From: "Eastern History Review"
On October 30, 1943, the "Moscow Declaration" announced that the Allies would extradite Germans who committed war crimes to the country where they committed the crime after the war, and the court hearing. The Auschwitz concentration camp is located in Poland. Therefore, after the end of World War II, the arrested German Nazi guards at Auschwitz concentration camp were handed over to the Polish authorities.
Rudolf Hoess, Auschwitz's first commander, was tried by Polish authorities in Warsaw on April 2, 1947, sentenced to death and hanged by the gallows next to Auschwitz's gas chamber execution by hanging. From November 24 to December 22, 1947, the Polish National Supreme Court indicted and tried some other high-ranking officers of Auschwitz in Krakow (the capital of Krakow Province, Poland), and sentenced 23 SS soldiers. The criminals were executed, 21 of them were executed, and the other 2 were later commuted to imprisonment. After this, many lower-class Auschwitz criminals were tried one after another, and 617 were prosecuted, of which 34 were sentenced to death. These trials later became known as the "First Auschwitz Trials". From December 20, 1963 to August 19, 1965, the trial of the middle and lower ranks of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Frankfurt, Germany, was called the "Second Auschwitz Trial".
The Frankfurt Trial
Germany's trial of the Nazis at Auschwitz was relatively delayed, with a systematic investigation only starting in 1958, also largely due to pressure from Holocaust survivors. Twenty-two Auschwitz personnel were indicted in the Frankfurt trial. After the trial, six were sentenced to life imprisonment (West Germany abolished the death penalty in 1949, and life imprisonment is the maximum sentence), three were acquitted, 2 were released due to illness, and the others were sentenced to 3 years and 3 months to 14 years in prison. The prisoners later appealed to Germany's Federal Supreme Court, which upheld the original sentence in all but one case. After this, a number of smaller trials took place in Frankfurt, such as the second Frankfurt trial (14 December 1965 to 16 September 1966) and the third trial (30 August 1967 to 16 September 1966) June 14, 1968).
Historical researchers at the Auschwitz State Museum estimate that the number of SS troops in Auschwitz was about 700 in 1941, 2,000 in 1942, 3,000 in April 1944, and peaked in January 1945. The SS numbered 4,415 men and 71 women. According to personnel files, between 7,000 and 7,200 SS troops served at Auschwitz. Fewer than 15 percent of all these personnel were prosecuted, but that percentage was already higher than for Nazi personnel in other concentration camps. This is because Auschwitz is more well-known than other concentration camps, and therefore more visible to the world.
The Auschwitz SS was tried and sentenced in the courts of other countries as well. According to the available information, there were 11 trials in Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, France and the Czech Republic, and 24 SS soldiers were convicted, either in prison or on death row. Their crimes in Auschwitz were also considered in the trial for the massacre of the guards at Bergen-Belsen (also known as Belsen), because some of them were sent from Auschwitz of. Trials of officials from IGFarben-Werke, which makes chemicals, and Krupp, a steel and heavy industry company, can also be seen as part of the Auschwitz trial, as these companies used prisoners as slaves work. In addition, Bruno Tesch, the chemist and entrepreneur who built the Auschwitz crematorium, was sentenced to death; Gerhard Peters was acquitted at the Frankfurt trial.
The Frankfurt trial was aimed at middle and lower-ranking officers in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The purpose of the prosecution and the scope of the trial boiled down to two basic questions: first, what kind of concentration camp was Auschwitz; second, how to investigate the situation there The culpability of the specific individual who committed the crime. The nature of the Auschwitz concentration camp is clear, it was a killing machine for the extermination of the Jews, where the Nazis committed the most serious crime of all, "murder". It was this crime that the Frankfurt trial was prosecuting. Limiting the scope of prosecution to murder is for the operability of legal trials, not for full justice. To pursue only murder in this trial is not to say that other crimes are not crimes, but to say that other crimes are not pursued here.
The mere pursuit of individuals for "murder" later became a major reason for much criticism of the Frankfurt trial. This is because, a person "murders" not only that he kills, but also that he has a personal motive to kill from his own will, so if the latter condition is not met, the court cannot convict him of the crime charged with murder. George Zimmerman, who killed 17-year-old black child Trayvon Martin, was acquitted in July 2013 because a jury could not determine Zimmerman's "murder." motivation". He clearly killed a person, and it was unjust to kill an innocent person, but the law declared him innocent. This is because law is just law, and law does not equal justice. The Frankfurt trial also encountered such a problem. Since it only prosecuted the crime of "murder", its trial scope is very narrow, and the legal trial results within this narrow scope cannot be equal to justice. Of course, the Frankfurt trial did not have this meaning.
Murder motive and coercion
The legal basis for the trial of criminals is very important. Without a credible law, the result of the trial will lack legitimacy and be unconvincing. Since the Frankfurt Trial was held on German soil, within the German jurisdiction, by a German court, it was based on German law. Prior to this, the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials (November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946) was that at the end of the Second World War, the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France held on August 8, 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal adopted in London. The legal basis for the first Auschwitz trial was a Polish decree of August 31, 1944 and promulgated on December 11, 1946: "Punish the Fascist-Hitler criminals who kill and torture civilians and captives, punish Poland A traitor to the state." Israel's execution of Eichmann (who was chief of the "ultimate plan" to kill millions of Jews) was based on a law of Israel's own ["Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law) ”] because Eichmann was captured from Argentina by Israeli agents and tried in Israel. Israel's use of this law is controversial internationally because Eichmann did not commit the crime on Israeli soil, and Israel did not exist when he committed the crime. Moreover, the laws used to try him were made after the fact. It is an undisputed fact that Eichmann committed crimes against humanity, and he himself does not deny that murder is a crime. However, he argued that it was not his own idea, he just executed it. Obedience to orders to kill became a key issue in the later Frankfurt trial.
The Frankfurt trial relied on 19th-century German law when considering the homicide charge of "murder". Nineteenth-century Germany, like any other country, did not experience totalitarianism like the Nazis and systematic massacres of this magnitude. "Murder" in the 19th century was relatively simple, and the legal definition of "murder" was based on this. The law at that time dealt with "murder" as an individual act, and murder was a murder committed by the murderer himself "on his own accord" and for his own motives. However, in the totalitarian system of the 20th century, a person can kill because of obedience to orders, not because of his own or personal motives.
The Frankfurt trial was based on the principle that there must be a personal motive for murder, and while it may seem outdated, there is precedent in postwar German court decisions. In 1963 a Soviet Secret Police (KGB) officer named Bohdan Stashynsky was tried for several murders committed in West Germany in the 1950s. However, since he was ordered to kill by the KGB boss, not by his own intention, the German court sentenced him not for "murder" but for "commitment to murder". The Stashinsky case became a precedent for legal decisions in West Germany, according to which homicide in a totalitarian system only those "administrative decision makers" could be convicted of murder, and those who obeyed orders to kill , they can only commit murder by coercion.
In the Frankfurt court, "administrative decision-makers" were defined as the top leaders of the Third Reich during the Nazi era, and all those who killed people by carrying out their orders were coercive murderers. Among them, only those who can be conclusively committed to killing themselves will be convicted of murder.
The difference between murder and coercion meant that an SS guard who had murdered hundreds of Jews in the Auschwitz gas chambers could only be convicted of coercion murder if he merely obeyed orders; but if another SS guards who deliberately beat a Jewish prisoner to death could be convicted of murder because he was not carrying out orders. There was an SS lieutenant named Karl Hocker, who was responsible for killing at least 3,000 prisoners, and the court ruled that he just obeyed orders. As far as Hawke was concerned, it was immoral to obey orders he should not have obeyed, but he was not guilty of murder, he had never committed the law before, and he was a law-abiding citizen after the war. He was therefore sentenced to seven years in prison. Another SS was convicted of murder for "shooting and killing without order". Such convictions are as if there were orders to shoot and kill. Critics have pointed out that such accusations are hilarious and ironic. However, although this seems almost absurd, it conforms to the logic of legal trial and proves once again that the law is the law, and the law does not mean justice.
While accepting the outcome of the trial, Attorney General Fritz Bauer of the Frankfurt trial has repeatedly criticized the trial's principles. Bauer, of Jewish descent, was imprisoned in the Heuberg concentration camp for a time in 1933, before fleeing to northern Europe for asylum. He returned to Germany after the war to help rebuild the German judicial system. Regarding the Frankfurt trial, he advocated that the world should see the "Auschwitz system" clearly. In this system, not only a few extremists are doing evil, but many ordinary people are actively participating in the evil killing. Bauer said, "Hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved in ... the 'final plan,' not just because of orders, but because of a worldview that they voluntarily had". Of course, whether the "voluntary" of many Germans mentioned by Baumann is completely voluntary, or whether it contains elements of "brainwashing" and "duress" is a controversial issue that must be considered.
The problem of "coercion" The
Frankfurt trial showed the world a universal problem of evil in the system, that is, "coercion". A soldier or policeman shoots or kills innocent people because he is coerced by his superiors and organizations to obey orders. Should he be held responsible for his actions? If so, what culpability must be taken? Other crimes of murder or manslaughter that occur in similar circumstances have the same problem. For example, in the “Cultural Revolution” the Red Guards and rebel factions “organized actions” that injured, maimed, or killed an individual should be held accountable, and how to convict him for his guilt would also involve the issue of coercion. Coercive crime does not necessarily take place in an authoritarian, organized environment, but it is more extreme and brutal than any other situation in an authoritarian setting.
Coercion refers to the use of threats, intimidation, deception, or other forms of pressure by an individual or group to impose its will on an involuntary other party to act in accordance with the will of the coercer. Coercion often uses harmful means to force others to cooperate or obey in order to achieve their goals. A person is in a situation of coercion and has to act against his or her will or will. Coercion can use a variety of means other than violence and threats, causing various pressures on people, such as loss of jobs and means of livelihood, expulsion from the party, demotion or dismissal, imprisonment, wearing a political hat, implicated family members and children, etc. . Such coercion often takes place in a holistic totalitarian system. Black's Law Dictionary defines coercion as: "The use of unlawful threats or coercion to induce a person to act in a way he would not otherwise be able to." "Unlawful" here refers to the laws of society in general. In the totalitarian system of evil, doing so is not only legal, but also the ruling role that the system specially designed to achieve. The coercion of an individual by a system or an organization is different from the coercion of an individual against an individual. It has more, more hidden, and more effective means, as well as a longer-term control effect.
Coercion becomes a "problem" in relation to the institutional environment only when individual crimes are brought to justice or when individuals (or collectives) engage in self-reflection. Usually, when people do bad things or evil in the system, they rarely reflect on their own behavior. They tend to think that everyone does things this way and that it should be. Because of being brainwashed by propaganda, they may even feel that what they are doing is the right thing to do (such as brutal criticism and persecution of "class enemies"). Even if some people feel that they have done something wrong and their conscience is disturbed, they will still excuse themselves, thinking that it is a "last resort" thing for survival (such as to keep their jobs or not to end up with "bad people". 's fate). This kind of situation is very common in the "Cultural Revolution". In May 2013, an old Red Guard named Wang Jiyu (b. 1951) published an article titled "Bearing the Responsibility for Murder" in "Yanhuang Chunqiu". He talked about the issue of being coerced into committing crimes during the "Cultural Revolution". , whose purpose is not to absolve himself of guilt.
Wang Jiyu was a member of the "Old Red Guards" faction in Beijing during the "Cultural Revolution". Killed in a fight at the age of 16. In his recollections, he touches on the coercive elements of criminal behavior, including the “revolutionary pressure” of the Red Guard organization he was part of, and how external coercion was internalized into his own “class consciousness.” For the first time, Wang Jiyu saw the Red Guards beat people fiercely. After knocking them down, they kicked them violently with hard-toed flying boots. The head of the kicked person hit the terrazzo floor of the workers' gymnasium. On his head, he shouted, 'Stop beating, it's too cruel, I'm going to kill him!'" However, his words and deeds were dissuaded by his companions, who regarded him as "bourgeois humanity", "Not only did he not let everyone stop, but he started to fight. Just as he was shouting, a high school student who did not know which army compound he came from pulled him up and reprimanded him: 'What class feelings are you, do you know who he is? He is a hooligan , he is the scum of our society, he is the enemy of the people!'" The reprimands and warnings that were often heard during the "Cultural Revolution" were a form of coercion. Wang Jiyu still remembers that when he heard this reprimand, "I am so ashamed. I felt that there was something wrong with my class feelings, so why couldn't I stand on the side of the proletariat? As a result, as soon as I gritted my teeth, I threw myself into the ranks of beatings." Five minutes later, he beat his comrades even more fiercely. Wang Jiyu started beating people "as a last resort", nothing more than to prove that he could make a revolution, but beating people soon became his habit and pleasure in his life, he said, "The Cultural Revolution, why do we say it was a catastrophe? It was because it destroyed The dam at the bottom line of human nature, even to this day!" On August 5, 1967, he killed a classmate named Wang Yanhong with a stick in a fight. On December 14 of that year, just as Wang Jiyu was about to return to Beijing to surrender himself, he was arrested. After being detained in Haikou Prison for nearly half a month, he was brought back to Beijing and detained in Beijing Banbuqiao Prison for more than nine months.
