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Author: Fern Overbey Hilton
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786417684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
In the 489 Dachau trials, 1700 criminals of Nazi Germany faced American justice. Held in the old administration building of the defunct concentration camp, they began just weeks after the capitulation in 1945 and were completed on December 30, 1947. The defendants varied from major figures in the Reich, to doctors, engineers, and teachers, to farmers, students, and villagers. The crimes include the abuse or murder of downed American airmen and atrocities committed against victims of all nationalities in the concentration camps and transports. This study concentrates on a selection of the trials that show a broad group of representative crimes and lend themselves to an understanding of World War II German culture. In proving that the average citizen could be as devoted a contributor to the Nazi cause as Hitler, it hopes to reveal something about those who would not stand up to him, who tolerated him, or who joined him. It addresses the disturbing reality that most atrocities committed in the Hitler era were the result of personal decisions made by others than the dictator. Written from primary source documents such as letters, testimony, petitions, military records, physical evidence, and the official files and reviews of the trials, the case descriptions also provide defendants' personal details: upbringing, family life, education, career choices, their behavior during the trials, and their lives afterward. The study concludes with an appendix of all cases by number and defendant, divided by series, and a bibliography. It is illustrated with mug shots of the defendants and photographs of relevant sites and events.
Author: Fern Overbey Hilton
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786417684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the 489 Dachau trials, 1700 criminals of Nazi Germany faced American justice. Held in the old administration building of the defunct concentration camp, they began just weeks after the capitulation in 1945 and were completed on December 30, 1947. The defendants varied from major figures in the Reich, to doctors, engineers, and teachers, to farmers, students, and villagers. The crimes include the abuse or murder of downed American airmen and atrocities committed against victims of all nationalities in the concentration camps and transports. This study concentrates on a selection of the trials that show a broad group of representative crimes and lend themselves to an understanding of World War II German culture. In proving that the average citizen could be as devoted a contributor to the Nazi cause as Hitler, it hopes to reveal something about those who would not stand up to him, who tolerated him, or who joined him. It addresses the disturbing reality that most atrocities committed in the Hitler era were the result of personal decisions made by others than the dictator. Written from primary source documents such as letters, testimony, petitions, military records, physical evidence, and the official files and reviews of the trials, the case descriptions also provide defendants' personal details: upbringing, family life, education, career choices, their behavior during the trials, and their lives afterward. The study concludes with an appendix of all cases by number and defendant, divided by series, and a bibliography. It is illustrated with mug shots of the defendants and photographs of relevant sites and events.
Author: John J. Dunphy
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476695407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
The U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group investigated atrocities committed in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These young Americans--many barely out of their teens--gathered evidence, interviewed witnesses, apprehended suspects and prosecuted defendants at trials held at Dachau. Their work often put them in harm's way--some suspects facing arrest preferred to shoot it out. The War Crimes Group successfully prosecuted the perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre, in which 84 American prisoners of war were shot by their German captors; and Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, aptly described as "the most dangerous man in Europe." Operation Paperclip, however, placed some war criminals--scientists and engineers recruited by the U.S. government--beyond their reach. From the ruins of the Third Reich arose a Nazi underground that preyed on Americans, especially members of the Group.
Author: Joshua Greene
Publisher: Broadway Books
ISBN: 0307419053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
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.
Author: Joseph Halow
Publisher: Legion for the Survival of Freedom
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"American teenager Joe Halow was still a boy when he sailed to war-ravaged Germany in late 1946. The year he spent there, taking part in some of the most sensational of the war-crime trials of the defeated Nazis, turned him into a man. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's account of his year in postwar Germany, above all his work as a court reporter during the U.S. Army courts-martial at Dachau. There Halow witnessed, recorded and transcribed some of the most gripping testimony from some of the most sensational trials of the postwar years: of SS guards from Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Dora/Nordhausen; of the inmates who carried out their orders as kapos (prisoner trusties); and of German villagers who attacked and murdered downed American fliers in the last phase of the Allies' terrifying air war. Armed with an ironclad faith in American righteousness when he arrived, young Halow soon saw the flaws and the abuses in the Dachau trials: reliance on ex post facto law and broad conspiracy theories; abuse of prisoners during interrogation; and the shocking tolerance, even encouragement, of perjured testimony by concentration camp survivors. The teenaged American court reporter came to sympathize with the plight of the accused, particularly those convicted, sentenced or executed unjustly. Innocent at Dachau is Joe Halow's story of his coming of age, his loss of innocence, in the Dachau courts. And it's the human drama of how he came to terms with his own anti-German feelings as he loved and worked in a Germany still heaped with rubble and ruled by the black market, in the shadow of the looming Iron Curtain and the approaching Cold War. Innocent at Dachau is also the story of how, four decades later, Joe Halow went back - back to the long-classified records of the Army's trials at Dachau, where he found astounding confirmation, from official sources, of his own misgivings about the trials; and back to Germany, for a moving visit with one of the German SS men Joe Halow watched testify about his role at the Nordhausen concentration camp."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Tomaz Jardim
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
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.
