While we know a lot about the general framework of the trials of Nazi perpetrators, including of specific professional groups, the field of Holocaust, mass violence, and perpetrator studies still needs more in-depth studies on the careers, crimes, and the postwar whereabouts of individual midlevel Nazi officials who had power of life and death over thousands of inmates of Nazi camps and whose lives and careers were not thoroughly investigated by scholars. That is why the book authored by Andrew Wisely examining the case of the SS doctor Franz Bernhard Lucas as a long durée historical biography is a much-needed addition to this field of academic inquiry. The book offers valuable insights into the radicalization of German medical professionals who participated in Nazi crimes, how they dealt with their highly unethical decisions targeting innocent victims during the war, and how they tried to evade their criminal responsibility after the end of the war by invoking various technical justifications and claiming oblivion about specific deeds, crimes, and persons encountered during their careers in the Nazi system.
This study is especially welcome as, in general, the previous scholarship discussing in passing Lucas’s role in the Holocaust either relied on the Auschwitz (group) trial, and ignored his biography, or relied on second-hand sources—produced by the journalists and survivors attending the trial—and on Lucas’s dubious statements, which sometimes resulted in factual errors and problematic distortions. Thus, most of the scholars who referred to this Nazi doctor presented a rather uncritical assessment of Lucas’s work in the Nazi camps depicting Lucas as a reluctant Nazi medical bureaucrat—“a good German” and/or a “While Raven”—whose actions helped some Jews and other inmates survive the camps. A few scholars even depicted Lucas as a doctor who resisted Nazi ideology, group conformity, and kept his moral compass.
Against this widespread (but hardly unanimous), historiographical trend, the author demonstrates that in his career as an SS doctor in the camps—between December 1943 and April 1945—Lucas participated in a series of crimes against the inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Stutthof, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen camps. These crimes included the sterilization of Roma and Sinti and the infamous “selections” process of Jews and other inmates in Auschwitz Birkenau, Mauthausen, and Stutthof that sent them to the gas chambers. Wisely persuasively shows that Lucas behaved opportunistically toward the Nazi regime and displayed an ambivalent behavior toward the camp inmates, alternating between extreme cruelty and consigning to death—perpetrated until early 1945—and kindness and rescue.
The book is based on an impressive collection of primary and secondary sources gathered in various libraries and central and local archives in the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, and especially Germany. These documents are convincingly interpreted through a biographical literary-historical methodology. Structurally, the book is divided into two parts. Part one examines Lucas’s personal history during the Nazi regime covering his radicalization and his activity in each camp he worked (made of five chapters). Part two discusses the Nazi doctor’s encounters with the postwar criminal justice system in West Germany (made of four chapters).
One of the strong points of the book is that Wisely painstakingly reconstructed Lucas’s postwar life in the second part of the book, elucidating his interactions with the criminal justice system and its consequences: after the war, Lucas moved to different parts of Germany, practiced his medical profession, and kept a low-profile fostering silence, denial, and omission. Lucas’s evasive strategy was temporarily successful, and he escaped the first wave of (harsher) criminal justice prosecuted by the Allies. He was eventually indicted in West German courts in the 1963–1965 Auschwitz trial and again in 1970. Lucas claimed that he ended up working in various camps as a result of punishments for his defeatist behavior and lack of trust in the Nazi regime, that he resisted the orders received from his supervisors and caved in only because of fear, and that he cared about the well-being of camp inmates. He also often invoked stress and oblivion about his wartime actions. As Wisely meticulously shows, after the prosecutors caught up with him, Lucas continued his evasive strategy by lying during the judicial investigations and court proceedings, rewriting his involvement with the Nazi party, downplaying his role in the camps as a helpless victim of totalitarianism, and even threatening to sue for libel those who accused him of complicity in the Nazi crimes. Dismantling these defensive strategies, Wisely found out that influenced by the Nazification of the universities and the German society, Lucas eagerly joined the SS and that his record is more complicated and troubling than Lucas and his exculpatory witnesses, defense lawyer, wife, and other supporters depicted it in their guarded testimonies.
Despite his efforts to deny his involvement in the Nazi crimes and downplay his role in the camp sterilizations and selections, Lucas was sentenced to a three-year prison term in 1965. This was a lenient punishment as, by that time, the domestic context of nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-communism in West Germany led to a tendency to forgive or treat benevolently the former Nazi criminals and their wartime crimes. There was little surprise that during the 1970 retrial of his case, the increasingly lenient German criminal courts acquitted Lucas.
One way the author could have improved the book is by rearranging its structure to merge some chapters or expand several of them, as now some chapters are uneven and a few of them are very short (e.g. chapter three has only seven pages). Additionally, I would have liked to read more about how the public opinion in West Germany, and perhaps in other countries, such as Israel, perceived Lucas, his trials, and their outcome, beyond the journalists’ opinions quoted in the book. This would have allowed the reader to better understand the social impact of the brushes of this particular Nazi doctor with the criminal justice system and of the representation of his case in history and memory.
Overall, The Trial of a Nazi Doctor is a significant contribution to the scholarship aiming to uncover the truth about the behavior and activities of Nazi doctors who participated in the Holocaust by uncovering Franz Lucas as an eager Nazi and obedient participant in the sterilization of Roma and Sinti and the “selection” of thousands of Jews for the gas chambers, and a deceiver about his actions and motivations during the postwar years. Wisely’s findings present a valuable in-depth perspective challenging much of the existing scholarship which was partially influenced by Lucas’s own problematic narrative depicting him as a “good German” who resisted Nazi ideology and refused to conform and to participate in the violence against the inmates of Nazi camps. This book will be very useful for the reader interested in Holocaust criminal justice processes, perpetrator studies, transitional justice, and medical ethics.
