Einsatzgruppen trial

The case

The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile death squads, operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million Jews, up to 250,000 Romani, and around 500,000 so-called "partisans", people with disabilities, political commissars, Slavs, homosexuals and others. The 24 defendants in this trial were all commanders of these Einsatzgruppen units and faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal stated in its judgment:

The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II-A, were Michael Musmanno (presiding judge and naval officer) from Pennsylvania, John J. Speight from Alabama, and Richard D. Dixon from North Carolina. The chief of counsel for the prosecution was Telford Taylor; the chief prosecutor for this case was Benjamin B. Ferencz. The indictment was filed initially on July 3 and then amended on July 29, 1947, to also include the defendants Steimle, Braune, Haensch, Strauch, Klingelhöfer, and von Radetzky. The trial lasted from September 29, 1947, until April 10, 1948.

Indictment

1. Crimes against humanity through persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds, murder, extermination, imprisonment, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, including German nationals and nationals of other countries, as part of an organized scheme of genocide.
2. War crimes for the same reasons, and for wanton destruction and devastation not justified by military necessity.
3. Membership of criminal organizations, the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or the Gestapo, which had been declared criminal organizations previously in the international Nuremberg Military Tribunals.

All defendants were charged on all counts. All defendants pleaded "not guilty". The tribunal found all of them guilty on all counts, except Rühl and Graf, who were found guilty only on count 3. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death. However, only four of them were executed. Nine of those condemned had their sentences reduced. Another, Eduard Strauch, couldn't be executed since he had been transferred to Belgian custody after his conviction.

Defendants

The presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, explained his rationale for sentencing while testifying at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s. He had chosen to impose death sentences in all cases where the defendant had actively participated in murder and failed to present mitigating circumstances. For example, although Erwin Schulz confessed to presiding over the execution of 90 to 100 men in Ukraine, he received a 20-year sentence since he had protested an order to exterminate all Jewish women and children, and immediately resigned when he was unable to get the order retracted. Superior orders was rejected as a defense.

Of the 14 death sentences, only four were carried out; the others were commuted to prison terms of varying lengths in 1951. In 1958, all convicts were released from prison.

Quotes from the judgment

The Nuremberg Military Tribunal in its judgement stated the following:

... a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.

The number of deaths resulting from the activities with which these defendants have been connected and which the prosecution has set at one million is but an abstract number. One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated.

It is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating. One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons – men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family – falling before the executioner's guns. If one million is divided by ten, this scene must happen one hundred thousand times, and as one visualizes the repetitious horror, one begins to understand the meaning of the prosecution's words, "It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children."}}

Notes

References

• Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Nürnberg, October 1946 – April 1949, Volume IV, ("Green Series) (the "Einsatzgruppen case")
• Description from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Einsatzgruppen trials. Another description.
• Ferencz, Benjamin, “A Prosecutor's Personal Account: From Nuremberg to Rome", Journal of International Affairs, 52: No. 2, Columbia University, Spring 1999
• Benjamin Ferencz, Mémoires de Ben, procureur à Nuremberg et avocat de la Paix mondiale, Michalon, Paris, 2012 (French).

References

1. [[Benjamin Ferencz]]: ''Opening Statement of the Prosecution'', vorgetragen am 29. September 1947. In: ''Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10.'' Vol. 4. District of Columbia 1950, S. 30.
2. (2021-12-28). "Ben Ferencz recalls his work on the Einsatzgruppen Trial".
3. "Extermination camp".
4. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120213004056/http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/04/NMT04-T0412.htm United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.]'' (Einsatzgruppen trial), Judgement (via Internet Archive).
5. "Five death sentences were confirmed: the sentence against Oswald Pohl, as well as those passed against the leaders of the Mobile Killing Units, Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann, and Otto Ohrlendorf. . . . In the early morning hours of 7 June, the Nazi criminals were hanged in the Landesburg prison courtyard." Norbert Frei, ''Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration''. Columbia University Press, 2002. [[iarchive:adenauersgermany00frei/page/370
6. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120213004102/http://www.mazal.org/archive/nmt/04/NMT04-T0585.htm United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.]'' (Einsatzgruppen trial), Judgment, pages 585-586. Internet Archive.
7. "Tonbandmitschnitt des 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses".