When, as it is now, the talk is all of genocide and the slide to the right, it can be hard to find space amid the heat in which to think properly about these things; to consider meaning and context, if not consequences. But a book is a good place to have a go – for me, it’s the only place at this point – and Tobias Buck’s Final Verdict is both timely and sufficiently involving – on occasion, it’s gripping – to help drown out distracting noise. Outwardly, it appears to tell a straightforward story. Buck is a newspaper journalist, and in this capacity he attended much of the trial of Bruno Dey, who in 2019 stood accused of the murder of at least 5,230 people at Stutthof, a Nazi death camp in present-day Poland.
But Dey’s case, however fascinating, is really only a jumping-off point. This is a narrative that wrestles – calmly and very elegantly – with huge questions. Like many writers before him, Buck worries away at the collective guilt of Germany. However, he looks forward as well as back. What, he wants to know, will happen to that guilt when there are no living survivors left to speak to it?
In the dock, the long decades since Dey served as a guard at Stutthof are underlined not only by his frailty (now in his 90s, he arrives at court in a wheelchair), but more strikingly by his daughter, who wears a hijab (she is married to a Muslim). Germany is a country of immigrants now, and later Buck will have much to say about how those communities are supposed to feel in a country where Holocaust guilt and so-called “memory culture” has come to be an essential part of national identity.
But for the time being, his eye is on the trial, which may be one of the last of its kind. It gives him an opportunity to retrace Germany’s failure widely and fully to prosecute Nazis in the years after the war, and to recount the unbearable testimonies of the camp survivors who are witnesses in the case. In the face of their stories, Dey’s insistence that he had no knowledge of the gas chamber at the camp doesn’t just stretch credulity; it seems at once pathetic (his stubbornness) and obscene (his denial).
From here, things spiral outwards. Buck is half-German, and Dey’s service as a camp guard, in so many ways horribly quotidian, brings him to consider his own grandfather, Rupert, who wore a swastika on an armband at his wedding. Buck discovers that he was “an early Nazi” who joined the party in May 1933 (3.5 million people had by then done the same, but a further 6.5 million had yet to follow). And while he’s not shocked or even surprised at this, it gives him pause. Discussing his German grandparents’ attitude to the war, his English-born mother recalls not their denial, exactly, but their sense of victimhood: a “warped” perspective that was grounded in experience (Buck’s grandmother fled Upper Silesia as the Red Army approached; after Hitler’s suicide, Rupert surrendered to the Americans, who handed him over to the Russians, who kept him prisoner). It’s an “inversion” that was typical among Germans in the postwar years.
Buck’s book isn’t particularly long, but hereafter he manages to slip so much into it. Carefully, he explains the Auschwitz ruling, born of a case in a Frankfurt court and upheld by the Federal Court of Justice in 1969, which encouraged German prosecutors to believe they had to prove a suspect’s participation in a specific crime, his or her mere presence in a concentration camp not being enough to secure a conviction. He also explains how this shifted, though not until 2011, when a Ukrainian-American, John Demjanjuk, was finally convicted as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that had taken place at Sobibor extermination camp during his service there.
Buck meets several Holocaust survivors, most notably Charlotte Knobloch, who has done so much to reestablish Jewish life in Munich. (“It will be different,” she says, when he asks what will happen when her generation is gone. “The stones will have to speak.”) He visits Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, allowing himself to get a little lost in its maze of 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”.
Finally, he details the debates that now rage among German historians and other intellectuals over the matter of German guilt and its centrality to civic life. There is growing unease in the country around the rituals of memory culture. The right, predictably, talks of a “cult”. The left worries that outward expressions of sorrow and regret are performative. And all the while, antisemitic attacks continue to happen. Eight days before Dey’s trial opens, a man arrives at a synagogue in Halle, east Germany, hoping to commit a massacre.
This is a brilliant book. I learned a lot from it, and I was glad of Buck’s unshowy, measured style: on the page, he makes complicated things (the law, especially) straightforward. Like an expensive car (I won’t say a German car), his prose is in the service of ideas and other human beings who have more to say than him. It glides along; you notice neither its capaciousness, nor the speed with which it’s moving; when the terrain is at its most tussocky, any resulting jolts are only ever emotional. Above all, I found it – and this feeling has only grown since I finished it – to be important. When I was a child, living in Israel, I asked a woman at a barbecue about the tattoo on her arm. I was small, my parents were English and Protestant, and I knew nothing of the Holocaust then. She was very kind. I remember that she was smiling. “That’s my camp number,” she said, her hand on my shoulder. This was the start, for me – of a certain, horrible kind of knowledge. Women like her (I’ll never forget her name) are almost all gone now, and for this reason alone, books such as Final Verdict have never been more necessary.
• Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century by Tobias Buck is published by W&N (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
