World History

- Einsatzgruppen Trial, Wiki. ed.

The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al., commonly known as the Einsatzgruppen trial, was the 9th of the 12 "subsequent Nuremberg trials" for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the end of World War II between 1947 and 1948. The accused were 24 former SS leaders who, as commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, were responsible for the mass killing of more than a million victims in the Eastern Front.[1]

The Einsatzgruppen trial was held by United States authorities at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg in the American occupation zone before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal. All of the accused were found guilty: 14 were sentenced to death by hanging and 8 received prison sentences ranging from life imprisonment to time served. Two were only convicted of being a member of an illegal organization, one committed suicide before the arraignment, and one was removed from the trial for medical reasons. Otto Ohlendorf, Erich Naumann, Paul Blobel, and Werner Braune were executed in 1951 while the others sentenced to death had their sentences commuted.

* The trial marked the first use of the term genocide in legal context, being used by both the prosecution and by the judges in the verdict.[2]

- The case. The Einsatzgruppen were SS mobile death squads, operating behind the front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million Jews, up to 250,000 Romani, and around 500,000 so-called "partisans", people with disabilities, political commissars, Slavs, homosexuals and others.[3][4] The 24 defendants in this trial were all commanders of these Einsatzgruppen units and faced charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal stated in its judgment:

.. in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholesale killings through channels. They are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. It is asserted with particularity that these men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.[5]

The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II-A, were Michael Musmanno (presiding judge & naval officer) from Penn., John J. Speight from Ala., & Richard D. Dixon from No. Carolina. The chief of counsel for the prosecution was Telford Taylor; the *chief prosecutor for this case was Benjamin B. Ferencz...

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