Recent scholarship on trials of Nazi perpetrators has not for the most part included the twelve trials held by U.S. authorities at Nuremberg following the four-power Trial of the Major War Criminals. Notably absent has been an account of United States vs. Otto Ohlendorf et al., also known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which twenty-two SS officers of the mobile squads that killed more than a million Jews in the U.S.S.R. stood trial in 1947 and 1948. Using a broad array of U.S. and German records, including personal papers of many participants, Hilary Earl provides a fine analysis of the trial.

Earl covers a variety of themes, one being the trial's accidental nature. U.S. prosecutors could not stomach another joint trial with the Soviets, but still wanted additional proceedings, each focused on a different facet of Nazism. The Einsatzgruppen Trial was to have been a general SS trial. But the admission of SS-Brigadeführer Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D's initial commander, that he oversaw the killing of 90,000 Jews, together with the discovery of twelve binders of the Einsatzgruppen Reports, narrowed the trial's focus. It was the only Nuremberg trial to deal specifically with the Holocaust, but its hurried nature prohibited the exploration of larger historical questions and even the expansion of legal concepts such as genocide itself. Nor did prosecutors call many witnesses. They relied mostly on documents. The aim was to convict the individual defendants by tying them to specific crimes.

Earl also uses the defendants to test recent theories of perpetrator motivations, steering closely to Michael Wildt's Generation des Unbedingten (2003). Most defendants were born between 1900 and 1910, old enough to have been influenced by Germany's bitter defeat in 1918. Most joined the Nazi Party before 1933. Most were university graduates imbued with right-wing sentiments. Most quickly joined the SS intelligence arm, the Sicherheitsdienst, where one could advance a career. They represented a mix of ideology and ambition and were not chosen from desk jobs in the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) to head murder squads by chance. They saw themselves as forging a new age of racial cohesion while advancing their careers.

Earl examines their testimonies as self-evaluations, particularly since most defendants were forthcoming on the stand. They viewed Adolf Hitler as a visionary, they recognized a global “Jewish Problem,” and they equated Jews in the U.S.S.R. as the carriers of Bolshevism. Killing was thus a security measure and even a form of self-defense. Some defendants expressed distaste with their assignment, but only one, Paul Blobel, suffered negative psychological effects, likely from the mass shooting at Babi Yar in September 1941. Despite “fighting for their lives,” Earl concludes, the defendants “refused to compromise their … allegiance to the SS and Nazism (p. 160).”

In this vein Earl contextualizes the “Führer Order” said to be relayed at Pretzsch in East Prussia by Bruno Streckenbach (then head of the RSHA Personnel Office) before the invasion of the U.S.S.R. It allegedly contained Hitler's directives for the mass killing of Jews. Returning from Soviet captivity in 1955, Streckenbach denied the order's existence. Earl explores Ohlendorf's early interrogations and the possibility of an order if not the order. She also examines the degree to which the defendants used the phantom order for legal and even moral mitigation. Ohlendorf, Earl shows, was a contrarian within the RSHA—why did he not question this particular directive? More disturbing were testimonies such as that of Erich Naumann, who proudly showed no remorse. Fourteen of the defendants received death sentences, the rest long prison terms. Four, including Ohlendorf, were hanged in 1951.

Earl's account of the trial's aftermath adds to the familiar narrative of Nazis released owing to Cold War pressures and West German allegations of unfairness. She notes that Judge Michael Musmanno, despite his revulsion at Nazi crimes, helped German defense attorneys with court procedure. He also struggled mightily with the death penalty. Earl adds to analyses of church figures such as Theophil Wurm, who lobbied U.S. authorities on behalf of “decent human beings” such as Martin Sandberger and who financed Nazi lawyers such as Rudolf Aschenauer, who had almost 700 convicted Nazis as clients. She emphasizes the haphazard nature of the U.S. clemency board, which commuted Walter Blume's death sentence on nothing but his own word. In all, Earl's conclusions augment the better scholarly examinations of the necessary but imperfect judicial reckoning with Nazism.