Since the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark judgment of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) in 1996, hundreds of books on war criminals, war crimes, and war-crimes trials have been published in English, French, German, Polish, Russian, and virtually every other European language. As it turns out, tens of thousands of individuals were tried in courtrooms across Europe for their role in the crimes committed during World War II, especially crimes committed against innocent civilians, and also for domestic-political crimes such as treason. From the trial of the major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) to the trial of the lowliest traitor in domestic European courts, historians, lawyers, and participants have written extensively about these trials. Andrew Szanajda's, Indirect Perpetrators: The Prosecution of Informers in Germany, 1945–1967, is the latest offering to this ever-growing field of scholarship.

As the title suggests, Szanajda's book concerns the postwar trial of individuals (mostly Germans) accused of informing and denouncing fellow citizens during the life of the Third Reich, and whose actions indirectly led to the imprisonment, physical harm, and in some instances unjustified death of those who were betrayed. The book is organized into five chapters, beginning with a discussion by various German contemporaries, of the shortcomings and strengths of the postwar law used to prosecute some individuals for denunciations. Control Council Law No. 10, promulgated in December 1945 and used by American prosecutors in the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials (NMT) held between 1946 and 1949 to prosecute an additional 185 high-ranking Nazis, was also used by various legal authorities to indict and prosecute those suspected of denunciation during the life of the Third Reich. This chapter is followed by three more that summarize and describe a sampling of denunciation trials in the American, French, and British zones of occupation. The fifth and final chapter offers a summary of the same types of “denunciation trials” in the Federal Republic.

Indirect Perpetrators was a difficult book to review. In spite of its potentially interesting subject, it is marred by a series of problems that made the book difficult to read and the information contained therein almost impossible to digest. First, and possibly most seriously, is that the book lacks any kind of central argument or even a research question to be answered. Outside of the obvious theme of “denunciation trials” and the legal problem common to all of them—nulla poene sine lege (no crime without law)—the book lacks any argument whatsoever. Even the individual cases that are discussed are done so in a descriptive fashion rather than analyzed thematically or even as individual cases with specific issues and problems unique to each case. Instead the author uses summaries and descriptions of seemingly randomly selected cases from a variety of courts in the three occupation zones and the Federal Republic, cases that were linked as near as I could tell only by the fact that they were against denouncers and informers. In fact, the author never tells us why he selected the cases he describes.

This leads to the second shortcoming of the book: context, or the lack thereof. Nowhere do we learn where the courts that prosecuted these individuals gained their authority, nor do we know who was in charge and how decisions for prosecutions were made. There is also no discussion of the changing political contexts (why, for example, does the author select the 1945 to 1967 period rather than some other timeframe?), who interpreted the law and under what circumstances, nor how these trials materialized and when. We don't even know why Szanajda introduces the legal philosophers and scholars that he does in the opening chapter. There is so little context here that one has the impression that the cases presented are entirely disconnected from the structures of society and that they took place in some other realm. Some of these shortcomings can be attributed to the simple fact that the author has not engaged the historiography of this field; had he, he could have easily offered the context in which the trials of informers took place and he would have been able to situate his research in a more comprehensible framework. The fact that he ignores more than twenty years of scholarship on this subject has ensured that his conclusion that the courts that prosecuted denouncers did not pass harsh enough sentences is, at best, banal. Readers will agree, the discipline of history comprises two distinct, yet inseparable components. It is at once an interpretation and analysis of the historical record based on a variety of primary evidence; yet history is also about engaging in conversation with other historians who have thought about and written on the same or a similar historical question/issue. Unfortunately, Szanajda's book, Indirect Perpetrators: The Prosecution of Informers in Germany, 1945–1967, fulfills neither of these components of the discipline.