Even though US reactionaries like Ron DeSantis are obsessed with trying to destroy the Disney Corporation, Disney has recently produced a semi-documentary drama called German House, the story behind the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, Germany.

Disney’s miniseries is about a young interpreter who is confronted with the shocking truth of the Holocaust during her work at the first Auschwitz trial in 1963. 

The series takes place in post-Nazi Germany, when German institutions were once again generously filled with former Nazis, while Germany’s establishment preferred to look the other way.

Disney’s five-part miniseries is an adaptation of the best-selling novel of the same name by author Annette Hess, who also wrote the screenplay and serves as showrunner.

The story takes place in Frankfurt where the Auschwitz trial was held. It began on 20 December 1963. The public and media interest was huge. During the trial, 211 concentration camp survivors testified against their Nazi torturers and tormentors.

At the Frankfurt tribunal, just twenty-two Nazi defendants were on trial for the murder not only of Jews but also of other people the Nazis despised. Interestingly, there were over 7,000 SS personnel working – and killing – at Auschwitz from the time of the camp’s construction in 1940 to the liberation by the Red Army in January 1945.

During the trial, hundreds of witnesses testified. Yet, the largest criminal Nazi trial in German post-war history also caused considerable disappointment in a country that did not want to be reminded of what it had done. 

Mauritius Berner – a Jewish doctor originally from Romania – re-told the worst day of his life. Calmly and in a firm voice, he described how the Nazis deported him, his wife and three daughters to Auschwitz and separated the family. 

He did not have much time to hug his wife. She cried, “Come, let us kiss!” Berner fought his way past the Nazi soldiers, kissed his wife and children. Then he was dragged away. It was the last time he saw her. His whole family was murdered.

Mauritius Berner was only one of the 359 witnesses from 19 countries who testified. From 1963 to 1965, the largest criminal Nazi trial in German post-war history had over 183 trial days spread over 20 months. 

The crime of the century – mass murder carried out by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp – was put on trial. Meanwhile, Germany’s conservative post-Nazi Chancellor – Konrad Adenauer – called for, as he said, “let the past be the past.” 

Adenauer’s top-advisor was super-Nazi Hans Globke – who in 1935 was involved in drafting the Nuremberg Racial Laws, which officially turned German Jews into second-class citizens. Adenauer’s government was full of ex-Nazis.

A few Nazi officials had already been held accountable before the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. Yet, many received the infamous Persilschein (Persil was the best known laundry detergent in Germany) by simply claiming their innocence during the late 1940s. 

Before all that, and immediately after the end of the Second World War, twenty-four surviving major Nazi war criminals – including top-Nazi and Air Force Chief Hermann Göring – had to answer for their crimes to an international tribunal in Nuremberg. 

On 16 October 1946, shortly after the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, ten prominent members of the political and military leadership of Nazi Germany were executed by hanging.

Around the same time, the first Auschwitz commander – Rudolf Höß – was convicted in Warsaw in 1947 and – perhaps fittingly – executed in Auschwitz. In 1933, Hitler’s SS had 209,000 members. About 5,000 Nazi perpetrators were sentenced to death by the judiciary in Germany’s three western occupation zones by 1949 – many were later pardoned.

Instead of fearing the death sentence, thousands of ex-Nazis simply lost their jobs in the civil service – often only temporarily. On the whole however, the persecution of Nazi perpetrators quickly subsided during the 1950s. With the beginning of the Cold War, Western powers needed Germans as allies in their expected fight with the Soviet Union. 

Already in 1949 – a few weeks after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany – its new Chancellor – Konrad Adenauer – reiterated his catch-phrase, “let the past be the past.” 

During those early post-war years, many – if not most – already convicted Nazi perpetrators were pardoned. Ex-Nazi officials returned to state administration, to banks, companies and corporations, universities, etc. 

Resistance fighter Witold Pilecki was a Polish soldier who voluntarily went to Auschwitz. He was one of the bravest men of the 20th century. Witold Pilecki had himself smuggled into the Auschwitz camp to tell the world about the horror. After almost three years, he managed to escape. 

Years later, after the war, he was put on trial by the Polish communist government, convicted of treason, and executed. But through his book, Witold’s Report, the dark memory of the Nazi era was pushed powerfully into the public consciousness.

However, the more immediate origins of the Frankfurt trial were linked to the year 1958, when a previously dismissed state official in Germany filed a lawsuit demanding to be reinstated in his job.  

Unfortunately for the ex-Nazi, and in a rare post-war occurrence, proper investigations revealed that the man had been involved in mass murders as an SS Oberführer and as a former police director in the Baltic Memel. 

A trial of a Nazi Einsatzgruppe – a mobile SS killing unit – had revealed that a number of SS murderers were living in post-Nazi Germany, camouflaged as innocent people. In order to locate killer Nazis, the German state set up the Central Office of the State Judicial Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in the city of Ludwigsburg. 

In addition to all that, two men were vital for Disney’s filmic illustration of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. One was the then Attorney General of the home state of Frankfurt, Fritz Bauer. The second man was the Secretary General of the International Auschwitz Committee in Vienna, Hermann Langbein, author of the seminal People in Auschwitz.

Fritz Bauer – a social-democratic lawyer – had been locked up by the Nazis in a concentration camp for eight months in 1933. He later escaped from the Nazi killing machine to Scandinavia and returned to post-Nazi Germany in 1949. 

