On May 8, 1945, the day that Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces in Europe, ten percent of the German population—approximately 5.8 million people—were members of the Nazi party. Many party members had aided and abetted the German state in carrying out its genocidal policy against Europe’s Jewish population. Very few of these people were ever prosecuted and even fewer were punished. The fates of Herman Göring and Albert Speer are today well-known, but what about the former Nazi perpetrators who escaped justice? What became of them? Dr. Hilary Earl explores a less familiar story of genocide—its aftermath. 

Hilary Earl is an historian of the Holocaust whose research focuses on perpetrator testimony and war crimes trials in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She is currently Associate Professor of European History at Nipissing University, North Bay and is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Dr. Earl has published extensively in the field of Holocaust studies and her book, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History, won the 2010 Hans Rosenberg Prize for best book in German History at the American Historical Association. She is the co-editor of Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives of the Holocaust in a Changing World (2014), a collection of essays on the most recent scholarship in the field. Dr. Earl is working on a number of projects including a study of the integration of Nazi war criminals back into German society, the cultural impact of the Holocaust on pedagogy, and she is also beginning work on a film on Nazi perpetrators.