Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography edited by Kim C. Priemel and Alexa Stiller (review)

Few historical processes tell us as much about assessing evidence, individual and collective accountability, or the vision of a world guided by common legal principles as the various trials of German war criminals after 1945. As Norbert Frei’s Vergangenheitspolitik (1996) and Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander’s Nazi Crimes and the Law (2008) demonstrate, recent trends in research are directed more towards assessing the postwar impact and relative success of trials than toward mobilizing evidence of Nazi criminality.¹ Introducing Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Michael Marrus criticizes Telford Taylor’s The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992) for “erroneously…inexplicably using the plural” while focusing solely on the International Military Tribunal (IMT) (p. xi). Hyperbole aside, this work explores issues resonating beyond the records of the IMT. The contributors redefine the legacy of the trials, viewing the testimony, prosecution, and public representation as firmly embedded in Western culture. Solidly researched, these articles revisit many themes already present in the literature.²

Robert Kempner, a German lawyer intimately familiar with the German police system, assisted the American prosecution at Nuremberg. Based on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection of Kempner’s papers, Dirk Pöppmann depicts Kempner as tainted in German eyes by his place alongside American war crimes prosecutors in trials aimed at revenge rather than justice. Kempner had uncovered the Wannsee Protocol and presented it to Taylor in March 1947 (pp. 38, 91). Paralleling the reports submitted to the Office of Strategic Services by Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer, Kempner envisioned war crimes trials as tools to educate the German populace but also as an opening to a new, more stable political culture.³

Exploring courtroom dynamics, Hilary Earl reviews the trial of Otto Ohlendorf. She finds Ohlendorf, Benjamin Ferencz (the prosecutor) and Michael A. Musmanno (the judge) somewhat oblivious to the criminality of the SS-Einsatzgruppen. Viewed initially as an ideal witness in the trial against Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Ohlendorf passed from British to American hands. His statements to prosecutors shed light on his own involvement with SS-Einsatzgruppe D as its commanding officer. Nuremberg’s youngest prosecutor, Ferencz lacked significant courtroom experience; yet his research team uncovered the evidence necessary to justify a trial against all Einsatzgruppen commanders (p. 53). Judge Musmanno draws Earl’s strongest criticisms. She finds him to have been an opportunist, more interested in his own public image and future book sales than in objectively assessing the facts (pp. 59–61).⁴ Several chapters later, Jan Eric Schulte examines the evolution of the image of the SS through the 1960s. Where the Wehrmacht largely escaped public recognition of its involvement in the Nazi war of extermination until the opening of the Wehrmachtausstellung (German Army exhibition) in 1995, the SS remained the “alibi of a nation”—as Gerald Reitlinger put in 1956—until Heinz Höhne debunked the view of the SS as a “monolithic omnipotent organization” in 1967 (pp. 212, 151–52).

Where the IMT approached Nazi criminality by focusing on its leadership, the “Doctors’ trial” integrated both witnesses and survivors. Paul Weindling’s research shows prosecutors leaning more on documentation than on eye-witnesses; horrific accounts of medical experiments tend to overshadow Nazi biological-racism. Unfortunately, institutional actors—namely the Robert Koch and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes—escaped closer scrutiny and prosecution. On the other hand, the Doctors’ trial inspired Raphael Lemkin’s proposal of a new legal concept: genocide. Alexa Stiller traces the conceptual and legal evolution of genocide, showing how prosecutors used the concept as a legal umbrella coupling the Nazi “master plan” with actions taken in the field. Ultimately, Lemkin’s influence led to the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in late 1948 (p. 113). Similarly, totalitarianism implied an all...