One of the deadliest phases of the Holocaust, the Nazi regime's
"Operation Reinhard" produced three major death camps-Belzec,
Treblinka, and Sobibor-which claimed the lives of 1.8 million Jews.
In the 1960s, a small measure of justice came for those victims
when a score of defendants who had been officers and guards at the
camps were convicted of war crimes in West German courts. The
conviction rates varied, however. While all but one of fourteen
Treblinka defendants were convicted, half of the twelve Sobibor
defendants escaped punishment, and only one of eight Belzec
defendants was convicted. Also, despite the enormity of the crimes,
the sentences were light in many cases, amounting to only a few
years in prison. In this meticulous history of the Operation
Reinhard trials, Michael S. Bryant examines a disturbing question:
Did compromised jurists engineer acquittals or lenient punishments
for proven killers? Drawing on rarely studied archival sources,
Bryant concludes that the trial judges acted in good faith within
the bounds of West German law. The key to successful prosecutions
was eyewitness testimony. At Belzec, the near-total efficiency of
the Nazi death machine meant that only one survivor could be found
to testify. At Treblinka and Sobibor, however, prisoner revolts had
resulted in a number of survivors who could give firsthand accounts
of specific atrocities and identify participants. The courts,
Bryant finds, treated these witnesses with respect and even made
allowances for conflicting testimony. And when handing down
sentences, the judges acted in accordance with strict legal
definitions of perpetration, complicity, and action under duress.
Yet, despite these findings, Bryant also shows that West German
legal culture was hardly blameless during the postwar era. Though
ready to convict the mostly working class personnel of the death
camps, the Federal Republic followed policies that insulated the
judicial elite from accountability for its own role in the Final
Solution. While trial records show that the "bias" of West German
jurists was neither direct nor personal, the structure of the
system ensured that lawyers and judges themselves avoided judgment.
General
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