Strafsache 4 Ks 2/63 - Auschwitz vor dem Frankfurter Schwurgericht (1993) - full transcript
The movie covers the trial, which took almost two years, in a court in Frankfurt of the men who ran Auschwitz. Frankly, many long segments of it are boring. Some are very moving.In covering its subject, the movie also reviews the whole gamut of the 12-year "1,000-year Reich," even the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann.Perhaps because there were no survivors, the film does not cover the abuse of Soviet prisoners of war in Auschwitz, especially the horrible medical experiments that they were subjected to (I recall one from another source in which two Russians were submerged in ice water, either to see how long it would take them to die, or to see whether they could be resuscitated by being placed between two naked women).But the movie concentrates on the murder of Jewish children, while the accused denied all.
[police siren]
[narrator] Frankfurt, 1964.
In these prison vans
are accountants,
businessmen and pharmacists.
They're accused
of many thousands of murders,
committed in Auschwitz
concentration camp.
The biggest trial
in German legal history
is taking place in Frankfurt.
The matter before the court
is the state's genocide
of the European Jews.
Twenty-two Holocaust
perpetrators
have to face their judges.
[birds chirping]
[mysterious music]
[crowd murmuring]
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
a marshy district
on the River Vistula in Poland.
From 1941 on,
a few thousand SS men
implemented a secret German
government project here:
state-ordained mass murder.
They killed more
than a million people.
[train braking and whistling]
Day and night
the German railways
deported European Jews
from the countries occupied
by the Wehrmacht
to the concentration camps
in the east.
Tens of thousands died
even before the journey ended.
And journey's end
was Auschwitz-Birkenau.
SS doctors selected
those Jews capable of working
they were sent to the camp,
the others were gassed
right away.
One SS man took these pictures.
They were submitted
to the court as evidence.
So was this Soviet film footage.
[silence]
The chief state prosecutor
in Hesse,
Fritz Bauer,
had been working
on the Auschwitz case
since the mid-fifties.
He inaugurated a process
that encompassed
the entire complex of crimes.
Bauer,
himself a victim of Nazism,
wanted a German court
to uncover the entire truth
about Auschwitz.
He wanted the Germans
to be aware
of their responsibility
for the genocide.
[silence]
The press conference
before the start of the trial:
The Auschwitz trial
is to show us Germans
in Germany,
but also the world,
that a new Germany,
a new German democracy,
is willing to uphold the dignity
of every human being.
This trial is less
about looking backwards
and more about setting
the tone for the future.
[narrator] The twentieth
of December 1963.
A Christmas market in Frankfurt.
Much was forgotten
eighteen years
after the end of the war.
People looked
after their families,
their careers, their savings.
Few knew
what had actually happened
in Auschwitz.
That was about to change.
A trial was to start
in Frankfurt
that would confront the Germans
with their past.
While the world
was eagerly awaiting this trial,
the Germans didn't pay
much attention.
[crowd talking]
There was neither resistance
nor enthusiasm.
Life in Germany just plodded on.
[jazz music]
[narrator] Escapism after work,
daydreaming at the bar.
In the country
of the economic miracle,
the entertainment industry
came up
with suitable illusions.
[jazz music continues]
The trial was a signal
that the German people
would be confronted
with what had happened
a few years earlier.
It hadn't been that long ago.
[narrator] On the twentieth
of December 1963,
Hans Hofmeyer stepped up
to the bench.
The trial was formally opened.
Four of the 22 defendants
were about to make
the headlines.
Wilhelm Boger,
an interrogation expert
for the Gestapo in the camp.
Josef Klehr, a paramedic
and disinfector.
Victor Capesius,
the camp pharmacist in charge
of the Zyklon B.
And the main defendant
Robert Mulka.
A former member
of the Freikorps,
a right-wing paramilitary group,
he'd been discharged
from the regular army,
accused of embezzlement.
He joined the SS.
He knew Rudolf Höss,
the camp commandant
in Auschwitz,
from his time in the Freikorps.
Höss made him his adjutant.
In 1946 Höss was arrested
by the British military police
and handed over to the Poles.
Convicted and sentenced
by a Polish court,
he was executed in Auschwitz.
Mulka, his adjutant,
was arrested as a wealthy
businessman in Hamburg.
He was able
to stay out of prison
after putting up bail
of fifty thousand Deutschmarks.
[mysterious music]
Public prosecutor Joachim Kügler
discovered Mulka by chance.
Frankfurt's public prosecutors
had spent years
looking all around the world
for the perpetrators
of Auschwitz.
They followed hundreds of leads,
mostly to no avail.
[mysterious music]
Mulka was found when his son
won an Olympic medal in Rome.
[Joachim Krüger]
When I arrested him,
he tried to play the reputable
businessman from Hamburg.
He said at the start
of the trial
that he had been a soldier.
[clearing throat]
He wanted the court
to treat him like a soldier
who had done his duty.
I stood up in the courtroom
and told him
and all the participants
that he wasn't a soldier,
but a member
of a uniformed death squad.
[narrator] As adjutant,
SS-Hauptsturmführer Mulka
was the head
of the uniformed death squad,
which was called in
for special purposes.
His three thousand SS men
kept the Auschwitz
killing factory going.
A band of men, brutal to others,
brothers to each other.
Their camaraderie held up
during the trial too.
[silence]
The public prosecutors submitted
this document
from Auschwitz as evidence.
It proves Mulka's appointment
as the second-most powerful man
in the camp.
All the organizational matters
went through him...
including this special order
issued by camp commandant Höss.
To avoid personal harm,
the SS men were only
to enter the gas chambers
five hours
after the gassing took place.
Mulka's signature
on this document
proves that he knew
about the gassing.
Mulka was also responsible
for acquiring the Zyklon B
and for transporting
the victims to the gas chambers.
[crowd murmuring]
The trial was now
on the public radar,
providing fodder
for the tabloids.
Mulka put Auschwitz
in the headlines.
In April, the court moved
to different premises.
[crowd murmuring]
The new courtroom
provided more space
for the growing number
of spectators,
including many school parties.
[suspenseful music]
This is an exact replica
of that court room.
Filming was not permitted during
the trial.
But the court made
an audio recording,
which also includes
Mulka being interrogated
by prosecutor Kügler.
[crowd murmuring]
[Kügler] I ask you now,
did you know
that the people in the lorries
were heading
to the gas chambers?
[Mulka] I was not aware of that.
[Kügler] How do you explain
that this was kept from you
and that you're only finding out
today?
[Mulka] There was no reason
to tell me
because I had nothing to do
with the prison camp
and inmates.
[Kügler] You're trying to say
that when you were adjutant,
you didn't know
that the lorries were used
to drive those destined
to be gassed
to the gas chambers?
[Mulka] I wasn't asked about it.
[Kügler] You mean
you didn't know?
[Mulka] I didn't know!
[narrator] That was the tactic
of all the accused.
Mulka's lies made the headlines.
Witness Josef Glück
couldn't believe it.
[Josef Glück] I read
in the papers
that the men say
they didn't know
what was going on in Auschwitz.
Let me tell you
that I already knew everything
on the second day I was there.
But not just me.
This young lad, who was sixteen,
Andreas Rappaport,
he wrote with blood:
Andreas Rappaport,
lived for sixteen years.
He called to me:
'Uncle, I know I have to die!
Tell my mother I thought
of her till the end.'
This young lad
knew what was going on
and these men didn't?
[silence]
[narrator] A lot of witnesses
spoke for the first time
about their time in the camp.
Hermann Langbein was responsible
for getting more
than two hundred survivors
to Frankfurt.
They trusted him.
He too had been an inmate
and for many years
the secretary general
of the International
Auschwitz Committee.
The hearing of witnesses began
in February 1964.
Frankfurt Central Station became
the hub
for all the Auschwitz survivors
from around the world.
They came from Israel, Poland,
Canada, the United States,
Czechoslovakia
and the Soviet Union.
They all felt uneasy
about setting foot
on German soil again,
reading German words
and hearing German announcements
on the loudspeakers.
Hermann Langbein suffered
with the witnesses.
[Hermann] For many people
from other countries,
German was the language
of the enemy.
And when they heard German,
their first reaction
was to think that they were
in the presence of someone
who had done these things
to them.
That may not sound nice today,
but it was the reality.
Now you had these witnesses
who didn't know where to sleep
or where the courtroom was.
They couldn't take a taxi
because they couldn't pay
for it.
It was an intolerable situation.
[narrator] The Jewish doctor
Mauritius Berner,
who now lived in Israel,
came as a witness to Frankfurt.
His wife and three children
had been murdered in Auschwitz.
On the way to the stand
he had to reckon
with confronting
the perpetrators of Auschwitz.
Several of the accused
weren't yet under lock and key
and strolled casually
to the court as a group.
[car horns]
The SS dentist Doctor Schatz
was also still free.
He affably greeted
the court security guard,
who stood to attention
and saluted him.
The many witnesses
that were called.
And not all of them came,
because they had no trust
in Germany.
Were put up in hotels
and the accused were
in the same hotels.
The chief defendant,
Robert Mulka,
the adjutant
of the camp commandant,
was sitting having breakfast
with them.
I mean!
I never understood that people,
Germans,
who had also been through a lot,
could permit that.
Private individuals,
such as Mrs. Bonhoeffer,
came and looked after them.
How many witnesses
broke down crying
after leaving the witness stand
because of having had to talk
about their experiences?
[narrator] The duty to speak out
for the dead
was also what made
Doctor Mauritius Berner
take the stand.
He told the story of his family
that came on one
of the trains from Transylvania.
[Mauritius] We quickly
put our wives and children
in their coats and got out.
We were immediately confronted
with an awful sight.
[narrator] Dr. Berner
and his family
arrived in Auschwitz
in the summer of 1944,
during the Hungarian transports.
The railways brought
ten thousand people
to the gas chambers every day.
The court had these photographs
of the murder
of the Hungarian Jews
as evidence.
Doctor Berner
had an unexpected encounter
on the overcrowded platform.
[silence]
[Mauricius Berner] Two German
officers came up to us.
One of them was a tall,
handsome man.
I later found out
that this was Dr. Mengele.
Much to our surprise
there was an old acquaintance
next to him,
Doctor Victor Capesius,
whom we knew from Transylvania.
He'd worked for IG Farben
and had visited us doctors two
or three times a year.
[narrator] Dr. Berner still had
the business card
of the IG Farben representative.
He gave it to the court.
[car horns]
Up until his arrest,
Capesius lived an affluent life
as the owner of a pharmacy
in Göppingen near Stuttgart.
The man who had been
in charge of the Zyklon B
was now in cosmetics.
As the camp pharmacist,
he gave Dr. Berner hope
on the arrival platform
in Auschwitz.
A thought popped into my mind
and I said to Dr. Capesius:
I have twins,
who need protection.
I'll work as you wish
in return for staying
with my family.
He said:
'Twins? Where are they?'
I said: 'There!'
He said: 'Call them back.'
I called my wife and children.
They turned around
and I indicated they were
to come back.
Dr. Capesius took my twins
by the hand
and took them to Dr. Mengele.
He told me: 'Tell him'.
I started to
but he dismissed me,
telling me he didn't have time
right now.
Dr. Capesius sent them back
to the row
where I had called them from.
I started crying
but Dr. Capesius said to me
in Hungarian:
'Don't cry,
they're just going for a wash'.
'You'll see them again
in an hour.'
I'm still calling
after my wife and children.
I never saw them again.
[silence]
[narrator] An SS photograph
used as evidence by the court:
the morning roll call
in the women's camp,
the inmates before leaving
for their workplaces.
There are clearly adolescents
in the group.
They had to be at least fourteen
to be picked for the camp,
rather than the gas chamber.
They were often forced
to do awful things.
[silence]
One of these teenagers
was Yehuda Bacon.
He was deported
from Czechoslovakia
together with his parents,
siblings and relatives in 1943.
He was fourteen at the time.
He's the only one who survived.
Yehuda Bacon is now
an art professor in Jerusalem.
On the stand,
he described the work
the children had to do.
[Yehuda] There was a cart
and it wasn't drawn by horses,
but by around twenty teenagers.
We took this cart
to all the camps
and loaded it up.
One of the jobs
was to take the ash
from Crematorium number three
and scatter it on the icy paths
in the women's camp B2C.
Sometimes when we were finished
with the work
and the overseer was
in a good mood,
he said, Children,
there's no one
in the gas chambers right now.
You can go in there and warm up.
I, as a potential artist,
tried to memorize exactly
what they looked like.
