Historical Responsibility at Hammelsgasse 1

Whenever Germany applies universal jurisdiction, abstract allusions to the country’s historical responsibility abound. Responsibility is a state of being; but eight decades after the end of the Second World War, increasingly fewer people appear to comprehend what, exactly, historical responsibility means. To transport its meaning, we must refocus on the concrete. The recent trial of Alaa M presents a good opportunity for this.

Whispers in the Walls

When presiding judge Koller pronounced former Syrian doctor Alaa M guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes against persons, and murder last month in Frankfurt, he referred to Nuremberg, though in a somewhat unconventional fashion: Koller spoke not of Germany’s much alluded to historical responsibility, but cited that section of the International Military Tribunal’s judgement which highlighted that crimes are committed by concrete individuals rather than abstract entities. Granted, there are many lessons one could learn from Nuremberg. And the connection between Germany’s historical responsibility and its current international criminal law enforcement efforts is – for reasons of democratic separation of powers – one best made by politicians, not judges. And yet, the reason why Koller was instinctively right to omit reference to historical responsibility via Nuremberg sits closer to home: Had he wanted to make this connection, he need not have searched for it in Bavaria. It would have sufficed to exit the Frankfurt courthouse and look at its outer walls.

This post is an invitation to look. While we should continue to speak about Germany’s historical responsibility in academic and political debates about universal jurisdiction, there is value in considering the almost curiously concrete dimensions this responsibility sometimes – in fact, surprisingly often – takes. Instead of shrouding the already vague idea of historical responsibility in even vaguer allusions, we would be well-advised to remember Koller’s Nuremberg: the concrete, rather than the abstract.

The outer walls of courthouse E of the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt carry a plaque that opens with a 1985 quote from former President of the Federal Republic of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker whose father had been sentenced in Nuremberg at the Ministries Trial, though the plaque does not mention this fact. In the quote, Weizsäcker warns about closing one’s eyes to the past, lest one becomes blind to the present. What follows is information about what had once stood “in this place”, namely the “Hammelsgasse”, a formerly Prussian institution that the Nazis had used during their reign as a site from which to send detainees and prisoners to places where they’d be tortured or killed. In its lieu now stands courthouse E, in which the abovementioned criminal trial had unfolded, as well as ended, with the conviction of Alaa M for – notably but not exclusively: torturing detainees.

Mass Atrocities beyond Place and Time

But this physical connection is not the only one between the recent trial and Nazi crimes. During the trial in the criminal case against Alaa M, Prof Dr Rothschild, director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Cologne, testified as an expert witness. In addition to sharing his expertise with regards to physical traces of torture, Prof Rothschild also spoke of bodily signs of extreme malnutrition, such as thickened skin around the eyebrows. He added that he had never encountered such symptoms outside of textbooks – a statement that bears special weight given Prof Rothschild’s extensive experience in this domain, including in the context of the former Yugoslavia. These skin symptoms had been previously documented in relation to seafaring and – more to the point – concentration camps, Rothschild noted. The Syrian Justice and Accountability Center’s trial monitor, who watched the testimony live, reported that “it became clear that the last time evidence for such a treatment became public, was during the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi-regime in Germany.”

Prof Rothschild had furthermore been tasked with verifying torture methods used in Syria, which included the so-called “German chair”. While the use of this method could not be ascertained in this trial of Alaa M, the “German chair” had also featured in another trial (see for example p.103), the subject of which was torture in Syria, namely the al-Khatib trial in Koblenz that concluded in 2022. The “German chair” is aptly so named, because this method is thought to have been introduced to Syria by fugitive Nazis, notably Alois Brunner. Though there is some controversy around this with some claiming that the method had instead possibly been invented in the German Democratic Republic, present-day Germany’s past is implicated either way.

Responsibility Is a State of Being

Now, what should be made of these concrete connections? Are these simply observations that the more anthropologically-minded among us note with intellectual curiosity? Empirical bits that make for catching article openings?

There is real value in grounding oneself in the concrete. Anyone researching mass violence and human rights violations can testify to the intuitive truthfulness of the fact that the emotional impact of reading about an individual’s fate often trumps that of encountering numbers – even if these numbers range in the hundreds of thousands or millions. Though concrete in their own way, numbers, especially high ones, feel abstract. The reason for this is probably deeply human; some such scales of violence may simply be beyond the reach of our comprehension. Keeping the conversation this abstract risks failing to reach us at an emotional level, making it easier to forget.

This risk is real: 80 years after the end of the Second World War, parts of the German public seem to tire of historical responsibility invocations. This year’s elections to the Bundestag saw the AfD, one of Germany’s right-wing extremist parties, sore to over 20%. This marks the scary electoral success of a party whose honorary chairman has notoriously called Hitler and the Nazis “bird droppings” in an otherwise millennium-long successful German history, minimising Nazi crimes in terms that frankly sound even more radical in the German original. But the issue touches the highest echelons of German politics, too: In a recent television interview given to Fox News, Chancellor Merz blamed immigrants for “a type of imported antisemitism.” He, whose grandfather – much like von Weizsäcker’s father, though arguably to a lesser degree – is known to have been implicated in the Nazi regime, appears to have forgotten. Of course, this familial legacy is one that Merz and Weizsäcker share with many Germans. But this fact accentuates my point; what is public knowledge should be harder to collectively forget.

Whispering Walls, All Around

Remember that the Weizsäcker quote from above speaks also, arguably even primarily, to the danger of becoming blind to the present. At a time when historical responsibility and especially interpretations about its lessons for present-day Germany are contested, even weaponised, Weizsäcker’s remarks seem pertinent in this regard, too. Though now somewhat attenuated, Merz’s invitation of Netanyahu to Germany is an example of this. Apart from being dangerous and shocking, his blatant disregard of international law, including the statement that the ICC’s alleged labelling of the Israeli Prime Minister as a “war criminal” was “scandalous”, is also a cocky assumption of Deutungshoheit (a difficult-to-translate German term meaning something resembling prerogative of interpretation). Germany has been loving its relatively newfound role as a champion of international criminal law, a pioneer of its enforcement, especially with regards to universal jurisdiction. Whereas the praise levelled at Germany originates in real, and laudable, efforts – seeing as it is the state that applies universal jurisdiction the most (see table 1, p. 1189) – it appears as though the accolade has gotten at least into Chancellor Merz’s head. This comes, moreover, at a time when he himself continues to contribute to the decline of Germany’s repute in this very domain.

The problem is that the tale of Germany’s rise from the ashes entices stressing the rise at the expense of the ashes. The manner in which Nuremberg is often invoked illustrates this point: Portraying Germany’s Nuremberg legacy as springing from the fact that this city was the birthplace of international criminal law carries an entirely positive connotation. But – in a last attempt to convince you of the value of looking at the concrete – consider this: The International Military Tribunal in fact opened at the Kammergericht, Berlin’s equivalent of a Higher Regional Court, before moving to Nuremberg. Nuremberg’s Berlin beginnings – how very symbolic! – are a striking testament to the power with which the concrete can sometimes illuminate the abstract. The same can be said about the scene of Alaa M’s trial, which started in the concrete in the 2020s, in the abstract in the 1940s, but each time at Hammelsgasse 1.