On March 18, 1946, the first trial against those responsible for the Neuengamme concentration camp before a British military court begins in Hamburg's Curiohaus. The accused show no remorse
by Irene Altenmüller
In the so-called Curiohaus trial, 14 senior SS men are accused, including the last commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp, Max Pauly. They are accused of killing and ill-treating inmates, gassing Soviet prisoners of war and "extermination through work". Among the accused are several SS men who were involved in the murder of 20 children at the Bullenhuser Damm school in the Rothenburgsort district of Hamburg.
In prosecuting Nazi crimes, the British limited themselves to crimes committed against nationals of the Allied nations. At the end of December 1945, the British transferred the prosecution of crimes against Germans to the German courts.
Death lists hidden in the floorboards
Unlike the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, for example, when the British encountered mountains of corpses and masses of emaciated prisoners, they found the Neuengamme concentration camp empty. Before the SS left the camp in April 1945, they had destroyed almost all written documents in order to remove traces of the crimes. However, a prisoner clerk managed to take the last quarterly report and a death register and hide it under the floorboards in the infirmary. These notes are now the only written evidence available to British investigators at the trial.
The most important source of information for the investigators are the former prisoners. They report on the crimes in Neuengamme, identify the perpetrators and testify as witnesses.
survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp testify
The Curiohaus on Hamburg's Rothenbaumchaussee served the British as a courtroom.18 former prisoners appeared as witnesses in the trial. They describe the inhuman conditions in the camp and barbaric punishments such as whipping or the hanging of prisoners by their arms, which are tied behind their backs. They were imposed, for example, "when a prisoner washed his handkerchief during mealtime and hung it up to dry at work in the afternoon," reports the witness Albin Lüdke, who was imprisoned in Neuengamme concentration camp as a communist from June 1940.
"Let prisoners die slowly"
Prisoners in the Neuengamme concentration camp. Those who had to work in the penal company had the lowest chances of survival.The subject of the negotiations is in particular the National Socialist strategy of "annihilation through work":"It was a system not only to beat the prisoners, but to let them die slowly. Everything in the camp was organized with the aim of keeping the prisoners as far away as possible possible to leach out," explains the French anatomy professor Marcel Prenant, who came to Neuengamme in June 1944, in his testimony. The British headmaster and former prisoner Harold Le Druillenec reports something similar:"After two or three months it was perfectly clear to us that the main aim of a concentration camp was the death of the prisoners, but only after doing enough work or at least trying to get as much work as possible received from the prisoners shortly before they died. Or, to put it very briefly:death through work."
No remorse from the accused
The accused are marked with numbers for better identification by witnesses. Their lawyers sit in the row in front of them.There is no sign of remorse from the accused until the end of the trial. All plead "not guilty" at the beginning of the trial. As far as they understood, they were only acting on orders and within the framework of the applicable law. At the same time, they deny knowing about crimes, downplay the situation or claim that they tried to do what was best for the prisoners under the given circumstances.
The cynicism of the perpetrators
SS man Walter Kümmel testified in court that he had beaten the inmates out of caring motives:"Some inmates exchanged their bread rations for cigarettes, and since they had so little bread and I wanted to protect them from illness, I sometimes hit them. If I had reported it they would have gone to the penal company and I could not be responsible for subjecting these poor starving people to such severe punishment." The statement by camp commander Max Pauly, on the other hand, speaks above all of pride in his own work:"In my opinion, Neuengamme was one of the best organized and managed concentration camps. Neuengamme was number 1".
The Royal Warrant - crucial for punishing the perpetrators
It is not always possible to prove that a specific crime was committed by an individual Nazi perpetrator during the trial. In order to take this special problem of evidence into account, the British stipulated in the so-called Royal Warrant as early as June 1945 that individual members of a fixed group who can be proven to have committed a crime can also be held jointly responsible for this crime - even if they were not present at the act itself. This means that participation in the concentration camp system is already a punishable offence. This was not possible in German criminal law.
Eleven death sentences, three prison terms
On May 3, 1946, after 39 days of hearings, the British military court announced the verdicts against the 14 accused. The British military court sentenced eleven of them to death, including Max Pauly. They were executed in Hamelin prison on October 8, 1946. The other three convicts - including Walter Kümmel - receive prison sentences. The burial ground in Hamelin, where the perpetrators from Neuengamme and other Nazi criminals are buried, has developed into a place of pilgrimage for old and neo-Nazis over the decades. It was not leveled until 1986.
"You didn't want to hear that"
To this day, the Curiohaus trial is not only of great importance for the legal investigation of the crimes committed in the Neuengamme concentration camp. In 1946, these crimes were publicly named for the first time. But for the most part, there were no horrified reactions. "People didn't want to hear that. The Germans were a Nazi society - and now they were accused of being morally reprehensible. They couldn't reconcile that with their self-image," says Reimer Möller, a historian at the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial 2011 in an interview with "taz".
Most of the perpetrators get away with it
After this Curiohaus trial, a number of other trials related to the Neuengamme concentration camp take place. By 1948, the British had indicted 109 members of the SS, including 19 women, who had worked as guards in the camps. In the decades that followed, the Federal Republic and the GDR launched a total of only 142 investigations - a negligibly small number in view of the number of around 4,500 SS men who worked in the Neuengamme concentration camp and its satellite camps. Most of the proceedings are discontinued. For example, perpetrators such as Arnold Strippel, who was demonstrably involved in the murder of the children from Bullenhuser Damm, escaped unmolested.