News
Frankfurt Trial of the Former Adjutant to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Commandant
On October 4, 2002, the Museum archives were enriched by a copy of 200 volumes of records from the Criminal Case against Mulka et al. Twenty-four persons accused of committing crimes in Auschwitz, including Robert Mulka, the former adjutant to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, went on trial in Frankfurt am Main in 1963. Six of the defendants were sentenced to the most severe penalty available under German Federal Republic law—life imprisonment—and the others were sentenced to prison sentences ranging from three to fourteen years.
Fritz Bauer, general prosecutor at the time, played a leading role in bringing Mulka and his co-defendants to trial; now, the Institute named after Bauer has transferred the records to the Museum.
The symbolic transfer of the documents took place in Frankfurt on September 25. Professor Micha Brumlik, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute (which is part of the Goethe University in Frankfurt), presented the donation to the Archives director, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, and the Section for Contact with Former Prisoners director, Dr. Henryk Świebocki.
The materials will be a priceless resource for historians investigating the punishment of war criminals.
The City of Frankfurt Historical Museum also donated a negative viewer-enlarger that will be of aid to researchers studying documents in the Archives.
Aleksander Lasik, a specialist in the punishment of Auschwitz criminals and a co-author of a study of the camp, writes that "in evaluating the results of the efforts of the international justice system, we must conclude that they were not overly impressive, since 788 persons, accounting for some twelve to fifteen percent of the entire SS garrison at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, are known to have been brought to trial before various courts. This is not a significant proportion. Many people known to have committed crimes in the camp never faced justice . . . It would seem that, after the initial and relatively effective search for Auschwitz suspects in the 1950s, the international justice system left the judgment of war criminals to the historians."
