Imagine a criminal-justice system with the following features: (1) criminal defendants more likely to be convicted and punished when they caused the death of one person than when they played a crucial role in killing thousands of people; (2) willing and enthusiastic wrongdoing treated in court not as an aggravating factor but as a mitigating factor; and (3) trials with judges who were essentially accomplices of the accused. Unfortunately, this is not the premise of a dystopian science-fiction story. As Lewy reveals in Perpetrators, it captures the essence of the trials involving Nazis and their collaborators in Germany following World War II.
Lewy’s research, based to a great extent on rarely tapped and relatively inaccessible primary sources, reveals a system that offered more lenient treatment of “the SS man who, as part of his official duties in a factory of death, killed tens of thousands by throwing the gas...