Auschwitz: A History

by Sybille Steinbacher

  Two trials were also held by the highest Polish judicial authority, the Supreme National Court, founded in Warsaw in February 1946, whose sole task was to bring German war criminals to justice. Here the highest-ranking SS officials in Auschwitz were put on trial: Commandant Rudolf Höss and – along with thirty-nine other members of the Lager-SS – Commandant Arthur Liebehenschel.

  After the end of the war Höss had gone into hiding as an agricultural worker by the name of Franz Lang, on a farm near Flensburg. British officers had soon arrested him on suspicion of belonging to the German navy, but his true identity remained unrecognized. It was not until March 1946 that the British discovered who he really was and arrested him again. At the end of May 1946 Höss was handed over to Poland. First he spoke as a witness for the defence before the International Tribunal in Nuremberg in the trial of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s successor as head of the RSHA, who was later condemned to death. Before being handed over, Höss was heard as a witness on several further occasions, including the preparation for the subsequent Nuremberg trials of the SS Economic Administration Head Office and IG Farben.

  While in custody in Cracow, Höss wrote an account of his life, several hundred pages long, which he entitled My Psyche. Development, Life and Experience. Like a bookkeeper, he sets out the details of mass extermination, and yet, as in the Allied hearings, he makes many errors concerning dates and contexts. His memoirs, which were published in Polish in 1956 and two years later in the original German, document his obsession with his duties as organizer of the ‘Final Solution’, but also testify both to a lack of awareness of wrongdoing, and a remarkable level of sentimental narcissism.

  The Warsaw trial of Höss began in the presence of many foreign observers and journalists on 11 March 1947; at the beginning of April Judge Alfred Eimer passed the death sentence. In the grounds of the parent camp, next to the SS camp administration block, and not far from the villa where he formerly lived as commandant, Höss was hanged on 16 April 1947.

  The Cracow Supreme Court trial of forty Lager-SS members, the largest that was ever held in relation to Auschwitz, began on 25 November 1947. The highest-ranking official among the accused was the former commandant Arthur Liebehenschel. The accused followed a common strategy: they shifted responsibility to the executed Höss. For twenty-three of them the trial ended with a death sentence in any case, announced six days after the end of the trial on 22 December 1947. Among those executed were Liebehenschel, Lagerführer (‘camp leader’) Hans Aumeier, the head of the political department Maximilian Grabner, and Maria Mandel, camp leader of the women’s camp. Seven of the accused were condemned to life imprisonment, including two female warders. The court passed nine sentences of imprisonment, six of them for more than fifteen years. Two of the accused who had been sentenced to death, SS camp doctor Johann Paul Kremer and Johann Arthur Breitwieser, later had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, and were transferred to the Federal Republic of Germany in the late fifties. There was also one acquittal: SS doctor Hans Münch, formerly deputy-director of the SS Hygiene Institute and responsible for studies into hunger among the camp inmates, went unpunished because prisoners had spoken up in his favour.

  Allied judgements and early judicial practice in the Federal Republic of Germany

  Allied military judges did not hold an actual trial on the subject of Auschwitz. None the less, in line with the Potsdam Agreement, many SS guards were brought before the courts in Allied concentration camp trials, because towards the end of the war many of them had been transferred back inside the Reich and taken prisoner there. In the Bergen–Belsen trial in British-occupied Lüneburg, the first trial by a military tribunal of German Nazi criminals, hearings were specifically devoted to the Auschwitz crimes from September until November 1945. Josef Kramer, who before he was appointed camp commandant of Bergen–Belsen held the same position in Auschwitz–Birkenau, as well as Franz Hössler, camp leader in the parent camp and in Birkenau women’s camp, and the two Auschwitz warders Elisabeth Volkenrath and Irma Grese were sentenced to death by hanging.

