Hanna Schmitz on trial brings the novel’s private history into a public courtroom. The proceedings investigate Hanna’s conduct as a former camp guard, but they also expose the limits of legal judgment, the postwar generation’s condemnation of its parents, and Michael Berg’s intimate connection to a defendant he cannot regard as merely a case. The trial establishes the facts of a crime while leaving Michael to confront what judgment means when the accused is someone he once loved.

Background and legal questions

Michael encounters Hanna again in a courtroom, where his professor has made the trial the subject of a seminar. It is not described as the first or one of the major trials concerning the camps. The professor hopes the students can follow the proceedings and evaluate them, but Michael later cannot remember the precise academic question the seminar set out to test. What remains vivid is the argument about retroactive justice: whether prosecution is justified because relevant ordinances were already on the books when the crimes occurred, or whether law must also be judged by how it was interpreted and enforced at the time. The students ask whether law is simply what a society writes down and obeys, or whether it must be enacted and obeyed even when existing practice fails to meet that standard.

The professor, a scholar returned from exile who remains an outsider among German legal scholars, resists treating the problem as a purely academic puzzle. He argues that the defendants do not themselves believe they had been granted permission to murder. His position sharpens the distinction between formal legal authorization and moral knowledge: the seminar debates legal standards, but the trial concerns actions that the defendants could not plausibly mistake for innocent conduct.

The seminar begins in winter, and the trial begins in spring. Proceedings run Monday through Thursday for weeks; assigned students make word-for-word records of each day, and the seminar meets on Fridays to examine the material. Michael and his fellow students understand themselves as explorers of a past that German society had allowed to settle into silence. They believe convictions are necessary, but not sufficient: individual guards and enforcers are only the immediate defendants, while a larger generation must answer for having served the regime, failed to resist it, or tolerated perpetrators after 1945.

That indictment reaches into the students’ own families. Their parents had occupied varied positions under the Third Reich: some fathers had served in the war, including officers in the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS; other parents had worked in the judiciary or local government, as teachers, or as doctors. Michael knows that his father lost a philosophy lectureship after scheduling a lecture on Spinoza and supported the family during the war as an editor for a publisher of hiking maps and books. He nevertheless remembers condemning his father to shame, although he had no charge beyond the postwar generation’s tolerance of perpetrators. The seminar’s campaign to expose the past thus becomes a judgment on parents as well as defendants—and, in retrospect, Michael recognizes how readily the students converted horror into certainty and accusation.

The charges and the victims

Hanna is the fourth of five women accused. The indictment takes a day and a half to read, its repeated legal formulae setting out alleged acts and culpability in the cautious language of procedure. The five women had served as guards in a small satellite camp near Cracow, connected to Auschwitz. They had been transferred there from Auschwitz in early 1944 to replace guards killed or injured in a factory explosion. The indictment also includes conduct at Auschwitz, but Michael recalls that count only as comparatively minor and is uncertain whether it seemed less important because Hanna was not implicated in it or for some other reason.

The defendants had not commanded the camp. A commandant, special troops, and additional women guards occupied other positions in its hierarchy. At the end of the prisoners’ forced westward march, a bombing raid brought the march to a halt; many of those troops and guards did not survive, while others fled, including the commandant. The trial nonetheless focuses on the responsibility of the five women whose actions could be investigated and prosecuted.

Two prisoners survived the night of the bombing: a mother and daughter. The daughter wrote and published in America a book about the camp and the march west. Investigators found the defendants and witnesses from the village where the bombing ended the march. The daughter came to Germany to testify; her mother remained in Israel, where the court, prosecutors, and defense lawyers planned to take her deposition. That trip was the sole part of the trial Michael did not attend. The survivors’ separate locations and testimony make the case depend on both a written account and witnesses whose experiences are not all presented in the courtroom Michael observes.

One principal charge concerns the monthly selection of prisoners. Around sixty women were sent from Auschwitz to the satellite camp each month, and approximately the same number were returned, less those who had died. The camp’s factory produced munitions, but its prisoners were often assigned to repair damage caused by the explosion rather than to the actual factory work. Those who could no longer perform useful labor were sent back to Auschwitz, where they would be killed. The routine, recurring exchange turns selection into an administrative process with lethal consequences: the trial asks who participated in decisions that sorted women according to their capacity to work.

The other principal charge concerns the night of the bombing and the end of the forced march. Several hundred women prisoners were locked inside a village church by the troops and guards. Bombs struck nearby buildings, including the church steeple; the fire spread to the roof, and the burning rafters fell into the nave. The doors could have been unlocked, but the defendants did not open them, and the prisoners died in the fire. The issue is not only the chain of events that made the church burn, but the guards’ failure to release the women when escape remained possible. That omission becomes a central ground of criminal and moral responsibility.

Michael’s encounter with Hanna

The courtroom encounter begins with recognition delayed. Hanna sits among the defendants and their lawyers, with her back to Michael’s group. He does not identify her until she is called and stands; then he recognizes her name and her familiar body, though her hair is arranged differently. She is forty-three, born near Hermannstadt on October 21, 1922. She confirms that she had worked at Siemens in Berlin and joined the SS in autumn 1943. Michael reports feeling nothing when he recognizes her. That emotional blankness anticipates the numbness with which he will follow the proceedings, but it does not erase the personal history through which he sees her.

