Hanna Schmitz's trial

Hanna Schmitz's trial is both a criminal proceeding about the conduct of former concentration-camp guards and the formative public encounter through which Michael Berg confronts the Nazi past. Its questions exceed the verdict: the court examines individual actions, while the students following it turn their attention to a society that had tolerated perpetrators after the war—and Michael carries into the courtroom a concealed personal relationship with the accused woman.

Origins and Legal Questions

The trial was not the first proceeding to address the camps, nor one of the major trials. A professor who was among the few German legal scholars working on the Nazi past made it the subject of a seminar, hoping that students could follow the proceedings and evaluate them. The seminar began in winter; the trial opened in spring and lasted for weeks. Court sat Monday through Thursday, with students assigned to make word-for-word records of each day, and the seminar met on Fridays to examine the previous week’s material.

The seminar’s central legal problem was the prohibition on retroactive justice. The students debated whether it was enough that the ordinances used to convict camp guards and enforcers had existed when the crimes were committed, or whether the more important issue was that such laws had not been applied to the defendants at the time. The dispute opened onto a broader question: whether law consists of rules on the books, rules actually enacted and obeyed by a society, or rules that must be enacted and obeyed if society is to function rightly. The professor, an exile who had returned but remained an outsider among German legal scholars, took part with scholarly force and with a detachment that did not expect scholarship alone to resolve the dilemma. He observed that none of the defendants seemed to believe that they had been authorized to murder.

The students did not regard convictions as an adequate endpoint. They saw conviction of individual guards as only a prelude to judging the generation that had served them, failed to stop them, or allowed them to remain in society after 1945. Their image of inquiry was one of opening windows and driving away dust: they wanted the past brought into daylight and its perpetrators and protectors exposed. In their certainty that convictions had to follow, however, the moral urgency of the seminar sat alongside the unresolved question of how law could judge crimes that the contemporary society had not effectively restrained.

Defendants, Witnesses, and Charges

Five women were on trial. They had served as guards at a small satellite camp near Cracow after being transferred from Auschwitz in early 1944 to replace guards killed or injured in a factory explosion. One count concerned their conduct at Auschwitz, but Michael remembers it as minor compared with the other charges and is unsure whether that reflected the count itself or its relevance to Hanna. The five women had not commanded the camp: a commandant, special troops, and other female guards also formed part of its authority structure. Many of those troops and guards did not survive the bombing that ended the prisoners’ westward march; some fled, and the commandant had disappeared when the forced march began.

One main charge concerned the camp’s monthly selections. Around sixty women were sent from Auschwitz to the satellite camp each month, and a similar number were sent back, less those who had died in the meantime. The prisoners selected to return were those no longer able to do useful work; everyone understood that they would be killed at Auschwitz. The factory produced munitions, but the women seldom performed the factory work itself. Much of their labor went to raw construction repairing the heavy damage caused by the earlier explosion.

The other main charge concerned the night of the bombing. The guards and troops locked several hundred women inside a church in a village largely abandoned by its inhabitants. A few bombs fell, perhaps aimed at a nearby railway or factory, or perhaps released after a raid on a larger town. One struck the priest’s house where troops and guards were sleeping; another hit the church steeple. The steeple and then the roof caught fire, and blazing rafters collapsed into the nave as the pews burned. The heavy doors could have been unlocked. They were not, and the prisoners inside burned to death.

Two prisoners survived the night: a mother and daughter. The daughter wrote a book about the camp and the march west and published it in America. Police and prosecutors tracked down the five defendants and witnesses from the village where the bombing ended the march. The daughter came to Germany to testify; the mother remained in Israel, where the court, prosecutors, and defense lawyers planned to depose her. Michael did not attend that part of the trial. The difference between what the proceedings could establish through witnesses and what remained beyond Michael’s own attendance marks the limits of his account as well as the reach of the prosecution.

Michael and the Trial

Michael’s account begins with the shock of seeing Hanna again in a courtroom. As a student in the seminar, he attended the trial every day, week after week. At the time, his stated reason was interest in the proceedings. Years later, at the funeral of the professor who had led the seminar, a former fellow student remembered that he had often given Michael a lift on Wednesdays and asked why Michael had been there so persistently. He suggested that Michael had watched the defendant who was reasonably good-looking, and recalled that the students had wondered what was happening between the two of them.

The former student’s recollection turns the courtroom’s public scrutiny toward Michael. He remembers that he could not decide how to answer a question about what had been going on between himself and the defendant: whether to betray, confess, or parry. When the question came at the cemetery entrance, a departing streetcar offered him an escape. He called goodbye, ran beside it as if trying to jump onto its running board, and struck the door with the flat of his hand; unexpectedly, the streetcar stopped and let him on. The action does not resolve the secret, but gives his evasion a concrete form. The trial is at once a public investigation of Hanna and a private encounter Michael repeatedly finds himself unable to explain.

After Hanna’s death, Michael tells her surviving daughter that they had lived in the same neighborhood, had become friends when he was a young student, and that he had attended the trial that convicted her. The daughter asks why he sent Hanna cassettes. Michael falls silent. His explanation establishes that the trial did not leave him as a detached observer: the case remained bound to a relationship he could neither straightforwardly disclose nor set aside.

Generational Judgment and Aftermath

The seminar’s campaign against silence was also a judgment of the students’ parents. Their parents had held varied roles in the Third Reich: some fathers had served in the war, including as officers in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS; others had worked in the judiciary or local government. There were teachers and doctors, and one student had an uncle who was a senior official in the Ministry of the Interior. Michael knew that his own father had lost a philosophy lectureship after scheduling a lecture on Spinoza and had supported the family during the war as an editor for a publisher of hiking maps and books. He had no accusation against his father comparable to the seminar’s accusations against perpetrators, yet he remembers having condemned his parents’ generation to shame for tolerating perpetrators after 1945.

Years later, Michael reflects that coming to terms with the Nazi past could be either the form taken by a generational conflict or its central issue. Some students could not accuse their parents, or did not wish to; for them, the past still demanded reckoning in its own right. The idea of collective guilt, whether valid in legal or moral terms, was a lived reality for his generation. Shame attached not only to the crimes of the Third Reich but also to defaced Jewish gravestones, former Nazis’ subsequent careers in courts, administration, and universities, the Federal Republic’s long failure to recognize Israel, and the inheritance of conformity rather than emigration or resistance. Accusing identifiable wrongdoers could turn passive shame into energy and action, but did not abolish it.

Michael’s reckoning with Hanna makes that moral movement more painful. He could point to her crimes, which were worse than the guilt of others in his social world, but the finger turned back toward him: he had loved her and chosen her. He tried to tell himself that he had known nothing of her past when he chose her, and to imagine a child’s innocence in loving someone. But, as he recognizes, a person is not responsible for the love of parents in the same way as for chosen love. The trial’s significance therefore extends beyond its criminal findings. It exposes the divide between prosecuting individual crimes and judging the social world that permitted them, while leaving Michael to confront the fact that his own emotional history cannot be separated from the defendant he watched in court.