  In the Dachau trial that began in November 1945 an American military tribunal passed a death sentence on a number of Auschwitz SS men, including Vinzenz Schöttl, camp leader in Monowitz, Otto Moll, director of the crematoria in Birkenau, and the SS camp physician Friedrich Entress. In the Natzweiler trial a French military court sentenced to death Friedrich Hartjenstein, commandant of Auschwitz–Birkenau, along with Heinrich Schwarz, commandant of Monowitz. In the Mauthausen, Buchenwald and Ravensbrück trial Auschwitz SS men also appeared before the court. In the Nuremberg trial of the ‘major war criminals’ the camp itself was not explicitly the subject of proceedings.

  In March 1946 the directors of the Hamburg company Tesch und Stabenow, which had delivered Zyklon B to Auschwitz, appeared before a British military court. The owner Bruno Tesch and his business manager were sentenced to death and executed. The technicians working with the extermination installation attracted the particular attention of the occupying forces. At the end of May 1945 the engineer of the crematoria, Kurt Prüfer, was arrested by the Americans. The same night Ludwig Topf, co-owner of the company Topf und Söhne, committed suicide. His brother, Ernst Wolfgang, presented himself to the American authorities, but for unknown reasons was left in peace and founded a new business in Wiesbaden in 1947: a company making ovens for crematoria. Theengineer Prüfer,freed by the Americans, was arrested by the Soviets in Erfurt in 1946 and sentenced to twenty-five years in a penal camp. He died in 1952.

  The pressure to prosecute eased considerably when the investigation of Nazi criminals became a matter for the judicial authorities in the newly founded Federal Republic. The idea of exculpating those who were seriously incriminated entered into the federal legal system. The young Federal Republic’s attitude to the past meant that a speedy end to investigations as well as an amnesty and social integration for the incriminated parties was to be expected. Polish applications to have the perpetrators handed over were increasingly seen as a national humiliation, and from 1950 they went unanswered.

  Doctors and business managers who had actively promoted the selection of prisoners and their mass murder in Auschwitz escaped with mild sentences in the new federal state, or escaped criminal prosecution completely. Gerhard Peters, for example, general director of Degesch, which produced Zyklon B, was acquitted after two court appearances in Frankfurt am Main in 1955.

  In the fifties doctors no longer needed to worry about accusations, and no one who had carried out killings in the context of the ‘euthanasia’ programme was found guilty of murder, because ‘base motives’, the precondition for such a judgement, could not be assumed. The mass murderer Horst Schumann, who had opened a medical practice under his own name in Gladbeck in Westphalia, moved to the Sudan in the early fifties, presumably having been tipped off by the authorities. Nigeria and Libya were his next stopping-points, before he entered the state health service in Ghana. Schumann was tried in 1970 in the Federal Republic, after he had been handed over four years previously. But the trial had to be interrupted on grounds of Schumann’s ill health, and in July 1972 he was freed from captivity; until his death in 1983 he lived freely in Frankfurt am Main.

  Johann Paul Kremer, who was brought before the court again in Münster in 1960 after being released from Polish imprisonment, did lose his academic title, but despite being sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment he was able to go home a free man because the court ruled that he had served his term in prison in Poland. Carl Clauberg had been condemned to twenty-five years’ imprisonment in the Soviet Union in 1948, but after being granted a ‘special pardon’ he returned to the Federal Republic in 1955, where he made no secret of his human experiments in Auschwitz and even boasted about his method of mass sterilization. In response to public pressure Clauberg was arrested a few weeks after his return, and put on trial two years later. In 1957 Clauberg died in custody in Kiel. Josef Mengele had been released unrecognized as a prisoner of war of
the Americans, and first went into hiding near his Swabian home town of Günzburg, where his family, who supported him, ran a flourishing farm machinery factory. By the time his identity came to light in the late fifties he had already moved to South America, where, like many Nazi criminals, he did not have to fear extradition. Thirty years after his escape from Germany Mengele lost his life in a swimming accident in Brazil in 1979.

  The management of IG Farben also profited from the political considerations of the post-war period. Ten of the twenty-four leading officials who had to answer to the courts in the Nuremberg IG Farben trial were acquitted on 30 July 1948 after a year’s proceedings, while the rest were given custodial sentences of between one and a half and eight years. If the US authorities pursued ‘Case VI’ only half-heartedly, this was in part due to the world political situation, because, as the Cold War developed, German industrialists came to be seen as indispensable for the economic and military security of western Europe. The major perpetrators from IG Farben were given custodial sentences – Otto Ambros and Walther Dürrfeld received the maximum sentence of eight years – but were quickly pardoned after the foundation of the Federal Republic. Released by January 1951 into the euphoric atmosphere of the ‘Economic Miracle’, there was nothing to prevent them from rising back to senior positions in industry: Carl Krauch, Fritz ter Meer, Walther Dürrfeld and Heinrich Bütefisch, all of them once holding directorial roles in the IG Farben works in Auschwitz, were important players in the reconstruction of the Federal Republic’s chemicals industry; Ambros was immediately given management positions in several large companies.

  In January 1952, in the Frankfurt seat of the former company headquarters, IG Farben went into liquidation; four months later twelve subsidiary companies were formed out of the large combine. After legal action was brought by Norbert Wollheim, a former Jewish prisoner in the Monowitz camp, the shareholders of the dissolved company undertook to pay 30 million marks in compensation to the victims of forced labour. From now on 6,000 former Jewish prisoners received payments of between 2,500 and 5,000 marks; a tenth of the overall sum went to non-Jewish camp inmates. These payments, made specially with a view to improving the company’s image, had a favourable impact on values on the stock exchange: after the compensation agreement the share value of ‘IG Farbenindustrie in Liquidation’ immediately rose by about 10 per cent.

  The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and other proceedings

  The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial was brought about both by chance and by the commitment of a very few people. The attorney-general of the Federal German state of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, who had initiated many proceedings against Nazi criminals, had received from a journalist documents owned by a surviving Auschwitz prisoner, containing lists of names of members of the SS who had ‘shot escaping prisoners’. Henceforth Bauer became the driving force behind the criminal investigations that he brought before the regional court in Frankfurt am Main in June 1959, with the agreement of the Federal Court of Justice.

  No less strikingly, at around the same time, in the town of Schwäbisch-Hall, investigations by the Stuttgart public prosecutors had begun into one of the most brutal torturers of the political department in Auschwitz. In March 1958 Wilhelm Boger, inventor of the torture device known as the ‘Boger Swing’, was reported by a former prisoner for mass murder. Six months passed before a warrant for Boger’s arrest was issued, because the man who had reported him, who was himself in prison for perjury, was considered to be a notorious liar, and the International Auschwitz Committee supporting him was decried as communist. But once the investigations were under way, and the cooperation of Hermann Langbein, the secretary-general of the International Auschwitz Committee, had been secured, arrests followed in quick succession. Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, who had been living unchallenged under a false name as a forestry worker near Hamburg, was arrested late in 1960. But Baer died in custody before the trial began; following him in terms of SS rank was Robert Mulka, the former adjutant to Commandant Höss, who now became the chief defendant. The case ‘against Mulka and others’ (file 4 Ks 2/63) was opened by the director of the regional court, Hans Hofmeyer, on 20 December 1963 in the Römer city hall in Frankfurt, attracting public attention all around the world; in April 1964 the court moved into the newly built House of Gallus. The trial was witnessed by 20,000 visitors in the course of its twenty-month duration, among them countless school classes; the media reported the case in detail; and in the music-less oratorio Die Ermittlung (The Investigation), by Peter Weiss, the trial also made it on to the stage.

  Public interest was aroused above all by the statements of surviving prisoners, and it was these that gave the Frankfurt trial its particularly striking profile. More than 350 men and women, most of them living abroad and no longer in the best of health, undertook the journey to Frankfurt and endured the nervous strain of facing the former SS thugs and describing features of life in the camp. For many of them it was their first meeting with Germans since the end of the war.