We have no way of knowing the legal basis for detaining Wang Jiyu for nearly 10 months. According to him, while he was personally responsible for killing people, he was "a victim of a political struggle" because he was imprisoned "without any trial" and many others who killed people were not caught. During the trial of "coercion" in a country under the rule of law, there must be strict regulations on coercion, and the "environmental cause" (actusreus) of the negligent act must be proved and the "mensrea" of the negligence must be excluded. The so-called exclusion of "criminal intent" means that its existence cannot be proved, which is the principle of innocence. In the Frankfurt trial, the "environmental cause" was fairly clear, that the lower-level Nazis acted on orders from their superiors, but the absence of a personal "criminal intent" did not equal innocence, as a coerced defense was actually a plea of guilt . It does not deny the fact of the crime, but only demands that the punishment of the crime be mitigated. In the criminal legal investigation of homicide and wounding, what is the motive of the suspect for committing the crime is not within the scope of considering whether he is guilty or not. However, it is possible to reduce the sentence when a "last resort" motivational reason is established. Therefore, it can be said that beating, torturing, and murdering people during the "Cultural Revolution" are all sinful, and the "environmental reasons" only concern the degree of culpability of their perpetrators, and cannot completely exonerate them. For coercion to be a reason for mitigating crimes, it must be able to prove two points. First, the external pressure really overwhelmed the actor’s own will (“I” really can’t do anything about it); second, the pressure is really big enough to overwhelm The will of ordinary people of ordinary courage (there is no way for "all of us"). Even so, whether, or to what extent, the use of coercion as a mitigating ground is a matter of policy. Some can ignore the coercive factor (for example, political revenge against KMT personnel after liberation is like this), and some can think that although people's courage is high and low, in some cases, anyone may. Coercion to do evil or evil, this weak feature of human nature should be taken into account by the law. The Frankfurt trial adopted the latter policy.
The Controversy and Historical Significance of the Trial of "Ordinary Nazis"
The significance of the Auschwitz trial is controversial, and there are two different views, one is that it gave many Germans who actually participated in the crimes of the Nazis an excuse to "get off" and therefore was a "failure" . The other is to see its educational effect on the German populace and affirm its "success" in that sense. There is some truth to both views, and they both have to do with how the media reported the event.
Ball, an exponent of defeatism, was critical of how the media reported the Frankfurt trial. He argues that media reports portray convicted murderers as deranged thugs, as if the crimes at Auschwitz were the work of a few gangsters with a particularly wicked heart, different from ordinary Germans. He believes that simply treating all obedience orders to kill as coercive killings, and assuming that orders should be obeyed and executed, wouldn’t that be tantamount to assuming that these orders themselves are reasonable and legal?
Ball wrote that the way the media reported the trial fostered a "self-delusional idea" that "only a few people were responsible for the tragic deaths of millions of Jews ... while everyone else involved was simply out of fear." , or forced to do things completely contrary to their natural nature.” Martin Walser, a German writer who participated in the Frankfurt trial in person, also wrote in a newspaper article that the more the news reports portrayed the criminals as green-faced and heinous, "the more we and Oswi are intensified. We have nothing to do with these events, these atrocities that were not committed by humans.” Such reports gave a false peace of mind to the German public, "who took satisfaction from the conviction of the SS guards, felt that they had cut ties with them, and that the matter was settled, even if it could be passed." .
Bauer also believes that the judges at the Frankfurt trial were also responsible for the failure of the trial. The judge's sentence on the criminal sounds as if Germany during the Nazi era was a country occupied by a foreign country, and most Germans had no choice but to obey the orders of the occupiers, "which is inconsistent with historical facts. Germany's Those fanatical statists, anti-Semites, and Jewish haters, without whom Hitler's rule would be unthinkable." Bauer has always reminded the German people not to shy away from their share in the Nazi crimes. The Germans during the Nazi era were not ruled by foreigners, their rulers were the wise men they were fascinated by. leader Hitler.
Although the Frankfurt trial was not perfect, on the whole it was instructive for Germans to reflect on the "sins" of World War II and the moral responsibilities of ordinary people, which the German philosopher Jaspers once called "Germany" Many details of the sin" were vividly and shockingly brought to light by the Frankfurt trial. For ordinary people, the power of details is far more than philosophical reasoning. Prosecutors and judges reviewed more than 4,000 documents and mobilized 359 witnesses from 19 countries to testify, including 211 Holocaust survivors. The two-month-long trial drew widespread attention in the West German media. More than 20,000 people attended the trial, many of them primary and secondary school students. The trial educated an entire generation, and it positively contributed to the reflection on the Nazi past of the radical young generation in Germany from the late 1960s to the 1970s (known as the "Generation 68", 68er-Bewegung). The 1980s had an impact on the historical research (Alltagsgeschichte) of "everyday life" during the Nazi period, and this historical research itself once again aroused a lot of thinking and debate about the social environment and personal responsibility of the Nazi period.
From the outset, the Frankfurt Trials had a public education purpose of helping the German public remember the Holocaust. It avoids magnification in the prosecution, which is consistent with this purpose. Even in the process of prosecuting a limited number of criminals, its purpose is not only to convict a few criminals, but also to make the trial process public to the greatest extent possible, so that the public at home and abroad can fully understand the big How the carnage happened and how the Germans should face the not so long ago. This kind of trial is not a campaign, and it is completely different from the mass imprisonment and execution that we are familiar with before setting a percentage and then "digging out the hidden enemy" as if the task was completed.
As early as the 1943 talks between the United States, Britain and Tehran, the heads of the three countries discussed how to deal with Nazi criminals and whether to execute Germans on a large scale. Stalin proposed the execution of 50,000 to 100,000 German officers. Roosevelt jokingly said to Stalin, forty-nine thousand is enough? Thinking they were serious, Churchill said unhappily, "This is a cold-blooded slaughter of soldiers who fought for their country." However, he agreed to try the war criminals, as agreed in the 1943 Moscow Declaration. Still, Churchill strongly opposed any "execution for political purposes". The Auschwitz trials, in Poland, Germany or elsewhere, were for crimes against humanity and war, not political reprisals. Political revenge itself is unjust. It is carried out in the judicial process and can only completely destroy the rule of law. This is also the historical lesson we have learned from the judgment and suppression of some so-called "land-rich anti-bad right" elements and class enemies. The Frankfurt trial is different from the political revenge of the massacre, which can provide experience and precedent for similar culpability in the future.
The significance of the Frankfurt trial is that it was an organic part of the complete reckoning of Hitler and the Nazis. It pursues lower- and middle-level caretakers who have committed crimes in Auschwitz and is a follow-up to the first Auschwitz trial in Poland more than five years ago. The first Auschwitz trial, which was held against senior officers of Auschwitz, was a follow-up to the Nuremberg trials. However, even the most senior Nazi leaders were not prosecuted at the Nuremberg Tribunal, because Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Goering committed suicide before the Nuremberg trials. After the war, the reckoning of the crimes of the Nazis was top-down, with clear stages, and each stage of the trial traced back the main source of the crimes to Hitler, the supreme leader of the Nazis. This overall guilt settlement therefore has a high degree of credibility. Just imagine what it would have been like if the Nuremberg Tribunal tried high-ranking Nazi officials with some reserved affirmation of Hitler himself. Think again, if in Poland or Germany, while adjudicating officers at all levels in Auschwitz, while affirming the "historical merits" of Hitler and the Nazi party, and maintaining the "historical status" and "prestige" of him and the party, What would that be like? Even more, if Hitler's flag doesn't fall, how can it be avoided that the trial of the Nazis is not either avoided or pretended to go through the motions, or simply impossible because of ideological restrictions?
History is not imagined or assumed, but people can't help but make various assumptions about history, or imagine different possibilities for major events in history. Such assumptions or assumptions are not intended to change the occurrence of history, but to obtain such an understanding of history: the occurrence of history does not have any inherently invariable logic or rule, and it is the result of different people under different systems made a different history.
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