"This book examines the use of national and international law to prosecute Nazi crimes, the centerpiece of twentieth-century state-sponsored genocide and mass murder. In its various essays, the contributors reconstruct the historical setting of the crimes committed under the aegis of the Nazi regime and examine why postwar adjudication took place only within limits, within the national and international judicial forums responsible for prosecuting perpetrators. The topics discussed include the impact of the Nazi justice system on postwar justice, postwar legal proceedings against those who committed war crimes and genocide, the work of the Nuremberg tribunal and Allied trials, and judicial investigations and prosecutions in East Germany, West Germany, and Austria. They span the postwar period up to contemporary U.S. legal efforts to deport Nazi criminals within its borders and libel suits brought by Holocaust deniers in British and Canadian courts, and they reveal new perspectives on the present and future implications of these trials."--Jacket.

Introduction : Nazi crimes and the law / Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander -- Nazi crimes and the German law / Henry Friedlander -- The setting and significance of the Nuremberg trials : a historian's perspective / Gerhard L. Weinberg -- The American military commission trials of 1945 / Patricia Heberer -- Punishing the excess : sadism, bureaucratized atrocity, and the U.S. Army concentration camp trials, 1945-1947 / Michael S. Bryant -- Perceptions and suppression of Nazi crimes by the postwar German judiciary / Joachim Perels -- Getting away with murder : the Täubner case / Dick de Mildt -- "A great achievement of German troops in mountain warfare" : Cold War pressures and the German prosecution of Wehrmacht war crimes in the case of Cephalonia, 1943 / Nathan Stoltzfus -- The trials of Nazi war criminals in Austria / Winfried R. Garscha -- The German-German rivalry and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals during the Cold War, 1958-1965 / Annette Weinke -- History in the courthouse : the presentation of World War II crimes in U.S. courts sixty years later / Elizabeth B. White -- Law, history, and holocaust denial in the courtroom : the Zündel and Irving cases / Christopher R. Browning.