No Time for “Old Fighters”: Postwar West Germany and the Origins of the 1958 Ulm Einsatzkommando Trial
2011; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1017/s0008938911000690
ISSN1569-1616
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoIn May 1955, the local Ulm newspapers reported on a curious lawsuit brought before the labor court. Earlier that year, authorities had forced the director of the nearby refugee camp to resign upon learning that he had been an SS officer under the Nazi regime. Now the former Nazi, Bernhard Fischer-Schweder, felt he had been unfairly victimized by the regional government and was suing to be reinstated to his post. Far from solving this perceived injustice, the lawsuit instead signaled the end of Fischer-Schweder's postwar rise from door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to prominent director of a displaced persons camp. In the coming weeks, he lost his lawsuit and, more seriously, allegations regarding his Nazi past surfaced. Once authorities began to investigate, they uncovered a broader web of entanglement, and three years later the case culminated in Fischer-Schweder's conviction along with nine other defendants in one of the largest Nazi trials put before West German courts, the so-called Ulm Einsatzkommando trial of 1958. Although most scholarship has focused on the legacy of this trial, this article looks at the unusual origins and escalation of the case in order to draw attention to the trial's complex but overlooked relationship with postwar political and social attitudes toward the Nazi past.
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