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Overview After the war, numerous trials were held in occupied Germany, in West Germany, East Germany, Austria and Poland, during which crimes allegedly committed at the former Auschwitz Camp were the main focus or at least an important factor. Among the first was the British Bergen-Belsen Trial against Josef Kramer and others. (See the entries…
The West-German trial against defendants accused of having been deployed at the Belzec Camp is a typical case of a show trial where the facts of the case and a guilty verdict were a foregone conclusion. It was conducted by the same Munich court which had tried Himmler’s chief of staff Karl Wolff just a…
The British conducted three trials on crimes allegedly committed at the Bergen-Belsen Camp. The first trial was staged between 17 September and 17 November 1945 against 45 SS men and women, some of whom had been transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen toward the end of the war, just as were many inmates. Among them were…
BUNA is an acronym formed from the two words BUtadiene and NAtrium (for sodium), denoting a method of polymerizing the chemical butadiene with the catalytic assistance of sodium to form artificial rubber. It was one of the methods used in wartime Germany to alleviate the rubber shortage due to the Allies’ blockade of continental Europe….
Corporate Censorship As long as plenty of companies compete with each other offering similar services, chances are high that someone will offer these services – even to individuals or groups whose views are rejected by many if not most in a society. However, the situation changes as market shares in a certain market get more…
Israel After it had turned its Arab neighbors into lethal enemies with its genocidal war of 1948, Israel had to maintain huge armed forces to secure its spoils of war and prevent an Arab revenge. These armed forces were utterly disproportionate to Israel’s financial and economic abilities. Hence, within a few years, Israel was in…
The U.S. occupational authorities in postwar Germany conducted a series of trials against members of the German armed forces and of SS and Waffen SS. These were mainly about alleged crimes committed against inmates in the various concentration camps which had been liberated by the Americans, such as Dachau, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Nordhausen and Buchenwald, as…
DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, German Association for Pest Control) was a limited-liability company specializing in the development of pesticides and pest-control technologies. It was established in 1919 as a subsidiary of the German chemical company Degussa (Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheide-Anstalt). In later years, the German chemical trust I.G. Farbenindustrie, Inc., held major parts of…
John Demjanjuk (3 April 1920 – 17 March 2012) was a Ukrainian citizen who immigrated to the U.S. after the Second World War. He and many other Ukrainian immigrants were targeted by pro-Soviet groups in the U.S. for their alleged collaboration with German authorities during World War II. U.S. authorities cooperated with these pro-Soviet groups,…
Background Before the investigations for the great Frankfurt Auschwitz trial started, the German government was reluctant to evaluate the contents of eastern European archives. Offers by communist countries were conceived as attempts to destabilize West Germany with propaganda, potentially falsified evidence and manipulated witnesses. This resistance, however, collapsed under the lobbying of various pressure groups…
The company Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke Ltd. was a Berlin coachwork manufacturer mainly known for producing bus coachworks. During the war, the company also built custom-made coachworks (bodies) for trucks. In April 1942, the German Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) approached Gaubschat with the intent to equip the cargo boxes of special vehicles ordered but not…
The term “genocide” was legally defined only in 1948, when the United Nations adopted its genocide convention (see https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/1948-convention). According to this convention, genocide does not require the mass murder of members of a defined group because they belong to that group. Already any measure that causes serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately creates conditions…
The trust Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG (in short, I.G. Farben) was a conglomerate of German chemical and pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and AGFA. It was established in 1925 and dissolved at the end of World War Two. After the war against Poland in late 1939, the I.G. Farben soon made plans to set up…
The Origins With victory over National-Socialist Germany in May of 1945, the Allied forces consolidated their gains, moved to take control of German territory, and accelerated plans to hold leading Germans legally accountable for the war. Initially, Stalin suggested rounding up the top 50,000 or even 100,000 top German war leaders and executing them without…
Already in 1944, the British government organized a Central Tracing Bureau for the registration and tracing of missing people resulting from Axis persecution. In 1955, after several reorganizations and relocations, the center ultimately was named International Tracing Service (ITS) and established with its permanent archives in the West-German town of Arolsen. It was put under…
The north-western Ukrainian city of Kharkov (today spelled Kharkiv) had some 700,000 inhabitants, when it was occupied by German forces in late October 1941. The city changed hands three times in 1943, and was ultimately reconquered by the Soviets in late August 1943. In a repeat performance of what had been staged earlier in Krasnodar,…
Krasnodar is a city northwest of the Caucasus Mountains, today with over a million inhabitants, but much less during the Second World War. It was occupied by German forces in August of 1942. After the defeat during the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, German forces withdrew from the Caucasus area in order to avoid…
Several trials were orchestrated by both Poland and Germany with a focus on crimes alleged to have been committed at the Majdanek Camp during the war. Soviet-Polish Show Trials The first show trial in Poland was conducted by a mixed staff of Soviet and Polish officials. It was staged at Lublin from 27 November to…
During the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, the Allied victors tried what they perceived as the 24 major German war criminals. However, already during the preparation of this tribunal, the victorious powers agreed that many more suspected war criminals needed to be prosecuted. But since it had proven very difficult to get all four…
After the Second World War, as the Cold War was gearing up, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to secure the spoils of war in occupied Germany. For instance, with “Operation Paperclip,” the U.S. transferred many German rocket scientists to the U.S., first as privileged prisoners, but later as voluntary immigrants willing to…
The Ostrowski Company operated a factory at the Polish city of Koło, some 7 km northwest of the Chełmno Camp. After the war, a damaged moving truck of the German truck manufacturer Magirus, once operated by the moving company “Otto Koehn Spedition,” was discovered on the Ostrowski factory grounds which several witnesses claimed to have…
Since the Geneva Convention of 1929 only covered prisoners of war, the Third-Reich authorities consistently denied the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to its concentration camps. This changed only toward the end of the war, when the German authorities realized that they could no longer maintain the camps due to Germany’s collapsing…
The Third Reich’s term Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) translates to Imperial National or simply Homeland Security Main Office. It was established in 1939 and merged Germany’s police forces (Gestapo and ordinary police) and the SS intelligence-gathering service Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) into one governmental body. This office was directly subordinate to the Chief of the German Police Heinrich…
For many decades, the Swiss Saurer Company was leading in the development of truck Diesel engines. They furthermore had branches in Austria and France. By the time the Second World War broke out, the Swiss and Austrian branches equipped their trucks exclusively with Diesel engines, while the French branch phased out the last gasoline-engine trucks…
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