Dachau Trials
US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al
Outside wall of gas
chamber, hidden by wooden screen in April 1945
Before the first American Military Tribunal
at Dachau began its proceedings in November 1945, a War Crimes
Investigation Team had summarized its findings in the Report
of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed
by JAGD Col. David Chavez Jr. on 7 May 1945.
The Chavez Report stated on page 56 that
the wooden structure, shown against the east wall of the crematorium
in the photo at the top of this page, was a "Wooden shed
believed to contain a pump or compressor."
This wooden shed, which was against the
exterior wall of the gas chamber, has long since been removed.
Today tourists are told that gas pellets were poured into the
Dachau gas chamber through two bins on the outside wall. These
bins were hidden by the wooden shed when the American liberators
arrived. An undated addendum, which mentioned the bins, was added
to the Chavez Report at a later date.
One of the bins on
outside wall of the Dachau gas chamber, May 2003
On page 25, The Chavez Report, which
was not introduced at the trial, stated the following:
The new building had a gas chamber
for executions... the gas chamber was labeled "shower room"
over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and
double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was
studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole,
double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the
conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen
cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber
and out the top vents.
In the film presented by the American prosecutor
at Nuremberg on November 29, 1945, the "top vents"
mentioned in the Chavez report were called "gas vents."
These vents were light fixture boxes on the wall near the ceiling
from which the light fixture had been removed. In the descriptions of the Dachau gas chamber by
other Americans who first saw it, none mentioned the gas coming
through the "top vents," as described by Col. Chavez
in the quotation at the top of this page.
Today, these "top vents" or
"gas vents" are no longer claimed to have been used
to introduce gas into the Dachau gas chamber, and the Dachau
Museum has no explanation for why half of the light fixture boxes
have no lights. The photo below shows one of the "gas vents"
flush against the poured concrete ceiling; it appears that some
re-grouting has been done around the tiles near the light box.
Box for light fixture
was one of the "top vents" mentioned in the Chavez
Report
Col. Chavez testified as an expert witness
on the first day of the trial of Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39
others, but he did not mention the gas chamber; the gas chamber
exhibits which his investigative team had prepared were not shown
in the courtroom. The gas chamber itself was only a few hundred
yards away from the courtroom and could easily have been used
as Exhibit A in the trial.
Although the American public had been
told that there was a gas chamber at Dachau, none of the accused
at the American Military Tribunal, held at Dachau, were specifically
charged with any crimes involving the gas chamber. The prosecution
did not mention the existence of the gas chamber in its opening
statement, nor in its closing statement. Neither was the gas
chamber mentioned in the judgment of the court. None of the accused
was asked any questions about the gas chamber.
At the American Military Tribunal proceedings,
the only witness who mentioned the gas chamber was Dr. Francizek
Blaha, a Communist inmate at Dachau, who also signed an affidavit containing information about the
Dachau gas chamber which was entered at Nuremberg as Document
3249-PS. The Blaha affidavit, written on May 3, 1945, was read
into the proceedings at Nuremberg. The Chavez report was rewritten
and entered into the Nuremberg trial as Documents 159L and 2430-PS.
Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was an SS officer
and a judge, who was authorized by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich
Himmler to investigate all the concentration camps and bring
charges against the staff members for any corruption or cruelty
in the camps. He testified for the defense for two days at the
Nuremberg IMT. Quoted below is his testimony at Nuremberg on
8 August 1946, regarding Dachau:
Q. Did you see the internal arrangements,
the hospital, and so forth?
A. I examined all these facilities
carefully, and I must say the hospital was in excellent order.
I went through all the wards. There was no noticeable overcrowding,
and remarkably enough the number of medical instruments which
were at the service of the prisoners was astonishing. Prisoners
with special professional abilities were there, too.
Q. Very well. You want to say that
conditions were good. Then you contradict the testimony of the
witness Doctor Blaha, which was made the subject of evidence
here. Do you know his testimony?
A. I read the testimony of Doctor
Blaha in the Press, and here I had the opportunity to look through
the record of the trial. I must say that this testimony amazes
me. I am of the opinion that Blaha, from his own knowledge, cannot
make such statements. It is not true that prisoners in a concentration
camp can move about freely and have access to the different sections
and installations.
THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal thinks
he can say that he disagrees with the evidence of Blaha, but
not that Blaha was not telling the truth. He disagrees, he said
it. We think you might get on. How much more time do you anticipate
that you will take.
DR. PELCKMANN: Five minutes, your
Lordship.
Q. You were just about to say, witness,
why you did not agree with the testimony of Blaha?
THE PRESIDENT: He has given his own
evidence about the matter, and he says he is in contradiction
with Blaha. We do not want further details about it.
