this kind of goes to also this question of missed opportunities, because one of these you can say is like a huge missed opportunity was in Germany, that Germany in many ways has done a pretty impressive job as you know, of confronting its deeply troubled past. There has really been a very kind of systematic reckoning with the legacy of the Third Reich in Germany. That reckoning though, it is not the German legal system that's compiled a particularly impressive record when it comes to a form of reckoning. And in many ways, we can say that the German legal system really acquitted itself very badly and very badly in this as a result of some of the things that I mentioned by concluding that prosecutors couldn't use these tools that were designed to facilitate prosecutions and how to use this ordinary murder statute. Well, it just really made for a lot of impunity of people who should have been tried, never being tried. And yet to go to the point that you're also talking about about kind of restorative justice, you can say that almost in a kind of grotesque way, things worked out for the best for Germany. That is, to the extent that there were a handful of, you know, high profile trials in Germany, at least there was some legal reckoning. And then the fact that the legal system basically shielded a lot of deeply tainted former Nazis from any form of legal reckoning, you can say that that actually worked in Germany's case. Because you could say that, you know, a kind of more systematic reckoning through criminal trials might have, you know, led to all sorts of revanchist political impulses coming to the fore. Alan, do you mind if I just ask a follow up before I turn it over to you? Go ahead. So with that in mind, it's a, I mean, I totally follow what you're saying, and I think I truly agree. But it raises the larger question of maybe just other strategies of achieving justice. I think, you know, most people in general, and maybe many of the people who are in our audience this evening, think of justice as something that's usually achieved through the legal sphere. But to invite it, rather to invoke another scholar you're not familiar with, Martha Milo, Martha Minow, you know, she and others have pointed out that legal approaches to achieving justice are, you know, just one of others. There's economic methods through reparations. There's symbolic ones through apologies. And then of course, commemorative examples of using monuments and museums to bring about a sense of justice through education. I'm wondering if you think that maybe, as societies who are that are post-authoritarian and are trying to come to grips with difficult paths, as they do move through the stages of coming to terms with the past legally, economically, symbolically, if maybe the legal strategy is ultimately time bound, and that the most effective, the greatest effectiveness of a legal approach might be in the initial generation after the commission of atrocities, but that maybe in later eras, you know, the educational slash commemorative approach might be more suitable and more effective. And I guess you yourself are saying that if in the legal sphere the Germans didn't achieve so much with regards to coming to terms with the past, then obviously that means in other areas they did a better job. So might there be a time bound, you know, sort of expiration date for legal strategies potentially? I guess I would say jaing to use the German expression of combining ja and nae. In many ways, you know, I think that holding trials immediately afterwards, on one level that could be an important thing, but sometimes societies actually digest the history before they are mature enough actually to stage trials. So it is not necessarily the case that trials that immediately follow in the wake of whatever difficult history has transpired are the most efficacious. I think sometimes it's important for time to pass. And I say that not simply, I say that also just in terms of like accumulating the evidence. I mean, one of the things that we know is we're talking about state-sponsored atrocities. And state-sponsored atrocities often require an incredibly elaborate prosecutorial effort of combing through evidence. And it means getting a hold of that evidence. And when you're dealing with states, states can be very recalcitrant in sharing evidence with prosecutors and prosecutorial teams. So I think sometimes it's very valuable to have a time lag between the atrocities occurring and the legal reckoning with them, both for the purposes of putting together a compelling case and also for the purposes of just having the necessary requisite level of maturity within the society so that they can properly digest what is being told. And one of the things I should also point out is, you know, when I talk about these trials of the Holocaust, they weren't simply retributive exercises. Almost all the prosecutors associated with them thought of them as pedagogic exercises as well. That is, they really thought of these criminal trials as ways of teaching history. And you see that very clearly, even at Nuremberg, you had Robert Kempner, who was a German Jewish jurist, who then worked with the Allied prosecution. He called Nuremberg the greatest history seminar ever conducted. Very clearly, if you look at the Eichmann trial, Giddinghausner, you know, he very clearly said, look, if we're just thinking about this in retributive terms, it almost looks great test because how do you possibly associate these