Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust. Michael J. Bazyler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 next chapter examines one of the most morally and legally difficult set of trials arising out of the Second World War in general and the Holocaust in particular: those in which the defendants were Jewish kapos charged with committing crimes against other Jews. The primary focus here is on the various trials of such former kapos held between 1951 and 1964 in the new State of Israel. These individuals were tried under the same Israeli law as applied to Eichmann in 1961. However, the first Israeli Knesset (parliament) enacted the so-called Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Law not to bring to account Germans who might find themselves within the borders of Israel after the war—seen as a ridiculous impossibility at the time of the law’s enactment in 1950—but Jews who became part of the machinery of death in the camps (Lagers), and then survived the Lagers and became citizens of the new State of Israel. This chapter explores the legal and moral issues unique to this hybrid class of prisoner-functionary who occupied the “gray zone” between master and slave in the camps.

      Chapter 8: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: The Germans Trying Germans under German Law. The next trial deals with how Germans themselves prosecuted their own nationals for German criminality, specifically those Germans who were part of the most profound symbol of the Holocaust: Auschwitz. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which took place over twenty months between December 1963 and August 1965, was a highly dedicated effort by West German prosecutors to charge Germans operating the Auschwitz death camp under German criminal law. Defendants at Nuremberg, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and others often raised arguments that they were being tried under ex post facto laws. This claim could not be raised here. Nevertheless, the use of the German Penal Code of 1871 to deal with Nazi criminality, before a postwar German judiciary, whose origins were largely in the Nazi era, had its own set of problems.

      Chapter 9: The Trial of Feodor Fedorenko: Treblinka Relived in a Florida Courtroom. None of the trials discussed up to this point was brought in the United States. Any U.S. prosecution of Holocaust-era crimes would run afoul of the ex post facto clause of the U.S. Constitution, which precludes any such proceeding. However, criminal trials are not the only vehicle by which persons in the U.S. can be charged for their participation in the Holocaust. After the war, the United States, as well as other countries, became a haven not only for Holocaust victims, but also for perpetrators who became citizens. In such a case, the legal route taken with such persons is first to denaturalize and then to expel them from the U.S. The usual basis for denaturalization is that the person made a false statement in an entry application to the United States. Concealing one’s role as a guard at a concentration camp by misstating one’s activities during the war is such a false statement. Since the mid-1970s over one hundred naturalized Americans have been stripped of their citizenship for participating in the murder of Jews in German-occupied Europe and then hiding their role when immigrating to the United States.

      A Ukrainian in the Red Army captured by the Germans in 1941, Feodor Fedorenko was trained as a concentration camp guard and then posted as a guard to the Treblinka extermination camp in 1942. Between July 1942 and October 1943, approximately 900,000 men, women, and children were murdered there—almost all Jews. In United States v. Feodor Fedorenko, brought in 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, the U.S. Justice Department sought to denaturalize Fedorenko on the basis of his role at Treblinka. Ultimately, the case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1984, Fedorenko became the first and only war criminal to be deported from the United States to the Soviet Union, where he stood trial for his crimes.

      Chapter 10: The Trial of Anthony Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey: The Holocaust in the British Courtroom. The trial of Anthony Sawoniuk took place in the Central Criminal Court (the “Old Bailey”) in London between February and April 1999. Like Fedorenko, Sawoniuk was a collaborator from Eastern Europe who began a new life after the war in a new country, in this case England. In the 1980s, the British rejected the Americans’ choice to simply denaturalize and then deport Nazi-era perpetrators and instead decided to prosecute them for their crimes directly. To do so, Parliament enacted the War Crimes Act 1991, a novel law that established criminal jurisdiction in England for conduct committed by a naturalized British citizen who committed crimes in German-occupied Europe. Sawoniuk’s hidden past was exposed after the passage of the law, and he was arrested and subsequently tried at the Old Bailey for multiple murders of Jews he allegedly committed in 1942 while a policeman in German-occupied Belarussia. As a result, Sawoniuk attained the dubious distinction of being the only person to be tried for Nazi-era crimes on English soil.

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      As this overview makes clear, the trials discussed in this book are each distinctive—in the issues with which they contended, in the legal contexts in which they were prosecuted, and in the way in which the genocide was presented. Yet taken together we can see the progressive formation of public memory of the Holocaust in courtrooms throughout the world. In the 1943 Kharkov trial, Jews were not an explicit focal point, though almost all of the victims were Jewish. By the 1999 Sawoniuk trial in London, the entire focus was on the murder of Jews. Each trial explored here presents a landmark in apprehending the dimensions of the Jewish genocide. Indeed, these trials reveal the significant role the legal process has played in the formation of an understanding of the Holocaust even as they illuminate how understanding of the Holocaust shifted over time.

      It is difficult to contemplate the murder of six million people. Thus it should not be surprising that efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of so many murders are also far from perfect. Nevertheless, each such effort represents part of the human endeavor to reach for justice. This book is dedicated to the many who labored at not forgetting and attempted to bring some measure of justice to those bearing responsibility for genocide and other mass atrocities.

      The four defendants at the Kharkov Trial: (l to r) Wilhelm Langheld, Reinhard Retzlaff, Hanz Ritz, and Mikhail Bulanov. Photo Archive, Yad Vashem.

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      The Kharkov Trial of 1943

      The First Trial of the Holocaust?

      In the brutal history of humanity, no other tragedy compares to the scale of death and destruction СКАЧАТЬ