What might prove to be the last trial of a Nazi functionary lies at the heart of Tobias Buck’s discursive and engaging book. Bruno Dey (93) was found guilty in July 2020 of accessory to the murder of 5,232 people at Stutthof Concentration Camp near Danzig in the final months of the second World War.
Dey had, despite giving evidence related to his time in Stutthof in a separate criminal trial in 1982, escaped justice until almost eight decades after the facts. In the dock, he denied any knowledge of the camp being used to murder Jews, Poles and other deportees, claiming he had spent most of the war on a watchtower as a 17 year old, ignorant of the crimes within the camp’s confines.
It was a version that did not wash with the court. The prosecution used a new strategy for trying Nazi war criminals, influenced by the failure in Israel to convict Treblinka camp guard John Demjanjuk in 1988. Instead of focusing on specific crimes, which were reliant on often-flawed testimony from camp survivors, it was decided to build the case on the fact that certain camps, such as Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, were for extermination only, unlike others, such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, thereby making everyone working there complicit. By the time Dey arrived at Stutthof, it too was primarily used for murder.
A lawyer by training, and now managing editor of the Financial Times, Buck deftly outlines the legal procedures while also expanding his narrative to take in other late Holocaust trials and testimonies from survivors. He also investigates his own grandfather’s Nazi past, which proves to be a lot more implicated than the family had believed – rather than being a common-or-garden Mitläufer or follower, Rupert Buck was an early party member and also in the SS. Though there are no records of his grandfather’s involvement in any crimes, Buck does wonder if he was a more enthusiastic believer than the convicted Bruno Dey.
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Buck acknowledges how the Federal Republic of Germany dragged its feet on denazification and prosecutions for decades after the war. He also devotes a fair-minded chapter to Germany’s Holocaust-centred memory culture, which has been much criticised in recent months for the way it has been mobilised to snuff out pro-Palestinian advocacy and even mild critiques of the state of Israel.
