The Dachau Nazi Trial The First Attempt To Punish Nazi Crimes Committed At The Concentration Camps

By Davis Truman

During the postwar years, the United States initiated a comprehensive trial program in Germany to address Nazi crimes. This program included three main sets of trials: the International Military Trial at Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and trials conducted at the Dachau concentration camp. The Dachau trials focused on prosecuting individuals involved in atrocities at several camps liberated by American forces, such as Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Dora-Mittelbau.

These trials were a critical effort by the United States to punish Nazi crimes within the concentration camps. Over 1,000 defendants were tried at Dachau for violating the laws of war, as defined by international and American military norms. The legal process faced challenges due to the unprecedented nature of the crimes. A notable innovation in the Dachau trials was the use of a criminal conspiracy charge, which accused defendants of participating in the standard criminal design of the concentration camp system as a criminal organization.

However, after 1947 and 1948, issues arose due to inadequate planning for the trials' aftermath, particularly regarding the appellate process for convicted individuals. This became more pressing amid escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two scandals drew public attention, leading to official investigations by the U.S. Congress into the Dachau tribunal program.

While the reviews were critical of the Army's handling of clemency, they largely praised the trials themselves. Despite this, over time, the Dachau trials faded from public memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: vincenzo nappi
• Release date: May 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224488865

Book preview

Chapter One

RHEToric and reality

THROUGHOUT THE WAR, the allies of the United Nations, particularly the US, USSR, and UK, had used rhetoric to define the war in legal tones: the Nazis and their actions were criminal and needed to be brought to justice by the Allies. After making promises throughout the war, the actual practicalities of using international law to punish the worst of the Nazi crimes, including those committed in the concentration camps, were unresolved. Although united by multiple promises to punish Nazi crimes, for most of the war, the Allies remained divided over what form justice should take: swift and summery executions? Political trials? Military tribunals? This chapter looks at the wartime rhetoric as well as the realities of crimes committed in the concentration camps (with a specific focus on the concentration camps, which would become the subject of American prosecution at Dachau).

The Nazi concentration camp system began at a makeshift camp in an old munitions plant at Dachau, about ten miles from Munich.  Initially, the camp held 4800 inmates. The first prisoners of the concentration camps, including Dachau, were political prisoners who had resisted Hitler’s rise to power – Communists and Social Democrats, along with other left-wind activists and journalists. The camp system was ‘wild’ and decentralized as German police, the SS, and the SA arrested alleged subversives en masse. By 1934, ‘the function of political repression had been taken over by the police, the courts, and the regular state prisons and penitentiaries,’ and the concentration camp population dropped. The camp system, starting with Dachau, was centralized under the control of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and the SS; ‘it was the approach pioneered here – with both the political police (in charge of arrests) and the SS (in charge of the camp) united in Himmler’s hands — which was soon extended to the whole Reich.’

SS Lieutenant General (Gruppenführer) Theodor Eicke, commandant of the Dachau camp from the summer of 1933 to the summer of 1934, became the Inspector of Concentration Camps (Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager). Eicke used his experience at Dachau to introduce a model system to the entire camp system, including ‘the organizational structure with separate administrative departments; the formal division of SS men into those stationed around the perimeter of the camp and those inside; draconian camp regulations and punishments such as whippings; and the creation of a professional corps of SS jailers.’ In 1935, Dachau became the primary training center for SS concentration camp guards.

The character of Dachau, particularly its inmate population, changed rapidly through the years. Soon after its foundation, Dachau became the central Bavarian camp for police custody. After the Anschluss, Dachau was the holding place for many prominent persons, including the deposed mayor of Vienna, Richard Schmitz, the sons of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Ernst and Maximilian Hohenberg – whom the other prisoners referred to as ‘Your Royal Highnesses’ — and the last Chancellor of Austria Kurt Schuschnigg. The camp was expanded from 1937-1938, and the number of Jewish prisoners rose after Kristallnacht (10-11 November 1938). Dachau eventually incorporated thirty larger sub-camps that included over 30,000 prisoners. The main camp had a courtyard used for executions, thirty-two barracks, and a prison block, along with support buildings. A crematorium and gas chamber were constructed in 1942; the gas chamber was never used as prisoners were sent to a euthanasia center in Hartheim near Linz, Austria, along with inmates from Mauthausen and Buchenwald, to be killed if they were too weak to work. Between 1933 and 1945, 188,000 inmates passed through Dachau.

Over the next few years, Dachau remained, and more camps were established, including Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938) and Mauthausen (1939). By 1939, there were six concentration camps (and their subcamps) in the Greater German Reich – Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen. Opened in July 1937 near Weimar, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. Despite the later predominance of communist prisoners, most of the prisoners at Buchenwald were not political prisoners; they were ‘asocials,’ repeat criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and German military deserters. After 1938, Jews made up a large proportion of the camp’s population. Around 250,000 people passed through Buchenwald from July 1937 to April 1945. Buchenwald had eighty-eight subcamps, including the notorious Berga-Elster camp, where 350 American POWs worked in horrendous conditions along with other inmates to build an underground munitions factory. At its peak population in February 1945, the Buchenwald camp system held 112,000 prisoners. Among other sites, prisoners worked quarries, the Gustloff armaments and rail works, and at the DAW (Deutsche-Ausrüstungs-Werke, German Equipment Works).

Medical experiments were carried out on prisoners, including testing vaccines and treatments against contagious diseases such as typhus and cholera. At least 56,000 male prisoners died at Buchenwald; they died from medical experiments, over-work, starvation, executions (shot or hanged), or were sent to be killed at Bernburg and other ‘euthanasia’ sites to be killed by injection. The 6th Armoured Division liberated the camp on 11 April 1945. The first prisoners arrived at Flossenbürg, in northeastern Bavaria, in May 1938. The campsite was chosen partly because it was near a large granite quarry, and the SS planned to use the inmates as forced labor to harvest the stone for building projects. Later in the war, prisoners were used as forced labor in the Messerschmitt plant as well as in around one hundred sub-camps concentrated in the armaments