Ulm Task Force Process

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The Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial began on April 28, 1958 before the Ulm jury court and was directed against ten Gestapo , SD and Ordnungspolizei members , parts of the Einsatzkommando Tilsit , which, according to a report by Walter Stahlecker, had 5,502 Jewish children, women and men between June and September 1941 Had murdered men in the Lithuanian- German border area. The process is considered to be the first turning point in the judicial and public reappraisal of National Socialism.

Legal proceedings and judgments

After the war , the defendants initially returned to a middle-class life, and investigations by the public prosecutor began only when SS Oberführer Bernhard Fischer-Schweder sued the state of Baden-Württemberg for reinstatement. It was the first major trial against National Socialist perpetrators before a German criminal court. The police chief of Memel , Bernhard Fischer-Schweder and nine other members of the Tilsit task force were on trial . ( Hans-Joachim Böhme , Werner Hersmann , Edwin Sakuth , Werner Kreuzmann , Harm Willms Harms , Gerhard Carsten , Franz Behrendt , Pranas Lukys , Werner Schmidt-Hammer ). A total of 184 witnesses testified or their testimony read out, including some eyewitnesses who had survived. The evidence also included Directive No. 21 and its execution orders , insofar as they concerned the Einsatzgruppen.

All of the defendants were sentenced to prison terms of between 3 and 15 years in 315 to 3907 cases for “ aiding and abetting murder”. They also lost their civil rights for a period of time . Although the public prosecutor's office had emphasized the high level of initiative involved in the murders and had demanded life sentences for several former SS leaders, the defendants were only sentenced as "assistants" on August 29, 1958, and thus as if the perpetrators had not committed the crime themselves would have wanted. At that time this corresponded to the coming to terms with the past of the case law up to the Federal Court of Justice , which Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich were considered to be the main culprits. This was also the aim of the defense strategy in the trial: The court followed Boehme's presentation that, prior to the first murder in Gargždai on June 24, 1941, Walter Stahlecker, with confirmation from the RSHA, ordered him to murder all Jewish men, women and children. This seems unlikely to recent research: A Boehmes report of July 1, 1941 only speaks of approval and "consent" by Stahlecker, an instruction for the systematic murder of Jewish women and children has not been proven for this time and this corresponds to the practice of systematic murders that did not include women and children until August 1941.

Defendant community complicity in community murder Prison sentence Loss of civil rights
Hans-Joachim Böhme in 3907 cases 15 years ten years
Werner Hersmann in 1656 cases 15 years ten years
Bernhard Fischer-Schweder in 526 cases ten years 7 years
Pranas Lukys in 315 cases 7 years 5 years
Werner Kreuzmann in 415 cases 5 years 4 years
Harm Willms Harms in 526 cases 3 years 2 years
Franz Behrendt in 1126 cases 5 years, 3 months 3 years
Gerhard Carsten in 423 cases 4 years 3 years
Edwin Sakuth in 526 cases 3 years, 6 months 2 years
Werner Schmidt-Hammer in 526 cases 3 years

consequences

The media reported extensively on the process and aroused extraordinary public interest. Several headlines such as “The darkest chapter in German history”, “A whole epoch is on trial in Ulm” and “The truth finally came to light” emphasized the importance of the trial in the summer of 1958, which was a turning point in the handling of the German judiciary with National Socialist violent criminals and at the same time brought the Holocaust to the general public. It now became apparent that a large part of the mass crimes had not yet been investigated and prosecuted and that unclear responsibilities prevented targeted investigative work.

Initially, the occupying powers had initiated lawsuits against perpetrators who were guilty of crimes against Allied military and civilians or who were charged with crimes against humanity . There had already been a task force process in 1947 . It was left to the German courts to punish the Nazi crimes in which German nationals were the victims. When the occupying powers withdrew, only some of the Nazi mass crimes for which they had taken jurisdiction had been convicted.

It now became evident that systematic investigative work was urgently required. The repressed past could no longer be denied. The Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial is therefore often seen as a turning point in the public perception of the punishment of National Socialist crimes . The post-war society, which tried to evade a frank coming to terms with the past with its close-knit mentality, was confronted with terrifying facts in the following period through the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and then from 1963 through the Auschwitz trials.

A direct consequence of the Ulm Einsatzgruppen process was the establishment of the central office of the state justice administrations for the investigation of National Socialist crimes based in Ludwigsburg (Ludwigsburg central office for short). In almost all cases, their preliminary investigations laid the basis for the federal German criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes. It started work on December 1, 1958, and the chief public prosecutor from Stuttgart Erwin Schüle , who had made the plea for the prosecution in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial, was in charge.

literature

Follow-up lawsuit against Hans Richard Wiechert and Bruno Heinrich Schulz

Movie

  • The Ulm Trial. SS Einsatzgruppen in court. Documentation, 2006, 45 min., Script and direction: Eduard Erne, production: SWR , first broadcast: May 4, 2006, summary by the city of Ulm

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Sabrina Müller: On the script of an exhibition. The Ulm Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1958 . In: Jürgen Finger, Sven Keller, Andreas Wirsching (eds.): From law to history. Files from Nazi trials as sources of contemporary history . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-35500-8 , p. 205 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ Karl Heinz Gräfe: From the thunder cross to the swastika. The Baltic States between dictatorship and occupation . Edition Organon, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-931034-11-5 , Pranas Lukys short biography p. 436.
  3. ↑ Main State Archives Stuttgart, Finding aid for the holdings R 20/003 05. Audio documents on the verdict in the NS-Einsatzkommando trial
  4. ↑ Jürgen Matthäus : Beyond the border . In: Journal of History . tape 44 , no. 2 . Metropol, 1996, ISSN  0044-2828 , p. 103-105 .
  5. ↑ Christoph Dieckmann : The war and the murder of the Lithuanian Jews . In: Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): National Socialist Extermination Policy 1939–1945. New research and controversy . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-596-13772-1 , pp. 296, 298 .