The scale and arrangement of the courtroom make the encounter public. In a turn-of-the-century building, large windows with milky glass admit light without revealing the outdoors. The prosecutors sit before the windows as dark silhouettes; the judges and selected local citizens occupy the head and side of the room, while the defendants and lawyers extend into the space before the public seating. Hanna’s presence is first one among many, until her name and movement make her unmistakable to Michael. The same woman he once knew privately now stands as one of five defendants before a crowded institution of law and spectators.

Michael’s connection to Hanna becomes visible to his former seminar colleague only much later. The former student remembers that Michael attended the trial every day, while he himself went on Wednesdays and sometimes gave Michael a ride. He asks whether Michael’s interest was really in the trial or in the defendant he kept watching; the students had wondered what was between them. Michael cannot find an answer that would confess or explain the relationship without betraying it. His regular attendance therefore has two overlapping meanings: a student’s participation in an inquiry into the Nazi past and the repeated presence of a former lover before the woman on trial.

At the trial, Michael’s failure is not simply that he has personal feelings. He does not reveal what he knows about Hanna’s illiteracy to the court, even though that fact bears on the proceedings. Later, he questions her about whether she thought about the matters discussed at trial while they were together, when he read to her. Hanna replies that she had felt no one understood her, and that being understood would have made it possible to call her to account. In prison, she says, the dead came to her nightly and could hold her responsible in a way the living had not. Michael recognizes that placing her in a private niche could itself be a way of keeping her, and the dead, at a distance. The courtroom’s public judgment thus intersects with the private silence that Michael has maintained.

Verdict and aftermath

At the end of June, the court sentences Hanna to life imprisonment; the other defendants receive prison terms. The courtroom is full, with members of the justice system, university students, schoolchildren, domestic and foreign journalists, and other spectators. When Hanna enters in a black suit and white blouse, the spectators interpret the clothes as resembling an SS uniform, though Michael has never seen the women’s uniform. In their eyes, her appearance gathers together the accused woman and the crimes attributed to her. That reading is an impression formed by the crowd, not a formal finding about what she intends by her clothing.

The spectators first fall silent, then begin whispering and expressing outrage. Some believe Hanna is ridiculing the trial and its audience. When the court enters, the judge glances irritably at her and announces the verdict. Hanna listens standing, straight-backed and motionless; she sits during the reading of the reasons. The full judgment takes several hours. Michael watches her head and neck, then waits to see whether she will look toward him as the defendants are led away. She looks straight ahead, seeming to see neither him nor anyone else. The sentence settles her legal fate, but the final image does not offer Michael a private recognition or reconciliation.

The trial also exposes the gap between criminal proceedings and the wider work of historical reckoning. In retrospect, Michael questions the students’ confidence that bringing the past into daylight would make them morally distinct from the previous generation. Collective guilt may be debatable as a legal or moral doctrine, but he remembers it as a lived reality for his generation. Defaced Jewish gravestones, former Nazis advancing in the courts, administration, and universities, and the Federal Republic’s long failure to recognize Israel all contribute to their shame. Accusation could turn passive shame into activity, but it did not remove the burden, and confronting parental guilt consumed energy without making the students innocent observers.

Michael cannot simply transfer that judgment to Hanna. He had loved and chosen her before he knew what she had done, but this does not end his responsibility for the relationship or for his conduct during the trial. When he points at Hanna, he finds that the finger turns back toward himself. The trial’s moral reach therefore extends beyond the defendants: it forces Michael to distinguish not knowing her crimes when he chose her from the later choice to remain silent when he could have disclosed her illiteracy. His judgment of her and his account of himself remain entangled.

Years later, Hanna’s imprisonment continues to give the trial consequences beyond the verdict. Michael sends her recorded readings, and in the fourth year of their word-driven, wordless contact she writes to thank him for a story. Her forceful, laborious handwriting shows that she has learned to write; Michael understands this as a movement from dependence toward independence, though he also feels the lateness of that achievement. In the eighteenth year of her imprisonment, her plea for clemency is granted and release is expected. The prison warden asks Michael to help find Hanna a small apartment and a job and to support her as she faces ordinary tasks outside after eighteen years in prison. She has worked in the prison sewing shop, where she has shown skill, but release would still mean confronting the city, shopping, official business, and restaurants after a long absence.

When Michael eventually visits the prison, the warden shows him Hanna’s cell and the sewing shop where she worked. The cell contains the cassette player and the tapes he sent, alongside her books and ordinary belongings. These later details return the trial to the material facts of punishment: the sentence is not only a judgment read aloud but eighteen years of restricted space, work, learning, and narrow contact with the outside. Hanna’s literacy and the prospect of release do not undo her responsibility for the prisoners who died; they show instead how punishment, personal change, and accountability persist on different timelines. The trial’s decisive significance lies in holding these questions together without making any one of them a substitute for the others.