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  • Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Mary Fulbrook
  • Peter Fritzsche
Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, Mary Fulbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 672 pp., hardcover $34.95, electronic version available.

Mary Fulbrook addresses the disjuncture between firmly established "official myths" about Germany's success in "'dealing with the past' and the extent to which the overwhelming majority of perpetrators actually evaded the net of justice on the other" (p. 7). Despite an initial flurry of activity and public interest in the trials, the well-documented record of Nazi crimes resulted in only 6,675 convictions in the Federal Republic. No more than 164 individuals were convicted in the murder of millions of innocent civilians. Statistically this means that "each murder cost ten minutes in prison."1 The discrepancy between the steadfast rejection of Nazism on the one hand and the incomplete and variable postwar reckoning on the other inspired Fulbrook to analyze how both victims and perpetrators "reflected on their experiences, spoke or did not speak about the past, and transmitted the consequences of this past—through habits, anxieties, attitudes, and behaviors if not actual stories" (p. 6). Her book goes well beyond an investigation of judicial reckoning: it is a broadly conceived history of the presence of the past in the successive "presents" of the postwar decades. In the end, Reckonings is about the homes that the catastrophe left behind, "our mothers, our fathers," as in the title of a hugely popular 2013 German TV series. In many ways, the courtroom was an extension of the kitchen table. [End Page 106]

Painful, evasive, and self-exculpatory discussions began in 1933, not 1945. Fulbrook is abso-lutely right to insist on the "violence that was not hidden from sight, tucked away in faraway places, but all around and plain for all to see, even within the heart of the Reich" (p. 23). Only a few weeks into the Third Reich, Germans had already picked up the new, pitiless vocabulary of friends and foes, talking or even joking about concentration camps, and assessing the danger of being "concentrated"—a volubility which the whirlwind of denunciations in spring 1933 both registered and attempted to police. The Nazis deliberately ritualized the violence in public pillorying and boycotts. As a young law student, Sebastian Haffner was astonished that "suddenly everyone felt justified, and indeed required, to have an opinion about the Jews, and to state it publicly." Careful "distinctions were made between 'decent' Jews and the others."2 Rumors about the mass shootings of innocent Jews spread like wildfire in autumn 1941, so much so that Goebbels eventually had to admonish relatives of the soldiers who came home on leave to "live up" to the brutal "face of the war."3

The task of building the "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) was regarded as urgently defensive and rehabilitative in a way that sanctioned violence. Eyewitnesses went back and forth, lamenting the suffering of individuals but invoking the collective needs of the Germans. Even when the sinister parts stood out, as in 1941 rumors about massacres of naked women and children, the cover-up was already beginning: it was the SS, not the Wehrmacht; soldiers were expected to follow orders; they were drunk. As Fulbrook points out, the violence was difficult for many Germans because it was integral to the Volksgemeinschaft that so many cherished. No surprise then that after the war, perpetrators were often sentenced merely as "accessories," or that convictions depended on showing "base motives" or "excessive" brutality: conditions hard-to-prove. It was easier to acquit the defendants if the accused "had only been following orders."

Germans amnestied themselves: many saw each other as complicit accessories rather than willful perpetrators. The persistent idea that Germans were "casualties of March" (i.e., 1933) exonerated the majority for being weak or opportunistic, but not fundamentally guilty of crimes. Fulbrook stresses that when legal proceedings such as the 1963–1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials got underway, it was not the result of West Germany's changing attitudes, but highly energetic—and isolated—individuals such as Fritz Bauer, who increasingly felt that he was living in...

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