Konrad Morgen: The Conscience Of A Nazi Judge (paperback Or Softback)

Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge is a moral biography of Georg Konrad Morgen, who prosecuted crimes committed by members of the SS in Nazi concentration camps and eventually came face-to-face with the system of industrialized murder at Auschwitz. His wartime papers and postwar testimonies yield a study in moral complexity. "Georg Konrad Morgen was a judge in the SS courts, placed in charge of prosecuting crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. Although delegated by Heinrich Himmler to root out corruption, Morgen remarkably went on to prosecute camp officers for the murder of prisoners. He secured the convictions of several concentration camp commandants, two of whom were executed for their crimes. Yet, despite being face-to-face with the horrors of the Nazi killing machine, he was unable to prosecute anyone for the systematic extermination of the Jews. Instead he tried unsettle the system by seeking an arrest warrant for Adolf Eichmann, albeit for minor offences, and the chief of the Auschwitz gestapo. This is a moral biography of Morgen, focusing on how he felt, thought, and deliberated about the challenges of his unique position. In wartime memos and correspondence, both official and private, as well as his post-war interrogations and his gripping testimonies at war-crimes trials, Morgen's moral and legal reasoning is placed at the fore. What emerges is a deeply equivocal figure whose strong but flawed sense of justice was unequal to the extraordinary circumstances of the Third Reich."-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xxiv Introduction....Pages 1-10 The SS Man....Pages 11-17 The SS Judiciary....Pages 18-19 Criminals and Spies....Pages 20-25 The Criminal Character....Pages 26-33 The Issue of Race....Pages 34-39 From Cracow to Buchenwald....Pages 40-46 Karl Otto Koch....Pages 47-51 From Corruption to Murder....Pages 52-57 Partners in Crime....Pages 58-66 “Legal” Killing....Pages 67-73 The “Final Solution”: Conflicting Stories....Pages 74-81 Aktion Erntefest....Pages 82-85 Auschwitz....Pages 86-101 Adolf Eichmann....Pages 102-106 The Weimar Trials....Pages 107-111 Rudolf Höss and Eleonore Hodys....Pages 112-114 Out of the Fray....Pages 115-119 Postscript....Pages 120-128 Back Matter....Pages 129-190