Sofia, December 26, 1944. Meeting Protocol, Secretariat of the Central Committee of the (Communist) Bulgarian Workers’ Party.

Agenda: The progress of the People’s Court and measures for eliminating its documented shortcomings.

In the geopolitical matrix of the Second World War, Bulgaria occupied a unique position. Although it was a member of the Tripartite Pact (March 1, 1941) and an ally to Nazi Germany, the country refused to declare war on the USSR and send troops to fight on the Eastern front. Meanwhile, from April 1941 until October 1944, the country ruled by King Boris III occupied large segments of the kingdoms of Yugoslavia (most of Vardar Macedonia and the Serb region of Pirot) and Greece (Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia). In March 1943, following bilateral negotiations with the Germans, the Bulgarian authorities rounded up and deported an estimated 11,343 Jews— that is, nearly all the Jewish population residing in these territories—to Treblinka, where they were exterminated.

During the 1970s, West German society was aroused by the campaigns of a group of French activists led by Serge and Beate Klarsfeld who called former Nazi perpetrators to accountability. With spectacular actions, they exposed the identity of three former SS officers who had taken part in the decisionmaking and organization of the deportations of Jews from France to the Nazi extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. Because the majority of West Germany’s political and juridical elites, as well as society in general, continued to turn a blind eye to Nazi crimes and the presence among them of former Nazi officials, it took nearly a decade of campaigning before these three former SS officers who had served in occupied France—Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn—were finally taken to court in Cologne in October 1979.

This chapter examines the significant role that Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, together with a group of Holocaust survivors and their relatives, played in the transformation of the political-legal and public discourses in West Germany concerning the accountability of SS officials who had commanded and organized the deportations of Jews from France. The activists first organized themselves under the title “Militants de la Memoire,” thus pointing to the idea of social movements that during that time had an important impact on democratization processes. Later, in the run-up to the trial, the French-Jewish group used the self-designation Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France (Sons and daughters of Jews deported from France, or FFDJF) in its public appearance, which called closer attention to processes of Jewish identity formation and the transgenerational legacies of the Holocaust. In order to expose the three SS officials as being responsible for the deportations from France, the group organized several demonstrations in their hometowns, principally Cologne and Warstein (North Rhine–Westphalia), and in Burgstadt (Miltenberg District, Bavaria). Additional action took place with the aim of overcoming the legal barriers fixed in the so-called Transition Agreement (Überleitungsvertrag) between the governments of France and West Germany. A central paragraph in this treaty prohibited Germany from charging war criminals in West Germany who had previously been judged in absentia in France.

In November 1945, the Moscow Central Documentary Film Studio (CSDF; hereafter “the Studio”) sent its operators to Nuremberg to film the trial of the major Nazi criminals. At the end of the eleven-month trial, the feature film Sud Narodov (The judgment of the peoples) was released first, in 1946, on Soviet and then on American screens (The Nuremberg Trial, 1947). About one hour long, this documentary was meant to serve as an educational and political reflection on the participation of the USSR in the trial. The film’s production process met the needs of a key historiographical moment for Soviet state news. According to Roman Karmen, the film’s shooting manager, director, and editor, the documentary brought to a close the cycle of films that retold the story of the “Great Patriotic War,” which had begun to be elaborated by historians and Party officials beginning in 1941. For Karmen, the national and international ambitions of the “great topic on punishment” involved the opportunity to settle accounts with the fascist enemy, but also to draw the world’s attention to the tribute paid by his country. The film was intended to communicate the “lessons” of a Soviet Nuremberg.

When it aired in 1946–47, and despite some critical success across the Atlantic, the film aroused uncomfortable reactions. In the United States, while the trade press deplored an absence of any national competitor for the theme, a journalist from the New York Times expressed confusion about the film’s discourse of victimization as well as its political aims. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, apart from the self-promotion campaign led by Karmen and his friends, the response was scarcely more enthusiastic. Critics remained content to salute the work of the filmmakers and the film’s “historical significance.” The Kremlin reversed its policy on the heels of the revelations of the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1946, subsequently resolving to keep its distance from media coverage of events. After a few weeks of modest release, the film left theaters, only to be updated and reissued in 1962 as part of an anti-American campaign.

