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Hilary Earl, THE NUREMBERG SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN TRIAL, 1945–1958: ATROCITY, LAW, AND HISTORY Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), 2009. xv + 336 pp. ISBN 9780521456081. £50.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.3366/elr.2010.0024
Date01 May 2010
Published date01 May 2010
AuthorThérèse O'Donnell
Pages353-354

The particular focus of Earl's book is The United States of America v Otto Ohlendorf et al, (1947–48), popularly known as the Einsatzgruppen case. Notwithstanding that intelligence and security work lay at the heart of the original Einsatzgruppen formations, it is for their association with mass murder that these groups are best remembered. Their acts of barbarism are hauntingly recorded in numerous black-and-white photographs depicting shootings on the fringes of open graves. On average, 100,000 people per month were rounded up and murdered between July 1941 and July 1942. However, Earl cautions against simplistic analyses of responsibility, making specific mention of the role of local auxiliaries, notably at the infamous Babi Yar massacre.

The Einsatzgruppen case took place subsequent to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) and was US-run. It very nearly did not happen. Earl notes the “[s]heer good luck” of investigators, in stumbling across one of the only surviving copies of the Einsatzgruppen reports. Clearly, a general trial of the SS would not suffice. The Einsatzgruppen's activities demanded their own particular trial. Given the IMT's focus on the crime of aggressive war, this book offers a valuable analysis of legal proceedings whose focal point was instead the Final Solution. Twenty-four individuals were indicted on three charges: crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership of illegal organisations. Crimes against humanity quickly emerged as the key crime.

For historians willing to extrapolate from it, trial material is a rich reservoir. This is clear from the work of Lawrence Douglas and Donald Bloxham regarding law's role in the construction of memory and the unsettled relationship between law (in particular courts) and history. It is within this new tradition that Earl locates this book. She acknowledges the controversies over war crimes trials’ didactic functions and the historical value of trial testimony. Casting a historian's forensic eye over early appearances of such testimony (in interviews) and its evolution to trial stage is illuminating. However, trial testimony is not inevitably historically accurate. Earl considers historians were too accepting of Ohlendorf's IMT testimony, and that the Einsatzgruppen trial testimony actually complicated historical understandings of the origins of the Final Solution.

When lawyers and historians analyse trials, their approach is different (though complementary): the lawyer's...

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