Dr. Hilary Earl to deliver CICAS keynote

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences (CICAS) is pleased to present the keynote presentation for Winter 2017, “From Perpetrators of Genocide to Ordinary Germans: The Reintegration of Nazi Perpetrators to German Society,” by our very own Dr. Hilary Earl. Everyone is welcome to the keynote talk on February 2, 2017, at 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, in room F210.

Here is an abstract of Dr. Earl’s presentation of "From Perpetrators of Genocide to Ordinary Germans: The Reintegration of Nazi Perpetrators to German Society"

30 million people were killed during World War II; 17 Million of them were civilians. Of these, 6 million were Jewish—deliberately targeted and murdered by Nazi perpetrators in a European-side campaign of mass murder. Murdering that many people required thousands of individual perpetrators. Very few of these men were ever fully prosecuted and even fewer were punished although 185 were prosecuted in the 13 Nuremberg trials between 1945 and 1949 and, for a variety of reasons this paper will discuss, most of them were released from prison in the early 1950s before their sentences were complete. Using legal and archival sources, this talk explores the means by which convicted war criminals reintegrated into German society, their criminal pasts all but forgotten and ignored, and it will assess the factors that enabled such men—perpetrators of genocide—to become ordinary Germans again.

Hilary Earl is an Associate Professor of History at Nipissing University. Her research interests include comparative genocide, war crimes trials, perpetrator testimony, and the cultural impact of the Holocaust in the 21st century. She is the author of The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945-1958: Atrocity, Law, and History, which won the 2010 Hans Rosenberg prize. Most recently she co-edited Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives the Holocaust in a Changing World (Northwestern University Press).