Overview

In 1963, West Germany was gripped by a dramatic trial of former guards who had worked at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. It was the largest and most public trial to take place in the country and attracted international attention. Using the pretrial files and extensive trial audiotapes, Rebecca Wittmann offers a fascinating reinterpretation of Germany's first major attempt to confront its past. Evoking the courtroom atmosphere, Wittmann vividly recounts the testimony of survivors, former SS officers, and defendants - a cross-section of the camp population. Attorney General Fritz Bauer made an extraordinary effort to put the entire Auschwitz complex on trial, but constrained by West German murder laws, the prosecution had to resort to standards for illegal behavior that echoed the laws of the Third Reich. This provided a legitimacy to the Nazi state. Only those who excceded direct orders were convicted of murder. This shocking ruling was reflected in the press coverage, which focused on only the most sadistic and brutal crimes, allowing the real atrocity at Auschwitz - mass murder in the gas chambers - to be relegated to the background. The Auschwitz trial had a paradoxical result. Although the prosecution succeeded in exposing SS crimes at the camp for the first time, the public absorbed a distorted representation of the criminality of the camp system. The Auschwitz trial ensured that rather than coming to terms with their Nazi past, Germans managed to delay a true reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust.

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Federal German law precluded the release of trial documents until thirty years after the case's conclusion, while the proceedings themselves had been audiotaped rather than transcribed. Only in the last few years has the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt completed the transcription of some fifty hours worth of tape recordings. Rebecca Wittmann's new book thus represents the first detailed study on the trial, a valuable contribution that draws upon previously untapped evidence and fills a significant gap within existing war crimes historiography. A glance at Wittmann's work reveals that the long wait for a detailed account of the Auschwitz trial has proved worthwhile. Over the course of six chapters, the entire history of the trial is laid bare in meticulous detail from its inception to the final sentencing. For those unfamiliar with the history of Nazi war crimes trials up to this point, the first chapter provides a concise overview, exploring earlier Allied policies as well as competing political interpretations of the Nazi past played out between Adenauer and Schumacher during the formative years of the Federal Republic...Wittmann's book thus provides a refreshing corrective to previous scholarly claims about the impact of the Auschwitz trial. Through her careful and immensely detailed analysis of the proceedings, Wittmann offers new evidence of the trial's impact upon the West German people, and the extent to which it really can be said to have altered popular attitudes towards the Nazi past. -- Caroline Sharples H-Net

A not wholly successful examination of the seminal trial of Nazi perpetrators. In December 1963, two dozen former guards who had worked at Auschwitz were put on trial in West Germany. Wittmann (History/Univ. of Toronto) demonstrates, first, how the prosecution, with massive documentation about the camp, tried to show the political context of the crimes, and, second, how German law shaped the outcome of the trial. West Germany banned retroactivity in law, meaning that Nazi criminals had to be charged under the laws that were in place at the time. Absurdly enough, this meant that the court had to make the case that the defendants' acts violated Nazi law in a Nazi extermination camp. As a consequence, behind-the-scenes managers like Karl Hocker, an adjutant to the last Auschwitz Commandant, Robert Baer, received lesser sentences for lesser crimes than more visible camp personnel. Less satisfying than the story of the trial itself is Wittmann's confusing thesis. On the one hand, she takes a more exculpatory view of Adenauer-era justice than other critics-most famously, Hannah Arendt, whose withering survey of West Germany's tendency to connive in comfortable amnesia about the past takes up a chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Wittmann, by contrast, believes that the argument that the entire West German justice system was tainted with a malaise regarding Nazi crimes is too simplistic. Her own account, however, shows that the court was able, if it chose, to make very creative end runs around the retroactivity law and, furthermore, that the law itself was not imposed on the West German system, but chosen by it. Arendt's harsher verdict still seems more valid than Wittmann's. As if confirming Arendt's suspicions, Hofmeyer, the presiding judge, questioned afterward whether the background of the 'entire event' should be addressed at all in such trials. In practical terms, that would mean covering up the genocidal nature of Auschwitz completely. A dry style and theoretical casuistry mar this otherwise terrifying history. (Kirkus Reviews)

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