The story of Col. William Denson was an “inspiring story of what can be achieved in a courtroom,” said Joshua M. Greene.
Greene, author of Justice at Dachau: the Trials of an American Prosecutor, spoke last week at the University of Denver for Hillel’s Holocaust Remembrance lecture.
Justice at Dachau, published in April 2003, is about the Dachau trials after the Holocaust. These trials are not as well known as the Nuremberg trials, but were just as important in charging the Nazi war criminals, Greene said.
Greene spoke about the process of the trials, the end results and the key roles of the trials. Denson was the chief prosecutor at the Dachau trials. Greene interviewed Denson’s widow who called him after seeing his award-winning documentary “Witness: Voices from the Holocaust” on PBS. Greene visited Denson’s widow at her Brooklyn apartment and she showed him a room full of papers and documents from the Dachau trials.
The trials took place in Dachau, Germany, from 1945 to 1948. There were four primary trials of 177 defendants who had operated the concentration camps at Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg and Buchenwald. These primary trials established the precedent that those who operated the concentration camps were, if convicted, guilty of war crimes. Denson was one of five prosecutors in the primary trails. The others were Capt. William D. Lines, Lt. Paul Guth, Capt. Robert G. McCuskey and Capt. Phillip Heller, said Greene.
In addition to the primary trials, another 1,495 defendants were tried for specific crimes. Twenty-one prosecutors handled these trails.
At, Dachau, 30,000 Nazis were incarcerated awaiting trial. These were men who operated the camps, were guards or who tortured the inmates, said Greene. The Nuremburg trials, by comparison, had only 22 defendants, all Nazi leaders.
At Dachau, the court room was a converted supply depot and the court consisted of judges sitting as a tribunal, said Greene.
Denson, an Alabama native and a Presbyterian, was sent to Germany for the trials. Denson was given two months to complete the first trial. The trial started on Nov. 13, 1945 against 40 defendants. These men were not accused of specific crimes but of knowingly operating or participating in the operation of a death camp.
Claus Shilling was one of the 40 defendants. He was a medical doctor who was researching cures for malaria and was using camp inmates as laboratory test subjects, said Greene.
Some of the pleas that the accused men used included, “It wasn’t me,” “I didn’t do it” or “You have me confused with someone else.” All 40 defendants were found guilty. Thirty were sentenced to hang and two were sentenced to life imprisonment, said Greene.
The second primary trial was of 61 Nazis who operated or worked at Mauthausen, a concentration camp in upper Austria.
During the fourth primary trial at Buchenwald, Ilse Koch, who was married to an officer at this camp, was one of the defendants. She became pregnant during the trial so she would not get hanged and was put in prison, said Greene. Denson left Germany after the fourth trial. He obtained convictions in every trial. Ten years later, he read in the newspaper that of the 1,672 Nazis prosecuted, only 97 were hanged and the rest were released by Soviet Union, which occupied East Germany.
Denson then quit the army and never set foot in a courtroom again, said Greene. This lecture was Greene’s 60th after writing his book.