astonishing mass crimes with one individual? I mean, it makes no sense. It kind of renders the whole notion of retributive justice as almost incoherent. And so there has to be some kind of other purpose. And so he very consciously saw that purpose as kind of a pedagogical, almost didactic purpose that was actually very well served by the Eichmann trial, very successful in the case of the Eichmann trial. So I do think that, you know, I certainly wouldn't say that that criminal trials are the sufficient tool of reckoning. But certainly when you're dealing with these episodes of mass atrocity, I do think they are necessary. They are necessary tools of reckoning. Though, of course, we do have to look at other ones. And yeah, so I think that. Of course, by now, there are many more questions online. So I'm going to be brief in asking you my questions. But during your talk, I was really struck by that photo of Eliyahu Rosenberg. Was that his name? Looking at John Demianio, being positive that he was, in fact, Ivan the Terrible. And I remember reading about that moment when it happened. So we know that eyewitness testimony is not particularly reliable. In choosing to use survivor testimony at that trial was the prosecutor desperate to have, you know, to prove his case? Was there something about particularly dramatic about having a Holocaust survivor speak? I mean, what was the legal strategy involved in 1987? It wasn't all that long ago in using survivor testimony. Well, I think, in a sense, it was twofold. On the one level, they were trying to kind of emulate the strategy of the Eiffel trial. So they really were saying that, you know, this is almost, actually, if you ever have a chance to read the judgment that was written by the trial court in the Demianio trial in Jerusalem, they make, they really make a mess of it because they really act almost as if the trial is a vehicle for honoring survivors. And it's nice to think of it in those terms, but it's also something that shouldn't blind us to something that, you know, many people in the legal profession will tell you and that you yourself just mentioned, Alan, that survivor testimony is not reliable. And, you know, at the time, the prosecutors, they tried to make a difference. They tried to say, in fact, it's something the court said in its judgment. The court said, we have heard people try to make an analogy between the trauma that someone who has experienced a rape feels compared to the trauma that someone at Treblinka has felt. And they really say this incredible thing. They say the two cannot be compared at all. And they really seem to almost have this very mistaken identity, very mistaken equation in their mind in which the veracity of testimony is directly related to the intensity of the trauma, that the truthfulness of the testimony is directly, so the greater the trauma, the greater the likelihood the testimony will be reliable, which of course any forensic psychologist can tell you is just simply wrong. And, you know, the other thing I can say is it really did look to the prosecutors like they had strong case. I mean, what do you do when you have, you know, one survivor after another saying, yeah, this is the guy. This is the guy. I'm certain. So, you know, the first person you might think about, oh, I'm not so sure I rely on that, but it's not one. And then it's people saying, hey, listen, Alan, this is not like a hit and run accident where you're asking me do I remember the color of the or the make of the car. I saw this guy every day for months on end. I'm not going to misidentify him. And they still did. And, you know, I actually, I don't really have time necessarily to go into this right now. But I think one of the things that explain, because in many ways you can ask like, how did they do that? How did they misidentify a guy who they saw day in and day out for months on end? And the Israeli police in retrospect, they really botched what's called the identification parade. That is, you know, this process by which you show you know, witnesses, photographs to see if they can identify or they completely botched it in ways that the prosecutors were not even aware of when they brought their case forward. Let me, since it's almost a quarter to nine, let me start by asking some of the questions that people have been writing in here. Oliver Miller wrote a question that was very similar to something I was going to ask you. He wrote, is it obvious that genuine quote justice would be an impossibility? No, sorry. It is obvious that genuine justice would be an impossibility during any of the Holocaust trials, and indeed during any other genocide trials. So what can we say is the real value and or meaning of these trials? Is it cathartic for the victims? Is it cathartic for the quote, new Germany? Is it educational for students of history? Is it intended to have a chilling effect on would be perpetrators of future genocides? Any reflections would be greatly appreciated. So I'll deal with a couple of those. One is, so is the purpose of these trials deterrence? The answer is no. It's not. I mean, sometimes prosecutors, they use that saying like we want to deter, but I don't think that is the purpose of the trial. And I don't think, you know, deterrence of course, is what we describe as a negative effect. It's something that doesn't happen. So it's hard to prove that deterrence ever is working in the logic of a criminal trial because it's hard to prove that something didn't happen