TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter V: Treblinka Trials 163
book NS-Vernichtungslager im Spiegel deutscher Strafprozesse (NS Extermination
Camps as Reflected in German Criminal Trials), which was published
in 1977. This book cites long passages from the verdicts. In his introduction to
Rückerl’s work, Martin Broszat, director of the Munich Institute for Contemporary
History, wrote 479
“Without wishing to anticipate an historical investigation and assessment
of the role of the German justice system in the prosecution of NS
crimes, so far one thing can be said to have resulted from it, and also from
the activity of the Central Office [in Ludwigsburg]: the significance of the
extensive prosecutorial and judicial investigations, which began in this
area at the end of the 1950s in the Federal Republic [of Germany], cannot
be measured only by their – often low – number of sentences. In regard to
the investigations and proceedings dealing with mass killings of Jews […]
in particular, the systematic clearing up of the aggregate of crimes had a
general public and historical relevance extending considerably beyond
criminal prosecution. […] Although the fact of the ‘Final Solution to the
Jewish Question’ is noted in nearly all history and textbooks on the NS period,
the individual modalities of this horrible event have scarcely been
systematically documented until now. Their methodical concealment by the
administrative departments of the regime and the thorough eradication of
the traces after the conclusion of the operations, above all in the carefully
hidden large extermination camps in the occupied Polish territories, have
made it difficult or have hindered an exact reconstruction of the events.
Despite an unfavorable point of departure, the years of painstaking work
of judicial investigation have finally made the facts and context very
clear.”
First of all, it ought to be stressed that Broszat’s claim that “the large extermination
camps in the occupied Polish territories” were “carefully hidden”
is blatant nonsense. Auschwitz was situated in an industrial zone swarming
with civilian workers, and the prisoners were in constant contact with them;
Majdanek directly bordered on the city of Lublin, so that people were able to
look into the camp from their houses at the edge of the city; in Treblinka, the
farmers cultivated their fields nearly up to the camp fence, and the brisk trade
between the prisoners and the civilian population described by former inmates,
as noted above, 480 guaranteed a steady flow of information from the
camp to the outside world.
Let us move on to the “historical relevance” of the trials, as emphasized by
Broszat. When he writes that the “individual modalities of this horrible event”
have “scarcely been systematically documented up until now,” but that “years
of painstaking work of judicial investigation have finally made the facts and
479 Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager…, op. cit. (note 62), pp. 7f.
480 See Introduction.