Reviewed by: Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Hilary Earl Hilary Earl Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. By Mary Fulbrook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 660. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 978-0190681241. World War II was arguably the deadliest war in modern history: not only did millions of soldiers lose their lives, but civilians also died in record numbers, including [End Page 426] millions of European Jews who were victims of a deliberate policy of European-wide mass murder. No one knows with any certainty how many individuals participated in the state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime; but, given the nature of the pan-European project that included a vast network of slave labor, concentration, and death camps, the number of direct and indirect perpetrators must have been at least in the hundreds of thousands, if not more. How many of these individual perpetrators were held to account after the war? Very few, and Mary Fulbrook, in her latest and largest tome Reckonings, is angry about that injustice and the toll it has taken on survivors and their families (355–356). Close to 700 pages long, Reckonings is an ambitious attempt to expose the myth of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. By bringing together three distinct yet related issues (the crimes of the German state, the punishment of the perpetrators, and the aftermath of conflict), each of which, Fulbrook readily admits, has a well-established literature, she hopes to illustrate that the past has not been fully reconciled, but rather continues to haunt not just those who lived through it, but also their family and friends, and the German people as well. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring one of these issues. Part 1, "Chasms: Patterns of Persecution," offers the reader a glimpse into the many crimes committed against German and Polish civilians before and during the war. It also weaves in personal experiences of violence and juxtaposes the stories of victims caught in the web of Nazi racial policy with the narratives of those who carried it out, thereby attempting to integrate the history of the victim and perpetrator experience. Part 2, "Confrontations: Landscapes of the Law," is a survey of varied judicial "reckonings" of Nazi crime by Allied, European, and West and East German courts from the years immediately following the war until the present day. Again, Fulbrook tries to bring together the voices of victims and perpetrators in the courtroom. She concludes part 2 by lamenting the passage of time and the failure of formal justice adequately to hold the guilty to account. As she notes, by the time John Demjanjuk and Oskar Gröning were tried, it was too late "for any serious legal reckonings with Nazi perpetrators" (337). Part 3, "Connections: Memories and Explorations," is a survey of various personal efforts—what Fulbrook calls "private reckonings"—to "wrestle with the past" outside the courtroom and addresses the lasting impact of violence not only on the victim-survivors and their families but also on the families of perpetrators, who largely went unpunished (338). Writing an "integrated history of the Holocaust," (12) as Fulbrook sets out to do, is admittedly difficult. She is most successful, however, when employing the methods of microhistory, cleverly weaving the history of Mielec, a tiny Jewish industrial hamlet in southeastern Poland, and the surrounding community of Dębica, where SS guards were trained, throughout the first two parts of the book. In part 1 she describes the destruction and reconfiguration of the Jewish community of Mielec following the German invasion and occupation of Poland. Few Jews survived the March 1942 [End Page 427] deportations to the newly opened Bełżec and Sobibor death camps; those who did were exploited as slave labor at the nearby Heinkel Mielec works making aircraft for the Reich. Fulbrook weaves in the story of industrialist Ernst Heinkel who, as it turns out, was well connected to some high-ranking Nazis and who was one of the first German industrialists to exploit the labor of concentration camp inmates. The story of Mielec and Deçbica is continued in part 2, where trials of two perpetrators...
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Jun 2, 2020
Melissa Guzman 
Open Access