Americans, Germans and war crimes justice : law, memory and "the good war" / James J. Weingartner.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The legal prosecution of war criminals in Germany for deeds committed during World War II has attracted a fair degree of historical interest. However, Americans, Germans, and War Crime Justice chooses an interesting and new approach by comparing the way the U.S. military justice system dealt with atrocities committed against its own soldiers and the way it prosecuted American servicemen who illegally killed enemy prisoners of war or civilians during the war. It does so by focusing on two incidents. By far the most space is devoted to the case of seven American flyers who were captured, abused, and killed after their B-17 was forced to crash-land on the German North Sea island of Borkum on August 4, 1944. The second case study deals with the unprovoked killing of six (and possibly two more) German civilians by 2nd Lt. Robert A. Schneeweiss of the Thirty-Sixth Tank Battalion, and three of his men in the German town of Voerde on March 27, 1945. In addition, the author makes repeated references to the better-known killings of prisoners of war at Biscari, Sicily (by U.S. troops), and Malmedy, Belgium (by German SS troops). As the author of two books on the Malmedy case and a number of articles on World War II war crimes and trials, James J. Weingartner is a recognized expert in the field, and it clearly shows. The book is thoroughly researched and written with authority, and the two incidents as well as their judicial aftermaths are described in great detail and carefully contextualized. The narrative concludes with a discussion of how these incidents are remembered (or forgotten) in Germany and the United States and what this tells us about the culture of memory in both countries. Despite its undeniable strengths, the book would have benefited from a thorough editing to eliminate the frequent repetition of facts or misspellings of German words. Although the comparative approach is interesting, its benefits are not always clear. The fact that the U.S. Army showed greater leniency toward its own men than toward the defeated enemy is hardly surprising, and Weingartner{u2019}s conclusion 2that German and American collective memories regarding the Second World War are approximate opposites of each other3 is somewhat too general if one looks, for example, at the perception of the campaign in North Africa (pages 211). Another question is whether the atrocities on Borkum and in Voerde can{u2014}or should{u2014}be compared at all, as they have hardly anything in common. Unfortunately, Weingartner makes no attempt to discuss the methodological or theoretical problems raised by the book{u2019}s comparative approach, although he is aware of the possible moral dilemma created by it and frequently stresses that he does not want to equate the crimes committed by Nazi Germany with the transgressions of U.S. soldiers. Overall, the book adds little of substance to Weingartner{u2019}s excellent article 2Americans, Germans, and War Crimes: Converging Narratives from {u2018}the Good War,{u2019}3 which was published in this journal in March 2008 and deals with the same topic.