The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 173
Hence we have do make do with breadcrumbs for now, that is, with
what the judges deemed to be important. Later generations of critical
researchers may be able to do a better job, once they manage to get to
the core of this documentation.
I have split up the West German trials into four subchapters, which
does not only serve to make the chunks more digestible, but also to give
an impression about the temporal clustering of these trials 93 reflecting a
general tendency of trials against alleged NS criminals. Right after the
creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, West German
courts continued these trials mainly as a legacy of the various Allied
tribunals. But with the rising Cold War, pressure to prosecute German
veterans soon decreased, as the Western Allies needed those veterans’
support in building up a new German army as a bulwark against communism.
In addition, since the German judiciary is organized by the
German Länder, a central authority investigating NS crimes on a national
and international level was missing.
After some political pressure by interested lobby groups, such a
body was formed in 1958: the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen
zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen (Central Office
of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National
Socialist Crimes), which is basically an official (initially only West)
German Nazi hunter organization. This office’s activities, together with
the fear that the statute of limitation for murder would soon make the
prosecution of the alleged perpetrators impossible, led to a rising tide of
court cases in particular during the second half of the 1960s. This fear
proved to be misplaced, however, as the same pressure groups which
had pressed for the creation of West Germany’s Nazi hunter organization
also successfully lobbied for the repeated extension and finally for
the abrogation of the statute of limitation for murder. Ever since the
amount of trials has steadily declined simply due to the fact that most
cases had already been dealt with, that the defendants are no longer
alive, and that new evidence, which usually is almost exclusively anecdotal
in nature, was harder to come by as time passed by.
The mindset of the persons working in the Zentrale Stelle can be determined
by the sources they quote, for which the book by Kogon et al.
(1993) is a textbook example. One of the main editors of this tome,
Adalbert Rückerl, was the head of the Zentral Stelle between 1966 and
93 Mere retrials of successful appeals are always treated together with the first trial.