History of the prosecution of perpetrators in Bergen-Belsen
The first Belsen Trial, which was held before a British military tribunal in Lüneburg in the autumn of 1945, attracted the most public attention. Since many of the defendants had worked at the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp before being posted to Bergen-Belsen, the tribunal decided to additionally charge them with the crimes that had been committed there.
Denazification proceedings were instituted against former members of the staff at Bergen-Belsen between 1947 and 1949. However, only a single trial concerning crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen was ever held in a German court.
The crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers against the Soviet POWs in Bergen-Belsen, Fallingbostel, Wietzendorf, and Oerbke were never prosecuted by the German judiciary. Two preliminary proceedings were instituted against former members of the Hamburg Gestapo for their participation in the ‘selection’ of POWs to be murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but these investigations were discontinued in 1970 and 1971.
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Immediately after the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated, British military authorities began to investigate the crimes that had been committed there. Between 17 September and 17 November 1945, a total of 44 men and women were tried by a British military tribunal in Lüneburg.
The defendants were the former camp commandant, Josef Kramer, along with sixteen other SS men, sixteen female SS supervisors, and 11 former prisoner functionaries. They were tried according to British military criminal law, and they were charged only with war crimes. By contrast, the major war criminals who were tried before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946 were also charged with crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
Well over one hundred German and international journalists reported extensively on the trial in Lüneburg. They informed the public not only of the mass deaths that had occurred in Bergen-Belsen, but also of the gassings in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Witnesses were questioned intensively over the course of two months. The judges finally sentenced eleven of the defendants to death, including the former commandant Josef Kramer, the head female guard Elisabeth Volkenrath, and the last camp physician Fritz Klein. They were executed on 13 December 1945 in Hamelin Prison.
Fourteen of the defendants were acquitted. The others received prison sentences of betweeen one and fifteen years, but most of these sentences were substantially reduced following appeals and pardons. Nine other members of the Bergen-Belsen camp personnel faced two subsequent military tribunals in 1946 and 1948.
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Denazification courts were set up on the initiative of the Allies to pass judgement on individuals who had been members of the Gestapo, the SS, or other criminal organizations. Between 1947 and 1949, denazification proceedings were instituted against at least 46 former members of the guard squads and headquarters staff of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Nearly half of these proceedings were discontinued. In sixteen cases, the defendants were sentenced to between 120 days and 30 months in prison, or they were fined. In each of theses cases, however, the defendants were immediately released because the judges declared that they had fully served their prison terms during their previous internment by the Allies, which had often lasted for several years.
The German judiciary held only a single trial concerning crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen. The trial was held before the Jena district court in 1949 and ended with the acquittal of the defendant, a former SS-Unterscharführer. No other trials relating to Bergen-Belsen were ever held in either West or East Germany. The few investigations launched by the Lüneburg public prosecutor’s office were eventually discontinued.
More than 200 SS members who were posted to Bergen-Belsen are known by name and never had to stand trial.