Bringing killer Nazis to justice became his life’s task because he was convinced that German Nazis had to face up to history. He – like many other Jews – feared the risk of a relapse into a Nazi regime. For years, Fritz Bauer confronted German Nazis. Eventually, Fritz Bauer became the chief prosecutor at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.

It was thanks to Bauer’s investigations and his well-founded distrust of Germany’s post-Nazi legal system, that he worked with Israel. Israel’s Mossad secret service had tracked down super-Nazi Adolf Eichmann – the main Nazi organizer of the genocide – in 1960. 

Back in Frankfurt, Bauer was able to ensure that many small trials did not have to be conducted against individual Nazis, but that the murder of at least 1.2 million women, men and children at Auschwitz could be investigated as a collective crime perpetrated by a number of individuals in one single comprehensive trial.

The other person who was instrumental in the Auschwitz trial was Hermann Langbein, who was once forced to work as a prisoner clerk at Auschwitz. He was now able to name survivors as witnesses and provided the prosecution with important evidential documents. 

For almost two years, judicial officials collected material, heard 600 witnesses, and wrote a 700-page indictment. Finally, on 20 December 1963, the trial began. 

Among the 22 Nazis in the dock were the two adjutants of the camp commandant – Robert Mulka and Karl Höcker – as well as wardens, paramedics, concentration camp doctors, the camp pharmacist, even the SS man who handed out the prisoners’ clothes – all had to answer the charges against them in court. It was a cross-section of Auschwitz’s camp hierarchy. 

Only two defendants admitted complicity during the trial. The inconspicuous looking ex-Nazis – now dressed in dark suits – were accused of having killed people in Auschwitz, at times through their independent actions, at times alone, sometimes jointly with others, out of lust for murder, out of racist and anti-Semitic convictions, and all too often out of sadistic motivations, most often insidious and cruel. 

One of Fritz Bauer’s dreams – by the time he conceived the trial – was that sooner or later one of the defendants would say, “Mr. Witness, Mrs. Witness, what happened then was terrible, I’m sorry.” 

This, unfortunately, did not happen in Frankfurt with the Nazis, but something similar did happen later in South Africa during the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Only two of the accused – admitting to complicity in the mass murder – ever expressed regret. Most of the Nazis took refuge in the delusional idée fixe that – somehow – they themselves were victims of Nazism and that they only carried out orders – the ultimate lame excuse. 

The “We are the victims” excuse  was also used liberally by the Trumpian perpetrators of the January 6 Insurrection in Washington D.C.

Meanwhile, the trial placed a heavy burden on the 211 Auschwitz survivors who appeared as witnesses. In 1964, participants in the trial had to visit Auschwitz to take a look at the crime scene. For many survivors, the trial turned into an ordeal. 

One of the most unbearable tensions resulted from direct confrontation with former tormentors and torturers. This was further exasperated by the court. It repeatedly urged witnesses to provide the most accurate and detailed information possible.

Some had to live through the horrors of the concentration camp one more time in court, hardly finding words to describe the horror they had experienced. 

Others described in detail how they witnessed torture and murder. For example, the engineer Jósef Piwko, who reported that one of the accused grabbed children by the legs in order to kill them by smashing their heads against a wall. 

Those present were overcome by the descriptions of the horror presented in the courtroom in a calm voice. Some listeners were not ashamed to let tears run free. 

On 27 January 1945, Russian Red Army soldiers liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Twenty years later and shortly before the verdict in 1965, the presiding judge turned angrily to the accused killer Nazis and said: “We would have come a good deal closer to the truth if you had not so stubbornly built a wall of silence around yourselves. Perhaps it became clear to one or another of you during the proceedings that this is not about revenge – this is about atonement.” 

The court sentenced six Nazis to life imprisonment for murder. Most of them got away with shorter sentences. They could only be proven to have aided, abetted or have been accessories to murder. Three of the accused were released due to lack of evidence. 

Many observers criticized the judgments as too mild. Yet in 1965, the majority of Germans – as revealed in a public poll – believed that “you shouldn’t shit in your own nest” – don’t be a Nestbeschmutzer!

Nevertheless, the trial became an historical milestone, imperative for the German policy of remembering. This is because Auschwitz witnesses gave a face to the horror of Auschwitz. In the end, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial made sure that people will not be able to forget what the name Auschwitz stands for. 

Disney’s Deutsches Haus series runs on Disney+ in five episodes. Unfortunately, it got into the whirlpool of Germany trying to pretend to have become good again. Nevertheless, Disney’s series is still important. It brings the Auschwitz trial back into the public eye. 

Some might interpret Disney’s presentation as saying to the German people: It is not you who is to blame, but those over there, the monsters in the dock. 

Still, no matter how monstrous the acts at Auschwitz were, the killer Nazis were neither monstrous nor demonic. The actual horror was the ordinariness of the killers. These people were just as ordinary as the countless Nazis who, thanks to Adenauer and the Cold War, re-entered Germany’s post-Nazi system. 

Miraculously, with the accession of the 1968 student generation, Germany was actually becoming good again. Today, as Susan Neiman argues, we can even learn from the Germans and from how they dealt with the Holocaust.

Others might argue that a few Nazis were put on a handful of show trials so that Germany seemed to become good again. 

Meanwhile, the surviving German corporations had profited handsomely from the Nazis, and had continued to build their wealth during the height of the Nazi system – often with the use of concentration camp slave labor. These are today’s Nazi Billionaires.

Perhaps there really is something like Nazis All The Way Down and the creation of The Myth of the Moral Modern Germany. Despite all this, Disney’s German House is an exquisite series – not to be missed.

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