Dachau Trials Alex Piorkowski The proceedings of an American Military Tribunal against Alex Piorkowski, a former Commandant of the Dachau Concentrastion Camp, started in eary January 1947. This was a subsidiary case conducted after the main Military Tribunal proceedings against Martin Gottfried Weiss, and 39 others on the Dachau concentration camp staff, which began in November 1945. Piorkowski was quickly convicted on the testimony of 34 paid witnesses and was sentenced to death by hanging on January 17, 1947. Like all the other Dachau accused, he was convicted of being a participant in the "common design" to commit acts of brutality against concentration camp prisoners who were civilians and members of the armed forces of countries that were allied with America in World War II. The Piorkowski case was unremarkable and would have been quickly swept into the dust bin of history, had it not been for the vigorous protest of his sentence by the chief defense council, Major Bigelow Boysen of the US Army. Boysen believed so strongly in Piorkowski's innocence that he even tried to bring the case before the Supreme Court of the United States, but it was rejected. After Boysen was discharged from the Army, he continued to fight for the release of Piorkowski, although he was no longer responsible for his defense. Alex Bernhard Piorkowski was the Commandant at Dachau in 1941 and 1942, before he was replaced by Martin Gottfried Weiss in September 1942. According to Harold Marcuse in his book, "Legacies of Dachau," Heinrich Himmler "punished several of the sadistic and corrupt concentration camp commandants" including Piorkowski who was fired from his position as Commandant of Dachau, as of September 1, 1942. According to Paul Berben in his book "Dachau 1933 - 1945, The Official History," Piorkowski was later kicked out of the Nazi party. Berben wrote that Piorkowski "rarely entered the prisoners' camp. He was not active, and left most things in the hands of his subordinates. They were given a free reign and could treat prisoners as they wished." Heinz Höhne mentions in his book, "The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS," that Piorkowski was indicted for murder, but not convicted, by SS officer Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, who was an investigator and the judge of an SS special court. As a defense witness for the SS, Morgen testified at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on 7 August 1946 that he had looked at 800 documents that pertained to the concentration camp cases of corruption and murder. This eventually resulted in 200 indictments including 5 concentration camp commandants who were arrested and put on trial. Dr. Morgen mentioned in his Nuremberg testimony that he was imprisoned in the bunker at the Dachau camp while the Military Tribunals were in progress and his cell mates included some of the people that he had arrested and investigated, which would have included Piorkowski. Berben mentioned in his official history that investigations of camp conditions were held at Dachau by Morgen between May and July of 1944. However, by that time, the Commandant of Dachau was Wilhelm Weiter, who had replaced Martin Weiss, the successor of Piorkowski. The crimes which were charged against the accused at the Dachau trials were only those committed between January 1942 and May 1945 when the accused were participating in a war against America and its allies. This meant that any atrocities committed in the Dachau concentration camp before 1942 would not count. Piorkowski had only been present in the Dachau camp for approximately 6 months during this period, because he was absent due to illness for a couple of months. Under the "common design" concept, Piorkowski was guilty of any violations of the Laws and Usages of War while he was the commandant, regardless of his personal conduct toward the prisoners. As in all the Dachau cases, Piorkowski's trial was reviewed by the US Military after sentencing. The lawyer who reviewed the Piorkowski case was First Lieutenant Elmer Moody. At the end of his report, Moody wrote "He participated in the common design to a very substantial degree. The evidence is sufficient to support the findings and sentence of the Court." Major Boysen apparently did not believe in the "common design" theory of guilt because he tried to get clemency for Piorkowski by pointing out letters that had been sent to the War Crimes Group by former inmates who claimed that Piorkowski had not committed any atrocities. These letters, which were probably sent at the suggestion of Boysen himself, were dismissed by the War Crimes Group because it didn't matter what Piorkowski did personally in the camp; he was the Commandant of the camp and as such was a participant in the common design to violate the Laws and Usages of War. According to Joseph Halow's book, one of the letter writers was Lt. Col. H.H. Stevens, a Prisoner of War at Dachau. Stevens was a spy in the British Secret Intelligence Service in Holland, who was arrested as a conspirator in the failed plot to kill Hitler with a bomb placed in a Munich beer hall by Georg Elser, a former prisoner at Dachau who had recently been released. In his letter, Stevens described his treatment at Dachau: he was given a private room, not a cell. His room was furnished with a good bed, a desk and a chair. Piorkowski had brought him occasional gifts of flowers or wine or real coffee. He even permitted Stevens to swim in the SS officer's swimming pool when no one else was around. Another letter writer, Dr. Konrad Stromenger, a Protestant religious dissident who spent seven years at Dachau, said that the inmates at Dachau were well-fed and rested. He maintained that Dachau, under Piorkowski's administration, had the best reputation of all the German camps. As quoted in Halow's book "Innocent at Dachau," the review board, after reading the letters, wrote the following report: It must be presumed that these statements are as favorable as anything they would have said in court. These two statements were accompanied by others from members of the clergy and from lay persons, all Germans. All of them were found to be without merit by a War Crimes Board of Review on the ground "they testify to individual acts of kindness to individuals, and in no way negative (sic) the atrocious treatment meted out to the vast majority of non-German nationals." Another innovative idea used by the America prosecutors in the war crimes proceedings was that any findings and sentences in the main trials would become matters of judicial notice at subsequent subsidiary trials. In other words, any atrocities proven in a prior trial could be used as proof of guilt against future defendants since they were all being tried under the common design concept. Major Boysen pointed out that the prosecution's allegation that 6,000 to 8,000 Russian POWs had been executed at Dachau in the spring of 1942 had not been proved in the main trial of Dachau camp personnel, yet it was put into evidence in the Piorkowski trial, along with other atrocities that had become matters of judicial notice and did not have to be proved again. According to Joseph Halow, Boysen concluded that he was of the "definite opinion that no such massacre occurred at Dachau as is factually stated to have taken place there in Prosecution Exhibit 1." In spite of all of Boysen's efforts, Alex Piorkowski was hanged at Landsberg am Lech prison on October 22, 1948. Back to Dachau Trials Home