Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor
For nearly two years, William Denson led the prosecution team at Dachau, Germany, that by August 1948 had found 177 Nazis guards and officers guilty of war crimes at Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Ninety-seven were sentenced to death, 54 to life imprisonment, and the rest to terms of hard labor. After Denson's death in 1998 at the age of 86, his wife sorted out boxes of documents in their basement: 30,000 pages of trial transcripts, miles of microfilm, stacks of photographs and newspaper clippings, death's head insignias, and letters from both SS officers and victims of Nazi horror. Greene, coauthor ofWitness: Voices from the Holocaust, posits that with the rise of the cold war, American priorities shifted from punishing Germans to winning Germany's support in the fight against the Soviet Union, and points to the fact that one by one, the sentences of Nazis found guilty at Dachau were either commuted or completely reversed.George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved