Victim Witnesses at Nazi Trials. An Analysis of their Changing Role in Sixty Years of the Federal Republic

该项目系统地介绍了前集中营囚犯和大屠杀幸存者作为审判证人参与联邦共和国参与国家社会主义大规模犯罪的司法活动的情况。1949年至1989年期间，数千名受到迫害的人在针对肇事者的司法调查和刑事审判中作证，他们的陈述往往构成起诉书和证据的支柱。然而，到目前为止，人们对他们作为证人出庭的情况、条件和后果知之甚少；到目前为止，相关的原始材料几乎没有被用于学术研究。他们作为证人出现的参数--从寻找、选择和审查证人到刑事司法证人可信度标准--构成了本研究的重点。该项目分析了德国联邦律师与被纳粹迫害的人之间的通信，阐明了证人证词的法律概念与就灭绝作证的可能性之间的紧张关系，并审查了受害者证人在犯罪的法律重建和判决中的重要意义。该项目的目的是根据对纳粹罪行的法律起诉中作为主角的证人的经验核实和历史背景知识，提供基础性研究。为了掌握特定群体和特定时间的证人出庭形式和内容，选择了两个与犯罪现场有关的刑事程序作为实证研究的基础：与奥斯维辛集中营和灭绝集中营有关的审判，证人群体极为多样化；以及与索比博尔灭绝集中营有关的审判，只有犹太人证人参与。由此产生了两项研究，其结果将以两本专著和一篇合作和比较论文的形式公布。受害者证人被理解为参与审判的一群人，他们大部分是出于自己的动机进入这一进程的，但他们发现自己的角色和交流情况只是略微符合他们的关切。因此，将纳粹罪行作为一部冲突史的法律接触史具有重要的新视角。该项目提供了一种迄今被忽视的接触，即在这些刑事程序中产生的被纳粹迫害的人的证人证词。它认真对待这些案件出现的条件，而不是仅仅从查明事实的角度加以考虑，将其置于刑事司法系统适用的可信度标准之下，或将其简化为一种道德或文化记忆的功能。这为未来在不同学科中的研究铺平了道路，使其能够利用迄今鲜为人知的原始材料的丰富语料库。

The project offers a novel systematic account of the involvement of former concentration camp inmates and Holocaust survivors as trial witnesses in the judicial engagement of the Federal Republic with National Socialist mass crimes. Thousands of people who had been persecuted testified between 1949 and 1989 in judicial enquiries and criminal trials against the perpetrators, their statements often forming the backbone of the indictment and evidence. Until now, however, relatively little was known about the circumstances, conditions, and consequences of their appearance as witnesses; the appertaining source materials have hardly been used in scholarship to date. The parameters of their appearance as witnesses – from the search for, selection, and examination of witnesses through to the criminal justice criteria of witness credibility – constitute the focal point of this research. This project analyzes communications between the Federal German lawyers and persons persecuted by the Nazis, elucidates the tensions between the legal conception of witness testimony and the possibilities of testifying about annihilation, and examines the significance of victim witnesses in the legal reconstruction of the crimes along with the verdicts. The aim of the project is to provide foundational research on the basis of empirically verified and historically situated knowledge about the witnesses as protagonists in the legal prosecution of Nazi crimes. In order to capture both the group-specific and time-specific forms and contents of witness appearances, two criminal procedures relating to crime sites were selected as the basis of empirical research: the trials relating to the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz, with an extremely heterogeneous group of witnesses, and the trials relating to the extermination camp at Sobibor, in which exclusively Jewish witnesses were involved. Two studies thus emerged, the results of which will be presented in two monographs and one collaborative and comparative essay. The victim witnesses are understood as a group of persons involved in the trials who for the most part entered into the process with their own motives, who however found themselves in a role and a communicative situation which only marginally suited their concerns. The history of the legal engagement with Nazi crimes as a history of conflict is thereby enriched with an important new angle. The project offers a hitherto neglected engagement with the witness testimonies of persons persecuted by the Nazis generated in these criminal procedures. It takes the conditions surrounding their emergence seriously without regarding them solely from the perspective of ascertaining facts, submitting them to the standards of credibility applied by the criminal justice system, or reducing them to a function of ethics or cultural memory. This paves the way for future research in various disciplines to work with a rich corpus of hitherto little regarded source materials.