As soon as the war was over,
I did these drawings.
I think they were shown during
the Auschwitz trial.
That's the disrobing chamber
and that's the gas chamber.
This is the shower-head.
That interested me
because there were
no real holes.
There were big fans
and a big shaft.
The Zyklon B was thrown in
from above.
This was the disrobing chamber.
The people had
to take their clothes off.
The SS man told them:
Remember your number
and hurry up,
the coffee's waiting.
[wind blowing]
[narrator] On the thirteenth
of December 1964
something unimaginable happened.
In the middle of the Cold War
a delegation
from the court in Frankfurt,
headed
by associate judge Walter Hotz,
flew to Auschwitz.
There were
no diplomatic relations
between Poland
and West Germany at the time.
Auschwitz was a huge camp system
that extended
for forty square kilometers.
At the center were former
Polish army barracks,
then the seat
of the camp administration
and the SS guards.
When the camp system
was extended,
it was renamed
Stammlager Auschwitz I.
More than two hundred
journalists
from around the world attended.
On the fourteenth
of December 1964
the Frankfurt delegation
set foot in the camp.
The group wasn't just made up
of judges
and public prosecutors,
but also of eleven defendants.
And of the representatives
of the victims,
Henry Ormond
and Christian Raabe.
Herr Ormond
and I submitted an application
that the court make a visual
inspection of Auschwitz,
the crime scene.
We had to state exactly
what was to be proved
as a result.
Lots of questions came up
during the trial
where many said
in their defense
that they hadn't been able
to see something
or that something
the witness had described
hadn't been possible.
All of these things were
to be investigated
during the visual inspection.
A lot of things
could be cleared up
and refuted that way.
[suspenseful music]
[narrator] One thing
that was cleared up
was what could be seen
from where in Block Eleven.
Mass executions took place
at the 'Black Wall'
in the courtyard of this block.
Tens of thousands
were killed here
by being shot in the back
of the neck.
It was found
that this could be seen
from Block Eleven.
That confirmed important
witness statements.
[suspenseful music]
This visual inspection was
a turning point in the trial.
Up until then more
than 250 witnesses
had testified in Frankfurt,
but the only image
the court managed
to create of Auschwitz
was based purely on words.
Much remained unclear.
It wasn't
until the confrontation
with the reality in the camp
that all the participants
became fully aware
of the monstrous dimensions.
Auschwitz was a death factory.
[suspenseful music continues]
Chief defendant Mulka
had his office
in the commandant's
headquarters
in Stammlager Auschwitz I.
When he looked out
of the window,
he would see the gas chamber
and crematorium.
There's no way
he couldn't have known
about what went on there.
There's a shaft
on the roof of the bunker
through which the Zyklon B
poison gas pellets were poured.
The gas chamber lay below.
Next to the gas chamber
were the ovens
in which the victims
could be burned without delay.
The killing took place
with the poison gas Zyklon B,
a pesticide produced by Degesch,
a company owned in equal measure
by Degussa and IG Farben.
The headquarters of IG Farben,
the largest chemical company
in the world at the time,
were in Frankfurt.
The construction
of a huge factory
in Monowitz near Auschwitz
was planned.
It was to manufacture
synthetic rubber
and synthetic fuel
for the arms industry.
In July 1942
the head of the SS,
Heinrich Himmler,
visited the building site.
The SS was in business
with IG Farben
and provided the company
with inmates as laborers.
The Frankfurt court
spent three days
exploring Auschwitz.
All the camps and extermination
sites were visited.
The final appointment
was in the possessions store.
[crowd murmuring]
The delegation saw
a huge warehouse:
everything the deported
and killed had on them
was sorted,
catalogued and stored.
[crowd murmuring]
The defendants
were very impressed
with what they saw,
particularly
with what the Auschwitz Museum
had compiled.
There were mountains of glasses,
shoes, suitcases
and other items.
In retrospect,
I regretted
that not everyone in court
and not all the defendants
were required to see that.
[silence]
[narrator] The extracted
gold teeth of the dead
were particularly sought
after by the SS men.
Witness Rudolf Vrba
came to Frankfurt from London.
He'd managed to escape in 1944.
He informed governments,
the Vatican
and the world public at the time
about the events occurring
in Auschwitz.
[lawyer] Mr Vrba,
what was your job
in the clean-up squad?
Our work started
the next morning.
The squad was marched
to the effects chambers.
The packages were ripped open
and everything was sorted.
Documents, personal photographs,
family albums
and the like were burned.
Shirts, jackets and so on
were carefully sorted according
to their quality,
as were women's blouses.
The valuables were taken away
in suitcases.
There was a suitcase full
of dollars,
pounds sterling, reichsmarks,
zloty, gold watches
and things like that.
The people were burned,
killed and burned.
The suitcases weren't killed
or burned.
They were treated
very carefully.
I had to ask myself:
where are all their
other things?
They weren't the poorest
in Europe.
They had shops, houses,
fields, cars, bicycles,
radios, furniture.
What happened to all the things
they hadn't brought with them?
There can be a big discussion
about whether it was six
or seven million Jews
that were killed,
but I can tell you for certain
that not a single one
was murdered
without also having
been robbed. Not one.
[narrator] The raid
of the Nazi state
on the possessions
of the European Jews
was a taboo subject during
the post-war era.
When the chimneys
were smoking again
and the factories were working
at full capacity
and the economic miracle
was in full swing,
nobody asked anymore
what had happened
to their billions.
Too many Germans had had
their piece of the pie.
This goal
of the extermination policy
was also raised
in court in Frankfurt.
The press started picking up
on issues like this.
The literary elite were
to be found in the foyer
of the courtroom.
The New York Times sent
the famous dramatist
and husband of Marilyn Monroe,
Arthur Miller, to Frankfurt.
[crowd talking]
This reporting had an impact.
I don't know how long
that lasted.
But they were outraged
about what they heard and read.
There were many
who didn't believe it,
but they couldn't refute it.
There were new revelations
every day.
I liked hearing
Axel Eggebrecht's reports.
We sometimes sat together
and wrote these reports
in the evening
and afterwards we got drunk.
Because, who can bear it?
Even if you only have
to write it down.
[narrator] People were horrified
by the reports
about the Boger swing,
an instrument of torture
where the shackled victims
hung over an iron bar
with the backs of their knees,
while they were beaten
in the abdomen.
