Dachau Trials
US vs. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont
Trial of 31 war criminals
from Buchenwald camp
On March 4, 1947, war crimes charges
were brought against Hermann Pister, the Commandant of the Buchenwald
concentration camp from 1942 to 1945, and 30 others associated
with the camp. Ilse Koch, the wife of former Buchenwald Commandant
Karl Otto Koch, was among the accused. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont,
the highest ranking prisoner among the accused, was an SS-Obergruppenführer
and head of judicial matters in the district which included the
city of Weimar and the Buchenwald camp.
Josias Erbprinz zu
Waldeck-Pyrmont sentenced to life, August 14, 1947
Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont was
a member of the German royalty, who had joined the SS in 1929.
He is shown in the photograph above, as he faced the Tribunal
to hear his sentence of life in prison.
Waldeck was the one who blew the whistle
on Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch in 1943 after he noticed
the name of Dr. Walter Kramer on a list of political prisoners
who had been executed on Koch's orders. By that time, Koch had
been transferred to the Majdanek death camp in Poland, but his
wife, Ilse, was still living at the Commandant's house in Buchenwald.
Waldeck ordered a full scale investigation of the camp by Dr.
Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS officer who was a judge in a German
court. It was during this investigation that prisoners at Buchenwald
told Morgen about the lampshades allegedly made from human skin.
Thus started the human lampshade story that is still alive and
well today.
After the German Army surrendered to
the Allies in May 1945, a total of 1,672 German war criminals
were brought before a series of American Military Tribunals,
held at the former Dachau concentration camp, between November
1945 and August 1948. These cases against staff members of the
Nazi concentration camps were those in which the American military
had jurisdiction by virtue of having been the liberators of the
camps where the crimes had been committed.
The American Military Tribunals at Dachau
included proceedings against staff members of the Dachau, Mauthausen,
Flossenbürg, Buchenwald and Nordhausen concentration camps,
as well as other trials of German war criminals. The proceedings
against the 31 accused Buchenwald war criminals began on April
11, 1947, the second anniversary of the liberation of the camp
by the 6th Armored Division of the US Third Army.
Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen
on the witness stand, August 5, 1947
Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, shown in
the photograph above, was one of the accused in the 1947 American
Military Tribunal proceedings against former staff members and
prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen
commanded a great deal of attention in the courtroom because
he was a former American citizen, 65 years old, very arrogant
and able to hold his own against the American prosecutor, as
he testified in a deep baritone voice. A prisoner at Buchenwald,
he had originally been on the prosecution witness list, and had
helped with interrogations of other prisoners; then he wound
up among the accused.
Also among the accused was Hans Merbach,
the SS soldier who had been in charge of the transport train
on which around 5,000 Buchenwald inmates were transported to
the Dachau concentration camp, and only about 25% of them survived
the trip. This was the infamous Death Train which was discovered by the American
liberators on the day that they liberated the Dachau concentration
camp.
The "Buchenwald trial" was
officially known as US vs. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont,
Case No. 000-50-5-9. Waldeck was an SS general and the highest
ranking person among the accused. Dr. Walter Wendt and Arthur
Dietzsch were Kapos who assisted the SS staff in the Buchenwald
camp. The list of the 31 accused war criminals in the main Buchenwald
case is as follows:
Otto Barnewald
August Bender
Anton Bergmeier
Arthur Dietzsch (Kapo)
Dr. Hans Eisele (Camp doctor)
Werner Greunuss
Philipp Grimm
Hermann Grossmann
Heinrich Hackmann
Gustav Heigel
Hermann Helbig
Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen (prisoner)
Josef Kestel
Ilse Koch
Richard Koehler
Hubert Krautwurst
Hans Merbach
Peter Merker
Wolfgang Otto
Hermann Pister (Camp Commandant)
Emil Pleissner
Guido Reimer
Helmut Rocher
Hans Schmidt
Max Schobert
Albert Schwartz
Josias, Erbprinz von und zu Waldeck-Pyrmont (SS general)
Dr. Walter Wendt (Kapo)
Friedrich Wilhelm
Hans Wolf
Hans Zinecker
The authority for charging the defeated
Germans with war crimes came from the London Agreement, signed
on August 8, 1945 by the four winning countries: Great Britain,
France, the Soviet Union and the USA. The basis for the proceedings
of the military tribunals against the accused German war criminals
was Law Order No. 10, issued by the Allied Control Council, the
governing body for Germany before the country was divided into
East and West Germany. Law No. 10 defined Crimes against Peace,
War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. A fourth crime category
was membership in any organization, such as the Nazi party, that
was declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal
at Nuremberg.
