Victim Witnesses at Nazi Trials. An Analysis of their Changing Role in Sixty Years of the Federal Republic

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Yfaat Weiss
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403498844

The project offers a novel systematic account of the involvement of former concentration camp inmates and Holocaust survivors as trial witnesses in the judicial engagement of the Federal Republic with National Socialist mass crimes. Thousands of people who had been persecuted testified between 1949 and 1989 in judicial enquiries and criminal trials against the perpetrators, their statements often forming the backbone of the indictment and evidence. Until now, however, relatively little was known about the circumstances, conditions, and consequences of their appearance as witnesses; the appertaining source materials have hardly been used in scholarship to date. The parameters of their appearance as witnesses – from the search for, selection, and examination of witnesses through to the criminal justice criteria of witness credibility – constitute the focal point of this research. This project analyzes communications between the Federal German lawyers and persons persecuted by the Nazis, elucidates the tensions between the legal conception of witness testimony and the possibilities of testifying about annihilation, and examines the significance of victim witnesses in the legal reconstruction of the crimes along with the verdicts. The aim of the project is to provide foundational research on the basis of empirically verified and historically situated knowledge about the witnesses as protagonists in the legal prosecution of Nazi crimes. In order to capture both the group-specific and time-specific forms and contents of witness appearances, two criminal procedures relating to crime sites were selected as the basis of empirical research: the trials relating to the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz, with an extremely heterogeneous group of witnesses, and the trials relating to the extermination camp at Sobibor, in which exclusively Jewish witnesses were involved. Two studies thus emerged, the results of which will be presented in two monographs and one collaborative and comparative essay. The victim witnesses are understood as a group of persons involved in the trials who for the most part entered into the process with their own motives, who however found themselves in a role and a communicative situation which only marginally suited their concerns. The history of the legal engagement with Nazi crimes as a history of conflict is thereby enriched with an important new angle. The project offers a hitherto neglected engagement with the witness testimonies of persons persecuted by the Nazis generated in these criminal procedures. It takes the conditions surrounding their emergence seriously without regarding them solely from the perspective of ascertaining facts, submitting them to the standards of credibility applied by the criminal justice system, or reducing them to a function of ethics or cultural memory. This paves the way for future research in various disciplines to work with a rich corpus of hitherto little regarded source materials.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Sybille Steinbacher