Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ called a Holocaust survivor from each country where Jews were murdered. Eichmann, of course, was not personally present or even directly involved in the acts that the witnesses testified to, and so much of the live testimony dealt with events with which Eichmann had little or no connection. Because the charge alleged that Eichmann, together with others, agreed to the murder of Europe’s Jews, under basic principles of conspiracy law, the conduct of others in furtherance of the underlying criminal agreement became admissible against Eichmann.

      These two trials—at Nuremberg in 1945–46 and Jerusalem in 1961–62—though by far the best known, were not the only trials in which the major focus, or even a significant portion of the trial, was the mass murder of the Jews. Over the last seventy years, tens of thousands of individuals who were part of the German regime and their local collaborators in the occupied countries have been prosecuted for crimes committed during the years of German rule of occupied Europe. In somewhat sporadic and unorganized fashion, many of these trials dealt either directly or indirectly with the genocide of the Jews. A close look at some of these other Holocaust trials tells us a great deal about the implementation of the conspiracy to murder European Jewry and how various justice systems have tried to address it. While some of these trials are well known to scholars, they have been overshadowed by the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. Because they have faded from public memory, we call them “forgotten trials of the Holocaust.”

      The ten trials discussed in this book have taken place over the last seventy years in a range of countries. While separate books have been written on some of these trials, this book is the first to provide an overarching, global picture of the various efforts to prosecute those responsible for the murder of Jews under Hitler’s plan, both high-ranking statesmen and minor foot soldiers involved in one of the momentous crimes in human history. The ten specific snapshots provided here illustrate how both international law and various domestic legal systems have dealt with Nazi-era perpetrators. Legal historian David Fraser speaks of the “shadow and gloom of legal and historical forgetfulness”¹¹ that has been cast over the judicial processes used to handle Nazi war crimes. This volume is meant to undo some of that forgetfulness.

      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. СКАЧАТЬ