In Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook, the author of a series of works on modern German history, including several about German and East German history since 1945, turns her attention to the extent to which justice was done to those engaged in Nazi Germany's policies of persecution and extermination.Footnote 1 Fulbrook's central theme is “the significant disjuncture” that is “revealed between official myths about ‘dealing with the past,’ on the one hand, and the extent to which the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators actually evaded justice, on the other” (7).
The work is divided into three sections. Part I, “Chasms: Patterns of Persecution,” describes policies of persecution and extermination in Auschwitz, the other major death camps, less well-known ghettos and concentration camps, the euthanasia campaigns, and the Einsatzgruppen murders. In Part II, “Confrontations: Landscapes of the Law,” Fulbrook draws on German- and English-language scholarship of recent decades to discuss judicial reckoning in the era of Allied occupation, as well as in the successor states of the Federal Republic (West Germany), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and, briefly, Austria. Part III, “Connections: Memories and Explorations,” rests on anecdotes taken from memoirs by survivors of Nazi persecution and from statements of avoidance by former perpetrators, and it surveys successes and shortcomings of individual efforts, both public and private, to reckon with the crimes of the Nazi era.
Fulbrook's descriptions of the crimes in Part I, while accurate, present events that have been examined many times in previous excellent works on the Holocaust and on other crimes of the Nazi regime. Her examination in Part III of the trauma and suffering—or, as the case may have been, avoidance and deception by individuals—after the war, stirs emotions but does not address significant issues of historical causation regarding the quest for justice. The book would have been better if the editors at Oxford University Press had drastically cut Parts I and III and produced a text of about 200 rather than 539 pages, focusing specifically on the issues of judicial reckoning addressed in Part II. For it is here that Fulbrook states her main case and makes her most valuable contribution to the historical interpretation of reckoning in German- speaking Europe. But it is also where she runs into difficulties.
Reckonings points to a methodological problem facing historians of modern Germany. Its twentieth century was so eventful and engrossing that a comparative perspective on its history can be lost from view. The important historical issue regarding the German confrontation with the Nazi past was not why so little justice was done. Rather, it is why there was any memory and any justice at all in postwar German politics and society, given the huge popularity of Nazism in German society by 1939, as well as the remarkable persistence of the German military and civilians to fight to the bitter end of the war and carry out the Holocaust into the spring of 1945.Footnote 2 It would not have been surprising if there had there been no memory, if all judicial reckoning had come to an end after 1945 (or after 1949), if the Nazi Party had revived, and if Holocaust denial and lies about the Nazi regime had become major elements of postwar German politics. Indeed, a second “stab-in-the-back legend” repeating Nazi propaganda but defying all the evidence to the contrary was conceivable. Had this been the case, historians would be writing that such avoidance, denial, and lies simply repeated the experiences of many, if not most, societies confronting a difficult past.
The signers of the Treaty of Westphalia codified a version of this norm when they advocated “perpetual acts of oblivion” about the past. That was a sentiment echoed by Winston Churchill in a speech in Zurich in 1946, when he called for a “sacred act of oblivion,” after the guilty had been brought to justice, as the path to peace in the future. A book such as Fulbrook's, which is focused narrowly on Germany, does not adequately grasp the novelty and uniqueness of the Nuremberg trials in the occupation era, as well as the successes of the West German tradition of “coming to terms with the past.” Both broke with longstanding norms advocating “oblivion,” and they faced fierce resistance in the process.Footnote 3 Fulbrook's Reckonings documents the unsurprising denial and avoidance, but, in my view, it does not appreciate the unprecedented novelty of justice, however limited, in this instance.
In describing aspects of the Holocaust, Fulbrook covers familiar ground. She writes, for example, that the 1.2 million people murdered in Auschwitz were “‘only’” around one-fifth of the total number of victims of the Holocaust and a mere fraction of the more than 50 million deaths caused by Adolf Hitler's war. She warns of the risks of “concentrating our focus primarily on this one site” (20–21). Yet, in view of the massive scholarship on the many locations in which the Holocaust took place, and on the Nazi race war on the Eastern Front, this risk, at least in the scholarly literature, has been surmounted. For decades, scholars have drawn attention to the many other major sites of mass shooting, as well as to the vast numbers of concentration camps and ghettos. The most recent example of this is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's remarkable three-volume compendium on camps and ghettos.Footnote 4 In short, there has been no scholarly “displacing [of] attention from other sites of terror, large and small.”
At times Fulbrook overstates her case. She writes that the violence of the Nazi regime “was not hidden from sight, tucked away in faraway places, but all around and plain for all to see, even within the heart of the Reich” (23). To be sure, a great deal of the regime's violence and persecution was visible in the Reich, including vicious propaganda announcing the “extermination” of the Jews on the front pages of the Völkischer Beobachter during wartime; the public racial laws; the firing of Jews from their jobs and the taking away of their homes and apartments; the concentration camps in Germany, whose neighbors were aware of the terrible conditions there; the smell of burning bodies emanating from the crematoria of those institutions that carried out the euthanasia murders. On the Eastern Front, Wehrmacht officers and soldiers saw the Einsatzgruppen in action.
Yet, for the German public, if not necessarily for civilians in Eastern European towns and cities, the Holocaust was a distant and vast covert operation about which the censored and controlled press published not a single fact illuminating the declarations in the press and radio of unspecified “extermination.” The mass murder of the European Jews, whether in the death camps in Poland or by the mobile killing units behind the lines of the Eastern Front, was indeed hidden from most Germans and did not take place in the heart of the Reich. Any reasonably attentive newspaper reader or radio listener knew that Hitler and Joseph Goebbels had repeatedly announced their policy to “exterminate” the Jews of Europe. Soldiers home from the Eastern Front told stories about massacres they had witnessed. Yet, Fulbrook's assertion about how much the German population knew about the specifics of the regime's crimes goes beyond the available evidence.
