Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955–1966 by Michael S. Bryant (review)

With its horrific history the subject of countless memorials and endless public discussions, Germany is the poster child for national self-reckoning. But when it comes to using retributive justice as a tool of Vergangenheitstbewältigung—confronting the past—the German legal system has accumulated a disappointing if not pitiful record.

In the years immediately following the war, German courts conducted more than 4,600 trials related to crimes committed during the Nazi period—a number that sounds impressive but obscures the fact that these trials were conducted under the watchful eye of Allied zonal occupiers, and for the most part involved relatively trivial property crimes committed during the last months of the war. In the early years of the Federal Republic, proceedings against Nazi perpetrators of atrocities came to a virtual standstill. The situation improved with the creation in 1958 of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, Ludwigsburg. All the same, in subsequent decades, courts in the Federal Republic (formerly West Germany, and today’s unified Germany) have managed to convict only around 560 persons for Nazi-era killings.

Why this lamentable record? The default explanation has been simple: (West) Germany was full of former Nazis. In his excellent new book, Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955–1966, Michael Bryant challenges this picture, or at least fruitfully complicates it. He does so by analyzing the postwar German trials of members of two distinct groups: functionaries at the three Operation Reinhard death camps—Bełz˙ec, Treblinka, and Sobibór—and former members of the Nazi judicial apparatus.

Concerning the latter, Bryant arrives at rather conventional conclusions. It is well known that the entire history of the Federal Republic contains not a single successful prosecution of a former Nazi jurist—a fact that sounds less surprising when one considers that a staggering percentage of judicial offices in the early years of the Federal Republic were filled by former Nazis. Once reinstalled in positions of judicial power, jurists who had been Nazis had little incentive to investigate crimes committed by their former colleagues (or themselves).

When it comes to examining the Operation Reinhard trials, which took place in Germany between 1955 and 1966, Bryant tells a more distinctive story. In the disastrous Bełz˙ec proceedings in 1964, a Munich court set aside the indictments of seven of the eight former SS functionaries of the death camp. By contrast, the major Treblinka trial, which took place in Düsseldorf in 1964 and 1965, resulted in the conviction of nine of the ten defendants, with four (including the notorious Kurt Franz) receiving life terms. The 1965–1966 Sobibor trial, conducted in Hagen, achieved a mixed result, with roughly half of the accused convicted and half acquitted.

Bryant deserves praise for drawing attention to these trials. The last several years have witnessed a wave of publications on the famous Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–1965), while the important Operation Reinhard proceedings have remained largely overlooked, particularly within the English-speaking world. Bryant’s book now admirably fills that gap. Bryant rightly praises the Treblinka trial as “stunningly effective”; at the same time, he argues persuasively that instances of prosecutorial failure cannot generally be explained simply in terms of “bad faith.” (The notable exception was the scandalous dismissal of charges against several Sobibor functionaries—a dismissal fortunately reversed on appeal from the prosecution.) Instead, Bryant argues that even the failures resulted largely from jurists’ good-faith attempts to conduct complex atrocity trials in compliance with German laws ill-suited to such cases.

German legal doctrine erected major obstacles to the prosecution of death-camp guards. Having concluded early on that trying Nazis for crimes against humanity or genocide would represent an unconstitutional violation of the ban against retroactivity, German jurists were forced to rely on the existing murder statute and its bewilderingly subjective standard of perpetration. This...