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(Executions carried out by Lithuanian partisans on my instructions and under my command:

Kauen - Fort VII - July 4, 1941 - 416 Jews, 47 Jewesses
Kauen - Fort VII - July 6, 1941 - 2,541 Jews

Jul 13 to Aug 21, 1941 - Dünaburg - 9,012 Jews, Jewesses and Jewish children, 573 active Communists

Nov 29, 1941 - Kauen Fort IX - 17 Jews, 1 Jewess who had contravened the ghetto laws, 1 Reich German who had converted to Judaism and had attended a rabinnical school, and then 15 terrorists of the Kalinin Group

Sept 2, 1941 - City of Wilna - 864 Jews, 2,019 Jewesses, 817 Jewish children (Special operation because Jews had shot at German soldiers)

Jews liquidated by pogroms and executions, exclusively by partisans, before the assumption of security police tasks by Einsatzkommando 3: 4,000~

Total [Jews Liquidated]: 137,346

I can state today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. In Lithuania, there are no more Jews, other than the Work Jews, including their families.

The Einsatzgruppen trial, United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et al., was the ninth of twelve war-crimes trials before U.S. military tribunals held at Nuremberg following the well-known Trial of the Major War Criminals conducted there before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) beginning in late 1945. Otto Ohlendorf et al. was heard by a panel of three judges from 15 September 1947 to 10 April 1948 with Judge Michael Musmanno presiding.

According to the chief prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, no trial of the Einsatzgruppen had originally been planned. The Einsatzgruppen reports—one set, the only set that survived the war—had been scooped up among two tons of documents found on the fourth floor of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in September 1945. They escaped prosecutor attention for more than a year; a thousand tons of documents captured throughout Germany had to be sorted. The Einsatzgruppen figured into the IMT Nuremberg trial—Ohlendorf notoriously admitted in open court that his Einsatzgruppe D had murdered 90,000 people—but the full range and scale of Einsatzgruppen activity did not emerge.

Ferencz, a tough, smart, compact graduate of the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan and Harvard Law School, chief of the Berlin branch of the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, remembers seeing the Einsatzgruppen reports for the first time in late 1946 or early 1947. Having participated in the liberation of Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau as a sergeant in George Patton's Third Army, he was horrified by the extent of Einsatzgruppen atrocity. He carried the three folders of reports to Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the IMT Nuremberg trial and chief of counsel for war crimes for the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Taylor agreed that the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen were appalling but pointed out that the trials he was preparing (intended to reveal the criminal participation of a representative cross section of German institutions, including medicine, the law, industry and government ministries) had already been scheduled and budgeted. Ferencz insisted that at least the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen had to be brought to trial. Whereupon Taylor appointed twenty-seven-year-old Ferencz, who had never tried a criminal case before, to organize Otto Ohlendorf et al. and to serve as chief prosecutor.

Ferencz was up to the challenge. Brilliantly, he introduced the Einsatzgruppen reports as evidence in the first two days of the trial, authenticated them and rested his case. The remainder of the trial consisted of defense presentations and incisive cross-examination. Two defendants escaped conviction. Otto Rasch arrived in Nuremberg with such severe Parkinson's disease and associated dementia that his trial had to be severed from the case; he died on 1 November 1948. Emil Haussmann, an SS-Sturmbannführer with Einsatzkommando 12, committed suicide. All twenty-two other defendants were convicted on at least one of the three counts of indictment (crimes against humanity, conventional war crimes, membership in an illegal organization). Fourteen were sentenced to death by hanging, two to life imprisonment, the remaining six to lesser sentences. After the trial Ohlendorf, one of those sentenced to death, told Ferencz, “The Jews in America will suffer for what you have done to me.” (Ferencz, one Jew in America, went on to a successful legal career in partnership with Taylor and became in the fullness of time one of the founding organizers of the International Criminal Court.)

All defendants except Gustav Nosske applied to the U.S. military governor of the American sector of occupied Germany, General Lucius Clay, for clemency, but Clay confirmed all their sentences in 1949. In January 1951 U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy confirmed some sentences but reduced others, including ten of the fourteen death sentences. On 7 June 1951 Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann and Ohlendorf were hanged at Landsberg Prison. By 1958 all surviving defendants had been freed. Four other Einsatzgruppen leaders were sentenced to death and executed after trials conducted by other nations.

The West German Central Prosecution Office of Nazi War Criminals initiated proceedings against more than one hundred Einsatzgruppen members, but between 1945 and 1992, West German courts convicted and punished only 472 defendants in total for involvement in the persecution and murder of Jews. It follows that most Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, Totenkopf, Waffen-SS and other SS members who perpetrated mass murder in the East during the Second World War were neither indicated nor convicted but have lived out their lives in freedom, unpunished, a liberty they summarily denied their victims.

