Seventy years ago, thousands of Germans gathered in the Bavarian town of Landsberg to demonstrate against the death penalty for Nazi war criminals. The event shows how little awareness of guilt there was among Germans.
The people of Landsberg am Lech, some 60 kilometres (35 miles) west of Munich, decided to dress up for the occasion on January 7, 1951. It was a Sunday, and 4,000 people — almost a third of the town’s population — came to the historic market square.
Less than six years after the end of World War II, Germany was recovering and experiencing its so-called economic miracle.
The demonstrators claimed to have a Christian cause: They demanded that the Americans suspend the death penalty for 28 men imprisoned in Landsberg. The sentences had been handed down by the judges of the US military justice system.
And, in Landsberg, rumour had it that the executions were imminent.
The director of the European Holocaust Memorial in Landsberg, Manfred Deiler, describes the event.
“There was a cross-section of the town’s population present on that day,” he said. “There was the mayor of Landsberg, city councillors and there were also members of the state parliament.” This solidarity, however, was not with just any prisoners.
These were men who stood for some of the worst crimes in human history.
Oswald Pohl, for example, had been the head of the Nazis’ SS paramilitary unit’s Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt) and was instrumental in carrying out the Holocaust during the National Socialist era.
Then there was Otto Ohlendorf, who as commander of an SS task force was responsible for the murder of more than 90,000 civilians.
In September 1941, his staff reported from the Soviet Union to SS leader Heinrich Himmler and the Reich Security Main Office that the “working areas of the command have been cleared of Jews.
Between August 19 and September 25, 8,890 Jews and Communists were executed, bringing the total up to 17,315. At present, the Jewish question is being solved by Nikolayev and Kherson.”
Pohl and Ohlendorf were arrested after the end of World War II and, like hundreds of other prisoners, housed at Landsberg in confinement the United States designated as “War Criminal Prison Nr. 1.”
Landsberg has an eventful history in the early part of the 20th century. In 1924, Adolf Hitler was imprisoned here after his failed coup, and wrote his anti-Semitic book “Mein Kampf.”
During the Nazi era and World War II, a concentration camp [Dachau] was established with 23,000 people being used here for the German armaments industry; most of them were Jews from Eastern Europe. The deployment was carried out according to the guiding principle of the Nazi state: “Extermination through labor.”
After the war, many of the thousands of Jews who had become destitute continued to live in the city on a former barracks site in a so-called “displaced persons” camp, awaiting emigration to the US or Israel, which had been founded in 1948.
On January 7, 1951, the Holocaust victims in the neighbouring camp soon become aware of the people of Landsberg’s solidarity with the war criminals, as Manfred Deiler reports: “They then also came and demonstrated for the victims of National Socialism.”
But what drove the thousands of citizens — apart from the Germans’ still widespread anti-Semitism — in their solidarity with the mass murderers?
For Manfred Deiler, it is the rejection of the notion of guilt that was widespread in postwar Germany. “In the minds of many people at that time, the Americans were still occupiers, even though the Federal Republic had already been founded. And in their thinking, a German war criminal was still worth more than an American occupier.”
This article was provided by Deutsche Welle
Source: dtnext.in, Deutsche Welle, January 8, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde