A BOOK EVERYONE SHOULD READ
Philippe Sands’s investigation into genocide is riveting required reading
DON’T be misled by the subtitle with its hint of dusty legal libraries. Philippe Sands (pictured above), though he is a legal academic, has created an utterly compelling book. Its heart is in the city of Lvov, or Lwow, or Lemburg, and currently Lviv, one of those places that has lurched between the Austrian empire, Poland, Russia, Germany and now Ukraine, changing its name to suit its masters.
Linked to the city are four men: Sands’s grandfather Leon Buchholz, who was born there; Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, who were both involved in the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials; and one of the nastiest men in the dock, Hans Frank, the brutal governor of German-occupied Poland who was known as “the butcher of Warsaw”.
Sands interweaves the personal stories of his characters with wider issues. The three Jews — Buchholz, Lauterpacht and Lemkin — escaped from the Nazis. Most members of their extended families were not so fortunate. Like many Holocaust survivors, none of them spoke much about their family history, and Sands has searched records, across Europe and beyond, to piece together the scandals, loves, disasters and day-to-day happenings that make up the human condition.
He does the same for Frank, though there is less about his childhood. During the 1930s, he was Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer. Sands made contact with Frank’s youngest son, Niklas, and the two struck up a surprising friendship. Some of the most moving passages in the book are those dealing with Niklas Frank, who keeps a photograph of the body of his hanged father in his wallet: “To make sure he is dead.” How the children of war criminals deal with their patrimony has been the subject of many studies: here Sands gives us the stark reality in a poignant portrait.
He opens and closes his book with the Nuremberg Trials, and again, he makes his retelling personal, mentioning the 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg, in which Spencer Tracy as a judge flirted with Marlene Dietrich as the widow of a German officer. While the reader knows the outcome of the trials, in places Sands’s book reads like a legal thriller.
Lauterpacht and Lemkin were not friends, and their different approaches to war crimes play out to this day. Lauterpacht’s focus was on crimes against humanity, dealing with the individual, while Lemkin’s passion was for the group, whether defined by race or some other criterion. Before the war Lemkin had been involved in trying to avenge the mass killing of Armenians by Turks, and from him came the notion of genocide.
It was not always popular: the Americans were nervous that if genocide appeared on the statute books, their treatment of the Native American population could come under scrutiny. Lemkin, a volatile, emotional character, managed to get genocide mentioned in the Nuremberg judgment, but it was only later that the UN did what the Nuremberg judges failed to do and made genocide a crime under international law.
Sands deals with the debate, ongoing to this day, in a measured manner. Perhaps now, more than half-a-century after Nuremberg, genocide has inched ahead in the hierarchy of crimes. But, as Sands points out, by focusing on the group over the individual, there is potentially an increased risk of a group being singled out and targeted. All this makes for a thoughtprovoking, profound and immensely readable book; it hardly matters whether your taste is for legal argument or human stories.