|
View the H-German Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-German's December 2006 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-German's December 2006 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-German home page.
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (December 2006)
Devin O. Pendas. _The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963-1965: Genocide,
History, and The Limits of the Law_. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006. xii + 340 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $65.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-521-84406-1.
Reviewed for H-German by Alan E. Steinweis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial is the most famous of the thousands of
prosecutions for Nazi crimes mounted by West and East Germany in the
decades after 1945. Several recent publications, including the excellent
book under review, testify to the trial's
historical significance.[1] The trial
is often considered to have been a watershed event in the process of
_Vergangenheitsbewältigung_ in West Germany during the 1960s. In a
proceeding that was widely publicized and closely followed by many
Germans, twenty defendants, representing various levels of the
administrative hierarchy in place at Auschwitz, were prosecuted for murder
and other atrocities. In the end, all but three of the defendants were
convicted of either murder or being an accessory to murder and were
given prison sentences ranging from just over three years to life. Many
observers inside and outside of Germany criticized the sentences as
too lenient.
In his book, Devin O. Pendas meticulously examines every phase of the
trial. He provides an in-depth account of the complex, lengthy legal
and political machinations that preceded the trial, moves on to an
exhaustive analysis of the actual courtroom proceedings and concludes
with an assessment of German public reactions. The extremely detailed
narrative will certainly satisfy readers who prefer encyclopedic rigor,
although others might consider the book's reconstruction of the
procedural maneuvers during the trial to be denser than necessary,
despite the author's formidable lucidity. The impressive archival research
on which the book is based is well reflected in its extensive citations,
which Cambridge University Press admirably continues to print at the
bottom of the page.
In his introduction, Pendas identifies the historical contexts in which he
intends to analyze the trial. These include the legal context, for which
Pendas considers not only juridical issues, but also representational
ones--such as the manner in which the trial communicated historical
understanding about Auschwitz to a broader public. Also important are
contexts created by the international relations of the Cold War period
and the related inter-German competition for legitimacy. Finally, Pendas
examines the context of the politics of the past within West Germany
during the crucial decade of the 1960s, when the relative silence about
Nazism that had predominated during the 1950s began to lift. One of the
truly impressive achievements of this book lies in the success with which
it shifts back and forth between the details of the trial and one or more of
these broader contexts.
With respect to the legal context, Pendas emphasizes the inherent
tension between the legal and the historical aspects of the trial. Unlike
the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Allies employed innovative principles
tailor-made for prosecuting Nazi crimes, the Auschwitz Trial was conducted
on the basis of established German criminal law. In this regard, the
Auschwitz Trial continued a long-standing West German practice that had
originated during the Allied occupation. The "limits of the law" mentioned
in the book's subtitle refer to the inadequacy of ordinary criminal law (which
highlights the acts and motivations of individual persons) when it came
to capturing the magnitude and systematic nature of the criminality of
Auschwitz. Demonstrating individual guilt under German statute was not
the same as conveying the essence of state-sanctioned genocide, and
Pendas argues persuasively that the trial was far more successful in
accomplishing the former than the latter.
The Cold War rivalry between the two Germanies provided for one
especially fascinating wrinkle of the trial. Pendas rightly devotes a good
deal of attention to the role of Friedrich Karl Kaul, an East German expert
on Nazi crimes. By claiming to represent survivors of Auschwitz living in
the German Democratic Republic, Kaul managed to have himself
recognized by the court as a civil counsel. This status gave him the right
to participate in the trial proceedings, including in the interrogation of
defendants. Acting, in effect, as the East German Politburo's
representative in the courtroom, Kaul attempted to shift attention to the
complicity of capitalism--as most notably embodied by I. G. Farben--in
the crimes of Auschwitz. While this contention, in its broadest sense,
was not without some historical merit, the argument certainly did not
help the prosecution's case against the defendants on the stand, and the
overblown manner in which Kaul and his historical expert presented the
case made clear that their highest priority was propaganda against West
Germany, rather than a just verdict in this particular case.
According to Pendas, Kaul's attempt to place an East German
ideological spin on the case was not the only instance in which historical
interpretation was skewed at the trial. Pendas devotes a brief section to
the expert reports submitted to the court by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.
Although he does not ascribe to Hans Buchheim, Helmut Krausnick and
Martin Broszat the same kind of overt ideological motivation as he does
to Kaul, Pendas does contend that the reports and testimony of these
historians were historically misleading. Buchheim's institutional history
of the SS, for example, overstated the institutional autonomy of that
organization to the point of letting the German state and German society
off the hook. For its part, Krausnick's report emphasized the universal
nature of antisemitism and in doing so, Pendas argues, absolved the
Germans of any specific responsibility for it. Readers familiar with Nicolas
Berg's recent, controversial book[2] might recognize some parallels to
Pendas's assertions, but it should be emphasized that Pendas, unlike
Berg, attributes the alleged deficiencies of the expert reports mainly to
constraints imposed by the legal framework of the trial, not to the
personal experiences or motives of the scholars.
The argument that will probably be of greatest interest to most historians
of modern Germany concerns West German public responses to the
trial. Pendas concedes that the trial indeed helped to raise consciousness
about Nazi crimes in a society that had done much to repress them
from the collective memory. Nonetheless, he concludes, the trial
conveyed a grossly distorted understanding of Nazi crimes to the
German public. It was not only that the legal framework of the trial was
not conducive to achieving a proper appreciation of systematic,
state-sanctioned genocide. The German press further distorted the
meaning of Auschwitz through sensationalistic reporting in which it
focused on individual acts of sadism. This emphasis corresponded
nicely with the preconceptions of Germans who refused to admit
any collective responsibility for the crimes of Nazism. They
acknowledged the criminal nature of Auschwitz, but continued to regard
it as the creation of Adolf Hitler, the SS and a few sadists. Pendas
expresses reluctance to employ the word "failure" to describe the trial,
but his verdict is nonetheless a damning one.
Pendas's sobering assessment might well hold true when considering
the trial's immediate impact in the early to mid-1960's. But perhaps we
would arrive at a more balanced judgment were the trial to be situated
in the longer context of (West) Germany's process of coming to term
with the crimes of Nazism. It was not very long after the end of the
Auschwitz Trial that the New Left and the student movement began to
promote aggressively the notion that Nazism and its atrocities had
indeed been systemically rooted in German society. To be sure, New
Left theories of fascism suffered from their own kind of historical
reductionism, but at least they tried to move beyond questions of individual
culpability. After the struggles over historical interpretation during the
1980s and the efflorescence of Holocaust consciousness since the
early 1990s, few responsible Germans would today contend that
Auschwitz was reducible to the acts of a few hard-core Nazis and
sadistic perverts. Seen in this light, the Auschwitz Trial might well be
regarded as a flawed, but necessary step in a lengthy learning process.
Notes
[1]. Notable works include Rebecca E. Wittmann, _Beyond Justice:
The Auschwitz Trial_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005);
Marc von Miquel, _Ahnden oder amnestieren? Westdeutsche Justiz
und Vergangenheitspolitik in den sechziger Jahren_ (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2004); and Friedrich-Martin Balzer and Werner Renz, eds.,
_Das Urteil im Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, 1963-1965_ (Bonn:
Pahl-Rugenstein, 2004).
[2]. Nicolas Berg, _Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker.
Erforschung und Erinnerung_ (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list,
and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|