Download or read book The Mauthausen Trial written by Tomaz Jardim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Mauthausen war crimes trial and American military justice in Germany written by Tomaz Jardim and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the American military trial of sixty-one personnel from the notorious Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen in 1946. As one of nearly 500 war crimes cases brought before U.S. military courts at Dachau between 1945 and the end of 1947, the Mauthausen trial was part of a justice system designed to judge and punish Nazi crimes in the most expedient manner the law would allow.Drawing on trial and pre-trial records as well as interviews with surviving witnesses and trial participants, I reconstruct the arc of the prosecution process - from the investigation of crimes at Mauthausen in the days following its liberation, through to the trial and its aftermath. The investigation phase, I illustrate, was hampered by chronic understaffing and a lack of trained personnel. As a result, American war crimes investigators at Mauthausen came to depend on camp survivors to assist in virtually every step of the investigation, from the gathering of evidence to the arrest and interrogation of suspects. I argue that it was this remarkable relationship between liberator and liberated that gave fundamental shape to the Mauthausen investigation, and that influenced the vision of Nazi crimes presented by prosecutors in the courtroom. The ensuing trial, which lasted thirty-six days and resulted in the conviction of all sixty-one defendants, was efficient if also problematic. I argue that relaxed rules of evidence, questionable interrogation techniques, and the absence of an appeal procedure tipped the proceedings in favor of the prosecution and rendered the trial fundamentally flawed. Paradoxically however, I show that under the circumstances, this questionable legal framework allowed for the speedy punishment of dozens of indisputably guilty men who in all likelihood would otherwise have gone free.
Download or read book Justice at Dachau written by Joshua Greene and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex written by United States. National Archives and Records Administration and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spaniards in Mauthausen written by Sara J. Brenneis and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spaniards in Mauthausen is the first study of the cultural legacy of Spaniards imprisoned and killed during the Second World War in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen. By examining narratives about Spanish Mauthausen victims over the past seventy years, author Sara J. Brenneis provides a historical, critical, and chronological analysis of a virtually unknown body of work. Diverse accounts from survivors of Mauthausen, chronicled in letters, artwork, photographs, memoirs, fiction, film, theatre, and new media, illustrate how Spaniards have become cognizant of the Spanish government’s relationship to the Nazis and its role in the victimization of Spanish nationals in Mauthausen. As political prisoners, their numbers and experiences differ significantly from the millions of Jews exterminated by Hitler, yet the Spaniards in Mauthausen were nevertheless objects of Nazi violence and witnesses to the Holocaust.
Download or read book The Photographer of Mauthausen written by Salva Rubio and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2020-10-11 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a dramatic retelling of true events in the life of Francisco Boix, a Spanish press photographer and communist who fled to France at the beginning of World War II. But there, he found himself handed over by the French to the Nazis, who sent him to the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp, where he spent the war among thousands of other Spaniards and other prisoners. More than half of them would lose their lives there. Through an odd turn of events, Boix finds himself the confidant of an SS officer who is documenting prisoner deaths at the camp. Boix realizes that he has a chance to prove Nazi war crimes by stealing the negatives of these perverse photos—but only at the risk of his own life, that of a young Spanish boy he has sworn to protect, and, indeed, that of every prisoner in the camp.
Download or read book The Eternal Nazi written by Nicholas Kulish and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times reporters who first uncovered S.S. officer Aribert Heim’s secret life in Egypt comes the never-before-told story of the most hunted Nazi war criminal in the world. Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator named Alfred Aedtner. After Heim fled on a tip that he was about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see justice done at almost any cost. As late as 2009, the mystery of Heim’s disappearance remained unsolved. Now, in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded capture--living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family--while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that illuminates a nation’s dramatic reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust.
Download or read book Tyranny on Trial written by Whitney R. Harris and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eichmann in Jerusalem written by Hannah Arendt and published by Topeka Bindery. This book was released on 1963 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hannah Arendts authoritative report on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann includes further factual material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendts postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account.
Download or read book The Moral Witness written by Carolyn J. Dean and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.