[silence]
Boger was notorious
for such torture.
His job in the Gestapo
was to prevent inmates
from escaping
or putting up resistance.
His office was in the barracks
right next to the crematorium.
That's where
the torture took place.
Women from the camp
acted as secretaries.
You can imagine that I saw
a lot of awful things.
The interrogations were
with inmates
who had fled
and been recaptured.
The Gestapo from Katowice
sent hostages from the prisons
or others who were suspected
of having worked
in the resistance movement.
They were often shackled
to the swing to make them talk.
It was an instrument of torture
that Boger had invented.
I saw the inmates before
and after.
They were almost unrecognizable.
Two days later I often got
the document confirming
their death.
[silence]
[narrator] Boger,
the former police commissioner,
enjoyed the torture.
In the camp he was called
'the devil of Auschwitz'.
[silence continues]
After the war, Boger lived
in Hemmingen near Stuttgart.
He worked as an accountant
and was a respected citizen.
After his arrest,
a reporter interviewed his wife.
[reporter] Were you in Auschwitz
together with your husband?
Yes.
[reporter] How do you judge
the things your husband
is now being accused of?
I can't imagine
that he did all of that.
My husband was very precise,
but I can't imagine
that he murdered children
and then just came home.
We had children ourselves
and he was a very good father.
[crowd murmuring]
[narrator] The court
had now been in session
for eleven months.
[crowd murmuring]
Then Erna Krafft
from Aurich took the stand.
She came to Auschwitz
because she refused to work
in a munitions factory
in Dortmund.
Once in the camp,
Boger got his hands on her.
There are moments
when you don't care at all.
Suddenly Boger stood up
after this long interrogation
and pulled out a whip
from under his desk.
He came towards me slowly.
I was standing by the door.
He kept cracking the whip hard
in front of my face.
Then he whipped me twice
across the face.
Any surviving inmates
from Birkenau
will confirm
that when I returned,
I was unrecognizable.
If Mr. Boger is in the room
and if he should be released
and I'm alive,
I'll whip him like
that in return.
[man] Defendant, Mr. Boger,
rise.
I would like to ask Mr. Boger
whether he has anything
to say to us
in light
of this terrible account.
[Boger] No,
I have nothing to say.
[crowd murmuring]
[narrator] One of the people
sitting in on the trial
was Frankfurt-based lawyer
Manfred Amend,
a close confidant
of Fritz Bauer.
The things that came
to light were awful.
It wasn't
a place where you wanted to be.
Fritz Bauer told me
that he hadn't been able
to sleep a single night
without sleeping pills
since the start
of the Auschwitz trial.
In one speech I heard him make,
he started his account with:
I've come from hell.
[sighs]
[birds chirping]
[narrator] Block 20
of the Stammlager
housed the inmate hospital.
This is where
the SS paramedics worked.
Inmates infected with malaria
and typhus were brought here.
If more beds were needed,
the weakest were identified
and killed.
The paramedic responsible
for clearing the beds
was SS-Oberscharführer
Josef Klehr,
a trained carpenter,
who joined the SS in 1932.
[silence]
The Czech witness Imre Gönczi,
who was a nurse in the hospital
while he was imprisoned
in the camp,
explained how Klehr
killed people.
The patients got undressed
in this small room.
We had
to write their prisoner number
on their chest in blue ink.
I had to take them down
a corridor to the lab.
There was a table
between two windows
and the SS man Klehr
stood next to the table.
A chair was prepared
and another inmate
who was working there
sat my patient down.
The SS man Klehr
dressed in white like a doctor
went over to the patient
while the other inmate held him
and injected him straight
into the heart.
He was dead immediately.
Then we took him
into the neighboring room,
a bathroom,
and laid him on the floor.
I had to be there.
And the SS man Klehr
killed them all by injection.
[narrator] Each one
of these murders
was recorded
in Auschwitz's register office.
The cause of death
is listed as heart failure.
The court had some
of these death registers
as evidence.
For a 183 days
the accused SS men had to listen
to the Auschwitz
witness accounts.
Their deeds caused an outrage
around the world.
Not once did they
express any remorse.
On the nineteenth
of August 1965,
the verdict was expected.
[crowd talking]
The world was looking
to Frankfurt
with tense curiosity.
Long queues were forming
in the courthouse.
The courtroom was packed.
The presiding judge
Hans Hofmeyer
started reading the verdict,
a process
that would take two days.
The court has been
at pains to find the truth.
The length of the trial
and the amount of evidence
that was heard
confirm that finding the truth
was the focus of this trial.
But what was it really like
in Auschwitz?
Above the main entrance
stood the words
'Arbeit macht frei'.
But what it said invisibly
was 'Abandon hope,
all ye who enter here.'
Hell started behind this gate.
Hell, that is inconceivable
to normal human minds.
There aren't the words
to describe it.
Physically and mentally broken,
robbed of their human dignity,
these victims
took their final breaths
in the gas chambers
of Birkenau.
Jews and Christians,
Poles and Germans,
Soviet prisoners of war
and gypsies,
people from all over Europe,
all of whom had a mother
and all of whom were human:
that was the Auschwitz
concentration camp.
[narrator] Of the 20 accused,
Robert Mulka was sentenced
to 14 years in prison.
He was released in 1968
on compassionate grounds
and died in 1969.
Victor Capesius was sentenced
to nine years
and died in 1985.
Wilhelm Boger got
a life sentence
and died in prison in 1977.
Josef Klehr was also sentenced
to life in prison.
He was released in 1988
and died shortly afterwards.
[mysterious music]
Fifty years have passed
since Fritz Bauer brought
the Auschwitz case to court.
It was important
to punish the guilty,
but to reveal the truth
about Auschwitz
was yet more important.
[mysterious music]
It will never be extinguished.
Like the memory
of the deported and murdered
on the countless memorial tiles
outside their former homes.
[mysterious music]
But the file on Auschwitz
has not yet been closed.
SS guards
at the former extermination camp
are still living quiet lives
in many German towns.
[mysterious music continues]
The Central Office
for the Investigation
of National Socialist Crimes
in Ludwigsburg
still has much work to do.
[mysterious music]
Mountains
of documents are piling up
on the desk of public
prosecutor Kurt Schrimm.
If prima facie
a crime has been committed,
prosecutors they must prosecute.
Provided the legal time period
has not expired.
