Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust by Michael J. Bazyler and Frank M. Tuerkheimer (review)

Legal proceedings against the perpetrators of the crimes of Hitler’s Europe range from the well-known International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg to tens of thousands of lesser known cases. Prosecutors charged people well beyond the Nazi leadership, extending to all levels of society, all regions under Nazi sway, and almost every ethnic group. Among the scholars whose works have addressed these proceedings, Andrew Szanajda expanded the scope of research to suspected Nazi informers; Alan E. Steinweis combed legal testimony at German postwar proceedings involving Kristallnacht; and Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander explored the challenges facing prosecutions under Control Council Law no. 10 (war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity).¹ Historians have yet to tap the records of the early Adenauer-era Zentrale Rechtsschutzstelle (Central Legal-Defense Office), which provided counsel to German war criminals convicted in foreign countries.² Now Bazyler and Tuerkheimer have revisited ten episodes, beginning with the USSR’s 1943 Kharkov trial and ending with the 1999 British proceedings against Anthony Sawoniuk, to produce a work that appears to me less new research than didactic exercise. Contrary to the largely document-based IMT proceedings, eye-witness accounts by both perpetrators and victims played the primary role in the other cases. Despite having to take into account as well the differences among ten legal and political systems, Bazyler and Tuerkheimer have demonstrated clear threads in courtroom evidence that help us better understand the Holocaust.

In his treatment of the 1943 Kharkov trial, Bazyler may have side-stepped Soviet ideological imperatives that defined the victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens” rather than targets of a genocide against European Jewry (p. 17). While Bazyler perceives a Soviet effort to tailor the record for Western eyes, the Kharkov trial did in part signal Soviet concern at the Germans’ recent discovery of the mass grave of Polish prisoners of war whom Stalin’s government had murdered at Katyn. If integrated into the broader stream of postwar Soviet trials, Bazyler argues, the Kharkov trial helps the historian disentangle Soviet wartime objectives, Holocaust-related evidence, and staged show-trial renditions of events.³

France’s prosecution of Pierre Laval also displayed certain show-trial features. Tuerkheimer characterizes the proceedings as “seriously flawed,” noting that Laval’s presumed guilt resided more in his cooperation with the German authorities than in his decision to cooperate in the Nazis’ genocide. In fact, questions raised in Laval’s trial cast shadows on the entire Third Republic, which he and others like him had served before the war (p. 59). Laval’s delivery of 641,500 French workers for the German war effort constituted collaboration (p. 68), but his decision to deport non-French Jews implicated him in the Holocaust. If Laval’s trial faded from the limelight, his place in French history continues to exercise scholars, including Robert Aron, Alexander Werth, and more recently Alan Riding; public expressions of hatred for the collaborationist prime minister appeared in a poll in 1980.⁴

From 1944 to 1948, U.S. Army courts conducted 489 proceedings against administrators and staff of the Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, and Mühldorf concentration and forced labor camps (p. 79). In his chapter on them Tuerkheimer singles out proceedings related to Dachau. A virtual metaphor for Nazi brutality, the Dachau charges served a clear didactic purpose for denazification, as the associated trials added medical experimentation and the “just-following-orders” defense to the common currency.⁵ Tuerkheimer opens his inquiry with American troops’ liberation of Dachau and other camps, and their summary execution of a number of SS staff members (he connects content from postwar trials for medical experimentation with Walter Reed’s use of human subjects in his 1902 yellow fever experiments in Panama; pp. 78, 94). Subsequently Tuerkheimer stresses the American “commitment to fair procedure,” regardless of questionable practices such as group proceedings during the Dachau trials (p. 96).

In chapter 4, Bazyler...