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8 - ‘A trial of this magnitude has never previously taken place before a German court’: arrest and trial, February 1959–June 1962

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2016

Alex J. Kay
Affiliation:
Institut für Zeitgeschichte München–Berlin
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Summary

The year 1958 witnessed a turning point in the prosecution in West Germany of violent crimes committed by the Nazi regime and its representatives, above all in Eastern Europe. The so-called Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial (Ulmer Einsatzgruppenprozess) against ten members of the Einsatzkommando Tilsit, which had murdered more than 5,000 Jews in the German-Lithuanian borderlands in the summer of 1941, provoked a startled and appalled response across sections of the West German public and media regarding the magnitude and savagery of the crimes committed. Among the West German authorities, it also led to the realisation of the necessity of a systematic and coordinated nationwide investigation and prosecution of National Socialist crimes. A direct consequence of the Ulm trial was the establishment of the Central Office of the Judicial Authorities of the Federal States for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen) in the city of Ludwigsburg later the same year. Like Ulm, Ludwigsburg was located in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg. The main focus of the investigations carried out by the Zentrale Stelle were the crimes committed by the Einsatzgruppen and its subordinated commandos in the occupied Soviet Union and by units of the Security Police and the Order Police and by ethnic German battalions in Poland.

The year of the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial and the founding of the Zentrale Stelle also ushered in a turning of the tide for Filbert. According to Thomas Harlan, someone had blown the whistle on Filbert; another participant of the regular meetings of former SS men in Berlin. In the autumn of 1958, the West Berlin Public Prosecutor's Office initiated an investigation into former members of Reserve Police Battalion 9, some of whom had been assigned to Einsatzkommando 9 in the summer of 1941. During the questioning of a police official, Filbert's name was mentioned. Preliminary proceedings against almost 250 members of Reserve Police Battalion 9 were ultimately discontinued in early 1960 because their plea of having acted under superior orders (Befehlsnotstand) could not be disproven. The investigation against Filbert and other members of Einsatzkommando 9, on the other hand, continued.

In the second half of February 1959, a few days before Filbert's arrest in Berlin, police officers were in Bad Gandersheim enquiring after his whereabouts.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Making of an SS Killer
The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990
, pp. 96 - 103
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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