“Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on May 27, 1947, the first of forty-nine men condemned to death for war crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp mounted the gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison near Munich.”
So begins Tomaz Jardim’s fine book on the workings of U.S. military justice in a single Nazi concentration camp in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Jardim, an associate professor of history at Ryerson University in Toronto, has relied on newly declassified primary sources—trial transcripts, interviews with some of the surviving participants, investigators’ reports and at least one memoir—to tell a previously unknown story. He has intricately structured his book on two levels: the first, a powerful account of a problematic war crimes trial hastily put in place by the U.S. military; the second, a cautionary tale concerning the nature of justice itself.
Mauthausen, located just 20 kilometres from Hitler’s boyhood home in Linz, was the...
Erna Paris was the author of many acclaimed works of literary non-fiction, including The Sun Climbs Slow: The International Criminal Court and the Search for Justice.
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