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History and Justice: Paradigms of the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes
Wilfrid Laurier University
The confluence of two distinct disciplines—history and justice—in the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity has been the subject of controversy since the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. Particularly controversial, and often poorly understood, is the role of historians in the trials of National Socialist perpetrators of genocide. Addressing this issue in its philosophical, methodological and practical dimensions, this article details the interaction of history and justice in Nazi crimes prosecutions at Nuremberg and in the Ludwigsburg-initiated West-German proceedings. Although the objectives and modi operandi of the two disciplines are dissimilar, a comparative analysis demonstrates that both law and justice benefited from this interaction. Jurists could not do without history and, in the service of justice, historians fashioned and refashioned the historiography of the Holocaust.
1. In ancient Greece, historia or "history" was born at the intersection of medicine and rhetoric: "History examines cases and situations, seeking out their natural causes, in emulation of medicine; history then sets them forth in accordance with the rules of rhetoric, an art of persuasion that developed in the courtroom." Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian (London: Verso, 1999), 12.
2. Ibid., 13–14; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 52–59. See also Carlo Ginzburg’s "Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian," in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 290–94.
3. In this vein Ginzburg states: "If one attempts to reduce the role of the historian to that of a judge, one simplifies and impoverishes historiographical knowledge; but if one attempts to reduce the role of the judge to that of a historian, one contaminates—and irreparably so—the administration of justice" (The Judge and the Historian, 118).
4. Michael Stolleis, "Der Historiker als Richter—der Richter als Historiker," in Geschichte vor Gericht: Historiker, Richter und die Suche nach Gerechtigkeit, ed. Norbert Frei, Dirk van Laak, and Michael Stolleis (Munich: Beck, 2000), 173.
5. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
6. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
7. On the continuity of judicial personnel and its negative effect on the prosecution of Nazi crimes, see Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991) (translation of Furchtbare Juristen: Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit unserer Justiz [Munich: Kindler, 1987]), 201–98. More recent works on the failings of the West German judiciary in its efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) are: Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) (translation of Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit [Munich: Beck, 1996]); Michael Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang mit den NS-Gewaltverbrechen in den sechziger Jahren (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001); and Marc von Miquel, Ahnden oder amnestieren? West-deutsche Justiz und Vergangenheitspolitik in den sechziger Jahren (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004).
8. The term "desk perpetrators" applies to officials who handled the paperwork and portfolios essential to the implementation of the Final Solution. Prominent among these were the "Nazi genocidal bureaucrats" of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), such as, for instance, Adolf Eichmann. For the legal loopholes that allowed them to escape prosecution, see Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of their Postwar Prosecution in West Germany (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 33–35, 41–44.
9. For a recent study of the complex juridical problems of prosecuting individuals involved in the Nazi genocide of Jews and the unsatisfactory outcomes of such trials (specifically the Nuremberg International Tribunal, the Eichmann and Demjanjuk trials in Jerusalem, and the Imre Finta case in Toronto), see Stephan Landman, Crimes of the Holocaust: The Law Confronts Hard Cases (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
10. Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 16. Elsewhere Ginzburg refers to "the notion of proof." See also his "Checking the Evidence," 294.
11. Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 11–12.
12. Dirk van Laak, "Widerstand gegen die Geschichtsgewalt," in Frei, Geschichte vor Gericht, 57.
13. Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, 117.
14. Cited by Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2001), viii. The book itself is a refreshingly unabashed statement of "commitment to truth" in historical research in the face of the post-modernist denigration of the concept. As Bauer puts it quite simply, "A historian, in my estimate, has to do two things ... : one, research and analyze; and two, remember that there is a story to be told, a story that relates to people’s lives. So a real historian is also a person who tells (true) stories" (ix).
15. Michael Marrus, "The Holocaust at Nuremberg," Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 4–41.
16. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, (italics mine), 229.
18. Ibid. For a similar interpretation, see Michael Marrus, "History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom," unpublished paper delivered at the conference "Vom Prozess zur Geschichte: Die juristische und historische Aufarbeitung der Shoah in Frankreich und Deutschland," Einstein Forum (Potsdam, January 1998), 4–7.
19. Martin Broszat, "Juristische und zeitgeschichtliche Bewältigung der Vergangenheit," in Nach Hitler: Der schwierige Umgang mit unserer Geschichte. Beiträge von Martin Broszat, ed. Hermann Graml and Klaus-Dietmar Henke (München: Oldenburg, 1986), 42; Johannes Tuchel, "NS-Prozesse als Materialgrundlage für die historische Forschung," in Vergangenheitsbewältigung durch Strafverfahren?: NS-Prozesse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed. Jürgen Weber and Peter Steinbach (Munich: Olzug, 1984), 136–37.
20. Cited in Scheffler, "NS-Prozesse als Geschichtsquelle: Bedeutung und Grenzen ihrer Auswertbarkeit durch den Historiker," in Lerntag über den Holocaust als Thema im Geschichtsunterricht und in der politischen Bildung, ed. Wolfgang Scheffler and Werner Bergmann (Berlin, 1988), 19–20. Telford Taylor headed the American Office of Chief Council for War Crimes, which was in charge of all subsequent Nuremberg trials. Regarding the Ohlendorf case, see Hilary Earl, "Accidental Justice: The Trial of Otto Ohlendorf and the Einsatzgruppen Leaders in the American Zone of Occupation, Germany, 1945–1958" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2002), which has a section entitled "Benjamin Ferencz and the Discovery of the Ereignismeldungen UdSSR."
21. For detailed discussions of this problem, see Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 29–30, and Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 60–63, 73, 120–24.
22. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 62; see also 69–75 ("Tyranny of a Construct").
24. "Judicial historiography" has a dual meaning here: the judgmental writing of history and the writing of history to meet legal requirements.
25. As Bloxham ironically remarks: "The educational intent of the IMT project was established, but it does not appear that the teachers were particularly well informed about the subject matter" (Genocide on Trial, 63).
26. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, xi. Christopher Browning terms it the "Nuremberg view" ("German Memory, Judicial Interrogation, and Historical Reconstruction," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 26.
27. Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 84–89; de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 5–9.
28. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 12. On this theme, see also de Mildt, In the Name of the People 7–9.
29. Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH: for Brandeis University Press by the University Press of New England, 1987), 36.
30. Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, 205.
31. See de Mildt’s excellent critique of the "patho-ideological paradigm" in his In the Name of the People, 1–17.
32. In this respect Bloxham has been overly critical of the Nuremberg trials, paying too little attention to the constraints that the prosecution faced in the context of the time—which called for expediency in order to cope with the financial, organizational, and material demands of the trials. It should be noted as well that while the conspiracy charge was also used in the indictment of the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings, the majority of convictions were not on this count (Telford Taylor, "Nuremberg Trials: Synthesis and Projection," Information Bulletin 162 [31 May 1949]. Truman Library Institute. Young Papers. Box 78: Publications and Telephone Directories, Folder 1).
33. While much has been written about the Nuremberg trials, the numerous military trials that took place in the Allied zones have received little attention. As Johannes Tuchel points out, these proceedings and their historically relevant documentation of Nazi crimes—especially those perpetrated in concentration camps—have yet to be thoroughly researched. Eberhard Kolb has made a good start, using the British trial protocols for his Bergen-Belsen: Geschichte des "Aufenthaltslager" 1943–1945 (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1962). Until further research has been conducted, it would premature to discuss the quality of this trial material and the insights it may yield on the interaction between history and justice (see Tuchel, "NS-Prozesse als Materialgrundlage," 137–38).
34. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 15.
35. Central Agency of the State Judicial Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.
36. Bernd Hey, "Die NS-Prozesse—Versuch einer juristischen Vergangenheitsbewältigung," Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (GWU) 6 (1981): 331–62. Except for a short article by Willy Dreßen ("Die Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltung zur Aufklärung NS-Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg," Dachauer Hefte 6 [1990]: 85–93), scholars began to research the establishment and significance of the Zentralstelle only very recently. The monographs by Michael Greve and Marc von Miquel (cited in fn. 7) have contributed greatly to the current discourse on the agency’s role in German Vergangenheitspolitik and the prosecution of Nazi crimes in the 1960s, but neither work elaborates on the interplay of history and justice. In addition, two good articles by Rüdiger Fleiter deal specifically with the Zentralstelle: "Die Ludwigsburger Zentrale Stelle und ihr politisches und gesellschaftliches Umfeld," GWU, Heft 1 (January 2002): 32–50; and "Die Ludwigsburger Zentrale Stelle—eine Strafverfolgungsbehörde als Legitimationsinstrument? Gründung und Zuständigkeit 1958 bis 1965," Kritische Justiz 2 (2002): 253–72.
37. Wolfgang Scheffler, "Beitrag der Zeitgeschichte zur Erforschung der NS-Verbrechen—Versäumnisse, Schwierigkeiten, Aufgaben," in Weber and Steinbach, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 119–20; Fleiter, "Die Ludwigsburger Zentrale Stelle," 254–55.
