Belsen Trial

Place of the Belsen Trial: old MTV gymnasium, Lindenstraße 30, Lüneburg

The Belsen Trial was one of several trials that the Allied occupation forces conducted against former officials and functionaries of Nazi Germany after the end of World War II. The Belsen Trial took place in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany in 1945 and the defendants were men and women of the SS as well as prisoner functionaries who had worked at various concentration camps, notably Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The trial generated considerable interest around the world, as the public heard for the first time from some of those responsible for the mass murder in the eastern extermination camps. Some later trials are also referred to as Belsen Trials.

First trial

Josef Kramer, photographed in leg irons at Belsen before being removed to the POW cage at Celle, April 17, 1945.

Franz Hössler at Bergen-Belsen

Officially called the "Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others",^[1] the trial began in a Lüneburg gymnasium on September 17, 1945.^[2] The defendants were 45 former SS men, women and kapos (prisoner functionaries) from the Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camps. Josef Kramer had been camp commandant at Bergen-Belsen and before that at Auschwitz. Of the other defendants, 12 were kapos, 16 female SS members and 16 male SS members. Although the SS was an all-male organisation, women were able to enlist as members of the SS-Gefolge, a form of civilian employee. One prisoner functionary, Ladislaw Gura, who was also an SS member under arrest, was found to be too ill to stand trial after the trial had started. Three others had been excluded from the list of indicted for the same reason before the trial began.^[3] Three SS members had been shot trying to escape after the British took over the camp and one had committed suicide. Out of a total of 77 camp personnel arrested by the British in April, another 17 had died of typhus by June 1, 1945.^[4]

Next to Kramer, the most high-profile defendants were Dr. Fritz Klein, who had been camp doctor at Belsen, and Franz Hössler, deputy camp commandant. Elisabeth Volkenrath had been Oberaufseherin (head warden or supervising wardress) at Auschwitz, before she came to Belsen. Many of the defendants had arrived in Bergen-Belsen only after February 1945, some as late as two days before liberation.^[5] However, most of them had been active in similar functions in other concentration camps before that.

The trial took place before a British military tribunal. The judges were Major-General H.M.P. Berney-Ficklin (presiding), Brigadier A. de L. Casonove, Colonel G.J. Richards, Lt.-Colonel R.B. Moriush and Lt.-Colonel R. McLay. C.L. Stirling was Judge Advocate. Colonel T.M. Backhouse, Major H.G. Murton-Neale, Capt. S.M. Stewart and Lt.-Col. L.J. Genn were Counsel for the Prosecution. Counsel for the Defence were also members of the British Army — in the case of the five Polish defendants a Polish officer, Lt. Jedrezejowicz.^[6][3]

As this was a military court, it was legally based on the Regulations for the Trial of War Criminals made under Royal Warrant of June 14, 1945.^[7] All the charges related to international law, which applied at the time the crimes were committed, so this was not a case of retroactive justice.^[5] Due to the nature of the court, the only charges that could be brought were war crimes and crimes against citizens of the Allied countries. "Crimes against humanity" and "crimes against peace", which featured in the later trials at Nuremberg, were not among the charges at Lüneburg.^[2]

Charges

The official charges were grouped into crimes committed at Auschwitz and Belsen and were as follows:

and

All defendants pleaded not guilty.^[10]

Overview of the trial

The trial lasted for a total of 54 days in court. It began on September 17 with the indictment and the opening speech for the prosecution. Brigadier Glyn Hughes was the first witness for the prosecution on September 18 and 19. On September 20, the British Army screened a film they had made of the conditions at Belsen immediatedly after liberation. On September 21, the court visited Bergen-Belsen. Evidence for the defence began on October 8 with the opening speech for the defendant Kramer who also testified. Closing speeches were made from November 7 through 12, followed by the closing arguments by the prosecution on November 13. Sentencing took place on November 17, 1945.^[11]

Interior shot of the court room ten days before the start of the trial

Since the trial was conducted in English, translations into German and Polish were necessary. This was one of the factors that prolonged the trial, which had initially been expected to last for two to four weeks. In retrospect, the prosecution has been criticised as hasty and ill-prepared. None of the SS guards who had fled the camp after the ceasefire on April 13 had been searched for. Instead of eye witness testimony in some cases only affidavits were available at the trial. Some witnesses contradicted themselves on cross-examination, others failed to identify the defendants as the perpetrators of the crimes in question. One former inmate, Oskar Schmitz, was erroneously charged as an SS man and had no chance to clarify things before the trial began.^[12][13]

