| West German participants in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials cross the Alte Judenrampe (“Old Jewish Ramp”). The gas chamber and Crematorium Number 3 can be seen in the distance. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as Auschwitzprozesse, was a series of 3 trials running from December 20, 1963, to June 14, 1968, charging defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in Konzentrationslager (“Concentration Camp”) Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hessian Generalstaatsanwalt (“State Attorney General”) Fritz Bauer (July 16, 1903 – July 1, 1968), himself briefly interned in 1933 at the Heuberg concentration camp, led the prosecution. Bauer was concerned with pursuing individual defendants serving at Auschwitz-Birkenau; only 22 SS members were charged of an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 thought to have been involved in the administration and operation of the camp. The men on trial in Frankfurt were tried only for murders and other crimes that they committed on their own initiative at Auschwitz and were not tried for genocidal actions perpetrated “when following orders”, considered by the courts to be the lesser crime of accomplice to murder. After 121 days of testimony from 150 witnesses, 2 dozen key participants traveled to Oświęcim during a 10-day recess to tour the Nazi death and labor camp. Judges, prosecutors, court officials and defendant Doctor Franz Bernhard Lucas (September 15, 1911 – December 7, 1994) The West Germans took brisk, 15-minute a walk through the street to the main Auschwitz camp, pausing only once – for 20 seconds — to gaze with bowed heads at the reconstructed “black wall of Auschwitz.” This is a fragment of a brick wall where Schutzstaffel (SS) men shot 20,000 prisoners. The original was dismantled in 1944, while the camp was still in operation. “The most important thing is that now for the first time a German court will see and recognize the existence of gas chambers,” one prosecutor, Joachim Kugler (May 19, 1926 – December 25, 2012), told a press conference. “Up to now, gas chambers have been called to our attention by the Allied war crimes tribunals. Now a German court will see that.” The West German party entered the former SS hospital which is now the museum headquarters, but members of the Polish citizens’ militia kept newsmen from accompanying them inside. The official purpose of the visit was to examine the buildings to determine if witnesses could have seen or heard from 1 Auschwitz cell bloc to another and identified the perpetrators of specific acts of torture and mass slaughter. The trial attracted much publicity in Germany, but was considered by Bauer to be a failure. Bauer complained that the media treated the accused in such a manner as to imply that they were all freakish monsters, which allowed the German public to distance themselves from feeling any moral guilt about what had happened at Auschwitz, which was instead presented as the work of a few sick people who were not at all like normal Germans. Moreover, Bauer felt that because the law treated those who had followed orders when killing as accomplices to murder it implied that the policy of genocide and the Nazi rules for treating inmates at Auschwitz were in fact legitimate. Doctor Lucas was given 3 years for his participation in sections of Jews for the gas chambers. He claimed his participation was involuntary, but witnesses denied this. He reopened his medical practice after his release from prison. 5 others were released. The others received sentences from 3 years to life imprisonment. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0564.jpg |
| Image Size | 638.84 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 3000 x 2158 |
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| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | December 14, 1964 |
| Location | |
| City | Auschwitz |
| State or Province | Upper Silesia |
| Country | Poland |
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| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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