German war crime trials were held

The major emphasis, especially for the Americans, was to try the Nazi leadership for the crime of waging aggressive war. The proceedings also provided copious documentary evidence of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. The Nuremberg judgment constitutes an important historical turning point, one of the great landmarks in the development of international law and international relations, whose importance has grown in recent years.

In this respect, it served as a binding precedent that was followed in subsequent trials almost everywhere. Consequently, no attention was paid to such crimes as the April 1, , boycott , the Nuremberg laws, Kristallnacht , etc. There were many who found the trial problematic. Others regarded it as ex post facto law. The role of the Soviet Union in the invasion of Poland was deliberately ignored. Still others felt that Nuremberg was a distraction because they wanted to focus on the future and the swiftly developing Cold War — the next war — and not the last war.

Others felt that the punishment given the convicted defendants, however great, was inadequate given the magnitude of the crimes. In subsequent years, as the punishments meted out to subsequent defendants became less severe, some questioned whether any real justice was achieved or merely the appearance of justice. This law, with minor modifications, eliminated the connection between crimes against humanity and the two remaining crimes crimes against peace and war crimes , and raised crimes against humanity to a level equal to that of the other two.

This also extended the period covered by the law from the war years alone to the entire Nazi period. Control Council Law No.

The —46 trial at Nuremberg of the surviving Nazi leadership was the only one conducted by the IMT. Twelve trials of special significance were conducted at Nuremberg by U.

Other U. Occupation Zone, during the same period. Supreme Court at the conclusion of the IMT proceedings. The twelve cases were brought against groups of important Nazis who bore the chief responsibility for some of the most serious and significant of Nazi crimes. They were:. As noted above, the crimes committed against the Jews were not the main focus of the IMT trial.

During the subsequent trials, however, much more attention was paid to acts of cruelty and the annihilation of Jews under the Nazi regime. In the last trial. Robert Kempner , one of the chief U. It was the record of the Wannsee Conference of January 20, , during which cooperation was requested and received from all party and government institutions involved in the implementation of the Final Solution.

The Einsatzgruppen trial was primarily a trial of documents. The chief prosecutor in the case, Benjamin Ferencz, a young American Jewish lawyer working under Taylor, was able to obtain conviction of the generals responsible for the murders by these mobile killing squads by introducing into evidence the operational field reports sent to Berlin from the killing fields of the Soviet Union.

One hundred seventy-seven Nazis were tried and convicted in these twelve trials. Of these, twelve were sentenced to death, 25 to life imprisonment, and the remainder to long prison terms. Proximity to the crime was taken as a measure of guilt. Those who were directly involved in the killing — doctors, concentration camp heads, Einsatzgruppen officers — received the most severe sentences.

Thus, those who profited by the crime and developed the infrastructure that enabled the killings to proceed were treated more leniently.

The U. This vast corpus of material supplements extensively that from the International Military Tribunal. A large part of the documentation of the military tribunal trials was published by the U.

In the U. Of these, were sentenced to death, and of these sentences were carried out. In the British Occupation Zone, in Lueneburg , Hamburg , and Wuppertal , 1, defendants were tried before British military tribunals and were sentenced to death.

Among the more important trials in the British Zone, that of the SS guards at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the Bergen Trial , September 17—November 17, should be mentioned. Josef Kramer, the camp commandant, and his accomplices were convicted. Kramer was put to death.

The total number of Nazi criminals convicted in the three Western occupation zones between and was 5,, of whom were sentenced to death. Four hundred eighty-six death sentences were carried out; the remainder were commuted to prison terms of varying lengths. Official or semiofficial figures are not available for the trials of Nazis in the Soviet Occupation Zone. It is assumed, however, that tens of thousands of Germans were tried there and that most of them were convicted and in large measure deported to Soviet territories to serve their sentences.

In , in the wake of a Soviet-West German agreement, 8, criminals were freed. Another were handed over to West Germany for further investigation.

In the course of its work, the United Nations War Crimes Commission prepared 80 lists of war criminals, which together comprised 36, names including Japanese. The Commission published a number of partial statistics on the period until March 1, Death sentences were passed for ; 1, were sentenced to varying prison terms, and were acquitted.

Before the trials concluded, the political climate changed. For some Americans, the Korean War made putting the Nazi period in the past ever more urgent. John J. McCloy, a former assistant secretary of war who became U.

