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THE RIGHT WRONG MAN

Lawrence Douglas

John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk's legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was twice stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka--only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler's SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.

An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk's bizarre case. THE RIGHT WRONG MAN is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law's effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. His books include The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and The Vices. His work has appeared in leading publications such as the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harper's.

SPaeTE KORREKTUR
Die Prozesse gegen John Demjanjuk
Deutsch von Felix Kurz
[ HC Wallstein 06/2020]
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Book

Published 2016-01-01 by Princeton University Press

Comments

An excellent legal-minded elucidation of the long trail toward the conviction of a notorious concentration camp guard.

The Right Wrong Man is powerful, richly observed, and darkly entertaining. Anyone interested in postwar history will want to read it. (staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert)

A remarkable and important work that lays bare the limits of the justice system for the greatest crimes. Lawrence Douglas has woven out of the trials of John Demjanjuk a book that is utterly gripping and finely crafted, one that offers insights that are profound, troublesome, and enlightening. -- Philippe Sands, University College London

In this insightful and gracefully written book, Douglas elevates the Demjanjuk case from a legal curiosity--one involving an initially mistaken prosecution followed by a later valid one--to a study in the uses and limits of the law when it confronts genocide. -- Michael B. Mukasey, former US attorney general

Author's opinion piece on the distinction between moral and criminal culpability. Read more...

A marvelous book and a gripping read, The Right Wrong Man dissects one of the most bizarre episodes in the adjudication of the Holocaust. It is reminiscent of, but superior to, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Like Arendt, Douglas studied his subject from up close, from inside the courtroom. Combining eloquent reporting with trenchant analysis, he has produced a rare thing indeed--a learned page-turner. -- Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics