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Einsatzgruppen Trial | |
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The Einsatzgruppen Trial (officially, The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.) was the ninth of the twelve trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity that the US authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal. They took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve US trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg trials" or, more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile death squads, operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million Jews, up to 250,000 Romani, and around 500,000 so-called "partisans", people with disabilities, political commissars, Slavs, homosexuals and others. [1] [2] The 24 defendants in this trial were all commanders of these Einsatzgruppen units and faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal stated in its judgment:
... in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholesale killings through channels. They are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. It is asserted with particularity that these men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest. [3]
The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II-A, were Michael Musmanno (presiding judge and Naval officer) from Pennsylvania, John J. Speight from Alabama, and Richard D. Dixon from North Carolina. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor; the Chief Prosecutor for this case was Benjamin B. Ferencz. The indictment was filed initially on July 3 and then amended on July 29, 1947, to also include the defendants Steimle, Braune, Haensch, Strauch, Klingelhöfer, and von Radetzky. The trial lasted from September 29, 1947, until April 10, 1948.
All defendants were charged on all counts. All defendants pleaded "not guilty". The tribunal found all of them guilty on all counts, except Rühl and Graf, who were found guilty only on count 3. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death. However, only four of them were executed. Nine of those condemned had their sentences reduced. Another, Eduard Strauch, couldn't be executed since he had been transferred to Belgian custody after his conviction.
Name | Photo | Function | Sentence | Outcome, 1951 amnesty |
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Otto Ohlendorf | SS Gruppenführer ; member of the SD; commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe D | Death by hanging | Executed on June 7, 1951 [4] | |
Heinz Jost | SS Brigadeführer ; member of the SD; commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe A | Life imprisonment | Commuted to 10 years; released in December 1951; died in 1964 | |
Erich Naumann | SS Brigadeführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B | Death by hanging | Executed on June 7, 1951 [4] | |
Otto Rasch | SS Brigadeführer; member of the SD and the Gestapo; commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe C | Removed from the trial on February 5, 1948 due to medical reasons | Died on November 1, 1948 | |
Erwin Schulz | SS Brigadeführer; member of the Gestapo; commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C | 20 years | Commuted to 15 years; released on January 9, 1954; died in 1981 | |
Franz Six | SS Brigadeführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Vorkommando Moskau of Einsatzgruppe B | 20 years | Commuted to 10 years; released in October 1952; died in 1975 | |
Paul Blobel | SS Standartenführer ; member of the SD; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C | Death by hanging | Executed on June 7, 1951 [4] | |
Walter Blume | SS Standartenführer; member of the SD and the Gestapo; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B | Death by hanging | Commuted to 25 years; released in March 1955; died in 1974 | |
Martin Sandberger | SS Standartenführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A | Death by hanging | Commuted to life imprisonment; released on May 9, 1958; died in 2010 | |
Willi Seibert | SS Standartenführer; member of the SD; Deputy Chief of Einsatzgruppe D | Death by hanging | Commuted to 15 years; released on May 14, 1954; died in 1976 | |
Eugen Steimle | SS Standartenführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B and of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C | Death by hanging | Commuted to 20 years; released in June 1954; died in 1987 | |
Ernst Biberstein | SS Obersturmbannführer ; member of the SD; commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C | Death by hanging | Commuted to life imprisonment; released on May 9, 1958; died in 1986 | |
Werner Braune | SS Obersturmbannführer ; member of the SD and the Gestapo; commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 11b of Einsatzgruppe D | Death by hanging | Executed on June 7, 1951 [4] | |
Walter Haensch | SS Obersturmbannführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C | Death by hanging | Commuted to 15 years; released in August 1955; died in 1994 | |
Gustav Adolf Nosske | SS Obersturmbannführer; member of the Gestapo; commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D | Life imprisonment | Commuted to 10 years; released in December 1951; died in 1986 | |
Adolf Ott | SS Obersturmbannführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Sonderkommando 7b of Einsatzgruppe B | Death by hanging | Commuted to life imprisonment; released on May 9, 1958; died 1973 | |
Eduard Strauch | SS Obersturmbannführer; member of the SD; commanding officer of Einsatzkommando 2 of Einsatzgruppe A | Death by hanging ; handed over to Belgian authorities and received another death sentence; died prior to execution on 11 September 1955 | ||