By nearly all prisoners had been freed. Courts in postwar Germany began to function at the end of , when some of the Allies reinvested the Germans with the right to hold trials. According to a summary prepared by the Federal Department of Justice in Bonn , indictments were issued by the West German authorities against 9, Nazi criminals between and Jan.

Of these, twelve were condemned to death through , 98 to life imprisonment, 6, to various prison terms, and the remainder acquitted or never brought to trial.

All in all, during the above period, investigations were carried out against 79, accused Nazi criminals. Among the most important trials were those of the Treblinka guards —65 ; the Auschwitz SS personnel —79 and —64 ; Franz Stangl , commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka —75 ; the Majdanek case —81 ; and Josef Schwammberger , commandant of the Mieliec , Rozvadow , and Przemysl forced labor camps in Poland, who also destroyed the Przemysl ghetto — Immediately after the end of World War II, the Allies realized that in the interests of international security, Germany must be thoroughly purged of its Nazi elements.

In the military sphere, the magnitude of the German defeat ensured that the German military posed no threat to the occupying armies; the Allied military governments in occupied Germany further secured themselves by means of preventive arrest of members of all Nazi government, military, police, and party bodies. In the political sphere, denazification proceedings were intended to prevent Nazis not included in the list of war criminals from assuming influential positions in the political, economic, and social life of Germany, and to assure the process of German democratization.

In the legal sphere, investigations of Nazi functionaries were carried out and those accused of crimes prosecuted, when the evidence warranted trials and denazification were not the same thing. More than 3,, Germans were obliged to undergo this process, and trials were conducted against accused Nazi criminals in both Allied and German courts. From to , trials were held by the West German states of, inter alia, participants in the Kristallnacht riots November 9—10, , and the number of accused reached several hundred.

When a state and civil society are dominated so totally by a ruling party that all officials either willingly or by necessity adhere to its expressed ideology, it is difficult to purge these people from its institutions, including the judiciary and legal community and the government bureaucracy, and still have a functioning system.

Denazification, therefore, was not at all successful, and most former Nazis, especially in the judiciary, returned to their old posts. After , denazification ceased in West and East Germany. Searching for criminals not yet brought to trial abated, and many were able to flee Germany and go elsewhere. Latin America was a frequent destination, as were Arab countries.

As a result murderers lived freely and with only vague fears throughout the world — Adolf Eichmann lived in Argentina ; the physician Josef Mengele lived in Argentina until and later in Paraguay and Brazil ; Horst Schumann , who performed medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps, lived in Ghana until his extradition; Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, lived in Syria and Brazil until his extradition; and there were plenty of others.

And many lived freely in East and West Germany as well. West German authorities rationalized this by claiming that the Nuremberg trials, even though they had been held in Germany, did not evoke the appropriate reaction in the country. After its overwhelming defeat, the German nation was busy repairing the ravages created by the war.

Appropriate documentation was lacking, as the victors had taken all the German archives that remained after the war.

The reservoir of potential witnesses that existed in Germany between and and constituted an important element in gathering complaints and evidence, disappeared with the elimination of Displaced Persons camps and the migration of the refugees to Israel and other countries. Most importantly, the Cold War became a central concern of the Allies and the politics of fighting it predominated. There was less incentive for the Western allies to pursue war crimes trials.

In addition, Germans in general, and their official institutions, maintained that they were not completely aware of the extent of the crimes committed by the Nazis. It was only in the wake of the Ulm trial against the members of the Einsatzkommando Tilsit , which operated in Lithuania, that most Germans learned of the extent of the crimes — or so it was argued. Whatever the validity of this claim, it is a fact that marked a turning point in the attempt to bring Nazi criminals to justice within the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, and, to a far lesser extent, in Austria.

In a number of places suitable conditions and tools were created for renewed activity in this field, especially in West Germany, Israel where Yad Vashem , the memorial institution whose work includes documentation of the Holocaust, was established, as was a special police unit for Nazi criminals , and the United States where the Institute of Jewish Affairs concentrated exclusively on assistance to German and Austrian judicial authorities.

In the Ulm trial, it became clear to the prosecution that until that time the crime of the Final Solution was barely considered by the German courts and that those mainly responsible for its planning and execution were not tried at all. This had to do with the restrictions placed by the Allies on the authority of the West German courts, which were loosened only later. As a result of this trial, there was an awakening among liberal jurists in Germany.