DR. PELCKMANN: Mr. President, if I
understood correctly, it is for the witness to give credible
testimony. If he does not say that to such and such points of
the testimony of Blaha he has such and such an objection, the
prosecution can say he did not comment on it. That is my point.
Please instruct me, your Lordship, if I am mistaken.
THE PRESIDENT: He has given his account
of the camp at Dachau. The Tribunal has before it the evidence
and testimony of Blaha. The Tribunal can see for itself if the
evidence is inconsistent. That is sufficient.
DR. PELCKMANN: I attempted to give
the reasons, but if the Tribunal does not wish to go into it
further, I will withdraw the question.
Dr. Morgen was being held as a prisoner
in the Dachau bunker while the trials at Dachau were in progress,
according to his own statement at Nuremberg. He was called as
a witness for the
defense at the Buchenwald trial, but not at the trial of the
Dachau staff members.
The transcripts and exhibits from the
proceedings against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al are available
on 6 reels of microfilm in the National Archives in Washington,
DC. The transcripts, on reels 2 & 3, contain no mention of
any gas chamber at Dachau except for a few sentences in the testimony
of Dr Francizek Blaha, a Communist prisoner at Dachau. The pre-trial
gas chamber exhibits, on reel 1 of the microfilm in the National
Archives, were never introduced into evidence at the trial and
are not included in the trial exhibits on reel 4.
By the time that the Dachau proceedings
began, a small museum had already been set up by Erich Preuss,
a former prisoner, in Baracke X, the crematorium building, and
on the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as many American
soldiers as possible were being brought to view the gas chamber.
The Dachau trials only included crimes
committed against the Allies during World War II. The charges
against all of the accused was that they had participated in
a common plan to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the
Geneva Convention of 1929 and the Hague Convention of 1907. There
was no evidence that any citizen of an Allied country, or an
Allied soldier, had been killed in the gas chamber at Dachau.
In the Dachau trial of the staff of the Mauthausen concentration
camp, there were charges that Russian soldiers had been killed
in the gas chamber there.
At the Nuremberg International Military
Tribunal, 3 members of the American prosecution team provided
sworn affidavits, testifying to the existence of lethal gas chambers
at the Dachau concentration camp. These affidavits were signed
by James B. Donovan, Lt. Col. Calvin A. Behle of the Judge Advocate
General's Department and Lt. Hugh C. Daly of the 42nd Rainbow
Division of the US Seventh Army which liberated Dachau. The affidavits
were included in Nuremberg Document 2430-PS which was read in
court, but Donovan, Behle and Daly were not present so that they
could have been cross-examined by the defense.
After the war, Lt. Hugh C. Daly wrote
a book entitled "A Combat History of World War II"
which was published in 1946 by the Army and Navy Publishing Company,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In his book, Lt. Daly wrote that Dachau
prisoners were herded into the gas chamber to die and that "thousands
of men, women and children died this way in Dachau."
Confessions about the use of lethal gas
chambers to murder the Jews and Russian POWs were obtained by
British, American or Russian interrogators from the Commandants
of Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Auschwitz, but Martin
Gottfried Weiss, who was the Commandant of Dachau when the gas
chamber was built there, never cracked under the interrogation
of Lt. Paul Guth, an American Jew who had emigrated from Vienna.
Weiss was one of the few staff members at Dachau who apparently
made no incriminating confession.
The existence of a gas chamber at Dachau
was never proved at Nuremberg, nor at the Dachau proceedings.
Nevertheless, the Dachau Memorial Site today acknowledges the
claims of some of the survivors that the gas chamber at Dachau
was used to kill prisoners in the camp. However, one of the most
famous inmates at Dachau, Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler who was
a Catholic Bishop, wrote the following on page 17 of his book
"What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?":
Also behind the wire fence was the
camp crematorium. At first it was housed in a wooden barrack,
later in a stone building built by Polish Catholic priests, to
whom the building trade had been taught. This crematorium was
located in a small forest on the west side quite close to the
camp. The prevailing wind was from the west and consequently
the smell of burning corpses filled the camp, reminding the prisoners
of their approaching end and adding immeasurably to their despair.
With the new crematorium a gas chamber
was also connected. The whole construction of the crematorium
with its gas chamber was completed in 1943. It contained an "undressing
room", a "shower bath", and a "mortuary".
The "showers" were metal traps which had no pipelines
for a supply of poisonous gas. This gas chamber was never set
in action in Dachau. Only the dead were brought to the crematorium
for "burning", no living for "gassing". And
yet thousands of the inmates of Dachau were gassed. For this
purpose they were brought as "Invalids-Transport" (from
1942 - 1944 alone, 3166 prisoners) to Hartheim near Linz (Austria).