The war crimes contained in Law Order
No. 10 were new crimes, created specifically for the defeated
Germans, not crimes against existing international laws. Any
acts committed by the winning Allies which were covered under
Law No. 10 were not considered war crimes.
Although commonly referred to as "trials,"
these proceedings were technically not trials because the normal
rules of court trials in America or Great Britain were not followed.
Hearsay testimony was allowed and most of the prosecution witnesses
were paid. Affidavits from witnesses were allowed, which meant
that the defense had no opportunity to cross-examine the witness
who had signed the affidavit. Interrogators questioned the accused
before the proceedings began and established that they were guilty.
The accused were charged with participating
in a "common plan" to commit war crimes and they were
presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. They were not called
"defendants" because the burden of proof was on them,
not on the prosecution as is customary in a court trial. The
tribunal took judicial notice that the crimes had been committed,
so the defense could not argue, for example, that no human lamp
shades had been made, but only that Ilse Koch had not been involved
in their manufacture.
All that was necessary, to prove that
one of the accused war criminals was guilty of being part of
a "common plan," was to prove that he had some association
with the place where the crimes, which were already an established
fact, had been committed. The basis for this was Article II,
paragraph 2 of Law Order No. 10 which stated as follows:
2. Any person without regard to nationality
or the capacity in which he acted, is deemed to have committed
a crime as defined in paragraph 1 of this Article, if he was
(a) a principal or (b) was an accessory to the commission of
any such crime or ordered or abetted the same or (c) took a consenting
part therein or (d) was connected with plans or enterprises involving
its commission or (e) was a member of any organization or group
connected with the commission of any such crime or (f) with reference
to paragraph 1 (a), if he held a high political, civil or military
(including General Staff) position in Germany or in one of its
Allies, co-belligerents or satellites or held high position in
the financial, industrial or economic life of any such country.
The room where Ilse Koch and other members
of the Buchenwald staff were brought before a US military tribunal
was in one of the buildings in the former Dachau concentration
camp complex. Extra rows of seats had to be installed in the
200-foot-long courtroom to accommodate the crowd of photographers
and reporters who flocked to see the "Bitch of Buchenwald."
The accused war criminals who were awaiting trial were housed
in the prison barracks of the former Dachau concentration camp.
A panel of American military officers,
guided by "law member" Lt. Col. John S. Dwinell, who
made legal rulings, served as both judge and jury for the proceedings.
The court president was Brig. Gen. Emil Charles Kiel. The accused
were defended by American military officers, led by Captain Emmanuel
Lewis, the chief defense counsel. The chief prosecutor was 34-year-old
Lt. Col. William Denson, who had a conviction rate of 100% in
similar proceedings against the staff members of the Dachau,
Mauthausen, and Flossenbürg concentration camps.
The chief interrogator was 24-year-old
Lt. Paul Guth, an American Jew who was born in Vienna and educated
in England before emigrating to the United States. It was Guth's
job to get confessions from the accused, who were then regarded
as guilty until proven innocent. Many of the accused claimed
that they had been beaten during interrogation.
Among other crimes, the staff at the
Buchenwald concentration camp was charged with violating the
rules of warfare according to the Geneva Convention with respect
to mistreatment of American Prisoners of War, held in the camp,
but no names of any American victims were contained in the charges.
When the chief defense attorney, Capt. Emmanuel Lewis, asked
for the names or the whereabouts of the American POWs who had
been mistreated at Buchenwald, the prosecuting attorney, Lt.
Col. William D. Denson, replied that the victims had last been
seen as they were carted off to the crematories, and from there
"they went up the chimney in smoke, and all the power of
the United States and all the documents in Augsberg cannot tell
which way they went."
Contrary to Lt. Col. Denson's colorful
story of what had happened to these American POWs, it is now
known that, after about three months in Buchenwald, the Americans
were rescued by a Luftwaffe General and transferred to Stalag
III, a POW camp.
The American prisoners at Buchenwald
were members of a group of American Air Force pilots, who had
been supplying the French resistance; they were captured after
being shot down in France. Buchenwald was one of the main camps
for French resistance fighters, and the pilots had been lumped
in with captured French civilians who were fighting as insurgents.
According to the Geneva Convention of 1929, it was a war crime
to aid insurgents in a country that had signed an Armistice and
promised to stop fighting. Technically, these pilots had violated
the Geneva Convention by helping insurgents that were illegal
combatants who had continued to fight after their country had
surrendered.