Fulbrook refers to “the almost arbitrary nature of arrests, periodic imprisonment, and persecution” that “was evident with rampant terror against political opponents of Nazism from the outset” (27). To be sure, she is right that the “rampant terror” was arbitrary, in the sense that it flouted all legal norms of presumption of innocence and due process. However, the targeting of Jews, communists, socialists, anti-Nazi liberals and conservatives, critical writers and journalists, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and those said to have mental and physical handicaps, was not arbitrary. Members of the racial Volksgemeinschaft who kept dissenting opinions to themselves did not need to worry that “arbitrary” terror would strike them.
Fulbrook's chapters on the euthanasia campaign, Nazi occupation policies in Poland, and the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question repeat what has long been documented in the vast scholarship on these events. Yet, in the midst of repeating what is well known, Fulbrook writes that “the distinctiveness of the Jewish experience has on occasion threatened to overshadow the sufferings inflicted on other groups, causing frictions and controversies; but even within the Jewish community, hierarchies of victimhood emerged … We need to be sensitive both to the diversity of experiences, and also to the common aspects of persecution” (143). At least in the scholarship on Nazi Germany, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the Nazis’ attacks on non-Jews, especially the non-Jewish civilians of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.Footnote 5
Fulbrook observes further that political organizations and Jewish communities “were assiduous in their collections of testimonies from an early date,” whereas victims of forced sterilization and euthanasia did not produce much documentation by themselves—“nor did they have powerful interest groups acting on their behalf” (193). The implication that organizations of Jewish survivors constituted “powerful interest groups” overstates the reality of the small, not powerful, and often ignored Jewish organizations of the immediate postwar decades. The concluding chapter of Part I effectively juxtaposes the “parallel worlds” of survivors “seeking to recover as best they could from the injury done to them,” to that of “the majority of perpetrators,” who “were busy covering their tracks and changing their tales” (201). Fulbrook recalls the efforts of survivors of the Holocaust to collect documents and to speak out about their experiences. She offers convincing evidence of the lack of interest and empathy that they often faced in the early postwar years.
The 153 pages of Part II, on judicial reckoning with the crimes of the Nazi regime, comprise the core of the book. Fulbrook writes that, “in the Western zones the majority [of Germans] simply got away with it” once the Allied occupiers decided to describe most of them as “fellow travelers (Mitläufer)” or even as “‘exonerated’ (entlastet).” Conversely, “the most extensive measures took place in the Soviet Zone, alongside the construction of a new communist political system and a far-reaching social and economic revolution” (211). Historians of the postwar occupation era have long noted the small number of convictions—compared to the approximately 100,000 persons interned in the Western zones in 1945–1946—of those who might plausibly have been indicted for war crimes or for participation in the mass murder of Jews and others. Unfortunately, Fulbrook devoted less than a dozen pages to the trial records, findings, and verdicts of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg in 1945–1946, and to the twelve successor trials of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) trials of 1945 to 1949, the single most important event of judicial reckoning after the defeat of Nazi Germany. As a result, she does not acknowledge the unprecedented extent to which the Allies, especially the United States, brought to trial, during the four years of occupation, a large number of officials in all the major ministries of the Nazi regime.Footnote 6 She does not mention that, during this time, the Allied occupying authorities in the three Western zones convicted 5,025 persons of war crimes or of crimes against humanity, condemned 806 to death, and carried out 486 of those death sentences. Also unmentioned is the fact that, in 1946 and 1947 alone, the United States delivered to authorities in sixteen European countries 3,914 persons being sought for trial, two-thirds of them to ones in France and Poland.Footnote 7 That said, Fulbrook confirms a consensus among historians that many who could plausibly have been indicted and convicted avoided trial and punishment.
Fulbrook does acknowledge that, in Nuremberg, the Allies focused on the responsibility of German government officials, and that they rejected the “following orders” defense. Nor did they follow German law in requiring evidence of individual personal brutality or subjective mentality—requirements which, as Devon Pendas and Rebecca Wittmann have pointed out, would later make it very difficult in West Germany to render appropriately harsh verdicts for participation in the crime of state-organized mass murder.Footnote 8 Yet, Fulbrook does not mention some of the most important contributions of the Nuremberg trials. These included a demonstration, on the basis of the Nazi regime's own documents, that it was true, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Nazis bore sole responsibility for launching World War II, for implementing a race war on the Eastern Front, for committing war crimes throughout occupied Europe, and for carrying out the Final Solution in Europe. Establishing the elementary factuality of these events, determining precisely who the major decision-makers were, identifying the individuals who ran the vast machinery of death, clarifying the place of these institutions in the Nazi regime, executing and imprisoning high-ranking surviving Nazi leaders, and delivering over three thousand other Nazi officials for trial, mostly in Poland and Eastern Europe but also in France, were all enormous and unprecedented accomplishments. It was a historically unprecedented amount of judicial reckoning. The trials of the Nuremberg era made an indispensable contribution to the destruction of the moral legitimacy and political appeal of Nazism, especially for a younger generation that would subsequently play a significant role in the political and intellectual life of all three German successor states. It is perfectly conceivable that Nazism would have remained an important aspect of German politics in the postwar era, had the Allies not carried out the trials and purges of the occupation era. The quest for justice after the war entailed a largely successful, if understandably partial, search for the truth about these matters. One wishes that Fulbrook had devoted much more space to these central events in the history of postwar reckoning.
The book devotes only four pages, in fact, to one of the single most important reckonings of the entire post-Nazi era, namely, the NMT successor trials of 1945–1949 conducted by the American prosecutors led by Telford Taylor.Footnote 9 The American prosecutors uncovered enormous amounts of evidence about Nazi medicine, the euthanasia murders, the Einsatzgruppen murders, big business and its use of slave labor and involvement in the Holocaust, the use of the press to spread racial hatred, and the role of the German military in implementing Hitler's racist ideology. These trials drew on the initial findings of the IMT to reveal how deeply implicated the German elites and the various ministries of the Nazi regime were in the commission of these crimes. Yet, Reckonings does not include a single reference to Telford Taylor and the American team of prosecutors and investigators, even though they, as much as any group of people in the postwar era, contributed to a judicial reckoning with Nazi criminality.
