Indicting Auschwitz? The paradox of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial

German History

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 505-532

  Wittmann, Rebecca Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34249654901     PISSN: 02663554     EISSN: 1477089X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/0266355403gh294oa     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Fritz Bauer, 'Zu den Naziverbrecher Prozessen', in Stimme der Gemeinde turn Kirchlichen Leben, zur Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur, 18 (Sept. 1963), p. 568. Fritz Bauer was the decisive force that shaped the trial. Bauer, a German Jew who had lived in exile during the Nazi period and who led the public prosecutor's office in Frankfurt after the war, made it his lifelong mission to bring to justice the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide. In this respect Bauer was an exception in the legal system, as his intentions were not strictly judicial but more broadly historical as well. Quite explicitly, beyond his concern with individual cases, Bauer wanted to take to task a whole era, an entire ideology. Bauer saw this trial as something quite removed from a normal criminal trial. Indeed, it would have been most difficult for anyone following the pre-trial investigations and the proceedings themselves to view this as a typical trial, for sitting on the defendants' bench were twenty men involved in mass murder and genocide, in state-sanctioned and ordered systematic killing at a death camp. Bauer saw the trial as an opportunity for Germany to confront its past and to examine its relationship to the Nazi period
2. Anklageschrift, in Pre-trial files of the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, The Public Prosecutor's Office at the District Court of Frankfurt am Main (hereafter 4Js 444/59), 78: 14619-62. In spring 1964 the trial moved to the Gallus house, a newly erected building with much more space for a courtroom and observers
3. Henry Friedlander, 'The Judiciary and Nazi Crimes in Postwar Germany', The Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual (New York, 1984), p. 32
4. Adalbert Rückerl, The Investigation of Nazi Crimes 1945-1978: A Documentation, trans. Derek Rütter (Heidelberg, 1979), pp. 35-6
5. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1964)
6. The Penal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, trans. Joseph Darby (Littleton, Colo., 1987), p. 88
7. Alfred Bongard, 'Die Unterschied zwischen Mord und Totschlag', in Michael Ratz (ed.), Die Justiz und die Nazis: Zur Strafverfolgung von Nazismus und Neonazismus seit 1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 1979), p. 83
8. Rückerl, The Investigation of Nazi Crimes 1945-1978, p. 42
9. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 16
10. According to Krausnick, Buchheim, Broszat and Jacobsen, Auschwitz in particular fell under the jurisdiction of both offices (which often had conflicting aims) as it was both a deportation camp for the Jews (controlled by the RSHA) and a massive slave labour camp (controlled by the WVHA). Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, The Anatomy of the SS State, trans. Richard Barry, Marian Jackson and Dorothy Long (New York, 1968), pp. 483-4
11. Broszat in The Anatomy of the SS State, p. 432
12. see also Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992). Browning deals with this subject particularly in chapter 18
13. See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York, 1986), particularly the chapter entitled 'The Grey Zone'
14. See also Filip Müller, Auschwitz Inferno: The Testimony of a Sonderkommando; trans. Susanne Flatauer (London, 1979)
15. and Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Other Stories, trans. Barbara Vedder (London, 1967)
16. Also, see Richard Glazar, Trap with a Green Fence: Survival in Treblinka, trans. Roslyn Theobald (Evanston, 1992). These are among the most famous accounts, but many other survivor memoirs include details of prisoners who tortured others in order to survive
17. Anklageschrift, ibid., 14815
18. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, The Anatomy of the SS State, p. 525
19. Anklageschrift, ibid., 78: 14634
20. Anklageschrifi, ibid., 80: 15150