Vivien Spitz
Vivien Spitz is an American journalist best known for her coverage of the Nuremberg Trials and her advocacy on behalf of Holocaust awareness.
Journalistic Career
In 1946, at the age of 22, Spitz was called by the United States War Department to cover the prosecution of Nazi officials accused of conducting heinous medical experiments on inmates at the German concentration camps. For two years, she recorded verbatim the testimony of victims and witnesses recounting experiments involving freezing, malaria, poison, and sterilization, among others. In May 1948, she elected not to renew her contract and returned to the United States. She later stated that her experience at Nuremberg caused her to be haunted by nightmares in which she tried to escape from a Nazi death camp. [1]
From 1972 to 1982, Spitz was the Official Reporter of Debates and Chief Reporter to the United States House of Representatives. She was responsible for covering the State of the Union addresses of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan and addresses by King Juan Carlos of Spain, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin of Israel.
Holocaust Awareness
Since 1987, Spitz has been using her position as a witness to history to challenge Holocaust deniers. Provoked by an incident in which a Colorado high school teacher referred to the Holocaust as a “Holohoax,” she began to give presentations on Nazi war crimes using graphic slides of victims’ injuries. [2] More recently, Spitz has compiled her transcripts from Nuremberg into a book, Doctors from Hell. Many of the accounts in this book were not previously accessible to the public.
Bibliography
- Doctors from Hell ISBN 978-1-59181-032-2