Holocaust Education Week 2015’s scholar-in-residence, Hilary Earl, is a historian whose research focuses on perpetrator testimony and war crimes trials in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She is associate professor of European history at Nipissing University and the author of The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History, which won the 2010 Hans Rosenberg Prize for best book on German history from the American Historical Association. The CJN spoke to Earl about her research.

What are some things you’ll be speaking about during HEW?

I’ll be giving two public talks. One is at Beth Tzedec Congregation (Nov. 5) and is about a Nazi perpetrator named Martin Sandberger, who lived until 2010. He was prosecuted, but then reintegrated back into German society, raising a family and having quite a good career.

During the war, Sandberger was in charge of a commando responsible for killing all the Jews of Estonia. He was very well educated and had a PhD in law. After the war, he was prosecuted in Nuremberg. He was sentenced to death, but because of various political reasons, like the Cold War, the Americans reviewed his sentence and commuted it from death to a prison sentence. He was only in jail for 10 years. Then there was enormous pressure on the Americans to let German war criminals go, and they released him from prison in 1958. He had a lot of supporters and help from various important Germans, and got a good job for a major company, becoming their lawyer. He made a handsome living.

Why are you so interested in Nazi perpetrators?

I started out my scholarly career looking at victims and I didn’t sleep, it was so horrible, and it broke my heart continuously. I was very interested in the question of why people who aren’t pathological or otherwise sadistic or deranged are willing to participate in violence against other people – the question of why people hurt each other – and so I came upon this subject of research.

The trial that I came to look closely at is the Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, which took place from 1945 to 1958. It was the ninth of the 13 Nuremberg trials and was a genocide trial of 24 individuals who could have been leaders or professors or business icons but happened to be in the Third Reich. They were major perpetrators who carried out major crimes against the Jews of Europe.

I think it’s easier to understand why someone hurts someone else when they’re ill or pathological, but harder to understand why regular people are involved in killing.

Have you found answers about why people who weren’t deranged were involved in this sort of genocide?

With the individuals I’ve been looking at, they were highly ambitious and the state offered them careers to advance themselves if they were willing to do what it wanted. Almost all of these men were committed nationalists, and the professorate in the 1920s and ’30s in Germany was full of diehard German nationalists who influenced their students. They weren’t necessarily fascist, but were sympathetic to the Nazis. Sandberger, for example, was heavily influenced by his professors.

There are a number of reasons why men like him got involved in Nazi activity, but anti-Semitism was probably the least motivating factor. Some were diehard anti-Semites, but some really weren’t at all. And that, too, is scary – that people can participate in killing when they don’t even hate the people they’re killing. I call these guys hybrid killers. They weren’t the shooters, but the order-givers. But they also weren’t sitting at desks like Adolf Eichmann. They were in the field overseeing mass atrocities. Collectively, these 24 supervisors killed between one million to 1.5 million people.

What can we learn about their reintegration into German society?

One takeaway is that Germany is the country that has dealt most extensively with the crimes of its past, but in order to do so, they have had to let people like Sandberger be welcomed back into German society. They prosecuted who they could prosecute, but then they had to run their country somehow.

Millions of Nazis were still alive after the war. Genocide is a corporate act, and it takes a myriad of people to carry it out. Sadly, many of the perpetrators ended up being major government officials or major players in business after the war. There was a collective amnesia in Germany in some ways. Inevitably, some people were never held to account. But Germany is also unique in that it recognizes what it’s done and did its best to bring to trial who they could.

One hears about contemporary Germans having a collective sense of guilt for the Shoah. Is this recent and not prevalent in the years after the war?

It depends who you talk to and on the time frame. Nothing is static. Germany has ensured that education plays a major role in the transformation of its society. Germans learn all about the country’s past in school. It’s no coincidence Germany is one of the countries that produces the most historians. So, sure, there’s a collective guilt and a sense of feeling badly, but they’ve also confronted it and continue to confront it, like with the recent prosecution of former Auschwitz death camp officer Oskar Groening.

If there was this sense of guilt, why were so many perpetrators allowed to work in high positions after the war?

Because there were millions of perpetrators. It requires half a country to commit genocide, and we don’t have a justice system that’s able to contend with that. Even if we did, you can’t put your entire country in jail. It’s one of the greatest problems in post-conflict societies – there are so many people involved in the violence that you can’t penalize all of them. Germany’s way to address this has been multifaceted: it has been to prosecute the highest-ranking people it could find, the decision-makers, and to use the educational system to transform society. It’s also been to keep the issue alive by creating memorials and museums and making transfer payments to Israel.

The guys I study from the Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial were leaders of killing units, and most got out of prison by 1958. The men they gave the orders to were largely prosecuted in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many of these order-receivers got heavier sentences than the order-givers.

Why is that?

Because the leaders were prosecuted by the Americans, and the underlings were prosecuted by the Germans. Politics got involved. Between 1945 and 1949, the Americans prosecuted the biggest surviving war criminals they could find. But then Germany first got independence in 1949 (and completely in 1955), and part of the process of getting independence was its ability to prosecute the criminals themselves. So they began initiating trials starting in 1949, and they tended to have more severe penalties, aside from the death penalty against the original 23 tried in Nuremberg. The Americans wanted Germany as an ally against the Soviets, and part of that was letting the German war criminals out of prison. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.