Pohl Trial

The Pohl Trial (or WVHA Trial, or, officially, The United States of America vs. Oswald Pohl, et. al.) was the fourth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" or, more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).

In this case, Oswald Pohl and 17 other SS officers employed by the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA), the Economic and Administrative Department of the SS, were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the time of the Nazi regime. The main charge against them was their active involvement in and administration of the Endlösung. The WVHA was the government office that ran the concentration and extermination camps. It also handled the procurement for the Waffen SS and, as of 1942, the administration of the SS Totenkopf Divisions.

The judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II, were Robert M. Toms (presiding judge) from Detroit, Michigan, Fitzroy Donald Phillips from North Carolina, Michael A. Musmanno from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and John J. Speight from Alabama as an alternate judge. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor; James M. McHaney and Jack W. Robbins were the principal prosecutors. The indictment was presented on January 13, 1947; the trial began on April 8, and sentences were handed down on November 3, 1947. Four persons, including Oswald Pohl, were sentenced to death by hanging, three were acquitted. The others received sentences for imprisonment between 10 years and lifetime.

At the request of the judges, the court reconvened on July 14, 1948 to consider additional material presented by the defense. On August 11, 1948, the tribunal issued its final sentences, confirming most of its earlier sentences, but slightly reducing some of the prison sentences and changing the death sentence of Georg Lörner into a sentence of life imprisonment.

Indictment

1. Participating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity;
2. War crimes through the administration of concentration camps and extermination camps, and the mass murders and atrocities committed there.
3. Crimes against humanity on the same grounds, including slave labor charges.
4. Membership in a criminal organization, the SS.

The SS had been found a criminal organization previously by the IMT. All defendants were charged on all counts of the indictment, except Hohberg, who was not charged on count 4. Charge 1 (conspiracy) was largely disregarded by the tribunal and no judgments on this count were passed.

Defendants

All convicts were found guilty on charges 2, 3, and 4, except Hohberg (who was not charged on count 4, but found guilty on counts 2 and 3). Three defendants were acquitted on all charges: Vogt, Scheide, and Klein.

Hohberg's sentence of 10 years accounted for time already served—he was imprisoned on October 22, 1945—because he was not a member of the SS. The defense counsel for Karl Sommer filed a petition to modify the sentence to General Lucius D. Clay, the Commander-in-Chief for the U.S. occupation zone. In response to this appeal, Clay [1] ordered Sommer's death sentence to be commuted into a lifetime imprisonment on May 11, 1949. Pohl kept claiming his innocence, stating that he had been only a lower functionary. He was hanged on June 7, 1951, in the prison at Landsberg.

The head of Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen of the WVHA (the department of concentration camps), Richard Glück, who had been the direct superior of all commanders of concentration camps and as such directly responsible for all the atrocities committed there, could not be tried: two days after the unconditional surrender of Germany, he had committed suicide on May 10, 1945 in the navy hospital of Flensburg. (Flensburg was in the British occupation zone anyway.)

References

• Trial proceedings from the Mazal Library.
• Description of the trial from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.