SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

186 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
� Robert Jührs, charged with aiding and abetting with others the murder
of 30 persons;
� Ernst Zierke, charged with aiding and abetting with others the murder
of 30 persons. 528
While the acquittals of Jührs and Zierke may be understandable in
the light of the low number of murders in which they allegedly participated
jointly, those of Lachmann, Schütt, and Unverhau are surprising
on account of the seriousness of the indictment and are in striking disagreement
with the sentences in the cases of Wolf, Ittner, Dubois, Lambert,
and Fuchs who had likewise claimed an emergency state of putative
compulsion and had not been charged with any excesses.
Schelvis explains Lachmann’s acquittal on the grounds that the court
had considered Lachmann to be “mentally impaired.” 529 What is much
more illuminating, however, is what Schelvis has to say about Unverhau:
530
“He [Unverhau] was cleared after both the Hagen and the Be��ec
trials [the latter of which took place in Munich between 1963 and
1965]. He was the only SS man who voluntarily spoke of his part in
Operation Reinhardt immediately after the war.”
In other words: Unverhau had enlisted voluntarily as a witness for
the prosecution in the NS trials after the war – and hence received his
reward. Schütt’s acquittal as well can be explained by his readiness to
adopt the prosecution’s cause, for he said in the trial: 531
“In answer to the question why I was on the ramp when the
transports arrived, I declare I was there out of curiosity. I wanted to
convince myself of the inhumanity of the final solution, and to relay
my impressions back to Berlin so that I might be released. Under no
circumstances did I ever get actively involved [in the crimes committed]
at Sobibór. In fact, the crude manner in which the Ukrainians
carried on repulsed me. The Jews were often pushed and beaten by
them. They were merciless.”
All this indicates that the Hagen Sobibór trial, in line with most of
the trials against “NS perpetrators,” was primarily seen as an instrument
to establish the judicial notoriety of the alleged mass murders. Defen-
528 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobibor-Prozess
529 J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 71), p. 258.
530 Ibid., p. 263.
531 Ibid., p. 261.