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Authors: Andrew Nagorski
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the Dachau trial relied on a steady procession of witnesses who provided Denson with chilling testimony about the workings of this machinery of extermination, including the last transportof Jews from Dachau.As Ali Kuci, an Albanian prisoner, testified, 2,400 Jews were ordered into the train wagons on April 21; on April 29 when U.S. troops liberated the camp, those were the wagons that were overflowing with dead bodies. Kuci and other prisoners dubbed the train, which never left the station, as the “Morgue Express.” Only six hundred of the prisoners survived, he added. The SS guards had not allowed anyone to approach it as the others inside starved to death.
Denson also relied on confessions obtained from some of the defendants by Guth and other interrogators, leading to allegations that they had used coercive methods. Guth strenuously denied such charges, but the speed and outcome of the Dachau trial would prompt lingering questions about how carefully legal procedures were observed. As Denson summed up his case, he declared: “I wish to emphasize that these forty men are not charged with killing. The offense is in a common design to kill, to beat, to torture and starve.” In other words, it was the “common design” that was critical to the case against them, rather than individual acts of murder.
He also dismissed all pleas from the defendants that they were merely following orders, castigating them for “failing to refuse to do what was obviously wrong.” He added: “The answer that ‘I was ordered to do it’ has no part in this case.” This helped establish a principle that would be followed in subsequent trials. Wrapping up his case, Denson declared: “These accused will have turned back the hands of the clock of civilization at least a thousand years if this court in any manner condones the conduct that has been presented to it.”
The conditions of the German masters-turned-prisoners had sometimes created the misleading impression that they were benefiting from the benevolence of the victors. Lord Russell of Liverpool, who served as the deputy judge advocate for the British Army of the Rhine, visited Dachau in this period and was startled by what he saw of the German prisoners. “Each one of these lived in comfort in a light airy cell, had electric lighting, and in winter central heating, a bed, a table, a chair, and books. Well fed and sleek they looked, and on their faces was a lookof slight astonishment. They must indeed have wondered where they were.”
But on December 13, 1945, when the military tribunal announced its verdicts, any such misperception was banished. It found all forty men guilty, and thirty-six were sentenced to death. Of the thirty-six who were sentenced to death, twenty-three were hanged on May 28–29, 1946.
On his visit to the camp, Lord Russell emerged from one of its buildings and noticed something that struck him as particularly odd: “Nailed to a pole on the crematorium roof, a little rustic nesting box for wild birds, placed there by some schizophrenic SS man.”
This prompted his final reflection on what he had just observed. “Then and then only was it possible to understand why the nation which gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Schubert, gave it also Auschwitz and Belsen, Ravensbrück and Dachau,” he wrote.
• • •
Unlike many of the other members of the Army’s legal team, Denson did not return to the United States when the first Dachau trial ended. He remained in charge of the prosecution teams in the subsequent trials that continued through 1947. Although those trials focused on the death machinery in such camps as Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, they also took place within the confines of the Dachau camp compound.Denson personally prosecuted a record 177 cases against concentration camp guards, officers, and doctors, winning guilty verdicts in all of them. In the end, ninety-seven of them were hanged.
As he prepared to fly
Denson also relied on confessions obtained from some of the defendants by Guth and other interrogators, leading to allegations that they had used coercive methods. Guth strenuously denied such charges, but the speed and outcome of the Dachau trial would prompt lingering questions about how carefully legal procedures were observed. As Denson summed up his case, he declared: “I wish to emphasize that these forty men are not charged with killing. The offense is in a common design to kill, to beat, to torture and starve.” In other words, it was the “common design” that was critical to the case against them, rather than individual acts of murder.
He also dismissed all pleas from the defendants that they were merely following orders, castigating them for “failing to refuse to do what was obviously wrong.” He added: “The answer that ‘I was ordered to do it’ has no part in this case.” This helped establish a principle that would be followed in subsequent trials. Wrapping up his case, Denson declared: “These accused will have turned back the hands of the clock of civilization at least a thousand years if this court in any manner condones the conduct that has been presented to it.”
The conditions of the German masters-turned-prisoners had sometimes created the misleading impression that they were benefiting from the benevolence of the victors. Lord Russell of Liverpool, who served as the deputy judge advocate for the British Army of the Rhine, visited Dachau in this period and was startled by what he saw of the German prisoners. “Each one of these lived in comfort in a light airy cell, had electric lighting, and in winter central heating, a bed, a table, a chair, and books. Well fed and sleek they looked, and on their faces was a lookof slight astonishment. They must indeed have wondered where they were.”
But on December 13, 1945, when the military tribunal announced its verdicts, any such misperception was banished. It found all forty men guilty, and thirty-six were sentenced to death. Of the thirty-six who were sentenced to death, twenty-three were hanged on May 28–29, 1946.
On his visit to the camp, Lord Russell emerged from one of its buildings and noticed something that struck him as particularly odd: “Nailed to a pole on the crematorium roof, a little rustic nesting box for wild birds, placed there by some schizophrenic SS man.”
This prompted his final reflection on what he had just observed. “Then and then only was it possible to understand why the nation which gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Schubert, gave it also Auschwitz and Belsen, Ravensbrück and Dachau,” he wrote.
• • •
Unlike many of the other members of the Army’s legal team, Denson did not return to the United States when the first Dachau trial ended. He remained in charge of the prosecution teams in the subsequent trials that continued through 1947. Although those trials focused on the death machinery in such camps as Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, they also took place within the confines of the Dachau camp compound.Denson personally prosecuted a record 177 cases against concentration camp guards, officers, and doctors, winning guilty verdicts in all of them. In the end, ninety-seven of them were hanged.
As he prepared to fly
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