By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
While the widely covered Nuremberg Trials prosecuted and convicted those leaders who gave the orders to torture and murder millions in the Holocaust, they were not the only trials at the end of World War II to do so. The overshadowed Dachau Trials were prosecuted concurrently only 65 miles south of Nuremberg by a soft-spoken 32-year-old human rights lawyer from Alabama. This bible-loving Christian would ultimately deny 177 guards, officers, doctors and others the claim of innocence because they were merely following a superior’s orders.
Plucked from his prestigious post teaching law at West Point in 1945, William Denson — who had never been outside of the United States and could hardly imagine such depravity — would be chosen by the U.S. Army to go to Germany and lead the prosecutions against war criminals at Dachau, the scene of their unspeakable crimes.
“The world’s attention was focused on Nuremberg because the chieftains and the policy makers and the crafters of the ‘final solution’ were all on trial there,” said award-winning writer and producer Joshua M. Greene, author of Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor, in an interview with the Transcript.
Greene spoke at Seattle University about his book, an account of Denson’s voluminous documentation of the Dachau trials that he collected during the 50 years prior to his death in 1998.
Greene’s appearance was sponsored by the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center and Seattle University.
“At Dachau, it was the henchmen, the dregs, the guards and the administrators,” said Greene. “Nuremberg was garnering all the headlines. The people on trial [at Dachau] did not wage war. These were the people who starved and tortured out of disrespect for human life.”
Chief Prosecutor Denson spent two years building and winning legal cases against the war criminals at the Dachau camp. He meticulously researched recognized conventions of international law and based his courtroom strategies on firm legal foundations.
His work defending human rights helped establish legal standards that are in use today by international courts, and stripped the Dachau defendants and any future war crimes defendants of any hope of escaping justice by arguing that they were merely following orders.
“Denson succeeded at establishing personal responsibility and the irrelevance of the chain of command,” said Greene. “Because of his work, it is no longer possible to hide behind a superior order. In Denson’s mind, if you were a guard standing on the periphery of the camp you were as guilty as someone who did the torture.”
At one point, under the intense, self-imposed pressure to be fair, Denson approached the brink of death due to overwork and exhaustion. He developed palsy and his weight fell from 170 lbs. to 116 lbs.
This Bible-believing man, who, at first, could not believe the reports of the systematic extermination in the camps, would see his naïveté shattered when confronted with the evidence and eyewitness accounts.
Dee Eberhart, a member of the Rainbow Division that was present at the liberation of the Dachau camp and a member of WSHERC Speakers’ Bureau, recalls “On April 29, my platoon was attached to the first battalion of the 222nd Division heading toward Munich when we were suddenly diverted to the gates of Dachau,”
Eberhart, 77, and his wife currently live in Eastern Washington. The old veteran was in town to introduce Greene at the Seattle event and also spoke to the Transcript.
“There was something like a moat around it,” continued Eberhart. “It was mid-afternoon and all the prisoners were out in the yard beating up and probably killing the kapos [German criminals in charge of prisoners]. The SS guards generally stayed outside the camp in the enormous administrative area. Some of the old guards slipped away. SS Officer [2nd Lt.] Wicker surrendered to [Brig.] Gen. Linden using the Red Cross.”
In addition, A total of 1,600 war criminals were prosecuted on the grounds of the Dachau camp for crimes committed in three additional camps — Mauthausen, Flossenburg and Buchenwald.
Ninety-seven of the Dachau defendants were found guilty and hanged. Denson was most concerned with leaving history a record of a fair and just prosecution by a conquering nation against a defeated enemy.
“This was a man of God who read his bible every night – a Mr. Smith goes to Germany,” added Greene. “If Bill Denson had been a different kind of guy he might have said, ‘Let’s get this over with.’” But he wanted this by the book, and he built an unassailable case because it was built on legal conventions.”
But in 1948, when the U.S. needed Germany as an ally against Soviet Russia, the army overturned all of Denson’s convictions in what would become a scandalous series of commutations and reversals of sentences.
In a special investigation, a senate subcommittee subsequently vindicated Denson in an attempt to restore his legal reputation but not before the army released the previously convicted war criminals.