The tribunals set up to adjudicate that crimes of all crimes, the extermination of the Jews and mass murder during the Nazi period has in many respects set historical standards –even if it is unlikely that any court in the world could properly do justice to the enormity of the wrongdoing.
In the often whitewashed history of the emergence of the Democratic Federal Republic of Germany, it is often forgotten that after the Nuremberg trials, held after World War II by the Allied victors, the West Germans did almost nothing to pursue prosecutions for crimes of the Nazi regime. Nazi elites in particular enjoyed impunity.
The German judiciary did properly not begin its gradual confrontation with the Nazi past until the 1958 Ulm trial on the so called Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads) and the efforts of prosecutor Fritz Bauer, which resulted in the Frankfurt Auschwitz process in 1963. The process continues to this day. The Nazi crimes and the subsequent failure to pursue prosecutions will be discussed by Fritz Bauer-biographer and Süddeutsche Zeitung editor Ronen Steinke along with lawyer Thomas Walther who represented joint plaintiffs in various Nazi trials, and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Werle of the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Further reading:
Ingo Müller: Furchtbare Juristen. Kindler-Verlag, Munich 1987; Berlin 2014
Joachim Perels: Entsorgung der NS-Herrschaft – Konfliktllinien im Umgang mit dem Hitler-Regime, Hannover 2004
Gerhard Werle: Auschwitz vor Gericht. Völkermord und bundesdeutsche Strafjustiz (gemeinsam mit Thomas Wandres), Munich 1995
Gerhard Werle: Justiz-Strafrecht und polizeiliche Verbrechensbekämpfung im Dritten Reich, Berlin/New York 1989
Ronen Steinke: Fritz Bauer oder Auschwitz vor Gericht, Munich 2014
Peter Huth and Hans-Christian Jasch: Die letzten Zeugen. Der Auschwitz-Prozess von Lüneburg 2015: Eine Dokumentation, Stuttgart 2015
Christopher R. Browning: Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Penguin Books, 2001
Irmtrud Wojak: Fritz Bauer 1903-1968: Eine Biographie, Berlin 2011
Alf Lüdtke: “Coming to Terms with the Past”: Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany, 65:3 The Journal of Modern History 542 (1993)
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (ed.): Auschwitz auf der Bühne. Peter Weiss: „Die Ermittlung“ in Ost und West, DVD, Bonn 2008