Place of the Belsen trial: old MTV gymnasium, Lindenstraße 30, Lüneburg
The Belsen trials were a series of several trials that the Allied occupation forces conducted against former officials and functionaries of Nazi Germany after the end of World War II. British Army and civilian personnel ran the trials and staffed the prosecution and judges.
The Belsen trials took place in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany, in 1945 and the defendants were men and women of the Schutzstaffel as well as prisoner functionaries who had worked at various concentration camps, notably Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
The first trial generated considerable interest around the world, as the public heard for the first time from some of those responsible for the mass murder in the eastern extermination camps. Some later trials are also referred to as Belsen trials.
Officially called the "Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others",[1][bettersourceneeded] the trial began in a Lüneburg gymnasium on 17 September 1945, within the British occupation zone.[2]
The defendants were 45 former SS men, women and kapos (prisoner functionaries) from the Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Josef Kramer had been camp commandant at Bergen-Belsen and before that at Auschwitz. Of the other defendants, 12 were kapos, 16 female SS members and 16 male SS members. Although the SS was an all-male organisation, women were able to enlist as members of the SS-Gefolge, a form of civilian employee. One prisoner functionary, Ladisław Gura, who was also an SS member under arrest, was found to be too ill to stand trial after the trial had started. Three others had been excluded from the list of indicted for the same reason before the trial began.[3][bettersourceneeded] Three SS members had been shot trying to escape after the British took over the camp and one had committed suicide. Out of a total of 77 SS men and women arrested by the British in April, another 17 had died of typhus by 1 June 1945.[4]
Next to Kramer, the most high-profile defendants were Fritz Klein, who had been camp doctor at Belsen, and Franz Hössler, deputy camp commandant. Elisabeth Volkenrath had been Oberaufseherin (head warden or supervising wardress) at Auschwitz before she came to Belsen. Many of the defendants had arrived in Bergen-Belsen only after February 1945, some as late as two days before liberation.[5] However, most had been active in similar functions in other concentration camps before that. The trial took place before a British military tribunal. The judges were Major-General H.M.P. Berney-Ficklin (presiding), Brigadier A. de L. Casonove, Colonel G.J. Richards, Lt.-Colonel R.B. Moriush and Lt.-Colonel R. McLay. C.L. Stirling was Judge Advocate. Colonel T.M. Backhouse, Major H.G. Murton-Neale, Capt. S.M. Stewart and Lt.-Col. L.J. Genn were Counsel for the Prosecution. Counsel for the Defence were also members of the British Army — in the case of the five Polish defendants a Polish officer, Lt. Jedrezejowicz.[6]
As this was a military court, it was legally based on the Regulations for the Trial of War Criminals made under Royal Warrant of 14 June 1945.[6] All the charges related to international law, which applied at the time the crimes were committed, so this was not a case of retroactive justice.[5] Due to the nature of the court, the only charges that could be brought were war crimes and crimes against citizens of the Allied countries. "Crimes against humanity" and "crimes against peace", which featured in the later trials at Nuremberg, were not among the charges at Lüneburg.[2]
Charges
The official charges were grouped into crimes committed at Auschwitz and Belsen and were as follows:
At Bergen-Belsen, Germany, between 1st October, 1942, and 30th April, 1945, when members of the staff of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp responsible for the well-being of the persons interned there, in violation of the law and usages of war, were together concerned as parties to the ill-treatment of certain of such persons, causing the deaths of Keith Meyer (a British national), Anna Kis, Sara Kohn (both Hungarian nationals), Heimech Glinovjechy and Maria Konatkevicz (both Polish nationals) and Marcel Freson de Montigny (a French national), Maurice Van Eijnsbergen (a Dutch national), Maurice Van Mevlenaar (a Belgian national), Jan Markowski and Georgej Ferenz (both Polish nationals), Salvatore Verdura (an Italian national), and Therese Klee (a British national of Honduras), Allied nationals, and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown, and physical suffering to other persons interned there, Allied nationals and particularly to Harold Osmund le Druillenec (a British national), Benec Zuchermann, a female internee surnamed Korperova, a female internee named Hoffmann, Luba Rormann, Isa Frydmann (all Polish nationals) and Alexandra Siwidowa, a Russian national and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown.[7]
