In this book, Philippe Sands, professor of law at University College London, investigates the intersections of the lives of four men and a city – Lviv – now in Ukraine. Three were famous lawyers: Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin played important roles in the development of international law on crimes against humanity and genocide. The third man, Hans Frank, was Hitler’s personal lawyer and governor of Poland during World War II.

The fourth man was Sands’s grandfather, Leon Buchholz, who worked as a liquor trader in Vienna until the war.

All of these men had a connection to the Ukrainian city of Lviv (Lemberg is its Austro-Hungarian name, Lvov its Russian name and Lwow its Polish name; the name used in the book changes according to the period that is being discussed). Sands seeks to use that connection as a prism to understand the fate of his grandfather’s family and the course of the Holocaust.

Born in Poland, Lauterpacht spent his teenage years in Lemberg, as it was then called. He left Poland for Vienna, went to England well before the Nazis arrived and had a successful career as an academic lawyer specialising in international law and human rights. In due course he became one of the Nuremberg prosecutors.

Lemkin had a less distinguished career. He too spent time in Lemberg studying law in the early 1920s. Later he became a commercial lawyer in Warsaw, and when the Germans invaded he managed to escape to Sweden, already formulating ideas for a book on genocide and taking with him source materials on the Nazi occupation. He then went to America via Russia. In America he became known as an authority on Nazi occupation practices.

In 1944 he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and dealt with genocide, a word he created for the purpose. He too was involved, albeit in the background, in the Nuremberg trials. Hans Frank needs no introduction; he was responsible for a major Aktion in Lemberg during the war in which most of the families of the other three protagonists were murdered. Leon Buchholz survived the war on the run in France, where he lived quietly until his death in the 1990s.

Despite the fascination of the several parts of this well-researched effort, the whole does not really gel. There is always a risk in seeking to introduce a story of great personal interest into a larger theme that the writer will do poor service to both. The fact that all four of these people had some connection with a much fought-over Eastern European town is not really a compelling reason to combine their stories into one book.

That said, the story of these men’s lives does shed light on a poorly understood region and time – the eastern provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states up to the war – and the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide continue to be used to bring war criminals to account.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen