West Germany 4.5 years imprisonment with hard labor East Germany 15 years imprisonment
Josef Kaspar Oberhauser (20 September 1915 – 22 November 1979) was a low-ranking German SS commander during the Nazi era. He participated in Action T4 and Operation Reinhard. Oberhauser was the only person to be successfully convicted of crimes committed at the Belzec extermination camp. He was charged with 450,000 counts of accessory to murder and sentenced to 4.5 years imprisonment during the Belzec Trial of 1964.[1]
In 1939, Oberhauser was assigned to Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Heil- und Pflegeanstalten, part of the office for Action T4 and one of several front organizations of Hitler's Chancellery, in November 1939. This organization was responsible for the killing of approximately 100,000 mentally ill and disabled people during Action T4. At the killing centers of Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Bernburg, where these people were murdered en masse by gas (carbon monoxide poisoning), Oberhauser was a Brenner (burner), or Leichenbrenner (corpse burner): he was responsible for the burning of the bodies in the specially installed crematory ovens.
After finishing Action T4 in August 1941, in November Oberhauser was transferred to the staff of the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) for the Lublin district, SS-BrigadeführerOdilo Globocnik, to take part in Operation Reinhard, the extermination of Poland's three million Jews. From November 1941 until 1 August 1942, Oberhauser was posted to Bełżec extermination camp as the leader of a guard platoon. He first visited Bełżec in the fall of 1941, before the extermination camp existed, to remove military equipment at the site. He was responsible for the development of the camp. In December 1941, Oberhauser returned to Bełżec with construction materials and a team of Ukrainian Trawnikis. He was under the command of camp commandant Christian Wirth, and he also served as Wirth's liaison to Globocnik.[3]
For his work in the implementation of Operation Reinhard, Oberhauser was promoted from SS-Hauptscharführer to SS-Untersturmführer, effective 20 April 1943, reaching officer rank in the SS. Previously, the Reichsführer-SSHeinrich Himmler had made a personal visit to the Operation Reinhard camps, including Bełżec, on 12 February 1943, and had decided to promote Oberhauser. In the 21 January 1965 judgment of the Munich District Court I (Case No. 110 Ks 3/64), his work at Belzec is described as follows (translated to English):
The defendant, Oberhauser, – then an SS-Oberscharführer – was on the staff of the senior SS and Police Leader in Lublin from November to Christmas 1941. Subsequently, he was assigned to work for the camp commandant of Belzec (Christian Wirth), which saw him appointed as liaison officer to the staff of the senior SS and Police Leader and moreover, unlike other non-commissioned officers, given no fixed area of responsibility within the camp; on the contrary, he was free to do as he personally saw fit. Consequently Oberhauser was often seen in Wirth's company within the camp, but no recognizable activity would have resulted nor would any independent authority have been exercised.
Only occasionally was Oberhauser given a role at the implementation of mass killings, the illegality of which he had fully recognized. For example, on the orders of the camp commandant, Wirth, he met trainloads arriving at Belzec, each comprising at least 150 people, at the camp gates on at least five occasions in the period from mid-March to 1st August 1942. He led the supervision of the unloading of the trains and made sure that the train crew did not enter the camp area but were held outside the camp in readiness, to be able to reinforce the outer cordon in case there was an uprising or desperate breakout attempt by the doomed people. All the Jews who arrived on these trains were killed in the manner already described.
When, in spring 1942, a major expansion of Belzec Camp was carried out to increase its capacity for extermination, it was the task of the defendant, to procure the necessary building materials, in particular, for the construction of the larger gas chamber facility. He was allocated vehicles and the people necessary for the fulfillment of this task. In exercising his duties, he was aware of the fact that the work carried out with his assistance, was intended to create the conditions for a significant increase in the numbers of those exterminated. On 1 August 1942, as inspector of the three extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, Wirth moved to his new office in Lublin, and succeeded in getting Oberhauser, whom he assessed as a dutiful subordinate, also transferred there. There, the defendant was given the command of the Ukrainian guards employed by the staff of the senior SS and Police Leader, Globocnik, to guard important sites in Lublin. In addition, he was still available to Wirth, and had to act as an escort on his inspection visits to the extermination camps.
