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The Trials of an American Prosecutor
Broadway
April 2003
On Sale: April 8, 2003
400 pages
ISBN: 0767908791
EAN: 9780767908795
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The world remembers Nuremberg, where a handful of Nazi
policymakers were brought to justice, but nearly forgotten
are the proceedings at Dachau, where hundreds of Nazi
guards, officers, and doctors stood trial for personally
taking part in the torture and execution of prisoners inside
the Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald
concentration camps. In Justice at Dachau, Joshua M. Greene,
maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voices
from the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals
the dramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young
lawyer from Alabama whisked from teaching law at West Point
to leading the prosecution in the largest series of Nazi
trials in history. In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first
concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team
from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and
determining charges for crimes that courts had never before
confronted. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling,
responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a
cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard
psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s
most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of
Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human
bone lamps made headlines worldwide. Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial
to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but
nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll.
His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and
he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure
from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end
when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to
winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War.
Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of
responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a
final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine
reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those
found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try
to prevent justice from being undone.
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