In an effort to be helpful I will you give the Taubner Verdict, Nizkor reproduced it from "The Good Old Days."
[...] However, I'd say it would do you some good to read the book.
Sure. I now have a copy of the book, the key part of which for this discussion is the Taubner verdict. This also contains material relevant to the existence of special laws in the East raised by Lemmy Caution in the context of Morgen. I note that the Diemut Mayer book is by a former prosecutor at Nuremberg, so possibly slanted, though I will try and find a copy. Some of the later German defense lawyers, particularly Hans Laternser, had bite and also wrote on the subject. Their work would need also to be consulted to get close to a rounded view. I comment on
The Good Old Days as follows:
"The Good old Days" - in general
I find this a sad book in some ways. It dates from 1988 prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and is the product of three members of the "Auschwitz generation" in West Germany, who compiled documents painting their parent's generation in a bad light. It is clearly designed to shock. One was a theologian who taught disabled children, the second was an archivist and the third a doctoral student in history. The preface by Hugh Trevor-Roper to the 1991 English edition goes some way to acknowledge the value of revisionism (pages X-XI), though he does not represent the scope of its criticisms accurately or cite any actual revisionist authors. This was the era when writers like David Irving were taken seriously, but revisionism as such was little known and considered fringe at best. Trevor-Roper was a British army officer who first came to notice for his published investigation of Hitler's suicide. He must then have seen the results of allied bombing first hand. Despite this (or perhaps because of it in an exculpatory way) he represents the Germans as peculiarly or unnaturally morally depraved. He does this by contrasting their warped moral judgments about the Jews with gluttonous and sensual descriptions of food ("wonderful vanilla ice-cream [...] baked pike, as much as you wanted, real ground coffee", XVI). Clearly, such people had it coming to them. He himself made serious efforts to evaluate evidence, but not always successfully, as the Hitler diaries fiasco showed.
The Taubner verdict - sources
I am told that the original is "probably" in Berlin. I'm not sure if there is any point pursuing the matter further at our level. No-one seems to have put a copy of the German original online. Apparently Taubner was also investigated in the 1950s in West Germany and there may be further holdings related to that.
The Taubner verdict - content
This reads strangely to me in places, as if it not all of a piece, but this may be a result of my ignorance. The judgment itself is attributed to the "SS and Police Supreme Court" (201, 204). One wonders if this was the only such case this body ruled on. It contains a statement of facts and a sentence with justification. The document as a whole implies that Taubner was subject to both the Reich Criminal Code (
RStGB, 203), the Military Criminal Code (
MStGB, 202) and a separate Criminal Law War Decree (203). Taubner ranked as a commissioned officer (second lieutenant equivalent). Presumably then he would have had a sense of the scope of his authority and the applicable law. Despite this, it is stated that he "resolved to 'get rid of' 20,000 Jews if possible" (196). How, based on the above legal framework, could he have thought he had authority to do this? - presumably from some order not included in the verdict. The authors do not seem to indicate what this is.
The statement of facts describes three shootings of Jews in different locations (196-99), with Taubner deciding to order the shootings on various flimsy pretexts and the orders being implemented. Again, it's not clear how the perception of his having authority to do this arose. One case might be represented as reprisal (after two Ukrainian women stepped on mines). In other cases it is just a matter of hearing rumors. One significant section of the sentencing reads:
The accused shall not be punished because of the actions against the Jews as such. The Jews have to be exterminated [vernichtet] and none of the Jews that were killed is any great loss. Although the accused should have recognized that the extermination of the Jews was the duty of Kommandos which have been set up especially for this purpose, he should be excused for considering himself to have the authority to take part in the extermination of Jewry himself.
The court thus decides on its own authority not to punish three killing actions and gives two reasons. It offers no justification for the first, that the Jews "have to be exterminated". This would be common knowledge at most only in the sense that Hitler used the term, in which it meant "deprived of power", not necessarily killed. It does not attempt to reconcile this with the applicable law, nor does it indicate an order that would override the law. Nor does it attempt to justify the statement that none of the Jews were any great loss. Indeed, the inference from someone's death being no great loss, to someone else having the right to kill them is obviously suspect. I can imagine such a thing being said in the heat of war in a British trial of an RAF officer who bombed German civilians through negligence. The bombing of Munich, where the SS Court head Office was located, began in October 1942. The sentence about "special Kommandos" is also unclear. If the
Einsatzgruppen were meant, these had other responsibilities; if "vernichten" had the reduced meaning I have suggested, it is not clear who is being referred to.
Then there are the photographs of atrocities. It is not clear why Taubner would show these to people. Perhaps it is like jihadists today showing videos of beheadings to shock or desensitize, but it still reads strangely. You would expect him to fear his wife's disapproval. Descriptions of German women rejoicing in atrocities are a common feature of propaganda. Equally, war can give scope to psychopathic personalities and perhaps Taubner or his wife were instances of this. However, the main point at issue is the legal framework and how it was applied.
The execution of the Ukrainian captain and the attempt to procure an abortion read like a normal legal procedure.
This chapter of
The Good old Days includes an equally significant document on the SS and Police response to unauthorized shootings of Jews (205) addressed to the "SS Court Head Office" dated 26 October 1942. This implies that in some circumstances, order to shot Jews were given (unauthorized shootings has the implication that other shootings were authorized), though not why.
