Tomaz Jardim's book raises a moral issue: how flawed may a legal proceeding be and still render justice? His example is the trial in early 1946 that involved the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. While the world fixed its gaze on the famous Nuremberg trial by the four Allied powers of twenty-two of the most powerful Nazis, the Americans convened the second in a series of their own military commissions in Dachau, Germany, to try sixty-one men who had carried out the dirty work at Mauthausen. Jardim tells the story of the camp, the crimes there, its liberation, and the subsequent prosecution with economy, force, and insight.

The atrocities committed at Mauthausen cried out for justice. Except for extermination centers in the east, Mauthausen was one of the worst camps. It housed the Nazi regime's last functioning gas chambers, although they choked to death anti-Nazi opponents in general rather than Jews in particular. Exposed to grueling work, disease, and brutality, Mauthausen's prisoners died off quickly, with a tally by war's end of some 100,000 dead, a quarter of them Jews.

Complementing the historical debate on whether the Nuremberg trial gave voice to Nazi victims, Jardim shows how Mauthausen's prisoners helped to bring their oppressors to justice. During the war two prisoners, assigned to keep “Death Books,” not only methodically listed 72,000 of the dead but also secretly encoded the true causes, and one of them later risked his life to save this documentation from destruction. Once liberated, the prisoners immediately organized themselves and volunteered their services to the shorthanded American occupation authorities—gathering witness statements, identifying perpetrators, tracking them down, interrogating them, and testifying at trial. Not all former prisoners were heard, or heard fairly. The trial itself ignored the plight of women, downplayed Jewish suffering, and even exposed Jewish witnesses to antisemitism, with defense counsel suggesting that they failed to appreciate the solemnity of oaths and testified simply for vengeance. Still, by the partial standard of empowering victims, the active engagement of Mauthausen's prisoners promoted justice.

The trial promoted justice, too, at least by the standard of identifying perpetrators. The lead prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel William Denson, a West Point and Harvard Law School graduate in his early thirties, devised an effective prosecutorial strategy. He selected a variety of defendants, from high in the camp's hierarchy to guards in surrounding sub-camps, who provided a representative sample of Mauthausen's methods of oppression, like pinpoints on a map of horrors, including men who conducted medical experiments, worked prisoners like slaves, and tortured and murdered them. To counter the danger that the nine-member bench might doubt atrocities that virtually burst the bounds of the human imagination, Denson hoped to condition the judges gradually by carefully choosing the order of his witnesses. Nonetheless, imperfections blemished the trial. Denson's approach was to charge and then prove only a defendant's participation in a “common design” (originally “common intent”) to commit war crimes. This approach freed him, first, “from the need to connect any of the accused to a specific act of atrocity,” and second, unlike the conspiracy charge used at Nuremberg, “from the burden of having to show the existence of a previously conceived plan or agreement to commit the crimes in question” (p. 111). Furthermore, the rules of evidence were so lax that the court admitted almost anything the prosecutors submitted. With an unorthodox charge and permissive rules of evidence, the outcome was almost preordained: prosecutors needed only prove that defendants worked at Mauthausen to ensure their convictions. The judges, only one a lawyer, convicted all sixty-one defendants after only an hour's deliberation. In telling the story of their sentences—in the most executions from a single trial in American history, military authorities hanged forty-nine defendants in late May 1947—Jardim shifts attention from trial taints to justice. Without these executions, Jardim implies, any chance of justice would have slipped away. In later related trials, conviction rates of alleged Nazi perpetrators dropped and the sentences imposed grew more lenient. Romancing western Germany to its side in the emerging Cold War, the United States released all surviving Mauthausen trial defendants by late 1951. Jardim concludes that, imperfections of the trial notwithstanding, justice required expedience and severity.

Ever alert to trial biases favoring the prosecution, the book still suffers a pro-prosecutorial slant. This flows easily enough from Mauthausen's unspeakable inhumanity. It is redoubled by heavy reliance on materials that Denson gathered and generated (including his various retrospectives). But in a tale of crime, investigation, prosecution, and retribution, Jardim has trouble placing defense counsel. Jardim ignores them—until, that is, a half dozen suddenly appear at trial, sans introduction, as if from nowhere. Most were army officers, although Jardim never reports whether the civilian one (or two?) was American or German. He does faithfully detail their defense, but he fails to explore their significance for the theme of justice. The material is suggestive, albeit contradictory. On the one hand, these lawyers represented their unsavory clients zealously, making sensible legal objections to the court's jurisdiction and rulings, cross-examining witnesses deftly, and challenging the weight of largely hearsay evidence against individual defendants. Why did these lawyers provide such able representation? Did the army counsel take their obligations seriously from a sense of military duty? Did they dutifully represent their clients because a military mentality, rigid and obedient, on occasion encourages adherence to law? On the other hand, a handful of lawyers representing sixty-one defendants, with often divergent interests, necessarily suffered conflicts of interest. The problem surfaced most acutely after trial when they petitioned military authorities for clemency, but only for select clients, abandoning the rest. Jardim never poses the question of what kind of defense counsel these were, who stepped aside while the jailer escorted their clients to the noose.

The ambiguity in the role of defense counsel, in both enhancing and eroding justice, points to the general theme that Jardim recognizes and tackles: the imperfection in attempts to achieve justice, especially in unprecedented circumstances. Whatever conclusion anyone reaches on whether the Mauthausen trial ultimately rendered justice—whatever balance was right and true in terms of war, politics, and law, Jardim has opened a rich vein of material and sketched it lucidly.