Auschwitz trial 1963:When denial was no longer possible

In one of the largest trials of the German post-war period, the Nazi crimes at Auschwitz were tried in Frankfurt from 1963. At the same time, the public debated the statute of limitations for National Socialist acts.

by Ulrike Bosse, NDR Info

"The Christmas market in Frankfurt, wonderful. And we started the process on the floor above." It's often trivial things that stick in a contemporary witness' mind. Like the Christmas market remembered by Gerhard Wiese, one of the prosecutors in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which dealt with a gruesome truth that was in such stark contrast to the Christmas market's joyful mood.

The most important case against Nazi criminals in Germany

On December 20, 1963, the first of three Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt began with the trial in the Römer in Frankfurt - it was one of the largest trials of the post-war period in Germany and the most important trial against Nazi criminals in Germany up to that point. What distinguished it from other court hearings on Nazi crimes:Here, not one aspect was singled out, but the full extent of the horror in Auschwitz and the system behind it became clear.

"From morning to night only murder and manslaughter"

The Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer had received documents from a former Auschwitz prisoner with the names of guards who had shot people trying to escape. There was also material that the later co-founder of the Auschwitz Committee, Hermann Langbein, had collected since the end of the war. This became the starting point for the prosecutor's investigation, which eventually led to the indictment of 22 men who had worked in various capacities at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Gerhard Wiese was assigned two SS men as prosecutors whose bill of indictment he had to formulate:Oswald Kaduk and Wilhelm Boger. "Only murder and manslaughter from morning to night for the first few days," he recalls of the testimonies he had to work through. "Well, I was happy when I could get out and ride the tram home surrounded by normal people acting normal."

Atrocities and instruments of torture

Kaduk and Boger were among those accused of multiple atrocities at Auschwitz. "He hit and kicked for the smallest offences, and that ran through his entire work in Auschwitz," says Wiese about Oswald Kaduk. A special torture method was even named after Wilhelm Boger, the "Boger swing". The brutality becomes clear even in the sober description of prosecutor Wiese:"It's a pole, and the body was laid over it and the beating continued. Until the man was just dead or didn't make a sound."

Defendants don't want to be able to remember anything

Around half of the 360 ​​witnesses in the trial were former concentration camp prisoners who described what they had to endure. Or what they had seen. The defendants mostly withdrew to the fact that they could not remember. They could not deny that they had served at Auschwitz, but they claimed they were not guilty. This applied not only to the SS guards, but also to the desk clerks in the administration or the doctors who decided at the Auschwitz ramp who was to be sent to the gas chambers. For example, the camp doctor Josef Mengele, whose inhuman experiments with prisoners only became known to a broader public through the various trials surrounding the Nazi crimes in the 1960s.

On-site visit in Auschwitz:Could it have been like this?

During an on-site visit to Auschwitz, the testimonies were checked. "Could he see that? Could he hear that? Visual tests have confirmed that, audio tests have confirmed that," reports Wiese. The lawyers, who had initially viewed the on-site meeting as a company outing, had also become calmer and more thoughtful. "It's impressive, goes to the inside. There's no other way, it can't be avoided," Wiese describes his own reaction.

The public also reacted to the process. When Attorney General Fritz Bauer initiated the investigation, the majority of Germans wanted nothing more to do with the Nazi past. Now the debate about the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes has been reopened, and the statute of limitations, which would have expired in 1965, has been postponed for the time being. The statute of limitations on murder was finally lifted in the late 1970s.

Auschwitz process opens young people's eyes

The process also aroused great interest among young people. School classes visited the process every day. According to prosecutor Wiese, this is independent of whether an interesting witness testified or only documents were read out. Many young people learned things for the first time that their parents and grandparents had never talked about. Dealing with the crimes of National Socialism then became an important feature of the student movement in the Federal Republic.

19 prison sentences - and disappointment with acquittals

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial ended on August 20, 1965. Six defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, the others to prison terms of varying lengths, three were acquitted for lack of evidence. "Of course we hoped that it would be enough for everyone," says Wiese. But the evidence just wasn't enough.

Not only Gerhard Wiese was disappointed with the acquittals. But what the trial had achieved beyond the individual guilty verdicts was that the horrific facts of Auschwitz could no longer be denied. There had also been descriptions of victims before, but:"You could say:'They exaggerate.' And since every report about Auschwitz sounds exaggerated, it was easy to say so," says Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein. It was different after the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial:"What remains in this trial is undoubtedly only part of the truth, but that is the truth."