and
...at Auschwitz, Poland, between 1st October, 1942,and 30th April, 1945, when members of the staff of Auschwitz Concentration Camp responsible for the well-being of the persons interned there, in violation of the law and usages of war, were together concerned as parties to ill-treatment of certain of such persons, causing the deaths of Rachella Silberstein (a Polish national), Allied nationals, and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown, and physical suffering to other persons interned there, Allied nationals, and particularly to Ewa Gryka and Hanka Rosenwayg (both Polish nationals) and other Allied nationals whose names are unknown.[7]
Interior shot of the court room ten days before the start of the trial
The trial lasted 54 days in court. It began on 17 September with the indictment and the opening speech for the prosecution. Brigadier Glyn Hughes was the first witness for the prosecution on 18–19 September.[9]
On 20 September, the British Army screened a film they had made of the conditions at Belsen immediately after liberation. On 21 September, the court visited Bergen-Belsen. Evidence for the defence began on 8 October with the opening speech for the defendant, Kramer, who also testified. Closing speeches were made from 7–12 November, followed by the closing arguments by the prosecution on 13 November. Sentencing took place four days later, on 17 November 1945.[10]
Since the trial was conducted in English, translations into German and Polish were necessary. This was one of the factors which prolonged the trial, which had initially been expected to last for two to four weeks. In retrospect, the prosecution has been criticised as hasty and ill-prepared. None of the SS guards who had fled the camp after the ceasefire on 13 April had been searched for. Instead of eyewitness testimony, in some cases only affidavits were available at the trial. Some witnesses contradicted themselves on cross-examination, while others failed to identify the defendants as the perpetrators of the crimes in question. One former inmate, Oskar Schmitz, was erroneously charged as an SS man, and had no chance to clarify this before the trial began.[11][12]
The defence claimed that the arrest of the defendants had been illegal, as it contravened the promise of free withdrawal contained in the ceasefire agreement. However, the wording on this point was only clear for members of the Wehrmacht at Belsen. Moreover, according to the prosecution, the burning of the camp files by the SS and the firing of shots on 15 April had voided the agreement.[13] In fact, the relevant section of the ceasefire agreement read:
SS guard personnel [...] will be treated as PW. SS Adj personnel will [...] remain at their posts and carry on with their duties (cooking, supplies, etc) and will hand over records. When their services can be dispensed with, their disposal is left by the Wehrmacht to the British authorities.[14]
On 17 November, the court sentenced 11 of the defendants to death by hanging.[2] Another 18 were found guilty and sentenced to prison sentences of one to 15 years.[2] One defendant, Erich Zoddel, was sentenced to life in prison,[10] but was then executed 13 days later. Zoddel had been sentenced to death in a separate military trial in August 1945 for murdering a female prisoner after the liberation.[15] None of the sentenced were only found guilty of the "conspiracy" of working within the concentration camp system, but rather all of them were sentenced for individually committed crimes.[16] 14 defendants were acquitted[2] (the final defendant was too sick to stand trial). Due to clemency pleas and appeals, many prison sentences were eventually shortened considerably. By mid-1955, all those sentenced to prison had been released.[2]
Individual defendants and sentences
List of SS-defendants
Fritz Klein surrounded by bodies. The British Army liberating Bergen-Belsen forced German camp personnel to bury the corpses of prisoners.
(A=guilty of crimes at Auschwitz, B = guilty of crimes at Bergen-Belsen)[17][18]
Not able to stand trial due to illness: Nikolaus Jänner, Paul Steinmetz, Walter Melcher, Ladisław Gura (who was both an SS member and a prison functionary).