That said, one of the great merits of Reckonings is to draw the attention of an English-language audience to recent German-language scholarship on the investigations and trials conducted in the Western occupation zones and in the Federal Republic, whose magnitude was previously far less known. Of particular importance have been the findings of a large research project, led by Andreas Eichmüller and Edith Raim at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, about trials of and investigations into Nazi-era crimes carried out by German courts during the occupation, and then by courts in the Federal Republic since 1949. Their research has revised our understanding of the German contributions to judicial reckoning in the immediate postwar years and in the Federal Republic's postwar era more generally.Footnote 10 Eichmüller has concluded that, in the Western occupation zones between 1945 and 1949, German courts opened 14,046 investigations, introduced 13,333 indictments, delivered 4,667 guilty verdicts and 3,703 findings of innocence, and closed 500 cases without a result. He has also found that, between 1945 and 2005, a total of 36,393 investigations and trials were initiated, involving 172,294 individuals in the Western occupation zones, in the Bonn Republic, and in unified Germany.Footnote 11
Edith Raim's detailed reconstruction of many of the cases conducted in the Western zones of occupation between 1945 and 1949 confirms that many trials ended in absurdly lenient sentences—some as a result of antisemitism, others because witnesses refused to testify out of fear that the Western Allies would soon leave West Germany, thereby leaving them at the mercy of enraged Nazi defendants—or of surviving Nazi networks that would target them even if the Allies remained in place. It is unfortunate that, in the large literature on memory and silence about the crimes of the past, the issue of witness intimidation has not received much attention. Raim regrets that these early German Nazi trials “sank into oblivion,” and she adds that “the simple fact that a dreadful past was being reconstructed and that the perpetrators had to face a reckoning commands respect for the German administration of justice that worked under tense conditions. The aims of the members of the judiciary were to stem the tide of forgetting and to set out on a search for justice despite the myriad material needs of post-war Germany.”Footnote 12
Fulbrook also helpfully draws attention to the work by Christian Frederik Rüter and Dick de Mildt at the University of Amsterdam on German trials for Nazi-era crimes. Their research sends a double message: that there were far more trials and investigations than conventional wisdom suggests, and that many trials concluded with lenient sentences for very serious crimes. Fulbrook's focus is on the latter point, to such an extent that the reader could be excused for missing the point that the quest for justice was both broader and more consequential than is often thought to be the case. That said, the huge gap between the number of cases opened and the number of subsequent convictions remains a striking feature of West German judicial reckoning with Nazi criminality.
Fulbrook argues that reckoning with the past in the Soviet occupation zones (1945–1949) and then in the German Democratic Republic was more consequential. She writes that “the most extensive measures took place in the Soviet zone … but even here there was more continuity—particularly in areas not deemed politically sensitive—than the authorities would care to admit” (211). By 1950, the Soviet Union had handed over 14,202 persons to the East German Interior Ministry; it had also sent 12,770 prisoners from the Soviet occupation zone to the USSR, and 6,880 to prisoner-of-war camps. In 1964, the East German government reported 12,807 convictions related to the Nazi era, 11,274 of which took place between 1948 and 1950. According to the works published by Norman Naimark and Karl Wilhelm Fricke several decades ago, between 78,500 and 95,643 of the 240,000 Germans interned in Soviet zone camps died between 1945 and 1950—figures higher than the 42,889 cited by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) itself.Footnote 13 Who were these prisoners? What were they accused of having done? What was the quality of justice they received? Were these trials examples of a quest for justice as well as of a new era of injustice? One wishes Fulbrook had done more to address these questions regarding the meaning of Soviet judicial reckoning during the occupation era.
Turning to the Federal Republic, Fulbrook effectively synthesizes the scholarship of recent decades on judicial reckoning in West GermanyFootnote 14 She draws attention to the problematic aspects of the West German trials, previously well examined by Pendas and Wittmann. West German criminal law required proof of personal “base motives” and initiative by individuals in order to arrive at guilty verdicts in cases involving murder. Hence, those who were following orders but could not be proven to have acted with individual sadism or cruelty could be found guilty of the lesser charge of “aiding or abetting” murder—and thus receive more lenient sentences. Fulbrook echoes the conclusions of these scholars, arguing that the focus on individual motivations was “not suited to the task of putting state-sponsored mass murder on trial” (246). In contrast to the Nuremberg-era trials, individuals could therefore, under West German law, be found not guilty—or guilty of lesser crimes—by claiming they were only following orders. Fulbrook summarizes the record of the high tide of West German judicial reckoning in the 1960s as follows:
Nearly two-thirds (61 percent) of those found guilty were classified as “accessories to murder,” accomplices rather than murderers, and given sentences of between three and five years for their part in tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths. Barely one third (31 percent) were given a sentence of between six and ten years, and a mere seven percent earned sentences of between ten to fifteen years. This meant that in this crucial decade—when West Germany was gaining an international reputation for “facing up to” its past—people who had been involved in mass murder were being recast as merely obedient servants of the state blinded by ideology or motivated by fear of their superiors (246).
Using any comparative historical perspective, this remains an unprecedented amount of judicial reckoning. Yet, Fulbrook is right to stress that many Germans successfully avoided punishment or received lenient sentences that did not fit the serious nature of the crimes for which they had been convicted.
