A mission to keep truth alive on Nazi crimes

Imagine yourself a 22-year-old woman on a military transport plane en route to Nuremberg in 1946. A whiz at manual and machine shorthand, you’ve been selected by theWar Department to assist in creating what some will call the “record that will never forget,” of the trials of Nazi war criminals.

The experience would likely change your life.

It did with my Aunt Vivien. The harrowing testimony on behalf of victims of Nazi medical experiments and the chilling attitude of the doctors in the dock would especially sear her soul.

“I would spend the rest ofmy life trying to recover from what I had heard and written,” she wrote decades later in her book, “Doctors from Hell.”

“From that point on, I would no longer tolerate any bigotry.”

Vivien Spitz died last week in Houston after a long life of accomplishment, including a lengthy stint in the Denver district courts and another as “chief reporter” in the U.S. House of Representatives— the first woman in that position— leading a group that compiles the Congressional Record.

But it was her memories of the doctors’ trial that in a sense came to define her— and to prod her, unexpectedly, when she was already in her 60s, into a personal quest as a witness to history.

“The cocoon burst wide open in 1987,” she wrote, “when I read in The Denver Post that a German language arts teacher at a high school in my Denver suburb of Aurora referred to the Holocaust as the ‘Holohoax’ to her students.”

“Some say Holocaust,” the teacher reportedly declared. “Some say Holohoax.”

Vivien was so livid that she “hauled outmy transcripts, material, and original press photographs that I had brought from Nuremberg and stored away in boxes all these years.” She put together a presentation that she would take on the road to groups across the country— and even abroad— that reached and