The Mauthausen Trial

The Mauthausen Trial PDF 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.

The Mauthausen Trial

The Mauthausen Trial PDF Author: Tomaz Jardim
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book

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.

The Mauthausen war crimes trial and American military justice in Germany

The Mauthausen war crimes trial and American military justice in Germany PDF Author: Tomaz Jardim
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780494812280
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
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.

Justice at Dachau

Justice at Dachau PDF 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.

Spaniards in Mauthausen

Spaniards in Mauthausen PDF Author: Sara J. Brenneis
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487512961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
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.

The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex

The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex PDF Author: United States. National Archives and Records Administration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


St. Georgen - Gusen - Mauthausen

St. Georgen - Gusen - Mauthausen PDF Author: Rudolf A. Haunschmied
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3833474408
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This study discusses the Mauthausen concentration camp complex, with facilities in St. Georgen and Gusen, Austria. Using information from local sources, camp survivors, and archives, it focuses on the SS industrial infrastructure and the underground earth and stone works factory where concentration camp prisoners were forced to labor.

Tyranny on Trial

Tyranny on Trial PDF Author: Whitney R. Harris
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566199537
Category : Aggression (International law)
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description


The Photographer of Mauthausen

The Photographer of Mauthausen PDF Author: Salva Rubio
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1682476286
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 114

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Book Description
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.

The Eternal Nazi

The Eternal Nazi PDF Author: Nicholas Kulish
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 038553244X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
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.

Theories of Co-perpetration in International Criminal Law

Theories of Co-perpetration in International Criminal Law PDF Author: Lachezar D. Yanev
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004357505
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 654

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Book Description
This book provides a refined definition of co-perpetration responsibility that could be uniformly applied in both the ad hoc- and the treaty-based (ICC Rome Statue) model of international criminal justice.