  The subject of the trial was not the ‘administrative mass murder’ (Hannah Arendt) of the bureaucrats and ‘desk perpetrators’. Instead, the defendants were accused of a multitude of concretely provable individual crimes. And it was clear that the people before the court were not beasts, which made cosy attribution of guilt in the public discussion all the more difficult. The accused were henchmen and executors of the mass extermination, including seven former SS officers who, unlike the decision-makers at the top of the Nazi regime, and unlike the organizers of the extermination transports in the local public authorities, had directly confronted the victims with violence, the arbitrary use of force and annihilation. Not one of the twenty-two accused showed any sense of guilt, or even any insight into their individual responsibility for the murders (apart from Baer, the SS medical orderly Hans Nierzwicki also escaped trial, for reasons of ill health; in the course of the trial the block leader Heinrich Bischoff died, and the medical orderly Gerhard Neubert was declared incapable of standing trial because of a kidney infection). But none of them, while protesting his personal innocence, denied that a huge amount of killing had been carried out.

  The judicial and political climax of the trial was the field inspection of Auschwitz. In the judicial process of the Federal Republic, it was customary in the case of capital crimes to visit the scene of the crime, particularly if no confessions were forthcoming. A court delegation directed by Walter Hotz, the appointed judge and member of the court, travelled to Poland in mid-December 1964. The visit behind the Iron Curtain was a very bold undertaking, particularly since the Federal Republic did not yet have diplomatic relations with Poland, and there could be no question of normalizing relations between the states. The fact that the field inspection could none the less take place in the chilly political climate of the sixties was thanks to the commitment of the lawyer Henry Ormond, the Nebenklage advocate (under German law the victims of a crime have a right to influence proceedings; this is called Nebenklage, and a lawyer is assigned to facilitate the process), and his Polish colleague Jan Sehn, the head of the Criminological Institute of Cracow University. As a member of the Polish Investigatory Commission in the camp, Sehn had already set criminal investigations in motion immediately after being liberated from the Nazis, and also led the forensic investigations in the two Auschwitz trials by the Supreme Court.

  Eleven of twenty-two defence counsels, three public prosecutors and the three Nebenklage advocates, a recorder, two judicial officers, a court photographer and an interpreter attended the inspection. The only defendant who decided to return to Auschwitz was the former SS physician Franz Lucas. Between 200 and 300 journalists from all over Europe, the USA and Israel turned the inspection, which began on 14 December 1964 with a minute’s silence by the (reconstructed) Black Wall in the parent camp, into a major publicity event. The 2½-day visit was central to the trial. Its significance lay in ascertaining the facts, and in its lasting psychological effects on the participants in the trial. It
became apparent that almost all the statements by the former SS men could be contradicted, and conversely that many of the charges could be substantiated. It was clear, for example, that the parent camp had not been too big, as the defendants claimed, for them to know what was happening. The whole of the camp compound could be seen from every watchtower. Through holes in the roof, peep-holes and gaps in the wooden beams over the windows, prisoners could actually observe what was happening, and SS men could be recognized from a distance taking part in the selection process. The field inspection provided something that the trial had not managed to supply in the course of a year: a clear picture of the machinery of extermination.

  On 19 and 20 August 1965, after 182 days of hearings, the judgement was reached in the Auschwitz trial. Seventeen defendants were given custodial sentences, and three were acquitted for lack of evidence: Johan Schoberth of the political department, the medical orderly Johann Arthur Breitwieser and the dentist Willi Schatz. Six were given life sentences: Stefan Baretzki, a block leader in Birkenau, Emil Bednarek, Wilhelm Boger of the political department, Franz Hofmann, as ‘functionary prisoner’ Kapo in the punishment unit, the report leader Oswald Kaduk and the medical orderly Josef Klehr. Robert Mulka was given a fourteen-year sentence; in 1968 he was released as unfit to be kept in prison, and died a year later. Hans Stark of the political department was sentenced to ten years; Victor Capesius, who had been in charge of the camp pharmacy, was given nine years; Karl Höcker, adjutant to Commandant Baer, and Willy Frank, head of the dental ward, received seven years; the squad leader Bruno Schlage was given six years; Klaus Dylewski of the political department was sentenced to six years; the medical orderly Herbert Scherpe four years and six months; Pery Broad of the political department four years; medical orderly Emil Hantl three years and six months; and the camp physician Franz Lucas three years and three months.