An Exhibition at Frankfurt's Haus Gallus, Location of the Auschwitz Trial in the 1960s, Creates Moving Moments

Michael Jeismann, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (April 2004):

What was Auschwitz? A wall of fog of indefinable horror. Who were the criminals? Others. The dead. Leaders. That was the state of play until the trial whose name indicates one of the main locations of Nazi annihilation.

Forty years ago, 22 members of the camp staff of the Auschwitz extermination camp were initially on trial before a criminal court in the Bürgerhaus Gallus, the municipal hall for the Gallus district in Frankenallee 111 in Frankfurt am Main, which had been specially built for the trial. Of these, 11 were charged with murder, while the other 11 were accused of being accessories to murder. Here they sat opposite each other under police guard, the former prisoners and those who were supposed to have murdered them. Some police officers saluted the high SS ranks at the door. Upstairs in the cloakroom, these then met the survivors for the first time.

Later, the judge broke down in tears when he was passing his judgment, as he described the fate of the children in Auschwitz, and the public prosecutors' voices faltered and failed. However, many a defendant even had the audacity to laugh at the witnesses, stylizing themselves as the smallest possible cogs, which actually always only wanted to be a miniscule wrench in the works. This “dialectic of rationality and drama“ in the trial, as Micha Brumlik, director of the Fritz Bauer Institute formulated it, is so powerful that a second-hand emotivity is automatically unthinkable.

The Auschwitz trial had opened on Dec. 20, 1963 in the Römer city hall in Frankfurt, and had subsequently moved to the Gallus municipal hall, ending with the verdict being passed on Aug. 20, 1965. Of the 17 defendants who were convicted of a total of 15,209 murders in the Auschwitz death camp, only six were described as perpetrators in the immediate sense. These six were called “extreme peretrators,“ because it could be proven that they had demonstrated particular cruelty in the murder of the concentration camp inmates.

Thus the opening of an exhibition on the Auschwitz trial in this historic place, Haus Gallus, was not just another reminder of the German offenses against humanity. That would be a fatal misunderstanding that would deprive the visitor of a great opportunity. No hypertrophic symbolism is offered here like that which in years gone by often achieved the opposite to that to which it had aspired. However, you will equally be hard pressed to find pure historicism, which only creates a safe distance from the events.

The exhibition on the Auschwitz trial is one of the best things to be shown in recent years on the Nazi past and the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany. Partly because of Holger Wallat's effective architecture, it creates one of those rare and moving moments in which the Federal Republic has the opportunity to look around and look its own history in the eye. At last, the Federal Republic has docked with itself and its political and moral foundation. One should come here, just around the corner, if one wants to grasp a little of what occurred in the National Socialist era: the extermination of the term “human being.“ In Berlin, on the large Holocaust building site, it is now immediately obvious in contrast to this exhibition that it is about something entirely different - the symbolism of a country, which it regards as enough of an end in itself and, it can be feared, which will arouse great, but vague feelings.
On the other hand, the reminder of the criminal court proceedings of the Auschwitz trial is about precision: of the lawyers, of the statements, of the reporters. The 40th anniversary of the Auschwitz trial has come at exactly the right time, because the memory of the policy of annihilation in Nazi Germany is in danger of becoming an empty, cheap formula that is obscuring the historical consciousness rather than throwing light on it.

The Auschwitz trial was not the first, but probably the most important trial against Nazi criminals. It gave the “totally normal men“ who killed in the Auschwitz death factory a face, a social existence, an address. The figures of horror, which had become intangible, turned into persons that had to answer for their deeds.
How can a trial be displayed, along with the legal background and subsequent history? This question found an exemplary answer in the exhibition, which was put together by a team headed by Irmtrud Wojak from the Fritz Bauer Institute. The main part provides a history of the trial, in which the proceedings in the courtroom can be heard and read. On a second level, the history of its reception in literature, philosophy, publishing and theater, which was collated by Marcel Atze, can be studied on the basis of selected examples. Finally, a number of contemporary artists, gathered together by Erno Vroonen, have created an echo chamber of the trial, as it were.
Apr. 9