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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…
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…
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 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…
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…
Calling a legal proceeding a “show trial” amounts to accusing the involved judiciary of not playing by the rules of a fair trial. The degree of unfairness can vary, of course. The following are some of the features that distinguish show trials from normal, fair trials. The more of them are that are present, the…
Bruno Tesch (14 Aug. 1890 – 16 May 1946) was a German businessman and owner of the pest-control company Tesch & Stabenow. He was indicted and put on a show trial by the British for his company’s massive sales of Zyklon B to the SS, and especially to the Auschwitz Camp. Based on false testimonies…
Gottfried Weise (11 March 1921 – 1 March 2000), SS Unterscharführer, was deployed at the inmate property administration at the Auschwitz Camp from May 1944. Between 1986 and 1988, Weise was tried and sentenced for five cases of murder allegedly committed during his time at Auschwitz. The case of Gottfried Weise is the only legal…
Modern-day trials staged against alleged perpetrators or deniers of claimed Holocaust crimes have many characteristics which put them into the same category as medieval witch trials. Here is a list of some of the pertinent characteristics of witch trials, and how they compare with trials against claimed National-Socialist perpetrators and against those contesting the reality…
Karl Wolff (13 May 1900 – 17 July 1984), SS Obergruppenführer, was Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and his liaison officer to Adolf Hitler. As such, he had access to all the material crossing Himmler’s desk. Toward the end of the war, on Himmler’s initiative, Wolff negotiated an early surrender of the German forces in…
In 1983, the German immigrant to Canada Ernst Zündel, a confessing admirer of Adolf Hitler, was charged in a Canadian court for knowingly spreading false news about the Holocaust. This offense allegedly had been committed by Zündel when he sold a 1974 brochure contesting the orthodox Holocaust narrative. With the help of a French expert…
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