The death march guards were among the most difficult perpetrators to prosecute after the war. They were not senior figures. Many were not career SS but had been assigned to camp duty from other branches of the Wehrmacht late in the war. Their crimes had been committed along hundreds of kilometres of open road, often in front of local civilian witnesses, but in circumstances where the identities of individual guards were hard to establish and survivors were scattered across several countries. Prosecution was uneven and the sentences obtained were, in many cases, far short of what the evidence warranted.
The Allied military trials, 1945 to 1948
The first prosecutions came from Allied military courts in the immediate postwar years. The Bergen-Belsen Trial, held by the British Military Court at Lüneburg from 17 September to 17 November 1945, was the most significant early proceeding relating to the marches. Forty-five defendants were tried; thirty were convicted. Eleven were sentenced to death, including the camp commandant Josef Kramer, the women guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath, and others responsible for conditions in the camp and on the marches that had brought prisoners to it. The eleven were hanged at Hameln Prison on 13 December 1945.
American military courts at Dachau tried cases relating to the Dachau march and to the Mauthausen and Flossenbürg evacuations. Several hundred defendants were tried in these proceedings. Death sentences were passed in a significant number of cases, though many were subsequently commuted during the Cold War years when West German political pressure and changing American priorities led to a systematic review of sentences.
German prosecutions
West German prosecution of death march perpetrators was slow and limited. The Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, established at Ludwigsburg in 1958, undertook systematic investigation of death march cases among others, but the standard of proof required by German criminal courts, and the difficulty of establishing individual responsibility for killings carried out along dispersed routes over several months, meant that many cases were closed without prosecution.
Some significant convictions were obtained. Guards responsible for specific documented massacres were prosecuted when survivor and civilian witness testimony was sufficient. But the general picture was of partial accountability: those who had given the orders were more likely to face trial than those who had carried out the killings on the road, partly because the former were more identifiable and partly because military hierarchy provided an easier framework for establishing criminal responsibility.
The Gardelegen case
The Gardelegen massacre of 13 April 1945, in which approximately 1,016 prisoners were burned alive in a barn, was investigated by American authorities immediately after liberation. The local SS commander responsible was never captured. Several lower-ranking perpetrators were tried. The American occupation authorities required the local civilian population of Gardelegen to bury the victims with full military honours, a form of collective witness to the crime that was also a public confrontation with local responsibility.
Sources
- Daniel Blatman, The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide, Harvard University Press, 2011
- Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory, Oxford University Press, 2001
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Little, Brown, 2015
- Raymond Phillips (ed.), Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial), William Hodge, 1949
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Gardelegen, encyclopedia.ushmm.org