Konrad Morgen

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.

The remarkable true story of the man tasked by the Nazis with prosecuting crimes at concentration camps. In autumn 1943, SS judge Konrad Morgen—a graduate of the Hague Academy of International Law—visited Auschwitz concentration camp to investigate an intercepted parcel containing gold sent from the camp. While there, Morgen found the SS camp guards engaged in widespread theft and corruption. Worse, Morgen also discovered that inmates were being killed without authority from the SS leadership. While millions of Jews were being exterminated under the Final Solution program, Konrad Morgen set about gathering evidence of these “illegal murders.” Morgen also visited other camps, such as Buchenwald, where he had the notorious camp commandant Karl Koch and Ilse, his sadistic spouse, arrested and charged. Found guilty by an SS court, Koch was sentenced to death. Remarkably, the apparently fearless SS judge also tried to prosecute other Nazi criminals including Waffen-SS commanders Oskar Dirlewanger and Hermann Fegelein and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. He even claimed to have tried to indict Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for organizing the mass deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps. This intriguing work reveals how the lines between justice and injustice became blurred in the Third Reich. As well as describing the actions of this often-contradictory character, the author questions Morgen’s motives and delves into his postwar life—which included both testifying at Nuremberg and being investigated for crimes himself.

This volume provides an in-depth discussion of Saul Friedlander's landmark two-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews. It brings together a range of internationally acclaimed historians to address the manifold conceptual and historiographical issues raised in Friedlander's monumental work. It includes a major essay by Friedlander himself on the challenges of producing an integrated history of the Holocaust. The aim of this book is not simply to evaluate Friedlander's work on its own merits, but rather to use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. The central concern is to situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as to explore the ways in which his book opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Shoah in particular and twentieth century genocide in general.

In autumn 1943, SS judge Konrad Morgen visited Auschwitz concentration camp to investigate an intercepted parcel containing gold sent from the camp. While there Morgen found the SS camp guards engaged in widespread theft and corruption. Worse, Morgen also discovered that inmates were being killed without authority from the SS leadership. While millions of Jews were being exterminated under the Final Solution program, Konrad Morgen set about gathering evidence of these 'illegal murders'. Morgen also visited other camps such as Buchenwald where he had the notorious camp commandant Karl Koch and Ilse, his sadistic spouse, arrested and charged. Found guilty by an SS court, Koch was sentenced to death. Remarkably, the apparently fearless SS judge also tried to prosecute other Nazi criminals including Waffen-SS commanders Oskar Dirlewanger and Hermann Fegelein and Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. He even claimed to have tried to indict Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for organizing the mass deportation of the Jews to the extermination camps. This intriguing work reveals how the lines between justice and injustice became blurred in the Third Reich. As well as describing the actions of this often contradictory character the author questions Morgen's motives.

Examines Nazi legal theory, the normative ideas driving the Führer state and the legal subtext to the regime's escalating atrocities.

Nazi Germany, June 1943, Buchenwald concentration camp. The last place you'd expect to find any form of justice. And yet justice against the SS men who brutalised the prisoners here would be attempted by the unlikeliest of sources – SS officer Konrad Morgen. Nazi Germany, despite the atrocities it carried out on an industrial scale, still had legislation and a legal system, and Morgen used these laws to bring individual members of the SS to justice for their crimes. He was a fearless investigating judge and police official, and when he crossed swords with more powerful forces inside the SS, he was demoted and sent by Heinrich Himmler himself to the Eastern Front as an ordinary soldier in the Waffen SS. But Morgen's skills were still required and he returned to launch a series of criminal investigations in various concentration camps, including Buchenwald. As a direct result of his work, two concentration camp commandants were shot before the end of the war and he arrested three others. Targets of his investigations included Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, and Rudolf Höss, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz. Described by historian John Toland as 'the man who did the most to hinder the atrocities in the East', Konrad Morgen pursued Nazi Germany's worst murderers from inside the SS. This is his incredible true story.

Spy, businessman, bon vivant, Nazi Party member, Righteous Gentile. This was Oskar Schindler, the controversial savior of almost 12,000 Jews during the Holocaust who struggled afterwards to rebuild his life and gain international recognition for his wartime deeds. Author David Crowe examines every phase of the subject's life in this landmark biography, presenting a figure of mythic proportions that one prominent Schindler Jew described as “an extraordinary man in extraordinary times.”

After WWII, Ilse Koch became known worldwide as the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” She was assuredly guilty of atrocities, but the most sensational crimes ascribed to her by prosecutors and newspapers went unproven. Tomaz Jardim reveals how Koch’s perceived betrayal of womanhood sealed her fate as a scapegoat for a society seeking absolution.