The court’s verdict — Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years imprisonment only to be released pending appeal — aroused controversy, more here than abroad. Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles called Demjanjuk’s release “an insult to his victims and the survivors.” Yet the survivors and relatives of victims I spoke to generally expressed satisfaction with the Solomonic verdict. Little was to be gained by jailing the nonagenarian as his appeals wended through the court system. More important was the conviction itself, the fact that a German court had finally managed — nearly seven decades after the fact — to condemn one of the thousands of auxiliaries who served as the foot soldiers of genocide.

Germany rightfully enjoys the reputation as having succeeded in the difficult collective task known as Vergangenhetstbewältigung – confronting the past. While Turkey and Japan continue vehemently to dispute any responsibility for crimes of genocidal sweep, while Spain brings criminal charges against a local magistrate who dares to investigate Franco-era crimes, Germany has emerged as the poster boy for national self-reckoning, the land willing to face down its monstrous past. The casual tourist in Berlin cannot escape the public memorials to atrocity that dot the urban landscape with a mushroom-like plentitude. And when all else fails, German law serves as the muscle of memory, stepping in to prosecute those who would deny the Holocaust.

And yet when it came to bringing Nazi perpetrators to the bar of justice, the German legal system managed to amass a record of impressive failure that stretched back to its founding days. Hans Globke, the jurist who penned the law forcing all Jews to adopt Sarah or Israel as a middle name, enjoyed a stellar postwar career as Konrad Adenauer’s closest advisor. In early 1960, Fritz Bauer, the famous German-Jewish prosecutor, passed intelligence concerning Adolf Eichmann’s Argentine whereabouts to Mossad and not to his own intelligence office out of fears that Germany would botch or sabotage any trial.

More to the point, the vast majority of those who participated in the extermination process never faced criminal charges, and those unlucky few who found themselves indicted were either acquitted outright or received minor punishment. This was largely the consequence of a calamitous holding by postwar German courts that mere service as a concentration camp guard didn’t constitute a crime. Only if one had engaged in some value-added act of violence — such as the unauthorized killing of an inmate — could a former guard be found guilty of a crime. This calculus essentially used Nazi standards of legality in assessing the guilt of camp guards; or to put it another way, postwar German courts condemned only those former functionaries who could have been condemned by the SS’s own tribunals.

In this regard, Demjanjuk’s conviction in Munich represented an important corrective — though admittedly one long in coming. The Munich court accepted a novel theory of criminal responsibility specifically tailored to the realities of genocide. Sobibor, it needs to be recalled, was a pure extermination facility; its sole purpose was the killing of Jews. According to the prosecution, this meant that all Sobibor guards by necessity had been involved in the killing process. That the prosecution couldn’t prove Demjanjuk had beaten to death an inmate or shot another was immaterial; Demjanjuk had to have been an accessory to murder because as a Sobibor guard, that was his job. Once the prosecution was able to prove that Demjanjuk had served at Sobibor — which, despite the persistence of claims to the contrary, it was able to do beyond any reasonable doubt — its case was over. The theory was simple, irresistible in its logic, and yet no court in the Federal Republic had managed to embrace it — that is, before the court in Munich this past May.

It is, of course, regrettable that the German court system took more than a half-century to self-correct. Clearly there is something ironic about a precedent so late it coming that it will furnish no legal legacy.  Yet such is the fate of the Demjanjuk case. In the weeks after the conviction, German prosecutors announced their intention to use the novel holding to reopen long-moldering cases, but whether any of these will go to trial remains doubtful. Actuarial realities certainly make this less than likely.

Those inclined to cynicism may also find significance in the fact that this belated self-correction came in a case involving a non-German who served invisibly at the very bottom of the SS’s exterminatory hierarchy. True, Demjanjuk was no Eichmann; he was not even a Nazi, and never would have found service as a death camp guard had the former soldier in the Red Army not been taken as a POW by the Wehrmacht. But what does this prove? The fact that other, more senior functionaries in the exterminatory process lived out their lives unruffled by prosecutors conferred no immunity on an underling in genocide. And without the Demjanjuks of the world, the death camp system could not have functioned.

