Justice at Dachau
Justice at Dachau

Author: Joshua Greene

Publisher: Broadway Books

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0307419053

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The world remembers Nuremberg, where a handful of Nazi policymakers were brought to justice, but nearly forgotten are the proceedings at Dachau, where hundreds of Nazi guards, officers, and doctors stood trial for personally taking part in the torture and execution of prisoners inside the Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. In Justice at Dachau, Joshua M. Greene, maker of the award winning documentary film Witness: Voices from the Holocaust, recreates the Dachau trials and reveals the dramatic story of William Denson, a soft-spoken young lawyer from Alabama whisked from teaching law at West Point to leading the prosecution in the largest series of Nazi trials in history. In a makeshift courtroom set up inside Hitler’s first concentration camp, Denson was charged with building a team from lawyers who had no background in war crimes and determining charges for crimes that courts had never before confronted. Among the accused were Dr. Klaus Schilling, responsible for hundreds of deaths in his “research” for a cure for malaria; Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a Harvard psychologist turned Gestapo informant; and one of history’s most notorious female war criminals, Ilse Koch, “Bitch of Buchenwald,” whose penchant for tattooed skins and human bone lamps made headlines worldwide. Denson, just thirty-two years old, with one criminal trial to his name, led a brilliant and successful prosecution, but nearly two years of exposure to such horrors took its toll. His wife divorced him, his weight dropped to 116 pounds, and he collapsed from exhaustion. Worst of all was the pressure from his army superiors to bring the trials to a rapid end when their agenda shifted away from punishing Nazis to winning the Germans’ support in the emerging Cold War. Denson persevered, determined to create a careful record of responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust. When, in a final shocking twist, the United States used clandestine reversals and commutation of sentences to set free those found guilty at Dachau, Denson risked his army career to try to prevent justice from being undone. From the Hardcover edition.

Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials
Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials

Author: John J. Dunphy

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2024-08-28

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1476695407

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The U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group investigated atrocities committed in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These young Americans--many barely out of their teens--gathered evidence, interviewed witnesses, apprehended suspects and prosecuted defendants at trials held at Dachau. Their work often put them in harm's way--some suspects facing arrest preferred to shoot it out. The War Crimes Group successfully prosecuted the perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre, in which 84 American prisoners of war were shot by their German captors; and Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, aptly described as "the most dangerous man in Europe." Operation Paperclip, however, placed some war criminals--scientists and engineers recruited by the U.S. government--beyond their reach. From the ruins of the Third Reich arose a Nazi underground that preyed on Americans, especially members of the Group.

Innocent at Dachau
Innocent at Dachau

Author: Joseph Halow

Publisher: Legion for the Survival of Freedom

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13:

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"American teenager Joe Halow was still a boy when he sailed to war-ravaged Germany in late 1946. The year he spent there, taking part in some of the most sensational of the war-crime trials of the defeated Nazis, turned him into a man. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's account of his year in postwar Germany, above all his work as a court reporter during the U.S. Army courts-martial at Dachau. There Halow witnessed, recorded and transcribed some of the most gripping testimony from some of the most sensational trials of the postwar years: of SS guards from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dora/Nordhausen; of the inmates who carried out their orders as kapos (prisoner trusties); and of German villagers who attacked and murdered downed American fliers in the last phase of the Allies' terrifying air war. Armed with an ironclad faith in American righteousness when he arrived, young Halow soon saw the flaws and the abuses in the Dachau trials: reliance on ex post facto law and broad conspiracy theories; abuse of prisoners during interrogation; and the shocking tolerance, even encouragement, of perjured testimony by concentration camp survivors. The teenaged American court reporter came to sympathize with the plight of the accused, particularly those convicted, sentenced or executed unjustly. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's story of his coming of age, his loss of innocence, in the Dachau courts. And it's the human drama of how he came to terms with his own anti-German feelings as he loved and worked in a Germany still heaped with rubble and ruled by the black market, in the shadow of the looming Iron Curtain and the approaching Cold War. Innocent at Dachau is also the story of how, four decades later, Joe Halow went back - back to the long-classified records of the Army's trials at Dachau, where he found astounding confirmation, from official sources, of his own misgivings about the trials; and back to Germany, for a moving visit with one of the German SS men Joe Halow watched testify about his role at the Nordhausen concentration camp."--Provided by publisher.

