Treblinka Trials Were Almost Perfect

Treblinka trials were almost perfect because the prosecutors got, tried, convicted and secured adequate punishment for all key personnel of the Treblinka killing center. Consequently, the two-part Treblinka trial was a model war crimes trial.

The whole thing started in 1946, when Josef Hirtreiter, an employee of Hadamar Euthanasia Centre (he worked in the kitchen, of all places) was arrested by Allied occupation authorities who were investigating Aktion T4.

There was no proof that Hirtreiter committed any crime at Hadamar (other than being a member of SS – a genuinely criminal organization) but, completely out of the blue, he suddenly confessed to having worked in a camp where Jews were killed in a gas chamber.

Further investigations showed that Hirtreiter had been stationed at the Treblinka killing center (a massively scaled-up reincarnation of Hadamar), where he supervised the victims’ disrobing prior to their gassing.

He was (predictably) charged with being a part of serial mass murder of Jews, and on March 3, 1951 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served 30 years – a rare occurrence in war crimes trials and was released in 1977.

Prior to the foundation of West Germany in 1949, Nazi war crimes were investigated by Allied occupation authorities that governed Germany. After Federal Republic of Germany was established, these responsibilities were transferred to the police authorities of the new state.

However, after the Ulm Einsatzkommando trial in 1958 of Gestapo and SS officers responsible for crimes along the Eastern front at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, German authorities decided that a large number of Nazi crimes that had occurred outside Germany itself had remained uninvestigated.

To remedy this unacceptable situation, the justice ministries of German states formed the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle or just Zentrale) in December 1958.

From July of 1959, Zentrale began investigating Nazi war crimes committed in the General Government territory of occupied Poland. The lead investigator was the specialist in the Nazi prosecution Dietrich Zeug, present at the Eichmann trial.

His inquiry led to the first arrest of Treblinka deputy commandant on December 2, 1959. Zeug received survivor testimonies from Yad Vashem which allowed him to examine German national archives for more clues. He was the first to establish the chain of command for Aktion Reinhard.

The first Treblinka trial began on 12 October 1964. Eleven members of the SS camp personnel, or about a quarter of the total number of SS employed in the serial mass murder of Jews stood trial before D;sseldorf District Court. Unlike in other trials, there was some “big fish”: deputy commander of the killing center and commander of subcamp (where actual killing took place).

The verdicts were pronounced on September 3, 1965. Four out of eleven got life in prison (one died in jail; others served 14, 21 and 28 years – a lot by West German standards); five got from 4 to 12 years (served only a small part of their sentences); one died during the trial and one was acquitted.

But the biggest fish was yet to come: on May 13, 1970 camp commandant Franz Stangl, extradited three years earlier from Brazil, finally stood trial. Stangl had previously assisted in killing handicapped people during Aktion T4, and, before moving on to Treblinka, had been the first commandant of Sobibor. Under his supervision, most of the Treblinka killings took place.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in prison on 28 June 1971, while trying to appeal the verdict.