Non­fic­tion

Final Ver­dict: The Holo­caust on Tri­al in the 21st Century

  • Review
By – August 5, 2024

Some say time heals all wounds, but oth­ers know bet­ter. Because when it comes to the Holo­caust, it is not time that lessens pain, but rather con­crete action — action that expos­es the per­pe­tra­tors and attempts to even the score.

Tobias Buck’s com­pelling new book takes a giant step in this direc­tion by bring­ing us into a Ham­burg court­room and telling us the sto­ry of one Bruno Dey, a for­mer Nazi guard at the Stuffhof con­cen­tra­tion camp in Poland. At the age of nine­ty-three, Dey was final­ly charged with aid­ing in the mur­der of more than five thou­sand people. 

Read­ing Buck’s entic­ing prose, we learn that Dey’s crimes were con­sid­ered small in rela­tion to the enor­mous evil car­ried out by the SS hier­ar­chy over­all; yet it still took over sev­en­ty years to even begin to deliv­er jus­tice to his victims.

Why? The Ger­man courts sim­ply let hun­dreds of thou­sands of Holo­caust per­pe­tra­tors go free, fail­ing to orga­nize them­selves quick­ly enough to pros­e­cute them. By the time they did, only a few low-lev­el con­cen­tra­tion camp guards were still alive.

Yet Ger­man pros­e­cu­tors did even­tu­al­ly see the light and go after the small num­ber that remained. Final Ver­dict offers us a sat­is­fy­ing, bold­ly con­struct­ed, step-by-step walk through their adju­di­ca­tion process. Along the way, it exam­ines sig­nif­i­cant issues of Ger­man his­to­ry and pol­i­tics in light of the cul­ture of memory.

Though the Dey case was seri­ous­ly belat­ed, it was part of a series of pros­e­cu­tions that has shed light on the strug­gle to deal with ris­ing fas­cism and anti­semitism, both of which threat­en our soci­ety today.

Buck, who was born in Ger­many and stud­ied law in Berlin, calls atten­tion to the silences sur­round­ing his family’s expe­ri­ences in the Nazi era, adding a wel­come touch of per­son­al his­to­ry and emo­tion to his metic­u­lous­ly researched book. He believes that the steps to cre­ate Holo­caust jus­tice can nev­er come too late; though it took until the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry to bring that jus­tice to fruition, the pro­ceed­ings dis­cussed in Buck’s book still serve as a pow­er­ful exam­ple of a country’s strug­gle to rec­on­cile its past. They can offer a les­son to oth­er nations that are still hid­ing their crimes.

While the book includes a wealth of high­ly orga­nized infor­ma­tion that will appeal to seri­ous schol­ars and stu­dents of his­to­ry and cul­ture, Buck’s live­ly writ­ing will also invite any­one with an inter­est in Ger­many, the Nazi era, or the com­plex prob­lems of today’s polit­i­cal sys­tems to lis­ten and learn.

Lin­da F. Burghardt is a New York-based jour­nal­ist and author who has con­tributed com­men­tary, break­ing news, and fea­tures to major news­pa­pers across the U.S., in addi­tion to hav­ing three non-fic­tion books pub­lished. She writes fre­quent­ly on Jew­ish top­ics and is now serv­ing as Schol­ar-in-Res­i­dence at the Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al & Tol­er­ance Cen­ter of Nas­sau County.

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