Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Moeller, Robert G.
Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (review)
Holocaust and Genocide Studies - Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 121-124

Oxford University Press

Robert G. Moeller - Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (review) - Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21:1 Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21.1 (2007) 121-124 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Robert G. Moeller University of California, Irvine Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial, Rebecca Wittmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), xii + 336 pp., cloth, $35.00. Beyond Justice received much recognition long before its publication, earning the annual Fritz Stern dissertation prize of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., in 2002 and the Wiener Library's Fraenkel Prize in 2005. These honors are well deserved. Wittmann has written a compelling, convincing history of an important moment in West Germany's attempts to "come to terms with the past." She demonstrates how painful, halting, and incomplete this process was. In December 1963, in a courtroom in Frankfurt am Main, Germans put Germans on trial for crimes committed at the Nazi killing facility, Auschwitz. This was not the first time that Nazi criminals had appeared in West German courts, but no previous case had been prepared with such diligence. For months,...