Questions posed by the trial of a seventeen-year-old guard at Stutthof concentration camp
FINAL VERDICT A Holocaust trial in the twenty-first century
TOBIAS BUCK 336pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £25.
ANINETY-THREE-YEAR-OLD MAN is convicted as an accessory to the murder of more than 5,000 people but is given a two-year suspended sentence, in part because he had been tried in a juvenile court. That bizarre set of circumstances, which sounds like the start of a Mensa puzzle, describes the actual verdict handed down by a Hamburg court on July 23, 2020, in the case of Bruno Dey. Dey had served in the SS during the Second World War as a guard at Stutthof, a Nazi concentration camp located on the outskirts of Gdansk, Poland. But because the nonagenarian had undertaken his guard duties when he was seventeen, Dey was tried as a juvenile.
The fact that German prosecutors continue to file charges against wheelchair-bound former SS guards might lead one to conclude that their legal system has pursued perpetrators of Nazi genocide with unrelenting thoroughness. As Tobias Buck makes clear in his excellent new book, Final Verdict: The Holocaust on trial in the twenty-first century, little could be further from the truth. Germany enjoys the reputation of having confronted its Nazi past with impressive forthrightness; its cities are festooned with memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. But when it came to bringing Nazi perpetrators and collaborators to justice in the decades after the war, the Federal Republic achieved a pitifully thin record. The obstacles to the successful prosecution of former Nazis proved many and formidable. Jurists in the early days of West Germany insisted that to charge their compatriots with “crimes against humanity” – the incrimination pioneered at Nuremberg – would amount to using ex post facto law. This forced prosecutors to use as their charging instrument Germany’s murder statute, a domestic law designed to deal with ordinary killings committed out of base motives, such as greed or bloodlust – not with the complexities of state-sponsored genocide. It wasn’t until 1958 with the creation of Die Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (The Central Office of the Regional Administration of Justice for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes) that Germany had a dedicated unit authorized to prepare cases against former Nazis. But even after the establishment of the Central Office, few prosecutions followed. There was no getting around the fact that the German judiciary was filled with jurists who had served in the Third Reich. Of the 120,000 investigations launched by the Central Office, only 5,000 cases ever made it to trial, resulting in fewer than 600 convictions.
