The ten trials covered, albeit a small fraction of the multitude of the prosecutions of Nazi-era perpetrators, were chosen for this book because they are representative of the various types of prosecutions of war criminals and collaborators. In reviewing these trials, we look at the prosecution’s case, defenses, the ultimate verdicts, and the legitimacy of the verdicts and sentences.
Can one ever hope for justice in these cases? For the murderer of hundreds or thousands of individuals—and many of the defendants discussed in this volume fit that description—even the ultimate punishment of death may seem unsatisfactory, both to the immediate survivors and to society at large. To use the terms “Holocaust” and “justice” in the same phrase itself appears incongruous.12 As Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum has commented: “In one sense, the entire quest for justice in the aftermath of genocide is futile, because you cannot punish all the killers, and the punishment itself is incommensurate with the nature of the crime.”13
In choosing the trials analyzed here, we have tried to present a vertical picture of the detailed operation of the conspiracy to murder that (1) Hitler, Himmler, and Göring initiated, (2) Eichmann coordinated, and (3) many hundreds of thousands of Germans, Austrians, and others implemented. We have thus selected trials involving concentration camp commandants, guards, and prisoner-functionaries (known in concentration camp slang as kapos) that assisted in the murder process. Also, we have selected cases prosecuted under different legal systems so that, by virtue of comparison, something can be learned about the varied legal responses to the enormity of crimes committed during the Nazi era in Europe.
Chapter 1: The Kharkov Trial of 1943: The First Trial of the Holocaust? The very first trial held of Germans for Nazi-era crimes took place in December 1943, before the war was over, in the newly Soviet-liberated Ukrainian city of Kharkov. The three-day trial took place as the war was still raging and the Red Army was pushing westward. The defendants consisted of three Nazi personnel and a Russian collaborator. Almost all of their victims were Jews but the word “Jew” was never uttered during the trial. This chapter examines why.
Chapter 2: The Trial of Pierre Laval: Criminal Collaborator or Patriot? The Laval trial in Paris in October 1945 involved the collaborationist prime minister of Vichy France responsible for the deportation of seventy-five thousand Jews from France to the death camps in Poland. Laval’s defense rested entirely on his claim that he ended up saving the lives of most of French Jewry, albeit at the expense of some French Jews and almost all non-French Jews who were in France at the time. Did that justify the collaboration he openly acknowledged?
Chapter 3: The Dachau Trial under U.S. Army Jurisdiction. Dachau, located in Germany, was the first of Hitler’s concentration camps and among the last to be liberated. Soon after its liberation on April 29, 1945, American military authorities began prosecuting Dachau camp personnel on the very grounds of the former camp. The U.S. Army conducted trials of 1,672 alleged war criminals. These trials, brought under the U.S. military justice system, continued from 1945 to 1948.
Among the diversity of inmates at Dachau, Jewish inmates were singled out for the harshest treatment, pursuant to the euphemistic German term “special handling.” Jews lived under the worst conditions, received the least food, and constituted a clear plurality of the many thousands murdered at Dachau through starvation and disease. Their death rate was the highest of any of Dachau’s sizable population groups. This chapter focuses on the trial of forty Dachau administrators that took place in November–December 1945, concurrently with the major trial in Nuremberg.
Chapter 4: The Trial of Amon Göth in Postwar Poland: Poland’s “Nuremberg.” We then turn to the trial of Amon Göth, the brutal commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp on the outskirts of Kraków, whose deeds would have been forgotten were it not for Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Göth’s trial spanned a two-week period in August–September 1946 before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland. It was one of seven trials conducted by this special Polish court for German war criminals, which applied both local Polish law and international law principles. In the Göth trial, and the other six trials conducted by this court, the Poles modeled their proceedings on the Nuremberg trial in session at the same time.
A notable feature of the trial was the use of the term “genocide” (in Polish, ludobójstwo) to describe the crimes Göth committed. This was one of the first uses of the term “genocide,” coined just a few years earlier in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee from German-occupied Poland living in the United States.
Chapter 5: The Hamburg Ravensbrück Trials in British-Occupied Germany: Women as Perpetrators, Women as Victims. Having covered trials under Soviet, French, Polish, and U.S. military law, we turn to British military law and a series of trials conducted between December 1946 and July 1948 in the British-occupied zone of Germany. The seven trials, known as the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials, involved personnel from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the largest penal complex ever constructed for women.
Because of the unique status of Ravensbrück in the multitude of camps the Nazis established, the trials at Ravensbrück also demonstrate another element of the Holocaust: the roles of women not only as victims, but also as perpetrators. Generally speaking, the perpetration of the Holocaust was an all-male affair. The macho mentality and ideology of the Third Reich placed German men as the planners and implementers of the glorious future that would create the Thousand Year Reich for all German people. Nevertheless, some German women were part of the SS, and provided the necessary female staff at the concentration and labor camps where female victims were held.
Other trials featured women as defendants. The female brutes put on the dock at these trials had a celebrity quality to them, typical of other female defendants throughout time who have been charged with ghastly murders. Hence, the female perpetrators at the other trials went by such colorful monikers as the “Bitch of Belsen” or the “Stomping Mare.” None of the women on trial at Hamburg enjoyed such notorious celebrity status, though the depravities of some of the female Ravensbrück staff equaled those of the better-known German female war criminals.
Chapter 6: The Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg: Did Anyone Have to Follow Orders to Kill? The Einsatzgruppen trial is one of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials conducted just by the Americans. This trial was a latecomer to the post-IMT trials with the discovery in 1947 in war-ravaged Berlin of “smoking gun” evidence that implicated Einsatzgruppen commanders in the murders of more than one million Jews and others in German-occupied Soviet territory. The Graebe affidavit describes these mass murders in detail. By such means, the Einsatzgruppen squads murdered men, women, and children one by one, bullet by bullet, town by town, and city by city. These massive killings elevated the scale of German atrocities to totally new levels. To present the fullest picture, we have included a victim’s perspective on one such horrific instance of mass murder.
Because the Einsatzgruppen commanders claimed to have followed orders from Berlin, this trial also illuminated the defense of “following orders” in far more depth than the IMT proceeding. More information was available to the Einsatzgruppen prosecutors in 1947 than was available in the cramped period in 1945 and the inception of the IMT trial. In addition, the chief trial judge, Michael Musmanno, was firmly committed to getting all facts, and a considerable portion of the trial was devoted to determining whether there was any factual basis to the claim that SS men had to kill in order to save their own lives.
Chapter 7: The Jewish Kapo Trials in Israel: Is There a Place for the Law in the Gray Zone? The