Thirteen years after the end of the war, a special meeting of the ministers of justice of the 13 Laender states then constituting the Federal Republic was held in city of Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. Following the suggestion of the minister of justice of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the ministers of the federal Laender decided in October to create the aforementioned Zentralestelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklaerung der NS-Verbrechen Central Office of the State Judicial Authorities for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes — Central Office, for short.

This authority started its work in Ludwigsburg on December 1, According to the administrative agreement of the Laender, the task of the Central Office consisted of collecting and sifting all obtainable records about relevant criminal acts under investigation, examining crimes, classifying them and determining the whereabouts of the perpetrators.

The office was obliged to coordinate preliminary inquiries and transmit relevant information to the appropriate public prosecutors and to be of further assistance to them. As the Central Office itself was not a public prosecution office, it could not prefer charges, apply for arrest warrants, or examine property, but was obliged to pass its findings to the public prosecutors.

The Central Office had no competence to investigate genuine war crimes. It also did not initially possess any jurisdiction to investigate killings in those concentration camps which were located in the area of the Federal Republic. Later on — at the end of — its jurisdiction was extended and it then investigated such crimes committed in German territory, with the exception of those committed by the Reich Central Security Office, which remained within the jurisdiction of the Chief State Prosecutor at the Supreme Court of Justice.

Under the terms of the Administrative Agreement, public prosecutors were obliged to forward to the Central Office all the findings they obtained during proceedings and present the minutes of the examination sessions of accused and witnesses, as well as other relevant documents together with their concluding notes. The Central Office registered these documents in card indexes. In January , the central card catalogue in the Central Office contained more than 1.

The data was obtained from witnesses, the accused, and other persons. The document collection included more than half a million individual documents about the Nazi era mainly photocopies and more than microfilms.

These were also available for use through separate document catalogues. Initially, the Central Office was entrusted with the investigation, in addition to murders, of crimes classified as manslaughter. The statute of limitations ran out on these as of May 8, As a result, only those murders which are defined as willful murders can be prosecuted. A law of December lifted limitations for all murders, not only Nazi killings. The employees of the Central Office were generally prosecutors and investigating judges; the majority were devoted young people, who were not adults when the Nazi crimes were committed.

They began their work by becoming acquainted with the problem, gathering documentary material and establishing ties with Israel and Jewish institutions in the United States.

This office did not deal with crimes committed within German territory itself; those crimes were prosecuted by the regular judicial authorities in the states in which the alleged perpetrators resided, as were crimes committed outside Germany — the Central Office gathered information, and individual states undertook investigations and trials.

The Central Office came up against many problems. On the one hand, its activities were an annoyance and a threat to German circles that included many influential figures who wanted to forget the past, e. On the other hand, prosecutors encountered many difficulties and obstacles in gathering documentary material scattered in many countries.

Certain countries, for political reasons, were not always willing to assist by placing the material in their possession at the disposal of the German authorities. In addition, in dealing with Nazi crimes, investigation authorities had to take into consideration further difficulties. Many witnesses who were victims of National Socialism were no longer alive or were unwilling to give testimony about their terrible experiences, especially in the oppressive atmosphere of a courtroom.

Proof becomes more difficult to establish over time. Some survivors refused to return to Germany even for a trial. Others were angry at what they considered the disrespectful tone of cross-examination. Ordinary victims had usually been in contact only with low-level perpetrators and not with those in charge, the leaders. In cases of culprits who were not known to their victims either by name or by appearance verification could be arrived at only through documentary evidence.

Documents often arrived in the form of photocopies from the archives of Eastern European states and were therefore distrusted, or flatly rejected, by certain circles in the Federal Republic.

In some trials in which such documentary evidence was introduced, counsel for the defense asked the courts not to accept it. Unfortunately, in several cases, such documentary proof was entirely missing, as the documents had been destroyed shortly before the end of the war or never existed.

These proceedings were almost always dependent on the testimony of witnesses. But it is only natural that, decades after the events, the value of such testimony becomes more and more questionable. In addition, the exterminations of the National Socialist era were not carried out openly, but in specially chosen localities, behind walls and fences and under the strictest secrecy.

