The Nuremberg trials are regarded as models of postwar justice, but the Mauthausen trial was the norm and reveals the troubling face of American military proceedings. This rough justice, with its lax ...rules of evidence and questionable interrogations, compromised legal standards in order to guarantee that guilty people did not walk free.
The Nuremberg trials are regarded as models of postwar justice, but the Mauthausen trial was the norm and reveals the troubling face of American military proceedings. This rough justice, with its lax ...rules of evidence and questionable interrogations, compromised legal standards in order to guarantee that guilty people did not walk free.
When the first war crimes investigators entered Mauthausen on May 6, 1945, concentration camps Auschwitz, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald had already fallen into Allied hands. Yet despite the ...horrific scenes that their Russian, British, and American counterparts had reported from these camps, investigators were scarcely prepared for what they discovered. Aside from the masses of dead that littered the camp, the gas chamber and crematoria provided evidence of mass murder on a near-industrial scale. In the weeks that followed, investigators set to work piecing together the crimes committed within the camp’s walls, deeply affected by their visceral confrontation with atrocity.
Judgment at Dachau Jardim, Tomaz
The Mauthausen Trial,
12/2011
Book Chapter
The final two days of the Mauthausen trial were its most eventful. Not only did the prosecution and defense present their final arguments to the court, but the Dachau judges announced their verdicts, ...sentences, and a series of special findings designed to facilitate the more rapid prosecution of other Mauthausen personnel in subsequent proceedings. The brevity of this final trial phase typified the military trial process, while raising questions about its ultimate fairness. To summarize a case brought against sixty-one defendants, the prosecution spoke for a mere half hour, and the defense for even less. To arrive at sixty-one verdicts,
As Chief Prosecutor William Denson put the final touches on the statement he would present to the court on the first morning of the Mauthausen trial, he had every reason to feel confident. Less than ...four months earlier, he had achieved a 100 percent rate of conviction in the first Dachau concentration camp trial, before a similar military government court. Denson’s use of the innovative charge of “participating in a common design to commit war crimes” had therefore already proved to be highly effective in prosecuting the large groups of defendants chosen for the mass-atrocity parent cases. Further, American military
At the end of October 1943, the foreign ministers of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States came together to discuss the issue of German atrocities and possible measures to be taken ...against the perpetrators. The resulting Moscow Declaration, released to the press on November 1, 1943, established two separate paths along which Nazi war criminals would be brought to justice once hostilities had ended. The first path, which led ultimately to both the International Military Tribunal and the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg, was reserved for the arch-criminals of the Third Reich. The second path, which culminated
Toward the end of 1945, the Judge Advocate’s Office referred the Mauthausen case to trial, following an assessment of masses of evidentiary materials submitted by Major Eugene S. Cohen and other war ...crimes investigators who had worked at Mauthausen and its subcamps. Although officials in the Judge Advocate’s Office had reviewed thousands of cases concerning atrocities committed in the American zone of occupation, against American personnel or in concentration camps overrun by American forces, the Mauthausen case was one of a much smaller number ultimately chosen for trial at Dachau.¹ Lieutenant Colonel William Denson, assigned by the Judge Advocate to
