Stubble wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2026 6:02 pm
They couldn't even argue from the supposition that they had not done what they were accused of, given the rules of evidence and the 'legally established facts'.
Of course you could, see the book Blind Eye to Murder about the Majdanek trials.
It was only on 26 November 1975 that the trial finally started. It was originally expected to last one year. Billed as the last of the great Nazi trials, the prosecutors believed the evidence to be incontrovertible. Over one thousand survivors had been interviewed. Of those, 260 had been selected as having actually seen one of the defendants commit murder. The German courts insist that there must be an eyewitness to the act of murder. Hearsay or supposition is insufficient. Yet at the end of the first year only sixteen of the 260 witnesses had been heard. Judge Bogen was confronted by the obstructive tactics of the government-paid defence lawyers, intent on using the trial for their own purposes. He consistently refused to limit their attempts to disprove the existence of the Final Solution.
Exploiting the procedural rules which were drafted to prevent a repetition of the shotgun trials of the Third Reich, the defence lawyers embarked on a daily ritual, submitting endless challenges against the prosecution's introduction of evidence and introducing evidence designed not to clarify the issues or bolster their client's defence but to rewrite the history of the Nazi era.
Hans Mundorf, defending Braunsteiner, seized every possible opportunity during the first eighteen months to challenge the evidence that human corpses had been burnt in the crematoria. Every witness was asked whether he knew the difference between the smell of burning human and animal flesh. Veterinary doctors were called to testify that those outside the crematoria would not know the difference.
Ludwig Bock, the thirty-eight-year-old lawyer defending Lachert, went even further and called witnesses - all of them neo-Nazi historians - to disprove that there had ever been a planned Final Solution. With a conviction that goes beyond purely professional duty to a client, he insisted that no one, including animals, was gassed at Majdanek. `Even if there were gas chambers at Majdanek,' he told the author, `it doesn't mean that they were the reason for the death of a lot of people, because it is possible that the gas chambers were used to clean clothes.' Bock, who claimed that Lachert went to Majdanek as if it was just another job, `like being a cook in a kitchen,' insisted that she had no idea that anyone was being gassed or killed in the camp. That defence did not prevent him demanding, when a former inmate explained how she had been forced by a defendant to carry Zyklon B gas to the gas chambers, that the witness be charged as an accomplice to murder.
Hermann Stolting, who defended another of the accused, Hermine Bottcher, has a Nazi record of his own to explain. As a wartime prosecutor in a special court in Bromberg, Poland, he `persuaded' the court to give a series of death sentences for trivial offences like a farmer's illegal killing of six pigs. Today he unrepentantly justifies those sentences: `If both the circumstances and the law were the same today, I would do the same again." He points to his chairmanship of the German Animal Welfare Society as proof of his humanitarianism.
When the lawyers were not rewriting history, they were cruelly denigrating the survivors and their testimony. Credibility is hard to establish at the best of times, but thirty-five years after the event it is often impossible to remember the exact details which the defence lawyers always demanded. Time, date, place, the exact words, the precise movements of every person in the drama, the position of the lorry in relation to the hut - or was it a cart? - the final curse of the girl who was hanged by Lachert. `How can you be sure that the girl did not push the stool away herself?' `Did you see Lachert throw the children into the crematoria?'
https://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot ... e-and.html
This is not self-evident. Any points that are self evident would be in any case justifiable. Are you opposed to helping to write narrative about this?
