Why was the gas chamber at Dachau not mentioned in the trial of the Commandant and 39 others?

This post is in response to a comment on my blog regarding the Dachau gas chamber; the comment included a link to the web site of Carlos Whitlock Porter here.  The question of why the staff members of the Dachau concentration camp were not charged with the crime of gassing prisoners is frequently asked.  The trial of Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39 others, by the American Military Tribunal, started on November 15, 1945 shortly before the start of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal.  At the Nuremberg IMT, the charges against the German war criminals included the charge of gassing prisoners at Dachau and other death camps.  So why wasn’t the Commandant of Dachau (Martin Gottfried Weiss) charged with this crime by the American Military Tribunal?

The charges against all of the accused in all of the American Military Tribunal proceedings were that they had participated in a “common plan” to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the Hague Convention of 1907. However, in all of the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau, only crimes committed against the Allies during World War II were included.

Since the names and nationality of the prisoners who were gassed at Dachau were unknown, there was no testimony during the proceedings against Martin Weiss, et al, about any citizen of an Allied country, or an Allied soldier, who had been killed in the gas chamber at Dachau.

Unlike the Nuremberg IMT, the American Military Tribunal at Dachau did not include charges of Crimes against Humanity.

The definition of a Crime Against Humanity, according to the Nuremberg IMT, is as follows:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

If the charges by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau had included Crimes against Humanity, then the Dachau gas chamber could have been put into evidence at the Dachau proceedings because Crimes Against Humanity were crimes against ANY CIVILIAN POPULATION, not necessarily against civilians in countries at war with the German Reich.

After the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal against Martin Gottfried Weiss, and 39 others on the Dachau staff, ended in the conviction of all of the accused, 61 members of the staff at the Mauthausen concentration camp were charged with war crimes by the American Military Tribunal at Dachau on March 7, 1946 and proceedings against them began on March 29, 1946.

In the proceedings against the 61 members of the staff of the Mauthausen concentration camp, there was testimony that Soviet POWs had been killed in the gas chamber there and American Navy Lt. Jack Taylor testified that American soldiers had been gassed at Mauthausen.   

The defense team at the proceedings against Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39 others included a former prisoner at the Mauthausen camp, Baron Hans Karl von Posern, who was incarcerated at Dachau, awaiting trial himself in the Mauthausen case which was next on the schedule of the American Military Tribunal. Von Posern was never put on trial; instead, he was put on the prosecution team for the Mauthausen proceedings.

The Dachau gas chamber was only a few hundred yards away from the courtroom and could easily have been used as Exhibit A in the trial. If the gas chamber had been mentioned at the Dachau proceedings against Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al, it is conceivable that von Posern would have demanded a demonstration of the gas chamber. There were still rabbits in the hutches at the Dachau camp and a couple of them could have been put into the gas chamber to test it by introducing poison gas, using the method described in the film that was shown at the Nuremberg IMT on November 29, 1945.

Confessions about the use of lethal gas chambers to murder the Jews and Russian POWs were obtained by British, American or Russian interrogators from the Commandants of Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Auschwitz, but Martin Gottfried Weiss, who was the Commandant of Dachau when the gas chamber was built there, never cracked under the interrogation of Lt. Paul Guth, an American Jew who had emigrated from Vienna. Weiss was one of the few staff members at Dachau who apparently made no incriminating confession.

It is conceivable that Weiss and the 39 others were never interrogated about the Dachau gas chamber since there were no charges related to the gas chamber during the proceedings against them which began on November 15, 1945. On the first day of the proceedings against the Dachau staff, the defense made a motion to dismiss all the charges because “Neither the names and nationalities of the victims nor whether the nations of the victims were at war with Germany at the material time have been disclosed.”

Nerin E. Gun, a 20-year-old Turkish journalist in Berlin who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 for reporting on the extermination of the Jews, was a prisoner at both Mauthausen and Dachau. In his book entitled “The Day of the Americans,” written in 1965, Gun mentioned that he was asked to be a witness at both Nuremberg and Dachau.

Gun wrote that his job was to take down the names and vital information from Hungarian Jewish women who were brought to Dachau to be gassed in 1944, since he was able to speak both Hungarian and German, as well as several other languages. Although he was not allowed into the Dachau crematorium where the gas chamber was located, he learned about the gassing from other prisoners who worked in the crematorium.

Hungary was not among the Allies of America. Gun was never called to testify at Dachau because the Hungarian Jewish women that he observed on their way to the Dachau gas chamber were not Allied nationals.

Veronika Val Sors is the woman on the left, wearing glasses

In the photo above, Veronika Val Sors is shown in the courtroom in the Malmedy Massacre case. She is the woman on the left, wearing glasses, looking at Pfc. Samuel Bobyns, who was a witness at the trial. Veronika was among the Hungarian Jewish women who were brought to Dachau to be gassed in 1944, but she somehow survived. After the war, she stayed on at Dachau, working as a translator during the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal.

Veronika Val Sors and Nerin E. Gun could both have been witnesses to the gassing of prisoners at Dachau, but neither of them was ever called as a witness because Hungary was an Ally of Germany and only the gassing of prisoners who were from countries allied with America would have constituted a war crime in the American Military Tribunal trials.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, three members of the American prosecution team provided sworn affidavits, testifying to the existence of lethal gas chambers at the Dachau concentration camp, but these affidavits were not introduced into the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau.

The affidavits were signed by James B. Donovan, Lt. Col. Calvin A. Behle of the Judge Advocate General’s Department and Lt. Hugh C. Daly of the 42nd Rainbow Division of the US Seventh Army which liberated Dachau. The affidavits were included in Nuremberg Document 2430-PS which was read in court, but Donovan, Behle and Daly were not present and the defense had no opportunity to cross-examine them.

So was there a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau or not?  The photo below was taken by me in May 2001.  When I visited the Dachau camp again in 2003, the sign was gone.  The sign reads in 5 languages that there was no gas chamber at Dachau.  Today, visitors to the Dachau Memorial site are told that the Dachau gas chamber was used to gas small groups of prisoners, although not for mass gassing.  If only we knew their names!  The staff members at Dachau were not stupid enough to write down the names and nationality of the prisoners who were gassed, so without some proof that Allied nationals were gassed, there was no crime that could be prosecuted by the AMT.

Sign in Dachau gas chamber in 2001