Dachau Trials

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The Dachau Trials were proceedings against minor war criminals found in the United States sectors of occupation in Germany and Austria, and those accused of committing war crimes against American citizens and military personnel. The trials were conducted by the Dachau Military Tribunal, set up after World War II by the Judge Advocate Department of the U.S. Third Army. The chief prosecutor was William Denson, a 32 year-old US Army lawyer.^[1] The chief defense counsel was Douglas T. Bates Jr., a Lt. Col. artillery officer and a lawyer from the small town of Centerville TN.^{[citation needed]}

Less well known than the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which tried major German war criminals, the American Military Tribunal at Dachau tried 1,672 German alleged war criminals in 489 separate proceedings. Like the 12 Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, the Dachau trials were overseen exclusively by the United States. They were not part of the International Military Tribunal process, which had judges and prosecutors from the four Allied Occupying Powers.

The location of the court, within the Dachau concentration camp, is one of best known of the Nazis' infamous concentration camps, underline the moral corruptness of the regime under which those found guilty of war crimes had operated. The most highly publicised trials at the time and the best remembered are the Malmedy massacre trial when seventy-three Waffen-SS soldiers were found guilty of summarily executing eighty-four American prisoners of war during the second day of the Battle of the Bulge; and the trial of Otto Skorzeny and 9 others, all officers in the 150th Panzer Brigade, who were found not guilty of war crimes, arising from members of the brigade who had dressed themselves in American military uniforms to confuse the enemy during the same battle^[2].

Some other notable trials by the U.S. military court at Dachau included^[3]:

The Buchenwald Camp Trial, In this trial, during April, August, 1947, 31 members of the staff of the Buchenwald camp were found guilty of atrocities and 22 were sentenced to death; the rest to imprisonment.
The Dachau Camp Trials: Forty officials were tried; 36 of the defendants were sentenced to death (13 December 1945), of whom 23 were hanged on either the 28 May or 29 May 1946, including the former commandant Gottfried Weiss and the camp doctor Schilling. Smaller groups of Dachau camp officials and guards were included in several subsequent trials by the U.S. court at Dachau. On 21 November 1946 it was announced that, up to that date, 116 defendants of this category had been convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment.
The Flossenbürg Camp Trial, Fifty-two officials and guards of this camp were tried between 12 June 1946 and 19 January 1947. Forty of the defendants were found guilty; 15 of these were sentenced to be hanged, and 25 to terms of imprisonment.
The Mauthausen Camp Trials, Sixty-one officials of this camp were tried by a U.S. military court at Dachau in March/April, 1946; 58 defendants were sentenced to death (11 May 1946) and were executed, including the commandant of the Totenkopf guard.
The Mühldorf Concentration Camp Trial, five officials of this camp were sentenced to death by a U.S. war crimes court at Dachau on 13 May 1947 and 7 others to imprisonment.
August 7, 1947:^[4] The "Dora"-Nordhausen Trial, 'The United States of America versus Arthur Kurt Andrae et Al.,^[5] convicted fifteen Dora SS guards and Kapos (one was executed). The trial also addressed the question of liability of Mittelwerk V-2 rocket scientists.^[6]

[edit] People convicted in the Dachau Trials

Viktor Zoller: Ex-commander of the guards at Mauthausen concentration camp. Tried and Sentenced to death in April, 1946; hanged 21 May 1947.
Josef Kisch: SS-Gruppenführer and former official of Mauthausen camp. Tried and sentenced to death 15 September 1947 for murders of Allied POWs.
Hans Moeser: Former commandant of Nordhausen concentration camp. Tried and sentenced to death on 30 December, 1947.^{[citation needed]}
Kurt Mathesius: Former commandant of Nordhausen. Hanged himself while awaiting trial by a U.S. court at Dachau, May, 1947.
Jürgen Stroop: he was sentenced to death by the Dachau International Military Tribunal for the summary executions of the Allied airmen in Germany, but extradited to Poland, found guilty of war crimes and executed in Warsaw by the Polish authorities in 1952.^{[citation needed]}