Her discussion of Austria is brief, but it also echoes the well-established scholarly consensus: “It was easier for neutral Austria to subside into a comfortable form of relative obscurity, even despite the best attempts of determined Nazi hunters”—in contrast to the two Germanys, “with their mutual entanglement and international visibility, as well as determination of key individuals.” Fulbrook finds that none of the three states had criminal justice systems that were “adequate to the task of reckoning with collective violence on a scale committed by the Nazis and their collaborators.” (265) The trials themselves reinforced narrow definitions of what it meant to be a perpetrator, while bringing victims’ experience to wider public attention and uncovering material that proved “to be of more use to historians than to the courts” (265).
Fulbrook's chapters on the postwar trials in the Federal Republic that dealt with the euthanasia murders and the major concentration camps, as well as the extermination camp trials that addressed Auschwitz and the Operation Reinhard Camps (Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor), demonstrate both the distinctive history of the Federal Republic in organizing such trials at all, as well as the difficulty in obtaining verdicts that fit the crime. The fact nevertheless remains that these major trials took place in the Bonn Republic, not in communist East Germany or in Austria. Influenced by the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, they constituted the first effort by any of the three post-Nazi governments of German-speaking Europe to focus specifically on the operation of the extermination camps, whose primary victims were European Jews. They began too late and lasted in some cases many years. Yet, like the Nuremberg trials, they established the basic facts and provided many details about the existence and operation of the death camps and about the persons who engaged in mass murder there. Fulbrook notes changes in the legal reasoning that were adopted in German trials in recent decades. Eyewitnesses were no longer required to secure convictions: “Rather than treating mass murder as an individual crime, for which a subjective state of mind was crucial to proof of culpability, the court had finally decided that simple function within a wider machinery of mass murder was sufficient for conviction” (349). With that change in legal reasoning, the German court system finally proved adequate to address the systemic nature of state-sponsored criminality. Fulbrook writes that this belated legal advance underlined “the long-term inadequacy of attempts to bring Nazis to justice” (349).
Though East Germany famously placed antifascism at the core of its legitimating ideology, it did not conduct large, highly publicized trials comparable to the West German ones about the extermination camps.Footnote 15 Fulbrook notes that, as in West Germany in the 1950s, the number of prosecutions in East Germany for Nazi-era crimes “dropped dramatically once responsibility for justice had been handed over from the Soviet Military Administration and placed in the hands of the new regime under the communist SED,” i.e., the party that ruled East Germany. Also, as in West Germany, a series of amnesties in the GDR led to the release of “the vast majority of those with short prison sentences” (240). However, in contrast to the Federal Republic, the fatal consequences of the act, not the subjective motivations of the killer, proved enough for conviction and the handing down of sentences in the East German murder trials—ones that were more harsh than those in the West. Fulbrook observes that, in response to the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, the SED focused its efforts on propaganda campaigns against high-profile politicians and civil servants in West Germany. The East German Ministry of Justice did not organize a more comprehensive program of trials for Nazi crimes. Rather, the SED and the Ministry of State Security “kept very quiet about known former Nazis in their own state” (243).
One aspect of reckoning that does not appear in this work and that is rarely mentioned in the large scholarship on facing the Nazi past in Europe is the support for the United Nations (UN) Partition Plan and thus for the establishment of a Jewish state by the Soviet Union and the East European communist states in 1947–1948, and the active military support offered by Czechoslovakia to the Jews in Palestine and then to Israel in those same years. As the speeches by Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Ambassador to the UN made clear, reckoning with the extermination of the Jews of Europe was very much on his mind and on the minds of communist leaders in Poland, and, in particular, in Czechoslovakia. When Joseph Stalin realized that he had been mistaken in believing that the new Jewish state would be a spear aimed at the United States, he reversed policy in 1949 and initiated four decades of Soviet-bloc antagonism toward Israel. The turn began with the now much examined “anti-cosmopolitan campaigns” of the early 1950s, i.e., the series of purge show trials in Moscow, Prague, Budapest, and East Berlin that denounced Jews on the basis of antisemitic conspiracy theories. These proceedings, including the Slánský trial in Prague, the Doctors’ Plot in Moscow, the Noel Field case in Budapest, and the Paul Merker case in East Berlin, all included accusations that veteran communists had committed the sin of supporting Zionism and had done so as agents of American imperialism, thereby obscuring the realities of Soviet assistance to the Zionists in the War of 1948. In this long book, Fulbrook mentions neither the few years of support nor the four decades of Soviet-bloc diplomatic, and then active military, antagonism against the state of Israel.Footnote 16 Beginning in 1949 and escalating in the winter of 1952–1953, the East German regime purged any members of the SED who expressed sympathy for Israel or for financial restitution to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The GDR never opened diplomatic relations with the state of Israel, and it adopted what became a four-decade long policy of diplomatic and then military antagonism to the Jewish state. Those trials and purges, and those four decades of antagonism toward Israel, belong in a work published in 2018 about the quest for justice—and the history of injustice—in German history after 1945. Such policies were, of course, the opposite of a quest for justice.
