Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. By Mary Fulbrook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 657. Cloth $34.95 ISBN 978-0190681241.

Abstract

In Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook, the author of a series of works on modern German history, including several about German and East German history since 1945, turns her attention to the extent to which justice was done to those engaged in Nazi Germany's policies of persecution and extermination. 1 Fulbrook's central theme is "the significant disjuncture" that is "revealed between official myths about 'dealing with the past,' on the one hand, and the extent to which the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators actually evaded justice, on the other" (7). The work is divided into three sections. Part I, "Chasms: Patterns of Persecution," describes policies of persecution and extermination in Auschwitz, the other major death camps, less well-known ghettos and concentration camps, the euthanasia campaigns, and the Einsatzgruppen murders. In Part II, "Confrontations: Landscapes of the Law," Fulbrook draws on German-and English-language scholarship of recent decades to discuss judicial reckoning in the era of Allied occupation, as well as in the successor states of the Federal Republic (West Germany), the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and, briefly, Austria. Part III, "Connections: Memories and Explorations," rests on anecdotes taken from memoirs by survivors of Nazi persecution and from statements of avoidance by former perpetrators, and it surveys successes and shortcomings of individual efforts, both public and private, to reckon with the crimes of the Nazi era. Fulbrook's descriptions of the crimes in Part I, while accurate, present events that have been examined many times in previous excellent works on the Holocaust and on other crimes of the Nazi regime. Her examination in Part III of the trauma and suffering-or, as the case may have been, avoidance and deception by individuals-after the war, stirs emotions but does not address significant issues of historical causation regarding the quest for justice. The book would have been better if the editors at Oxford University Press had drastically cut Parts I and III and produced a text of about 200 rather than 539 pages, focusing specifically on the issues of judicial reckoning addressed in Part II. For it is here that Fulbrook states her main case and makes her most valuable contribution to the historical interpretation of reckoning in German-speaking Europe. But it is also where she runs into difficulties.