In April 1945, the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, and France agreed on the principle of an international trial to judge the major Nazi war criminals. On May 2, President Harry Truman appointed Robert Jackson to lead the American public prosecution. At only fifty-three, the associate justice of the Supreme Court would make the most of his new role following this auspicious appointment. While the four-party talks in London on the status of the future tribunal were still under way, the US chief prosecutor took it upon himself to move forward with the court preparations, thus becoming the trials’ main architect and the event’s staging director.

Jackson had previously served as attorney general in the Roosevelt administration, where he demonstrated a high regard for justice and a strong commitment to the principle of fairness of trial. In June 1945, Jackson impressed on President Truman the need to “punish only the right men and for the right reasons.” Jackson was also acutely aware that the scope of these tri- als would extend well beyond the mere fate of the individuals being prosecuted and would serve political, historical, educational, and moral functions. The prosecutor believed the Nuremberg judgments would be instrumental in promoting the values and ideals of American democracy and reforming international law in the service of peace. For this “romantic of the Law,” the need to deal with these past crimes went hand in hand with a strong desire to create a legal precedent that would end “illegitimate wars of aggression.”

Jackson, who sought to elicit support from world opinion for his vision of the trials, entrusted Lt. Gordon Dean—a law graduate who had been his press secretary and spokesperson during his tenure at the Justice Department—with the responsibility of managing the US prosecution’s public relations.

The chief prosecutor was also assisted in the trial preparation by Gen. William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence agency he had founded during the war. This brilliant and controversial man enlisted many talented recruits who had worked in various fields: espionage, military operations, research, and propaganda.

From December 1963 to August 1965, the so-called first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial took place, the first major trial in the second wave of Nazi crimes trials in West Germany. It was an exceptional case in several respects and has gained some prominence over the years. After a hesitant start, prosecutors pursued very extensive investigations. The attorney general of the state of Hesse, Fritz Bauer, wanted this trial to provide a comprehensive legal and historical clarification of the Auschwitz crime complex. He commissioned young public prosecutors with no professional roots in the National Socialist era for this task. More than two hundred Auschwitz survivors testified as witnesses in the courtroom—something that had never before happened on this scale in West Germany. The four historical reports commissioned by Bauer were for a long time the standard works of West German historians on Nazi crimes and their organizational preconditions. The response from the West German public and the media was tremendous. For many years, this trial was regarded as a kind of turning point, when the general public finally began to recognize the crimes of the Germans against the Jews and in the East European territories occupied by Germany, and when the judicial system began taking decisive steps against the perpetrators. This perception of the Auschwitz trial as a cathartic moment in West Germany’s postwar history is now rightly being called into question. The judgment was groundbreaking in its depictions of historical events, but ultimately disappointing in the judicial consequences. In the end, not much had changed in the judiciary (if at all, rather for the worse), and public attention to Nazi-era crimes soon decreased again.

What is certain, however, is that the Auschwitz survivors themselves, their organizations, and also the international Jewish and victims’ associations reacted vigorously to the investigations and participated in a unique way in the preparations for this trial. The mobilization of this large number of witnesses from numerous countries and from almost all prisoner groups was principally the consequence of the work of former Nazi persecutees and their organizations. The same applies to other aspects of the trial that were particularly important for the investigations or that attracted significant public attention: access to documents from East European archives, the large number of coplaintiffs (Nebenkläger), and the visit of the court to the Auschwitz crime scene.

Nikolaj Leont’ev was one of the witnesses whom internationally known Soviet writer, journalist, and critic Lev Ginzburg congratulated in 1965 for the courage of his testimony at the trial that June of six mass murderers in Krasnodar. The defendants, like Leont’ev, had been Red Army prisoners of war who, in the fall of 1941, entered the SS and police guard forces (Wachmannschaften) and served in the Nazi German extermination centers in occupied Poland in 1942–44. Leont’ev (and key witnesses like him) were free to testify against the defendants as direct participants in the killing only because no one had accused him also of participation. Leont’ev had told the court about the crime scene—the Bełżec extermination center in the General Government. The six were convicted and executed on October 7–8, 1965. Leont’ev’s prewar biography was indistinguishable from the lives of most Red Army men in 1941. His life had also been indistinguishable from the defendants’ lives in another way: together with them, he surrendered to German forces in the summer of 1941, then was recruited by the SS training camp in Trawniki (near Lublin in the General Government) to perform armed service for the SS and police. They had served as guards in the liquidation of the Lublin Jewish ghetto and at the Bełżec extermination center. His biography diverged from that of the defendants, however, because he had deserted to the partisans in early 1943 and ended the war “on the right side.” Their biographies converged again: all were arrested and tried for treason during the immediate postwar years and sentenced to long terms in labor camps, then amnestied after Stalin’s death.

