The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial began on 17 December 1963 in the Römer town hall in the medieval center of Frankfurt. After five and a half years of investigation and pretrial proceedings, the indictment had come to include twenty-three defendants, all of whom had served as staff at the Auschwitz complex during the second World War. In the twenty months over which the proceedings spanned, more than 20,000 people, the majority of whom were West German citizens, attended the trial. Yet in spite of the scale of the legal proceedings—it was the largest and most extensive trial in postwar Germany in terms of the scope of the investigation, the number of defendants, and the duration—there remains a great deal of contention as to the extent of the impact of the trial in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and its role in transitional justice in postwar West German society. While there is general accord that the proceedings played an important role in exposing the conditions and brutality of life at Auschwitz, the moral, pedagogical role of the trial is less certain. Scholarly opinions range from an endorsement of the trial as a major historical and cultural moment that shifted public consensus on the past and forced German introspection to a dismissal of the proceedings as an essentially failed attempt to inculcate into Germans a sense of responsibility for the crimes carried out in their name. The exigencies of the German penal code, the West German political and societal environment, and the convictions and sentences handed down by the Court all had far-reaching impacts for the didactics of the trial and the way in which blame was allocated. Ultimately, the trial likely had a profound effect on those who were willing to observe its proceedings and accept its lessons; however, those who wished to ignore the the proceedings could easily do so. Therefore, the role of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial to transitional justice was minimal, though not negligible.
Long before the Holocaust, Jews living in Germany were widely regarded as “enemies within” and were the subjects of pernicious stereotypes. As National Socialism ascended to predominance and assumed a mainstream place in German society, so too did the Nazi conviction that a new racial order, consisting only of the biologically-superior Aryan race, would be a cure all to Germany’s problems. This ideology served as the basis of the Holocaust, the “systematic state-sponsored killing of [approximately] six million Jewish men, women, and children … by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.” Although many groups were targeted and killed by the Nazis—the physically and mentally handicapped, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, ethnic Poles and other Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witness, and political opponents of the regime—“only the Jews were targeted for total annihilation.”
In June 1941, the Nazis began to carry out the Final Solution—the systematic murder of European Jews intended to bring about their complete extirpation. Auschwitz, located in the Polish town of Oświęcim, was a key apparatus in the genocide that occurred between 1941 and 1945. The complex was composed of three sub-camps: Auschwitz I, a prison camp; Auschwitz II / Birkenau, an extermination camp; and Auschwitz III / Buna-Monowitz, a slave-labor camp. Inmates were gassed, shot, injected with a lethal drug, fatally beaten, or worked to death until the camp was evacuated just a few days before the Soviet army arrived on 27 January 1945. In total, between 1.1 and 1.5 million people, ninety percent of whom were Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz.
Formal, comprehensive reparations for the devastation visited upon Jews by the Holocaust were first promised in September 1951 in a statement delivered by FRG Chancellor Konrad Adenauer before the Bundestag. Adenauer expressed his dedication to remedying the wrongs “committed in the name of the German people” and presented reparations as a moral obligation of the Germans, though he notably and deliberately refused to assign guilt for the crimes that had made the reparations necessary. Reparations were to be paid primarily to the newly-established Israel, which had received many Jewish survivors after the war. On 10 September 1952, representatives from Israel and Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement, a deal stipulating that Germany was to pay Israel DM 3 billion in commodities over the subsequent twelve years to reimburse Israel for the resettlement of 500,000 Holocaust survivors, and also included provisions to address the claims of Jews living outside of Israel. While the international optics of reparations presented the FRG as a state committed to atoning for its recent atrocities, only eleven percent of Germans supported payments to Jews, and forty-four percent did not consider reparations to be obligatory, according to a poll conducted in 1952. This chasm between governmental penance and civil apathy was not limited to the issue of reparations.
Following the formal defeat of Germany in 1945, German society had entered into a deliberate “collective amnesia” regarding its role in the war. The Adenauer government in West Germany limited judicial action against accused Nazi criminals, believing that such trials would inhibit the construction of a new, democratic West Germany. To this end, a program of clemency and mass commutation of sentences for ex-Nazis was carried out until 1958.
In breaking with this trend, the late 1950s saw an increase in the number of trials of former Nazis in West Germany. These trials were usually the result of individuals—most often survivors—recognizing camp guards or other Nazi officials on the streets and pressing charges against them. This occurred with increasing frequency as former Nazis were released from the East and made their way back to Germany. At this point, over a decade after the war’s end, the West German government’s goal had moved beyond trying to establish and maintain a precarious democracy to seeking respect and legitimacy in the international community; the government thought that allowing and encouraging trials of ex-Nazis would be conducive to this end. Therefore, in 1958, prompted by both the change in administrative policy and the complaints of camp survivors, German courts began a systematic inquiry into National Socialist crimes. A central office, known as Zentralstelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen (ZdL), was established in Ludwigsburg to carry out investigations into Nazi crimes and their alleged perpetrators.
Outside of West Germany, other states and jurisdictions had sought legal redress against Nazis since the end of the war. Most famously, the Allies conducted the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1946. Using international law, the tribunal charged Nazi leadership with conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg proceedings were notable for rejecting the so-called “superior orders” defense: that defendants were not legally responsible because their actions had been ordered from a higher echelon. The repudiation of this defense was meant to signal that individual responsibility could be ascribed in spite of the hierarchical structure of totalitarian regimes. Yet the IMT had been unpopular amongst the German public, which viewed the proceedings more as a form of political revenge than as a legitimate exercise in justice. This early rebuke of Nazi trials turned out to be a harbinger of the resistance that the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial would face nearly twenty years later.
Another important trial of Nazi criminals was the so-called “first Auschwitz trial,” or the “Polish Auschwitz trial,” which began in Krakow in December 1947. In the Moscow
Declaration of 1943, the Allied powers had agreed that Germans guilty of war crimes would be extradited to the country in which they had carried out such crimes. As a result, Germans arrested for crimes relating to activities in Auschwitz were sent to Poland to stand trial. Of the forty defendants tried—the majority of whom had been senior leaders at Auschwitz—twenty-three were sentenced to death. Interestingly, Artur Breitwieser, one of the defendants who had received a death sentence, later had his sentence commuted to life in prison and then reduced to time served, which left him free to return to Germany. He was re-arrested in the FRG in December 1960 and tried at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.
In addition to these two high-profile trials, SS officers who had worked at Auschwitz were also tried at various other national tribunals; available information reveals that there were eleven such trials held by American, British, French, and Czechoslovak national courts, resulting in twenty-four convictions and varying prison terms. The Soviet Union also tried Auschwitz personnel following the end of the war, though there is no available information on the extent of these trials.