The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

240 SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS
Germany have learned nothing from history. They propagate, 30
years after the assault on the Soviet Union that ‘this German offensive
of June 22, 1941, was a classic preventive war.’
With approval and support of ruling circles in West Germany, the
criminal SS units with their commanders march about, for instance,
they ‘cultivate their tradition’ and are recommended as role models
to the soldiers of the Bundeswehr.” (Case 1044., pp. 281f.)
This lengthy introduction to the verdict, of which only a part is quoted
here, makes the reader think that it was not the defendant who stood
trial in that instance, but rather West Germany, which shows that those
communist trials always also had an important political role in morally
undermining and thus delegitimizing West Germany. As a whole, the
East German verdicts are filled with such communist rhetoric and are
thus very similar in tone to those of the Stalinist show trials in Krasnodar
and Kharkov in 1943. This impression is reinforced by the courts’
occasional use of documentary evidence produced for these trials (see,
e.g., case 1018, p. 501) as well as by making ample use of the testimonies
of Soviet witnesses of yore.
The verdicts also made dogmatic assertions about history and morals,
which they then used as justification to ignore well-established legal
principles and international law as valid during World War II, like
the illegal nature of partisan warfare and the legality of executing partisans.
For the East German court, which were basically lackeys of the
Soviet Union, the Russian and Polish partisan fighters were patriots,
whereas Germans fighting partisans where terrorists and murderers (see,
e.g., case 1018, p. 517). Hence all the defendants in these cases were
sentenced for each and every civilian they had killed, whether they had
engaged in partisan warfare or not. As a consequence, all defendants either
received a life term (cases 1018, 1044, 1163) or were even sentenced
to death (cases 1024 & 1082).
When it comes to the actual or alleged crimes committed, the verdicts
often read like a dizzying staccato of frequently rather brief indictments.
In all five cases studied here, all five defendants gave full
confessions, as it is traditional custom in communist show trials (1018:
p. 502; 1024: p. 649; 1044: p. 294; 1082: p. 394; case 1163: p. 474).
Note also that the first three cases follow in the footsteps of West
German cases dealing with the same alleged crimes but trying other defendants.
Hence many of these East German trials look to me like