I seem to recall years ago reading about an incident (there may have been more than one) in Germany during WWII where a SS officer (or maybe a Wehrmacht soldier, but I think it was an SS officer assigned to a concentration or extermination camp) was put on trial for murdering a Jew. IIRC the officer was convicted and hanged.
I can’t find any information on this and of course after a morning spent on Google I’ve come up with bupkis: everything I can find relates to post-war war crimes / murder trials.
So did I completely imagine this? Were there any incidents of SS officers being convicted in Germany, by German authorities, during the war for crimes committed against Jews?
(I do recall that theft was illegal and some members of the SS were punished for stealing property that had belonged to Jews. IIRC it was considered property of the German state and so according to German law the SS officers were not stealing Jewish property but German state property. This is distinctly different from what I’m looking for.)
I don’t have a direct answer to your question but I wouldn’t be surprised if this did happen early on. The Nazis took power in 1933 and began passing laws to persecute Jews, but it’s not like the Holocaust happened overnight. Laws got stricter over time; in 1935 Jews couldn’t join the military and then were declared non-citizens. In 1936 they couldn’t hold professional jobs. In 1938 Jewish businesses couldn’t be awarded government contracts, and by 1939 there were few Jewish businesses that hadn’t gone bankrupt or taken over. In 1941 the Holocaust had fully begun, with the “Final Solution” being discussed in 1942.
So there was a period of time after the Nazis took power that it wasn’t acceptable to kill Jews without consequences in Germany, probably even for the SS. January 1933 was when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and that’s when Nazi Germany was born, but the “Night of Long Knives” when the purge began and the SS took over as executors of the law didn’t start until 18 months later (June 1934). So there’s a period of time there where it seems especially plausible that an SS officer could be subject to criminal prosecution for such a thing.
ETA: I realize now you said “during WWII”; that seems less plausible to me because by that point the SS essentially was the law. And Jews were heavily persecuted. It’s not impossible but it would seem remarkable to me and I’m sure there would be more to it than just murder (such as political motivations).
I’m thinking of a timeframe later, during the war itself. Auschwitz was operational as a death camp by the end of 1941, several other camps came on line around the same time. Operation Reinhard began, IIRC, in early 1942.
This is when I think such a conviction would be the most surprising: the extermination of Jews was German state policy so the conviction of someone for killing a Jew would seem strange.
ETA: Or, uh, what you said in your ETA, which I missed. :o
There was a famous case of a Nazi lawyer who tried to try Nazis for the crimes being commited during the holocaust, as they were happening. I think, as the OP says, he was only able to bring charges on related corruption, not the murders themselves (he remained within the nazi establishment the whole time). My google-fu is not so good today so can’t find any details.
I remember reading of a case like the OP in the book, “The Good Old Days” which is mostly a collection of primary source materials about the holocaust. One SS bastard was especially brutal and pointlessly cruel while murdering Jews. Technically He was put on trial for killing the Jews, but really it was because the German public found out about it. I think he had taken some pictures of the events (which was forbidden), gotten them developed at a commercial establishment back home while on leave (REALLY forbidden), and them shown them around to friends at a party back home (Super double flaming forbidden). The Nazis wanted to maintain the fiction that there was nothing untoward being done and so put the guy on trial to show that he was unique in his actions. He was imprisoned but was let out in late '44 or '45 to go back to the front.
Amon Göth (the notorious commandant pretty accurately represented in Schindler’s List) ran afoul of the stealing prohibition that you mentioned you weren’t looking for, though he probably still counts as other charges were leveled against him:
It should be noted that the looming end of the war interrupted the prosecution of Göth, though it seems he was arrested by U.S. military while an inmate. The “…violation of concentration camp regulations regarding the treatment and punishment of prisoners” clause above is especially eye-opening. How bad do you have to be to get the SS to start looking at you sideways in THAT regard?
Do you have a cite or two? I have several dozen books on the holocaust sitting on my home bookshelves and none of them mention this. As noted, Google isn’t returning any cites either.