Fulbrook describes East Germany's policy as “a complex balancing act, seeking simultaneously to integrate former Nazis, to expose and harshly punish a few, and variously to ignore and suppress evidence or make use of others, according to what appeared most advantageous in any particular case” (245). Actually, the SED regime was unambiguous, not “complex,” in pursuing a policy of undeclared war with Israel in the form of support for, first, the Arab states that both refused to recognize the state of Israel and rejected efforts at a compromise peace, and then for the Palestine Liberation Organization's terrorist campaigns from the 1960s to 1980s.Footnote 17 In the aftermath of the antisemitic purges of the early 1950s, anything that brought “the Jewish question” to the center of attention, such as high-profile trials of those who had murdered Europe's Jews, would have come into conflict with the regime's anti-Israeli policies and also with communist orthodoxy concerning the centrality of Nazi anticommunism, not antisemitism. The priority of the communist leadership in East Germany was not the quest for justice against perpetrators of the Holocaust. Rather, it was to lend the prestige of communist antifascism to the assault on the state of Israel. These issues have been a matter of broad public discussion, especially in April 1990, when the democratically elected Volkskammer (People's Chamber) passed a resolution (with abstentions but no opposing votes) that denounced the policies of the East German regime toward the Jews and toward Israel. The East German regime's record of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and its “undeclared war” with Israel, have since featured prominently in the scholarly literature, but they are not part of Fulbrook's account.Footnote 18
In her conclusion, Fulbrook writes that the scale of Nazi crimes was a phenomenon that went “well beyond the experience of particular groups.” The event “resists encapsulation in any one word—catastrophe, Shoah, Holocaust—restricting and defining as single words are” (521–522). Discomfort with those “single words” and with a focus on the centrality of the Jewish catastrophe has existed from the time it took place. In response to suggestions that this centrality comes at the expense of attention to other victims, it is important to recall that one of the central accomplishments of the scholarship on Nazi Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust, ever since the publication of Karl Bracher's The German Dictatorship in 1969, has been the integration of the history of the Holocaust into the history of the Nazi regime and World War II. Those labors of interpretive integration, which rejected previous separations of these three histories and the marginalization of the Holocaust, are evident in the leading works on the subject. Conversely, it was in the states of the Soviet bloc, including East Germany, that the communists suppressed or marginalized the specificity of the murder of the Jews. We should not return to a previous, less informed era.
Fulbrook and the scholars upon whom she relies, have demonstrated that, “compared to the total numbers involved, only a small proportion of perpetrators of the whole gamut of Nazi crimes were ever investigated, let alone brought to court and actually convicted: the vast majority escaped the net of justice entirely” (526). The evidence of the scholarship of recent decades supports that conclusion. Yet, alarming as the gap between the total numbers involved and those who were investigated or convinced, it was also the case that neither before nor since have so many perpetrators—however few, compared to the total—been called to account for crimes committed by a state-organized program of mass murder and inhumanity. Moreover, most of the trials that had anything to do with what one calls the rule of law took place in the democratic Federal Republic of Germany, not in the East German communist dictatorship.
The point deserves to be repeated that, in view of the extent of support for Nazism in German society before 1945, it would not have been surprising if there had been no public memory of the Holocaust and no quest for justice, especially after the return of sovereignty to West Germany, East Germany, and Austria. However inadequate and imperfect the quest for justice in the Bonn Republic was, the degree to which anyone was called to account there remains unique and unprecedented. Mary Fulbrook's Reckonings rightly reminds us of how much justice was denied and delayed. She is also right in pointing out that the international reputation of the Federal Republic of Germany for facing the crimes of the Nazi past was and is not a result of its success bringing most perpetrators to justice. It rightly rests instead on the fact that, after Nazi Germany's descent into unprecedented evil, the Allied victors and the authorities in the liberal democracy that followed managed to bring more perpetrators of injustice to account than had occurred in any judicial reckoning in any other post-dictatorial or post-genocidal regime, before or since. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the communist dictatorship in East Germany, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany did no more harm to the Jews.
Placing the history of postwar German judicial reckoning into a comparative context remains a scholarly task to be undertaken. Such a history would accord much more importance to the various Nuremberg trials and to the many other trials and investigations of the occupation era. It would offer a more critical view than Fulbrook's does of the East German record and of the harm the communists caused in using the courts to repress political opponents, in carrying out the antisemitic purges of the early 1950s, in marginalizing the Holocaust in its public memory, and in then in actively pursuing a foreign and military policy that was antagonistic to Israel. That said, Mary Fulbrook has written an important book. It is one that any historian addressing the issues of judicial reckoning with the Nazi past should read. It brings an impressive array of work to bear on important issues and will stimulate debate and further work on these issues. Reckonings is a significant and welcome contribution to the English-language scholarship on postwar West German judicial efforts to confront the crimes of the Nazi regime.
It is always interesting to hear what a colleague would have focused on had he or she been writing a book with the same title. In this case, Jeffrey Herf has already written extensively about some of the things I chose not to rehearse at length in Reckonings; and, in Herf's view, I skirted over his own chosen questions too lightly, while arguing from a different perspective. Let me first respond to the arguments he raises, and then turn to the broader context of the book as whole, including the parts he does not discuss, in order to raise some wider points.
In his selective review of what he conceives to be the “core” of my book, Herf advances three main arguments. He charges, first, that I do not sufficiently acknowledge (and praise) the Allies’ early postwar contributions to justice in a narrow judicial sense; second, that I do not sufficiently focus on (and castigate) anti-Zionism and the injustices perpetrated against Jews and Israel by the GDR and other communist regimes; and third, that I do not sufficiently praise the Federal Republic for what it did accomplish, rather than pointing out what it did not and at what cost. The first two issues have been well covered in other works, including Herf's own; with respect to the third, while we largely agree on the overall summary, I see the metaphorical glass as woefully way below half empty, whereas Herf sees it as worthy of note that it is filled at all. Let me elaborate briefly.
Justice is about far more than the sheer statistics of how many were brought to trial by whom, important though such statistics are. Of course, had I had been writing a book only about judicial reckonings, I could have devoted more space to the Allied efforts, which I summarize only briefly (and I do give detailed numerical tallies, though not in the form given by Herf). But I did not want to write yet again about the IMT and the Nuremberg successor trials, on which there are some excellent recent studies; or about the Slánský and related trials evidencing communist anti-Zionism; or about the broader injustices committed against Jews under communist regimes, including the GDR. There are, as Herf points out, already many books on these and related topics written by others, including him. (I have indeed also previously written about the experiences of Jews in the GDR, and about the SED's policies toward Jews and the Holocaust, in a couple of my other books, which Herf does not list in his kind introductory remarks about my work.Footnote 19) But these were not my topics here. In the trials section of Reckonings, I was interested particularly in how the successor states to the Third Reich dealt with the former Nazis in their midst, beyond and after the Allies’ trials.
