Volume 17 , Issue 35

(Dec., 1945) All 40 Defendants In Dachau Atrocity Trial Are Convicted

It was in "The Ada Weekly News, (Ada, Oklahoma)," dated 13 December 1945, Thursday, front page, that we found this news article concerning "All 40 Defendants In Dachau Atrocity Trial Are Convicted." They were found guilty of horrible cruelties; court deliberated only ;90 minutes after 24 day trial.

Found on Newspapers.com

Written by Don Doane, Dachau, Germany, Dec. 12 (1945) (AP) -- A U.S. military court convicted Commandant Martin Weiss and 39 fellow defendants on a charge of committing atrocities at the Dachau concentration camp.

They would be sentenced the next. Having was the penalty proscribed by U.S. Army headquarters for any sentenced to death for the regime of starvation, torture and murder at the nazi horror center overrun April 30, (1945).

The eight officer court, headed by Brig. Gen. John M. Lentz, received the case at noon. It deliberated only 90 minutes before reaching the verdict.

The defense wound up the 24 day trial with pleas for mercy for several defendants, most of whom were S.S. guards, although five were camp doctors and three were prisoners used in official capacities. The defendants received the verdict stoically.

Of the five doctors on trial, 74 year old Dr. Klaus Schilling was in charge of medical experiments at the camp and was accused of killing hundreds of inmates in malaria experiments.

Two of the other camp physicians, Fritz Hintermeier and Paul Walter, were charged with conducting pressure experiments on prisoners for the benefit of the German Air Force.

Troops of the U.S. 42nd and 45th divisions freed 32,000 tortured and emaciated men and 350 women when they overran Dachau in the April advances. It had been estimated that at least 5,000 Jews were killed in the Landsberg section of the camp alone.

Weiss, an S..S. officer, and scores of his men were taken into custody as the Americans swept into the camp with tank and bulldozer support.

Decapitation had been regarded as the probable fate of any of the Dachau war criminals sentenced to death, but U.S. army instructions had reinstated hanging, as in the case of common criminals. It was explained that the Germans consider hanging a more ignominious death than beheading.

Defense Chief St. Col. Douglas Bates of Centerville, Tenn., declared that if the defendants were guilty "of a common design of extermination" so was every German "who contributed to waging total war."

As Pictures Shown Nazi Leaders Squirm

written by Daniel De Luce, Nuernberg, Dec. 11 (1945) (AP) -- Twenty-one german leaders on trial for war crimes gazed with mixed emotions at a motion picture re-enacting their strutting years as self-proclaimed superman on the march which led to their ruin.

The once powerful Nazi chieftains watched the old familiar scenes from German films flash across the movie screen -- Hitler ranting to enthralled brown-sifted followers, the bonfires of forbidden books, the army goose-stepping down the streets of conquered neighbors.

The documentary film of Nazi aggression, assembled in Berlin by two naval officers form confiscated German movies, was shown as evidence before the international military tribunal.

Sometimes discomfited and self-conscious as their faces flashed on the screen, the defendants watched intently.
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