—Belzec Trial - Sentence: LG Munich I dated 21 January 1965, 110 Ks 3/64. IV. The duties of the defendant in Belzec and Lublin.[4]
Transfer to Italy
After the completion of Operation Reinhard, Oberhauser, along with many of his colleagues, was sent to northern Italy in the group Sonderabteilung Einsatz R to participate in anti-partisan warfare and the deportation and killing of Jews there. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Obersturmführer on 30 January 1945. Purportedly, Oberhauser was commandant of Risiera di San Sabba until its closure in late April 1945 (3,000 to 5,000 people died there). He then went to Austria with his unit, and was arrested by the British authorities in May 1945 in Bad Gastein.
Arrest and trial
After his release, Oberhauser was employed as a sawmill worker in Bevensen. On 13 April 1948, he was arrested during a stay in the Soviet occupation zone. On 24 September 1948, he was convicted by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany of violating "Control Council Law No. 10" of 20 December 1945 (which also served as a basis at the Nuremberg Trials), by his membership in a criminal organization (the SS) and his killing of victims in Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Bernburg. Oberhauser was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 10 years deprivation of civil rights.[citation needed] He was granted an amnesty on 28 April 1956, and released after only 8 years. Following his release, Oberhauser served as a casual labourer, bartender and waiter in Munich.
In 1963 the Bełżec trial began and Oberhauser was one of 8 defendants charged with war crimes committed at the extermination camp. On 30 January 1964, all of the defendants but Oberhauser were acquitted due to the collapse of the prosecution case but re-arrested shortly thereafter. Oberhauser appeared before the court again in January 1965. He was found guilty of a number of charges, namely:
Accessory to 300,000 cases (charged with 450,000) of collective murder;
Five other crimes of aiding and abetting collective murder in each of 150 cases.
Oberhauser was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison with hard labor.[5] He was released after serving half of his sentence. Oberhauser was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia for his crimes committed in Italy, but the Italian extradition request failed. Oberhauser died on 22 November 1979 in Munich.
Oberhauser was unwillingly filmed for Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah, released in 1985.
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.
Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.
Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to November 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early November 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide. In the time frame of July to October 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone. It was the single fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was a Nazi Party official from Austria and a perpetrator of the Holocaust. A high-ranking leader of the SS, Globocnik played a leading role in Operation Reinhard, the organized murder of around one and a half million Jews, mostly of Polish origin, during the Holocaust in the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec extermination camps. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". Globocnik killed himself shortly after his capture and detention by British soldiers.
Irmfried Eberl was an Austrian psychiatrist and medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, who helped set up and was the first commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp where he worked as SS-Obersturmführer from 11 July 1942 until his dismissal on 26 August 1942. He was arrested after the end of the war in January 1948. Eberl hanged himself the following month to avoid trial.
Franz Paul Stangl was an Austrian police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka in World War II.
Hermann Julius Höfle, also Hans (or) Hermann Hoefle, was an Austrian-born SS commander and Holocaust perpetrator during the Nazi era. He was deputy to Odilo Globočnik in the Aktion Reinhard program, serving as his main deportation and extermination expert. Arrested in 1961 in connection with these crimes, Höfle died via suicide by hanging in prison before he was tried.
Christian Wirth was a German SS officer and leading Holocaust perpetrator who was one of the primary architects of the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard. His nicknames included Christian the Cruel, Stuka, and The Wild Christian due to the extremity of his behaviour among the SS and Trawniki guards and to the camp inmates and victims.
Kurt Hubert Franz was an SS officer and one of the commanders of the Treblinka extermination camp. Because of this, Franz was one of the major perpetrators of genocide during the Holocaust. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Treblinka Trials in 1965, he was eventually released in 1993.