My point about the distinctions between East and West Germany is that the latter's good reputation is not as well deserved as is often made out. This is for several reasons. In statistical terms, given the disparity in relative population sizes, former Nazis were, in fact, six or seven times more likely to be tried and sentenced for Nazi crimes in the GDR than they were in the Federal Republic. But the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) seemed to have been more embarrassed by any revelation that there were still former Nazis living in their state than they were proud of the fact that they were bringing them to court—unless trumpeting this could be achieved in politically profitable ways. In the West, too, former Nazis were far more likely not merely to be reintegrated into society, but also to rise to high positions in a way not possible under state socialism.
These are simply questions of historical comparison, not political evaluations. But attempts to evaluate, as suggested by Herf, raise the wider question of who is the subject of history and who are the historical actors? In the case of the Federal Republic, for example, it is not some undifferentiated notion of “West Germany” as a collective actor worthy of praise, but rather particular groups and specific individuals, who undoubtedly benefited from a system within which they could attempt to achieve justice, but nevertheless had to fight their case in face of considerable odds. There is a history of specific struggles and attempts to bring Nazis to justice against often massive opposition—as evidenced by Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer's efforts to put Auschwitz on trial, and his decision to give Mossad the tip-off about Adolf Eichmann's whereabouts, since he suspected that a trial in West Germany would not have achieved the same effect as one mounted in Israel. When Bauer died in 1968, he was depressed not only by the opposition and opprobrium he personally had had to face, but also by the feeling that his efforts to bring to justice the major perpetrators of the “euthanasia” murders had been so apparently unsuccessful.
Justice is also about exploring who was not brought to account—not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of the high proportions of particular social and professional groups whose members largely succeeded in escaping culpability. These included the following groups in the Federal Republic: the highly nazified judiciary, whose officials excluded themselves from being brought to account for “merely” having upheld the law and passed innumerable death sentences for minor offences under Hitler, and who helped to shape the postwar parameters of the legal system and outcomes of particular trials at an early stage; former civilian administrators of Nazi oppression and racial discrimination both within the Reich and across occupied Europe, who went on to participate in the West German government and civil service; major entrepreneurs who had profited massively from the exploitation of forced and slave labor, and who strenuously resisted attempts by survivors to gain compensation; the high-level medical professionals involved in the “euthanasia” program; as well as innumerable former Nazis, including ones in the Gestapo and Schutzstaffel (SS), who had established networks of mutual support and defense, and for whom West German judges sometimes showed remarkable understanding. In addition, many convicted Nazis who had actually been given lengthy sentences by the Allies served only a few years, having their sentences radically reduced or being allowed to walk free in the early amnesties initiated by the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. At the same time, a 1951 law, based on Article 131 of the West German Basic Law, guaranteed reemployment of former Nazi civil servants at the expense of others, such as Social Democrats or Jews, who had already been discriminated against under the Nazi regime and now found themselves sidelined yet again.
Justice is, moreover, also about identifying those who did not gain compensation for their suffering until, as in the case of forced laborers after the year 2000, there was way too little far too late. The Allied trials may have raised to public attention the roles of I. G. Farben, Flick, Krupp, and others, but it is still notable that the Adenauer government, as well as the Federal Court of Justice, supported the continuing refusal of major industrialists to acknowledge legal responsibility or pay compensation for the sufferings of former forced and slave laborers.
Justice is, not least, about bringing to attention those continually marginalized groups that did not even gain, for decades after the end of the war, symbolic recognition for their victimhood. For this reason, I felt it important to pay attention to the experiences of homosexual men, whose sexual orientation was still liable to criminal proceedings for a quarter of a century after the defeat of Nazism. They are, of course, as Herf points out, discussed in the scholarly literature and in overviews of the Third Reich, along with other minorities, such as the Roma and Sinti. But even so, the emphasis tends to be on Nazi policies rather than on the experiences of those affected, and individual voices are barely heard; moreover, for the postwar period, the longer-term impact of persecution tends to be almost entirely lost from sight. How many scholars of German Vergangenheitsbewältigung also think to mention the sad film Paragraph 175—with its small bunch of surviving homosexual men (and one lesbian woman), who finally had the courage to speak out after decades of silence and shame—alongside the television miniseries Holocaust, or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, or Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List? Of course this film was never as well-known or considered as significant in the public sphere; but that is precisely the point.
The upshot in evaluating the record of the Federal Republic is indeed complex, then: some 140,000 people were investigated for Nazi crimes, but fewer than 6,700 were convicted. And, of those convictions, only 164 were actually sentenced for the crime of murder—yes, only 164 people were deemed to be “murderers” by West German courts, even in light of the murder of millions.
I stand by my view that the Federal Republic succeeded in facing up to the Nazi past in the sense of massive (if, for some groups, belated) memorialization of victims, and that its political system and public arena made it possible for repeated controversies to be aired and contested. This is what its reputation is based upon. But, at the very same time, it silently allowed the vast majority of those who had sustained the Nazi system to get away with it, while refusing to do all it could—beyond internationally significant gestures, including payments to Israel—to provide adequate, timely, and genuine assistance to all victims and survivors. Its reputation benefited from acknowledgement of national responsibility, while failing to complete the task of a differentiated attribution of guilt. This left subsequent generations a legacy of undeserved shame.
***
It is a pity that, in his lengthy review, Herf pays little attention to so much else that the book is about. Reckonings was not intended simply to “address significant issues of historical causation regarding the quest for justice”—the question Herf mistakenly feels should have informed Part Three, a section of the book with which he chooses not to engage at all. Nor is the book “focused narrowly on Germany.” There are also numerous little misunderstandings and related misrepresentations along the way (which, apart from one small and another very significant exception, I will not address).
