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Thursday 21 May 2020

Trials of Germans Criminals




"Simple crimes and atrocities do not constitute the most serious point of the charges brought. What is serious is the fact of having consciously participated in a system of tremendous cruelty and injustice with absolute disregard for all moral principles in civilized nations ” American magistrate Dan Haywood, played by a sensational Spencer Tracy, in the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg." 1961.
Foto film Judgment at Nuremberg.


There is a common feeling in the West that the leading German assassins were tried and punished after WWII. Nothing is further from reality. Only a handful of assassins were tried, not even the tip of the iceberg, the German assassins tried represent only the size of a seagull perched on the iceberg.
In the well-known Nuremberg trials in 1945, only 24 high-ranking German assassins were tried and not even all were punished, some were acquitted!
There were other trials :
1963-65 Cologne. Germany. German judges.)  13 tried.... 7 term imprisonment....6 acquitted.
2001 Lodz Poland. Polish judges  ) 1 criminal tried....1 term impprisonment. He was sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment, with consideration given to his advanced age
  • Dachau trials...245 criminal tried...132 executed...103 terms imprisonment...10 acquitted


Dachau/Germany



A public opinion poll conducted after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials indicated that 57% of the German public were not in favor of additional Nazi trials.

  • Majdanek trials, the longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years...The first one in Lublin ( Poland ) 6 tried...5 executed, 1 suicide. 
      The second one in Lublin an other cities of Poland 1946-1948 . 95 tried ...7 executed...88 terms imprisonment, most very shorts.
      Third Majdanek trial 1975-1981 Düsseldorf , Germany, 16 tried...5 acquitted, 11 shorts terms imprisonment ( German Judges )



  • 1. Frenzel, Karl, carpenter; arrested in 1962. Accused of personally killing 42 Jews and helping to murder approximately 250,000 Jews. Found guilty of personally killing 6 Jews and of helping to murder approximately 150,000 Jews. Sentenced to life in prison.
    2. Bolender, Kurt, hotel porter; arrested in 1961. The former commander of extermination Camp III was accused of personally killing approximately 360 Jews and of helping to murder approximately 86,000 Jews. Committed suicide in prison before sentencing.
    3. Wolf, Franz, warehouse clerk; arrested in 1964. Accused of personally killing one Jew and helping to murder 115,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of at least 39,000 Jews. Sentenced to eight years in prison.
    4. Ittner, Alfred, laborer. Accused of helping to kill approximately 57,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of approximately 68,000 Jews. Sentenced to four years in prison.
    5. Dubois, Werner, mechanic. Accused of helping to kill approximately 43,000 Jews. Found guilty of having assisted in the murder of at least 15,000 Jews. Sentenced to three years in prison.
    6. Fuchs, Erich, truck driver. Helped in the construction of the gas chambers at the death camps BelzecSobibor and Treblinka and was convicted for having directed experimental gassings that killed at least 3,000 Soviet prisoners. Also found guilty of assisting in the murder of at least 79,000 Jews. Sentenced to four years in prison. He died in 1984.
    7. Lachman, Erich, mason; accused of helping to kill approximately 150,000 Jews; freed.
    8. Shutt, Hans, salesman; accused of helping to kill approximately 86,000 Jews; freed.
    9. Unverhau, Heinrich, male nurse; accused of helping to kill approximately 72,000 Jews; freed.
    10. Juhrs, Robert, porter and janitor; accused of helping to kill approximately 30 Jews; freed.
    11. Zierke, Ernest, saw mill worker; accused of helping to kill approximately 30 Jews; freed.
    12. Lambert, Erwin, tile layer; accused of helping to kill an unknown number of Jews; freed




  • Gustav Wagner, Deputy Commandant of Sobibor, who had ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews as chief of the selections and had been sentenced to death in absentia by the Nuremberg Tribunal. With the help of the Vatican, Wagner and Franz Stangl escaped to Brazil, where Wagner was admitted as a permanent resident on April 12, 1950. Wagner lived openly in Sao Paulo until his arrest in May 1978, but the Brazilian Supreme Court refused to extradite him to Germany. According to his attorney, Gustav Wagner comitted suicide in October 1980.

  • Treblinka trials in Düsseldorf, Germany.( 1951-1988 . Frankfurt & Düsseldorf, Germany , Jerusalem , Israel)  12 tried....0 executed....10 terms imprisonment...2 acquitted.

The first SS man brought to trial for war crimes committed in Treblinka was Josef (Sepp) Hirtreiter in 1951.


He was rearrested and brought to trial in Frankfurt am Main in March 1951, at his trial he was recognised by Sawek Warszawski, who left for dead in a burial pit, survived.Hirtrieier was found guilty of war crimes and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 3 March 1951.
Hirtreiter was released from prison in 1977 due ti illness. He died 6 months later in a home for the lederly in Frankfurt.

Among the crimes of which he was found guilty of were beating two prisoners until they were unconscious, because money had been found on them, then hanging them by their feet and finally killing them with a shot in the head: killing many young children ages one and one –half to two, during the unloading of transports, by seizing them by the feet and smashing their heads against the boxcars.



A very approximate summary of the judgments of the trials gives us this graph.





Importantly, many sentenced to death and all sentenced to life imprisonment had their sentences commuted for a few years in prison and in the early 1950s virtually all were free walking the streets of Germany.


Another graph of sentences when judges were Germans. 0 death sentences.




And still today the news is being heard of an old man who is being tried for his crimes, most of the time they do not even go to trial or are acquitted because of their age. The collaborationism of German justice with the Nazi assassins deserves a separate chapter.

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