A Judge in Auschwitz
A Judge in Auschwitz

Author: Kevin Prenger

Publisher: Pen and Sword Military

Published: 2021-11-24

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1399018779

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The remarkable true story of the man tasked by the Nazis with prosecuting crimes at concentration camps. In autumn 1943, SS judge Konrad Morgen—a graduate of the Hague Academy of International Law—visited Auschwitz concentration camp to investigate an intercepted parcel containing gold sent from the camp. While there, Morgen found the SS camp guards engaged in widespread theft and corruption. Worse, Morgen also discovered that inmates were being killed without authority from the SS leadership. While millions of Jews were being exterminated under the Final Solution program, Konrad Morgen set about gathering evidence of these “illegal murders.” Morgen also visited other camps, such as Buchenwald, where he had the notorious camp commandant Karl Koch and Ilse, his sadistic spouse, arrested and charged. Found guilty by an SS court, Koch was sentenced to death. Remarkably, the apparently fearless SS judge also tried to prosecute other Nazi criminals including Waffen-SS commanders Oskar Dirlewanger and Hermann Fegelein and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. He even claimed to have tried to indict Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for organizing the mass deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps. This intriguing work reveals how the lines between justice and injustice became blurred in the Third Reich. As well as describing the actions of this often-contradictory character, the author questions Morgen’s motives and delves into his postwar life—which included both testifying at Nuremberg and being investigated for crimes himself.

Konrad Morgen
Konrad Morgen

Author: H. Pauer-Studer

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781137496942

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Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge is a moral biography of Georg Konrad Morgen, who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps and eventually came face-to-face with the system of industrialized murder at Auschwitz. His wartime papers and postwar testimonies yield a study in moral complexity.

Fritz Bauer
Fritz Bauer

Author: Ronen Steinke

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0253046890

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A biography of the German Jewish judge and lawyer who survived the Holocaust, brought the Nazis to justice, and fought for the rights of homosexuals. German Jewish judge and prosecutor Fritz Bauer (1903–1968) played a key role in the arrest of Adolf Eichmann and the initiation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Author Ronen Steinke tells this remarkable story while sensitively exploring the many contributions Bauer made to the postwar German justice system. As it sheds light on Bauer’s Jewish identity and the role it played in these trials and his later career, Steinke’s deft narrative contributes to the larger story of Jewishness in postwar Germany. Examining latent antisemitism during this period as well as Jewish responses to renewed German cultural identity and politics, Steinke also explores Bauer’s personal and family life and private struggles, including his participation in debates against the criminalization of homosexuality—a fact that only came to light after his death in 1968. This new biography reveals how one individual’s determination, religion, and dedication to the rule of law formed an important foundation for German post war society. “What is clear—and what this book makes clear—is that without people like Fritz Bauer there would have been none of this prosecution of Nazi atrocities, no trials for Auschwitz camp guards or Adolf Eichmann, no rehabilitation of the German resistance against Hitler. Ronen Steinke deserves thanks for bringing this message of Fritz Bauer back to light in such an accessible form, balancing professional distance and sympathy.” —Kai Ambos, Criminal Law Forum “Illuminates the biography of a central actor in Germany’s coming to terms with its Nazi past.” —Jacob S. Eder, author of Holocaust Angst

A Lucky Child
A Lucky Child

Author: Thomas Buergenthal

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2009-04-20

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0316070998

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Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.

Beyond Justice
Beyond Justice

Author: Rebecca Wittmann

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0674063872

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In 1963, West Germany was gripped by a dramatic trial of former guards who had worked at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz. It was the largest and most public trial to take place in the country and attracted international attention. Using the pretrial files and extensive trial audiotapes, Rebecca Wittmann offers a fascinating reinterpretation of Germany's first major attempt to confront its past. Evoking the courtroom atmosphere, Wittmann vividly recounts the testimony of survivors, former SS officers, and defendants--a cross-section of the camp population. Attorney General Fritz Bauer made an extraordinary effort to put the entire Auschwitz complex on trial, but constrained by West German murder laws, the prosecution had to resort to standards for illegal behavior that echoed the laws of the Third Reich. This provided a legitimacy to the Nazi state. Only those who exceeded direct orders were convicted of murder. This shocking ruling was reflected in the press coverage, which focused on only the most sadistic and brutal crimes, allowing the real atrocity at Auschwitz--mass murder in the gas chambers--to be relegated to the background. The Auschwitz trial had a paradoxical result. Although the prosecution succeeded in exposing SS crimes at the camp for the first time, the public absorbed a distorted representation of the criminality of the camp system. The Auschwitz trial ensured that rather than coming to terms with their Nazi past, Germans managed to delay a true reckoning with the horror of the Holocaust.