The book is much broader than just its second part on judicial reckonings. It seeks overall to explore how Nazi persecution was experienced by individuals in different positions and places, and how a wide range of people who had been closely involved, whether as perpetrators or persecuted, later came to reckon with the multiple legacies of their experiences, including at a personal level. For the overwhelming majority, this meant in the family, across generations, at home, in memorial sites—and not just in the courtrooms, where such a small minority was brought to account in a strictly legal sense. The three interrelated parts of Reckonings are therefore constructed in a way intended to address the intertwined developments of private reckonings alongside public accounting for involvement in Nazi crimes. I wanted to develop a framework for understanding successive waves of different types of reckoning over time: as early confrontations—or refusals to communicate—between perpetrators and the persecuted later gave way to cross-generational dialogues; as members of the “second generation” (including children of perpetrators, as well as of survivors) sought to make sense of parental experiences and to address those legacies for their own lives; and as memorialization entered new phases, entailing challenges not only around remembrance and survivor testimony but also around a more adequate portrayal of perpetrators.
As an organizing framework, I developed a series of key theoretical concepts: “communities of experience,” to highlight the significance of Nazi persecution as a defining moment in some people's lives, whether as perpetrators or victims; “communities of connection,” for those who are intrinsically connected to and affected by this past, whether by virtue of birth, close emotional ties, or personal location; and, finally, “communities of identification,” for those who orientate their concerns toward the Holocaust and its legacies, whether as individuals or as members of a collective for which this past is significant. In Part One, which is concerned with tracing the emergence of “communities of experience,” it is precisely because shared “defining experiences” are so important that I emphasize the need to draw attention both to “the diversity of experiences, and also to the common aspects of persecution.” (Herf misreads my comments as seeking to rectify an alleged imbalance in the scholarship, where, of course, I concur with his assessment of the secondary literature.) Whereas Part Two then examines the imbalanced records of legal confrontations, Part Three explores the changing patterns of connection and identification among different communities over time, as the relatively short-lived and ambiguous “era of the witness” gave way, beginning in the late 1970s, to what might be called the “era of the survivor.”
The structure of this book raises some general questions about the writing of history, which may make my own choices here worth airing more explicitly. To accomplish a panoramic survey of complex developments across decades and continents, but in ways that also allow deeper insights into personal experiences, I chose some selective emphases, many individual examples, and a few case studies—but always anchored in wider overviews for readers not as well-versed in the secondary literature as Herf and other scholars. I systematically take these examples through the different parts of the book, so that we are not dealing with unrelated snapshots of individuals stranded in a moment in time, but can instead gain a sense of continuing personal connections and intergenerational transmission, as well as of broader changes. Let me introduce an extended example that neither features nor would even fit in Herf's characterization of my book.
In Part One, I explore as a case study some “microcosms of violence” in Nazi-occupied Poland, including in the area around Mielec (an area interesting for the early use of slave labor by the Heinkel aircraft works), and I introduce individual characters whose fates are then taken forward throughout the book. Precisely in order not to give undue weight to this one otherwise relatively insignificant area, I embedded it within the wider context of more familiar developments. Moreover, highlighting individual experiences within this broader, well-known narrative provides the basis for picking up selected stories and particular emphases again in Part Three.
In Part Two, within a broader comparative survey of changing approaches to trials in the three successor states, from 1945 to the present—a survey I felt was badly needed, to complement the many excellent in-depth studies of individual trials and single-country studies or accounts of relatively limited time periods—I also analyze in more detail the fates of perpetrators from the Mielec area who ended up in West and East Germany. It will hardly be a plot spoiler to reveal that one of the former Mielec Gestapo bosses who went West was never brought to trial, and that the other was given only a lenient sentence—accompanied by some shockingly mitigatory remarks in the judge's summary. Having faced an accusation of committing what the Nazis saw as “racial defilement,” this particular Nazi had supposedly shown “humanity,” this West German judge averred, by not warning his Jewish mistress in advance that he was about to murder her while out on an apparently amatory walk in the woods.
The fortunes of these perpetrators are compared with a trial in the GDR of an “ethnic German” underling who had obediently followed their orders to shoot Jews in mass graves, including those dug behind the Heinkel works for laborers deemed too ill to work. After the war, the archival records show, this perpetrator appeared to have been genuinely struck by remorse, and he sought to make amends for his Nazi past by throwing himself into the task of “building socialism” in the GDR—but to little avail, as far as the court was concerned: he was sentenced to life imprisonment, ultimately dying in jail in 1988. Other less familiar trials I explore, using not only the secondary sources listed by Herf but also the original case files held in the German Federal Archive, include that of Josef Blösche, recognizable in a widely reproduced photo (taken from a report by SS-General Jürgen Stroop documenting the suppression of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising) as the SS man with a gun standing behind a little boy holding up his hands. He, too, had merged seamlessly into East German society as a good worker and citizen; and he paid for his crimes with a death sentence, in contrast to his superiors in the West. These and similar materials provide insights into the mentalities of judges and former perpetrators in East and West, the experiences of witnesses, as well as popular responses.
In Part Three, I return, again within a broader overview of transgenerational issues, to the Mielec case in order to explore the significance, for members of families growing up after the war, of earlier parental involvement in violence. I was amazed to find that the son of the low-level Nazi convicted in the GDR had been brought up to think that his father had been not a perpetrator of Nazi crimes but rather a victim of “Stasi injustice” and a “show trial”—a twist developed and embellished by his mother, also an ethnic German from Mielec who knew full well what her husband had done, but who had found in anticommunism a convenient cover story. Meanwhile, the West German son of another perpetrator from this area was worried more about what his father might have “known,” than about having to face what he had actually done, in this way echoing the familiar West German refrain of having “known nothing about it.”
The book's penultimate chapter surveying the changing landscapes of memorialization and oblivion looks not only at well-known memorial sites but also, again, at the peculiarities of commemoration and oblivion in Mielec. It was notable that the site of the former Jewish synagogue, destroyed by fire by the invading Germans in 1939, was marked there only by a rough-hewn stone—which, on the occasion of my visit in 2013, was marred by a painted swastika. The town square where Jews were gathered and selected for labor or death in March 1942, had no memorial plaque at all; and on the grounds of the former Heinkel works and concentration camp, there was only a communist-era plaque, ostensibly erected by young workers of the 1970s in memory of the former “young workers” who had died there—thereby overlooking the significance of their having been Jewish. There was absolutely no marker for the pits in the nearby woods, where so many Jews had been shot; the sites of these mass graves remain alive now only in the memories of very elderly local residents. By contrast, the German cemetery of the former “German colony” near Mielec was graced with a lavish new memorial stone garnished with flowers, funded by American relatives, including descendants of former perpetrators from the area.
I have laid out the Mielec example here at some length to give an indication of some of the longer-term concerns of the book that Herf fails to discuss in his review. His focus is more on the political causes of policies than on their consequences, let alone on the subjective reverberations over generations. But this example also raises wider questions about historical narratives, including how to embed a microstudy within a wider panorama, and how to relate the histories of legal confrontations with those of personal implications not easily captured in public records. Conversely, without a broader understanding of the realities of the past, how can historians interested in oral narratives and the co-construction of family stories evaluate the kinds of distortions and suppressions that might be involved—rather than merely speculating, as so often has to be the case?
It would seem, more generally, that Herf is not a fan of ego-documents produced by people who were not significant for public “memory”—at least in the sense in which he understands this term; after all, he pejoratively dismisses as “anecdotes” my selections from diaries, interviews, and memoirs. But these sources provide an illuminating, indeed crucial, way of exploring subjective perceptions and emotions on the part of people who had deeply significant experiences, and who, over time, sought to account for them to themselves and others. Such materials are essential for understanding the difficulties of finding sympathetic audiences, the sensitivities around particular subjects, the ways in which people felt able to talk to others with similar backgrounds but not to their own children, the terrible shame felt by some about past actions or failures to act, and, last but not least, the consequences across the long postwar decades for personal lives and family dynamics. These are areas not touched upon by the secondary sources Herf cites about judicial reckonings; but they are discussed extensively in other literatures—and they are richly evident in the broad range of primary sources I was able to use from archival collections in Europe, the United States, and Israel. They, too, relate to intensely significant questions of justice.
It was, furthermore, my intention to write in a way that would be accessible for a wider readership interested in understanding the Nazi past and its multiple legacies, not just for specialists already familiar with the area. In the public imagination, among those concerned with this past, and even among many students, “Auschwitz” still holds pride of place. This is why it was also important to contextualize within a wider picture “Auschwitz” and all it has come to stand for.
People all too often unthinkingly accept the implicit premise underlying postwar German pleas of ignorance and innocence by assuming that all that was truly evil took place far away under a cloak of secrecy, in extermination sites run by just a few perpetrators. It is ironic that even Herf seems to fall into one version of this trap when he asserts that “Fulbrook overstates her case” and criticizes my point about the evidence of inhumanity having been “all around and plain for all to see”—countering it instead with an emphasis on the relatively secret nature of atrocities in the East, where the “Holocaust was a distant and vast covert operation.” First of all, I was specifically referring to “the violence of the Nazi regime” and not to “the specifics of the regime's crimes” in the East, so Herf is simply misquoting here. But second, and underlining the fundamental point, I am not sure I could write off quite so lightly the matters that Herf lists: “vicious propaganda announcing the ‘extermination’ of the Jews on the front pages of the Völkischer Beobachter, the public racial laws, the Jews fired from their jobs and taken away from their homes and apartments, the concentration camps whose neighbors were aware of terrible conditions, the smell of burning bodies from crematoria of the institutions that carried out the euthanasia murders.” All of this, not to mention the explosive violence across the Reich in November 1938, surely constitute more than sufficient evidence for my assertion that violence was “all around and plain for all to see, even within the heart of the Reich”? If not, then I have no idea why so many German Jews felt the need to emigrate when they still had time, and, if they could muster the necessary resources, before the war and before the horrific developments that followed on a far larger scale across Europe. This was precisely my point: “Aryan” Germans should have long been aware of the fundamental inhumanity of Nazism.
But Herf seems himself to have fallen victim to a version of the Auschwitz-centrism I was seeking to critique. The later assertion that “we knew nothing about it” sought to restrict what was “truly evil” to things out of sight and far away—metaphorically epitomized by the gas chambers of Auschwitz—and to argue that professing “ignorance” amounted to demonstrating innocence. But this claim should be shown up for what it is: a postwar self-defensive utterance by the guilty and the complicit, who were seeking to repaint themselves as having been merely innocent bystanders, supposedly unaware of what was going on in their name—and in their midst. They may well have tried to reduce the violence of Nazism to what Herf calls the “specifics of the crimes of the regime” in the East. But we need not agree with this strategy of self-exculpation and easy evasion of any moral responsibility—and Herf should not be colluding with this cover-up.
Reckonings is a bigger book than the one represented by Herf in his selective review of the 153 pages he would like to consider “the core of the book.” So I hope that Reckonings has made not only, as Herf concludes, “a significant and welcome contribution to the English-language scholarship on postwar West German judicial efforts to confront the crimes of the Nazi regime,” but also to the far wider theme of understanding changing strategies for reckoning with the legacies of Nazism in different communities across time and place. I hope that Reckonings will be recognized for what it actually seeks to do, and that it will be seen as complementary to the book that Herf thinks I should have written—and, indeed, to his own work. Confronting the immensely significant issues raised by involvement in Nazi persecution and its multiple legacies among different groups and across generations is a mammoth and multifaceted task, and there remains a great deal to be done—from a wide variety of perspectives.
