Language:
English
Year of publication:
2011
Titel der Quelle:
Dapim; Studies on the Shoah
Angaben zur Quelle:
25 (2011) 11-64
Keywords:
War crime trials
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Jewish ghettos
;
Jews
;
Jews
Abstract:
In 1966-67 the former commander of the Security Police and SD for the Białystok district, Wilhelm Altenloh, and three other former SD members stood trial at the Bielefeld District Court. The defendants were charged with having organized the deportation of Jews from the ghettos of the Białystok district, as well as with killing Jews on the spot during the action. Altenloh and Lothar Heimbach were also found guilty of the execution by shooting of 100 Jews from the Białystok ghetto in February 1943. This murder was committed in retaliation for the so-called "acid attack", when a Jew, Icchok Malmed, threw sulfuric acid in the face of a German policeman who had broken into his home in order to deport him. Examining the recording of the main hearing of the trial, analyzes the court's reconstruction of the events leading up to this mass shooting, the court's interpretation of the events, and the use of the resulting narrative in the verdict. The court adhered to testimonies of Jewish survivors, as well as of Fritz Friedel, head of Jewish Affairs in the Białystok Gestapo (made during his trial in Poland in 1949), rather than the depositions of the defendants, who claimed that only 50 Jewish men had been executed, and ruled that there had been 100 victims and that this number included women and children. The court dismissed the claim that the RSHA, which presumably had ordered the murders, was solely responsible for the mass shooting of the 100 Jews; it found Altenloh and Heimbach guilty of this murder, but only accomplices in the case of the deportation.
Note:
In English and Hebrew.
URL:
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