"Justice at Dachau" is the story of post-WWII military tribunals told by an author who is neither a lawyer nor a soldier. Joshua Greene has unearthed a trove of interesting information that he reveals in this book, and this book is a worthwhile read because its subject has been ignored for years, but this book lacks the insight of a legal mind and the perspective of a soldier.
Joshua Greene tries to tell the story of the tribunals from the point of view of the chief prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel William Denson. These tribunals tried hundreds of Germans (and others) who ran the concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald. Although the book is a worthwhile read, it suffers many weaknesses. The first is that it its legal analysis is quite weak. The author tries to argue that, although the tribunals were ad hoc, the defendants were still given due process. But the author's selected quotations from the trial transcripts show loss after loss by the defense counsel, as they argue points that would prevail under basic tenets of American justice and common law.
It is also apparent that the author is not familiar with the United States military or the history of the US Army in World War II. He constantly refers to General Lucien Truscott as Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel Lucien Truscott (3rd Army Commander in Germany after WWII); he does the same with General Lucius Clay, military governor of Germany, incorrectly calling him a "lieutenant colonel" on one page then a "general" on another. The reader never gets a sense for the higher-level decisions made regarding the trials at "JAG HQ" or quite understands how the US Army was functioning in Germany during the immediate post-war period.
Many parts of the trials are brought to life through the extensive use of excerpts from the trial transcripts. These are very interesting and engaging, as few can tell the stories of these trials better than the witnesses and participants themselves. The trials are never quite wrapped up, though, because the author fails to follow up on many of the defendants and tell the reader who was actually executed and whose sentences were commuted. Despite this, a flawed look at these fascinating trials is better than none at all.