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This page was last updated on April 6,
2008
Dachau TrialsUS vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss, et alBefore the first American Military Tribunal at Dachau began its proceedings in November 1945, a War Crimes Investigation Team had summarized its findings in the Report of the Atrocities Committed at Dachau Concentration Camp, signed by JAGD Col. David Chavez Jr. on 7 May 1945. The Chavez Report stated on page 56 that the wooden structure, shown against the east wall of the crematorium in the photo at the top of this page, was a "Wooden shed believed to contain a pump or compressor." This wooden shed, which was against the exterior wall of the gas chamber, has long since been removed. Today tourists are told that gas pellets were poured into the Dachau gas chamber through two bins on the outside wall. These bins were hidden by the wooden shed when the American liberators arrived. An undated addendum, which mentioned the bins, was added to the Chavez Report at a later date. On page 25, The Chavez Report, which was not introduced at the trial, stated the following: The new building had a gas chamber for executions... the gas chamber was labeled "shower room" over the entrance and was a large room with airtight doors and double glassed lights, sealed and gas proof. The ceiling was studded with dummy shower heads. A small observation peephole, double glassed and hermetically sealed was used to observe the conditions of the victims. There were grates in the floor. Hydrogen cyanide was mixed in the room below, and rose into the gas chamber and out the top vents. In the film presented by the American prosecutor at Nuremberg on November 29, 1945, the "top vents" mentioned in the Chavez report were called "gas vents." These vents were light fixture boxes on the wall near the ceiling from which the light fixture had been removed. In the descriptions of the Dachau gas chamber by other Americans who first saw it, none mentioned the gas coming through the "top vents," as described by Col. Chavez in the quotation at the top of this page. Today, these "top vents" or "gas vents" are no longer claimed to have been used to introduce gas into the Dachau gas chamber, and the Dachau Museum has no explanation for why half of the light fixture boxes have no lights. The photo below shows one of the "gas vents" flush against the poured concrete ceiling; it appears that some re-grouting has been done around the tiles near the light box. Col. Chavez testified as an expert witness on the first day of the trial of Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39 others, but he did not mention the gas chamber; the gas chamber exhibits which his investigative team had prepared were not shown in the courtroom. The gas chamber itself was only a few hundred yards away from the courtroom and could easily have been used as Exhibit A in the trial. Although the American public had been told that there was a gas chamber at Dachau, none of the accused at the American Military Tribunal, held at Dachau, were specifically charged with any crimes involving the gas chamber. The prosecution did not mention the existence of the gas chamber in its opening statement, nor in its closing statement. Neither was the gas chamber mentioned in the judgment of the court. None of the accused was asked any questions about the gas chamber. At the American Military Tribunal proceedings, the only witness who mentioned the gas chamber was Dr. Francizek Blaha, a Communist inmate at Dachau, who also signed an affidavit containing information about the Dachau gas chamber which was entered at Nuremberg as Document 3249-PS. The Blaha affidavit, written on May 3, 1945, was read into the proceedings at Nuremberg. The Chavez report was rewritten and entered into the Nuremberg trial as Documents 159L and 2430-PS. Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen was an SS officer and a judge, who was authorized by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to investigate all the concentration camps and bring charges against the staff members for any corruption or cruelty in the camps. He testified for the defense for two days at the Nuremberg IMT. Quoted below is his testimony at Nuremberg on 8 August 1946, regarding Dachau: Q. Did you see the internal arrangements, the hospital, and so forth? A. I examined all these facilities carefully, and I must say the hospital was in excellent order. I went through all the wards. There was no noticeable overcrowding, and remarkably enough the number of medical instruments which were at the service of the prisoners was astonishing. Prisoners with special professional abilities were there, too. Q. Very well. You want to say that conditions were good. Then you contradict the testimony of the witness Doctor Blaha, which was made the subject of evidence here. Do you know his testimony? A. I read the testimony of Doctor Blaha in the Press, and here I had the opportunity to look through the record of the trial. I must say that this testimony amazes me. I am of the opinion that Blaha, from his own knowledge, cannot make such statements. It is not true that prisoners in a concentration camp can move about freely and have access to the different sections and installations. THE PRESIDENT: The Tribunal thinks he can say that he disagrees with the evidence of Blaha, but not that Blaha was not telling the truth. He disagrees, he said it. We think you might get on. How much more time do you anticipate that you will take. DR. PELCKMANN: Five minutes, your Lordship. Q. You were just about to say, witness, why you did not agree with the testimony of Blaha? THE PRESIDENT: He has given his own evidence about the matter, and he