Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (review)

Book Review Rebecca Wittmann. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 336, cloth. $35.00 US. Reviewed by Amir Čengić, Associate Legal Officer, Chambers, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ‘‘What happens when a nation tries to deal with its own genocidal past, using its own criminal code, in its own state courts?’’ (2). This is one of the questions that Rebecca Wittmann, professor of history at the University of Toronto, poses at the outset of her book Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. The book deals with the trial of twenty individuals alleged to have been involved in the atrocities that took place in the Auschwitz death camp during World War II. The trial began in December 1963; it took place in Frankfurt-am–Main, before a German court and under German law. It lasted for more than 180 court days. The 900-page judgment was rendered in August 1965, and all but three defendants were convicted of either murder or aiding and abetting murder (3). The book is divided into six chapters and includes a number of useful appendices, such as a list of participants and a pre-trial chronology. Chapter 1 deals with the pretrial history of the case and lays out the general background against which the Auschwitz trial took place. The author describes the state of the German judicial system after the war and the influence of Allied forces on the prosecution of Nazi perpetrators and explains the German Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, which were applied by the court. Chapter 2 sets out the course of the pretrial investigation and portrays the ambitious goal of the German prosecutors to turn the trial into more than an ordinary criminal proceeding, one that would enable the German public to face its past and serve as a lesson for the future. In this chapter Wittmann also describes the prosecution’s trial strategy and provides an introduction to the evidence that was to be offered by the survivors of Auschwitz during the trial. Chapter 3 is an overview of the structure of the indictment; chapter 4 describes the trial proceedings, summarizing the evidence given by survivors, experts, and former SS officers, and provides an outline of German press coverage of the trial. Chapter 5 discusses the final arguments of the parties and the judgment. Chapter 6 looks at responses to the judgment from the press (both West and East German, as well as foreign), the German public, and some of the main actors in the trial. It also includes the author’s concluding remarks. In the introduction, Wittmann announces her main point of criticism of the trial, which becomes the main theme of the book. The well-presented argument is that the outcome of the Auschwitz trial was a paradox: on the one hand, the trial did succeed in informing the largely ignorant German public of the horrors that had taken place in Auschwitz, but, on the other hand, it provided a skewed understanding of those horrors, because the trial became ‘‘a trial of sadists and reprobates,’’ rather than of the camp system itself, and because the majority of the accused were convicted as aiders and abettors instead of murderers and thus received sentences that did not justly correspond to their crimes (38–39, 101, 271–74). According to Wittmann, this outcome was primarily due to the application of the German penal code, with its narrow Amir Čengić, review of Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial by Rebecca Wittmann. Genocide Studies and Prevention 2, 2 (August 2007): 191–194. ß 2007 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi: 10.3138/gsp/007 definition of murder; the unwillingness of the trial judges, and the German judiciary in general, to interpret that definition of murder more broadly in Nazi trials; and the imposition of light sentences for Nazi defendants in German courts at the time (16, 44–48, 210–11, 273). In her words, ‘‘the West German penal code was not equipped to ‘teach lessons’ about how to prevent or punish genocide’’ (94); ‘‘the main impediment to effective justice in Nazi trials was the law, and its contemporary interpretation in Nazi trials’’ (190...