Historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial by Mathew Turner;

Author:Mathew Turner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786724793
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

THE PAPERBACK GUTACHTEN

Bauer's resolute determination expressed at the 7 November 1962 meeting between historians and prosecutors to see the Gutachten published ‘as a paperback’, immediately after the trial, came into fruition.6 Interestingly, on the same day of this seminal pre-trial gathering – though it is unclear whether before or after – Broszat and Heiber also met with members of the Fischer publishing house in Frankfurt. A file note, written by Fischer, recognised that the two historians' primary reason for visiting Frankfurt had been to meet with prosecutors in order to discuss the possibility of writing Gutachten for upcoming Nazi crimes trials.7 According to this file note, however, the IfZ historians saw fit to ‘seize this opportunity to canvass a publishing plan, one that members of the Institute had been discussing for some time’, and that had itself been drafted in response to an earlier expression of interest in collaboration flagged by Fischer. The plan, set out in substantial detail by the IfZ historians and discussed at length, foresaw ‘a detailed representation of the interwar period, a political history of the war, and a summary of the postwar period up to 1950’, with ten planned volumes in total. Thus, the IfZ historians saw fit to advocate an expansive research plan to a publisher on the very same day Anatomy was conceived by Bauer as a post-trial work. The two plans appear to be unconnected, however, save for the date of the meetings and the fact they took place in Frankfurt. The wider Fischer project differed markedly from what would become Anatomy, with only one of the ten volumes remotely resembling the latter's content, slated to examine the role of the SS within the Nazi system of rule.

For reasons unknown, the proposed collected edition with Fischer never eventuated. In contrast, the speed and course of Anatomy's development was astonishing. In early 1964, Bauer personally arranged contractual discussions between the IfZ and Anatomy's ultimate publisher, the Swiss-based Walter-Verlag. This interaction was mentioned in a letter from Hans-Dieter Müller, the head of Walter-Verlag's contemporary history programme, who contacted Krausnick on 1 March 1964. The correspondence related to payment details and royalties for the first 6000 copies of Anatomy.8 This contact took place just two days after Broszat gave evidence from the witness box in Frankfurt. The speed of this transition from trial reports into the chapters that formed Anatomy was frenetic, and caught the IfZ's regular, Stuttgart-based publisher Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt off-guard. On 24 July 1964, its representative Felix Berner contacted Krausnick and appeared to be oblivious to the negotiations already taking place with another publisher. In the context of a discussion around further collected editions of Gutachten – as had appeared in 1958 – Berner suggested the inclusion or separate publication of the trial Gutachten as quickly as possible. On this correspondence, however, there is one statement that its recipient, Krausnick, saw reason to single out with a visible question mark next to it. Berner reminds Krausnick – with the words ‘as you will

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