Rodrigo Zuleta
Berlin, 16 apr. Sixty years ago today the Frankfurt public prosecutor filed charges against 23 members of the SS and thus laid the foundations for the so-called “Auschwitz trials”, which would be key to Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust.
The statements of the witnesses revealed the dimensions of the horror of the camp, located in occupied Poland, where more than a million people died -mostly Jews- and which has become a symbol of the Holocaust with more than 6 million victims. .
At the end of the process, six of the defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment, three were acquitted. The others were sentenced to various penalties.
The accusation had 700 pages and would be the basis for a process that would take three years to complete and in which 360 witnesses were called to testify, of which 211 were Auschwitz survivors.
The mastermind and promoter of the Auschwitz trials was the then Attorney General of the federal state of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, who had to face a lot of resistance during a time when many Germans still refused to face the crimes of National Socialism.
“When I leave my office I find myself in enemy territory,” Bauer once said in a phrase that has been collected in books, exhibitions and films dedicated to him.
During the Auschwitz trials, and even before, Bauer received anonymous letters that were full of insults, threats and accusations that he was resorting to “typical Jewish lies”.
However, Bauer did not personally appear as a prosecutor in the process, but instead commissioned young prosecutors to do the job.
One of them, Gerdhard Wiese, is still alive. Wiese joined Bauer’s team late and has now maintained, in statements to the newspaper “Jüdische Zeitung”, that at the beginning of the process he had not realized the dimensions that it would have and that before it he did not know much about Auschwitz.
“I naturally knew it was a concentration camp but I didn’t know the details,” Wiese said.
During the work to formulate the accusation, Wiese says he had “a rough picture of what happened at Auschwitz.”
None of the defendants, according to Wiese, denied having been in Auschwitz but all denied their guilt.
Wiese still regrets that the court did not then accept the view of the prosecution, according to which everyone who had been part of the Auschwitz machinery had been at least an accomplice.
The prosecutors, therefore, were forced to prove the direct participation of the defendants in the murders, which they denied or claimed to have only followed orders.
Even Robert Mulka, a direct assistant to Rudolf Höss, the camp commander, claimed not to have known of the existence of the gas chambers.
“That has only changed in the last few years,” Wiese said of the doctrine that everyone who participated in the machine was at least complicit in the killings.
“But a lot of time had passed and the defendants were over 90 years old. Not much could be done. If the change had occurred before there would have been many more processes,” Wiese lamented.
At the time, the sentences generated some disappointment among supporters of starting a confrontation with the Nazi past. However, the trials helped to open a process of reflection and witness statements are key documentation of what happened at Auschwitz.
Part of the interrogations were collected in 1965 by the writer Peter Weiss in a play -“The Inquiry”- that he defined as an oratorio.
The Auschwitz trials were also collected by Bernhardt Schlink in his novel “The Reader” (1995), which was made into a film by Stephen Daldry and starring British actress Kate Winslet, who received an Oscar for her role as a former guard of the Auschwitz camp. extermination.EFE
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