38. In terms of public opinion, this shift was anything but swift. On the vilification of the Zentralstelle and the negative reception of its establishment in Ludwigsburg and elsewhere—including a slanderous campaign against its first director, Staatsanwalt Schüle, in 1965—see Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 52–56, 296–300, and Fleiter, "Ludwigsburger Zentrale Stelle," 47–48.
39. Helge Grabitz, Täter und Gehilfen des Endlösungswahns: Hamburger Verfahren gegen NS-Gewaltverbrechen, 1946–1996 (Hamburg: Erlebnisse, 1999), 31; Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht: Versuch einer Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Heidelberg: C.F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1982), 142. See also Greve on the politics of the establishment of the Zentralstelle and the change of course (Kurswechsel) that it occasioned—although with disappointing judicial results (Rechtsprechungsergebnisse) (Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 43–52, 395–402).
40. Fleiter, "Ludwigsburger Zentrale Stelle," 265; In the Name of the People, de Mildt, 26–27.
41. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 27.
42. Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 144; Offizielle Presseunterlagen, ZStL, 10 April 2003 (press release); Dreßen, "Zentrale Stelle," 88; Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 52–56.
43. Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 145–46.
44. Hey, "Die NS-Prozesse," 342–43
45. Cited in Hey, "Die NS-Prozesse," 334.
46. Broszat, "Juristische und zeitgeschichtliche Bewältigung," 44.
47. Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 324. On the excellent work done by Ludwigsburg jurists, see: Scheffler, "NS-Prozesse als Geschichtsquelle," 16; Broszat, "Juristische und zeitgeschichtliche Bewältigung," 42–49, and Tuchel, "NS-Prozesse als Materialgrundlage," 140.
48. Cited in Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 126.
49. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 33–35, 41–44; Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 256–66.
50. See Hilary Earl’s discussion of this issue with respect to the Ohlendorf case ("Accidental Justice: The Trial of Otto Ohlendorf").
51. Herbert Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, (Freiburg: Walter-Verlag Olten, 1967), 81–83.
52. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 41.
53. Adalbert Rückerl, The Investigation of Nazi Crimes, 1945–78 (Karlsruhe: C.F. Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1979), 80 (also notes subsequent rulings of the Federal Supreme Court, 80–81)
54. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 84, 94–122, 148–51; Zentrale Stelle, "Befehlsnotstand," in-house reports (henceforth, ZS Reports), July 1961, 4–5, 8, and November 1963, 5.
55. Rückerl, Investigation, 83.
57. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 269–76; Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 128, 150–51; ZS Reports, July 1961, March 1963, and June 1963.
58. Rückerl, Investigation, 80–82; Scheffler, "Beitrag," 123–27.
59. ZS Report, June 1962, 6–7.
60. Scheffler, "Beitrag," 127.
61. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 123–38.
62. Cited in de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 271.
63. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 133–34; ZS Reports, June 1963, 21–22 and June 1962, 6–7.
64. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 137–38, 152–55; de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 271–72.
65. Cited in de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 397 fn. 75.
66. ZS Report, March 1963, 1; November 1963, 7–8.
67. Rückerl, Investigation, 81–82.
68. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 81; de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 269.
69. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 92–93, 155–60. Rückerl renders it as "putative superior orders" (Investigation, 82).
70. The task of the historical expert in this respect is well explained in Hans Buchheim’s "Foreword to the Original Edition," in The Anatomy of the SS State (London, 1968), xiii–xv. In the original German edition, Buchheim uses the word Gerüst, rendered here as "Framework" (Anatomie des SS-Staates, 2 vols. [Freiburg: Walter Verlag, 1965], 1:9).
71. Rückerl, Investigation, 82.
72. See de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 49–301.
73. Rebecca Wittman, "Holocaust on Trial? The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in Historical Persective" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2001). All subsequent references to Wittmann relate to this work, parts of which are published in: "Indicting Auschwitz? The Paradox of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial," German History 21, no. 4 (2003): 503–32; Wittman, "The Wheels of Justice Turn Slowly: The Pretrial Investigations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963–65," Central European History 35, no. 3 (2002): 345–78; "Telling the Story: Survivor Testimony and the Narration of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial," Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 32 (Spring 2003): 93–101. The published version of Wittmann’s dissertation, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), was not available at the time of the writing of this article.
74. Wittmann, "Holocaust on Trial?" 136–37.
76. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 276.
77. Wittmann, "Holocaust on Trial?" 214–76; de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 32.
78. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Books, 1994), 14–15.
79. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 36–39.
80. Weber and Steinbach, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 13–99 (contributions by Steinbach, Hey, Rückerl, and Grabitz). Fleiter, "Ludwigsburger Zentrale," GWU 1 (January 2002), 49–50. See also Wittmann on the Attorney General of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, and generally on the efforts of German state prosecutors ("Holocaust on Trial?" and "Wheels of Justice," 361–63). The obstructionism and obfuscation could be attributed to the presence of a large number of Nazi judges and jurists who had been reinstated in the late 1940s and 1950s. In addition to insisting on the continuity of law as practiced in the Third Reich, many were opposed to the more vigorous Ludwigsburg-driven prosecutions because of their own involvement in Nazi judicial crimes. This is well documented by Müller (Hitler’s Justice, 201–39, 270–89) and Greve (Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 68–72, 102–44). The same holds for police officials, who were in many cases criminally liable themselves. Thus, as early as 1959, Ludwigsburg identified police agencies (Dienststellen) that deliberately obstructed the pre-trial investigative process. This resulted in the creation of "special commissions" (Sonderkommissionen) made up of untainted, reliable police personnel (Greve, Der justitielle und rechtspolitische Umgang, 66–68).
81. Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 268–69. Secondary reasons for staging "homogeneous trials" were to reduce legal costs, lower the risk of contradictory testimonies, and make it impossible for defendants "to play off one against the other" in trials dealing with similar cases (Rückerl, Investigation, 96–97).
82. Rückerl, Investigation, 97.
83. Cited by Scheffler in "NS-Prozesse als Geschichtsquelle in Scheffler and Bergmann Lerntag über den Holocaust, 14–15. For similar statements, see Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 12–15.
84. Wittmann, "Holocaust on Trial?" 117. On the trauma that the dispassionate courtroom questioning of their testimonies caused the witnesses, see de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 41–43. Katherina von Kellenbach’s argument that this caused "the continued dehumanization of the victims" while "the perpetrator’s humanity [moved] to the center of judicial concern" ("Vanishing Acts: Perpetrators in Postwar Germany," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 317–18) is questionable. By testifying at these trials, the Holocaust survivors individualized faceless millions of victims.
85. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 14–15.
86. Jäger, Verbrechen unter totalitärer Herrschaft, 13. The expression "machinery of destruction" was coined by Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of European Jews [Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967]).
87. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 14.
88. The mandate of the Zentralstelle did not include the investigation of "genuine war crimes" unless such acts were committed against civilians (Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 143).
89. Scheffler, "Beitrag," 122–30 and "NS-Prozesse," 20–24. Published expert reports (Gutachten) include: Anatomy of the SS-State (London: Collins, 1968); Gutachten des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Verlags-Anstalt, 1958 and 1966); Wolfgang Scheffler, "Zur Rolle der Zivilverwaltung bei der Durchführung der ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im Reichskommissariat Ostland," in Täter und Gehilfen des Endlösungswahns, ed. Helge Grabitz (Hamburg: Ergebnisse Verlag, 1999), 242–72. A comprehensive collection of unpublished reports is available at the Zentralstelle. Among the noteworthy publications by jurists and historians are Jäger, Verbrechen unter Totalitärer Herrschaft; Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im "Fall Barbarossa": Eine Dokumentation unter Berücksichtigung der Unterlagen deutscher Strafverfolgungsbehörden und der Materialien der Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklarung von NS-Verbrechen (Heidelberg, Juristischer Verlag, 1981); Streim, "The Tasks of the Einsatzgruppen," Simon Wiesenthal Annual 4 (1987), 309–28; Helge Grabitz, Klaus Bästlein, and Johannes Tuchel, eds., Die Normalität des Verbrechens: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung zu den nationalsozialistischen Gewaltverbrechen: Festschrift fur Wolfgang Scheffler zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1994); Klaus Bästlein, Helge Grabitz, and Wolfgang Scheffler, eds. Für Führer, Volk und Vaterland (Ergebnisse Verlag, 2000); Rückerl, ed. NS-Prozesse (Karlruhe: Verlag C.F. Müller, 1971).
90. For instance, respectively: Ordinary Men (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), The Origins of Nazi Genocide (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997).
91. Information is available on 109,565 case files (AR-Sachen) with approximately 1,649,800 index cards as a finding aid and some 558,200 copies of archival documents almost completely catalogued with 163,000 index cards (ZS, Official Press Release, 10 April 2003).
92. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 8.
93. For instance, the OSI, established in 1979, relied exclusively on civil suits—that is, on denaturalization and deportation proceedings—whereas the Ottawa Section could initiate both civil and criminal proceedings.
