'Final Verdict': A valuable account of an unusual Holocaust trial - review

The title of Tobias Buck’s new book, Final Verdict, is somewhat misleading. While it does focus on one of the very last trials of a Nazi war criminal in a German court, the trial of Stutthof watchtower guard Bruno Dey was not the last such proceeding conducted recently in Germany. Nor was it one of the most interesting of the “belated trials” in Germany of Holocaust perpetrators.

During the eight months Dey served in the Nazi concentration camp, he apparently did not murder any of the inmates, nor did he ever shoot his rifle.

It was precisely Dey’s relative insignificance, however, and the enormous difference between him and the major Nazi criminals, who served in notorious death camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, or the important desk mass murderers like Eichmann, that piqued Buck’s curiosity and attracted him to the case. He was quite certain that Dey would not have been a mass murderer or a commander of a death camp, but he was not sure that Dey would be able to admit his guilt and whether he would fully grasp his responsibility. 

The last chance for justice for Holocaust survivors

Another aspect which attracted Buck’s interest was that he viewed the trial as one of the last opportunities: for the survivors to relate their stories in a court of law; for an old man to confront his guilt in front of a judge; and for a German court to show that justice could still be served, even many years after the crimes had been committed.

Buck explained that it was also a last opportunity for him to revisit Holocaust issues, which, as he put it, “had held a grip on me since my early teenage years in Germany, when I developed a sudden and deep curiosity about the Nazi period, and specifically the murder of Europe’s Jews.” This interest prompted him to visit Auschwitz and to interview Holocaust survivors, something extremely rare among German youth his age. (Oddly enough, it was only once he began covering the Dey trial that he began to research his own family and discover that his grandfather Rupert was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933-1945 and member of the SS from 1933-1935.)

It was Buck’s interest in Holocaust issues, and especially in the failure of the German judiciary to bring so many major Nazi Holocaust perpetrators to justice, that motivated him to write a book not only about the Dey trial but also to explain the terrible failure of German justice and explain how and why Germany dramatically changed its prosecution policy vis-à-vis Holocaust perpetrators, the step which led to eight trials of individuals who served in death and concentration camps, who would never have been brought to justice without the change in policy.

According to Buck, “There was no single cause that can explain the historical failure of the West German judiciary to prosecute Nazi crimes. There were practical, as well as legal reasons, political reluctance, as well as popular resistance. Justice was thwarted by German amnesia, and American realpolitik (US high commissioner John McCloy pardoned some prisoners and reduced the sentences of others), and by an unspoken agreement between key German leaders to draw a line under the past and move on.”

The statistics speak for themselves. From 1949, when West Germany assumed responsibility for its judiciary, until 1985, some 200,000 Germans were investigated for Nazi crimes, the majority of whom (120,000) were indicted, but less than 7,000 were punished, many with extremely light sentences, some of which were subsequently commuted.

The situation hardly improved after German unification, until an extraordinary change in German prosecution policy vis-à-vis Nazi Holocaust perpetrators was implemented by Thomas Walther and his colleague Kirsten Goetze, a pair of dedicated prosecutors working at the German Central Office for the Clarification of Nazi War Crimes. They, and Anne Meier-Goering, the judge in the Dey trial, are the heroes of Final Verdict.

Until 2008, the main obstacle to the prosecution in Germany of Holocaust perpetrators was the requirement that there be available evidence that the suspect had committed a specific crime against a specific victim, which was almost impossible to prove decades after the crime had been committed.

Walther and Goetze suggested that instead of trying to convict suspects of murder, which was nearly impossible to prove, why not charge the suspects with “accessory to murder”? In that case, what the prosecution would have to prove in a case of a death camp guard was “only” that: 1) the defendant was present in the camp when the Jews were being murdered; 2) that during his or her service in the camp, at least a certain number of Jews were killed; 3) that the suspect had assisted in the murders due to his or her function in the camp hierarchy.

The case chosen to test this strategy was quite famous, that of Ivan Demjanjuk. He had initially been convicted in the United States (of immigration and naturalization violations) and in Israel (of mass murder in the Treblinka death camp) but was ultimately released on the grounds of mistaken identity and sent back to the United States. There, he was tried again, only this time for service in Sobibor, not Treblinka, and ordered deported. Based on the new policy, Germany was able to obtain his extradition and convict him for the deaths of some 28,000 Jews in Sobibor, a decision that paved the way for the trials of seven men and women who served in Nazi concentration camps, among them Bruno Dey.

The Dey trial posed several technical and judicial problems for Judge Anne Meier-Goering. The corona epidemic erupted during the trial, but Judge Meier-Goering managed to continue despite all the restrictions.

In order to convict Dey, she believed that the prosecution had to prove that the watchtower guard knew what was happening in Stutthof. Time and again, she asked Dey whether he conversed with the inmates to learn about their conditions. But Dey refused to “cooperate” with her and claimed that he had never witnessed an execution, a public whipping, or any other form of punishment. He even claimed that he didn’t know where the gallows were; but the detailed testimonies of the survivors about the gas chambers, the horrible lack of food, and the refusal to provide medical treatment for ill inmates made Dey’s supposed ignorance about the purpose of the camp much less believable. 

And indeed, Meier-Goering clearly and extensively mentioned the crimes that Dey witnessed day after day and the fact that he made no effort to be reassigned to a different task. In that respect, Meier-Goering’s verdict established a ruling which could have enabled the prosecution of numerous Holocaust perpetrators who were never put on trial in Germany, that no person who served in a concentration camp can be considered a “small cog.”

Final Verdict is an extremely valuable book, which deserves wide circulation not only in Germany but throughout the Western world. I can only hope that it will be translated into as many languages as possible.■

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

• Final Verdict; The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century
• Tobias Buck
• Hachette Books, 2024
• 327 pages; $32