The first German chancellor of the new republic, Konrad Adenauer, who came to power in , was opposed to the process of denazification. Adenauer instead opted for a strategy of integration — integrating old Nazis into the new republic in order to move forward. Ultimately, many of those involved in Nazi activities were not punished and retained their personal and professional positions, and much of the wealth plundered by the Nazis was not immediately returned to its rightful owners.
This extract is a translation of a report on altitude experiments at Dachau concentration camp, in which several prisoners of the camp died. Here, Stroop discusses resistance by the inhabitants of the ghetto. This letter, sent from Himmler to Oswald Pohl, ordered the deportation of Jews remaining in ghettos in the east to be placed in concentration camps.
In the summer of , legal representatives from the four Allied nations met in London to establish a charter for an International Military Tribunal. The Tribunal was in charge of prosecuting the major Nazi war criminals for their crimes throughout the Second World War, including the Holocaust.
The Tribunal decided on four charges: conspiracy against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the waging of aggressive war. The crimes of the Holocaust were included under crimes against humanity. The first trial took place between October and November in the German city of Nuremberg.
The trial covered the crimes and failures of the Third Reich as a whole, and there was no specific part which focused solely on the persecution and mass murder of Jews. The verdicts were announced on the 1 October The death sentences were carried out ten days later on 16 October He hoped these new laws would prevent mass killings such as the Armenian Genocide of Although the pamphlet was circulated at a meeting of the League of Nations in the spring of , it was not discussed and not accepted.
Eleven years later, after investigating the fate of Jews in the Holocaust, Lemkin decided to coin a new term — genocide — to both define the crime of mass murder more clearly and raise awareness of it. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington D. Lemkin continued to lobby the United Nations UN to adopt the term. On 9 December , the UN established genocide as a crime in international law.
An extract from the opening statement for the prosecution at the I. G Farben trial, given on 27 Aug A further extract from the opening statement for the prosecution at the I. Following the first Nuremberg trial of the twenty-one major war criminals in , twelve more trials were organised by the American occupying authorities. These trials are known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials and took place between and The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials tried major war criminals, but of lower ranks than those tried in the first trial.
Each of the twelve trials involved defendants from a different strand of the Nazi state, such as the Einsatzgruppen , industrialists, jurists, doctors, and civil servants. In total, defendants were tried, resulting in 77 terms of imprisonment, 8 life sentences and 12 death sentences. The sixth of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials was the trial of the 24 leading members of the industrial company I.
G Farben. It took placed between 27 August and 11 June The I. G Farben company had actively collaborated with the Nazis, primarily by using slave labour from concentration camps. The 24 defendants were charged with:.
Thirteen of the defendants were found guilty and received prison terms from one and a half years to eight years in prison. Adolf Eichmann 19 March — 1 June was a leading member of the Nazi Party in charge of organising mass deportations of Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
At the end of the war, Eichmann was captured by the United States although his identity remained unknown as he used a false name and placed in a camp for SS officials in Germany.
However, in , after US officials discovered his identity, Eichmann fled the camp using false papers and went into hiding. In , made his way to Argentina.
He was kidnapped and brought to Israel to stand trial. On 11 April , the trial against Eichmann began in Jerusalem. The court heard witnesses from 19 countries including survivors and 54 members of the Auschwitz-SS in proceedings against 21 members of the SS and 1 prisoner, accused of having taken part in the mass murder of millions of people. On August 20, , after 18 months of hearings, the verdicts were pronounced in one of the most significant trials in German legal history.
The immediacy of the testimonies in this film yields a historically precise and absorbing time-capsule. The court proceedings were recorded on audiotape that were to have been destroyed after the trial.
Filmmakers Bickel and Wagner located the hours of material in the early s that had languished in obscurity for decades. They present tape recordings along with extensive and exclusive original film material, original photos, and current interviews with witnesses and other people involved in the trial. Rarely does one get a glimpse inside a historic trial where the voices of the witnesses come alive. Survivor witnesses describe their unspeakable suffering at the hands of the defendants with amazing attention to detail, and their testimony helps to reconstruct the history of Auschwitz as it has never been told before.
This film therefore contributes greatly to our understanding of the actual experience of the Holocaust; rather than reading lifeless documents we are transported into the Haus Gallus to witness for ourselves the dedication of the prosecutors, the courage of the witnesses, the mendacity of the defendants, and the painstaking efforts of the judge to strike the right tone in his verdict.
The Auschwitz trial was an important turning point in West Germany's confrontation with the German past -- it represented the long overdue beginning of earnest scholarly and public inquiry into what actually happened at Auschwitz.
This documentary brilliantly captures the magnitude of that moment. The Supreme National Tribunal sat in Cracow for a second important trial, known as the Auschwitz garrison trial. The most common sentences for lower-ranking members of the Auschwitz garrison were three years in prison times, for Death and life sentences were relatively rare 41 times, 6. Poland aside, the German Federal Republic held the most trials of members of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp garrison.
The watershed in prosecuting Nazi war criminals there did not, however, come until the s. The best known trials of members of the Auschwitz garrison were four trials in Frankfurt am Main between and
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