1951: The Einsatzgruppen Trial war criminals

A batch of Nazi war criminals highlighted by four condemned at the Einsatzgruppen trial hanged at Germany’s Landsberg Prison on this date in 1951.

Formed initially to decapitate Polish intelligentsia when Germany invaded that country in 1939, these notorious paramilitaries were deployed by Reinhard Heydrich behind the advancing German line of battle to pacify occupied territory. “Pacify” in the event meant slaying Communists, partisans, and of course, the Reich’s innumerable racial inferiors. Einsatzgruppen authored many mass executions like the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar outside Kiev, each local atrocity a self-conscious contribution to the wholesale genocide. All told these units might have killed upwards of 2 million human beings; they were also used to gather Eastern European Jews into urban ghettos, which subsequently became the staging points for deportations to the camps.

Postwar, the big Nuremberg war crimes tribunal against the major names in the German hierarchy unfolded from late 1945 in a multinational courtroom: American, British, French, and Russian judges and prosecutors working jointly.

But the emerging superpower rivalry soon narrowed the window for similar cooperation in successor trials, leading the rival powers to try cases on their own.* Accordingly, United States military tribunals unfolded 12 additional mass trials, known as the subsequent Nuremberg trials — each exploring particular nodes of the Nazi project — such as the Doctors’ trial and the IG Farben trial.

The Einsatzgruppen trial was one of these — 24 Einsatzgruppen officers prosecuted at the Palace of Justice from September 29, 1947 to April 10, 1948......

I’ve run across dozens of videos on Youtube that covers the subject of the holocaust and actors. Some is really disturbing. More so than anything I had seen or read years ago.

Recently I watched one of these short documentaries on the Nazi women who participated. They were camp guards or something along that line. Some were not even 25 years old. Several had spent their teen years running around with some subgroup of the Hitler youth. It almost seems like over the course of a year or two, they became exponentially more sadistic. After the war, many escaped any punishment other than a few years in some prison and would go on and live into their 60s or older.

The Einsatzgruppen Trial was prosecuted by Benjamin Ferencz, who died (at the age of 103) just last April. Without Ferencz, it’s quite likely that none of them ever would have been identified or prosecuted.

Ferencz enlisted in the army right after graduating Harvard law school in 1943. He was slotted as a clerk-typist (he already was a skilled typist) but when he got to Europe he was re-assigned to anti-aircraft artillery.

In the military, good typists are always in short supply and it wasn’t long before he was reassigned to Patton’s HQ in his original MOS. Because he also could speak fluent German, as the war drew to a close, he was sent around with teams trying to document Nazi war crimes.

As he tells it, the war had ended, that assignment reached a conclusion, and his enlistment was expired, he snuck on a plane back to the states. Some weeks later an officer from the Pentagon came to see him in New York to ask him to go back to Germany for one more job. He would go back as a civilian but would wear a the rank of bird colonel to assist in the Nuremberg prosecutions.

Prosecutor Telford Taylor sent Ferencz (and a team of about 50) on a mission to gather prosecutable evidence against certain Nazis, but he found something that completely redirected his efforts. One of his team came across a stack of accounting ledgers in which the Einsatzgruppen (who no one outside the Nazi elites ever had even heard of) were reporting to Himmler (and hence to Hitler) exactly — EXACTLY — how many Jews that were murdering.

Ferencz sat down with these records and an adding machine and when he reached a million murdered Jews, he decided that he had to go after the Einsatzgruppen instead. He went back to Taylor, who said they already were stretched too thin to go after them. The only way the Einsatzgruppen could be tried in addition to the Nazis already slated for prosecution was if Ferencz himself would take on the case.

On the negative side, Ferencz had never tried a case in his life. On the plus side, while at Harvard he had law clerked for Sheldon Glueck, considered by some to be the leading authority on war crimes. So he probably knew more about war crimes than any other prosecutor at Nuremberg.

All 24 of his defendants were convicted.

Benjamin Ferencz, all five-foot-two of him, making arguments in his opening statements, and in the doing, created some of the most memorable expressions in the history of juris prudence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b67B-MoKG_o

And without Ferencz taking command of the situation, it is unlikely any of them ever would have come to trial.

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