The First Trial of Bernhard Rakers
By submitting jury court charges on July 21, 1952, the public prosecutor’s office of the Osnabrück Regional Court (LG, Landgericht) requested the opening of the main proceedings against Bernhard Rakers. The bill of indictment was based on the transcripts of the examination of 31 witnesses who had been questioned in the context of the pretrial proceedings. The LG Osnabrück instituted the main proceedings with the order dated August 20, 1952. Then the main trial, which lasted for 17 days in total, began on December 11, 1952. During the hearing of evidence, 49 witnesses were questioned under oath, and 23 records of the examination of witnesses (including the three questionings of Wollheim in 1950 and 1951),[1] as well as numerous documents, were read out.
Rakers was charged with serious bodily harm resulting either in lasting impairment of the injured parties’ health or in death, and also with murder. In addition to the unauthorized and arbitrary killing of prisoners in the Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen concentration camps and on the I.G. Farben plant grounds, in the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, and during the transport by rail in January 1945, Rakers was accused in particular of participating in selections at Buna/Monowitz. According to witness testimony, Rakers, acting together with the head of the preventive custody camp of Buna/Monowitz, SS-Obersturmführer Vinzenz Schöttl (1905–1946), and with SS physicians, had singled out weakened and debilitated prisoners as “unfit for work” during block and camp selections and during the prisoner detachments’ march into and out of camp. The men selected were recorded “on the lists” (“special-treatment transport lists”) and “in the card files” with the notation “SB” (“Sonderbehandlung,” special treatment), that is, death in the gas chambers of Birkenau.
Neither the interrogation records made during the pretrial proceedings nor the indictment contains references to participation in selections by representatives of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG.[2] At no place in the jury court charges is there any mention of the chemical companies, of the I.G. Farben Trial at Nuremberg (1947/48) and the American military tribunal’s finding of “direct liability under criminal law”[3] in the cases of the I.G. Farben employees Walther Dürrfeld, Heinrich Bütefisch, and Otto Ambros. These I.G. Farben coworkers, sentenced to eight or six years of imprisonment, had already been released and were free men.
The Exzesstäter (“excess perpetrator,” a sadist or morally unprincipled person) Rakers was sentenced by the Osnabrück jury court on February 10, 1953, to lifelong imprisonment plus 15 years for inflicting serious bodily harm while on the job, committing murder and attempted murder, and acting as an accessory to murder in five instances.[4] The court stripped him of his civil rights for the rest of his life. The sentence became effective in November 1953. Rakers’s involvement in selections was deemed acting as an accessory to murder, rather than complicity in murder, by the trial court. The judges could not resolve the matter of whether Rakers, in addition to the preventive custody camp head Schöttl and the participating SS physicians and SS medical orderlies, also had made life-and-death decisions about the prisoners.
(WR; transl. KL)