Bremen (Weltexpresso) – What legitimacy does a man who considers the Auschwitz trial superfluous have to expose Hannah Arendt’s book „Eichmann in Jerusalem“ to public ridicule, as Robert Probst lets us know in the feature section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 10 January?
It is still hard to believe how condescendingly and entirely in the spirit of the trivialisers of neo-Nazism the man has spoken about the meaning and purpose of the trials of Nazi criminals. If one asks whether there was a need for punishment in German society with regard to the Nazi perpetrators and whether the peace of the law would have been jeopardised without the punishment of the „henchmen“, then the answer can only be a clear „no“.
Werner Renz wrote this in 2001 in the newsletter of the Frankfurt Fritz Bauer Institute, where he was head of documentation at the time. Now he calls Hannah Arendt’s book, in which the whole horror of the criminal world of Nazism comes to life, a „grab bag“. The accused SS perpetrators had behaved impeccably as citizens of the Federal Republic and there was no danger of them relapsing into criminal behaviour ordered by the state, nor was there any suspicion of a lack of loyalty to the democratic state. Obviously the reviewer of the Süddeutsche Zeitung had no idea about any of this, otherwise he would probably have refrained from commenting that Renz had done „commendable work“ with his analysis, which helped to categorise the controversy from 1963. It is particularly important, he said, because the phrase „banality of evil“ still plays a major role today.
With all due respect, how commendable can the work of a man on Hannah Arendt be who did not shy away from speaking of „criminal law theatre“ in connection with the Auschwitz trial, as the legal philosopher Gerd Roellecke did before him, who accused the initiator of the trial, the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer, of having unlawful intentions in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
How commendable can the work of a man who repeatedly took sides with the defendants in the Auschwitz trial be? In 2012, for example, he wrote that it could be assumed in favour of the Nazi perpetrators that they had occasionally had a guilty conscience. Almost all of them were of the opinion that they would not be held criminally responsible. In this respect, Fritz Bauer must not have been free from doubts of conscience towards them, Renz claims without proof.
All this has been known for a long time and Robert Probst could have known it. The former investigating judge in the Auschwitz trial, Heinz Düx, discovered passages in an essay by Renz that could be seen as a dismantling and disavowal of Fritz Bauer. Now, Werner Renz has taken a look at a book by Holocaust survivor Hannah Ahrend and ranks it among the fun articles sold at fun fairs. He calls it a „grab bag“ because anyone could pull out whatever they wanted from it.