To Soviet security authorities, Trawniki-trained men like Leont’ev were undoubtedly traitors: they had surrendered to the Germans and sworn an oath to serve Nazi authorities loyally. They were subjected to the rightly notorious justice of Article 58 simply by virtue of having served the Germans. Some, however, had also been accomplices in Nazi-led mass state crimes. The Soviet security apparatus uncovered who the Trawniki men were—the two thousand Red Army men that surrendered and another two thousand western Ukrainian civilian recruits.

Following the Moscow Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe of October 1943, the Allies agreed in Potsdam in August 1945 that “war criminals and those who have participated in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises involving or resulting in atrocities or war crimes shall be arrested and brought to judgment. Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters, and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions, and any other persons dangerous to the occupation or its objectives shall be arrested and interned.” During the immediate postwar years, the internment practices by the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition were quite similar. Altogether, the Allies interned about four hundred thousand people who were suspected of constituting a danger to occupation policies (a “security threat”) or who had held a rank in the Nazi state apparatus (categorized for “automatic arrest”). In every Allied occupation zone in Germany, investigation of personal guilt and prosecution of “Nazi and war crimes” was not a prerequisite for internment, which can be seen foremost as a means of Allied security policy immediately after the end of the war, in a situation that was still militarily unsafe for the occupying powers. But how was internment connected to the Allies’ overall goal, formulated in the Moscow and Potsdam declarations, to determine and prosecute individual guilt—especially if the crimes affected their own citizens? This chapter will trace the identification and prosecution of guilty parties in the context of internment and Soviet occupation policy by examining the Soviet investigations in the context of internment, the practices of extradition between the Allied forces, and the convictions of former internees in Soviet military tribunals (SMTs), which were held mostly in secret. In connection with our analysis of these procedures, we seek to answer how the secrecy of both internment and prosecution affected the perception and assessment of Soviet efforts to prosecute war crimes in German society. We make extensive use of material from the Russian state archive of the Department of Soviet Special Camps in Germany, an element of the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD; renamed Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD, in mid-1946). This collection, however, does not contain individual camp prisoner records or case files. The Soviet material is complemented with sources from German and British archives.

In July 1963, the Supreme Court of East Germany convicted West German state secretary Hans Globke to life imprisonment for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nazi rule in Germany. The verdict was returned in absentia in East Berlin. This public event was the end point of a longer history of various Cold War efforts aimed at compromising “Adenauer’s chief aide” by means of the historical record.

Hans Globke, born 1898 in Dusseldorf, who worked from 1929 in the Prussian, then Reich Ministry of Interior, wrote in 1936 together with State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart the first commentary on the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws (“Reichsburgergesetz” and “Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre,” 1935). Due to the need for expertise in the new postwar public administration, positive testimonies, and luck in the “denazification” process, Globke gradually returned to public service during the second half of the 1940s. From 1953 until his retirement in 1963, he served as federal secretary of state and chief of staff in the West German Chancellery.

Globke belonged to the West German political elite that propaganda by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) continuously referred to in the Adenauer era. In 1956, the Committee of German Unity (ADE) published the first brochure dedicated to Globke. Also in West Germany, Globke was a controversial figure. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been critical of Globke and his successful political career from the beginning. His past was no secret. Adolf Arndt, the Social Democrat expert on legal affairs, referred to Globke’s commentary on the Nuremberg Laws already in a parliamentary debate on July 12, 1950.

The international controversy around Hans Globke between 1960, when the anti-Globke press campaign intensified, and 1963, when the Globke case culminated in the East Berlin trial, was a complex public affair. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 by the Mossad markedly influenced the Communist campaign that now aimed to implicate or at least discredit Globke by the criminal procedure in Jerusalem. Another turning point of the Globke affair dates to early 1963 when the final decision was made to organize a separate trial in East Berlin to incriminate Globke.

The resort to international criminal justice after the Second World War has recently been reassessed by a body of creative scholarship that is looking into the foregrounding attempts to design an international justice, transnational dynamics, or longer-term processes. The emergence of new legal definitions and judicial instances (e.g., International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and IMT for the Far East) has been increasingly studied within a wider framework, both in time and in space, without losing its unique character, while the respective parts played by the governments and the professional actors directly involved have acquired further nuance and deliberation.