The fate of other SS leaders involved in SS and Einsatzgruppen atrocities: Otto Bradfisch (Einsatzkommando 8), who conducted the 15 August 1941 Aktion in Minsk that upset Himmler, was sentenced in 1961 to thirteen years, subsequently commuted to six years. Kurt Daluege, the head of the Order Police, was executed in Czechoslovakia in 1946. Oskar Dirlewanger was beaten to death by guards at the Altshauser Detention Center on 7 June 1945. Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel in 1960 and hanged in 1962. Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, was sentenced to death at the IMT Nuremberg trial and hanged on 16 October 1946. Odilo Globocnik committed suicide in a British prisoner-of-war camp on 31 May 1945.

August Häfner (Einsatzkommando 4a), who murdered the children at Belaja Cerkov, was sentenced in 1973 to eight years. Joachim Hamann (Einsatzkommando 3), who supervised the Arajs commando and supplied the victims for Karl Jäger's charts, died on 13 July 1945. Albert Hartl (EG C), who saw the corpse gases bubbling at Babi Yar, was never tried. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was executed in Poland in 1947. Jäger, facing trial in West Germany, committed suicide in his cell at the Hohenasperg detention center on 22 June 1959. Friedrich Jeckeln was executed in the USSR in 1946. Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar for Byelorussia, was assassinated in 1943. Heinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar Ostland, was sentenced by a German denazification court to ten years in prison but released because of ill health in 1951. Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, disappeared. Arthur Nebe, implicated in the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler, was executed by the SS on 2 March 1945. Alfred Rosenberg, convicted in the IMT Nuremberg trial, was hanged in 1946. Franz Walther Stahlecker died of wounds inflicted by Estonian partisans on 23 March 1942. Bruno Streckenbach was a prisoner of war in the USSR until 1955; he died in Hamburg in 1977. Max Thomas, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, committed suicide in 1945.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski managed to evade incarceration until late in life. He testified for the prosecution at IMT Nuremberg, denouncing Himmler and his fellow Higher SS and Police Leaders. In 1951 he was convicted in a Munich denazification trial and sentenced to ten years' “special labor” but he did not report to prison and was not picked up; he worked as a night watchman during those years and lived at home. In 1951 he also identified himself to an American prosecutor as the person who had supplied Hermann Göring, awaiting hanging at Nuremberg, with the cyanide capsule with which Göring cheated the hangman. Bach-Zelewski was never prosecuted for murdering Jews, but in 1961 he was tried for his part in a Röhm Purge murder and sentenced to four and a half years. (“I was Hitler's man to the end,” he testified boastfully in that forum. “…I am still convinced Hitler was innocent.”) Indicted again in 1962 for the 1933 murder of six Communists, he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in a German prison hospital in 1972.

I'm too sure of the dates, but were the trials done during worsening Soviet-American relations?

Stas Bush wrote:

I'm too sure of the dates, but were the trials done during worsening Soviet-American relations?

That trial itself was done still under Lucius Clay, who wasn't too tolerant to the Nazis. Later, came McCloy, whose legacy is a whole lot of summary pardons to Nazi war criminals and mass murderers. 1951 amnesty commuted their sentences and in 1958 all of them were released.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Stas Bush wrote:

I'm too sure of the dates, but were the trials done during worsening Soviet-American relations?

That trial itself was done still under Lucius Clay, who wasn't too tolerant to the Nazis. Later, came McCloy, whose legacy is a whole lot of summary pardons to Nazi war criminals and mass murderers. 1951 amnesty commuted their sentences and in 1958 all of them were released.

Doesn't 1951 coincide with the rise in anti-Communist paranoia?

PeZook wrote:Eight years for systematic mass murder?.

During the first weeks after the invasion, while the Wehrmacht still controlled the occupied areas, a historian of the Polish experience summarizes, “531 towns and villages were burned; the provinces of Lodz and Warsaw suffered the heaviest losses. Various branches of the army and police [i.e., Himmler's legions] carried out 714 [mass] executions, which took the lives of 16,376 people, most of whom were Polish Christians. The Wehrmacht committed approximately 60 percent of these crimes, with the police responsible for the remainder.” The historian cites an Englishwoman's eyewitness account of executions in the Polish town of Bydgoszcz:

The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens. The square was surrounded by troops with machine-guns.

Three weeks after invading Poland, the Wehrmacht washed its hands of further responsibility for the decapitation, leaving the field to the specialists of the SS.