as a result of the trial that was conducted. The other thing is this notion of catharsis. Is the trial cathartic for, let's say, the people who testify? The answer then is again, not necessarily. You have people who testified at the Eichmann trial who thought it was cathartic and then others who thought it wasn't cathartic at all. So I wouldn't think of it in terms of this. And sometimes you read, people get kind of carried away in this almost kind of psychoanalytic vision of the utility of a criminal trial that it's something that creates this kind of catharsis. But I would return to something else that the questioner mentioned, and this again goes back to the response that I gave to Gavriel, where I do think the pedagogic purposes of the trials are very important. They really are very, very important. They really are meant to kind of teach history to a domestic and even an international audience. And I think in the case of the, I'll go back to the Eichmann trial, because I think in many ways the Eichmann trial was the great Holocaust trial. And in certain ways, I would even claim that the Eichmann trial almost, I don't want this formulation to sound misleading, but in a certain way it created the Holocaust. And by that, I simply mean that up until the Eichmann trial, the extermination of the European Jews was really kind of seen as almost following the logic of Nuremberg. It was seen as a footnote or part of World War II. You have this horrific war, one deeply, deeply disturbing aspect of which was the killing of the European Jews. After the Eichmann trial, it almost starts to, the Holocaust now starts to be recognized as a crime sui generis, really, as something kind of unique. And it's not something that should be associated with the logic of war, which is really what Nuremberg does. It now starts to train historical attention on the Holocaust as perhaps, you know, one of the emblematic events of the 20th century. And it really decouples it from any kind of connection to the waging of the war itself. Let me, all right, let me go back. From Roger Miller, he writes, Mr. Douglas, firstly, many thanks for both having written this important historical record of Holocaust and post-Holocaustal trials. And for speaking to us all this evening, enabling us to hear firsthand accounts from the author. In your years of research, were you ever fortunate enough, either for this book or in any of your previous writings regarding the Nuremberg trials, to have interviewed internationally renowned human rights attorney and activist Ben Ference, who at 101 years of age is the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor? The short answer is yes. I mean, I've crossed paths with Ben Ference. I mean, he's kind of this remarkable character. I guess, is it inappropriate to describe him as exceptionally short? He's a tiny little guy, but he is ferociously fit. And, you know, I don't know if he still does it, but up until recently, he would, he actually lives in the same town that my parents live in, in Delray, Florida. And so, yes, I have had the nice opportunity to cross paths with Ben Ference. James McGarry writes, please comment on German civilian Hermann Graves' eyewitness testimony regarding Dubno. Yeah, I'm the, you know, I'm going to pass on that only because it's not sharp enough in my memory. So I don't want to say anything that that is that's inaccurate. Okay, Mary Smith asks, are you familiar with Harriet Zetterberg? What kind of question is it? Who is, who is this? Who asked the question? I mean, I have no idea. Gov, do you know? I can't see Gov now. All right, let's, let's move on. Okay. How justified was the criticism of Hannah Arendt's commentary on the trials? Um, so, so Arendt, she famously wrote this book. I mean, it's first a couple of articles for a series of articles to the New Yorker, which was then collected as this book called Iceman Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil. And I think Arendt got certain things. She had certain insights, which are very interesting. And then there are other things that she got very wrong. And one of the things I think she got wrong is, in many ways, she was actually, I think it's fair to say that if there is a phenomenon such as the banality of evil, which it, which the variable might be, it probably is not a particularly accurate description of Iceman himself. There was a book that came out a few years ago by German actresses, a philosopher named Bettina Stognitz. And this is a book called Iceman before Jerusalem. And one of the things that she's able to kind of demonstrate pretty persuasively is that this vision of Iceman as simply being an unthinking cog in a bureaucratic machinery is a very misleading image. I mean, one of the things that Iceman argued at his trials, he basically said, I'm not even in a semi. I, in a sense, I was just kind of like the dutiful soldier who was performing my bureaucratic role as I understood it to be. And she really puts the lie to that claim. I mean, it really does seem that he was a pretty zealous Nazi, a true believer in anti-Semite. And so if there is a phenomenon such as that which Aaron describes of people who perform heinous acts simply out of a sense of obligation to their bureaucratic apparatus, Iceman wasn't one of them. Yeah. Mary Smith, who asked the question a while back about Harriet Zetterberg, just wrote in and said that Harriet Zetterberg was a lawyer who worked on the Nuremberg trials, but was not allowed to present her own work in court. