Focusing on the audio tapes, the planned empirical study will analyze how the Holocaust was dealt with in a selection of East and West German trials from 1968 to 1986 relating to “Operation Reinhardt”. In the “virtually forgotten” extermination camps in occupied Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka more than 1.6 million Jews were murdered in gas chambers between 1942 and 1943. Hundreds of thousands were shot dead during the deportations and ghetto liquidations.
This research concentrates on West German tapes from trials on Sobibor as well as on the deportations from Stanislau to Belzec, from Kielce and Tomaszów Mazowiecki to Treblinka. The trials took place between 1966 and 1984 in Hagen, Münster, Frankfurt am Main and Darmstadt. Seven East German trials from 1968 to 1986 in courts in Berlin, Erfurt, Potsdam, and Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz) are also analyzed. They concern the ghettos and labor camps as well as the deportation of Jews from Rzeszów, Przemyśl and Kraśnik to Belzec and from Warsaw and Siedlce to Treblinka.
The thematic focus of the study is on the narratives of perpetrators and victim witnesses, the interactions and emotional expressions of the courtroom participants, as well as the dynamics and atmosphere of the trial proceedings.
The Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main is an independent contemporary history research and educational institution. It investigates and documents the history of National Socialist mass crimes – especially the Holocaust – and their impact up to the present day.
Dr. Sara Berger is a research associate at the Fritz Bauer Institute and is working on the Alfred Landecker Foundation-funded research project The Holocaust on Tape Recordings of Trials Concerning “Operation Reinhardt” in East and West Germany.