The Sobibor trial was a 1965–66 judicial trial in the West German prosecution of SS officers who had worked at

Sobibor extermination camp Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As an ...

; it was held in Hagen. It was one of a series of similar war crime trials held during the early and mid-1960s, such as the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by Israel in

Jerusalem Jerusalem (; he, יְרוּשָׁלַיִם ; ar, القُدس ) (combining the Biblical and common usage Arabic names); grc, Ἱερουσαλήμ/Ἰεροσόλυμα, Hierousalḗm/Hierosóluma; hy, Երուսաղեմ, Erusałēm. i ...

, and the

Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as ''der Auschwitz-Prozess'', or ''der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess,'' (the "second Auschwitz trial") was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants unde ...

of 1963–65, also held in West Germany. These trials heightened general public and international understanding of the extent of the crimes that had been perpetrated in

occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...

some twenty years earlier by Nazi bureaucrats and persons acting as their executioners. The Soviet Union conducted trials in the 1960s of former

Trawniki men Trawniki is a village in Świdnik County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the present-day gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Trawniki. It lies approximately south-east of Świdnik and south-east of the regio ...

, mostly Ukrainian Soviet

POWs A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610. Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...

who had trained for the Nazis and worked at Sobibor. Most were convicted and executed. In these and subsequent years, separate trials prosecuted personnel of the Belzec (1963–65),

Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...

(1964–65), and

Majdanek Majdanek (or Lublin) was a Nazi concentration and extermination camp built and operated by the SS on the outskirts of the city of Lublin during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. It had seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, a ...

(1975–81)

extermination camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...

s, all of which had been located in Poland.

West German investigation

Investigator Dietrich Zeug from Ludvigsburg, in charge of preparing the documents to be put before the court at the Sobibor trial, studied old files related to other trials. He stumbled upon evidence related to numerous individuals who had never before been investigated. Some key '' SS'' officers who had served at Sobibor had been tried more than a decade earlier on other charges, such as '' SS-Oberscharführer'' Hubert Gomerski. He was acquitted in the euthanasia trials of 1947, which prosecuted persons known to have been involved in

Action T4 (German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of t ...

. Gomerski was convicted and sentenced in 1950, and was imprisoned at

Butzbach Butzbach () is a town in the Wetteraukreis district in Hessen, Germany. It is located approximately 16 km south of Gießen and 35 km north of Frankfurt am Main. In 2007, the town hosted the 47th Hessentag state festival from 1 to 10 June ...

.ARC (24 January 2006)
Sobibor Trials
''Aktion Reinhard Camps.'' Zeug asked authorities for help, and by spring 1960 had identified three dozen men directly involved in

(the killing of mentally and physically disabled persons in Germany) and in Operation Reinhard. He also contacted the

World Jewish Congress The World Jewish Congress (WJC) was founded in Geneva, Switzerland in August 1936 as an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations. According to its mission statement, the World Jewish Congress' main purpose is to act as ...

and

Yad Vashem Yad Vashem ( he, יָד וַשֵׁם; literally, "a memorial and a name") is Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; honoring Jews who fought against th ...

in the following months. On 23 June 1960 he filed his first letter of recommendations for prosecution at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations, requiring judicial action against 19 suspects.Michael Bryant (2014),
Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966
' Chapter: The Hunt for Witnesses, pp.36–132 University of Tennessee Press. .Michael Bryant
"West German Prosecution of Operation Reinhard Crimes, 1958–1966"
(PDF file, direct download), pp. 6–21/49. ''Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review'', 339 (2012). Ludwigsburg officials learned for the first time in August 1960 about the whereabouts of some of the suspects, several of whom were living in Germany.

Kurt Bolender Heinz Kurt Bolender (21 May 1912 – 10 October 1966) was an SS sergeant during the Nazi era. In 1942, he operated the gas chambers at Sobibór extermination camp, perpetrating acts of genocide against Jews and Romani people during Operati ...

lived under a false name in

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and was identified in 1961.

Karl Frenzel Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel
(20 August 1911 – 2 September 1996) was an Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the capital of the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, the population was 118,911. General information The ori ...