The accused were also charged with violations
of the Geneva Convention of 1929 with respect to Russian Prisoners
of war, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Convention,
and did not treat German POWs according to its laws during the
war and for 10 years afterwards.
In his opening statement in the Buchenwald
proceedings, the chief prosecutor, Lt. Col. Denson, asked for
the death penalty for each of the accused who was charged with
participating in a "common design" to subject the inmates
of Buchenwald to "killings, tortures, starvation, beatings,
and other indignities." He had not asked for the death penalty
for all of the accused in the Dachau, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg
cases, but the Buchenwald crimes were much more heinous.
One of the most important persons, among
the accused from Buchenwald, was the last Commandant of the camp,
Hermann Pister. Under direct examination by his defense attorney,
Pister testified that he was 62 years old, married and had three
children, aged 22, 18 and 4 years old. He said that his wife
was a prisoner in a camp at Landau in the French zone of occupation.
(All the wives and many of the children of the German war criminals
were imprisoned in internment camps where they occupied the barracks
formerly inhabited by prisoners of the Nazis. Their homes had
been confiscated and were being occupied by former Jewish prisoners
or by the American military.)
Pister testified that he had served in
the Imperial Navy in World War I, starting at the age of 16.
In World War II, he was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the
Waffen-SS; in 1939 he was put in charge of a "labor education
camp," which he said was not a concentration camp. In December
1941, Pister said that he was appointed the Commandant of Buchenwald
by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
In his direct testimony, Pister spoke
of the "great number of criminal elements" at Buchenwald,
which he said included "habitual drunkards and vagrants"
as well as "professional criminals" and Jehovah's Witnesses
who were imprisoned "not for their religious convictions,
but for their Communist tendencies."
In his testimony, as quoted by Joshua
M. Greene in his book "Justice at Dachau," Pister painted
a rosy picture of life at Buchenwald when he took over as Commandant
in 1942:
"I was surprised by the good
installations in the camp. There was a bed for every prisoner,
covered with a sheet and two woolen blankets. The capacity was,
under normal circumstances, about fifteen thousand. At that time
there were eight thousand. Each house consisted of two bedrooms,
two dormitories, two dayrooms, and toilets. There was a huge
sewer system, an excellent steam kitchen which could prepare
food for ten thousand at a time, a cold storage room underneath
the kitchen in which five million pounds of potatoes could be
stored, a modern laundry, electrical pressing equipment, and
a large clothing warehouse where the prisoners' clothing and
valuables were hung up in a sack with a number on it. The prisoner
hospital had two large operating rooms, a TB station, X-ray stations
and heated bath. There was a barber in each block and cleanliness
was excellent. Seeing such facilities, I believed I could create
the same results as I had achieved on a smaller scale at the
labor education camp."
Pister emphasized in his testimony that
he did not mistreat the prisoners, as had the former Commandant
Karl Otto Koch, who was executed by the Nazis for ordering the
death of two prisoners. Pister testified as follows:
"I immediately issued an order
that mistreatment would be punished most severely. I referred
to an order issued personally by the Führer (Adolf Hitler)
that read 'I am the one who decides about the life or death of
a prisoner or also my representative appointed by myself.' Of
course, I couldn't do away with all mistreatments overnight,
but witnesses can testify that any mistreatment of which I heard
was punished by me immediately."
In his testimony, Pister denied that
Jews had been sent on "death transports," saying that
he "knew as little about so-called death transports as I
did about so-called extermination camps." He said that prisoners
who were not fit for work were transferred to Bergen-Belsen;
he then made the following startling statement: "I state
here, under oath, that Bergen-Belsen was never known as an extermination
camp. Neither was Auschwitz." He pointed out that "from
one such so-called extermination transport so far five Jews have
taken the witness chair in this courtroom." He also pointed
out that, in 1945, one transport of prisoners unfit for work
could not be sent to Bergen-Belsen because that camp was overcrowded.
Pister asked "If Bergen-Belsen was an extermination camp,
how could it have been overcrowded?"
Under cross-examination by the prosecution,
Hermann Pister became so rattled by the questions put to him
by Lt. Col. Denson that he finally confessed on the witness stand,
in answer to a question about whether he was responsible for
extending the railroad line from Buchenwald to the city of Weimar,
that he was "responsible for everything." His defense
attorney, Dr. Wacker then asked that the proceedings be stopped
because Herr Pister's ill health was preventing him from paying
attention to the questions.
Before he lost it, and inadvertently
confessed to everything, Pister had denied all responsibility,
blaming everything on the big shots who were on trial at Nuremberg.
He denied knowing anything about the hooks on the wall in the
morgue where prisoners were allegedly strangled to death. The
recent photograph below shows the hooks near the ceiling in the
morgue.
Prisoners at Buchenwald
were allegedly strangled on hooks
In spite of his blatant denials that
no one was mistreated, beaten, tortured or killed at Buchenwald
on his orders or with his consent, Hermann Pister was convicted
and sentenced to be hanged. In its sentence, the tribunal said
that Pister was guilty of participating in the common plan to
violate the Laws and Usages of War because he had been the commandant
in the camp during the time that Russian Communist Commissars
were executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Such executions
were a violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929 which Germany
had signed, although the Soviet Union had not.
After American soldiers had liberated
the Buchenwald camp, they were astounded when the Communist prisoners
took them on a tour of the camp, showing them pieces of tattooed
human skin, two shrunken heads, preserved human body parts, and
a table lamp with a lampshade allegedly made from human skin.
The two shrunken heads, which looked just like those made by
primitive tribes in South America, were alleged to be those of
Polish political prisoners at Buchenwald. They were put on display
in the court room even though none of the accused was specifically
charged with shrinking these heads.
Prosecution witness
holds shrunken head
A movie about the Buchenwald camp, directed
by famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, had been made by a
film crew of the Signal Corps of the US Army shortly after the
liberation of the camp; it included some footage of a display
table. The photograph below is a still shot from the film which
was shown during the proceedings at Dachau.
Body parts in jars,
shrunken heads, tattooed skin and table lamp
At the suggestion of General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a group of newspaper reporters, who were flown in
from America, had been taken on a grand tour of the Buchenwald
camp in April 1945 and shown all the gory artifacts on the display
table, pictured above. Every major newspaper in America carried
the story of how Ilse Koch, the wife of the Commandant, had imperiously
ridden her chestnut stallion through the Buchenwald camp, selecting
tattooed prisoners to be killed by her lover in order to make
human lamp shades for her home.
The nickname,"Bitch of Buchenwald,"
was given to Isle Koch by a reporter, and it soon became a household
word in America. The public couldn't get enough of the lampshade
story and the proceedings of the Military Tribunal at Dachau
were sensationalized by the media. Film clips from the Buchenwald
camp, with footage of the display table, were shown in the newsreels
in every American theater. In the two years since the liberation
of Buchenwald, Ilse Koch had already been convicted by the media.
The Military Tribunal proceedings were filmed and every week,
film clips were shown in the newsreels at the movies in America.
The proceedings against the 31 accused
in the "Buchenwald trial" began with the showing of
the film made by Billy Wilder. The defense objected, pointing
out that the film had been made three or four days after the
camp came under the control of the American Army, and that it
did not show anything that had occurred prior to that time. The
objection was over ruled and the film was shown. The defense
also objected to the display of the two shrunken heads, but this
objection was also over ruled.
The narration in the film, as quoted
by Joshua M. Greene, in his book "Justice at Dachau,"
is as follows:
This is a pictorial record of the
almost unprecedented crimes perpetrated by the Nazis at the Buchenwald
concentration camp. In the official report, Buchenwald is termed
an extermination factory, and the means of extermination: starvation
complicated by hard work, abuse, beatings, tortures, incredibly
crowded sleeping conditions, and sicknesses of all types. This
is the body disposal plant. There inside are the ovens that gave
the crematory a maximum disposal capacity of four hundred bodies
per ten-hour day. The ovens are extremely modern in design, made
by a firm that specialized in baking ovens. All bodies were finally
reduced to bone ash. One of the first things that German civilians
from neighboring Weimar see on a forced tour of the camp is the
parchment display. A lampshade, made of human skin, made at the
request of an SS officer's wife..."
The SS officer's wife, who was mentioned
in the film, was none other than Ilse Koch, the "Bitch of
Buchenwald," and the wife of the former Commandant, Karl
Otto Koch.
Buchenwald was also the site of medical
experiments carried out by doctors in the camp in an effort to
find a vaccine for typhus, a disease which was devastating all
the concentration camps. The Nazis claimed that the subjects
of the experiments were condemned criminals who were prisoners
in the camp. Bodies of prisoners who died after being forced
to participate in the experiments were autopsied by the camp
doctors and the internal organs were then preserved in formaldehyde
in glass display cases.
America had developed a typhus vaccine
which had been sent to American POWs in Red Cross packages during
the war. The Germans took great pains to deliver these packages,
and consequently 99% of the American POWs in Germany survived
their imprisonment.
Arthur Dietzsch was a prisoner at Buchenwald
who was the chief Kapo (Captain) of the medical experiment building.
He had authority over other prisoners and he was accused of mistreating
his fellow prisoners.
The doctors in all the Nazi concentration
camps delighted in studying and displaying medical oddities,
such as human deformities. This was all part of their obsession
with eugenics and their plan to breed a superior race. According
to Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a Munich bishop who was a prisoner
at Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp had a medical museum.
He wrote in his book "What was it like in Dachau?"
that "The museum containing plaster images of prisoners
who were marked by bodily defects or particular characteristics
was gladly visited by Hitler's officers." Given this proclivity
for displaying medical curiosities, it is not at all surprising
that the doctors at Buchenwald removed large sections of tattooed
skin from dead prisoners and preserved it.
In the photograph below, a Buchenwald
prisoner shows preserved body organs to an American Jewish soldier.
Buchenwald prisoner
shows human organs to Corporal Jack Levine
Dr.
Hans Eisele
Ilse Koch -
human lampshades
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This page was last updated on April 12,
2008
Dachau TrialsUS vs. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-PyrmontTrial of 31 war criminals from Buchenwald campOn March 4, 1947, war crimes charges were brought against Hermann Pister, the Commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1942 to 1945, and 30 others associated with the camp. Ilse Koch, the wife of former Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch, was among the accused. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont, the highest ranking prisoner among the accused, was an SS-Obergruppenführer and head of judicial matters in the district which included the city of Weimar and the Buchenwald camp. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont was a member of the German royalty, who had joined the SS in 1929. He is shown in the photograph above, as he faced the Tribunal to hear his sentence of life in prison. Waldeck was the one who blew the whistle on Buchenwald Commandant Karl Otto Koch in 1943 after he noticed the name of Dr. Walter Kramer on a list of political prisoners who had been executed on Koch's orders. By that time, Koch had been transferred to the Majdanek death camp in Poland, but his wife, Ilse, was still living at the Commandant's house in Buchenwald. Waldeck ordered a full scale investigation of the camp by Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen, an SS officer who was a judge in a German court. It was during this investigation that prisoners at Buchenwald told Morgen about the lampshades allegedly made from human skin. Thus started the human lampshade story that is still alive and well today. After the German Army surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, a total of 1,672 German war criminals were brought before a series of American Military Tribunals, held at the former Dachau concentration camp, between November 1945 and August 1948. These cases against staff members of the Nazi concentration camps were those in which the American military had jurisdiction by virtue of having been the liberators of the camps where the crimes had been committed. The American Military Tribunals at Dachau included proceedings against staff members of the Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Buchenwald and Nordhausen concentration camps, as well as other trials of German war criminals. The proceedings against the 31 accused Buchenwald war criminals began on April 11, 1947, the second anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the 6th Armored Division of the US Third Army. Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, shown in the photograph above, was one of the accused in the 1947 American Military Tribunal proceedings against former staff members and prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen commanded a great deal of attention in the courtroom because he was a former American citizen, 65 years old, very arrogant and able to hold his own against the American prosecutor, as he testified in a deep baritone voice. A prisoner at Buchenwald, he had originally been on the prosecution witness list, and had helped with interrogations of other prisoners; then he wound up among the accused. Also among the accused was Hans Merbach, the SS soldier who had been in charge of the transport train on which around 5,000 Buchenwald inmates were transported to the Dachau concentration camp, and only about 25% of them survived the trip. This was the infamous Death Train which was discovered by the American liberators on the day that they liberated the Dachau concentration camp. The "Buchenwald trial" was officially known as US vs. Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck-Pyrmont, Case No. 000-50-5-9. Waldeck was an SS general and the highest ranking person among the accused. Dr. Walter Wendt and Arthur Dietzsch were Kapos who assisted the SS staff in the Buchenwald camp. The list of the 31 accused war criminals in the main Buchenwald case is as follows: Otto Barnewald The authority for charging the defeated Germans with war crimes came from the London Agreement, signed on August 8, 1945 by the four winning countries: Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the USA. The basis for the proceedings of the military tribunals against the accused German war criminals was Law Order No. 10, issued by the Allied Control Council, the governing body for Germany before the country was divided into East and West Germany. Law No. 10 defined Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. A fourth crime category was membership