List of Kapos
Erich Zoddel in Allied custody after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen
(A=guilty of crimes at Auschwitz, B = guilty of crimes at Bergen-Belsen)[19][20]
10 years, committed suicide in prison on 10 May 1946
Medislaw Burgraf (B)
5 years, released on 11 August 1949
Ilse Lothe
Acquitted (charged with B)
Oskar Schmitz
Acquitted (charged with B)
Ignatz Schlomowicz
Acquitted (charged with B)
Anton Polanski
Acquitted (charged with B)
Ladisław Gura
Unable to stand trial (accused of B)
Public reaction
The Belsen Trial attracted substantial national and international media interest. Significantly, more than 100 representatives of the news media reported at length on the trial's progress.[2]
Through them, the world learned not just about the thousands of deaths by hunger and disease at Belsen, communicated especially forcefully by the film and photo evidence produced by the British Army. Possibly even more importantly, the Belsen trial also was the first time that the organised mass murder at Auschwitz Birkenau received a public airing, with some of those responsible describing the selection process, the use of the gas chambers and the crematoria. In Great Britain, the trial was mostly viewed positively, as a triumph of the rule of law, given the fairness and meticulousness with which it had been conducted. However, in some other countries, notably the Soviet Union and France, the verdicts were criticised as too mild. Many survivors also felt this way.[2]
Executions
All the executions were carried out on 13 December 1945 by hanging at Hamelin Prison.[22] The executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, aided by an assistant.
Second trial
A second Belsen trial was conducted at Lüneburg from 13 to 18 June 1946 by a British military tribunal.
The British held a third Belsen trial in April 1948. There was only one defendant, Ernst Julius Curt Meyer. Meyer had been arrested in May 1945, but was erroneously released in September 1947. He was re-arrested in February 1948. Meyer was found guilty of war crimes for non-fatal abuse and sentenced to life in prison. His sentence was reduced to 21 years in 1950, and he was released from prison on 24 December 1954.[23]
Bergen-Belsen, or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to hold Jews from other concentration camps.
Irmgard Ilse Ida Grese was a Nazi concentration camp guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women's section of Bergen-Belsen. She was a volunteer member of the SS.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was a German supervisor at several Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
Juana Bormann was a German prison guard at several Nazi concentration camps from 1938, and was executed as a war criminal at Hamelin, Lower Saxony, Germany, after a court trial in 1945.
Herta Ehlert was a female guard at many Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The Hamburg Ravensbrück trials were seven trials for war crimes during the Holocaust against camp officials from the Ravensbrück concentration camp that the British authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Hamburg after the end of World War II. These trials were heard before a military tribunal; the three to five judges at these trials were British officers, assisted by a lawyer. The defendants included concentration camp personnel of all levels: SS officers, camp doctors, male guards, female guards (Aufseherinnen), and a few former prisoner-functionaries who had tortured or mistreated other inmates. In total, 38 defendants were tried in these seven trials; 21 of the defendants were women. One of the defendants died during the trial. Twenty of the defendants received death sentences. One defendant was reprieved while two others committed suicide before they could be executed. The remaining 17 death sentences relating to these trials were carried out on the gallows at Hamelin Prison by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint.
Josef Kramer was a Hauptsturmführer and the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Dubbed The Beast of Belsen by camp inmates, he was a German Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He was detained by the British Army after the Second World War, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on the gallows in the prison at Hamelin by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
The subsequent Nuremberg trials were twelve military tribunals for war crimes committed by the leaders of Nazi Germany (1933–1945). The Nuremberg Military Tribunals occurred after the Nuremberg trials, held by the International Military Tribunal, which concluded in October 1946. The subsequent Nuremberg trials were held by U.S. military courts and dealt with the cases of crimes against humanity committed by the business community of Nazi Germany, specifically the crimes of using slave labor and plundering occupied countries, and the war-crime cases of Wehrmacht officers who committed atrocities against Allied prisoners of war, partisans, and guerrillas.
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as Der Auschwitz-Prozess, or Der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. Hans Hofmeyer led as Chief Judge the "criminal case against Mulka and others".
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Fritz Klein was a Romanian-German Nazi doctor and war criminal, hanged for his role in atrocities at Auschwitz concentration camp and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with war crimes in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.
The Dora Trial, also the "Dora"-Nordhausen or Dachau Dora Proceeding was a war crimes trial conducted by the United States Army in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich. It took place between August 7 and December 30, 1947, on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, Germany.