Emil Haussmann | SS Sturmbannführer ; member of the SD; officer of Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D | Committed suicide before the arraignment on July 31, 1947 | ||
Waldemar Klingelhöfer | SS Sturmbannführer; member of the SD; officer of Sonderkommando 7b of Einsatzgruppe B | Death by hanging | Commuted to life imprisonment; released in December 1956; died in 1980 | |
Lothar Fendler | SS Sturmbannführer; member of the SD; Deputy chief of Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C | 10 years | Commuted to 8 years; released in March 1951; died in 1983 | |
Waldemar von Radetzky | SS Sturmbannführer; member of the SD; Deputy chief of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C | 20 years | Released; died in 1990 | |
Felix Rühl | SS Hauptsturmführer ; member of the Gestapo; officer of Sonderkommando 10b of Einsatzgruppe D | 10 years | Released; died in 1982 | |
Heinz Schubert | SS Obersturmführer ; member of the SD; officer in Einsatzgruppe D | Death by hanging | Commuted to 10 years; released in December 1951; died in 1987 | |
Matthias Graf | SS Untersturmführer ; member of the SD; officer in Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C | Time served | ||
Notes
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Of the 14 death sentences, only four were carried out; the others were commuted to prison terms of varying lengths in 1951. In 1958, all convicts were released from prison.
The Nuremberg Military Tribunal in its judgement stated the following:
[The facts] are so beyond the experience of normal man and the range of man-made phenomena that only the most complete judicial inquiry, and the most exhaustive trial, could verify and confirm them. Although the principal accusation is murder, ... the charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated.
... a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.
The number of deaths resulting from the activities with which these defendants have been connected and which the prosecution has set at one million is but an abstract number. One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated.
It is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating. One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons – men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family – falling before the executioner's guns. If one million is divided by ten, this scene must happen one hundred thousand times, and as one visualizes the repetitious horror, one begins to understand the meaning of the prosecution's words, "It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children." [3]
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Otto Ohlendorf was a German SS functionary and Holocaust perpetrator during the Nazi era. An economist by education, he was head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Inland, responsible for intelligence and security within Germany. In 1941, Ohlendorf was appointed the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which perpetrated mass murder in Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea and, during 1942, the North Caucasus. He was tried at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, sentenced to death, and executed by hanging in 1951.
Erich Naumann was an SS-Brigadeführer, member of the SD. Naumann was responsible for genocide in eastern Europe as commander of Einsatzgruppe B and was a convicted war criminal.
Emil Haussmann was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was part of Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppe D, which perpetrated the Holocaust in occupied Ukraine. Haussmann was charged with crimes against humanity in 1947 in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He committed suicide while in prison.
Otto Wöhler was a German general in the Wehrmacht and a war criminal during World War II. He rose to a corps and army level commander.
Eduard Strauch was a German Nazi SS functionary, commander of Einsatzkommando 2, commander of two Nazi organizations, the Security Police, or Sipo, and the Security Service, first in Belarus – then called White Russia or White Ruthenia – and later in Belgium. In October 1944, he was transferred to the militarised branch of the SS, the Waffen-SS.
Karl Rudolf Werner Braune was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era and a Holocaust perpetrator. During the German invasion of the Soviet Union of 1941, Braune was the commander of Einsatzkommando 11b, part of Einsatzgruppe D. Braune organized and conducted mass murders of Jews in the Army Group South Rear Area, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. For his role in these crimes, Braune was tried before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1948 in the Einsatzgruppen trial. He was convicted, sentenced to death and executed in 1951.
Heinz Hermann Schubert was a German SS officer. He held the rank of Obersturmführer. He was sentenced to death at the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948, which was later commuted to 10 years' imprisonment.
Lothar Fendler was an SS-Sturmbannführer, in Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C and was involved in the murder of the Jews in occupied Ukraine. At the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948 Fendler was sentenced to ten years in prison but was released in 1951.
David W. Peck was an American jurist. From 1947 to 1957, he was Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, First Department in New York, and in that time took a leading role in the reform of judiciary of that state. In 1950, in Germany, Peck led the Advisory Board on Clemency on recommendations for clemency for convicted war and Nazi criminals.
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