Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung deutscher Strafurteile wegen national-sozialistischer Totungsverbrechen 1945-1999, and: DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung ostdeutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Totungsverbrechen (review)

The first of the titles under review is a twenty-eight-volume compendium of verdicts from West German trials (by 2011 twenty-two more volumes are planned). The verdicts relate to homicides by Germans against a broad range of victims during World War II. The volumes, which unfold chronologically, are organized into eleven separate categories of National Socialist criminality:

1. Denunciation (crimes of "grudge informers" convicted of homicide for denouncing victims to the security organs of the Nazi government);
2. Euthanasia (murders under the Third Reich's "euthanasia" program, organized for the extermination of the mentally and physically handicapped);
3. Crimes of the Judiciary (homicidal crimes perpetrated by German legal personnel);
4. War Crimes (violations of the laws and customs of war carried out against enemy combatants and POWs);
5. Crimes of Mass Extermination by Einsatzgruppen (crimes of genocide perpetrated by German mobile units);
6. Crimes of Mass Extermination in Camps (acts of genocide committed in concentration and death camps);
7. Other acts of Genocide;
8. Other Nazi Crimes of Violence in Detention Centers (homicidal crimes committed in detention centers broadly defined, including concentration camps, prisons, forced labor camps, and POW camps);
9. Administrative Crimes (organization of Nazi programs of mass murder, excluding euthanasia);
10. Crimes in the Last Stages of the War (homicides perpetrated during the waning months of the Third Reich);
11. Other Nazi Crimes (homicidal crimes not readily subsumed under the preceding categories).

As a repository of documentation from the earliest days of Germany's judicial reckoning with the crimes of National Socialism, the Justiz series may be unique. Its main architect, C.F. Rüter, was a twenty-one-year-old graduate student from the University of Amsterdam when he began the project. As Rüter explains, what would prove to be his life's work originated in a fundamental question: how much had German society really changed since the end of the war? The continuities between German society under the Nazis and under the Federal Republic have been exhaustively demonstrated by studies published in recent decades. ¹ However, at the time Rüter launched his own inquiry in the late 1950s, few scholars were addressing this issue. Rüter believed that the attitudes of the German judiciary toward Nazi perpetrators still at large would reveal whether German society had truly divorced itself from its brown past. The judiciary was in one respect an ideal test case, insofar as former Nazi judges and prosecutors—many of whom had served on the infamous "special courts" and "People's Courts" of the Third Reich—were increasingly being reintegrated into the West German judiciary by the late 1940s. In the British Zone of Occupation, by 1948 more than eighty percent of Landgericht judges were former Nazi Party members. For Rüter, the extent to which these legal professionals were willing to investigate, indict, convict, and punish Nazi killers was a gauge of Germany's credentials as a Western democracy.

Rüter soon learned that the verdicts in Nazi-related homicides were not generally available. In 1960 he began negotiations with the authorities of the eleven Bundesländer for access to their trial records. At this point the West Germans still lacked a comprehensive survey of trials dealing with the crimes of National Socialism. Since the West Germans charged Nazi offenders under the conventional laws of homicide (§211 and §212 of the Penal Code), National Socialist crimes against humanity were...