The problem of locating witnesses was even greater with respect to German nationals, who were unwilling to give incriminating testimonies against their accomplices. The reservoir of witnesses was therefore usually limited to the circles of the perpetrators or the victims. Many of those who witnessed such acts or were in contact with those who committed them were afraid to expose themselves to investigation; they remained silent, because of misguided solidarity with the perpetrators, or because they had suppressed the terrible events from their memory.

The victims were often able to recall the essentials, but had forgotten details which seemed to them at the time unimportant and which might have been crucial for the proceedings. They often instinctively substituted for their imperfect knowledge hearsay evidence and conclusions reached later, often after discussion with other survivors. Perpetrators, times, and places became confused, especially as many of the victims had passed through a dozen or more camps. Still, even in these cases remarkably precise testimonies were often given which could be — sometimes through documentation — unequivocally verified.

It has also been repeatedly established that witnesses for the accused contacted each other, sometimes in an organized fashion, to coordinate their exonerating statements. Many of the investigations handed over for legal action were completed with the trial and conviction of the accused, e.

Among the important cases dealt with by the Central Office are those of the Einsatzgruppen , with all their units, that operated mainly in the German-occupied Soviet territories, and the infamous Aktion Reinhard case, the operation aimed at murdering Polish Jews. The Central Office also investigated the crimes committed in the ghettos in Poland and in all German-occupied countries of Europe. An important limitation of the prosecution of Nazi killings was the amendment of Article 50, Paragraph 2 of the Penal Code passed in October , whereby persons who had participated in such murders could be punished only if their own special criminal characteristics, such as delight in murder, avarice, or other base motives such as racial hatred or lust for revenge, were proved.

Failure to prove these meant that the act was covered by the statute of limitations and was not actionable as of May 8, Other related manifestations, such as extreme cruelty and malice, were, however, excluded from the above amendment.

In performing its functions, the Central Office cooperated from the outset with private and state institutions in Germany and elsewhere — especially with institutions in Israel, the U. From , the Central Office was also given the opportunity, after appropriate agreements were reached, to cooperate with states of the Eastern Bloc and to make use of the extensive documentary material in their archives.

Interpol had declined to help in clarifying Nazi crimes, as it classified these in the category of political offenses, with which, according to its constitution, it is not supposed to deal.

As a not insignificant number of persons sought for had succeeded, equipped with false personal documents and in some cases helped by the Vatican, in disappearing into Arab or South American countries, which as a rule declined extradition of these persons, proceedings against these accused often remained unsettled.

For example, Walter Rauff , former SS-Standartenfuehrer and director of the technical department of the RSHA dealing with the use of gas, lived until his death in in Chile , and could not be extradited. It is also possible that some accused lived unidentified in the Federal Republic. In comparatively numerous cases the accused committed suicide in detention or died during the proceedings.

Often, the inability of a defendant to stand trial — supported by official medical examinations — resulted in the suspension of the proceedings. The fact that these suspensions have occurred more frequently in Nazi trials than in other legal proceedings is related not to the indulgence of the courts, but to the age of the defendants. In , sixty years after liberation an officer who was thirty-years-old in was by then 90 and likely to plead ill health and feebleness.

All these circumstances now necessitate an especially careful and precise examination of testimonies by the courts. As over the years the number of living witnesses has decreased and their memories have deteriorated, the proportion of acquittals in forthcoming cases will undoubtedly increase. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the incorporation of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic did not lead to identification or prosecution of East Germans now under the jurisdiction of the Central Office.

The unified German government was more interested in trying former East German Communist Party leaders and former Berlin Wall guards responsible for the killing of East Germans attempting to escape than in prosecuting aged pensioners with a Nazi past.

As of , the Central Office had 35 suspected Nazi war criminals under review. In , two new indictments were filed for murder, and these were the only murder charges outstanding against former Nazis or collaborators anywhere in the world. Chances of obtaining additional convictions, moreover, remain small, for reasons apart from failing memories. As the Canadian historian Rebecca Wittmann has pointed out, the conservative German judiciary has always been loath to convict aging German pensioners for wartime acts.

In , Engel died of natural causes at age 97 in Hamburg. Despite the proclamations and claims of government circles in Austria about the desire to eradicate traces of Nazism and anti-Semitism from the country, the acts of the Austrian courts attest to the opposite. Only isolated trials against Nazi criminals were held in Austria in the s, and all the verdicts constituted a mockery of justice and law, to the point of arousing wrath the world over.