The Case for Auschwitz
The Case for Auschwitz

Author: Robert Jan van Pelt

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 593

ISBN-13: 0253028841

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From January to April 2000 historian David Irving brought a high-profile libel case against Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt in the British High Court, charging that Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust (1993), falsely labeled him a Holocaust denier. The question about the evidence for Auschwitz as a death camp played a central role in these proceedings. Irving had based his alleged denial of the Holocaust in part on a 1988 report by an American execution specialist, Fred Leuchter, which claimed that there was no evidence for homicidal gas chambers in Auschwitz. In connection with their defense, Penguin and Lipstadt engaged architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt to present evidence for our knowledge that Auschwitz had been an extermination camp where up to one million Jews were killed, mainly in gas chambers. Employing painstaking historical scholarship, van Pelt prepared and submitted an exhaustive forensic report that he successfully defended in cross-examination in court.

Denying the Holocaust
Denying the Holocaust

Author: Deborah E. Lipstadt

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-12-18

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1476727481

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The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Sixty years ago, such notions were the province of pseudohistorians who argued that Hitler never meant to kill the Jews, and that only a few hundred thousand died in the camps from disease; they also argued that the Allied bombings of Dresden and other cities were worse than any Nazi offense, and that the Germans were the “true victims” of World War II. For years, those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But as time goes on, they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how—despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence—this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, “independent” research centers, and official publications that promote a “revisionist” view of recent history. Lipstadt shows how Holocaust denial thrives in the current atmosphere of value-relativism, and argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but undermines the very tenets of objective scholarship that support our faith in historical knowledge. Thus the movement has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.

The Judges
The Judges

Author: Elie Wiesel

Publisher: Schocken

Published: 2004-10-12

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0805211217

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From Elie Wiesel, a gripping novel of guilt, innocence, and the perilousness of judging both. A plane en route from New York to Tel Aviv is forced down by bad weather. A nearby house provides refuge for five of its passengers: Claudia, who has left her husband and found new love; Razziel, a religious teacher who was once a political prisoner; Yoav, a terminally ill Israeli commando; George, an archivist who is hiding a Holocaust secret that could bring down a certain politician; and Bruce, a would-be priest turned philanderer. Their host—an enigmatic and disquieting man who calls himself simply the Judge—begins to interrogate them, forcing them to face the truth and meaning of their lives. Soon he announces that one of them—the least worthy—will die. The Judges is a powerful novel that reflects the philosophical, religious, and moral questions that are at the heart of Elie Wiesel’s work.

Auschwitz
Auschwitz

Author: Miklós Nyiszli

Publisher: Arcade Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9781559702027

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Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."

Auschwitz
Auschwitz

Author: Laurence Rees

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13:

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Auschwitz-Birkenau is the site of the largest mass murder in human history. Yet its story is not fully known. In Auschwitz, Laurence Rees reveals new insights from more than 100 original interviews with Auschwitz survivors and Nazi perpetrators who speak on the record for the first time. Their testimonies provide a portrait of the inner workings of the camp in unrivalled detail-from the techniques of mass murder, to the politics and gossip mill that turned between guards and prisoners, to the on-camp brothel in which the lines between those guards and prisoners became surprisingly blurred. Rees examines the strategic decisions that led the Nazi leadership to prescribe Auschwitz as its primary site for the extinction of Europe's Jews-their "Final Solution." He concludes that many of the horrors that were perpetrated in Auschwitz were driven not just by ideological inevitability but as a "practical" response to a war in the East that had begun to go wrong for Germany. A terrible immoral pragmatism characterizes many of the decisions that determined what happened at Auschwitz. Thus the story of the camp becomes a morality tale, too, in which evil is shown to proceed in a series of deft, almost noiseless incremental steps until it produces the overwhelming horror of the industrial scale slaughter that was inflicted in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Insights gleaned from more than one hundred original interviews shed new light on history's most famous death camp, with the testimonies of survivors providing a detailed and chilling portrait of the camp's inner workings, in a companion volume to the PBS documentary.