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Dick de Mildt, Hilary Earl. The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xv, 336. $85.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 908–909, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.908
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Extract
As Hilary Earl's study of the SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial shows, Case No. 9 was the least controversial of the twelve subsequent trials staged by the Americans against German war criminals at Nuremberg. Since their own account of the mass murders lay on the table and as leading defendant Otto Ohlendorf openly admitted to his supervision of the murder of 90,000 men, women, and children, the trial against Ohlendorf and his twenty-two codefendants was an open-and-shut case for both the prosecution and the court. In fact, the only real puzzle about the trial concerned the explanation for the conduct of Ohlendorf and his colleagues: in brief, their defense.
Although Earl raises many issues in her thoroughly researched book on the Einsatzgruppen case, ranging from the lack of counsel for the accused during pretrial interrogation down to the timing of Adolf Hitler's extermination order, in my view the most intriguing parts of her study relate to the two main protagonists: trial defendant Otto Ohlendorf and judge Michael Angelo Musmanno. Of all the Einsatzgruppen commanders in the dock, Ohlendorf was probably the most intelligent, but he was certainly also the most enigmatic of the lot. Why he freely admitted to his command over the Einsatzgruppen killings at a time when his allied captors were still very much in the dark on the subject remains a mystery, even though Earl gives a highly detailed account of the circumstances under which Ohlendorf made his disclosure. Earl suggests that Ohlendorf's direct frankness may be explained by his inability to grasp the criminal nature of his actions. This substitution of one puzzle with another brings us to the rationalization of the conduct of Ohlendorf and his fellow mass killers.