[narrator] His work led
to charges
against the Auschwitz
SS man Hans Lipschis,
who faces trial in Ellwangen.
Investigations are taking place
in the case
of a further 39 SS members.
The 1964 Frankfurt trial
left a deep mark
on German society.
And yet
there remains great unease.
The monstrosity of the crimes
exceeds all human imagination.
No court can do justice to that.
[helicopter turbine engine]
[narrator] Frankfurt, 1964.
In these prison vans
are accountants,
businessmen and pharmacists.
They're accused
of many thousands of murders,
committed in Auschwitz
concentration camp.
The biggest trial
in German legal history
is taking place in Frankfurt.
The matter before the court
is the state's genocide
of the European Jews.
Twenty-two Holocaust
perpetrators
have to face their judges.
[birds chirping]
[mysterious music]
[crowd murmuring]
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
a marshy district
on the River Vistula in Poland.
From 1941 on,
a few thousand SS men
implemented a secret German
government project here:
state-ordained mass murder.
They killed more
than a million people.
[train braking and whistling]
Day and night
the German railways
deported European Jews
from the countries occupied
by the Wehrmacht
to the concentration camps
in the east.
Tens of thousands died
even before the journey ended.
And journey's end
was Auschwitz-Birkenau.
SS doctors selected
those Jews capable of working
they were sent to the camp,
the others were gassed
right away.
One SS man took these pictures.
They were submitted
to the court as evidence.
So was this Soviet film footage.
[silence]
The chief state prosecutor
in Hesse,
Fritz Bauer,
had been working
on the Auschwitz case
since the mid-fifties.
He inaugurated a process
that encompassed
the entire complex of crimes.
Bauer,
himself a victim of Nazism,
wanted a German court
to uncover the entire truth
about Auschwitz.
He wanted the Germans
to be aware
of their responsibility
for the genocide.
[silence]
The press conference
before the start of the trial:
The Auschwitz trial
is to show us Germans
in Germany,
but also the world,
that a new Germany,
a new German democracy,
is willing to uphold the dignity
of every human being.
This trial is less
about looking backwards
and more about setting
the tone for the future.
[narrator] The twentieth
of December 1963.
A Christmas market in Frankfurt.
Much was forgotten
eighteen years
after the end of the war.
People looked
after their families,
their careers, their savings.
Few knew
what had actually happened
in Auschwitz.
That was about to change.
A trial was to start
in Frankfurt
that would confront the Germans
with their past.
While the world
was eagerly awaiting this trial,
the Germans didn't pay
much attention.
[crowd talking]
There was neither resistance
nor enthusiasm.
Life in Germany just plodded on.
[jazz music]
[narrator] Escapism after work,
daydreaming at the bar.
In the country
of the economic miracle,
the entertainment industry
came up
with suitable illusions.
[jazz music continues]
The trial was a signal
that the German people
would be confronted
with what had happened
a few years earlier.
It hadn't been that long ago.
[narrator] On the twentieth
of December 1963,
Hans Hofmeyer stepped up
to the bench.
The trial was formally opened.
Four of the 22 defendants
were about to make
the headlines.
Wilhelm Boger,
an interrogation expert
for the Gestapo in the camp.
Josef Klehr, a paramedic
and disinfector.
Victor Capesius,
the camp pharmacist in charge
of the Zyklon B.
And the main defendant
Robert Mulka.
A former member
of the Freikorps,
a right-wing paramilitary group,
he'd been discharged
from the regular army,
accused of embezzlement.
He joined the SS.
He knew Rudolf Höss,
the camp commandant
in Auschwitz,
from his time in the Freikorps.
Höss made him his adjutant.
In 1946 Höss was arrested
by the British military police
and handed over to the Poles.
Convicted and sentenced
by a Polish court,
he was executed in Auschwitz.
Mulka, his adjutant,
was arrested as a wealthy
businessman in Hamburg.
He was able
to stay out of prison
after putting up bail
of fifty thousand Deutschmarks.
[mysterious music]
Public prosecutor Joachim Kügler
discovered Mulka by chance.
Frankfurt's public prosecutors
had spent years
looking all around the world
for the perpetrators
of Auschwitz.
They followed hundreds of leads,
mostly to no avail.
[mysterious music]
Mulka was found when his son
won an Olympic medal in Rome.
[Joachim Krüger]
When I arrested him,
he tried to play the reputable
businessman from Hamburg.
He said at the start
of the trial
that he had been a soldier.
[clearing throat]
He wanted the court
to treat him like a soldier
who had done his duty.
I stood up in the courtroom
and told him
and all the participants
that he wasn't a soldier,
but a member
of a uniformed death squad.
[narrator] As adjutant,
SS-Hauptsturmführer Mulka
was the head
of the uniformed death squad,
which was called in
for special purposes.
His three thousand SS men
kept the Auschwitz
killing factory going.
A band of men, brutal to others,
brothers to each other.
Their camaraderie held up
during the trial too.
[silence]
The public prosecutors submitted
this document
from Auschwitz as evidence.
It proves Mulka's appointment
as the second-most powerful man
in the camp.
All the organizational matters
went through him...
including this special order
issued by camp commandant Höss.
To avoid personal harm,
the SS men were only
to enter the gas chambers
five hours
after the gassing took place.
Mulka's signature
on this document
proves that he knew
about the gassing.
Mulka was also responsible
for acquiring the Zyklon B
and for transporting
the victims to the gas chambers.
[crowd murmuring]
The trial was now
on the public radar,
providing fodder
for the tabloids.
Mulka put Auschwitz
in the headlines.
In April, the court moved
to different premises.
[crowd murmuring]
The new courtroom
provided more space
for the growing number
of spectators,
including many school parties.
[suspenseful music]
This is an exact replica
of that court room.
Filming was not permitted during
the trial.
But the court made
an audio recording,
which also includes
Mulka being interrogated
by prosecutor Kügler.
[crowd murmuring]
[Kügler] I ask you now,
did you know
that the people in the lorries
were heading
to the gas chambers?
[Mulka] I was not aware of that.
[Kügler] How do you explain
that this was kept from you
and that you're only finding out
today?
[Mulka] There was no reason
to tell me
because I had nothing to do
with the prison camp
and inmates.
[Kügler] You're trying to say
that when you were adjutant,
you didn't know
that the lorries were used
to drive those destined
to be gassed
to the gas chambers?