Few if any rue Demjanjuk’s death. Had his conviction been upheld on appeal, the nonagenarian would have faced imprisonment, a result his lawyers dreaded. And yet the prosecution also feared the appellate process, as the high court might have proved less receptive to its novel theory of responsibility than the trial chamber. In any case, his death brings us one step closer to the day when the Holocaust will pass from the memory of those who lived it and become an artifact of history. And it certainly brings to a close the era of galvanic Nazi atrocity trials that stretches back to Nuremberg. That this era should end not with a Goering or an Eichmann or even a Barbie in the dock is less ironic than it is fitting. The Holocaust was not accomplished through the acts of Nazi statesmen, SS bureaucrats and Gestapo henchmen alone. It was made possible by the Demjanjuks of the world, the thousands of lowly foot soldiers of genocide.

This grim fact is the jumping-off point for “Elusive Justice” (Tuesday, PBS; check local listings), a documentary by Jonathan Silvers about Holocaust survivors (and victims) and the German war criminals that still weigh on their minds nearly 70 years after the end of the war. Narrated by Candice Bergen, the movie hits some of the expected topics and people, including the Nuremberg Trials and the efforts of Weisenthal (who disliked being called a “Nazi hunter” because so much of his work consisted of sifting through documents) and Asher Ben Natan, who funded and organized ex-Nazi-tracking operations in Europe.

But for the most part, the movie loiters around the edges of the best-known events, delving into stories that we haven’t heard before, and philosophies and feelings we rarely hear articulated in a documentary like this one. And it pays special attention to the mid-level officers, party officials and anonymous citizens who carried out orders from the top. Some of these people fled to other countries after 1945, but most returned to their pre-war lives. One survivor asks, “Why the hell should they sleep like babies while I have nightmares?”

The film contains much unresolved discussion of the difference between justice and vengeance, and how the Nuremberg tribunal was created in order to head off an international wave of vigilante mayhem. A couple of once-persecuted Jews who killed Nazis during and after the war offer a spirited defense of vengeance. At one point the film suggests that despite the noble intent behind the Nuremberg Trials, they might have inadvertently hurt the long-term cause of justice, by making most of the world subconsciously believe that it was all over and the good guys won and there was no need to trouble our minds with any of it.

One of the movie’s subjects is an elderly Viennese man who narrowly survived being euthanized at the notorious Am Spielgelgrund clinic, where children deemed “undesirable” by the government were experimented on or killed and then dissected. In 1997, when the filmmaker was an ABC News producer, he managed to track down Dr. Heinrich Gross, who once ran the clinic, and interviewed him on a public street. “If you didn’t do what you were told, you would have been killed by the Nazis,” the elderly doctor said at the time — the justification of so many mid-level participants in war crimes. Three years after the ABC report aired, the doctor was charged with complicity in mass murder. The trial ended four days after it started when the presiding judge declared Gross medically unfit to stand trial. He died in his home in 2005. “And that was our so-called justice,” says one of the doctor’s victims.

“Death in the City of Light” recounts the infamous case of Marcel Petiot, a physician believed to have killed over 60 people in Paris between 1942 and 1944, under the Nazi occupation of the city. King presents the story as a procedural, beginning with the day in March 1944 when residents in the chic 16th arrondissement complained of a foul smoke billowing out of a neighboring townhouse. When attempts to rouse the house’s inhabitants proved fruitless, the fire department was called. In the basement, they found a coal stove with the “charred remains of a human hand” sticking out of it. Body parts and bones littered the floor. Further police investigations discovered a pit in which numerous corpses in various stages of decay had been covered with quicklime. In total, over 11 pounds of human hair would be gathered from the remains.

