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.
