Audio tapes from trials for violent National socialist crimes are an important historical source that has received only limited attention to date. They offer a variety of new approaches to the research on mass murder and the way the two German states dealt with the Nazi past after 1945.
Focusing on the audio tapes, the planned empirical study will analyze how the Holocaust was dealt with in a selection of East and West German trials from 1968 to 1986 relating to »Operation Reinhardt«. In the now »virtually forgotten« extermination camps in occupied Poland, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka more than 1.6 million Jews were murdered in gas chambers between 1942 and 1943. Hundreds of thousands more were shot dead during the deportations and ghetto liquidations.
West German tapes from trials on Sobibor as well as on the deportations from Stanislau to Belzec, from Kielce and Tomaszów Mazowiecki to Treblinka will be analyzed. The trials took place between 1966 and 1984 in Hagen, Münster, Frankfurt am Main and Darmstadt. Also included in the selection are seven East German trials from 1968 to 1986 in courts in Berlin, Erfurt, Potsdam, and Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz). They deal with the ghettos and labor camps as well as the deportation of Jews from Rzeszów, Przemyśl and Kraśnik to Belzec and from Warsaw and Siedlce to Treblinka.
The thematic focus of the study is on the narratives of the indicted crimes in the courts, the interactions and dynamics, the expressions of emotion by courtroom participants and the atmosphere during the proceedings.
