In 1946, the supreme commander of the American forces in Germany named the Landsberg prison as "War Criminal Prison Nr. 1". The prison housed 110 persons convicted during the Nuremberg trials, 1416 war criminals from the Dachau trials, and 18 from the Shanghai trials.
As early as December 1945, the first prisoners were sent to the Landsberg prison. They were the war criminals sentenced to death at the Dachau trials for "crimes against humanity".
Until 1951, there were 284 executions of war criminals at the Landsberg prison. Those whose bodies were not claimed by their relatives were buried in the war criminals cemetery near the Spöttingen chapel. In 1988, this cemetery was declared a protected historical site, and it is now being maintained at the expense of the taxpayers. This confers an undeserved honor on the graves, especially since there is no mention anywhere in the cemetery of the historical context.
The Landsberg war criminal prison was dissolved in May of 1958, when the last four prisoners were released. They were high-ranking SS officers who had been convicted during the trial of SS-Einsatzgruppen (Execution commandos).
A history of assistance for war criminals
The Catholic prison priest Karl Morgenweis (active from 1932- 1957) played a central role in the history of the official support given to the war criminals. In 1951, Morgenweis received the prestigious "Verdienstorden" (medal of merit) of the Federal Republic of Germany. This was followed in 1952 by the "Verdientsmedallie" of the State of Bavaria and in 1960 by the "Goldener Ehrenring" (golden ring of honor) of the city of Landsberg.
As early as 1948, the Association for the Welfare of Prisoners of the Bavarian ministry of justice took over the care of the Landsberg war criminals. Many forces in the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany - politicians, the church, industrialists, and artists - raised their voices in behalf of the inmates of the Landsberg war criminals prison. By the middle of the fifties, these inmates began to be seen not as war criminals but as political prisoners or prisoners of war. For instance, in1955, the city council of Landsberg asked their mayor "to work for the overdue release of the political prisoners" in the Landsberg prison.
But the most far-reaching decision in behalf of the war criminals was made as early as 1951 by the state government of Bavaria when it passed a resolution declaring that the inmates of the military prisons at Landsberg, Werl, and Wittlich should be recognized as prisoners of war and that the federal law guaranteeing financial assistance to prisoners of war should be applied to them.
The government agency which disburses financial aid to prisoners of war was supposed to examine the verdicts of the American military courts and check them against laws governing the relation between the occupation forces and German citizens. The result was that the guilty verdicts of the military courts were ignored. Moreover the convictions of war criminals by military courts were considered as foreign convictions and therefore did not become part of an individual' s criminal record.
According to estimates of the Freiburg military historian Gerhard Schreiber, 5,000 German war criminals have received additional pensions as prisoners of war.
Graves of honor for convicted war criminals
Anniversaries cast long shadows: June 7, 2001 was the fiftieth anniversary of the last execution on German soil.
The preparations for this anniversary were shifting into high gear at the Spöttingen cemetery directly adjacent to the prison of the city of Landsberg. In the workshops of the Landsberg prison, craftsmen were refurbishing cross-shaped grave markers and giving them new copper roofs. The administration of the prison knows what moral debt they owe to the war criminals who were executed by the Americans between November 1945 and June 1951.
The graves of the war criminals are decorated identically - the rest of the graves in the cemetery are ignored. The story that was told is that a confused old woman once procured some 125 flower pots and has kept refilling them with flowers.
Since 1923, the cemetery has been the property of the State of Bavaria. It houses not only war criminals, but also murderers and other prisoners from the Landsberg prison as well as displaced persons from the former DP camp in Landsberg. There is not a single word on any of the grave markers that refers to the historical context. Together with the other graves of war criminals, that of the SS-officer Oswald Pohl, who was the head of the SS fiscal administration, was decorated at the expense of the state of Bavaria.
One might think that what was wrong then - the heinous actions of the war criminals - cannot be right now. But many in the Landsberg area believe that the true wrong that was committed was the war criminal trials which led to the executions. A few years ago this opinion was printed up on a flyer and distributed to all households in the area.
The Bavarian justice system maintains graves of honor for people such as the SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers who headed the office for Ahnenerbe (preservation of ancestry) and oversaw human genetic experiments, and for SS-Sturmbannführer Martin Gottfried Weiss, who was the Kommandant of the concentration camps Neuengamme, Dachau, and Majdanek. The State of Bavaria even maintains an honorable memorial for the epitome of inhumanity, the SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll because the state pays for the upkeep of his grave with public funds. The Polish State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau recently wrote about Otto Moll: "This is just a quick note to confirm your suspicion - SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, head of the crematoria department of Birkenau, was sentenced to death during the trial of [ concentration camp ] Dachau staff and executed in Landsberg in 1946."
Despite Moll' s extreme cruelty and perversity, the parties responsible for the maintenance of his grave do not feel it necessary to distance themselves from him.
What is being maintained with this cemetery is the false belief on the part of some Germans that the justice of the American victors was really an injustice and that the only wrong that people like Otto Moll did was that they fought on the losing side. In view of this belief, one wonders about the much-touted German-American friendship.
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