The defence claimed that the arrest of the defendants had been illegal as it contravened the promise of free withdrawal contained in the ceasefire agreement. However, the wording on this point was only clear for members of the Wehrmacht at Belsen. Moreover, according to the prosecution, the burning of the camp files by the SS and the firing of shots on April 15 had voided the agreement.^[14] In fact, the relevant section of the ceasefire agreement read: "SS guard personnel [...] will be treated as PW. SS Adj personnel will [...] remain at their posts and carry on with their duties (cooking, supplies, etc) and will hand over records. When their services can be dispensed with, their disposal is left by the Wehrmacht to the British authorities."^[15]

On November 17, the court sentenced 11 of the defendants to death by hanging.^[2] Another 18 were found guilty and sentenced to prison sentences of one to 15 years.^[2] One defendant, Erich Zoddel, was sentenced to life in prison,^[16] but he had been sentenced to death in a separate military trial in August 1945 for murdering a female prisoner after liberation and was executed.^[17] None of the sentenced were found guilty only of the "conspiracy" of working within the concentration camp system, but all of them were rather sentenced for individually committed crimes.^[18] 14 defendants were acquitted^[2] (the final defendant was too sick to stand trial). Due to clemency pleas and appeals, many prison sentences were eventually shortened considerably. By mid-1955 all those sentenced to prison had been released.^[2]

Individual defendants and sentences

List of SS-defendants

Fritz Klein surrounded by bodies. The British Army liberating Bergen-Belsen forced German camp personnel to bury the corpses of prisoners.

(A=guilty of crimes at Auschwitz, B = guilty of crimes at Bergen-Belsen)^[19][16]

Not able to stand trial due to illness: Nikolaus Jänner, Paul Steinmetz, Walter Melcher, Ladislaw Gura (who was both an SS member and a prison functionary).

List of prisoner functionary defendants

Erich Zoddel in Allied custody after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen

(A=guilty of crimes at Auschwitz, B = guilty of crimes at Bergen-Belsen)^[19][16]

Public reaction

The Belsen Trial attracted substantial national and international media interest. Significantly more than 100 representatives of the news media reported at length on the trial's progress.^[2] Through them, the world learned not just about the thousands of deaths by hunger and disease at Belsen — communicated especially forcefully by the film and photo evidence produced by the British Army. Possibly even more importantly, the Belsen Trial also was the first time that the organised mass murder at Auschwitz Birkenau received a public airing, with some of those responsible describing the selection process, the use of the gas chambers and the crematoria.^[2]

In Great Britain, the trial was mostly viewed positively, as a triumph of the rule of law, given the fairness and meticulousness with which it had been conducted.^[2] However, in some other countries, notably the Soviet Union and France, the verdicts were criticised as too mild.^[2] Many of the survivors also felt that way.^[2]

Executions

All the executions were carried out on December 13, 1945^[21] by hanging at the prison in Hamelin.^[22] The executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, aided by an assistant.

Second trial

A second Belsen trial was conducted at Lüneburg from June 13–18, 1946 by a British Military Court. On trial was Kazimierz Cegielski, a Polish national and former prisoner at Bergen-Belsen who, according to his testimony, had arrived in March 1944. Known as "der Große (Big) Kazimierz" (to differentiate him from another kapo with that name), he was charged with cruelty and murder.^[23]

Kapos were prisoner functionaries selected by the SS to supervise their fellow prisoners. Selected for their willingness to be brutal, they were initially selected from the ranks of criminal prisoners. Later on, political prisoners chosen and later on, prisoners from other groups.^[24]

Cegielski was accused of beating – sometimes killing – sick and weak prisoners with large wooden sticks or poles. While at Bergen-Belsen, he had an affair with another prisoner, Henny DeHaas, a Jewish woman from Amsterdam. After the war, in 1946, he was arrested in Amsterdam, ostensibly looking for DeHaas so he could marry her. He was convicted on June 18, 1946 and sentenced to death by hanging. The day before his execution, he stated that his real name was Kasimir-Alexander Rydzewski. He was executed at Hamelin Prison at 9:20 a.m. on October 11, 1946.^[25]

See also

• Allied Control Council
• Subsequent Nuremberg Trials

References