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Reviewed by:
  • Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial
  • Robert G. Moeller
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 [End Page 121] 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, West Germans received daily accounts of the trial, including graphic descriptions of the unimaginable cruelties that defendants had inflicted on Auschwitz internees. When the trial ended in August 1965, the court's judgment was extraordinarily thorough—totaling some 900 pages—and all but three defendants were found guilty. Wittmann has provided a finely detailed, clearly written, and highly accessible account of the trial, as well as an assessment of its place in the "politics of memory" in postwar West Germany.

In contrast to historians who have identified the Auschwitz trial as the point at which large numbers of West Germans finally came to acknowledge the enormity of the Third Reich's crimes, Wittmann concludes that the "information that the public got about Auschwitz. . .ultimately hampered rather than helped the growing efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or overcoming the past" (pp. 6–7). The lesson of the trial was not that the willing complicity of millions of Germans made possible the criminal regime's actions. Rather, the court proceedings distinguished between "accomplices to murder"—"ordinary citizens who were basically decent and reluctant to perform their tasks"—and "sadists, 'excess perpetrators' (Excesstäter)" (p. 6) who had little in common with most of their fellow citizens. Thus, Wittmann argues, the trials confirmed a perception of National Socialism according to which a handful of truly fanatical Nazis stood apart from the vast majority of decent Germans, who had been caught up in a system over which they exercised no influence.

The trial's paradoxical outcome, Wittmann demonstrates, was largely a result of the application of German laws that had been on the books since the unification of the Reich in 1871. Although a March 1954 statute explicitly prohibited genocide, the criminal code to which it was added banned retroactivity. Former Auschwitz camp guards could not be put on trial for violating a law that came into being almost a decade after the camp's liberation. Instead, the defendants were tried under provisions of a criminal code according to which a conviction for murder required proof of "particularly reprehensible" and "base" motives. The court's inability to demonstrate such motives meant that many murderers on trial in Frankfurt were tried merely for "aiding and abetting" murder—that is, as accomplices and not as perpetrators. Wittmann suggests that the West German state could have followed a different path. When Israelis put Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem in 1961, he was charged under an article of international criminal law that included crimes against humanity. By choosing not to pursue this [End Page 122] alternative, the West German state was able to maintain the claim that it was a democratic polity based on a Rechtsstaat (a state based on law) that had survived the Third Reich. But at the same time, this choice prevented the state from putting the Final Solution on trial in Frankfurt. "The use of the German penal code," Wittmann argues, "made the trials easier for the public to digest: it distanced them from the proceedings" (p. 32). She concludes that this "reliance on the letter of the law legitimated the criminal Nazi state and set a standard for illegal behavior in the 1960s Frankfurt courtroom that eerily echoed the laws of the Third Reich" (p. 272...

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