Author and filmmaker Joshua Greene started out as a producer ofchildren’s books and films. One project led to anotheruntil he was asked to document the life of William”Bill” Denson, an American prosecutor at Dachau.
Greene spoke in an intimate gathing at the SMU Barnes and Noblesbookstore on Wednesday afternoon.
Greene stumbled on the project while doing a PBS documentaryWitness: Voices of the Holocaust.
The film contained the testimony of 19 concentration campvictims from the film footage that Greene was asked topreserve.
After seeing the film air on PBS, Huschi, Denson’slifelong companion contacted Greene through a mutual friend andasked him to consider writing her late husband’s story.
“She gave me access to trunks full of papers, drawings,photographs and evidence that he Bill had collected during hisyears trying the cases at Dachau, Mauthausen and Buchenwald,”Greene said.
“I like to show some of the drawings that Denson receivedfrom various survivors as a thank you gift for hisefforts.”
The Nuremberg trials are well known because of the many bookswritten about the subject, but little is known about the trialsthat followed the prosecution of Hitler’s right-hand men, hesaid.
“When I took this project on, I initially did not realizethe magnitude of the depravations Denson faced. Nuremberg was notthe only place where trials were held,” Greene said, citingsome of the major differences between the trials:
• There were 22 parent cases at Nuremberg and 177 atDachau,”
• There were 185 people accused as part of the subtitletrials in Nuremberg and 1,495 at Dachau.
• Nuremberg was held at the Palace of Justice. Dachau washeld at a supply depot.
Denson, who had been a professor of law at West Point, hadinitially seen the appointment as a stepping-stone to a career as ajudge.
Many of his ancestors had served as judges. He dedicated yearsof his life to fulfilling his mission of prosecuting the guilty. Inthe end, some of the same people he had fought fairly to convictlater had their sentences changed by the U.S. government in aclandestine manner.
After his experiences in Germany, Denson never entered acourtroom again for the rest of his life, Greene said.
Greene said that Denson’s evidence showed that Dr. KlausSchilling was responsible for hundreds of deaths in his”research” for a cure for malaria, while Ilse Koch hada penchant for preserved tattooed skins and lamps made of humanbones.
“Everything took a terrible toll on Denson,” Greenesaid. “At 32, his whole life changed. His wife divorced him,he dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Hedeveloped a spastic twitching that appeared similar toParkinson’s disease. Two weeks after leaving the hospital,the Army sent him to prosecute Buchenwald. It was just toomuch.”
Greene noted that most of the staff working to prosecute theGermans were mostly young boys in their teens and 20s. Yet theywere making policy decisions that impact today’s laws.
“The impact of visiting Dachau with the knowledge that Ihave, hasn’t really sunk in yet, but I really needed to moveon to something light after all of the terrible darkness of thisproject.”
