Nazis after Hitler: How Perpetrators of the Holocaust Cheated Justice and Truth by Donald M. McKale (review)

This well-intentioned book is a philippic against the persistence of antisemitism since 1945, the postwar inability or refusal of Nazi war criminals to recognize the injustice of what they had done, and the failure of the victorious Allies to identify the Holocaust as a distinct form of crime. Focusing on some thirty prototypical organizers or executors of mass murder, Donald McKale waxes indignant about what he sees as the widespread success of these perpetrators in furnishing Holocaust deniers with rhetorical ammunition and in evading punishment in the aftermath of World War II.

Years ago, Franklin Ford observed, "standing aghast is an unrewarding posture for anyone trying to pay close attention to the thread of history" (quoted in Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitler's World View [Cambridge, MA, 1982], 3). He meant, of course, that when historians have the task of explaining why repugnant developments occurred, analysis is generally more helpful than moralizing. But McKale is not primarily interested in explaining. He knows, for example, how earlier historians have accounted for the Allies'and the Germans' apparent postwar leniency toward many Nazi perpetrators. He recounts these arguments faithfully without adding much aside from irritation with them. His goals are to show that what happened was wrong and that it did short- and long-term harm that outweighed the myopic calculations of policymakers at the time.

The result is a seriously overstated case. Yes, many perpetrators, especially rank- and file shooters and camp guards, escaped punishment after World War II; yes, West German courts meted out remarkably light punishments to even many of those who were prosecuted; and yes, many perpetrators lied shamelessly about their roles after the fact. All of this is well known. But the overall record regarding "justice" is better than McKale lets on. Consider what he relates (but never compiles) about the fates of the thirty-one individuals to whom he devotes at least one chapter segment: no fewer than twelve were executed for their deeds; two more committed suicide; four died in captivity, two died as they were about to be arrested and prosecuted; one died on the run; four were convicted, sentenced, and ultimately released or pardoned; and only six went unpunished. Or consider the fate of a group he does not examine as a whole, the fourteen SS-men who commanded death camps at some point during the Holocaust: six were dead by the end of World War II, four committed suicide thereafter, two were hanged in 1947, and two were captured later and sentenced to life in prison. Not a single one escaped punishment. Consider as well that while McKale somewhat understates the number of SS personnel at Auschwitz who survived the war and later went on trial (789, not 600, out of some 6,500), he is silent about the prosecution rate among senior personnel, which was considerably higher. As for Allied inattentiveness to the Holocaust, consider that amidst all the pardons that John McCloy issued after the war as American High Commissioner, he steadfastly refused to block the execution of Otto Ohlendorff, the commander of an Einsatzgruppe. Yes, much more could have been done, but Cold War politics intervened, and that brings us to the matter of the effect on "truth," the other key word in McKale's subtitle.

McKale believes that the self-justifications offered by Nazi perpetrators and the timidity of Allied prosecutors lent strength to postwar Holocaust denial. But once again, he only sees very partially. Far fewer Germans doubt the reality and the criminality of the Holocaust now than did so in 1945 or 1955; the evasions that McKale quotes at length have become widely discredited. Yes, the society that was capable of committing the Holocaust was, on the whole, not capable of admitting its heinousness in the immediate aftermath, and considerable turnover of the German population was needed before that could happen...