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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 accused were 24 former SS leaders who, as commanders of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the SD, bore responsibility for the crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union. The indictment was based on the Einsatzgruppen reports of more than a million victims. [1]
The trial marked the first use of the term "genocide" in legal context. The term was used by both the prosecution and by the judges in the verdict. [2]
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. [3] [4] 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. [5]
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 [6] | |
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 [6] | |
Otto Rasch | SS-Brigadeführer; member of the SD and the Gestapo; commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe C | Removed from the trial on February 5, 1948 for 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 [6] | |
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 [6] | |
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 in 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; commanding officer of Vorkommando Moskau of Einsatzgruppe B | Death by hanging | Commuted to life imprisonment; released in December 1956; died in 1977 | |
Lothar Fendler | SS-Sturmbannführer; member of the SD; second highest-ranking officer 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; adjutant to Otto Ohlendorf 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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The presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, explained his rationale for sentencing while testifying at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s. He had chosen to impose death sentences in all cases where the defendant had actively participated in murder and failed to present mitigating circumstances. For example, although Erwin Schulz confessed to presiding over the execution of 90 to 100 men in Ukraine, he received a 20-year sentence since he had protested an order to exterminate all Jewish women and children, and immediately resigned when he was unable to get the order retracted. Superior orders was rejected as a defense. [8]
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." [5]
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries across Europe and atrocities against their citizens in World War II.
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.
Einsatzgruppen were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish question" in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the Catholic priesthood. Almost all of the people they murdered were civilians, beginning with the intelligentsia and swiftly progressing to Soviet political commissars, Jews, and Romani people, as well as actual or alleged partisans throughout Eastern Europe.
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 Pohl trial against the Nazi German administration of the "Final Solution" was the fourth of the thirteen trials for war crimes that the United States authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. The thirteen trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, although both courts presided in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. They are known collectively as the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" or more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany (Nuremberg) after the end of World War II. IG Farben was the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews in the Holocaust.
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, and a convicted war criminal. Naumann had a key role in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe as the commander of Einsatzgruppe VI and the commander of Einsatzgruppe B.
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.
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. Two days after his indictment, Haussmann committed suicide.
Sonderaktion1005, also called Aktion1005 or Enterdungsaktion, was a top-secret Nazi operation conducted from June 1942 to late 1944. The goal of the project was to hide or destroy any evidence of the mass murder that had taken place under Operation Reinhard, the attempted extermination of all Jews in the General Government occupied zone of Poland. Groups of Sonderkommando prisoners, officially called Leichenkommandos, were forced to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies; inmates were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
The Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft, or Circle of Friends of the Economy was a group of German industrialists whose aim was to strengthen the ties between the Nazi Party and business and industry. The group was formed and co-ordinated by Wilhelm Keppler, one of Adolf Hitler's close economic advisors.
Martin Sandberger was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era and a convicted Holocaust perpetrator. He commanded Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A, as well as the Sicherheitspolizei and SD at the time of Nazi German occupation of Estonia during World War II. Sandberger perpetrated mass murder of the Jews in German-occupied Latvia and Estonia. He was also responsible for the arrest of Jews in Italy, and their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp. Sandberger was the second-highest official of the Einsatzgruppe A to be tried and convicted. He was also the last-surviving defendant from the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.
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.
Waldemar Klingelhöfer was an SS-Sturmbannführer and convicted war criminal.
Heinz Jost was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was involved in espionage matters as the Sicherheitsdienst or (SD) section chief of office VI of the Reich Security Main Office. Jost was responsible for genocide in eastern Europe as commander of Einsatzgruppe A from March–September 1942.
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 an American military court 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, which was involved in the mass murder of the Jews in occupied Ukraine. At the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948, Fendler was sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, he was released early in 1951.
Gustav Adolf Nosske was a German lawyer and SS-Obersturmbannführer. In 1941–42, he commanded Einsatzkommando 12 within Einsatzgruppe D, under the command of Otto Ohlendorf. Tried in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1948, Nosske was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released early in December 1951.
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