Victims as Witnesses in Trials of Nazi Perpetrators. An Analysis of their Changing Role in the Sixty Years of the Federal Republic

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Raphael Gross
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269956819

With this project, the role of former victims of National Socialism in the legal treatment of Nazi crimes in the Federal Republic will be systematically examined in a monograph. Focussing on the trials of crimes in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps and Sobibór extermination camp, the significance of victims of National Socialism as victim-witnesses for the criminal prosecution and how they perceived their own role will be reconstructed over a period of 60 years.It is important for this selection of crimes that the victim-witnesses from Auschwitz constituted heterogeneous victim groups, whereas the few victim-witnesses from Sobibór were all Jews. The project will demonstrate which role this played in the trials.The two team members will examine victims as witnesses in their legal framework between 1950 and 2011. In the process, the course taken by the trials, from the initial witness search, the hearing of the mostly foreign witnesses in their homelands and the court appearances of the witnesses to the evaluation of their testimony in the reasons for the judgement, will be traced and placed in the respective contemporary historical context. The focus will be equally on the treatment of the victim-witnesses in the proceedings and their own intentions, conduct and experiences. The time frame encompasses periods of differing intensity in terms of the legal treatment of Nazi crimes, diverging penal interpretations on the appraisal of individual crimes, as well as a growing historical knowledge about the crimes in the individual camps. Finally, a major societal shift in the status of the survivors as witnesses, from their utilisation as legal evidence to being regarded as contemporary eyewitnesses, must be taken into account. The trials were accompanied by a public interest that varied. According to one thesis, this in turn impacted on the legal findings.In a detailed analysis, an example will be provided of how communication between victim groups and members of the judiciary took place, which consequences this had for the prosecution and how it changed. The victims' associations and the Jewish organisations exerted a considerable influence on the calling of witnesses. Their role will also be addressed in the framework of the project. The aim of the comparative study is to also place those who were persecuted at the centre of attention as a group of heterogeneous people with differing interests.The extensive source material is to be found above all in the case and trial files for the total of 18 individual legal cases, in records of proceedings, transcripts of recordings, and correspondence between the members of the judiciary and the witnesses as well as between the interest groups and the witnesses. Furthermore, the files of participating federal authorities such as the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Press Office will be included, but also those of the ministries of justice in the federal states affected.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants