Dora trial
In the proceedings, officially known as the United States of America vs. Kurt Andrae et al. (Case 000-50-37), 19 men were accused of war crimes committed in the operation of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, its many subcamps, and the Mittelwerk armaments plant located near Nordhausen, Germany.
Of the more than 60,000 prisoners who passed through the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex, with its catastrophic working and living conditions, at least 20,000 died of hunger, exposure, disease and abuse.
[2] In one infamous example, about 400 prisoners led by Erhard Brauny left the Rottleberode subcamp on 4 April 1945 in a plan to move them to Neuengamme concentration camp, which was still operational.
On September 3, 1946, an exchange of detainees and evidence failed, as no Soviet military representatives appeared at a previously agreed meeting point on the frontier.
[9] Josef Kollmer, the commander of Dora's SS guard battalion from October, 1943 to May, 1944, was executed in Kraków on January 28, 1948, following his conviction by Poland's Supreme National Tribunal in the First Auschwitz Trial.
[10] Helmut Bischoff, SS security chief for the V-weapons program and commander of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) detachment in Mittelbau-Dora, was arrested by Soviet occupation forces in January, 1946 and held in military detention in East Germany, and later Siberia, until 1955.
[13] The indictment, which was served on the defendants on 20 June 1947, consisted of two main charges brought together under the title "Violation of the Customs and Laws of War".
This was a decisive change from other Dachau Trials, because it now covered not only war crimes committed against Allied nationals, but also against stateless persons, Austrians, Slovaks and Italians.
[13][14] All the defendants were charged in a Common Design of unlawfully and intentionally participating in abuses and killings of prisoners of war and non-German civilians.
[16][17] The accused were defended by two American Army officers, Major Leon B. Poullada and Captain Paul D. Strader, and German legal advisers Konrad Max Trimolt, Emil Aheimer, and Louis Renner.
SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Mathesius, who had commanded the subcamp of Boelke Kaserne, was slated to appear as the 20th defendant at trial, but committed suicide while in US custody in May, 1947.
Former camp physician Heinrich Schmidt was accused of medical neglect of inmates, causing them to die of hunger, exposure, and disease.
[13][14] At the request of the prosecution, defendants Albin Sawatzki, Otto Brenneis, Hans Joachim Ritz and Stefan Palko were deleted from the list of the accused.
Berman went on to present evidence submitted at the arraignment of the defendants and placed it in the immediate context of war crimes by identifying specific camp operations targeted at human destruction.
In addition to the living and working conditions in the camp, the prosecution also referred to the death marches as evidence of collective criminality, with the Gardelegen Massacre a primary focus.
[23] The testimony of the witnesses regarding forced labor at the complex were essentially descriptions of working and living conditions during the construction phase of the camp during winter of 1943–1944.
This phase, also known as the "Hell of Dora", was marked by exhausting work in digging tunnels into the Kohnstein Mountain to create a subterranean V-weapons (German: Vergeltungswaffen) rocket factory.
The proof for this war crime was important, as Rickhey – unlike the other defendants – could not be blamed for the catastrophic living conditions in the concentration camps or the execution of the death marches.
Written evidence of Rickhey's guilt was also lacking; only after the end of the trial were documents found showing his culpability in the inhumane working conditions in the Mittelwork.
Rickhey testified on his own behalf and put the entire responsibility for the inhumane conditions and forced labor on the late internment engineer Albin Sawatzki [de], who had died in American detention in 1945.
[29] In closing arguments, prosecutor Berman argued for the death penalty for all defendants, because if a consistent interpretation of Common Design were applied then they were all mass murderers.
[31][32] A review of the verdicts was completed on 23 April 1948 by the Deputy Judge Advocate for War Crimes, which were all confirmed with one exception: regarding the offender Oskar Helbig, the sentence of twenty years in prison was reduced to ten.
The military Governor of the American occupation zone, Lucius D. Clay, confirmed all the judgments according to the recommendations in the review process and pronounced them final on June 25, 1948.
[38] Brinkmann and three men who had been convicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial were the last four inmates to be released from Landsberg Prison at the conclusion of the U.S. War Crimes program.
[39] As measured by the 2,400-strong staff of the Mittelbau-Dora complex, only a small number were actually charged: Only 19 defendants were indicted in the Dora Trial and 5 in the collateral proceedings.
[32] In addition, neither Wernher von Braun nor Arthur Rudolph nor other important representatives of the Mittelwerk GmbH were indicted or required to appear in court to testify.
In the German population, after the first shock of the concentration camp crimes, solidarity emerged with the welfare of the war criminals in Landsberg Prison.
[45] In these proceedings, former camp guard Erwin Busta, Gestapo official Ernst Sander and chief of security for the V-weapons program Helmut Bischoff were tried.
[47] In the spring of 2004, while emptying a container of waste paper, the owner of a recycling company in Kerkrade, Netherlands found an extensive set of documents from the Dora Trials as well as original photographs of the initial liberation of Mittelbau-Dora and its auxiliary camps.
However, it is clear they were from the estate of William Aalmans, the Dutch citizen who served with the U.S. Army in the liberation of Mittelbau-Dora and then worked for the prosecution in the Dora Trial.
