A series
of military
trials of concentration
camp guards, medical personnel, members
of S.S.
units, and various German civilians
indicted for war
crimes, were conducted by the United
States Army between November 1945 and
December 1947 at the site of the former concentration
camp at Dachau.
The camp was chosen because it was one of
the subjects of the Army’s prosecution
and because its facilities were adequate
to accommodate the trial participants.
The
series of 465 trials prosecuted four separate
categories of cases: (1) main (“parent”)
concentration camp offenses; (2) subsidiary
(“subcamp”) concentration camp
offenses; (3) atrocities committed on downed
fliers, typically by German civilians; and
(4) a catchall that included the Malmedy
massacre of U.S. troops and the murders
of eastern European workers at the Hadamar
mental hospital. The trials of concentration
camp crimes included the main camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, Nordhausen,
and Mühldorf, as well as the sprawling
network of subsidiary camps attached to each.
Juries were
not impaneled for these trials; rather, a
seven-man commission and a “law
member,” the latter a senior officer
with extensive experience in military law,
were the fact finders. In each of the trials
prosecuted at Dachau, only offenses against
Allied nationals were tried, leaving to the
German court system the prosecution of crimes
committed by Germans on other Germans. By
the time the military court had permanently
adjourned in December 1947, it had tried
1,200 defendants for war crimes committed
during World
War II, achieving a conviction rate of
approximately 73%.
Unlike the indictment of the 23 major war criminals by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,
the U.S. Army’s charges against German defendants adhered to a single model based on “violation of the Laws and Usages of War.” Numerous charges could be alleged against individual defendants under this heading. In the concentration camp cases, for example, defendants were accused of “wrongfully” participating in a “common plan” to commit war crimes through beatings, assaults, killings, tortures, starvations, abuses, cruelties and mistreatment of camp prisoners. In the parent Dachau case, the indictment refers to the victims as either “civilian nationals of nations then at war with the then German Reich” or as “members of the armed forces of nations then at war with the then German Reich,” whose identities were “unknown” but numbered in the “many thousands.” This
language from the Dachau charge sheet recurs
in other concentration camp cases with striking
frequency, indicating that many of the victims
were anonymous and their numbers legion.