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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (February 2006)
Rebecca Wittmann. _Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial_. Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press, 2005. ix + 336 pp. Illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-01694-7.
Digitale Bibliothek. _Der Auschwitz-Prozeß_. Herausgegeben vom Fritz Bauer
Institut Frankfurt am Main und dem Staatlichen Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Berlin: Directmedia, 2004. EUR 45.00 (DVD-ROM), ISBN 3-89853-501-0.
Reviewed for H-German by Caroline Sharples, Department of History,
University of Southampton
Putting the Past on Trial
The Auschwitz trial was the largest Nazi war crimes trial to take place
under the jurisdiction of the Federal Republic. Staged in Frankfurt am Main
between December 1963 and August 1965, the proceedings against twenty former
extermination camp personnel lasted over 180 days and called upon 254
witnesses. The trial commanded massive media attention, both within the West
German state and abroad. It stood in stark contrast to earlier West German
treatment of Nazi atrocities. During the late 1940s, popular voices called
for an end to the Allied-imposed denazification process, and for the
amnesties of those already sentenced by Allied tribunals. Once the Federal
Republic gained its sovereignty in 1949, the number of war crimes
prosecutions fell rapidly. The Allies rendered 5,006 convictions between
1947 and 1950; in 1954, there were just 44.[1] It was not until the Ulm
Einsatzkommando trial in 1958 and the subsequent establishment of the
Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung
nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg that the West German
judiciary was seen to be taking the Nazi past more seriously.
As a result, the Auschwitz trial--together with the 1961 prosecution of
Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem--has been popularly regarded by historians as
one of the key factors in inspiring a more critical West German engagement
with the legacy of the Third Reich. Ian Buruma insists that, for the West
German people, the Auschwitz trial "was the one history lesson that
stuck."[2] Similarly, Mark Osiel argues that the trial "captured the
imagination of millions of young Germans as virtually nothing about the
country's past had done before."[3] Despite such claims, however, there has
been little critical analysis to date of the trial and its impact upon the
West German population.[4] This absence of work on the Auschwitz trial stems
from the fact that primary source material on the proceedings was not made
available to researchers until fairly recently. 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 explains the nature of the West German penal code and its capacity
for dealing with Nazi crimes, together with the ongoing political debates on
the Statute of Limitations that came to characterize the 1960s. The
remaining five chapters deal in turn with pre-trial investigations leading
up to the Auschwitz trial, the indictment, the course of the trial itself,
the judgment and, finally, the response leveled at the verdict by Fritz
Bauer (Attorney General for the State of Hesse), the media (including the
West German and international press), Holocaust survivors and other
contemporary observers.
Wittmann's chief argument rests in her claim that--despite all the
educational ambitions invested by prosecuting agencies in the run up to the
trial, and despite the subsequent claims made by historians--the Auschwitz
trial produced a paradoxical result. It certainly brought the history of the
extermination camp to a far wider West German audience, inspiring Peter
Weiss's 1965 play, _The Investigation_, and producing much excitement among
the West German media. The press followed the proceedings avidly, with
dramatic headlines relaying each day's events to their readers. Yet the very
nature of this press coverage distorted reality. Sensationalized articles
demonized the defendants and emphasized the most sadistic acts described in
the Frankfurt courtroom. Wittmann comments, "It was almost a pornography of
the Holocaust, that both sold papers and distanced the general public from
the monsters on the stand whose actions were reported in graphic detail"
(p.176).
This implicit distinction between the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the
"ordinary" West German population, though, could be traced back to the
nature of the proceedings themselves. Indeed, as Wittmann argues, the
language of the indictment revealed how the basis for bringing the
defendants to trial rested on "the maltreatment of prisoners and excessive
cruelty leading to death, rather than murder per se" (p.101). During the
trial itself, lesser crimes were relativized, not least as a result of a
reliance on the testimony of former SS personnel. In 1943, the Morgen
Commission was sent to Auschwitz to investigate allegations of corruption
among the camp staff. Its leader, former Nazi judge Konrad Morgen, now
appeared in Frankfurt, outlining examples where defendants had used their
own initiative to follow their sadistic instincts. As a result, the
Auschwitz proceedings became a trial of excess perpetrators, men who could
clearly be seen as going beyond the call of "duty" to satisfy their own
bloodlust. Wittmann notes that "the limitations of the law obscured more
than they revealed, by making the prosecution dependent on the same
standards of illegality the Nazis themselves had used to investigate
criminal activity in the camps" (p.271-2).
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. Her findings highlight the contradictory nature of war crimes trials
and their treatment within the media, underlining the need to go beyond
conventional historical narratives and acknowledge the complexities involved
within any study of _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_ in 1960s West Germany. As
Wittmann concludes: "There is no doubt that the Auschwitz trial did, at
least for a short time, bring the atrocities of the Nazi regime to the fore.
The daily press coverage and most especially the widely staged, important
and sensational play _The Investigation_ by Peter Weiss, provided constant
reminders to the public of the crimes committed by former Nazis who were
then living in freedom in Germany.... At the same time, though, most people
saw the grisly crimes of the sadistic defendants as if they were part of a
macabre fantasy world...and did not make a connection between the
perpetrators on trial, the harmless neighbors living peacefully beside them,
and their own role in the Nazi past. To them the trial seemed to have done
its job, properly punishing the real monsters and leaving the rest, people
who had been confused, coerced or brainwashed into collaborating with the
Nazis, to go on with their lives" (p.247).
A perfect accompaniment to Wittmann's study comes in the form of a new
DVD-ROM compiled by the Fritz Bauer Institute and the Auschwitz-Birkenau
museum. This resource provides a good starting point for examining the
trial. It contains a wealth of documents, photographs, plans and transcripts
from the Auschwitz trial, including witness statements. A brief overview of
each of the twenty defendants is included, citing their date of birth,
former SS rank and role in the Nazi regime and the charges leveled against
them. Users are able to follow the key moments in the trial from start to
finish, or look up key terms or individual names within an easy to use
search facility. The program even includes some of the audio recordings from
the proceedings, enabling us to hear the testimonies for ourselves and
literally bringing the case to life.
Thus, after decades of neglect, the history of 1963-65 Frankfurt Auschwitz
trial has suddenly become accessible as a result of these two new resources,
marking a long overdue but vital contribution to the field of war crimes
trials and the history of _Vergangenheitsbewältigung_.
Notes
[1]. Statistics taken from C.M. Clark, "West German Confronts the Nazi Past:
Some Recent Debates on the Early Postwar Era, 1945-1960," _The European
Legacy_ 4 (1999), p. 122. For details on the amnesty campaigns of the late
1940s and 1950s, see Norbert Frei, _Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past:
The Politics of Amnesty and Integration_, translated by J. Golb (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 203-233.
[2]. Ian Buruma, _The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan_
(London: Vintage, 1995), p. 149.
[3]. Mark Osiel, _Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law_ (New
Brunswick: Transaction, 1997), pp. 192-193.
[4]. Existing works on the Auschwitz case have been confined to publications
during the 1960s by trial observers. See Bernd Naumann, _Auschwitz: A Report
on the Proceedings Against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the
Court at Frankfurt_, translated by J. Steinberg (London: Pall Mall Press,
1966); and Hermann Langbein, _Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Eine Dokumentation_
(Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1965).
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits
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