Das Gericht als Tribunal oder: Wie der NS-Vergangenheit der Prozess gemacht wurde

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was primarily individual large-scale criminal trials that brought National Socialist mass crimes into the light of the German public more than before. As a key venue for punishment and reappraisal, the courtroom advanced to become an important arena for social self-understanding about the "Third Reich" and its precarious legacies. The question of how the Nazi past was put on trial draws attention to the events in the proceedings themselves as well as to the reverberations of judicial investigations and trials in the media and in the culture of memory: What images and interpretations were produced by the criminal proceedings and how were they represented in the media? How and with what, then, was German society confronted in the aftermath of the trials? It is thus an attempt to determine the role of the courtroom in the production and construction of knowledge and ideas, and thus of collective memory and history.