in any organization, such as the Nazi party, that was declared to be criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The war crimes contained in Law Order No. 10 were new crimes, created specifically for the defeated Germans, not crimes against existing international laws. Any acts committed by the winning Allies which were covered under Law No. 10 were not considered war crimes. Although commonly referred to as "trials," these proceedings were technically not trials because the normal rules of court trials in America or Great Britain were not followed. Hearsay testimony was allowed and most of the prosecution witnesses were paid. Affidavits from witnesses were allowed, which meant that the defense had no opportunity to cross-examine the witness who had signed the affidavit. Interrogators questioned the accused before the proceedings began and established that they were guilty. The accused were charged with participating in a "common plan" to commit war crimes and they were presumed to be guilty until proven innocent. They were not called "defendants" because the burden of proof was on them, not on the prosecution as is customary in a court trial. The tribunal took judicial notice that the crimes had been committed, so the defense could not argue, for example, that no human lamp shades had been made, but only that Ilse Koch had not been involved in their manufacture. All that was necessary, to prove that one of the accused war criminals was guilty of being part of a "common plan," was to prove that he had some association with the place where the crimes, which were already an established fact, had been committed. The basis for this was Article II, paragraph 2 of Law Order No. 10 which stated as follows: 2. Any person without regard to nationality or the capacity in which he acted, is deemed to have committed a crime as defined in paragraph 1 of this Article, if he was (a) a principal or (b) was an accessory to the commission of any such crime or ordered or abetted the same or (c) took a consenting part therein or (d) was connected with plans or enterprises involving its commission or (e) was a member of any organization or group connected with the commission of any such crime or (f) with reference to paragraph 1 (a), if he held a high political, civil or military (including General Staff) position in Germany or in one of its Allies, co-belligerents or satellites or held high position in the financial, industrial or economic life of any such country. The room where Ilse Koch and other members of the Buchenwald staff were brought before a US military tribunal was in one of the buildings in the former Dachau concentration camp complex. Extra rows of seats had to be installed in the 200-foot-long courtroom to accommodate the crowd of photographers and reporters who flocked to see the "Bitch of Buchenwald." The accused war criminals who were awaiting trial were housed in the prison barracks of the former Dachau concentration camp. A panel of American military officers, guided by "law member" Lt. Col. John S. Dwinell, who made legal rulings, served as both judge and jury for the proceedings. The court president was Brig. Gen. Emil Charles Kiel. The accused were defended by American military officers, led by Captain Emmanuel Lewis, the chief defense counsel. The chief prosecutor was 34-year-old Lt. Col. William Denson, who had a conviction rate of 100% in similar proceedings against the staff members of the Dachau, Mauthausen, and Flossenbürg concentration camps. The chief interrogator was 24-year-old Lt. Paul Guth, an American Jew who was born in Vienna and educated in England before emigrating to the United States. It was Guth's job to get confessions from the accused, who were then regarded as guilty until proven innocent. Many of the accused claimed that they had been beaten during interrogation. Among other crimes, the staff at the Buchenwald concentration camp was charged with violating the rules of warfare according to the Geneva Convention with respect to mistreatment of American Prisoners of War, held in the camp, but no names of any American victims were contained in the charges. When the chief defense attorney, Capt. Emmanuel Lewis, asked for the names or the whereabouts of the American POWs who had been mistreated at Buchenwald, the prosecuting attorney, Lt. Col. William D. Denson, replied that the victims had last been seen as they were carted off to the crematories, and from there "they went up the chimney in smoke, and all the power of the United States and all the documents in Augsberg cannot tell which way they went." Contrary to Lt. Col. Denson's colorful story of what had happened to these American POWs, it is now known that, after about three months in Buchenwald, the Americans were rescued by a Luftwaffe General and transferred to Stalag III, a POW camp. The American prisoners at Buchenwald were members of a group of American Air Force pilots, who had been supplying the French resistance; they were captured after being shot down in France. Buchenwald was one of the main camps for French resistance fighters, and the pilots had been lumped in with captured French civilians who were fighting as insurgents. According to the Geneva Convention of 1929, it was a war crime to aid insurgents in a country that had signed an Armistice and promised to stop fighting. Technically, these pilots had violated the Geneva Convention by helping insurgents that were illegal combatants who had continued to fight after their country had surrendered. The accused were also charged with violations of the Geneva Convention of 1929 with respect to Russian Prisoners of war, although the Soviet Union had not signed the Convention, and did not treat German POWs according to its laws during the war and for 10 years afterwards. In his opening statement in the Buchenwald