Hitler's First Victims
Hitler's First Victims

Author: Timothy W. Ryback

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0804172005

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The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal. At 9 am on April 13, 1933, deputy prosecutor Josef Hartinger received a telephone call summoning him to the newly established concentration camp of Dachau. Four prisoners had been shot. The SS guards claimed that the men had been trying to escape. But what Hartinger found when he arrived convinced him that something was terribly wrong. All four victims were Jews. Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a legal state detention center for political prisoners. In 1933, that began to change. In Hitler’s First Victims, Timothy W. Ryback evokes a society on the brink—one in which civil liberties are sacrificed to national security, in which citizens increasingly turn a blind eye to injustice, in which the bedrock of judicial accountability chillingly dissolves into the martial caprice of the Third Reich. This is an astonishing portrait of Hitler’s first moments in power, and the true story of one man’s race to expose the Nazis as murderers on the eve of the Holocaust.

The Mauthausen Trial
The Mauthausen Trial

Author: Tomaz Jardim

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-01-02

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0674264738

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Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on May 27, 1947, the first of forty-nine men condemned to death for war crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp mounted the gallows at Landsberg prison near Munich. The mass execution that followed resulted from an American military trial conducted at Dachau in the spring of 1946—a trial that lasted only thirty-six days and yet produced more death sentences than any other in American history. The Mauthausen trial was part of a massive series of proceedings designed to judge and punish Nazi war criminals in the most expedient manner the law would allow. There was no doubt that the crimes had been monstrous. Yet despite meting out punishment to a group of incontestably guilty men, the Mauthausen trial reveals a troubling and seldom-recognized face of American postwar justice—one characterized by rapid proceedings, lax rules of evidence, and questionable interrogations. Although the better-known Nuremberg trials are often regarded as epitomizing American judicial ideals, these trials were in fact the exception to the rule. Instead, as Tomaz Jardim convincingly demonstrates, the rough justice of the Mauthausen trial remains indicative of the most common—and yet least understood—American approach to war crimes prosecution. The Mauthausen Trial forces reflection on the implications of compromising legal standards in order to guarantee that guilty people do not walk free.

Judgment Before Nuremberg
Judgment Before Nuremberg

Author: Greg Dawson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1681770415

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When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz and Dachau. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war crime trial against the Nazis was in this tiny Ukrainian town, which is fitting, because it is where the Holocaust actually began. Judgment Before Nuremberg is also the story of Dawson’s personal journey to this place, to the scene of the crime, and the discovery of the trial which began the tortuous process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, great-grandparents and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah, a moment and crime now largely cloaked in darkness.

Rethinking Holocaust Justice
Rethinking Holocaust Justice

Author: Norman J. W. Goda

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1785336983

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Since the end of World War II, the ongoing efforts aimed at criminal prosecution, restitution, and other forms of justice in the wake of the Holocaust have constituted one of the most significant episodes in the history of human rights and international law. As such, they have attracted sustained attention from historians and legal scholars. This edited collection substantially enlarges the topical and disciplinary scope of this burgeoning field, exploring such varied subjects as literary analysis of Hannah Arendt’s work, the restitution case for Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, and the ritualistic aspects of criminal trials.

Legacies of Dachau
Legacies of Dachau

Author: Harold Marcuse

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-03-22

Total Pages: 676

ISBN-13: 9780521552042

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Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. These names still evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany around the world. This 2001 book takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany's premier concentration camp, to the camp's postwar uses as prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site. With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, Legacies of Dachau documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized and silenced. Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Marcuse unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, to offer a unified interpretation of their interaction from the Nazi era to the twenty-first century.

Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950
Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950

Author: Devin O. Pendas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1108915957

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Post-war Germany has been seen as a model of 'transitional justice' in action, where the prosecution of Nazis, most prominently in the Nuremberg Trials, helped promote a transition to democracy. However, this view forgets that Nazis were also prosecuted in what became East Germany, and the story in West Germany is more complicated than has been assumed. Revising received understanding of how transitional justice works, Devin O. Pendas examines Nazi trials between 1945 and 1950 to challenge assumptions about the political outcomes of prosecuting mass atrocities. In East Germany, where there were more trials and stricter sentences, and where they grasped a broad German complicity in Nazi crimes, the trials also helped to consolidate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship by legitimating a new police state. Meanwhile, opponents of Nazi prosecutions in West Germany embraced the language of fairness and due process, which helped de-radicalise the West German judiciary and promote democracy.

Doctors from Hell
Doctors from Hell

Author: Vivien Spitz

Publisher: Sentient Publications

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1591810329

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A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorized in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.