If King’s book has a protagonist, it’s police detective Victor Massu (an inspiration for Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret), who picked up the case at the beginning. Determining, capturing and convicting the culprit, however, would prove supremely challenging in a city whose civil institutions were hopelessly compromised under Nazi rule. It was difficult for anyone to sort out wrong from right. For example, the patrolmen initially dispatched to the scene allowed a man claiming to be the brother of the owner to enter the building and take away some undetermined piece of evidence. Why? Because he assured them that the house was a Resistance outpost and that the bodies inside it were the remains of “Germans and traitors to our country.” Later, they learned that the man was in fact Petiot, the house’s owner and the prime suspect.

People were disappearing from Nazi-occupied Paris in droves. Some escaped to Spain and beyond via clandestine networks. Others vanished into the prisons of the Gestapo; you could be arrested for something as simple as wearing red, white and blue on Bastille Day. Above all, the city’s Jewish population was subject to raids and deportations, plucked from their homes or off the streets and loaded into trains destined for death camps, never to be seen again. This made identifying the dismembered and mutilated remains in Petiot’s charnel house extremely difficult, especially given that the parts of the bodies most useful to this process were missing.

King sketches this background in brisk, workmanly prose. At first it seems a bit too workmanly, but as the case evolves into a bizarre farrago of false identities, paranoia, wild goose chases, rumors, secret agendas and outright delusion — all liberally sprinkled with Gallic histrionics — the choice makes perfect sense. Authorial flourishes would be superfluous in a story already replete with penny-dreadful details: a mysterious femme fatale, a coffin stuffed with treasure just before it was interred, a crime boss who “obsessively collected” rare dahlias and orchids and entertained socialites in his lavish townhouse while members of the Resistance were tortured in the cellars beneath, and so on.

The authorities finally caught Petiot after a seven-month search. By then, Paris had been liberated — an event described with crisp brio by King — and Massu had been charged with collaboration, losing his job. (He was later fully exonerated.) The doctor was deliberately goaded into revealing himself by a newspaper that ran the wild testimony of a witness (who later disappeared), alleging that Petiot was a cocaine smuggler who hired prostitutes to have sex with other men while he watched and who wore German uniforms to hunt down Resistance fighters. Outraged, Petiot sent the paper a long, handwritten note filled with clues that led to his apprehension. He was working under a false identity as a captain in the counterespionage service, where he participated in the investigation of his own crimes.

Petiot’s trial gave him further occasion to display his almost superhuman brazenness. He was accused of operating a false “escape agency,” promising to spirit people out of France, then killing them and stealing their valuables. Petiot maintained that he had worked for a Resistance operation, called “Fly-Tox,” that “liquidated” collaborators and informants. He painted his victims — including several Jews fleeing Nazi persecution — as Gestapo agents. He admitted to killing scores of people, just not the ones found in the townhouse. Those corpses, he insisted, had been planted there by the Gestapo in order to frame him.

The trial quickly became a three-ring circus — a situation exacerbated by the French judicial process, which allows civil attorneys hired by victims’ families as well as prosecutors to question witnesses and permits the participants (including the defendant) to interrupt testimony and statements. The quick-witted Petiot lambasted his enemies with barbed jokes and accusations of collaboration, capitalizing on the uneasiness everyone felt in the aftermath of the war. He nearly came to blows with one attorney while on the stand.

Petiot was not the only one to misbehave. Incredibly, the presiding magistrate was quoted describing the accused as “an unbelievable demon” and “an appalling murderer” in the press while the trial was in process and yet no mistrial was declared. The public fought over spots in the overflowing courtroom, then camped out, munching on sausages and sandwiches and shouting remarks like spectators at a sporting match. It was the best show in town. The writer Colette turned up to report on the trial, and such luminaries as Prince Rainier of Monaco and the duke of Windsor requested seats.

King has unearthed new evidence (a first-person account of the early days of the investigation written by Massu not long after the trial) to counter the widespread assumption that Petiot killed his victims via lethal injections. He also suspects that Petiot had powerful protectors in the Occupation regime and presents a convincing case for those suspicions. But the most startling impression left by “Death in the City of Light,” is of Paris itself, confronting the bestiality lurking behind its supremely civilized facade, and of the handful of Parisiennes who tried to serve justice in spite of it.

