Mention criminal trials of architects or perpetrators of Nazi atrocities, and one invariably thinks of the Nuremberg trial before the International Military Tribunal in 1945-46, or of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, or of the trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon in 1987. In fact, thousands of trials dealt with the legacy of Nazi criminality, the vast majority of which have warranted little comment by scholars. This is an oversight that Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus, both historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., seek to correct in the volume, Atrocities on Trial. With contributions by an impressive group of historians—including Michael Marrus, Rebecca Wittmann, and Donald Bloxham—the editors have assembled a strong collection of essays devoted largely, though not exclusively, to trials that took place on German soil. These alone demonstrate a dizzying variety, from the trials conducted by the American military at Dachau and the Soviets at Sachsenhausen, to those conducted by East Germany and West Germany in the decades following their formal independence.

The quality of the writing throughout the volume is very high, which makes for pleasurable reading, and recommends the volume for courses. Several of the essays are impressive pieces of original scholarship. In this regard, Matthäus's two contributions, “The Lessons of Leipzig” and “No Ordinary Criminal,” deserve mention. The former deals with the aborted program of war-crimes trials established in Leipzig in the wake of World War I, while the second examines the legal odyssey of Georg Heuser, a perpetrator of mass murder against the Jews of Minsk who, after the war, rose to the rank of chief of police in Rhineland-Westphalia before being brought to belated and incomplete justice in 1963. Both essays are scrupulously researched and do a fine job of laying bare the fraught political issues that threaten all war-crimes prosecutions. Heberer's contribution, a study of the American trial of participants in the Nazi euthanasia program at Hadamar, also stands out as a sturdily researched piece that demonstrates how American jurists struggled to create a legal idiom adequate to the task of naming the crimes before the court. Also well researched is Ulf Schmidt's essay, “The Scars of Ravensbrück,” an examination of the Nazi medical experiment trials conducted by the British that documents the difficulty that British judges had in understanding the nature of the concentration camp environment.

Other chapters, such as Jonathan Friedman's “Law and Politics in the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, 1946-49,” represent less original scholarship and instead provide useful overviews to the student or scholar eager to gain a quick introduction to the subject. The only essay clearly out of place in the volume is the philosopher John Roth's “Prosecution, Condemnation, and Punishment,” an unfocused meditation on the Sixth Commandment that does little to illuminate the distinction between murder and killing and fails to address the specific difficulties of launching criminal trials in the wake of episodes of mass atrocity.

The only other disappointment is to be found in the editors' introduction, which could have done a better job of laying out the purposes and goals of the volume, and of teasing out lessons from the individual contributions. Granted, historians often eschew explicitly normative work, and Heberer and Matthäus hedge their bets with the anodyne observation, “the contributions to this anthology present insights into the complexity of the issues involved that make it difficult to arrive at simple answers and all-encompassing generalizations” (p. xxiii). Nonetheless, in writing about trial programs, particularly those involving spectacular, systematic, state-sponsored crimes, normative questions cannot be avoided, as they inform the historical actors' orientation to their roles. What, for example, did prosecutors and judges hope to achieve through these trials? How did they measure the success of war-crimes trials? By the rate of conviction? The length of the sentences? By the quality of the press coverage of the trials? Are these the proper or most efficacious standards?

While the editors avoid clear answers to these questions, their volume supports certain tentative conclusions, particularly with respect to the legacy of war-crimes trials in Germany. First, it underscores clearly the difficulty of pursuing war-crimes trials in the absence of strong political, in particular executive, will. Second, it makes abundantly clear how even strong gestures of prosecutorial will can be scuttled by questionable legal judgments issuing from trial and appellate courts. For example, the West German court decision that West Germany could only try Nazi-era perpetrators in accordance with the provisions of the extant German penal law, and could not apply international prohibitions against crimes against humanity or genocide, had a disastrous effect on the shape and quality of West German trials. (Ironically, it was East Germany, which, in a progressive gesture, used the Charter of the International Military Tribunal as a source of law for trying Nazi perpetrators.)

Heberer and Matthäus are no doubt correct when they observe, “justice is, like historiography, an exercise in approximation.” But as the essays in their volume make clear, unlike historiography, justice requires elaborate institutional resources, mechanisms of political support, displays of jurisprudential creativity, and acts of personal and organizational will to achieve even its approximate results.