says he is in contradiction with Blaha. We do not want further details about it. DR. PELCKMANN: Mr. President, if I understood correctly, it is for the witness to give credible testimony. If he does not say that to such and such points of the testimony of Blaha he has such and such an objection, the prosecution can say he did not comment on it. That is my point. Please instruct me, your Lordship, if I am mistaken. THE PRESIDENT: He has given his account of the camp at Dachau. The Tribunal has before it the evidence and testimony of Blaha. The Tribunal can see for itself if the evidence is inconsistent. That is sufficient. DR. PELCKMANN: I attempted to give the reasons, but if the Tribunal does not wish to go into it further, I will withdraw the question. Dr. Morgen was being held as a prisoner in the Dachau bunker while the trials at Dachau were in progress, according to his own statement at Nuremberg. He was called as a witness for the defense at the Buchenwald trial, but not at the trial of the Dachau staff members. The transcripts and exhibits from the proceedings against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al are available on 6 reels of microfilm in the National Archives in Washington, DC. The transcripts, on reels 2 & 3, contain no mention of any gas chamber at Dachau except for a few sentences in the testimony of Dr Francizek Blaha, a Communist prisoner at Dachau. The pre-trial gas chamber exhibits, on reel 1 of the microfilm in the National Archives, were never introduced into evidence at the trial and are not included in the trial exhibits on reel 4. By the time that the Dachau proceedings began, a small museum had already been set up by Erich Preuss, a former prisoner, in Baracke X, the crematorium building, and on the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as many American soldiers as possible were being brought to view the gas chamber. The Dachau trials only included crimes committed against the Allies during World War II. The charges against all of the accused was that they had participated in a common plan to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the Hague Convention of 1907. There was no evidence that any citizen of an Allied country, or an Allied soldier, had been killed in the gas chamber at Dachau. In the Dachau trial of the staff of the Mauthausen concentration camp, there were charges that Russian soldiers had been killed in the gas chamber there. At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, 3 members of the American prosecution team provided sworn affidavits, testifying to the existence of lethal gas chambers at the Dachau concentration camp. These affidavits were signed by James B. Donovan, Lt. Col. Calvin A. Behle of the Judge Advocate General's Department and Lt. Hugh C. Daly of the 42nd Rainbow Division of the US Seventh Army which liberated Dachau. The affidavits were included in Nuremberg Document 2430-PS which was read in court, but Donovan, Behle and Daly were not present so that they could have been cross-examined by the defense. After the war, Lt. Hugh C. Daly wrote a book entitled "A Combat History of World War II" which was published in 1946 by the Army and Navy Publishing Company, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In his book, Lt. Daly wrote that Dachau prisoners were herded into the gas chamber to die and that "thousands of men, women and children died this way in Dachau." Confessions about the use of lethal gas chambers to murder the Jews and Russian POWs were obtained by British, American or Russian interrogators from the Commandants of Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Auschwitz, but Martin Gottfried Weiss, who was the Commandant of Dachau when the gas chamber was built there, never cracked under the interrogation of Lt. Paul Guth, an American Jew who had emigrated from Vienna. Weiss was one of the few staff members at Dachau who apparently made no incriminating confession. The existence of a gas chamber at Dachau was never proved at Nuremberg, nor at the Dachau proceedings. Nevertheless, the Dachau Memorial Site today acknowledges the claims of some of the survivors that the gas chamber at Dachau was used to kill prisoners in the camp. However, one of the most famous inmates at Dachau, Dr. Johannes Neuhäusler who was a Catholic Bishop, wrote the following on page 17 of his book "What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?": Also behind the wire fence was the camp crematorium. At first it was housed in a wooden barrack, later in a stone building built by Polish Catholic priests, to whom the building trade had been taught. This crematorium was located in a small forest on the west side quite close to the camp. The prevailing wind was from the west and consequently the smell of burning corpses filled the camp, reminding the prisoners of their approaching end and adding immeasurably to their despair. With the new crematorium a gas chamber was also connected. The whole construction of the crematorium with its gas chamber was completed in 1943. It contained an "undressing room", a "shower bath", and a "mortuary". The "showers" were metal traps which had no pipelines for a supply of poisonous gas. This gas chamber was never set in action in Dachau. Only the dead were brought to the crematorium for "burning", no living for "gassing". And yet thousands of the inmates of Dachau were gassed. For this purpose they were brought as "Invalids-Transport" (from 1942 - 1944 alone, 3166 prisoners) to Hartheim near Linz (Austria). PreviousBack to start US vs. Martin Gottfried WeissThe gas chambers at DachauThe gas chamber at Hartheim near Linz AustriaBack to Dachau TrialsBack to Table of ContentsHomeThis page was last updated on April 6, 2008 |