. Heinrich Unverhau was arrested along with Franz Wolf no earlier than in March 1964. Meanwhile, Israel identified twenty-two Sobibór survivors living in that country. By consulting with them, investigators increased their list of suspected Sobibór personnel to one hundred names.Bryant (2014), p. 140. At this point the Federal Republic had determined that Zeug's reports were politically sensitive and classified them as secret.

The trial

The German court in Hagen initiated proceedings on 6 September 1965 against twelve former members of the ''SS'' camp personnel, accusing them of crimes against humanity. (They constituted about a quarter of the '' SS'' men employed at Sobibór; twelve SS men had been killed in the October 1943 uprising by prisoners, which precipitated closure and destruction of the camp by the end of the year.) The verdicts were pronounced on 20 December 1966.Sobibor - The Forgotten Revolt: Murderers.
2014 Thomas T. Blatt.Chris Webb, Carmelo Lisciotto, Victor Smart (2009)

, H.E.A.R.T. - Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. ''See:'' Sobibor Trial. Important testimony was provided by German historian, Professor Wolfgang Scheffler, as well as Dutch historian and Holocaust survivor

Jules Schelvis Jules Schelvis (7 January 1921 – 3 April 2016) was a Dutch Jewish historian, writer, printer, and Holocaust survivor. Schelvis was the sole survivor among the 3,005 people on the 14th transport from Westerbork to Sobibor extermination camp, ha ...

, among others.

Proceedings

In the 1965–66 trial, the defendants claimed that once assigned to serve at a death camp, they did not believe they could refuse their orders, citing the statement made by

Christian Wirth ), Christian the CruelZenter, Christian and Bedürftig, Friedemann (1991). ''Encyclopedia of the Third Reich'' (pg. 1053), New York: Macmillan; , allegiance = , branch = Schutzstaffel , serviceyears = , rank = Sturmbannführer (Major) , ...

to the personnel at Sobibor (quote): "If you do not like it here, you can leave, but under the earth, not over it." But the prosecution noted that ''SS-Untersturmführer'' Johann Klier, who asked to be transferred from Sobibór on moral grounds, was not punished but allowed to leave, which proved that the contrary was true.

Verdicts

By the time of this trial, some of the public had learned about ''SS-Oberscharführer''

Erich Bauer Erich Bauer (26 March 1900 – 4 February 1980), sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operati ...

, an officer who was known as the gas chamber "meister" and was described by survivors as notoriously cruel and violent in his treatment of prisoners. He had been tried and convicted 15 years earlier, after being recognised in 1949 on the streets of Berlin by Sobibor escapee and survivor Samuel Lerer and was later apprehended. On 8 May 1950 Bauer was sentenced to death by a District Court in

Berlin-Moabit Moabit () is an inner city locality in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany. As of 2016, around 77,000 people lived in Moabit. First inhabited in 1685 and incorporated into Berlin in 1861, the former industrial and working-class neighbourhood ...

. This was commuted to life in prison, as West Germany had abolished capital punishment. Bauer died in

Tegel Prison Tegel Prison is a penal facility in the borough of Reinickendorf in the north of the German state of Berlin. The prison is one of the Germany's largest prisons. Structure and numbers Tegel Prison is a closed prison. It is currently divided into ...

in Berlin in 1980.

Soviet Union trials of the 1960s

Some of the Ukrainian guards who served at Sobibór were prosecuted in Kiev, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. (They had been Soviet POWs held by the Germans, who were known as

if they agreed to train and serve as police and guards.) Defendants included B. Bielakow, M. Matwijenko, I. Nikifor, W. Podienko, F. Tichonowski, Emanuel Schultz, and J. Zajcew. They were convicted of treason against the state for having agreed to serve the Nazis, found guilty of war-crimes, and executed. In April 1963, another trial was held, in Kiev, in which survivor

Alexander Pechersky Alexander 'Sasha' Pechersky (russian: Алекса́ндр Аро́нович Пече́рский; 22 February 1909 – 19 January 1990) was one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Naz ...

was the chief prosecution witness. Ten former Trawniki from Ukraine were found guilty and sentenced to death; all were executed. Another was sentenced to 15 years in prison. A third Soviet trial was held in Kiev in June 1965. Three former Trawniki men from Sobibór and Belzec were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed by a firing squad.

References