[Mulka] I wasn't asked about it.
[Kügler] You mean
you didn't know?
[Mulka] I didn't know!
[narrator] That was the tactic
of all the accused.
Mulka's lies made the headlines.
Witness Josef Glück
couldn't believe it.
[Josef Glück] I read
in the papers
that the men say
they didn't know
what was going on in Auschwitz.
Let me tell you
that I already knew everything
on the second day I was there.
But not just me.
This young lad, who was sixteen,
Andreas Rappaport,
he wrote with blood:
Andreas Rappaport,
lived for sixteen years.
He called to me:
'Uncle, I know I have to die!
Tell my mother I thought
of her till the end.'
This young lad
knew what was going on
and these men didn't?
[silence]
[narrator] A lot of witnesses
spoke for the first time
about their time in the camp.
Hermann Langbein was responsible
for getting more
than two hundred survivors
to Frankfurt.
They trusted him.
He too had been an inmate
and for many years
the secretary general
of the International
Auschwitz Committee.
The hearing of witnesses began
in February 1964.
Frankfurt Central Station became
the hub
for all the Auschwitz survivors
from around the world.
They came from Israel, Poland,
Canada, the United States,
Czechoslovakia
and the Soviet Union.
They all felt uneasy
about setting foot
on German soil again,
reading German words
and hearing German announcements
on the loudspeakers.
Hermann Langbein suffered
with the witnesses.
[Hermann] For many people
from other countries,
German was the language
of the enemy.
And when they heard German,
their first reaction
was to think that they were
in the presence of someone
who had done these things
to them.
That may not sound nice today,
but it was the reality.
Now you had these witnesses
who didn't know where to sleep
or where the courtroom was.
They couldn't take a taxi
because they couldn't pay
for it.
It was an intolerable situation.
[narrator] The Jewish doctor
Mauritius Berner,
who now lived in Israel,
came as a witness to Frankfurt.
His wife and three children
had been murdered in Auschwitz.
On the way to the stand
he had to reckon
with confronting
the perpetrators of Auschwitz.
Several of the accused
weren't yet under lock and key
and strolled casually
to the court as a group.
[car horns]
The SS dentist Doctor Schatz
was also still free.
He affably greeted
the court security guard,
who stood to attention
and saluted him.
The many witnesses
that were called.
And not all of them came,
because they had no trust
in Germany.
Were put up in hotels
and the accused were
in the same hotels.
The chief defendant,
Robert Mulka,
the adjutant
of the camp commandant,
was sitting having breakfast
with them.
I mean!
I never understood that people,
Germans,
who had also been through a lot,
could permit that.
Private individuals,
such as Mrs. Bonhoeffer,
came and looked after them.
How many witnesses
broke down crying
after leaving the witness stand
because of having had to talk
about their experiences?
[narrator] The duty to speak out
for the dead
was also what made
Doctor Mauritius Berner
take the stand.
He told the story of his family
that came on one
of the trains from Transylvania.
[Mauritius] We quickly
put our wives and children
in their coats and got out.
We were immediately confronted
with an awful sight.
[narrator] Dr. Berner
and his family
arrived in Auschwitz
in the summer of 1944,
during the Hungarian transports.
The railways brought
ten thousand people
to the gas chambers every day.
The court had these photographs
of the murder
of the Hungarian Jews
as evidence.
Doctor Berner
had an unexpected encounter
on the overcrowded platform.
[silence]
[Mauricius Berner] Two German
officers came up to us.
One of them was a tall,
handsome man.
I later found out
that this was Dr. Mengele.
Much to our surprise
there was an old acquaintance
next to him,
Doctor Victor Capesius,
whom we knew from Transylvania.
He'd worked for IG Farben
and had visited us doctors two
or three times a year.
[narrator] Dr. Berner still had
the business card
of the IG Farben representative.
He gave it to the court.
[car horns]
Up until his arrest,
Capesius lived an affluent life
as the owner of a pharmacy
in Göppingen near Stuttgart.
The man who had been
in charge of the Zyklon B
was now in cosmetics.
As the camp pharmacist,
he gave Dr. Berner hope
on the arrival platform
in Auschwitz.
A thought popped into my mind
and I said to Dr. Capesius:
I have twins,
who need protection.
I'll work as you wish
in return for staying
with my family.
He said:
'Twins? Where are they?'
I said: 'There!'
He said: 'Call them back.'
I called my wife and children.
They turned around
and I indicated they were
to come back.
Dr. Capesius took my twins
by the hand
and took them to Dr. Mengele.
He told me: 'Tell him'.
I started to
but he dismissed me,
telling me he didn't have time
right now.
Dr. Capesius sent them back
to the row
where I had called them from.
I started crying
but Dr. Capesius said to me
in Hungarian:
'Don't cry,
they're just going for a wash'.
'You'll see them again
in an hour.'
I'm still calling
after my wife and children.
I never saw them again.
[silence]
[narrator] An SS photograph
used as evidence by the court:
the morning roll call
in the women's camp,
the inmates before leaving
for their workplaces.
There are clearly adolescents
in the group.
They had to be at least fourteen
to be picked for the camp,
rather than the gas chamber.
They were often forced
to do awful things.
[silence]
One of these teenagers
was Yehuda Bacon.
He was deported
from Czechoslovakia
together with his parents,
siblings and relatives in 1943.
He was fourteen at the time.
He's the only one who survived.
Yehuda Bacon is now
an art professor in Jerusalem.
On the stand,
he described the work
the children had to do.
[Yehuda] There was a cart
and it wasn't drawn by horses,
but by around twenty teenagers.
We took this cart
to all the camps
and loaded it up.
One of the jobs
was to take the ash
from Crematorium number three
and scatter it on the icy paths
in the women's camp B2C.
Sometimes when we were finished
with the work
and the overseer was
in a good mood,
he said, Children,
there's no one
in the gas chambers right now.
You can go in there and warm up.
I, as a potential artist,
tried to memorize exactly
what they looked like.
As soon as the war was over,
I did these drawings.
I think they were shown during
the Auschwitz trial.
That's the disrobing chamber
and that's the gas chamber.
This is the shower-head.
That interested me
because there were
no real holes.
There were big fans
and a big shaft.
The Zyklon B was thrown in
from above.
This was the disrobing chamber.
The people had
to take their clothes off.
