The Holocaust as the Object of West German Criminal Justice

The object of a criminal trial is the conduct and guilt of an individual defendant. Codes of Criminal Procedure are not designed for the adjudication of large-scale historical events, and yet courts are compelled to do just that when individual crimes were committed in the course of a state-organised genocideGenocide like the HolocaustHolocaust. In such cases, the large-scale workings of history inevitably move into the focus of criminal justice, but there is a major qualification: Judges remain bound by the procedural requirements of a criminal trial; and unlike historians, they are obligated to consider only legally admissible evidence and observe the principle of in dubio pro reo. Thus, while the applicable legal norms demand the judicial processing of the past, they simultaneously restrict the extent to which it is possible.