The Dachau trials encompass a considerable number of American military tribunals convened to try a wide variety of Nazi crimes. Most of them have only their venue in common; the trials took place in the former Dachau Concentration Camp, which was repurposed as an internment camp after its liberation.
Between 1945 and 1948, the American army conducted 489 trials under military law; the defendants were German perpetrators charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, the number of investigations was many times higher, since the only cases brought before the court were those with sufficient evidence to make a conviction likely. 1672 people were indicted, more than a thousand of whom were accused of related crimes. 426 defendants were sentenced to death, 268 of these sentences were executed.
At the beginning of the trials, the U.S. military was still struggling with the profound impression left by the atrocious conditions they had found when they liberated the concentration camps in the spring of 1945. In Buchenwald and Dachau, they had encountered the piled-up corpses of starved and murdered inmates; along the routes taken by the death marches, they found prisoners who had been shot or who were emaciated and dangerously ill.
The American War Crimes Program served two main purposes: the immediate punishment of Nazi crimes, and, in the longer term, the re-establishment of Germany as a constitutional state. The conditions for investigating the crimes in the concentration camps were extremely poor: the SS had deliberately obliterated traces of its activities and destroyed documents as the war was coming to an end. The SS staff had fled, gone into hiding, or evaded responsibility by committing suicide, as in the case of Eduard Weiter, the last commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp. The multinational, heterogeneous inmate community had only a very sketchy knowledge of the crimes committed in the camp. Many of the inmates who could have served as witnesses had been murdered by the SS, while others had only been imprisoned during the final phase of the war and were therefore unable to make any statements about crimes committed earlier on. Only a very few had a comprehensive overview of the camp and had not become complicit during their time there; one of these was Eugen Kogon, who had spent quite some time working as a clerk at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
When passing sentence on the defendants, the U.S. military adhered to valid international law including the Hague Convention respecting the laws and customs of war on land, ratified in 1907, and the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, ratified in 1929. Although they attempted to investigate the broader context of the concentration camps, they did not feel responsible for the crimes that had been committed there before war broke out or before the U.S. entered the Second World War. Moreover, they mainly focused their attention on crimes against citizens of the Allied states. The crimes committed in Dachau before 1939, e.g. against German and Austrian inmates, thus remained outside the scope of their investigations. The American prosecutors also focused on crimes committed by the perpetrators in a specific camp during a defined period. This meant that the men and handful of women who had been involved in mass crimes all over Europe were usually only punished for a small part of their actual crimes. Many of them had been in the SS since 1933 and had served in half a dozen or more camps. Martin Gottfried Weiss, for example, a former commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp, was not brought to justice for his crimes at Lublin-Majdanek Concentration Camp, while Otto Moll, camp leader in Kaufering, was never punished for the murders he committed at the Concentration and Extermination Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The six most well-known Dachau trials involved crimes committed at Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Mittelbau-Dora, and Flossenbürg Concentration Camps, and at the Dachau Satellite Camp in Mühldorf. The first Dachau trial took place from November 15 until December 13, 1945. The 40 defendants included former camp commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss, leaders of the protective custody camps, camp physicians, the leaders of the Allach and Kaufering satellite camps, and prisoner functionaries. 36 of them were sentenced to death for murders and abuse perpetrated during a jointly planned operation, 28 were executed at Landsberg Prison for war criminals. The conviction of these main defendants was followed by another 123 trials for crimes committed at Dachau and its satellite camps.
The biggest of the Dachau trials was the main Mauthausen trial in the spring of 1946, at which 61 defendants were indicted; 58 of them received death sentences, 49 of which were executed. 45 persons were indicted at the main Flossenbürg trial, 15 of whom were sentenced to death; 12 of the death sentences were executed. The Mühldorf trial was a special case inasmuch as it involved a satellite camp complex rather than a main camp. 5 of the 14 defendants were sentenced to death, one of the sentences was executed. At the main Buchenwald trial, there were 31 defendants and 22 death sentences, 11 of which were executed. 19 men were indicted at the Dora-Mittelbau trial, one of whom was sentenced to death and executed.
The General Military Government Courts, which passed sentence at the proceedings in Dachau, each consisted of 5 judges, one of whom had to be a trained legal expert. Decisions were made by a two-thirds majority. The defendants were assigned American military personnel as defense counsels; German attorneys were occasionally involved in the proceedings. No right of appeal was granted, but the legality of all judgments was reviewed, pleas for mercy considered, and pardons granted.
What is less commonly known is that the Dachau trials also included numerous proceedings that had no connection with the concentration camps; most of these were ‘aviator trials’, in which the defendants were charged with lynching Allied aircrews who had been shot down or made emergency landings. During the Malmedy trial, 73 members of the 1st SS Armored Division ‘SS Bodyguard Regiment Adolf Hitler’ were charged with the murders of American POWs, both soldiers and civilians. However, none of the 43 death sentences imposed were ever executed.
The American military’s consistent conduct of the trials made it clear that the perpetrators would be held accountable and that they would not be allowed to defend themselves by shifting the responsibility to their superiors or the power structures of the Third Reich. The Dachau (Concentration Camp) trials are of lasting importance since they questioned survivors to counter the extermination of victims in the concentration camps and the destruction of documents planned by the SS, secured the few written documents, and made them available for posterity.
