Belzec trial

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The Bełżec trial in the mid-1960s was a trial against eight former SS members of the Bełżec extermination camp before the Munich I District Court . Five suspects were charged both in this trial and in the subsequent Sobibor trial . In these two trials, as well as in the Treblinka trials , the crimes of mass extermination of Aktion Reinhardt - the killing of over two million Jews and 50,000 Roma and Sinti - were discussed . These processes are directly related to the Nazi murders of 100,000 disabled people, as many guards had worked in Nazi killing centers before they started working in the extermination camps . The first "euthanasia" trials were carried out shortly after the end of the war.

The Bełżec trial before the District Court of Munich I

The trial of eight defendants, which received little public attention, took place from August 8, 1963 to January 21, 1965 before the Munich I Regional Court. On January 30, 1964, the Munich Regional Court decided not to open main proceedings against seven of the defendants, as they had been in a putative emergency at the time of the offense . Among these seven defendants were five of those later accused in the Sobibor trial, namely Dubois, Fuchs, Jührs, Unverhau and Zierke. A complaint by the public prosecutor's office to open the main proceedings against all the accused was rejected by the Higher Regional Court in Munich . Therefore, the main hearing began on January 18, 1965 only against the defendant Josef Oberhauser and was concluded after three days. A total of 14 witnesses were heard, including Professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel , who with Kurt Gerstein witnessed the gassing of Jewish victims in Bełżec in August 1942 , the Bełżec survivor Rudolf Reder, who could neither name nor visualize the accused, the accused Dubois, Unverhau , Schluch, Zierke, Gley and Fuchs, against whom no main hearing was opened, and finally the former member of Bełżec's camp team , Hans Gierzig , who was unable to stand due to illness. Oberhauser, who did not provide any information on the matter, relied, like the other accused in the Bełżec trial, on the need for orders and also referred to the prison sentence he had already served in the GDR . After consulting with the GDR Public Prosecutor's Office , however, it was established that Oberhauser had only served eight years of his fifteen-year prison sentence and had not been convicted of his actions in the Bełżec extermination camp, but of his involvement in the T4 campaign in Magdeburg . The court did not see the putative emergency as a given, since Oberhauser, as adjutant to Christian Wirth ( camp commandant of Bełżec), must have had a good relationship with him. The mild judgment listed below was justified by the Munich Regional Court with the tougher conditions in prison in the GDR and the potential maximum sentence of 15 years if the two sets of offenses (Bełżec and Action T4) had been negotiated in one trial. A revision before the Federal Court of Justice confirmed the judgment against Oberhauser.

The judgments and crimes in detail

Defendant Function in Bełżec Offense judgment
Josef Oberhauser Liaison to the staff of the SS and Police Leader , no fixed area of ​​responsibility Aid for community murder in 300,000 cases (if charged : 450,000) and for five other crimes of aiding and abetting community murder in 150 cases each 4.5 years in prison and deprivation of civil rights for three years
Erich Fuchs Handling of incoming transports, procurement of material for the construction of a new gas chamber Aiding and abetting community murder in 90,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Heinrich Gley Handling of incoming transports, supervision in the undressing barrack Completion of community murder in 170,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Werner Dubois Handling of incoming transports (approx. 30,000 people), management of Jewish work details Aiding and abetting community murder in 360,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Karl Schluch The Jewish victims are deceived about their fate on their way to the gas chamber Aiding and abetting community murder in 360,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Heinrich Unverhau Recovery and removal of the victims' clothing Aiding and abetting community murder in 360,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Robert Jührs Supervisory services Aiding and abetting community murder in 360,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency
Ernst Zierke Blacksmithing, also handling of incoming transports Aiding and abetting community murder in 360,000 cases Acquittal due to putative emergency

This first trial, which was conducted around the three extermination camps Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka of Aktion Reinhardt, revealed the difficulties of the German judiciary in punishing Nazi crimes . After 1945 it was decided not to introduce any special law regarding Nazi crimes before German courts , but to negotiate them according to regular criminal law . In addition to the difficult problem of differentiating between perpetration and aiding and abetting, it was often not possible to provide evidence of the crime , which was shown in another procedure:

“The four attempted murders, the excesses, included the shots at an old woman that Gomerski fired from a submachine gun in close proximity. The woman presumably died from the gunshots, but the inmate who had observed the incident did not care about the case out of fear. So the court had to assume an attempt because it could not prove the committed murder. "

In addition, the emergency of orders proved , at least during the Bełżec trial, to be an element that inhibited sanctions. The question arose, not only for lawyers, why the seven defendants in the Bełżec trial were granted the emergency order and the five defendants in the Sobibor trial or even Josef Oberhauser not.

New Bełżec process in preparation

During the trial of John Demjanjuk in 2009/2010, statements by Russian witnesses from the 1940s and 1960s relating to a former security guard in Bełżec became known. The central office of the state justice administration for the investigation of National Socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg is currently conducting preliminary investigations. The 88-year-old alleged perpetrator lives in the Rhein-Sieg district . The co-plaintiff -Representation could, according to research in Wikipedia as plaintiffs Willie Glaser locate.

literature

  • Kerstin Freudiger: The legal processing of Nazi crimes. Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-16-147687-5 .
  • Information material from Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz e. V .: Bełżec , Reader - based on a previously unpublished manuscript by the historian and director of the Bełżec Memorial Robert Kuwalek

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Judgment of the LG Munich I
  2. On the murder allegations against Hubert Gomerski in 1977 who was charged in another trial . klick-nach-rechts.de
  3. cf. z. B. corresponding article ( memento of the original from September 13, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Cologne city gazette @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ksta.de