Yet the year 1943 remains a turning point, when the idea of resorting to justice to legally qualify and punish the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers and their local accomplices was asserted and effectuated. Admittedly, the St. James Declaration that the Allied powers signed in January 1942 had already expressed their collective appreciation of the particularity of the violence deployed by the occupier in Europe. It also affirmed their determination in the future to punish severely these infringements of extant rights and customs of war as well as of the international conventions adopted since the middle of the nineteenth century that governed wartime behavior. But the Soviet success at Stalingrad also marked a turning point in this respect: not even waiting for final victory, the governments in exile in London and Stalin in Moscow passed the first laws to punish invaders and indigenous traitors found guilty of unprecedented crimes against the nation.

There is now an extensive literature looking at the intersection of law, war, and postwar consequences. This includes, in particular, the history of war crimes prosecution and the creation of new postwar legal systems and institutions, but also questions of retribution and repatriation. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the postwar efforts of European governments to come to grips with citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in their countries and in subsequent scholarship on the topic, including a debate on the issue of Jewish forced cooperation during the Holocaust and the role of the postwar discussion around it in the formation of a post-Holocaust collective of Jews from Poland. While this chapter fits into the scholarship by looking at how justice and accountability were understood in the aftermath of war, it will focus in particular on incorporating into the narrative those Jews who stayed in Poland, and it links postwar justice sought outside courtrooms (demonstrating the initiative and agency of survivors) to that within the official legal system. This will be done by analyzing rehabilitation requests addressed to the Jewish Civic Court in Poland and on this basis demonstrating creation of public knowledge regarding collaboration during the Holocaust, formation of audiences, and circulation of the information on this topic. Central to this chapter, therefore, will be noncombatant victims, who were stigmatized by those surrounding them, both from within and from outside their community.

The chapter will look at the pursuit of justice and accountability in the aftermath of the Second World War, focusing on the case of wartime Jewish collaboration with the Nazi authorities, as investigated by the Jewish Civic Court (known in Polish mainly as sąd obywatelski or sąd społeczny, and in Yiddish as folks-gerikht). The Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce)—the central representative body of Polish Jewry— operated the court from October 1946 to early 1950. During the time of its existence, the Civic Court investigated 147 cases of members of the Polish Jewish community, who “during the Hitlerite occupation [were suspected of activity] unbefitting a Jewish citizen, through participation and harmful activity on ‘Jewish councils,’ in the [ghetto police], in the administration of concentration camps, or any other type of collaboration with the occupier to the detriment of society.”

On October 13, 1958, the former SS members Gustav Sorge and Wilhelm Schubert were put on trial at the district court of Bonn. The defendants were accused of murder and complicity in murder in more than eleven thousand instances, committed while serving as guards of the concentration camps in Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen between 1935 and 1942. The defendants had been charged once before, during a trial in Berlin-Pankow, which was conducted by the Soviets in 1947. The trial in Bonn, which lasted from October 1958 to February 1959, was the first in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that dealt extensively with crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camp system. The Bonn trial was litigated only a few months after the well-known Ulm trial, which dealt with mass murders of Jews committed by SS detachments in occupied Lithuania—and as a result of that led to the founding of the Central Office in Ludwigsburg in 1958. The Bonn trial was accompanied by heavy media publicity: in addition to extensive press coverage, parts of the trial were filmed and then broadcast nationwide in the form of a mid-length television report. After that broadcast, the TV report was distributed as a film for “political education” (that is, civic education). This state-initiated activity occurred under the umbrella of the Federal Center for Homeland Service, an authority subordinate to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. At the end of the 1950s, civic education gradually began to put crimes committed during the National Socialist period on its agenda. Thus, the film was distributed and screened with the title KZ-Schergen (Henchmen of the Concentration Camp, 1959, 33 min., produced by the Civic Education Office of North Rhine–Westphalia). In addition to an examination of the crimes committed in concentration camps like Sachsenhausen, the film aimed to demonstrate the procedures of law that guided the Bonn trial as the standards of a state governed by a democratic constitution—as the FRG proclaimed itself to be.

Not only the fact of the Bonn trial but also the later usage of the film are noteworthy. In 1964, a half decade after the trial, a law was introduced in West Germany prohibiting the recording of court hearings for the purpose of public use—be it on television, in a film, or on radio.