proceedings, the chief prosecutor, Lt. Col. Denson, asked for the death penalty for each of the accused who was charged with participating in a "common design" to subject the inmates of Buchenwald to "killings, tortures, starvation, beatings, and other indignities." He had not asked for the death penalty for all of the accused in the Dachau, Mauthausen and Flossenbürg cases, but the Buchenwald crimes were much more heinous. One of the most important persons, among the accused from Buchenwald, was the last Commandant of the camp, Hermann Pister. Under direct examination by his defense attorney, Pister testified that he was 62 years old, married and had three children, aged 22, 18 and 4 years old. He said that his wife was a prisoner in a camp at Landau in the French zone of occupation. (All the wives and many of the children of the German war criminals were imprisoned in internment camps where they occupied the barracks formerly inhabited by prisoners of the Nazis. Their homes had been confiscated and were being occupied by former Jewish prisoners or by the American military.) Pister testified that he had served in the Imperial Navy in World War I, starting at the age of 16. In World War II, he was a member of the Allgemeine SS and the Waffen-SS; in 1939 he was put in charge of a "labor education camp," which he said was not a concentration camp. In December 1941, Pister said that he was appointed the Commandant of Buchenwald by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In his direct testimony, Pister spoke of the "great number of criminal elements" at Buchenwald, which he said included "habitual drunkards and vagrants" as well as "professional criminals" and Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned "not for their religious convictions, but for their Communist tendencies." In his testimony, as quoted by Joshua M. Greene in his book "Justice at Dachau," Pister painted a rosy picture of life at Buchenwald when he took over as Commandant in 1942: "I was surprised by the good installations in the camp. There was a bed for every prisoner, covered with a sheet and two woolen blankets. The capacity was, under normal circumstances, about fifteen thousand. At that time there were eight thousand. Each house consisted of two bedrooms, two dormitories, two dayrooms, and toilets. There was a huge sewer system, an excellent steam kitchen which could prepare food for ten thousand at a time, a cold storage room underneath the kitchen in which five million pounds of potatoes could be stored, a modern laundry, electrical pressing equipment, and a large clothing warehouse where the prisoners' clothing and valuables were hung up in a sack with a number on it. The prisoner hospital had two large operating rooms, a TB station, X-ray stations and heated bath. There was a barber in each block and cleanliness was excellent. Seeing such facilities, I believed I could create the same results as I had achieved on a smaller scale at the labor education camp." Pister emphasized in his testimony that he did not mistreat the prisoners, as had the former Commandant Karl Otto Koch, who was executed by the Nazis for ordering the death of two prisoners. Pister testified as follows: "I immediately issued an order that mistreatment would be punished most severely. I referred to an order issued personally by the Führer (Adolf Hitler) that read 'I am the one who decides about the life or death of a prisoner or also my representative appointed by myself.' Of course, I couldn't do away with all mistreatments overnight, but witnesses can testify that any mistreatment of which I heard was punished by me immediately." In his testimony, Pister denied that Jews had been sent on "death transports," saying that he "knew as little about so-called death transports as I did about so-called extermination camps." He said that prisoners who were not fit for work were transferred to Bergen-Belsen; he then made the following startling statement: "I state here, under oath, that Bergen-Belsen was never known as an extermination camp. Neither was Auschwitz." He pointed out that "from one such so-called extermination transport so far five Jews have taken the witness chair in this courtroom." He also pointed out that, in 1945, one transport of prisoners unfit for work could not be sent to Bergen-Belsen because that camp was overcrowded. Pister asked "If Bergen-Belsen was an extermination camp, how could it have been overcrowded?" Under cross-examination by the prosecution, Hermann Pister became so rattled by the questions put to him by Lt. Col. Denson that he finally confessed on the witness stand, in answer to a question about whether he was responsible for extending the railroad line from Buchenwald to the city of Weimar, that he was "responsible for everything." His defense attorney, Dr. Wacker then asked that the proceedings be stopped because Herr Pister's ill health was preventing him from paying attention to the questions. Before he lost it, and inadvertently confessed to everything, Pister had denied all responsibility, blaming everything on the big shots who were on trial at Nuremberg. He denied knowing anything about the hooks on the wall in the morgue where prisoners were allegedly strangled to death. The recent photograph below shows the hooks near the ceiling in the morgue. In spite of his blatant denials that no one was mistreated, beaten, tortured or killed at Buchenwald on his orders or with his consent, Hermann Pister was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. In its sentence, the tribunal said that Pister was guilty of participating in the common plan to violate the Laws and Usages of War because he had been the commandant in the camp during the time that Russian Communist Commissars were executed on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Such executions were