Belzec trial

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The Belzec trial (German: Belzec-Prozess, Polish: proces Bełżec) in the mid-1960s was a war crimes trial of eight former SS members of Bełżec extermination camp. The trial was held at the 1st Munich District Court (Landgericht München I) and should be seen in the context of the Sobibor trial, which followed the Belzec trial, because five of the defendants were accused in both trials. In addition, the Belzec and Sobibor trials, along with the Treblinka trials, form a body of evidence of the crimes of mass extermination as part of the so-called Action Reinhardt programme – the killing of over two million Jews and 50,000 Roma and Sinti. These trials are directly related to the mass murder of 100,000 people in the official Nazi Euthanasia programme known after the war as Action T4, as many of the security guards worked in the euthanasia centres before transferring to the extermination camps. The first Euthanasia trials were carried out shortly after the war. The legal case against the eight accused men, scarcely noticed by the public, was heard by the Munich District Court between 8 August 1963 and 21 January 1965. On 30 January the decision was made by the District Court not to hold a full trial of seven of the defendants because at the time of the crime they would have been adjudged to have found themselves under a putative (claimed) threat from the Nazi authorities (Putativnotstand). Amongst the seven defendants were five of the accused who later appeared in the Sobibor trial: Dubois, Fuchs, Jührs, Unverhau and Zierke. An appeal by the prosecution to put on trial all the defendants was rejected by the High Court in Munich, and all seven were set free. In the trial that began on 18 January 1965 and ended on 21 January, the only defendant was Josef Oberhauser.