Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany—that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with accessory to the murder of more than 5,000 people—and a larger exploration of Germany's reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today's rising tide of fascism and antisemitism.

Bruno Dey's trial surfaced at a pivotal moment for Germany and its thinking about the Nazi genocide. The Holocaust continues to occupy a crucial space in German public life, but country's near-universal commitment to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (dealing with the past through commemoration and atonement) has recently showed signs of fraying. This reflects in part the passage of time, and the fact that the last surviving witnesses—victims and perpetrators alike—are rapidly fading away.

But it’s also the result of profound changes in German politics and society. The far-right has made electoral gains and is openly challenging the country’s consensus around the Holocaust. At the same time, there is a small but vociferous group of intellectuals on the left who question Germany’s memory culture from a different angle, asking whether the Holocaust was indeed a singular crime. What does the Holocaust mean for the country’s new Muslim citizens from Syria and Afghanistan, many of whom arrived with their own traumas? 

Final Verdict investigates questions that touch not just on German history, politics, and memory culture, but also on the author’s own family history. Buck revisits the silence that surrounds his own family’s experiences—and culpability—during the Nazi period. In the face of rising anti-Semitism in Germany, the United States, and globally, Final Verdict examines whether remembrance can bear the weight of warning and witness to prevent future atrocities.