The Nazis were assisted both by active collaborators and ordinary citizens failing to act, as Mary Fulbrook and Jon Silverman explore in their new books.

Drawing on an extraordinary archive of personal accounts, Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust sees Wolfson Prize winner Mary Fulbrook argue that rather than what and when Germans knew, how they interpreted and reacted was key. In Safe Haven: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice, academic and former BBC journalist Jon Silverman asks why, despite considerable expense and effort, the controversial 1991 War Crimes Act yielded just one conviction.

Buy a copy of Bystander Society by Mary Fulbrook and Safe Haven by Jon Silverman.

This event will last approximately 1 hour, without an interval. 

About the speakers:

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London. Among other books, she is the author of A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, winner of the Fraenkel Prize, and, most recently, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, awarded the Wolfson History Prize.

Jon Silverman is Emeritus Professor of Media & Criminal Justice at the University of Bedfordshire. He’s a former BBC Home Affairs Correspondent in which role he won the Sony Radio Journalist of the Year award for his coverage of the UK’s investigations into Nazi collaborators. He reported from both the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals and has written extensively on international war crimes justice, including the relationship between the International Criminal Court and Africa. Safe Haven is his fourth book.

Joshua Rozenberg QC is the only full-time journalist to have been appointed Queen’s Counsel honoris causa. After taking a law degree at Oxford he trained as a solicitor. He is an honorary Master of the Bench of Gray’s Inn and a non-executive board member of the Law Commission. Joshua was the BBC’s legal correspondent for 15 years before moving to newspapers. He now presents the popular Radio 4 series Law in Action, which he launched in 1984 and appears regularly on other news networks in the UK and abroad. His book Enemies of the People? How Judges Shape Society was published by Bristol University Press in April 2020.