TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter V: Treblinka Trials 165
which lasted only four days, he nevertheless got away with the incredibly lenient
sentence of merely four and a half years imprisonment: 483
“In the main proceedings, Oberhauser refused to testify. He referred to
the necessity of following orders.”
This meant that he was not contesting the extermination of Jews in Be��ec;
thus once again, the West German justice administration could triumphantly
point out that the defendant had not in no way denied the mass murder. Since
Oberhauser, as Rückerl informs us, 484 had been taken into investigative custody
in 1960, in 1965 his sentence was considered served and he was probably
released shortly after the verdict was announced. Had he ‘obstinately denied’
the alleged crimes, he probably would have faced a life sentence! 485
The witness testimony and confessions of defendants, the sole basis on
which the West German justice administration could support its case in these
trials, were accepted as ‘credible’ in all cases where they jibed with the charges.
Thus, with regard to an ‘expert opinion’ from historian Helmut Krausnick,
who had estimated the number of victims of the camp as at least
700,000, the verdict of the first Treblinka trial reads: 486
“The Court of Assizes has no reservations in following the expert, who
is well-known as a scholar due to his research into the National Socialist
persecution of the Jews, since his expert opinion is detailed, thorough, and
persuasive. This is all the more so when several defendants, among them
the defendant S., who is gifted with an especially good memory, figured the
number of victims at far more than 500,000. On what scale Treblinka operated,
emerges from a characteristic description of the defendant S. concerning
the opening of one of the body pits. As he plausibly tells, in the beginning
of 1943, he once was in the upper camp just as one of the enormous
body pits was being opened there, because the bodies now had to be
burned. [487] On this occasion, so S. relates, his comrade P., the deputy head
of the death camp, explained that this one body pit alone contained approximately
80,000 dead. Since there were several body pits, and since the
extermination operation by no means was ended in the beginning of 1943,
483
Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager…, op. cit. (note 62), p. 86.
484
Ibid., p. 45.
485
Another striking example of the tactic, successfully employed by many defendants in NS trials,
of purchasing a lenient sentence by confirming the picture of the extermination of Jews
as described in the charges is furnished in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963-1965) by the
defendant Robert Mulka. Such horrific atrocities were imputed to him that many objected to
his sentence of 14 years imprisonment as inappropriate. Yet only four months later, Mulka
was released without any fuss: G. Reitlinger, op. cit., (note 181), p. 551.
486
A. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager…, op. cit. (note 62), p. 199; during the second West German
Treblinka trial, the number of Treblinka victims mentioned by another expert report
compiled by Wolfgang Scheffler rose to 900,000 “on the basis of new research”.
487
In the same verdict we read that the cremation of the bodies began “in the spring of 1943”
(p. 205).