Dachau Epilogue

In the past several days, the U.S. War Crimes Tribunal in Dachau has sentenced the first forty defendants. As you’ve likely already read in the papers, 36 people were sentenced to death by hanging. The other four, insignificant wachtposts, received life sentences or long prison sentences.

This is a very important verdict. It’s even better than the one from Belsen, but it’s also much more than we could have expected from the weeks-long trial in Dachau, where the accused SS-men acted in a confident and sometimes rude manner, just like their American defense attorneys.

The first thing that we, the witnesses from Czechoslovakia, did was to tell the American prosecutor, lieutenant colonel Denson, that we were very dissatisfied with the Belsen trial and that we wouldn’t like to take part in a similar trial. We told him how the defense attorney in Belsen did not hesitate to tarnish the memory of our dead friends in order to help his Nazi clients. We declared that we would immediately leave the courtroom and wouldn’t participate in any other trial if something similar were to take place in Dachau. He assured us that they would do everything in their power to make sure that the U.S. trial in Dachau wouldn’t resemble the British trial in Belsen. The strict and just verdict proves that they succeeded. The world’s outrage at the Belsen verdict also had a significant impact.

I have said that this verdict surprised us and I think we must explain why we didn’t trust this trial very much at the beginning. The first thing that we Czech witnesses were dismayed at were certain rules established by the court prior to the trial. We were only allowed to speak about and press charges against acts committed in Dachau or its affiliated camps (Kaufering etc.). SS member Moll was the notorious murderer of thousands of prisoners in Auschwitz. After it was evacuated at the beginning of this year, he spent a mere five weeks in Dachau. He could only be prosecuted for the acts he committed during these 5 weeks. Nobody was allowed to utter a single word about his past in Auschwitz.

Other similar limitations: before the trial, only offenses committed after 1.1.1942 mattered. If SS-man Jarolim proved, for instance, that he participated in the shooting of thousands of Russians, but that it occured in the fall of 1941, he had reason to hope that he would be freed.

All of these limitations led to grotesque pronouncements, for the defense (four American officers and one German attorney) didn’t miss a single opportunity to help their clients in this way. And so, for example, right after the first witness’s testimony, a discussion took place that a European would find inconceivable. After the occupation of the Dachau concentration camp (April 29th, 1945), colonel Chavez officially sent me to uncover war crimes committed by Germans. But when this American officer wanted to open the trial by describing the situation that he discovered in Dachau on April 30th, 1945, he was immediately interrupted by the defense, who claimed that the court was not supposed to concern itself with the conditions in the camp after it was liberated, and so therefore the statement of the investigating officer was irrelevant. Only after more arguments, during which it was discovered that Chavez wanted to speak about the prisoners who died after liberation, but as a consequence of injustices committed against them by SS members prior to April 29th, he was allowed to continue his testimony.

Furthermore, only crimes committed against citizens of the nations at war with Germany were considered criminal offenses. The camp's head doctor, Dr. Hintermayer, didn’t deny that he killed mentally ill prisoners with lethal injections, but claimed that they were all German prisoners, and that therefore it was not aimed at the Reich’s enemies. This grotesque theory was taken to such extremes

that when our Czech witness, Dr. Bláha, spoke about how certain SS doctorswho carried out experiments looked forward especially to experimenting on Roma prisoners, the American defense attorney, lieutenant colonel Bates, stood up and said that the Roma weren’t at war with Germany and so therefore this statement should be considered irrelevant for the trial. But this only won him laughter from those present in court. Yet he still tried to invalidate our testimony, because we, too, hadn’t waged war.

However, the verdict proves just how little these limitations influenced the judges’ sense of justice. Moll, Jarolim, Hintermayer were hanged just as surely as commandant Weiss, who spoke at length about all the things he did to help the prisoners, leading the prosecutor to ironically ask him if he truly meant to claim that Dachau was a sanatorium. Weiss drew himself up proudly and stated: Dachau war ein gutes Lager! (Dachau was a good camp!)

The great political significance of this trial lies not in the proceedings themselves, which were often tarnished by the intolerable efforts of the defense and its witnesses, but in the judges’ final approach to the problem. The verdict vindicated the prosecutor, who constantly repeated that these defendants should not be tried for the crimes they individually decided to commit against the prisoners, but should be sentenced to death simply because they belonged to an organization whose main goal was to murder and torture political opponents and prisoners of war.

This theory won out in the end. If the Dachau trial will turn out to be any kind of precedent, it will be that of the ultimate Czech punishment for every German, whether an SS member or capo, who is found to have been connected in any way to the running of the concentration camps. And last but certainly not least, the testimony of the Czech witnesses was one of the main reasons that the court made such a significant ruling.

On behalf of the Documentation Campaign:

On behalf of the archive:

Transcript: R. Bramerová

Prague, 1. II. 1946