This week The Wall Street Journal published my review of the very interesting Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 20th Century. I re-post here.
Confronting Complicity
Bruno Dey was just starting school when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1944, at the age of 17, he became a member of the SS. A heart condition prevented himfrom fighting on the Russian front, so he was assigned to a watchtower at the Stutthof concentration camp, near present-day Gdańsk, Poland. In 2019 he was tried, and later convicted, in a Hamburg court as an accessory to murder. More than 5,000 people died at Stutthof as Dey stood watch, a rifle upon his shoulder.
Dey’s trial followed the more famous court proceedings of John Demjanjuka decade earlier. Demjanjuk was accused of brutal sadism and was convicted in Munich of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders at the extermination camp near Sobibor, Poland. He died in a German nursing home while his verdict was being appealed.
Recent cases such as these, against accessories to the mass murder of civilians—mostly Jews—stand in stark contrast to the cases brought against the Nazis in the aftermath of the war. In “Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century,” Tobias Buck tells us that, back then, “perpetrators had less to fear” from Germany’s “prosecutors and judges than common thieves” did. As the nation sought to move on from its sordid crimes, Mr. Buck tells us, officials during those early postwar years showed “unfathomable leniency” toward Nazis, who had roles in the deaths of millions.
This was the milieu in which Mr. Buck, a German-born editor at the Financial Times, grew up. His grandfather had been captured by the Russians and imprisoned for years in the Soviet Union, and in the Buck family talk about the war focused on the hardships experienced by Germans as the Nazi regime fell and the country’s cities were destroyed by Allied bombs. “This strange inversion of history was typical of the postwar years,” Mr. Buck writes, “which saw a nation of perpetrators revel in its own victimhood.” The author describes staring at a picture of his grandfather wearing a swastika armband: He sees the typical German—no monster, no criminal, but exactly the kind of person who made monstrous criminality possible. “Complicity was everywhere, as were the excuses and justifications that kept both a legal and a wider moral reckoning at a distance.”
Mr. Buck is drawn in particular to Dey’s trial as yet another reckoning with the moral legacy of a German generation—and likely one of the last times a court of law would hear from witnesses with firsthand accounts of what happened during the Holocaust. As Halina Strnad, a 90-year-old Jewish survivor testifying from Australia, recounted horrors still shocking to read about, she told the judge that, “in the camp, we said that if we survive we shall have to testify until we die.”
After one particularly disturbing piece of testimony, a survivor-witness expressed forgiveness to Dey and even asked to embrace him. It seemed that everyone in the courtroom was moved. A short time later it became clear that the “testimony” was a fantasy and that the “survivor” had made it up. “There is something powerfully seductive about victimhood,” Mr. Buck notes. And about sentimental stories of forgiveness.
The author provides a powerful guide to the proceedings and their context. No one doubted that Dey was a minor figure at Stutthof, but what did it mean to be a “minor figure” at a place that killed so many? The judge in the case was determined to show that even a lowly guard in a watchtower should have known that he was part of a horrendous crime and that even a soldier in the SS should have been able to refuse to participate in mass murder. Yet Dey seemed baffled by the notion that he could have walked away from his post. Even in the face of evidence presented by a historian showing that no guards had been punished for refusing to serve in a concentration camp, Dey asked: “Where is my guilt?” The judge concluded that even as a young man in the SS, Dey had the freedom to choose how to act. He chose the Bequemlichkeit des Gehorsams—the “comfort of obedience.”
After a nine-month trial, Dey was found guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation, with jail time suspended. Was justice served? Mr. Buck’s readers are left to wonder.
“Final Verdict” doesn’t present new information about the Holocaust, but it does provide a fresh perspective on how Germans have negotiated their sense of historical and individual responsibility. Mr. Buck shows that as memories of World War II dim, and as the country increasingly becomes a nation of immigrants, Germany must redefine its relation to its past, especially the Holocaust. How should one remember atrocities committed long ago? How should that memory inform contemporary political decisions?
In Germany today there is much talk of the brutality of colonialism, and there is resistance to the official prohibitions concerning criticisms of Israel. There is also a resurgence of political groups that openly express nostalgia for the Nazi period. And in almost every major city in the country one finds efforts to remind people of “their” responsibility for the efforts to exterminate the Jews.
Dey’s trial reached a conclusion, but the debates about responsible “memory culture” continue. “As long as we argue,” Mr. Buck writes, “we won’t forget.”
A historian who testified at the trial called Nazism a “consensual dictatorship,” a form of tyranny in which people willingly, often enthusiastically, participate. Bruno Dey was an ordinary German, but he was convicted because the court found that he should have refused to go along with a murderous regime that he knew was wrong. The judge and the prosecutor told Mr. Buck they wondered whether they had raised their own children “to be strong enough to say no.” Have we?
Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living With the Past” and, most recently, “The Student: A Short History.”
Appeared in the July 24, 2024, print edition as ‘Confronting Complicity’.Videos