《Justice at Dachau : The Trials of an American Prosecutor》是2003年Random House US出版的圖書。作者是Joshua Greene 。
基本介紹
- 中文名：Justice at Dachau : The Trials of an American Prosecutor
- 作者：Joshua Greene
- 出版社：Random House US
- ISBN：9780767908795
內容簡介
The world remembers Nuremberg, where a handful of Nazipolicymakers were brought to justice, but nearly forgotten are theproceedings at Dachau, where hundreds of Nazi guards, officers, anddoctors stood trial for personally taking part in the torture andexecution of prisoners inside the Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg,and Buchenwald concentration camps. In Justice at Dachau, M.Greene, maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voicesfrom the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals thedramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young lawyer fromAlabama whisked from teaching law at West Point to leading theprosecution in the largest series of Nazi trials in history.
In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s firstconcentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team fromlawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining chargesfor crimes that courts had never before confronted. Among theaccused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds ofdeaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; EdwinKatzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant;and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, IlseKoch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins andhuman bone lamps made headlines worldwide.
Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial to hisname, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly twoyears of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorcedhim, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed fromexhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiorsto bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted awayfrom punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in theemerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create acareful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust.When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestinereversals and commutation of sentences to set free those foundguilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to preventjustice from being undone.
