Anita Kugler Scherwitz Der jüdische SS-Offizier (Scherwitz: The Jewish SS-Officer) Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, August 2004. 757 pp. ISBN 3-462-03314-X In April 1948 Dr Eleke Scherwitz, Regional Director for the Welfare of Victims of National Socialism, was arrested as a suspected war criminal. Papers in his possession stated that he had been incarcerated in a concentration camp and persecuted by the Nazis as a Communist and a Jew. Two years and three trials later he was sentenced to six years in prison for the murder of three Jewish inmates of an SS-run camp under his control. So who was Scherwitz and what was his role in Hitler’s Germany? Date, place of birth, race and religion unknown, he presents a mystery from the start, but one fact at least is certain: during the early 1940s he was in charge of the ‘Lenta’, a sub-camp of the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga. How he got there has never been adequately explained, but SS colleagues and prisoners alike were puzzled by his comparatively humane regime. The camp in his time was turned over to the production of luxury goods for the SS and the Gestapo, and new arrivals were astonished to find themselves provided with adequate food, new living quarters and scheduled leisure time. His Jewish prisoners nicknamed him ‘King of the Jews’ on account of his leniency; the SS shadowed him for the same reason. But why was he there in the first place? In her meticulously researched biography, Taz journalist and historian Anita Kugler presents a story riddled with contradictions. Tracing lost documents, following up new leads, she cross-checks Scherwitz’s life in all its incredible details. She also reconstructs the fate of a number of his contemporaries: those murdered by members of the regime, SS colleagues who escaped punishment, prisoners who survived but were rearrested by the Russians. In a later section she deals with Scherwitz’s trial and here – significantly and controversially – she disputes the guilty verdict. Legally, she may well be justified, but what about the moral issue? In this extraordinary and disturbing story of a man who lied, deceived and conned, each reader must decide for himself.