Belzec Trial

Belzec trial

The 1st Munich District Court (Landgericht München I). Trial location, 2012 photo.

The Belzec trial (German: Belzec-Prozess, Polish: proces Bełżec) in the mid-1960s was a war crimes trial of eight former SS members of Bełżec extermination camp. The trial was held at the 1st Munich District Court (Landgericht München I) and should be seen in the context of the Sobibor trial, which followed the Belzec trial, because five of the defendants were accused in both trials. In addition, the Belzec and Sobibor trials, along with the Treblinka trials, form a body of evidence of the crimes of mass extermination as part of the so-called Action Reinhardt programme - the killing of over two million Jews and 50,000 Roma and Sinti. These trials are directly related to the mass murder of 100,000 people in the official Nazi Euthanasia programme known after the war as Action T4, as many of the security guards worked in the euthanasia centres before transferring to the extermination camps. The first Euthanasia trials were carried out shortly after the war.

The legal case against the eight accused men, scarcely noticed by the public, was heard by the Munich District Court between 8 August 1963 and 21 January 1965. On 30 January the decision was made by the District Court not to hold a full trial of seven of the defendants because at the time of the crime they would have been adjudged to have found themselves under a putative (claimed) threat from the Nazi authorities (Putativnotstand). Amongst the seven defendants were five of the accused who later appeared in the Sobibor trial: Dubois, Fuchs, Jührs, Unverhau and Zierke. An appeal by the prosecution to put on trial all the defendants was rejected by the High Court in Munich, and all seven were set free.

In the trial that began on 18 January 1965 and ended on 21 January, the only defendant was Josef Oberhauser. A total of 14 witnesses were heard, including Professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who with Kurt Gerstein in August 1942 witnessed the gassing of Jewish victims at Belzec; Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder, who could neither name nor describe the defendant, and the accused - Dubois, Unverhau, Schluch, Zierke, Gley and Fuchs, against whom no proceedings were opened - and a former member of the camp staff at Belzec, Hans Gierzig, who was unfit to attend the trial due to illness. Oberhauser, who did not comment on the case, pleaded that he was acting under superior orders, as did the other defendants in the Belzec trial, and also drew attention to the gaol sentence he already served out in the GDR. After consultation with the Attorney General of the GDR, however, it was ascertained that Oberhauser had only served a portion (eight years) of his fifteen-year prison sentence in the GDR and that he had not been convicted in Magdeburg of his role at Belzec extermination camp, but for his involvement in the Action T4 euthanasia programme. The court did not agree his defence that he was under a putative threat, because Oberhauser, as the adjutant for Christian Wirth (Camp Commandant of Belzec), must have had a good relationship with him. His subsequent lenient sentence by the Munich District Court took account of the more rigorous conditions in the prisons of the GDR and the potential maximum sentence of 15 years, if the two crimes (Belzec and Action 4) had been handled together in a single judicial process. An appeal to the Federal Court confirmed the sentence against Oberhauser.