German post war trials

Thirty-two prisoners, including former armaments magnate Alfried Krupp and eight of his co-defendants, were eligible for immediate release, with 29 walking free as a group on the morning of Saturday, February 3. As they emerged from the prison gates, these fallen elites of the Nazi empire were met with flowers, hugs, and kisses from a small crowd of family and well-wishers, as well as shouted questions from more than press correspondents in attendance. These prisoners had been prosecuted and convicted during fair trials by American judges of activities falling under one or more of the four criminal counts described in Allied Control Council Law 10 governing the occupation of Germany.

These offenses included crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization leadership corps of the Nazi Party, Gestapo, SD, SS, SA or the Reich Cabinet.

Telford Taylor, Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremberg successor trials, and his staff deliberately tasked the 12 Nuremberg trials with fulfilling a broader investigative and pedagogical purpose in line with other much-resented American efforts to re-educate the German people, redeeming them politically and morally as American-style democrats.

Although the trials were primarily concerned with determining the innocence or guilt of individual defendants for a slate of crimes newly enshrined in international law , they would also serve as a historical inquiry into the structure of the Nazi dictatorship. Nuremberg was designed as a forensic autopsy of the Nazi dictatorship that would unequivocally demonstrate to the German people the breadth and depth of individual and institutional complicity in Nazi atrocities as represented by war industries, the civil service, the military, the medical and legal professions, the concentration camp system, and the SS organizations tasked with racially reordering Europe through sterilization and murder.

General Lucius C. Although the prisoners, their attorneys, and their supporters frequently complained during and after the trials that their imprisonment represented an illegal American application of ex-post facto law, American and Allied lawyers tasked with defining the legal rationale behind the tribunals had made every effort to ground the Nuremberg proceedings in pre-existing concepts of international law and standard criminal justice procedures.

Why, then, did High Commissioner John J. McCloy show these individuals such mercy in ? Despite the broader context of the Cold War and the vociferous political debates in West Germany over the war criminals issue, McCloy did not justify his review of the Nuremberg sentences in the language of Cold War realpolitik or as a response to the agitations of pro-amnesty German political movements.

Both McCloy and his Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals, viewing themselves as standing above the ever-shifting whims of German and American public opinion on these matters, articulated a vision of impartial American justice as inspiring and legitimizing their actions. Despite the well-documented lobbying from West German veterans and church associations, politicians, and the media, the decision by a very small number of powerful American officials in Germany to free the war criminals did not represent the prioritization of politics over law at a time of shifting political realities so much as a faulty consensus that the Nuremberg tribunals had come to unjust conclusions that required correction.

Were the Landsberg prisoners entitled to parole or other similar reductions in their sentences for good behavior? Were they, particularly the prisoners who wore the red jackets of the condemned, entitled to formal appellate proceedings beyond their individual petitions to the USSupreme Court?

If the Supreme Court, by its own repeated admission, lacked jurisdiction over German nationals tried by American military courts, by what mechanism could the prisoners contest their sentences or present new evidence?

The emptying of Landsberg prison was inescapably tied to the resolution of these debates, wherein HICOG officials eventually concluded that German war criminals were criminals first and war criminals second, entitled to all the remedies of US laws to better their conditions and reduce their sentences. The list of arguments was long: the claim that the defendants acted under superior orders; charges of allied hypocrisy in not prosecuting their own atrocities; charges of ex post facto justice; claims of immunity from prosecution under prisoner of war status; and claims that trial procedures were unfair or opaque or that sufficient legal counsel or access to evidence had been denied to the defendants.

A HICOG clemency panel would only incentivize new petitions with these same tropes, which had already been extensively litigated and rejected as baseless. These concerns were justified, as it turned out. Tags Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics. Browse A-Z Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically. For Teachers Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust.

About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. More information about this image. Article Postwar Trials. Series After the Holocaust. Glossary Terms. She was in fact the youngest woman to be executed in the entire twentieth century under British justice. In March , she had been transferred to Birkenau camp, assigned at first to supervision of detainees building roads.

Those who were arrested received heavy sentences. But collective memory has retained only the major trial of Nuremberg, thus giving the impression that women were not involved in Nazi criminality.

Delbo, Charlotte. Le Convoi du 24 janvier Lasik, Aleksander. Les femmes au service de la SS. In Auschwitz. Wieviorka, Annette. Paris: R. Besides a history of the convoy and a sociological study of this group of women, the work includes an individual note on each of them. Site map — Contact — Website credits — Syndication.

Privacy Policy — About Cookies. OpenEdition member — Published with Lodel — Administration only. Skip to navigation — Site map. Clio Women, Gender, History. Complementary points of view. Annette Wieviorka. Translated by Jeanne Armstrong. Keywords: Nazi war trials , Nuremberg , women concentration camp guards. Full text PDF k Send by e-mail. Bibliography Delbo, Charlotte. Notes 1 This convoy was the focus of the first monograph on a convoy, by author Charlotte Delbo Delbo Top of page.

Translator Jeanne Armstrong Top of page.