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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Michael Bryant, “Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966” (University of Tennessee Press, 2014)
Description: My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple: “!!!!” Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt.
One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Why did it take so long to put them on trial? How did the German public and government respond to the trials? What do the trials say about German memory of th...