Judiciary and Nazi Atrocities: Court Districts Vienna & Linz

This research project aims to: 1. compile an overview of all judgements concerning Nazi crimes of violence (the section "Vienna/Linz" corresponds with the Austrian federal states Burgenland, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg and Vienna); 2. compare the punishment of Nazi crimes of violence by different Austrian courts (trials before people`s courts of the post war era and jury courts; regional differences); 3. compare the punishment of Nazi homicidal crimes by Austrian and (West, East) German courts; 4. examine the application of different material and procedural law, in oder to answer a question which has its relevance also for present trials for crimes of humanity - to which extent the application of different law influences the outcome of the punishment of identical or similar offenses. The interdisciplinary analysis of the data obtained by scanning the judgements is to be put into a framework of regional history and politics. The analysis of the application of law by the courts is to be confronted with the juridical discussion in the first three post 1945 decades. In addition to the analysis of the judgements the section "Vienna/Linz" of this project intends to register and to scan all Austrian preliminary proceedings concerning crimes in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its sub camps. They are to be compared with the German Mauthausen trials, including the preliminary proceedings instituted by the Zentrale Stelle at Ludwigsburg.

The project "Judiciary and Nazi Atrocities in Austria" (carried out 2002-2006) corrected some wide spread opinions about the punishment of Nazi crimes by Austrian courts: Despite numerous questionable judgements and abandons of proceedings (most of them in the 1960s and 1970s) Austrian judiciary did much more in prosecuting those criminals than perceived by the general public. This is true especially for the first postwar decade, when more war criminals were convicted and sentenced by Austrian than by German courts. The three teams of historians and lawyers were situated at the Austrian Research Centre for Postwar Trials (Vienna), the Institute for Austrian law history and European legal development at the University of Graz, and the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck. The sub-project "Judiciary and Nazi Atrocities: Court Districts Vienna & Linz" dealt with the trials for murder on Hungarian Jews during the last weeks of the war, with Mauthausen Concentration Camp trials, the Austrian Holocaust trials after Eichmann was sentenced in Jerusalem, and the different German and Austrian legal approaches towards the punishment of Nazi crimes and crimes against humanity. In March 2006 the three sub-projects presented the main results of their researches at an international conference in Graz on "Genocide on Trial" to an international audience. The conference was focussed on the relevance of the historical trials to the topical discourse on punishing war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the occasion on the conference the three project leaders Thomas Albrich, Winfried R. Garscha and Martin F. Polaschek presented the volume "Holocaust und Kriegsverbrechen vor Gericht. Der Fall Österreich" ("Holocaust and War Crimes on Trial: The Case of Austria"). Fruitful for all the paricipants of the project was the collaboration of lawyers with historians and political scientists. One of the results of the project was the establishment of a new field of research in Austria: the legal history of the postwar trials.