Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge

ISBN-13: 9781137496942 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 216 str.

Herlinde Pauer-Studer; J. David Velleman

Opis

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.

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Recenzje

"Konrad Morgen: Conscience of a Nazi Judge is the complex make-up of his rationale, all the grey areas of his humanity. People like Morgen do the right things for the wrong reasons, they hold essentially honourable principles which are nevertheless capable of being warped by the prevailing doctrines of their times." - The Jewish Chronicle

"Konrad Morgen: The Conscience of a Nazi Judge is a scrupulous and gripping account by two philosophers an Austrian and American of the confrontation of dilemmas of moral and legal philosophy by an actual person, a person not better or worse than any of us, in circumstances so unimaginably extreme that we may all hope never to have to encounter them. No hypotheticals concocted by clever academics to illustrate their ruminations on these abstractions could come close to the reality recounted here in meticulous detail, verified by unarguable documentation." - The New Rambler

"Through the words of Morgen himself, artfully intertwined with the two authors' analysis, we pick up on a character whose unswerving faith in justice led him to an untenable position that was revelaing of the utter uncompatibility of the Nazi principles and that which we cling on to in such cases: sheer humanity." - San Francisco Book Review

Spis treści

Timeline People in the Book Map of the German Reich and Polish Territories Acknowledgments Preface 1. Introduction 2. The SS Man 3. The SS Judiciary 4. Criminals and Spies 5. The Criminal Character 6. Karl-Otto Koch 7. From Corruption to Murder 8. Partners in Crime 9. 'Legal' Killing 10. The Final Solution: Conflicting Stories 11. Aktion Erntefest 12. KL Auschwitz 13. Adolf Eichmann 14. The Weimar Trials 15. Rudolf Hoess and Eleonore Hodys 16. Out of the Fray 17. Postscript Appendix 1. List of Sources Appendix 2. Documents Appendix 3. Photos

O autorze

Herlinde Pauer-Studer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. She has held fellowships from the Austrian Academy of Science and Fulbright; from 2010-21015 she held an Advanced Research Grant from the European Research Council.

J. David Velleman is a Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at New York University, USA. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.