Franz Stärfl, alias Xaver Stärfel, alias Franz Stofel, was a Nazi German SS-Hauptscharführer and camp commander of the Kleinbodungen subcamp of Mittelbau-Dora during World War II. Arrested by the Allies and convicted of war crimes in the Belsen Trial, Stärfl was executed by hanging at Hamelin prison in 1945.
Anton Thumann was a member of the SS of Nazi Germany who served in various Nazi concentration camps during World War II. After the war, Thumann was arrested by British occupation forces and charged with war crimes. At the Neuengamme Camp Case No. 1 in 1946 he was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed at Hamelin Prison.
The Majdanek trials were a series of consecutive war-crime trials held in Poland and in Germany during and after World War II, constituting the overall longest Nazi war crimes trial in history spanning over 30 years. The first judicial trial of Majdanek extermination camp officials took place from November 27, 1944, to December 2, 1944, in Lublin, Poland. The last one, held at the District Court of Düsseldorf began on November 26, 1975, and concluded on June 30, 1981. It was West Germany's longest and most expensive trial, lasting 474 sessions.
Irene Haschke was a German SS camp guard within the Nazi concentration camp system during World War II, notably, at the Bergen-Belsen camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. She was born in Friedeberg, Neumark in what is now Poland.
The Dachau camp trial was the first mass trial of the Dachau trials, a series of trials against war criminals held by the United States Army on the premises of the Dachau concentration camp. The main trial took place from 15 November to 13 December 1945. Forty people were charged with war crimes in connection with the Dachau concentration camp and its subcamps. The trial ended with 40 convictions, including 36 death sentences, of which 28 were carried out. The official name of the case was United States of America vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss et al. - Case 000-50-2. The main trial served as a "parent case" for 123 subsequent cases. In the subsequent trials, all crimes that were established in the main trial were taken as proven, significantly shortening their duration relative to the parent case. The Dachau trials consisted of 6 total parent trials, each with their own subcases, and were held between 1945 and 1948. In total, there were 489 Dachau trials, of which 394 were held within the confines of the camp itself.
Hilde Lobauer was a German prisoner and later a German camp guard in both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. She was known most infamously as the SS woman without uniform.
↑ Taake, Claudia (1998). SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Univ. Oldenburg. pp.112–. ISBN3-8142-0640-1.
1 2 Wenck, Alexandra-Eileen (1997). Verbrechen als 'Pflichterfüllung'? Die Strafverfolgung nationalsozialistischer Gewaltverbrechen am Beispiel des Konzentrationslagers Bergen-Belsen, in: Die frühen Nachkriegsprozesse. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (ed.), Bremen. p.40. ISBN3-86108-322-1.
↑ Taake, Claudia (1998). SS-Frauen vor Gericht. Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Univ. Oldenburg. p.54. ISBN3-8142-0640-1.
↑ Celinscak, Mark (2015). Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Concentration Camp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN9781442615700.
↑ Kolb, Eberhard (1996). Bergen-Belsen. Vom 'Aufenthaltslager' zum Konzentrationslager 1943 – 1945. Göttingen. pp.58–.
↑ Wenck, Alexandra-Eileen (1997). Verbrechen als 'Pflichterfüllung'? Die Strafverfolgung nationalsozialistischer Gewaltverbrechen am Beispiel des Konzentrationslagers Bergen-Belsen, in: Die frühen Nachkriegsprozesse. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (ed.), Bremen. pp.42–. ISBN3-86108-322-1.
↑ Kolb, Eberhard (1996). Bergen-Belsen. Vom 'Aufenthaltslager' zum Konzentrationslager 1943 – 1945. Göttingen. pp.54–.
↑ Wenck, Alexandra-Eileen (1997). Verbrechen als 'Pflichterfüllung'? Die Strafverfolgung nationalsozialistischer Gewaltverbrechen am Beispiel des Konzentrationslagers Bergen-Belsen, in: Die frühen Nachkriegsprozesse. KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (ed.), Bremen. p.41. ISBN3-86108-322-1.
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