94. Paul R. Bartrop, "Investigating War Crimes in Canada and Australia: The Deschenes Commission and the Menzies Inquiry," Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand. Fifth Biennial Canadian Studies Conference, University of New England, Armidale, 19–22 July 1990.
95. For the controversies surrounding the intake of these people and the judicial proceedings against them, see: Harold Troper and Morton Weinfeld, Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians, and the Hunt for War Criminals in Canada (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); David Matas and Susan Charendoff, Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada (Toronto: Summerhill Press, 1987); Mark Aarons, Sanctuary! Nazi Fugitives in Australia (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989); David Bevan, A Case to Answer: The Story of Australia’s First European War Crimes Prosecution (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1994).
96. In the Canadian case, with which I am more familiar, this routinely involved the official historian in direct on-site discussions with senior Soviet federal and republic procurators.
97. These were "post-Ludwigsburg" investigations in the sense that after 1990 the Zentralstelle processed few new cases. Soviet historians, too, found it difficult to gain access to the archives in question.
98. Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust. Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine (New York: St. Martin’s Press in association with the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, 2000); Jürgen Matthäus, "What About the ‘Ordinary Men’?: The German Order Police and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union," Holocaust and Genocide Studies (HGS) 10, no. 2 (1996): 134–50; Wendy Lower, "A New Ordering of Space and Race: Nazi Volksdeutsche Experiments in Zhytomyr, Ukraine," German Studies Review, 25 (May 2002): 227–54.
99. Ruth B. Birn, "Collaboration with Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe: The Case of the Estonian Security Police," Contemporary European History 10, no. 2 (2001): 181–98; Konrad Kwiet, "Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941," HGS 12, no. 1 (1998): 3–26; Erich Haberer, "The German Police and Genocide in Belorussia," Journal of Genocide Research 3, nos.1–3 (2001): 13–29, 207–18, 391–403; Robert G. Waite, "Kollaboration und deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Lettland," in Okkupation und Kollaboration, compiled and introduced by Werner Röhr (Berlin: Hüthig, 1994); Michael MacQueen, "The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania," HGS 12, no. 1 (1998): 27–48.
100. Representative for this approach is Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also Wendy Lower, "‘Anticipatory Obedience’ and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–44," HGS 17, no. 1 (2002): 1–21; and Erich Haberer, "Intention and Feasibility: Reflections on Collaboration and the Final Solution," East European Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2 (2001): 64–81.
101. Ernst Forsthoff, "Der Zeithistoriker als gerichtlicher Sachverständiger," Neue Juristische Wochenschrift 13 (1965): 574–75.
102. For the usage of this expression, see Dean, Collaboration, xi.
103. Broszat, "Juristische und zeitgeschichtliche Bewältigung," 45–49; de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 47–48; Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen, 310–25.
104. Confidential report for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 23 January 1996. See also Steinberg’s note of appreciation to WCU historians in his article: "The Third Reich Reflected: German Civil Administration in the Occupied Soviet Union, 1941–4," English Historical Review (June 1995): 620–51.
105. Buchheim, Anatomie des SS-Staates, 1: 7–8.
106. It should be noted, however, that the publicity surrounding the WCU trials did not enhance the public’s understanding of the Holocaust. The opposite was true, especially in Canada. While these trials were beneficial for new historical research, truth was not served in the courtroom. The judicial proceedings, governed by Anglo-American adversarial jurisprudence and publicized as such in the media, presented the public with a relativized image of the Nazi genocide. Even more damaging to the historically accurate representation of the Holocaust are the trials of denialists. These trials distinctly highlight what separates justice from history and why the truths of history should not be adjudicated in the courtroom. Invariably, and regardless of their outcome, they legitimize "revisionism" in people’s minds by trivializing and misrepresenting, in a highly respected public forum, the truth of Jewish victimization. They are a classic example of how the legal system can be used for the wrong reasons in that the law as practiced in the Anglo-American context is not interested in truth per se; truth has merely an instrumental value for the adjudication of guilt and innocence. For a perceptive discussion and equally critical appraisal, see Marrus, "History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom," and Lawrence Douglas, "The Memory of Judgment: The Law, the Holocaust, and Denial," History and Memory 7, no. 2 (1996): 100–120.
107. de Mildt, In the Name of the People, 47–48. For de Mildt’s discussion of "Trial Sentences as Historical Source," see In the Name of the People, 40–48. These sentences are published in de Mildt and C.F. Rüter, eds. Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, 22 vols. (Amsterdam: University Press of Amsterdam, 1968–).