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 ( ; ) 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 Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), ...

; it was held in

Hagen Hagen () is a city in the States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany, on the southeastern edge of the Ruhr area, 15 km south of Dortmund, where the rivers Lenne and Volme meet the Ruhr (river), Ruhr. In 2023, the ...

. It was one of a series of similar

war crime A war crime is a violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility for actions by combatants in action, such as intentionally killing civilians or intentionally killing prisoners of war, torture, taking hostage ...

trials held during the early and mid-1960s, such as the 1961 trial of

Adolf Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ;"Eichmann"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ; 19 March 1906 – 1 Ju ...

by Israel in

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

, and the

Frankfurt Auschwitz trials The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German language, German as , was a series of three trials running from 20 December 1963 to 14 June 1968, charging 25 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower- ...

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

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 During World War II, Trawniki men (; ) were Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from Prisoner of war, prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Red Army, Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the ...

, mostly Ukrainian Soviet

POWs A prisoner of war (POW) is a person 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 war for a ...

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 the second-deadliest extermination camp to be built and operated by Nazi Germany in Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the Treblinka, ...

(1964–65), and Majdanek (1975–81)

extermination camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe, primarily in occupied Poland, during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocau ...

s, all of which had been located in Poland.

West German investigation

Dietrich Zeug of the Ludwigsburg State Archives, 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 Homicide#By state actors, mass murder by involuntary euthanasia which targeted Disability, people with disabilities and the mentally ill in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-WWII, war trials against d ...

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

Yad Vashem Yad Vashem (; ) is Israel's official memorial institution to the victims of Holocaust, the Holocaust known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (). It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered; echoing the stories of the ...

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 lived under a false name in

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

and was identified in 1961. Karl Frenzel was caught in March 1962 in

Göttingen Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...

. 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

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, 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 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, 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. This was commuted to life in prison, as West Germany had abolished capital punishment. Bauer died in Tegel Prison in Berlin in 1980.

Soviet Union trials of the 1960s

Some of the Ukrainian guards who served at Sobibór were prosecuted in

Kiev Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...

, 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 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