Irredeemable: Framing Crime in the Shadow of the Holocaust

Michaela Soyer, Hunter College CUNY

During the postwar years, German courts famously showed leniency toward Nazi war criminals. At the same time the justice system continued to hand out harsh sentences to ordinary, repeat offenders. Among them were so-called “career criminals,” who had spent years doing slave labor in concentration camps. While these Holocaust victims served long sentences in German prisons, many Nazi perpetrators were acquitted of war crimes. Based on this counterintuitive sentencing practice this paper asks two main questions: 1) Why did this discrepancy in sentencing remain viable for decades after the war? 2) What role did this sentencing practice play in maintaining the stability of social stratification between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany? To address these questions, “Irredeemable: Framing Crime in the Shadow of the Holocaust”, draws on archival material related to the German investigations of war crimes committed at the concentration camp "Mittelbau-Dora". By analyzing witness testimonies, police records and judgments this project focuses on the interaction between cultural processes and legal practice. This case study reveals how culturally specific frames of deviance align with narrow legal definitions of crime. I hypothesize that eugenicist norms shaped the German judiciary well into the 1960s. Certain ethnically German victim groups (i.e. homosexuals, “asocials,” “career criminals”) were considered irredeemably “inferior”, and their behaviors remained criminalized. It took the German government 75 years to recognize “career criminals” as victims of the Nazi regime. I further maintain that normative criminological concepts, such as prediction of future crime based on past behavior, or deterrence as the main function of punishment, worked against these groups. The lack of a criminal record, steady employment, and a high-level of education, on the other hand, favored of upper-middle class and elite defendants, who had tortured and killed people in concentration camps.

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 Presented in Session 78. Memory, Law, and the Politics of Historical Narrative