The Belsen Trial (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Russell Wallis | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

On 15 April 1945, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen. These battle-hardened men were shocked by what they saw: a scene of unimaginable horror. Thousands of corpses were barely distinguishable from the living who existed in filth and squalor under the oppressive stench of death and disease. But was it a crime scene? Did the SS guards, now in custody, have any real influence over the state of things? Or were they mere pawns in a system of terror, no less fated than the inmates?

Twelve days later, a British legal officer had little doubt. He informed his boss, the Judge Advocate General, that the camp was not intended to merely incarcerate inmates but to let them die. A blackboard in the office identified those marked for death, a list which included 'criminals', 'Gypsies' and 'Jews'. The camp commandant, Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, was arrested on suspicion of having committed thousands of murders.

Specialist war crimes investigators were dispatched to Bergen-Belsen. In almost impossible conditions, they found themselves in a desperate race against time to collect evidence. What they assembled, and the statements they gathered, provided the substance to the Belsen Trial.

The legal bedrock for the trial was built more slowly. British jurists had been working on the laws of war since 1941. They knew the British legal system was to be pitted against the inhumanity unleashed by Nazism. They prepared for this not so much by creating new laws, but by defending what was good in British law, while also remoulding time-worn concepts of justice. The Belsen Trial put their work to the test.

Far from a foregone conclusion, this trial was replete with courtroom drama. There were forty-five defendants, all innocent until proven guilty. This book will explore how British justice did something astonishing in the aftermath of a long and bitter war. It will show how legal advocates, honourable men, argued their case with passion and integrity.

This book explores the story of that trial; by far, Britain's most significant confrontation with the Holocaust. The Belsen Trial, denigrated and ignored by historians was, in fact, the first Holocaust trial. It set a precedent for all others that followed.