Heinz Kurt Bolender was an SS sergeant during the Nazi era. In 1942, he operated the gas chambers at Sobibór extermination camp, perpetrating acts of genocide against Jews and Romani people during Operation Reinhard. After the war, Bolender was recognized in 1961 while working under a false identity as a doorman at a nightclub in West Germany, and subsequently accused in 1965 of personally murdering at least 360 Jewish inmates and assisting in the murder of 86,000 more at Sobibór. He died by suicide in prison two months prior to the end of the trial.
Lorenz Hackenholt was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) with the rank of Hauptscharführer. During World War II Hackenholt built and operated the gas chamber at the Bełżec extermination camp in occupied Poland during Operation Reinhard. In so doing, he personally carried out the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
Richard Thomalla was a German war criminal and SS commander of Nazi Germany. A civil engineer by profession, he was head of the SS Central Building Administration at Lublin reservation in occupied Poland. Thomalla was in charge of construction for the Operation Reinhard death camps Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka during the Holocaust in Poland.
Erwin Hermann Lambert was a German perpetrator of the Holocaust. In profession, he was a master mason, building trades foreman, Nazi Party member and member of the Schutzstaffel with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer (corporal). He supervised construction of the gas chambers for the Action T4 euthanasia program at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar, and then at Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during Operation Reinhard. He specialized in building larger gas chambers that killed more people than previous efforts in the extermination program.
Erich Fuchs was an SS functionary who worked for the Action T4 mass-murder program, and for the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust.
Ernst Zierke was a low-ranking member in the SS who took part in the Aktion T4 forced euthanasia program in Nazi Germany, and after the invasion of Poland worked at Bełżec and Sobibór extermination camps during Operation Reinhard. Zierke helped to perpetrate the Holocaust. He was charged with being an accessory to the murder of 360,000 Jews at death camps, acquitted twice, in the Belzec and Sobibor trials of 1965 on grounds of acting under duress and set free.
Franz Karl Reichleitner was an Austrian member in the SS of Nazi Germany who participated in Operation Reinhard during the Holocaust. Reichleitner served as the second and last commandant of Sobibór extermination camp from 1 September 1942 until the camp's closure on or about 17 October 1943. As the commanding officer of the camp, Franz Reichleitner directly perpetrated the genocide of Jews.
Gottlieb Hering was an SS commander of Nazi Germany. He served in Action T4 and later as the second and last commandant of Bełżec extermination camp during Operation Reinhard. Hering directly perpetrated the genocide of Jews and other peoples during The Holocaust.
The Belzec trial in the mid-1960s was a war crimes trial of eight former SS members of Bełżec extermination camp. The trial was held at the 1st Munich District Court and should be seen in the context of the Sobibor trial, which followed the Belzec trial, because five of the defendants were accused in both trials. In addition, the Belzec and Sobibor trials, along with the Treblinka trials, form a body of evidence of the crimes of mass extermination as part of the so-called Action Reinhardt programme - the killing of over two million Jews and 50,000 Roma and Sinti. These trials are directly related to the mass murder of 100,000 people in the official Nazi Euthanasia programme known after the war as Action T4, as many of the security guards worked in the euthanasia centres before transferring to the extermination camps. The first Euthanasia trials were carried out shortly after the war.
Franz Suchomel was a Sudeten German Nazi war criminal. He participated in the Action T4 euthanasia program, in Operation Reinhard, and the Einsatzgruppen actions in the Adriatic operational zone. He was convicted at the Treblinka trials in September 1965 and spent four years in prison.
Otto Hantke was a German SS-Unterscharführer, convicted murderer, and war criminal in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. Hantke joined the Nazi Party and the SS by 1933. Between at least 1942 and 1944, Hantke served as the commandant of the Budzyń labor camp and Poniatowa concentration camp, both subcamps of the Majdanek concentration camp, and was an SS officer at the Lipowa 7 concentration camp and Stutthof concentration camp.
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