Among the surprising legacies of World War II, none is perhaps more unexpected than the fact that Nazi atrocities continued to be prosecuted, not only decades after the cessation of hostilities, but in countries far removed from the killing fields of eastern Europe. Perhaps no venue for such prosecutions could be more unanticipated than Australia. Yet in the 1990s, a series of trials (or near trials) for Holocaust crimes took place in Adelaide, the legacy of a scandalously lax screening process for postwar immigrants from eastern Europe and the complex ethnic politics of 1980s Australia. David Fraser's fine book deftly tells the story of these legal proceedings, placing them in their proper political, legal, and historiographical contexts.

Fraser introduces the reader to a series of intrinsically fascinating criminal cases. Many sections of the book read like a legal thriller (in the best sense). But Fraser does much more than tell a compelling story. He makes a series of thoughtful and sophisticated arguments about politics, law, and history. Perhaps Fraser's most compelling argument—certainly his most informative for North American readers—concerns Australian politics in the 1980s and 1990s. In chapters dealing with the origins and debates surrounding Australia's war-crimes legislation and Helen Demidenko/Darville's novel, The Hand that Signs the Paper, Fraser delves into the complex political currents of postwar Australia. A multicultural society with a mosaic of immigrant communities and an ambivalent relationship to its own genocidal history, the Australian government's decision to push through legislation enabling the prosecution of Nazi atrocities in Europe (but not more universal war-crimes legislation) was both surprising and controversial. What Fraser makes clear in his account is how opponents of such legislation framed what were often blatantly antisemitic positions in terms of purportedly universal values. “Upon the façade of forgive and forget, or more precisely, forget, a set of concomitant legal/justice arguments was erected in opposition to war crimes trials. . . . Yet what was always elided, most often by a cursory nod of the head to the horrors of the Nazi regime, was the fact that it was impossible . . . to close the chapter because the book of Nazi collaborationist war criminals in Australia had been irrevocably opened” (p. 300). Few incidents make this clearer than the scandal surrounding The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel published to widespread acclaim in Australia. Fraser demolishes this book with brilliant clarity, revealing its deep-seated antisemitism. The irony of the scandal was that the “Ukrainian-Australian” author, Helen Demidenko, turned out to be the merely Australian Helen Darville, and the novel's positioning as the authentic voice of immigrant Australia was a sham, even if its anti-Jewish bias was not.

As for legal arguments, Fraser offers compelling accounts of the three main war-crimes proceedings under Australia's war-crimes legislation. Although he flirts with the idea that there can be a “synergistic relationship” (p. 151) between law and history in such cases, his main conclusion is more somber. On the face of it, these largely failed, as the defendants were either acquitted or the cases dropped before reaching trial. Yet Fraser's conclusions are more subtle. “Trials could only take place in the national context of Australia if the ordinary process and norms of criminal justice were adhered to” (pp. 312-13). But such ordinary processes and norms, Fraser demonstrates, were in tension with the historical character of the Shoah as a limit case for the law. “The translation of the universal to the local context must, almost by definition, betray the ethical imperative behind the pursuit of Nazi killers” (p. 313). The Holocaust both transcends ordinary law and demands justice, which can only be pursued through ordinary law. This is the paradox at the heart of Fraser's book.

It might be tempting to say, in light of this, that the law failed in the face of the Holocaust. This is a conclusion Fraser rejects. “The failure of the Adelaide prosecutions was simply a failure of results. But again, this characterization is accurate only if one believes that the accused were in fact guilty” (p. 304). The juridical rules of evidence meant to protect the due process rights of defendants are quite different from the probabilistic rules of evidence used by historians to figure out what likely happened in the past. These different standards of judgment and sometimes contradictory understandings of evidence mean, for Fraser, that in the end the stakes of Holocaust trials are neither primarily legal nor historical, but ethical. “Neither law nor history can fully, completely, or finally answer that ethical demand [of sorting out competing narratives of past events]” (p. 307).

In the end, Fraser offers a somber but far from despairing analysis of what law can do in the face of genocide, and what law in fact did in Australia. While it largely failed to create the kind of dramatic public reevaluation of national identity that some optimistic proponents of so-called transitional justice might hope for, it nonetheless did what could realistically be done to pursue justice. If anything, for Fraser, the failure to secure convictions in the Adelaide courts helps to prove that, if the law cannot do everything one might like it to do in confronting mass atrocity, it is a long way from doing nothing as well. In this eloquent and elegant book, he asks us to reassess our expectations for the law in such cases. This is a task well worth undertaking.