What the final trials of Nazis teach us about guilt and memory

The book focuses on the trial of Bruno Dey, who was brought into court at the age of 93, in 2019. Decades prior, Dey worked as a Nazi SS officer and manned a tower at the Stutthof concentration camp. Buck takes the reader through the trial: the questions brought up by the judge, Dey’s defense, testimony by survivors and expert witnesses. The verdict was handed down in 2020: Dey was found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 5,000 people, for which he was given a two-year suspended prison sentence. But despite the book’s title, he isn’t its real subject. Instead, Buck is interested in the process — in both the specific trial and the country at large — that led Judge Anne Meier-Göring to her decision.

To that end, Buck discusses other Nazi trials over the course of the past several decades, to show how thinking has evolved about who was culpable — in both the moral and the legal sense — for the Holocaust. In the 1950s, former Nazi police chief Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, a senior SS officer “who had volunteered for the mass killings and fired his own gun,” was found guilty only as an accessory. The judges in such cases found that the accused “acted in response to an order, not with the will of the perpetrator but the will of the accessory,” and were simply “tools of the Führer.” But over time, some worked to shift how Germany thought about guilt, and to transform the law. Buck tells their stories, too, among them Thomas Walther, who decided to take on the case of Nazi camp guard John Demjanjuk by proving not that he’d been involved in any one specific killing but that he was on duty at Sobibor, a “factory of death.” (That trial began in 2009; Demjanjuk was ultimately found guilty of being an accessory to murder in 28,060 cases.)

Buck fleshes out this picture with his own family story, but he also attends to the testimony of people who pretend to have survived the Holocaust and, in one especially moving chapter, how survivors rebuilt — or perhaps more accurately, built anew — a Jewish community in Munich after World War II. Along the way, he analyzes the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, which mark Holocaust victims’ names on the pavement outside their former places of residence. In these sections, especially when he writes of the detractors of some memorials, his point comes through elegantly: We contest not only what we remember but how we remember.

Despite Buck’s excellent reporting — or perhaps because of his focus on those details — larger questions are sometimes raised too hastily. German “memory culture” — how Germany relates to and faces up to its past, and the collective commitments that enable such practices — is tackled in one (thoughtful and compelling) chapter toward the end, but I was somewhat frustrated that these questions and this context were not given more consistent consideration throughout. And though Buck can hardly be faulted for writing a book that proved to be even more relevant and timely than it was when he started out, many readers are likely to wish that the role of Israel in Germany’s memory culture had been given more than the brief consideration Buck allots to the subject.

More than that, though, I was left wishing Buck had spent more time on what it means to entrust the memory of state-backed violence to the state — which is precisely what the legal proceedings he describes effectively do. Buck cites the words of the Dey case judge’s decision: “Don’t look away. Be compassionate. … Respect human dignity — at all costs.” Reflecting on this, he writes: “Hard as [these instructions] may be to follow, they must be followed. And they must be followed even in the most difficult and most dangerous of circumstances — precisely because the stakes are so high. That is not just what our conscience demands. That is what the law demands.”

But what about when the law does not demand it? What about when the law, today, allows or encourages discrimination? What does it mean to have memory entrusted to courts, which enforce the laws as they are written by those who have power — a thing that, historically, is used not only against the guilty but against the vulnerable?

I would not expect “Final Verdict,” or any book, to be able to wholly answer those questions. I would have loved to see Buck try. Still, it is to his credit that he leaves one wanting to see him think more about guilt, memory and what Germans, in and out of the courtroom, do with both.

Emily Tamkin is a global affairs journalist and author of “The Influence of Soros” and “Bad Jews.”

Final Verdict

The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century

By Tobias Buck

Hachette. 327 pp. $30