TRIALS OF WAR

This is a definitive account of the largest war crimes prosecution effort in American history - the U.S. Army's war crimes trials program in Germany. In the book, Pearl, the former director of national operations at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, traces the experiences of various figures involved in what are known as the Dachau Trials, which included 460 trials, with more than 1,600 defendants, that took place between 1945 and 1947.

As a law clerk in the 1990s at the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations (comprised of a team of lawyers and historians who helped bring Nazi war criminals living in America to justice), Lisa Pearl was assigned to find out all there was to know about the war crimes trials prosecuted by the U.S. Army in Germany right after World War II. After asking her supervisor which book on this subject she should read, he told her it hadn't been written yet. Since then, various books have been published on aspects of the topic, but, remarkably, there's never been a complete or definitive account of the Army's Nazi war crimes trials. After years of Pearl's research into literally thousands of original documents, films, photos, physical artifacts, and interviews, TRIALS OF WAR: The Untold Story of World War II American Justice will be the first authoritative and comprehensive historical account of the Dachau Trials. Pearl tells the dramatic World War II story of American justice and the people involved:. She traces the personal experiences of the Army's war crimes investigators who were embedded with the troops after D-day -- the investigators who collected evidence of unfathomable war crimes; the Judge Advocates who were faced with prosecuting unprecedented crimes -- prosecutors who created the blueprint for prosecuting war crimes and had to make sense of it all without the benefit of historical context; the GI attorneys assigned to defend the enemy against whom they had fought just weeks earlier; the accused who ranged from SS generals and concentration camp personnel, to Germans housewives accused of murdering American POWs; and the victims who provided some of the earliest eyewitness accounts of recorded war crimes testimony in modern history. TRIALS OF WAR unfurls layer after layer of human cruelty, suffering, criminal motivation, and vengeance, as well as telling an indelible story of resilience and triumph of the spirit, which reverberates to this day. "Part of my family was murdered by Nazi mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) outside of Riga, Latvia. I felt a strong sense of responsibility to bring the stories that were buried in those boxes back to life," Pearl said. Lisa Pearl, the former director of national operations at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was a law clerk at the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, the government's modern-day Nazi-hunting unit. As director of national operations at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she founded the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center, and currently serves on the board of trustees at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, Pearl operates an executive leadership development firm, Lisa Pearl Leadership Strategies LLC. She earned a Ph.D. in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science, a J.D. from Northeastern University, and a B.A. from Brandeis University. She lives in Washington, D.C.