The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany
2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/gerhis/ght055
ISSN1477-089X
Autores Tópico(s)European history and politics
ResumoThe Mauthausen Trial is a well researched, carefully crafted and thought-provoking book. This concise volume would have been even more compelling if the author had provided additional comparative context and developed a more sharply profiled assessment of his case study. In 1946, a US military commission court tried sixty-one Nazis for war crimes committed in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Having spent an average of four hours on each case, the court handed down fifty-eight death sentences. Forty-nine of the defendants were executed in May 1947, turning the proceedings into the most deadly trial in US legal history. The nine remaining defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment but quickly set free, along with many other German war criminals in Allied custody. The West German population and its elected officials had insisted on the release of the Nazi criminals in exchange for West German allegiance in the Cold War. Tomaz Jardim clearly acknowledges the shortcomings of the Mauthausen trial. The military commission court operated according to what Jardim euphemistically calls ‘relaxed rules of evidence’ (p 115). It accepted testimony based on hearsay, evidence about crimes not covered by the courts’ mandate, and confessions extracted under dubious circumstances. Moreover, the sentences were not subject to an independent appellate process and instead reviewed within the army chain of command. Finally, as a result of the trial strategy developed by the prosecution and accepted by the court, ‘the burden of proof shifted onto the accused’ rendering the charges ‘virtually unchallengeable’ (pp. 172, 170).
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