“Failing republics”! Why does Joseph Farah not believe in American exceptionalism?

Also, I know this is entirely beside the point, but: Hitler wasn’t ever elected president. He was appointed chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg. (The “loophole” that allowed Hitler to assume that office was that he legally obtained German citizenship.) When Hindenburg died, Hitler left the presidency vacant and (illegally) assumed the power of the office, but not the title. In other words: Hitler, who was legally eligible to be the president of Germany, was never the president of Germany.

Joseph Farah can’t even competently compare Obama to Hitler. This is basic wingnut stuff!

That’s the point. In the book’s prologue, Larson tells of his long-standing interest in what it was like to witness the “gathering dark of Hitler’s rule.” Certain perceptive individuals could see exactly where Germany was going, but the vast majority did not. You could even say that the rise of the Third Reich is primarily a story about what regular people failed to notice or to take seriously until it was too late. The two Americans Larson has chosen to focus on in this book are William Dodd, who was the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his daughter, Martha, who socialized with many crucial figures of the period.

“In the Garden of Beasts” dwells primarily on the first year of Dodd’s tenure in Berlin, from the summer of 1933, when the ambassador and his family arrived, willing to give the new government the benefit of the doubt and stirred by Germany’s mood of energetic renewal, to the summer of 1934, when they were utterly disillusioned and repulsed. The climactic event is the Night of the Long Knives, June 30, 1934, when Hitler ordered a political purge that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of his critics and rivals, many of them friends and acquaintance of the Dodds.

William and Martha Dodd weren’t entirely ordinary people, of course, but neither were they especially shrewd or insightful. The chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago, Dodd was something like seventh or eighth on FDR’s list of candidates for the post; none of the others wanted the job. Intelligent and hardworking, a “Jefferson Democrat” with a penchant for amateur farming and a man of unimpeachable integrity, Dodd had hoped for an assignment to an undemanding country like Belgium, where he’d have the time to work on his magnum opus, a history of the antebellum South. He was ambivalent from the start, claiming not to be “the sly, two-faced type so necessary to ‘lie abroad for the country.’” That’s a pretty fair self-assessment; he had little gift for diplomacy.

Martha was in her mid-20s, pretty and bright but (by her own measure) “flighty.” She’d been the assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune and had an affair with Carl Sandburg and a deep friendship with Thornton Wilder. An old friend compared her to Scarlett O’Hara — another fair assessment, as she made a habit of flirting and playing her suitors off against each other. By the time she decided to accompany her father to Berlin, Martha already had a secret marriage under her belt, although she and her banker husband were estranged.

In Berlin, Martha’s escapades (she had affairs with several Nazis, including Rudolf Diels, the first commander of the Gestapo, and one of her ex-lovers even tried to fix her up with Hitler) quietly scandalized the locals. “I must have appeared a most naive and stubborn young American, a vexation to all sensible people I knew,” she would later observe. She was also swayed by the theater of Nazi politics (which was designed to appeal to adolescent mentalities exactly like hers), writing to Wilder: “Wholesome and beautiful lads, these Germans, good, sincere, healthy, mystic, brutal, fine, hopeful, capable of death and love, deep, rich, wondrous and strange these youths.”

Her father had a leveler head — perhaps too level. His great weakness, according to Larson, was that he saw the world “as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people.” Although born and educated in the South, he resembled the quintessential Midwesterner: industrious, conscientious, principled and self-effacing but also a bit dull. It did not help that he harbored what Larson calls a “rudimental anti-Semitism” and once told the German foreign minister, “We have had difficulty now and then in the United States with Jews who had gotten too much of a hold on certain departments of intellectual and business life.” Like many, many Americans at that time, Dodd expected Hitler’s reign to be short-lived and regarded reports of Nazi persecution and harassment as exaggerations or isolated incidents.

