Eyewitness

In the 1950s, the policy of the West German law courts was to limit the number of Germans who could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity during the Nazi era, thereby preserving the old state elites who had been accomplices to the Nazi regime, among them the judiciary, 90% of whom had been Nazi party members. The number of Nazi criminals prosecuted in West Germany dropped throughout the 1950s. The Einsatzgruppen trial at Ulm in 1958 showed that many Nazi criminals held positions in the Federal Republic's administration. An investigation of the Nazi death camps was initiated by the Ludwigsburg Office in 1959. Focuses on three trials against former staff members of three camps: the Bełżec trial held in München in 1963-64; the Treblinka trial held in Düsseldorf in 1964-65; and the Sobibór trial in Hagen in 1964-65. Contends that despite their sometimes doubtful past, the trial judges acted in good faith within the bounds of West German law. The prosecutors based their cases on eyewitness testimonies. The Bełżec trial proved to be a debacle (all of the defendants but one were acquitted), primarily because only one survivor was found to testify. In Treblinka and Sobibór, successful uprisings of prisoners in 1943 helped many of them to survive and later to give evidence at the respective trials; at these trials, most of the defendants were convicted.