Bringing Justice to the Subcamps: Former Prisoners as Key Witnesses and Defendants in Postwar Trials

After the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, former prisoners played a key role in the prosecution of their perpetrators. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the correlation between the choice of former prisoners as witnesses during different types of trials and their role and position within a satellite concentration camp (subcamp or Außenlager) during the war. The discussion will take place within the theoretical framework of the prisoners’ society (Häftlingsgesellschaft), which has been the subject of several sociological analyses. It is the thesis of this chapter that the social structures of this prisoners’ society had a great impact on the choice of witnesses and how they remembered daily life and war crimes in the camps during the war period. Post-war trials regarding major camps like Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald have been subject to a great amount of research and are commonly known to the public. However, this is only the case to a very limited extend for most trials against the perpetrators of the subcamps, which were often located in rural areas in Germany and German-occupied Europe. Former research has primarily focused on the legal preconditions of the trials and how they were organised and accomplished. This chapter will differ from the above and will focus on the trials regarding the subcamps Husum-Schwesing, Ladelund, and Meppen-Dalum as an example, which were part of the Neuengamme concentration camp complex. The chapter will present the coherence in the use of witnesses in the British, Danish, and West German trials. Who were the witnesses and why were they chosen to testify in post-war trials? The significance of nationality, ethnicity, reasons for deportation, and the prisoner’s function in the camp society will be discussed to understand how and why a former prisoner became a witness.