Mauthausen-Studien 13: Christian Rabl

‘Mauthausen vor Gericht. Nachkriegsprozesse im internationalen Vergleich’ (‘Mauthausen on Trial. Postwar trials in international comparison’) by Christian Rabl was published as Volume 13 of the series ‘Mauthausen-Studien’.

The legal prosecution of the crimes committed in the Mauthausen concentration camp complex has received limited attention in academic study to date. This work is the first to take a comprehensive look at the investigations into and trials of Nazi perpetrators, and at their subsequent biographies. Following the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp in May 1945, survivors supported the US Army as it carried out initial, on-site investigations with the aim of arresting the perpetrators and bringing them to trial. In the first decade after the war, all four Allied powers prosecuted violent crimes; in addition, trials took place in several central and eastern European countries including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Austria, and West and East Germany. The focus for this study are around 500 trials in which a verdict was reached. Different legal frameworks and geopolitical and social relations had an impact on court proceedings and on the practice of granting amnesties. The author shows that for convicted Nazi perpetrators, there was no need for reintegration into postwar German and Austrian society after release from prison because at no time had they stood on the outside of these societies.

Christian Rabl was born in Lilienfeld in 1979 and studied politics and history at the University of Vienna. He is a researcher at the Zeithistorisches Zentrum Melk and teaches at the Department of Contemporary History in Vienna. His PhD thesis ‘The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex on Trial’ was awarded the Mauthausen Memorial Research Prize in 2018.