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there were, you know, again, the American team, the American team, as I mentioned that at Nuremberg, there were basically, there were four different prosecutorial teams, the Americans, the British, the Soviet and the French. The American prosecutorial team had 600 people in it. It was a very, very large prosecutorial team and had some really world-class legal talents associated with it. It had some lesser known, but very, very able lawyers. And I'm sure the contributions that in particular women lawyers made were probably long overlooked and that needs to be corrected. So thank you for that mention. Yeah. You know, you were talking at the beginning of your talk, you were describing the Nuremberg trials as extremely dull. And I have to say for me, when I think of the Nuremberg trials, I think of the Stanley Kramer film judgment at Nuremberg, which even though it was three hours was anything but dull. And I'm not sure if that was because it had an all-star cast or because the outbursts from different characters in the film were simply not what actually happened at the Nuremberg trials. Can you comment on the film? Absolutely. So one thing we should bear in mind is sometimes you hear the term Nuremberg trial and sometimes you hear the term Nuremberg trials. You'll hear plural. The difference is this. So Nuremberg trial refers to the trial before the International Criminal Tribunal, one that I discussed. After that trial concluded in the fall in the October of 1946, the American military then conducted 12 additional trials in the same courtroom. They basically had already retrofitted this courtroom and they thought, why not? We'll just use the same courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg to try these other members of Nazi functionaries. So they staged these 12 different trials. One of the trials involved members of the Nazi judiciary. And that trial, that was the trial that the film Judgment at Nuremberg was based on. So Judgment at Nuremberg was not based on the International Military Court. It really was based on this follow-up trial that was conducted by the American military. And even that trial, of course, did not have Marlena Dietrich and Spencer Tracy and Maximilian Schell and Judy Garland and Montgomery Cliff and some other people like that. So obviously Richard Woodmark, so it didn't have obviously that same, you know, when you're dealing with a Hollywood vacation, you can obviously bring to bare level drama of that. You can't when courts are extending for 211 days of a trial. But on the other hand, you know, I would point out, you know, maybe to people who are watching, it is a very good film, really very, very sophisticated film and certainly worth watching. Thanks. I think we have time just for one more question, and then we're going to have to call it a night. Peter Buckner asks, first of all, he says, a fascinating hour. Thank you so much. You said you wrote an article about this subject that was published in Harper's Magazine. He writes, I subscribed to Harper's from roughly 1994 to 2005. I canceled my subscription because the magazine's editorial became, and this is not a subjective opinion, continuously and vehemently anti-Israel. And my letter to the publisher asking him about this editorial policy went unanswered. When was your article published? So my article had to be published, so I've written for Harper's several times, but this one was, so the trial was, the conviction was 2011. I'm going to say, yeah, probably 2012 or something like that or so. And yeah, that was, and again, if anyone's interested in kind of reading more about it, they don't necessarily have to go running to the Harper's archive because this was expanded then into this book called The Right Wrong Man, the one that you mentioned that kind of inspired this Netflix miniseries. So if anyone wants more excruciating discussions about this entire matter, you're welcome to take a look at it. All the proceeds go to a very good cause. They go to the Milo Douglas College tuition fund. So thank you so much. I don't know if you want to say anything else. I know we hardly have any time. So well, all I was going to say by way of conclusion is at a time in the U.S. where there's a lot of, I mean, it's an apples and oranges question, but maybe if we can, in the course of the next couple of weeks, look at your research and maybe take some lessons for what we in the country may be able to get by way of justice for January 6th and all the recent events that are going to be in the legal system going forward. I don't know if there's any wisdom we can take from Nuremberg or any of these other trials, but I'd love to think that justice is not unattainable. Yeah, no, it's a nice thing to think about, but I think you're right to point out. It just reminds us how incredibly difficult it is for a nation to take on the task of having a honest reckoning with its own deeply, deeply troubled past and recent actions. So yeah, I care your hope. Thank you so much for your wonderful presentation, Lawrence. Oh, and thanks so much for the excellent questions and for hosting and for the invitation. I really enjoyed it and I'm very grateful to you. Well, thanks and thanks to everyone who was attending this evening. And I'll see you all next semester. Thanks again, Lawrence. We really appreciate your being with us. Thanks so much. Thank you again. Good night, everyone. Good night.