A dry style and theoretical casuistry mar this otherwise terrifying history.
A not wholly successful examination of the seminal trial of Nazi perpetrators.
In December 1963, two dozen former guards who had worked at Auschwitz were put on trial in West Germany. Wittmann (History/Univ. of Toronto) demonstrates, first, how the prosecution, with massive documentation about the camp, tried to show the political context of the crimes, and, second, how German law shaped the outcome of the trial. West Germany banned “retroactivity” in law, meaning that Nazi criminals had to be charged under the laws that were in place at the time. Absurdly enough, this meant that the court had to make the case that the defendants’ acts violated Nazi law in a Nazi extermination camp. As a consequence, behind-the-scenes managers like Karl Höcker, an adjutant to the last Auschwitz Commandant, Robert Baer, received lesser sentences for lesser crimes than more visible camp personnel. Less satisfying than the story of the trial itself is Wittmann’s confusing thesis. On the one hand, she takes a more exculpatory view of Adenauer-era justice than other critics—most famously, Hannah Arendt, whose withering survey of West Germany’s tendency to connive in comfortable amnesia about the past takes up a chapter of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Wittmann, by contrast, believes that “the argument that the entire West German justice system was tainted with a malaise regarding Nazi crimes is too simplistic.” Her own account, however, shows that the court was able, if it chose, to make very creative end runs around the retroactivity law and, furthermore, that the law itself was not imposed on the West German system, but chosen by it. Arendt’s harsher verdict still seems more valid than Wittmann’s. As if confirming Arendt’s suspicions, Hofmeyer, the presiding judge, questioned afterward whether the “background of the ‘entire event’ should be addressed at all in such trials.” In practical terms, that would mean covering up the genocidal nature of Auschwitz completely.
A dry style and theoretical casuistry mar this otherwise terrifying history.Pub Date: May 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-674-01694-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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