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Although this conference has already shown us that both East and West Germany made attempts to deal with the Nazi past through the law, it is surprising to many to discover that in West-Germany an enormous number of Nazi defendants were brought to trial over 6000, in fact. A great many more about 100,000 were investigated but never tried. They sat in court accused not of crimes against humanity, but regular murder, as defined by the German penal code in 1871. In this paper I would like to shed light on these trials, and particularly on the extraordinary difficulty prosecutors had in bringing former Nazis to trial, in getting them convicted, and then finally, in ensuring they served their time. Focusing on the period between 1960 and 1980, I will argue that there was a massive divide between the young and eager prosecutors and the older, more conservative, largely former Nazi judiciary. There is no clear cut picture of complicit jurists; in nearly every state in West-Germany there was evidence of a young, committed, and probing prosecution. But they had to work within a system that was defined by the generation of jurists who came before them and who still wielded extraordinary influence over the West German judicial system; in some states, 100% of Nazi judges had maintained or returned to their former posts. These judges sent a message to the public through their interpretation of the laws that the Nazi past was being dealt with properly. They developed the notion of the middleman as neutral, and therefore innocent; this representation of Nazi crime, reinforced time and again by trial verdicts, created a society in which there was no public will to deal with the Nazi past through the law, to punish Nazism fully. This is what Joachim Perels has called a normalization of the NS system from the elites. We have discussed here the legacy of Nuremberg, and I would like to explore the legacy of West German trials of Nazi perpetrators. Through an examination of the legal reforms in the 1960s, and by giving examples from 3 major investigations The Auschwitz Trial, the RSHA investigation, and the Majdanek trial I will show that changes to the law made it easier and easier for those who had the most power in the Nazi regime the desktop murderers to go free or escape trial, and in the end really only the most sadistic and exceptional of Nazi criminals, usually camp guards, were tried and convicted of murder. On the one hand, there were thousands of trials. On the other, the continuities in the jurist's personnel made the sentences and interpretation of the laws extremely favourable to the defendants. In the past decade there has been an explosion of historical research about West German confrontation with the past; in their work, most historians point to an undeniable presence of former Nazis in all parts of public life: in the civil service, the government, academia, the press, and most especially, in the judiciary. According to Ingo Miiller, despite the best efforts of the Allies to purge the judicial system of its Nazi members, this proved to be virtually impossible as it would have left the justice system without any functionaries. Therefore, during the reconstruction period of 1945-49, the Allies made more and more exceptions to their initial rule that anyone who had even nominally participated in the Hitler regime should lose their jobs. First, all those who had retired or been fired in 1933 were called back; next, anyone who joined the party after 1937 was given a clean slate; then, for every judge with a clean record, a tainted judge could be hired; and finally, all judges who had gone through the flimsy denazification process could be brought back. This meant that by 1949, for example, 93% of court officers in Westphalia had been affiliated with the Nazi party, in Schweinfurt 100%, and in the enormous state of Bavaria, 81% of judges were former Nazis.' Astonishingly, as Joachim Perels has pointed out, historians have not been willing to make the connection between the jurists and the laws that they generated, arguing that the new laws of the Federal Republic were basically purged of any antidemocratic tendencies from the Nazi period. However, upon examination, it becomes clear that legal theorists actively introduced road blocks to the

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The Normalization of Nazi Crime in Postwar West German Trials / Die Normalisierung von NS-Kriegsverbrechen in den Nachkriegs-Prozessen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland