The mauthausen trial jardim

The Mauthausen trial is noteworthy in that it produced more death sentences than any other trial in American history. Chief prosecutor Lt. William D. Denson argued that simply serving in any capacity at Mauthausen or any of its sub-camps constituted a war crime. Denson implied that any defendant who had served at Mauthausen was guilty unless proven innocent.

Navy Lt. Jack Taylor, had been a prisoner in Mauthausen beginning April 1, Taylor testified that his first job in Mauthausen was setting tile in the new crematorium. I would say that the new crematorium increased the facilities to a day. New prisoners thought they were going in to have their bath. They were stripped and put in this room naked. Then gas came out of the shower nozzles. William Denson conducted the pretrial investigation of Eduard Krebsbach, the chief doctor at Mauthausen.

Some of them were killed through gasoline injections. Wilhelm Ornstein, a Polish inmate assigned to the crematory in Mauthausen, also testified that there was a gas chamber at Mauthausen as described by Jack Taylor. Ornstein described other means of executing inmates, including so-called neck shots and hangings. These eyewitness statements that prussic acid was streamed through shower heads into homicidal gas chambers at Mauthausen are not credible. Germar Rudolf writes:. Zyklon B consists of the active ingredient, hydrogen cyanide, adsorbed on a solid carrier material gypsum and only released gradually.

Since it was neither a liquid nor a gas under pressure, the hydrogen cyanide from this product could never have traveled through narrow water pipes and shower heads. Possible showers, or fake shower heads, could therefore only have been used to deceive the victims; they could never have been used for the introduction of this poison gas.

There is general unanimity as to this point, no matter what else might be in dispute. False witnesses were used at most of the American-run war-crimes trials. Stephen F. Pinter served as a U. Army prosecuting attorney at the American-run trials of Germans at Dachau. Joseph Halow, a young U. In addition, they were provided free housing and food, at a time when these were often difficult to come by in Germany.

Some of them stayed in Dachau for months, testifying in every one of the concentration-camp cases. In other words, these witnesses made their living testifying for the prosecution. Usually, they were former inmates from the camps, and their strong hatred of the Germans should, at the very least, have called their testimony into question.

In regard to the Mauthausen trial, numerous prosecution witnesses used hearsay evidence to convict the defendants. Some of them stayed in Dachau for months, testifying in every one of the concentration-camp cases. In other words, these witnesses made their living testifying for the prosecution.

Usually, they were former inmates from the camps, and their strong hatred of the Germans should, at the very least, have called their testimony into question.

In regard to the Mauthausen trial, numerous prosecution witnesses used hearsay evidence to convict the defendants. The court consistently rejected attempts by defense counsel to have such testimony stricken from the record.

Tomaz Jardim writes:. Mass atrocities, the prosecution showed, were seldom committed in clear view of other prisoners, but were perpetrated rather in selected areas of the camp and especially in the basement of the bunker. Testimony of the sort [prosecution witness] Marsalek gave, though not in conformity with commonly applied rules of evidence, was therefore the best the court could hope for. As guidelines set out for the courts at Dachau made clear, accepting such evidence was well within the purview of military judges.

Benjamin Ferencz, a Harvard-educated attorney, was one of the first American war crimes investigators to enter Mauthausen. Ferencz had no qualms both humiliating and threatening the lives of those he interrogated in order to get forced confessions. Ferencz relates a story concerning his interrogation of an SS colonel in which he took out his pistol in order to intimidate him:.

He stood there naked for half an hour, covering his balls with his hands, not looking nearly like the SS officer he was reported to be. You are gonna sit down and write out exactly what happened—when you entered the camp, who was there, how many died, why they died, everything else about it. I want you to go in, be nice to him, and have him re-write it.

That was it. While one cannot assume that other war crimes investigators used similar interrogation methods as Ferencz, it does point to the existence of a culture in which such methods were deemed acceptable.

Paul Guth used more clever means to obtain signed statements from the Mauthausen defendants. Guth employed to stunning effect techniques he had learned while training both at Camp Ritchie in Maryland and the 21 st Army Group Intelligence Center in Divizes, England.

Rather than intimidate, Guth often used flattery or the promise of better treatment to obtain written confessions from the defendants. Though the methods used to extract confessions from all of those brought before military commission courts at Dachau would later cause considerable scandal in Washington, the statements of the Mauthausen defendants would be thrust to the fore by Denson and his team….

Defense witnesses repeatedly testified to improper interrogation techniques used by the prosecution. If Goessl did not write down what Guth dictated, Guth visually demonstrated to Goessl that he would be hanged. Goessl testified that he then signed the false statement and planned to clear up the matter in court. Frey testified that he had been severely beaten in Mossburg by an American officer.

Frey signed his confession only because he was afraid he would be beaten again. Defendant Johannes Grimm testified that he signed a false statement that Lt. Guth had dictated to Dr. Ernst Leiss. When asked why he signed this false statement, Grimm replied:. I already described my mental condition on that day. I had memories of the previous interrogations. My left cheekbone was broken and four of my teeth were knocked out…. Guth telling me to write this sentence.

Defense attorney Lt. Patrick W. Further, the striking similarity of the language made it obvious the statements contained only language desired by the interrogators. McMahon cited numerous examples in which defendants used similar language to say crimes committed at Mauthausen could not be ascribed to any one leader. Let the court also note the unbelievable accusations that the affiants make against themselves.

It is contrary to normal human conduct. Beyond any doubt, threats and duress were used to induce the signing of the untruthful statements in evidence. It took 90 minutes for the seven judges to decide the fate of the 61 defendants in the Mauthausen trial. Major Gen. Fay B. The commandant was never brought to trial because he was shot by an American soldier. The story is not entirely clear, but shortly after liberation, there was a chaotic scene with tons of survivors on the ground at Mauthausen interacting with war crimes investigators.

They were gathering evidence there and they were also trying to find out what happened to the notorious SS men who ran the camp. The prisoners, more than anyone else, want to find the commandant, Franz Ziereis.

He fled, like the rest of the SS, in anticipation of the Americans, about twenty-four hours before the Americans arrived there. The survivors said they thought he might be at an alpine hunting hut they built some miles from Mauthausen. He was brought to a field hospital at Gusen, a subcamp of Mauthausen. He was mortally wounded and he was interrogated for about twenty-four hours before he died.

Again, there was remarkable cooperation between former prisoners and war crimes investigators. He was put in charge of the interrogation of Franz Ziereis.

Hans Marsalek just died a few months ago and I interviewed him. They interrogated [Ziereis] and he smoked as he received blood transfusions before he died. He made boastful claims about the number of people who died. He estimated that a million and a half people died there, which is a crazy overestimation.

But he also implicated other people. He said Dr. Krebsbach mass murdered prisoners through injections, and that [Erich] Wasicky, the pharmacist, came up with the idea of the gas chamber at Mauthausen. So his testimony is important because he named a number of people before he died shortly thereafter. The highest-ranking person who came to trial -- and the highest-ranking person of anybody tried at Dachau -- was the gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber. He was not in day-to-day contact with the camp, but he was the Nazi provincial leader under whose jurisdiction Mauthausen fell.

He was clearly involved in the building of the camp and sending prisoners there and he was frequently there to witness executions and perhaps even participated in executions. He was instrumental in cutting bread rations to the camp, which led to mass starvation and the deaths of many people.

Eigruber also managed to escape and a sting was set up. He was ultimately caught in a roadblock after a tip on where he was driving. He was brought to trial and he was unrepentant to the end, an ideologically convinced Nazi. They set up a ruse to get him to talk. The American authorities talked to these business leaders, who were probably benefiting in some ways from the slave labor at Mauthausen.

The [Americans] made it clear that they were not pressing charges, but [the business leaders] had better cooperate. These [business leaders] agreed to sit in a waiting room at Dachau where Eigruber was to be interrogated and Eigruber sat among them. As far as Eigruber knew, each one of them was to be interrogated. These guys, who were coached by the Americans, talked casually to Eigruber.

He fell for it. The panel of judges deliberated only a short time before issuing its decision and the sentences. The judges recessed for about an hour to consider the fate of all 61 defendants before they came back with a verdict of guilty for all 61 defendants, which was a fairly standard outcome for all of the concentration camp trials at Dachau.

They again recessed and came back and announced sentences. Fifty-eight of the 61 defendants were sentenced to hang. Three of them were deemed part of the common design but were found not complicit to a degree that they deserved death, and were given life sentences. The three who were initially spared were guards who worked on the towers outside the camp.

And during trial, the defense counsel succeeded in having the court acknowledge that, even in the United States in major penal institutions, if prisoners were fleeing it was standard practice to shoot them in the process of escapes. The question became, could we execute these [guards] for shooting people as they fled from the camp?

Nonetheless, they still participated in the common design by assuring the prisoners stayed there and died there. So a few of the guards got life sentences. The judges handed down these sentences and there was no appeal procedure, but the military authorities conducted reviews of the sentences.

Under review, and based on the logic that three of the defendants should not hang, they extended that logic to another nine of the condemned and commuted their sentences also to life imprisonment. Ultimately what resulted from the trial was that 49 of the 61 original defendants were executed in what was the largest mass execution in American history.

The others benefited from weakening of Allied resolve with regard to seeing through the prison sentences because of Cold War pressures. The surviving Mauthausen convicts ended up serving only two or three years -- all getting out by That results from Cold War political pressure.

The war crimes trials were immensely unpopular in Germany. There was a sense that lower-level perpetrators were simply doing their jobs and that they should be released from prison. In fact, aside from the few defendants who received prison sentences at the first Nuremberg trial, every single defendant tried by the United States after the war, regardless of sentence, who was not executed was out of prison by This story has a lot of resonance now with the U.

Yesterday I was patched into a conference of judge advocates in Iowa who wanted to ask me about the book. These critics sketch out a narrative in which they say that, after the Second World War, the United States rose to the occasion with Nuremberg and illustrated that even perpetrators responsible for the most horrific crimes would have received the benefits of a full and fair trial and that was the legacy of American justice in the wake of the Second World War, and therefore Guantanamo is a gross deviation from an otherwise noble course.

In fact, Guantanamo Bay is very much in keeping with how the United States has dealt with the vast majority of war criminals in the past.

The Dachau trials were the common response of the United States to Nazi atrocities after the Second World War, and the Nuremberg trials were very much an exception to the rule.

Twenty-two people were tried at the first trial at Nuremberg versus 1, who were tried at Dachau by the military court system akin to those at Guantanamo Bay.

The legacy of the Mauthausen trial is mixed. We judge trials according to different goals and outcomes. Obviously, part of what a trial is established to do is to punish those guilty of criminal acts. As a practice in punishment, the Dachau trials were quite successful. After the war, there were a number of major concentration camp trials for Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek, and others.

The verdicts in these cases are often disappointing. People who were clearly complicit in the murder of millions of people got off with ten- or fifteen-year sentences and thousands more were left unprosecuted. The trials at Dachau went a long way in assuring that ordinary low-ranking concentration camp personnel were prosecuted and punished.

As an exercise in expeditious punishment and judgment, the trials were successful. However, the protests of the defense concerning the fairness of these trials cannot be ignored. From a legal perspective and judging by standard criteria for what constitutes a fair trial, you cannot conclude that these [defendants] received a fair trial as we understand fair trials.

There was no appellate procedure. The prosecution often relied on hearsay evidence. There were confessions extracted under seemingly dubious circumstances. And the list goes on. These guys are guilty. These postwar trials were not established only to mete out punishment, but also to have a pedagogical and instructive impact. The idea was that Nazi crimes would be brought to the fore, that people would understand -- especially the German public -- the real depravity and violence of Nazism, the dangers of ideological fanaticism, and through the fair trial of those responsible for those crimes, the German public would also understand the benefits of liberal democracy and a free judiciary.

But what happened is that news of the conduct of the Dachau trial, such as allegations of abuse of detainees during interrogation, made it out to the press. As a result, instead of prompting the German public to reflect on the evils of Nazism and their own role in supporting the Nazi state, the defendants were seen as victims of an unjust trial system, and it backfired on the American attempt to use these trials as a pedagogical tool.

Clearly, abuses undercut that mission and have the potential to turn otherwise moderate people against this process. As you stress, a measure of justice came out of the trial.