a violation of the Geneva Convention of 1929 which Germany had signed, although the Soviet Union had not. After American soldiers had liberated the Buchenwald camp, they were astounded when the Communist prisoners took them on a tour of the camp, showing them pieces of tattooed human skin, two shrunken heads, preserved human body parts, and a table lamp with a lampshade allegedly made from human skin. The two shrunken heads, which looked just like those made by primitive tribes in South America, were alleged to be those of Polish political prisoners at Buchenwald. They were put on display in the court room even though none of the accused was specifically charged with shrinking these heads. A movie about the Buchenwald camp, directed by famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, had been made by a film crew of the Signal Corps of the US Army shortly after the liberation of the camp; it included some footage of a display table. The photograph below is a still shot from the film which was shown during the proceedings at Dachau. At the suggestion of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a group of newspaper reporters, who were flown in from America, had been taken on a grand tour of the Buchenwald camp in April 1945 and shown all the gory artifacts on the display table, pictured above. Every major newspaper in America carried the story of how Ilse Koch, the wife of the Commandant, had imperiously ridden her chestnut stallion through the Buchenwald camp, selecting tattooed prisoners to be killed by her lover in order to make human lamp shades for her home. The nickname,"Bitch of Buchenwald," was given to Isle Koch by a reporter, and it soon became a household word in America. The public couldn't get enough of the lampshade story and the proceedings of the Military Tribunal at Dachau were sensationalized by the media. Film clips from the Buchenwald camp, with footage of the display table, were shown in the newsreels in every American theater. In the two years since the liberation of Buchenwald, Ilse Koch had already been convicted by the media. The Military Tribunal proceedings were filmed and every week, film clips were shown in the newsreels at the movies in America. The proceedings against the 31 accused in the "Buchenwald trial" began with the showing of the film made by Billy Wilder. The defense objected, pointing out that the film had been made three or four days after the camp came under the control of the American Army, and that it did not show anything that had occurred prior to that time. The objection was over ruled and the film was shown. The defense also objected to the display of the two shrunken heads, but this objection was also over ruled. The narration in the film, as quoted by Joshua M. Greene, in his book "Justice at Dachau," is as follows: This is a pictorial record of the almost unprecedented crimes perpetrated by the Nazis at the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the official report, Buchenwald is termed an extermination factory, and the means of extermination: starvation complicated by hard work, abuse, beatings, tortures, incredibly crowded sleeping conditions, and sicknesses of all types. This is the body disposal plant. There inside are the ovens that gave the crematory a maximum disposal capacity of four hundred bodies per ten-hour day. The ovens are extremely modern in design, made by a firm that specialized in baking ovens. All bodies were finally reduced to bone ash. One of the first things that German civilians from neighboring Weimar see on a forced tour of the camp is the parchment display. A lampshade, made of human skin, made at the request of an SS officer's wife..." The SS officer's wife, who was mentioned in the film, was none other than Ilse Koch, the "Bitch of Buchenwald," and the wife of the former Commandant, Karl Otto Koch. Buchenwald was also the site of medical experiments carried out by doctors in the camp in an effort to find a vaccine for typhus, a disease which was devastating all the concentration camps. The Nazis claimed that the subjects of the experiments were condemned criminals who were prisoners in the camp. Bodies of prisoners who died after being forced to participate in the experiments were autopsied by the camp doctors and the internal organs were then preserved in formaldehyde in glass display cases. America had developed a typhus vaccine which had been sent to American POWs in Red Cross packages during the war. The Germans took great pains to deliver these packages, and consequently 99% of the American POWs in Germany survived their imprisonment. Arthur Dietzsch was a prisoner at Buchenwald who was the chief Kapo (Captain) of the medical experiment building. He had authority over other prisoners and he was accused of mistreating his fellow prisoners. The doctors in all the Nazi concentration camps delighted in studying and displaying medical oddities, such as human deformities. This was all part of their obsession with eugenics and their plan to breed a superior race. According to Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler, a Munich bishop who was a prisoner at Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp had a medical museum. He wrote in his book "What was it like in Dachau?" that "The museum containing plaster images of prisoners who were marked by bodily defects or particular characteristics was gladly visited by Hitler's officers." Given this proclivity for displaying medical curiosities, it is not at all surprising that the doctors at Buchenwald removed large sections of tattooed skin from dead prisoners and preserved it. In the photograph below, a Buchenwald prisoner shows preserved body organs to an American Jewish soldier. Dr. Hans EiseleIlse Koch - human lampshadesBack to Dachau TrialsHomeThis page was last updated on April 12, 2008 |