Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

by Mary Fulbrook

“***Winner of the 2019 Wolfson History Prize***

Recommendations from our site

“What makes the book distinctive is the second half: the way that she pursues what happened to victims and perpetrators in the years after 1945. She tells different stories: the story of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the story of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, and the way in which reactions to the Holocaust contrasted in these settings and the reasons for that—the political configurations after 1945 and the Cold War.” Read more...

The Best History Books: the 2019 Wolfson Prize shortlist

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Theologians & Historians of Religion

Commentary

“She concludes that the ‘Auschwitz’ and other trials held in both Germanies in the 1960s drew public attention to the Nazi system ‘but what they did not do was bring the vast majority of those who were guilty of mass murder and collective violence to any sort of justice’. And yet, in the aftermath of these deeply flawed trials, West Germany found ways to promote the fiction that the nation of perpetrators was ‘facing the Nazi past’ to secure a better international reputation.”

Review of Reckonings by Christopher Hale in History Today, 2 February, 2019