The SS man told them:
Remember your number
and hurry up,
the coffee's waiting.
[wind blowing]
[narrator] On the thirteenth
of December 1964
something unimaginable happened.
In the middle of the Cold War
a delegation
from the court in Frankfurt,
headed
by associate judge Walter Hotz,
flew to Auschwitz.
There were
no diplomatic relations
between Poland
and West Germany at the time.
Auschwitz was a huge camp system
that extended
for forty square kilometers.
At the center were former
Polish army barracks,
then the seat
of the camp administration
and the SS guards.
When the camp system
was extended,
it was renamed
Stammlager Auschwitz I.
More than two hundred
journalists
from around the world attended.
On the fourteenth
of December 1964
the Frankfurt delegation
set foot in the camp.
The group wasn't just made up
of judges
and public prosecutors,
but also of eleven defendants.
And of the representatives
of the victims,
Henry Ormond
and Christian Raabe.
Herr Ormond
and I submitted an application
that the court make a visual
inspection of Auschwitz,
the crime scene.
We had to state exactly
what was to be proved
as a result.
Lots of questions came up
during the trial
where many said
in their defense
that they hadn't been able
to see something
or that something
the witness had described
hadn't been possible.
All of these things were
to be investigated
during the visual inspection.
A lot of things
could be cleared up
and refuted that way.
[suspenseful music]
[narrator] One thing
that was cleared up
was what could be seen
from where in Block Eleven.
Mass executions took place
at the 'Black Wall'
in the courtyard of this block.
Tens of thousands
were killed here
by being shot in the back
of the neck.
It was found
that this could be seen
from Block Eleven.
That confirmed important
witness statements.
[suspenseful music]
This visual inspection was
a turning point in the trial.
Up until then more
than 250 witnesses
had testified in Frankfurt,
but the only image
the court managed
to create of Auschwitz
was based purely on words.
Much remained unclear.
It wasn't
until the confrontation
with the reality in the camp
that all the participants
became fully aware
of the monstrous dimensions.
Auschwitz was a death factory.
[suspenseful music continues]
Chief defendant Mulka
had his office
in the commandant's
headquarters
in Stammlager Auschwitz I.
When he looked out
of the window,
he would see the gas chamber
and crematorium.
There's no way
he couldn't have known
about what went on there.
There's a shaft
on the roof of the bunker
through which the Zyklon B
poison gas pellets were poured.
The gas chamber lay below.
Next to the gas chamber
were the ovens
in which the victims
could be burned without delay.
The killing took place
with the poison gas Zyklon B,
a pesticide produced by Degesch,
a company owned in equal measure
by Degussa and IG Farben.
The headquarters of IG Farben,
the largest chemical company
in the world at the time,
were in Frankfurt.
The construction
of a huge factory
in Monowitz near Auschwitz
was planned.
It was to manufacture
synthetic rubber
and synthetic fuel
for the arms industry.
In July 1942
the head of the SS,
Heinrich Himmler,
visited the building site.
The SS was in business
with IG Farben
and provided the company
with inmates as laborers.
The Frankfurt court
spent three days
exploring Auschwitz.
All the camps and extermination
sites were visited.
The final appointment
was in the possessions store.
[crowd murmuring]
The delegation saw
a huge warehouse:
everything the deported
and killed had on them
was sorted,
catalogued and stored.
[crowd murmuring]
The defendants
were very impressed
with what they saw,
particularly
with what the Auschwitz Museum
had compiled.
There were mountains of glasses,
shoes, suitcases
and other items.
In retrospect,
I regretted
that not everyone in court
and not all the defendants
were required to see that.
[silence]
[narrator] The extracted
gold teeth of the dead
were particularly sought
after by the SS men.
Witness Rudolf Vrba
came to Frankfurt from London.
He'd managed to escape in 1944.
He informed governments,
the Vatican
and the world public at the time
about the events occurring
in Auschwitz.
[lawyer] Mr Vrba,
what was your job
in the clean-up squad?
Our work started
the next morning.
The squad was marched
to the effects chambers.
The packages were ripped open
and everything was sorted.
Documents, personal photographs,
family albums
and the like were burned.
Shirts, jackets and so on
were carefully sorted according
to their quality,
as were women's blouses.
The valuables were taken away
in suitcases.
There was a suitcase full
of dollars,
pounds sterling, reichsmarks,
zloty, gold watches
and things like that.
The people were burned,
killed and burned.
The suitcases weren't killed
or burned.
They were treated
very carefully.
I had to ask myself:
where are all their
other things?
They weren't the poorest
in Europe.
They had shops, houses,
fields, cars, bicycles,
radios, furniture.
What happened to all the things
they hadn't brought with them?
There can be a big discussion
about whether it was six
or seven million Jews
that were killed,
but I can tell you for certain
that not a single one
was murdered
without also having
been robbed. Not one.
[narrator] The raid
of the Nazi state
on the possessions
of the European Jews
was a taboo subject during
the post-war era.
When the chimneys
were smoking again
and the factories were working
at full capacity
and the economic miracle
was in full swing,
nobody asked anymore
what had happened
to their billions.
Too many Germans had had
their piece of the pie.
This goal
of the extermination policy
was also raised
in court in Frankfurt.
The press started picking up
on issues like this.
The literary elite were
to be found in the foyer
of the courtroom.
The New York Times sent
the famous dramatist
and husband of Marilyn Monroe,
Arthur Miller, to Frankfurt.
[crowd talking]
This reporting had an impact.
I don't know how long
that lasted.
But they were outraged
about what they heard and read.
There were many
who didn't believe it,
but they couldn't refute it.
There were new revelations
every day.
I liked hearing
Axel Eggebrecht's reports.
We sometimes sat together
and wrote these reports
in the evening
and afterwards we got drunk.
Because, who can bear it?
Even if you only have
to write it down.
[narrator] People were horrified
by the reports
about the Boger swing,
an instrument of torture
where the shackled victims
hung over an iron bar
with the backs of their knees,
while they were beaten
in the abdomen.
[silence]
Boger was notorious
for such torture.
His job in the Gestapo
was to prevent inmates
from escaping
or putting up resistance.
His office was in the barracks
right next to the crematorium.
That's where
the torture took place.
Women from the camp
acted as secretaries.
You can imagine that I saw
a lot of awful things.
The interrogations were
with inmates
who had fled
and been recaptured.
The Gestapo from Katowice
sent hostages from the prisons
or others who were suspected
of having worked
in the resistance movement.
They were often shackled
to the swing to make them talk.
It was an instrument of torture
that Boger had invented.
I saw the inmates before
and after.
They were almost unrecognizable.
Two days later I often got
the document confirming
their death.
[silence]
[narrator] Boger,
the former police commissioner,
enjoyed the torture.
In the camp he was called
'the devil of Auschwitz'.
[silence continues]
After the war, Boger lived
in Hemmingen near Stuttgart.
He worked as an accountant
and was a respected citizen.
After his arrest,
a reporter interviewed his wife.
[reporter] Were you in Auschwitz
together with your husband?
Yes.
[reporter] How do you judge
the things your husband
is now being accused of?
I can't imagine
that he did all of that.
My husband was very precise,
but I can't imagine
that he murdered children
and then just came home.
We had children ourselves
and he was a very good father.
[crowd murmuring]
[narrator] The court
had now been in session
for eleven months.
[crowd murmuring]
Then Erna Krafft
from Aurich took the stand.
She came to Auschwitz
because she refused to work
in a munitions factory
in Dortmund.
Once in the camp,
Boger got his hands on her.
There are moments
when you don't care at all.
Suddenly Boger stood up
after this long interrogation
and pulled out a whip
from under his desk.
He came towards me slowly.
I was standing by the door.
He kept cracking the whip hard
in front of my face.
Then he whipped me twice
across the face.
Any surviving inmates
from Birkenau
will confirm
that when I returned,
I was unrecognizable.
If Mr. Boger is in the room
and if he should be released
and I'm alive,
I'll whip him like
that in return.
[man] Defendant, Mr. Boger,
rise.
I would like to ask Mr. Boger
whether he has anything
to say to us
in light
of this terrible account.
[Boger] No,
I have nothing to say.
[crowd murmuring]
[narrator] One of the people
sitting in on the trial
was Frankfurt-based lawyer
Manfred Amend,
a close confidant
of Fritz Bauer.
The things that came
to light were awful.
It wasn't
a place where you wanted to be.
Fritz Bauer told me
that he hadn't been able
to sleep a single night
without sleeping pills
since the start
of the Auschwitz trial.
In one speech I heard him make,
he started his account with:
I've come from hell.
[sighs]
[birds chirping]
[narrator] Block 20
of the Stammlager
housed the inmate hospital.
This is where
the SS paramedics worked.
Inmates infected with malaria
and typhus were brought here.
If more beds were needed,
the weakest were identified
and killed.
The paramedic responsible
for clearing the beds
was SS-Oberscharführer
Josef Klehr,
a trained carpenter,
who joined the SS in 1932.
[silence]
The Czech witness Imre Gönczi,
who was a nurse in the hospital
while he was imprisoned
in the camp,
explained how Klehr
killed people.
The patients got undressed
in this small room.
We had
to write their prisoner number
on their chest in blue ink.
I had to take them down
a corridor to the lab.
There was a table
between two windows
and the SS man Klehr
stood next to the table.
A chair was prepared
and another inmate
who was working there
sat my patient down.
The SS man Klehr
dressed in white like a doctor
went over to the patient
while the other inmate held him
and injected him straight
into the heart.
He was dead immediately.
Then we took him
into the neighboring room,
a bathroom,
and laid him on the floor.
I had to be there.
And the SS man Klehr
killed them all by injection.
[narrator] Each one
of these murders
was recorded
in Auschwitz's register office.
The cause of death
is listed as heart failure.
The court had some
of these death registers
as evidence.
For a 183 days
the accused SS men had to listen
to the Auschwitz
witness accounts.
Their deeds caused an outrage
around the world.
Not once did they
express any remorse.
On the nineteenth
of August 1965,
the verdict was expected.
[crowd talking]
The world was looking
to Frankfurt
with tense curiosity.
Long queues were forming
in the courthouse.
The courtroom was packed.
The presiding judge
Hans Hofmeyer
started reading the verdict,
a process
that would take two days.
The court has been
at pains to find the truth.
The length of the trial
and the amount of evidence
that was heard
confirm that finding the truth
was the focus of this trial.
But what was it really like
in Auschwitz?
Above the main entrance
stood the words
'Arbeit macht frei'.
But what it said invisibly
was 'Abandon hope,
all ye who enter here.'
Hell started behind this gate.
Hell, that is inconceivable
to normal human minds.
There aren't the words
to describe it.
Physically and mentally broken,
robbed of their human dignity,
these victims
took their final breaths
in the gas chambers
of Birkenau.
Jews and Christians,
Poles and Germans,
Soviet prisoners of war
and gypsies,
people from all over Europe,
all of whom had a mother
and all of whom were human:
that was the Auschwitz
concentration camp.
[narrator] Of the 20 accused,
Robert Mulka was sentenced
to 14 years in prison.
He was released in 1968
on compassionate grounds
and died in 1969.
Victor Capesius was sentenced
to nine years
and died in 1985.
Wilhelm Boger got
a life sentence
and died in prison in 1977.
Josef Klehr was also sentenced
to life in prison.
He was released in 1988
and died shortly afterwards.
[mysterious music]
Fifty years have passed
since Fritz Bauer brought
the Auschwitz case to court.
It was important
to punish the guilty,
but to reveal the truth
about Auschwitz
was yet more important.
[mysterious music]
It will never be extinguished.
Like the memory
of the deported and murdered
on the countless memorial tiles
outside their former homes.
[mysterious music]
But the file on Auschwitz
has not yet been closed.
SS guards
at the former extermination camp
are still living quiet lives
in many German towns.
[mysterious music continues]
The Central Office
for the Investigation
of National Socialist Crimes
in Ludwigsburg
still has much work to do.
[mysterious music]
Mountains
of documents are piling up
on the desk of public
prosecutor Kurt Schrimm.
If prima facie
a crime has been committed,
prosecutors they must prosecute.
Provided the legal time period
has not expired.
[narrator] His work led
to charges
against the Auschwitz
SS man Hans Lipschis,
who faces trial in Ellwangen.
Investigations are taking place
in the case
of a further 39 SS members.
The 1964 Frankfurt trial
left a deep mark
on German society.
And yet
there remains great unease.
The monstrosity of the crimes
exceeds all human imagination.
No court can do justice to that.
[helicopter turbine engine]