Among those brought to trial were Franz Novak, an SS member and aide to Adolf Eichmann, who organized the transport of tens of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers he was tried in and sentenced to eight years. A new trial was held in and he was acquitted. While Austria as of had 27 ongoing investigations, the only convictions obtained there have been those discussed in the preceding paragraph.

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim , who later became President of Austria, was known to have lied about his whereabouts during World War II he served in Yugoslavia in the vicinity of the places where atrocities were committed. In contrast to the period immediately after the war, when membership in a Nazi organization was sufficient for a prima facie case, current German criminal law stipulates that proof must be given that an individual defendant committed acts of murder or was an accomplice to such acts.

Although it was still possible to find Jewish eyewitnesses to testify against low-ranking Nazis, it was almost impossible to do so in the case of high-ranking officials, those who gave the commands. Jews were seldom in direct, eyewitness contact with the leaders, merely with the lower-level officials who operated in the vicinity of Jews.

Thus, it was only based on testimony given by accomplices or documents from the period that they could be brought to trial, and these were often unavailable or nonexistent. Defendants who were convicted were largely convicted as accomplices, because to convict them as perpetrators earning an automatic life sentence the prosecution had to show their inner motivations.

Elements of inner motivation included lust for killing, sexual drive for killing, cruelty, treachery, base motives defined in Nazi trials as racial hatred, and very hard to prove.

Above all, the prosecution had to prove the individual initiative of the defendant to get a conviction of murder. This led to a strong focus on defendants who committed brutal acts in excess of their orders. Other, less publicised, atrocities were committed during Japanese advances and it's estimated that millions of Chinese civilians were killed. The Japanese attack had several major aims.

First, it intended to destroy important American fleet units, thereby preventing the Pacific Fleet from interfering with Japanese conquest of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and to enable Japan to conquer Southeast Asia without interference. The 10 Nazis were hanged one after the other in one hour and 34 minutes. Twenty-eight high-ranking political and military leaders were indicted on 55 counts of "crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

These deaths illustrated Japan's will to fight to the death to defend their mainland rather than surrender unconditionally. They may also have played a role in the US military's decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.

Where were the Japanese and German war crimes trials held? Category: news and politics war and conflicts. Why did Japan attack China ?

Total deaths by country. How many German soldiers died in ww2? Do Japanese schools teach about World War 2? What does Victor's justice mean? How many Russians died in ww2? There never have been American War Crimes Trials.

The trials are known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Nuremburg there were trials in many cities. Whereas in Nuremberg the trials were about war crimes and crimes against peace, the Franfurt trials were about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity.

German leaders stood trial for war crimes and it established resposibility for war. The trials were held in Nuremberg , Germany. The trials were held to posecute the Nazi war criminals for war crimes. Nuremburg Germany. The nuremberg trials were held after the war, when several of the officers were take to court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

They were tried for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials. The trials were held to bring to justice and punish those Nazis accused of war crimes and mass genocide. I believe that the Nurenburg War Crimes Trials answered this question. The Nuremberg Trials put officers from the German High Command responsible for war crimes to justice.

Among the war crimes that they were convicted of were atrocities committed in the concentration camps. No, the Nuremberg Trials were held in Nuremberg Germany, and as one might suspect, it was to try the Germans for war crimes.

The Tokyo Tribunal was held to try the Japanese. Between and German officials involved in the holocaust and other war crimes were tried in Nuremberg Germany.

Th trials were known as the Nuremberg trials. The War Crimes trials of the leading Nazi military and politican leaders, who survived the war, was held there. The first Nuremberg trial were only for the European war criminals Class-A. Subsequent Nuremberg trials were held for lesser criminals. Other countries held separate trials for lesser Class-B and C war criminals. After the surrender of Germany in Allies arranged Nuremberg trials to try war criminals.

These trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany. There were several war crimes trials for ex-Nazis who were captured by the Allies. The most famous trial of the top leaders, including Herman Goering, was held at Nurnberg, Germany. The first German executed for war crimes was General Dostler and his trial was held in Italy, where he was executed in December War crimes and crimes against humanity. These trials were held for prominent members of Nazi Germany who were accused of war crimes.