Existing comment:
1963-1965 AUSCHWITZ TRIAL IN FRANKFURT AM MAIN
Starting in 1963, 22 former SS men from Auschwitz concentration camp were put on trial in Frankfurt. There had been considerable resistance to the trial from within the judiciary. It was only through the untiring commitment of the Hessian Public Prosecutor General Fritz Bauer that the proceedings took place.
The trial lasted 20 months; more than 200 Auschwitz survivors were heard as witnesses. The proceedings, which attracted great media interest in Germany and abroad, showed the public the whole inconceivable dimensions of the mass murders committed in Auschwitz for the first time.
The trial had a broad influence on the social image of the typical Nazi criminal. Most of those who bore the main responsibility for the organised mass murders came from the middle class, and were doctors, businessmen, craftsmen or bank managers. The lack of sympathy and remorse shown by the suspects on trial shocked many observers.
These trials resulted in six defendants being sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. Ten defendants were sentenced to between three and fourteen years' imprisonment. Three defendants were acquitted. The court held that a sentence could only be passed if it could be demonstrated that each perpetrator had been specifically involved in committing a murder; thus, in the subsequent period there were only a few proceedings against people who had borne responsibility in
the concentration camps.
It was not until 2011 that the legal view taken by Fritz Bauer prevailed in the proceedings against former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk. Anyone who kept the murder machinery going through his activity in an extermination camp was an accessory to murder. This change of legal view led to new trials against former SS men, such as Oskar Gröning in Lüneburg in 2015 and Reinhold Hanning in Detmold in 2016. |