Fritz Bauer Institut, Irmtrud Wojak, Susanne Meinl. Im Labyrinth der Schuld: Täter - Opfer - Ankläger. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003. 362 S. EUR 29.00 (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-593-37373-7.

Reviewed by Frank Buscher (Department of History and Political Science, Christian Brothers University)
Published on H-German (October, 2004)

A Permanent Stain on German History

The title for this review stems from Heinz Duex, the investigating judge in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-65). It represents his grim assessment of West German efforts to punish the perpetrators of Nazi crimes and to compensate their victims (p. 283). Duex's verdict is in line with the recent historiography on this subject. The Federal Republic, specialists tend to agree, could and should have done far more. To be sure, West German authorities have launched over 106,000 investigations since the end of the war, but these have resulted in only 6,500 convictions. To make matters worse, convicted defendants have frequently received excessively low sentences.

At the same time, there were success stories, and one of them was the Auschwitz trial, the largest criminal proceeding in the Federal Republic's history. The trial and the German official whose determination and energy made it possible, Frankfurt Generalstaatsanwalt Fritz Bauer, stand at the center of this excellent volume. Bauer, who died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, would have celebrated his one-hundredth birthday in 2003. The same year also marked the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the Auschwitz trial. Thus, the Fritz Bauer Institut devoted its Jahrbuch 2003 to the famous Frankfurt prosecutor and his work.

The book consists of eight meticulously researched and well-written historical essays, one memoir, three interviews, and one Forschungsbericht. Written by young German historians (all born between 1959 and 1970), the essays explore various aspects of Auschwitz and its aftermath. They underscore that German scholars are among the most prolific and innovative researchers of the Holocaust and other national socialist crimes. The memoir and interviews feature four individuals whose personal contributions helped make the Auschwitz trial a success: Duex, the prosecutors Joachim Kuegler and Gerhard Wiese, and the Auschwitz survivor and longtime secretary general of the International Auschwitz Committee, Hermann Langbein. All four pieces are eminently readable and informative. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the research report at the end of the book. Neither its subject matter, methodology nor style fit. In the opinion of this reviewer, the editors would have done better not to include it.

Although the topics of the essays vary considerably, several themes emerge. Perhaps the most important is the notion that determined individuals can change the course of history. Fritz Bauer was one such individual. Irmtrud Wojak portrays him as an official who was too progressive for his time. However, although he confronted a public mood focused on drawing the final line under the Nazi past as well as the continued integration of Nazi perpetrators and fellow-travellers in West German society, Bauer was by no means discouraged. Dedicated to the construction of a free and democratic Germany, he decided to challenge this "heavy mortgage" (p. 19). Wojak and several other contributors, including Michael Greve, Langbein, and Duex, leave no doubt that there would not have been a Frankfurt Auschwitz trial without Bauer's initiative.

The Generalstaatsanwalt was not interested in a normal proceeding, though. To be sure, he wanted to see justice done, but he saw the trial's main function as educating the public about the utterly criminal purpose and nature of Auschwitz (p. 324). But Bauer was disappointed with the results. In 1965 the court convicted only seven defendants of murder and sentenced six to life. Three were found not guilty, and the remainder was convicted of the less serious charge of aiding and abetting murder. Similarly, the trial's educational potential remained largely unfulfilled during the few remaining years of Bauer's life. Certainly, as Greve rightly asserts, neither Bauer's colleagues in the judiciary nor West German legislators felt a great urge to conduct "a thorough prosecution of [Nazi] crimes" throughout the 1960s and thereafter (p. 59). Had he lived another twenty or thirty years, though, Bauer would undoubtedly have felt differently about "his" trial, particularly its contributions to the democratization of German society and the explosion of public and scholarly interest in the Holocaust.

There were, of course, other determined individuals who assisted Bauer and thus helped change history. In addition to the members of the prosecution team, Langbein deserves particular mention. Despite a "bad first experience" (p. 286) with postwar German authorities, Langbein helped the Frankfurt prosecutors locate some of the defendants, especially the brutal and notorious Rapportfuehrer Oswald Kaduk. More importantly, the prosecution relied on the International Auschwitz Committee to find witnesses. Langbein not only found Auschwitz survivors, he also persuaded many understandably reluctant victims to testify about their suffering in open court.

One of the witnesses who certainly made a difference was Rudolf Vrba. Due to his work assignments, he had excellent knowledge of the number of transports of Jews which had arrived at Auschwitz. Although he eventually became famous for his daring escape, with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler in April 1944, and the sixty-page report on Auschwitz they helped author, Vrba also played a significant role at the Auschwitz trial. In a fascinating essay, Dagi Knellessen describes how Vrba contributed to the conviction of Robert Mulka, the adjutant of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess. Vrba recognized Mulka. He also informed the court that Mulka had been present on the ramp when the trains arrived, and he testified about the brutal murder of a prisoner on the latter's orders. Vrba's testimony contradicted Mulka's defense which claimed that he had gone to Auschwitz reluctantly and steered clear of the camp's killing operations. The court believed the witness, but ruled that Mulka had merely assisted in the mass murder. Knellessen attributes the dissatisfying outcome to the system the SS had implemented at Auschwitz. It later permitted the high-ranking organizers of the mass killings like Mulka to evade responsibility for their crimes.

Unfortunately, as Christian Kolbe reminds us in his essay on Eichmann, several of the Nazi perpetrators also changed history with their activism and decisions. Kolbe seeks to explain Eichmann's motives during the deportation of Hungarian Jews by carefully examining two texts, an interview the latter had given to a former SS-man in the 1950s and the recently released document Goetzen, which he had written during his trial. Both show that the self-described "pedantic and cautious" SS bureaucrat considered himself a Kriegsteilnehmer, i.e. a soldier, and the Jews partisans (p. 73). Accordingly, he thought of his actions in Hungary as contributing to the German war effort. His front, his contribution to the defense of the Reich was the transporting of Jews to their deaths. To underscore his growing independence and freedom to make decisions as the power structures in Hungary unraveled in 1944, Eichmann speaks proudly and chillingly of "my deportations" (p. 72).

The Holocaust gave even those assisting the perpetrators the opportunity to make history. Annegret Schuele investigates the actions and motives of the management and employees of the company Topf & Soehne, which supplied the SS with the technology necessary to commit mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The company was not thoroughly nazified. In fact, Topf employed several communists, who founded an underground organization, and a half-Jewish accountant persecuted by the regime. Nonetheless, Topf's employees proved to be as callous, amoral, and murderously efficient as Eichmann. Designing the Auschwitz crematoria, company engineers even exceeded the expectations of the SS. Other company employees, including one communist, spent months and weeks at Auschwitz installing such devices. None was critical of the company's work during and after the war. Schuele attributes the managers' and workers' conduct to everyday motives such as job-related ambition, financial rewards, loyalty to the company, the promise of new business, etc.

The deleterious effect of the Cold War on efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice is a second important theme of this book. As Franziska Bruder correctly points out, the tensions between east and west gave the defense in the Auschwitz trial the opportunity repeatedly to challenge the credibility of witnesses from eastern European countries. Bruder describes how defense counsel made use of Ukrainian nationalists to challenge an important Polish prosecution witness. Ukrainian nationalists cooperated with the Abwehr during the war and with West German intelligence well into the 1950s. Langbein, Kuegler and Wiese discuss the difficulties inherent in dealing with witnesses in Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia with which the FRG did not maintain diplomatic relations at the time. In addition, arranging a visit to Auschwitz proved to be challenging, though not impossible. Once the trial was underway, the East German Nebenklaeger clashed repeatedly with attorney Hans Laternser, who seemed to specialize on challenging witnesses from communist states.

The Cold War also made possible the return of the old elites to their accustomed leadership positions. Dirk Poeppmann's valuable essay explores the clash between the traditional elite, which had loyally served Hitler, and its new democratically oriented challenger in the context of the Ministries case. The old leadership caste, eager to achieve rehabilitation and thereby secure its future, rallied around the most prominent defendant, Ernst von Weizsaecker. His prosecutor, Robert Kempner, sought to show not only the guilt of the defendants but also their unsuitability as leaders in a democratic Germany. The old elite triumphed again, at least during the Federal Republic's formative years. Kempner and other democrats stood accused of seeking the proletarianization of German society, of acting as "Stalin's best helpers" (p. 186). The Cold War also prevented an honest confrontation with the past in East Germany. In fact, some of the communists at Topf who had installed crematoria at Auschwitz went on to become informants for the Ministry of State Security. At the same time, the East German government portrayed the FRG as the home of the perpetrators and the GDR as that of the victims. The GDR's cultural establishment, as Marcel Atze observes, played a major role in the efforts to pin exclusive guilt on the West Germans.

Parts of this book will please Daniel J. Goldhagen and his supporters. Duex claims that, in interviews and presentations, Fritz Bauer pointed to "what Daniel Goldhagen in the end correctly defined as the eliminationist antisemitism of the Germans" (p. 271). Duex argues that 90 percent of the Germans were implicated in the regime's murderous activities either as perpetrators or fellow-travellers. This caused serious problems in the postwar years: "The ideological corruption of the majority of the population in the direction of the elimination of the Jews and other groups was the primary reason for the difficulties encountered during the prosecution of the perpetrators" (p. 275). This assessment, it must be remembered, is that of an insider intimately familiar with the prehistory and course of the Auschwitz trial. The other authors do not specifically comment on Goldhagen's controversial theory, but the essays dealing with the postwar period leave no doubt that covering up, forgetting, and obstructing justice were the priorities of Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

In conclusion, this volume is a must-read for scholars of the Holocaust and recent German history. It offers innovative approaches and highly interesting discussions of important facets of the Auschwitz trial and its aftermath. The fact that most of the contributors are young German historians is evidence of the cultural seachange in recent decades. This demonstrates that the democratization envisioned by Kempner and Bauer has indeed taken place.

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Citation: Frank Buscher. Review of Fritz Bauer Institut; Wojak, Irmtrud; Meinl, Susanne, Im Labyrinth der Schuld: Täter - Opfer - Ankläger. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9881

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