The material available charting the history of the concentration camps, the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, the perpetration of the Holocaust, the proceedings at Nuremberg, and the political machinations accompanying all of these matters, is huge. Rather than try to list these I’ve outlined those sources I found the most revealing, before listing the works cited in this book.
Of first importance are the literature and artefacts and memorials I found at the various sites I visited across Europe. Noteworthy amongst these were Bergen-Belsen, Flossenbürg, Neuengamme, Dachau, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, but I should also mention Colditz, Fossoli in Italy (where Primo Levi was first incarcerated before being transferred to Auschwitz), Plötzensee in Berlin and the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg. For the most part, the displays and exhibitions provided significant insights and directions that were invaluable in helping me understand the enormity of both the wrongs done and the Allied response. At most of these places there were people ready to open doors, show items and buildings of interest and treat every visitor with respect. They could each point to remarkable collections and records which even after seventy years have yet to reveal their full histories.
Occasionally, as I’ve mentioned in the book, local interest in preserving the memories of atrocities I found to be sometimes dulled or even suppressed. Finding information beyond graves or commemorative stones recording the numbers or names of the dead was sometimes difficult. I do wonder whether as generations pass, the German people and authorities will remain conscious enough of their country’s history to reinforce their abhorrence for those brutal times. If the last ten years are a good indication, when many memorials and museums, particularly at concentration camps, have been opened, there is still an apparent appetite for reflection. That can only be for the good. But the sense of responsibility to preserve the records and memories are bound to be strained. In the meantime, the sources of information are probably more fecund now than ever before despite the passing of the victims and perpetrators and avengers.
The second source to which I came to feel inextricably attached were the public collections at the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum. At both institutions the genial but professional assistance was uniform. Research can be a self-perpetuating enterprise and on more than one occasion the sense of discovery as I opened file after file was extraordinary. No one should rely on published books or articles for their inspiration or understanding of any subject if they can help it. The physical archive is a wonderful invention.
Though I prefer the public records, if only for their delivery of revelations that without exception I thought (often wrongly) were unique, I value highly the secondary source: those memoirs and histories and academic analyses, some of which appear in the bibliography. But there were few works that could tell me what I wanted to know. The story of the British military trials is an obscure one. Why no one has found it interesting enough to tell in any detail I do not understand. Perhaps lawyers and detectives make poor analysts and historians; they’re too steeped in taking a position, a brief, to see things from a variety of perspectives. Perhaps the experience of investigating and prosecuting atrocity simply saps the will to revisit the detail of death and suffering and the ‘evil’ (as many would describe it) of those crimes. Nonetheless, there are some accounts which help understand what happened during those few years after the war’s end and which I’ve mentioned in the bibliography below.
Angier, Carole, The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography (London: Penguin, 2013)
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1992)
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004)
Barnard, Clifford, Two Weeks in May 1945 (London: Quaker Home Service, 1999)
Baron-Cohen, Simon, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness (London: Penguin, 2012)
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989)
Beimler, Hans, Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau (London: Modern Press, 1933)
Ben-Naftali, Orna and Tuval, Yogev, ‘Punishing International Crimes Committed by the Persecuted: The Kapo Trials in Israel (1950s–1960s)’ (2006), Journal of International Criminal Justice, Vol. 4, pp. 128–78
Bernadotte, Folke, The Curtain Falls (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1945)
Bloxham, David, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Bower, Tom, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany – A Pledge Betrayed (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981)
Churchill, Winston, History of the Second World War, Vol. VI (London: Penguin Classics, 2005)
Collis, W.R.F. and MacClancy, P.C., ‘Some Paediatric Problems Presented at Belsen Camp’ (1946), British Medical Journal, No. 4442, pp. 273–5
Cox, Graham, ‘Seeking Justice for the Holocaust: Herbert C. Pell vs the US State Department’ (2014), Criminal Law Forum, Vol. 25, pp. 77–110
Earl, Hilary, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Frankl, Viktor, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973)
Frankl, Viktor, Man’s Search for Meaning (London: Rider, 2004)
Friedländer, Saul, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945 (London: Phoenix, 2008)
Friedman, Jonathan, ‘The Sachsenhausen Trials’, in Patricia Herber and Jürgen Matthäus, Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) pp. 159–84
Gellately, Robert, The Nuremberg Interviews: Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses Conducted by Leon Goldensohn (London: Pimlico, 2007)
Gilbert, G.M., Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995)
Gilbert, Martin, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Mandarin, 1991)
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1996)
Green, Joshua M., Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor (New York: Broadway Books, 2003)
Hackett, David A. (ed. and tr.), The Buchenwald Report (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995)
Halliday, Hugh A., ‘Relief Amid Chaos: The Story of Canadian POWs Driving Red Cross’ (2002), Canadian Military History, Vol. 11: 2, Article 7, available at http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol11/iss2/7
Harding, Thomas, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (London: Windmill Books, 2014)
Hardman, Leslie and Goodman, Cecily, The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1958)
Helm, Sarah, A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (London: Abacus, 2006)
Herber, Patricia and Matthäus, Jürgen, Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008)
HMSO, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission (London: HMSO, 1949)
Hughes, Ted (tr.), Aeschylus: The Oresteia (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
Isherwood, Christopher, ‘Berlin Diary’, in Goodbye to Berlin (London: Minerva, 1989)
Fermor, Patrick Leigh, A Time of Gifts (London: John Murray, 2004)
Jackson, Sophie, British Interrogation Techniques in the Second World War (Stroud: The History Press, 2012)
Jardim, Tomaz, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)
Jones, Priscilla Dale, ‘Nazi Atrocities against Allied Airmen: Stalag Luft III and the End of British War Crimes Trials’ (1998), Historical Journal, Vol. 41:2, pp. 543–65
Kemp, Anthony, The Secret Hunters (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 1986)
Kershaw, Ian, The End: Germany 1944–45 (London: Penguin Books, 2012)
Kogon, Eugen, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (London: Secker & Warburg, 1950)
Kramer, Rita, Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France (London: Penguin Books, 1996)
Lange, Wilhelm, ‘Cap Arcona: Summary of the Cap Arcona Disaster in the Bay of Neustadt on 3 May 1945 – On Behalf of the town of Neustadt’ (1996)
Lawrence, Geoffrey (Lord Oaksey), ‘The Nuremberg Trial’ (1947), International Affairs, Vol. 23:2, pp. 151–9
Lemkin, Raphael, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation; Analysis of Government; Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944)
Levi, Primo, If This is a Man (London: Abacus, 1979)
Levi, Primo, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1988)
Lewis, J.T., ‘Medical Problems at Belsen Concentration Camp (1945)’, reprinted in Ulster Medical Journal, Vol. 54:2, pp. 122–6 (October 1985)
Longerich, Peter, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954)
Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Margolian, Howard, Conduct Unbecoming: The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)
Megargee, Geoffrey P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, Vol. 1, Parts A & B (Bloomington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009)
Meyer, M. and McCoubrey, H. (eds), Reflections on Law and Armed Conflicts: The Selected Works on the Laws of War by the Late Professor Colonel G.I.A.D. Draper OBE (The Hague: Kluwer, 1998)
Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974)
Mollison, P.L., ‘Observations on Cases of Starvation at Belsen’ (1946), British Medical Journal, No. 4435, pp. 4–8
Moorehead, Alan, ‘Belsen’, in Cyril Connolly (ed.), The Golden Horizon (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1953), pp. 103–12
Mullins, Claud, The Leipzig Trials: An Account of the War Criminals’ Trials and a Study of German Mentality (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1921)
Niremberski, M., ‘Psychological Investigation of a Group of Internees at Belsen Camp’ (1946), Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 92, pp. 60–74
Padfield, Peter, Himmler: Reichsführer SS (London: Papermac, 1991)
Pelican, Fred, From Dachau to Dunkirk (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993)
Schawe, Karin (ed.), Georg Felix Harsch (tr.), The Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial – A Guide to the Site’s History and the Memorial (Hamburg: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, 2010)
Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh, Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 2007)
Sereny, Gitta, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (London: Picador, 1974)
Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003)
Staub, Ervin, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993)
Todorov, Tzvetan, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Phoenix, 1999)
Tusa, Ann and Tusa, John, The Nuremberg Trial (London: Macmillan, 1983)
Vaughan, Hal, Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and his Family in Occupied Paris (Washington DC: Brassey’s Inc., 2004)
Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KZ: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015)
Waller, James, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Wiesel, Elie, Night (London: Penguin, 2006)
Winstone, Martin, The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010)
Wyman, David, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)