Download or read book Mission at Nuremberg written by Tim Townsend and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend’s gripping story of the American Army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg, a compelling and thought-provoking tale that raises questions of faith, guilt, morality, vengeance, forgiveness, salvation, and the essence of humanity. Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke was fifty years old when he enlisted as am Army chaplain during World War II. As two of his three sons faced danger and death on the battlefield, Gerecke tended to the battered bodies and souls of wounded and dying GIs outside London. At the war’s end, when other soldiers were coming home, Gerecke was recruited for the most difficult engagement of his life: ministering to the twenty-one Nazis leaders awaiting trial at Nuremburg. Based on scrupulous research and first-hand accounts, including interviews with still-living participants and featuring sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, Mission at Nuremberg takes us inside the Nuremburg Palace of Justice, into the cells of the accused and the courtroom where they faced their crimes. As the drama leading to the court’s final judgments unfolds, Tim Townsend brings to life the developing relationship between Gerecke and Hermann Georing, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other imprisoned Nazis as they awaited trial. Powerful and harrowing, Mission at Nuremberg offers a fresh look at one most horrifying times in human history, probing difficult spiritual and ethical issues that continue to hold meaning, forcing us to confront the ultimate moral question: Are some men so evil they are beyond redemption?
Download or read book Ilse Koch on Trial written by Tomaz Jardim and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After WWII, Ilse Koch became known worldwide as the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” She was assuredly guilty of atrocities, but the most sensational crimes ascribed to her by prosecutors and newspapers went unproven. Tomaz Jardim reveals how Koch’s perceived betrayal of womanhood sealed her fate as a scapegoat for a society seeking absolution.
Download or read book The Eichmann Trial written by Deborah E. Lipstadt and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST (2012)*** Part of the Jewish Encounter series The capture of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann by Israeli agents in Argentina in May of 1960 and his subsequent trial in Jerusalem by an Israeli court electrified the world. The public debate it sparked on where, how, and by whom Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice, and the international media coverage of the trial itself, was a watershed moment in how the civilized world in general and Holocaust survivors in particular found the means to deal with the legacy of genocide on a scale that had never been seen before. Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced. As the world continues to confront the ongoing reality of genocide and ponder the fate of those who survive it, this trial of the century, which has become a touchstone for judicial proceedings throughout the world, offers a legal, moral, and political framework for coming to terms with unfathomable evil. Lipstadt infuses a gripping narrative with historical perspective and contemporary urgency.
Download or read book In the Matter of Josef Mengele written by Neal M. Sher and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Liberation of the Camps written by Dan Stone and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving, deeply researched account of survivors’ experiences of liberation from Nazi death camps and the long, difficult years that followed When tortured inmates of Hitler’s concentration and extermination camps were liberated in 1944 and 1945, the horror of the atrocities came fully to light. It was easy for others to imagine the joyful relief of freed prisoners, yet for those who had survived the unimaginable, the experience of liberation was a slow, grueling journey back to life. In this unprecedented inquiry into the days, months, and years following the arrival of Allied forces at the Nazi camps, a foremost historian of the Holocaust draws on archival sources and especially on eyewitness testimonies to reveal the complex challenges liberated victims faced and the daunting tasks their liberators undertook to help them reclaim their shattered lives. Historian Dan Stone focuses on the survivors—their feelings of guilt, exhaustion, fear, shame for having survived, and devastating grief for lost family members; their immense medical problems; and their later demands to be released from Displaced Persons camps and resettled in countries of their own choosing. Stone also tracks the efforts of British, American, Canadian, and Russian liberators as they contended with survivors’ immediate needs, then grappled with longer-term issues that shaped the postwar world and ushered in the first chill of the Cold War years ahead.
Download or read book Cartographic and Architectural Branch written by United States. National Archives and Records Administration. Cartographic and Architectural Branch and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Commandant of Auschwitz written by Rudolf Höss and published by . This book was released on 1960 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first-person account by the SS captain who arranged the gassing of two million people at Auschwitz between 1941-1943.