Their first year in Berlin stripped both Dodds of such comforting illusions. (Dodd’s wife and grown son were also with them, but William and Martha left the most extensive written accounts of their German years.) Martha, whose circle included both members and critics of the regime, finally got the message when she and a dissident friend paid a visit to the author Hans Fallada, who had supposedly come to some sort of accommodation with the Nazis. “I saw the stamp of naked fear on a writer’s face for the first time,” she recalled, although considering some of what she had witnessed before that, she could well be faulted for not taking the terrorizing of non-writers more seriously. Martha also commenced a passionate affair with a staff member of the Soviet embassy, and this stoked her growing interest in communism. (He turned out to have considerably mixed motives.)

William Dodd eventually grasped what he was dealing with in Germany, although he held out hope that Hitler would self-moderate for a surprisingly long time. It was seeing the Führer fume maniacally about “the Jews” that finally impressed the truth on him. After he returned from Berlin, Dodd went on speaking tours around the States, warning his fellow Americans of Hitler’s murderous, imperialist intent and the futility of isolationism; it would earn him a reputation for foresight. However, the U.S. consul general, George S. Messersmith, knew all of this even before Dodd arrived in Germany, and sent many similar warnings back to Washington, to little effect. The administration and Congress were preoccupied with the Depression and the droughts that had turned the prairie states into dust bowls; their priority was coaxing the Germans into repaying the millions of dollars they’d borrowed from American creditors.

Why did it take Dodd so long to wise up? Partly, you just had to be there for a while, as Messersmith had, but the ambassador was also distracted. “In the Garden of Beasts” provides an excellent case study in the folly of sweating the little stuff. Dodd was often caught up in battling the “Pretty Good Club,” a cadre of wealthy men who accepted ambassadorial appointments and maintained lavish standards of living and entertaining in foreign capitals. The frugal Dodd wished to make the State Department more “democratic” and practical, and insisted on living on his own humble salary. He also squandering any store of good will back home by perpetually scolding his colleagues for their profligacy — lengthy international cables made him particularly irate.

The State Department’s elitism was a real problem, so Dodd had a point. It’s just that it was a relatively trivial point compared to the threat posed by the Nazis’ burgeoning power and militarism. The patricians back home, not surprisingly, bridled at his nagging and wrote him off as a tedious, penny-pinching prig who lack the imposing style required to bring the Germans to heel. When he really needed their help and support, he would find himself flapping in the wind.

Whether Dodd could have done much to restrain Hitler isn’t clear — Larson seems to think not. When he finally understood what he needed to do, he certainly tried his best, and behaved with courage. Perhaps a man more suited to “lie for the country” (in other words, a worldlier person with more charm) might have made a difference. At the very least, William and Martha Dodd’s story serves as a reminder of how easy it is to be mistaken about what really matters.

The AP explains the verdict:

Demjanjuk was charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was accused of being a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. There was no evidence he committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing — the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

Born in the Ukraine, Demjanjuk moved to the U.S. after World War II and became an American citizen; his U.S. citizenship has been twice revoked since. In the 1980s, he was tried in Israel on war crimes charges and found guilty of being “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka; the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court when evidence linking the infamous extermination camp guard to a different name emerged.

The details of Demjanjuk’s case since the late 1970s, when the account of his past that he had provided on his citizenship application was first questioned, are intricate; this BBC profile offers a useful chronological primer.

Over the years since Demjanjuk’s case first reached international prominence, it has — not surprisingly — attracted attention from political and cultural commentators alike. Pat Buchanan once crusaded for the man he called an “American Dreyfus,” explaining in 2008 that he believed the Germans only wanted to bring Demjanjuk to trial so that he might “serve as the sacrificial lamb whose blood washes away the stain of Germany’s sins;” Demjanjuk’s Israeli trial also served as the setting for psychological intrigue in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel “Operation Shylock: A Confession.”