Sobibor trial

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The Sobibor trial was a 1965–66 judicial trial in the West German prosecution of SS officers who had worked at Sobibor extermination camp; it was held in Hagen. It was one of a series of similar war crime trials held during the early and mid-1960s, such as the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by Israel in Jerusalem, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65, also held in West Germany. These trials heightened general public and international understanding of the extent of the crimes that had been perpetrated in occupied Poland some twenty years earlier by Nazi bureaucrats and persons acting as their executioners. The Soviet Union conducted trials in the 1960s of former Trawniki men, mostly Ukrainian Soviet POWs who had trained for the Nazis and worked at Sobibor. Most were convicted and executed. In these and subsequent years, separate trials prosecuted personnel of the Belzec (1963–65), Treblinka (1964–65), and Majdanek (1975–81) extermination camps, all of which had been located in Poland. Dietrich Zeug of the Ludwigsburg State Archives, in charge of preparing the documents to be put before the court at the Sobibor trial, studied old files related to other trials. He stumbled upon evidence related to numerous individuals who had never before been investigated. Some key SS officers who had served at Sobibor had been tried more than a decade earlier on other charges, such as SS-Oberscharführer Hubert Gomerski. He was acquitted in the euthanasia trials of 1947, which prosecuted persons known to have been involved in Action T4.