Justice At Dachau
The Trials Of An American Prosecutor
by
Joshua M. Greene
|
BOOK SUMMARYTHE TRIALS OF AN AMERICAN PROSECUTOR From the producer / The Nuremberg trials, which brought charges against a handful of Nazi top brass, have been well-documented. Before now, however, little was known about the much larger proceedings that took place 65 miles south, on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp. The twenty-two German defendants at Nuremberg never lifted a gun; at Dachau nearly 2,000 Nazi guards, officers, and "doctors" stood trial for having personally committed the torture, starvation and extermination we now call the Holocaust. Denson was a soft-spoken Southern gentleman, a devout Presbyterian, who had to overcome his own disbelief at the extent of the horror, prosecute crimes that international law had never described, and prove to the world that America could provide a defeated enemy with fair trials. Denson staved off pressures from Army superiors for quick victories, and after two years of grueling courtroom proceedings achieved a near-perfect record of convictions. But the effort took its toll: Denson was physically near death, and America’s preoccupation with Soviet Russia led to clandestine reversal of his hard-won convictions. By the early ‘50s, every Nazi prisoner still in prison was set free–including the infamous Ilse Koch, "Bitch of Buchenwald." This is a riveting account of a critical yet little-known chapter in World War II history. The story is based on excerpts from trial transcripts and never-before published documents from Denson’s personal archive, including letters from Nazi defendants, trial evidence, and original photographs. |
