• The Right Wrong Man
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The Right Wrong Man

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Now the subject of the Netflix documentary The Devil Next DoorThe incredible story of the most convoluted legal odyssey involving Nazi war crimesIn 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert La...
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  • 08 January 2018
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Now the subject of the Netflix documentary The Devil Next Door

The incredible story of the most convoluted legal odyssey involving Nazi war crimes

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland.

An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

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Price: $22.95
Pages: 352
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 08 January 2018
ISBN: 9780691178257
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / Holocaust, The Holocaust, LAW / Legal History, LAW / International, LAW / Criminal Law / General, LAW / Courts, LAW / General, Legal history, International law, Criminal law: procedure and offences, Legal systems: courts and procedures, Jurisprudence and general issues
"Douglas relates with authority and clarity the story of these complex legal processes. . . . [He] does justice to both the story's factual complexities and its moral and political conundrums. . . . The Right Wrong Man, from its summary title to its thoughtful postscript, is an impressive work, as well as a timely one in its demonstration of the power of legal systems to learn from past missteps."---Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review
Lawrence Douglas is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College and a Guggenheim fellow. His books include The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and The Vices. His work has appeared in leading publications such as the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harper's. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts.