Liberation Day: Remembering Auschwitz – Double Witness

May 8th is the day on which the liberation from the Nazi regime is commemorated in Germany and some other European countries. However, coming to terms with National Socialism was slow after 1945. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial from 1963 to 1965 was a milestone. The exhibition “‘I want to talk about the truth that was there.” The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963–1965″, which ran until the end of April, was concerned with this event Frankfurt could be seen.

According to estimates, between 200,000 and 500,000 Germans were involved in the systematic persecution and extermination of European Jews, according to the exhibition. If you add up the verdicts in the GDR and the Federal Republic, only 9,000 people from the group of those involved in the Shoah were brought to the German criminal justice system: “That corresponds to a conviction rate of 3.6 percent.” Even of the 7,200 SS members, who worked in Auschwitz and destroyed 1.1 to 1.5 million human lives between 1941 and 1945, only 61 people were brought to trial in Germany and around 670 in Poland. Most of the sentences – especially in the Federal Republic – were lenient.

The exhibition was curated by a collective consisting of Florine Miez, Maximilian Steinborn, Alexander Toumanides, Anne Uhl and Anna Wolfinger. The starting point for the exhibition was a letter from the German-Jewish lawyer Henry Ormond from January 1963. As a co-plaintiff in the trial, Ormond advocated for the interests and legal rights of 15 Nazi victims or their relatives and took part in the investigation. In a letter to his Polish colleague Jan Sehn, he informed him about the status of the investigation into the Auschwitz trial.

An anti-fascist prosecutor

About Fritz Bauer, at the time the Hessian public prosecutor and the leading force in the criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes in Germany after 1945, Ormond writes that Bauer would have no objection if the material, which was not suitable for the trial itself, was in an exhibition, “preferably in the student house “the university” would be used. The student group has now fulfilled Fritz Bauer’s traditional wish on the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Auschwitz trial.

While there was no systematic criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes until the end of the 1950s, it was Fritz Bauer, who returned to Germany in 1949, who in April 1959 ensured that the Frankfurt Regional Court was given jurisdiction for all crimes committed in Auschwitz. “Bauer’s goal,” the exhibition says, was “a criminal trial that makes the dimension of this crime visible.”

The investigation by the Hessian public prosecutor’s office lasted four years. Bauer’s team searched for survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp around the world – including through calls in newspapers and on the radio. 1,500 people were identified in this way. In April 1963, prosecutors presented a 683-page indictment. It was clear to the prosecutors: the mass murder was organized on a factory basis, and extermination was the primary goal of the events in and around the Auschwitz camp system. Curator Miez also emphasizes that “from the beginning of the investigation, the focus was on the Auschwitz complex.” Bauer’s team wanted to gain information about the systematic connection between the crimes, she explains.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial finally began on December 20, 1963, in which 22 defendants had to answer for their involvement in the murders in the extermination camp. “It is the largest Nazi criminal trial in the post-war history of the Federal Republic,” says curator Uhl. During the trial, 211 survivors of the extermination camp traveled to Frankfurt to testify as witnesses. Among them was Imrich Gönczi, who gave the quote in the title of the exhibition: “I want to talk about the truth that was there.”

Ambiguous experiences

“At the center of the exhibition,” explains Miez, “we wanted to put the experiences and perspectives of the camp survivors, i.e. those people who found the strength to come to Frankfurt between 1963 and 1965, mostly from Eastern European countries, the USA and Israel come to tell their story and speak the truth about Auschwitz.” For example, the exhibition shows how the Auschwitz survivor Willi Kormes processed his experiences of being interrogated by the criminal justice system in lyrical form: “Is there little to do with my statement? Oh, if only I hadn’t gone to this interrogation!! The fact that I was tattooed like a piece of cattle – didn’t that embarrass you, Mr. Public Prosecutor?” A few lines later the open question: “… and that my body is covered with scars from blows and blows that are a reminder of Auschwitz?”

“The poem shows how the survivors were treated in Frankfurt,” says Miez. »Many of the survivors were ambivalent about the possibility of testifying in court. During the interrogations, there were repeated tensions and misunderstandings between witnesses and, in particular, the defense.” At the time, the crimes often occurred more than 20 years ago. The survivors, understandably, had, as they explained, gaps in their memory. These gaps in memory were cleverly used by the defense to raise doubts about the credibility of the witnesses.

The exhibition also shows what the plenary hall of the community center in the Gallus district of Frankfurt looked like in the 1960s. The survivors who testified as witnesses had to cross the entire hall to sit on a chair. To their left were the defendants and their defense, and in front of them on a stage were the judges and jurors. “That was a big hurdle for many witnesses,” explains Uhl. “Sitting there, they then had to publicly share their memories of traumatic atrocities and abuse. Some witness statements had to be interrupted because the survivors could not continue speaking. Emotional expressions were later classified by the court as unreliable. “This devalued the truth experienced by those people.”

Other witnesses were similarly critical during the trial, as was survivor Willi Kormes. Stanisław Kamiński, a Polish journalist and political prisoner interned in Auschwitz from 1941 to 1944, responded to attempts to question him about details he could not possibly know by saying: “I insist that it is the truth, what I said.”

“Few of the witnesses still lived in Germany at the time,” says Uhl. »There were always problems with understanding due to language barriers. The court often failed to provide interpreters. Many also had reservations and fears about testifying before a German court. And just hearing the German language was retraumatizing for many.” There were also witnesses like the archivist Anna Palarczyk who refused to testify in German.

Different reviews

After 181 days of trial, the Frankfurt jury read out the verdict on August 19th and 20th, 1965. Of the initial 22 defendants, 17 were sentenced to prison for murder or accessory to murder, three defendants were acquitted due to “lack of evidence,” and two others dropped out of the trial due to illness. “The court assessed the defendants’ actions as individually intentional and verifiable individual acts; the social dimension of the crimes in Auschwitz was therefore not taken into account,” reports Miez. »The process was not in vain. The surviving prisoners from before have brought the truth to light,” said survivor Karl Lill after the end of the Auschwitz trial. Fritz Bauer himself drew a more negative conclusion: “The punishments that were handed out were often at the minimum limit of what was legally permissible, which sometimes came close to mocking the victims.”

“You can come to different conclusions,” says Miez, assessing the statements. “Some argued at the time that in the climate of organized forgetting, the very fact that the Auschwitz trial had taken place was a success.” These voices also emphasized that the trial preparations had created an archive for research into the crimes, whose importance for posterity cannot be overestimated – the current exhibition was also based on it. Miez further explains: »Bauer wanted to fight against the “tide of comfortable forgetting” that prevailed in post-war Germany. The Auschwitz trial was an attempt to contain this forgetting and to confront Germans with their past. The exhibition aims to commemorate this.«