"Behind this gate began a hell that cannot be described in words," said presiding judge Hans Hofmeyer when he opened the sentencing session at the "Auschwitz" trial 60 years ago. After he finished announcing the verdicts, visibly shaken, he added: "There are probably people among us who will not be able to look at the joyful and trusting eyes of a child for a long time without the empty, questioning, incomprehensible and fearful eyes of the children who passed their last journey to Auschwitz coming to mind."
For a long time, German post-war society lacked the words with which to acknowledge responsibility for its own Nazi history. In the court in Frankfurt am Main, it was above all the voices of the surviving witnesses who painted a picture of "hell" for this society. in Auschwitz, writes the public media ARD on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of the trial.
The voices of the survivors
"The SS were pushing people out of the cars. And we stood in a line and under threat of death penalty we were forbidden to talk to any of the "new arrivals". This is how Rudolf Vrba describes the arrival of prisoners at the concentration camp (KZ) on the 117th day of the Auschwitz trial.
He was only 18 years old when he was deported to Auschwitz. After two years in the camp, he somehow managed to escape, and the report he wrote in 1944 was one of the first testimonies from which the Western Allies learned about the mass murder machine in the extermination camps and gas chambers, the ARD publication says.
Rudolf Wrba arrived from London for the trial in Frankfurt am Main. Before the court, he testified how transports with several thousand people arrived in Auschwitz, how immediately afterwards a selection of the newcomers was carried out on the ramp, and how many of them were killed immediately: "The remaining people were loaded into prepared trucks and sent to neighboring Birkenau - directly to the gas chambers."
The German history of the trial
The fact that the Auschwitz trial was held at all is a complete miracle in post-war Germany. After the Nuremberg trials immediately after the war, only a few high-ranking Nazis were tried for their crimes - at that time, resistance to making sense of history was too strong. For example, at the trial in Frankfurt am Main, police officers could be seen giving a salute as those accused of SS crimes entered the courtroom, ARD reported.
"The criminal trial against Mulka and others", as the Auschwitz trial is officially called, is a massive undertaking: four prosecutors and three civil lawyers are facing 22 defendants with 19 defense attorneys. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had already been sentenced to death in Poland in 1947, but at the trial in Frankfurt 60 years ago, his adjutant Robert Mulka was among the defendants. After 183 days of trial, the court pronounced 6 life sentences, acquitted three - due to lack of evidence, and the remaining defendants received sentences between 3 and 14 years in prison.
But in addition to punishing the perpetrators of Auschwitz, the then Chief Prosecutor of Hesse Fritz Bauer also pursued another important goal - he wanted society to finally see the crimes committed. He wanted the Germans to finally face the victims and convince themselves that the Nazis had indeed committed all the crimes described. For example, what Maurits Berner testified about on the 78th day of the trial: “When he arrived in Auschwitz, the concentration camp pharmacist Dr. Viktor Capesius told him not to cry for his wife and children, because they “were going to the bathroom and would be back in an hour”. Berner, however, never saw them again.
Historical testimonies recorded on tape
The Auschwitz trial is an important step in the revelation of Nazi crimes, also because the testimonies of 318 out of a total of 360 witnesses were recorded on tape. Initially, they were intended only for the court, not for the public. However, the Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee in Vienna, Hermann Langbein, appealed to the then Minister of Justice of Hesse with a request that the recordings be preserved. Today, they are part of the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage and can be listened to on the website of the “Fritz Bauer“ Institute.
From a legal point of view, the Auschwitz trial was not particularly successful. Although 16 convictions were handed down, the majority of the perpetrators of the crimes at Auschwitz, where over 8,000 people were involved in guarding the concentration camp alone, were never brought to justice.
Changed case law
This was due to the Federal Supreme Court, which at the time required that each individual perpetrator be proven to have committed a specific crime. It was not until 2016 that the Federal Court changed its position, recognizing that the concentration camps were part of an "industrialized killing system." If this had been the case during the Frankfurt Trial, there would have been convictions for complicity in murder even for people who were accountants or SS secretaries at the camp.
Since the 2016 ruling, several trials have been held against former concentration camp criminals - specifically for complicity in mass murder. Among them is Irmgard Furchner, a former concentration camp secretary who was convicted in 2024. However, this was the last trial before a German court for Nazi concentration camps. And the majority of SS criminals from Auschwitz and other concentration camps have never been brought to justice, ARD points out.
Author: Max Bauer ARD