Author: Steven P. Remy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067497722X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
During the Battle of the Bulge, Waffen SS soldiers shot 84 American prisoners near the Belgian town of Malmedy—the deadliest mass execution of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The bloody deeds of December 17, 1944, produced the most controversial war crimes trial in American history. Drawing on newly declassified documents, Steven Remy revisits the massacre—and the decade-long controversy that followed—to set the record straight. After the war, the U.S. Army tracked down 74 of the SS men involved in the massacre and other atrocities and put them on trial at Dachau. All the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Over the following decade, however, a network of Germans and sympathetic Americans succeeded in discrediting the trial. They claimed that interrogators—some of them Jewish émigrés—had coerced false confessions and that heat of battle conditions, rather than superiors’ orders, had led to the shooting. They insisted that vengeance, not justice, was the prosecution’s true objective. The controversy generated by these accusations, leveled just as the United States was anxious to placate its West German ally, resulted in the release of all the convicted men by 1957. The Malmedy Massacre shows that the torture accusations were untrue, and the massacre was no accident but was typical of the Waffen SS’s brutal fighting style. Remy reveals in unprecedented depth how German and American amnesty advocates warped our understanding of one of the war’s most infamous crimes through a systematic campaign of fabrications and distortions.
Author: John J. Dunphy
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476653429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
The U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group investigated atrocities committed in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These young Americans--many barely out of their teens--gathered evidence, interviewed witnesses, apprehended suspects and prosecuted defendants at trials held at Dachau. Their work often put them in harm's way--some suspects facing arrest preferred to shoot it out. The War Crimes Group successfully prosecuted the perpetrators of the Malmedy Massacre, in which 84 American prisoners of war were shot by their German captors; and Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, aptly described as "the most dangerous man in Europe." Operation Paperclip, however, placed some war criminals--scientists and engineers recruited by the U.S. government--beyond their reach. From the ruins of the Third Reich arose a Nazi underground that preyed on Americans, especially members of the Group.
Author: Christoph Schiessl
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498529410
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
This book follows the story of suspected Nazi war criminals in the United States and analyzes their supposed crimes during World War II, their entry into the United States as war refugees in the 1940s and 1950s, and their prosecution in the 1970s and beyond by the U.S. government, specifically by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI). In particular, this book explains why and how such individuals entered the United States, why it took so long to locate and apprehend them, how the OSI was founded, and how the OSI has tried to bring them to justice. This study constitutes a thorough account of 150 suspects and examines how the search for them connects to larger developments in postwar U.S. history. In this latter regard, one major theme includes the role Holocaust memory played in the aforementioned developments. This account adds significantly to the historiographical debate about when and how the Holocaust found its way into American Jewish and also general American consciousness. In general, these suspected Nazi war criminals could come to the United States largely undetected during the early Cold War. In this atmosphere, they morphed from Nazi collaborators to ardent anti-Communists and, outside of some big fish, not even within the Jewish community was their role in the Holocaust much discussed. Only with the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s did interest in other Holocaust perpetrators increase, culminating in the founding of the OSI in the late 1970s. The manuscript makes use, among other documents, of declassified sources from the CIA and FBI, little used trial accounts, and hard to locate OSI records.
Author: Suzanne Brown-Fleming
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268076219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
American-born Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962) was a key figure in German and German-American Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Jews, and Judaism between 1946 and 1959. He was arguably the most powerful American Catholic figure and an influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and in West Germany after the war. In this carefully researched book, which draws on Muench’s collected papers, Suzanne Brown-Fleming offers the first assessment of Muench’s legacy and provides a rare glimpse into his commentary on Nazism, the Holocaust, and surviving Jews. She argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic Church’s failure during this period to confront the nature of its own complicity in Nazism’s anti-Jewish ideology. The archival evidence demonstrates that Muench viewed Jews as harmful in a number of very specific ways. He regarded German Jews who had immigrated to the United States as "aliens," he believed Jews to be "in control" of American policy-making in Germany, he feared Jews as "avengers" who wished to harm "victimized" Germans, and he believed Jews to be excessively involved in leftist activities. Muench’s standing and influence in the United States, Germany, and the Vatican hierarchies gave sanction to the idea that German Catholics needed no examination of conscience in regard to the Church's actions (or inactions) during the 1940s and 1950s. This fascinating story of Muench’s role in German Catholic consideration—and ultimate rejection—of guilt and responsibility for Nazism in general and the persecution of European Jews in particular will be an important addition to scholarship on the Holocaust and to church history.
Author: Vivien Spitz
Publisher: Sentient Publications
ISBN: 1591810329
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
A chilling story of human depravity and ultimate justice, told for the first time by an eyewitness court reporter for the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Nazi doctors. This is the account of 22 men and 1 woman and the torturing and killing by experiment they authorized in the name of scientific research and patriotism. Doctors from Hell includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathizer tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. This landmark trial resulted in the establishment of the Nuremberg code, which set the guidelines for medical research involving human beings. A significant addition to the literature on World War II and the Holocaust, medical ethics, human rights, and the barbaric depths to which human beings can descend.
