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Portrait of Roman Sompolinski taken right before he took the stand as a prosecution witness at the Bergen-Belsen Trial.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 19587
Portrait of Roman Sompolinski taken right before he took the stand as a prosecution witness at the Bergen-Belsen Trial. Sompolinski gave testimony about being shot while searching for food discarded by the SS personnel and about Josef Kramer's killing of two Hungarian Jews.

Portrait of Roman Sompolinski taken right before he took the stand as a prosecution witness at the Bergen-Belsen Trial.

Sompolinski gave testimony about being shot while searching for food discarded by the SS personnel and about Josef Kramer's killing of two Hungarian Jews.

Date
1945 October 01
Locale
Lueneburg, [Prussian Hanover; Lower Saxony] Germany
Photo Designation
PURSUIT OF JUSTICE -- Concentration Camp/Atrocity Trials -- British Trials -- Bergen-Belsen -- Trial/Courtroom/Witnesses
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Roman Sompolinski

About This Photograph

Event History
Over the course of two months, from 17 Sept. to 17 Nov. 1945, forty-five former camp personnel and prisoners from Bergen-Belsen were tried for war crimes before a British Military Tribunal in Lueneburg, Germany. The defendants, thirty-two former members of the SS (sixteen men and sixteen women), including Josef Kramer, the former camp commandant, and twelve former prisoners (seven men and five women), were specifically charged with, either at Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz, being responsible for either the murder of Allied nationals or the suffering of those nationals under the terrible conditions of the camp. Regarding the second charge, a problem soon arose for the prosecution because unlike Auschwitz, where camp personnel were considered directly responsible for the deadly conditions, Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, making it harder to prove that the defendants were responsible for the conditions. Persuasive evidence, however, including film footage taken during the camp's liberation and a visit to the camp by the court, enabled the prosecution to secure guilty verdicts for all but fourteen of the defendants. Of those four guilty, eleven were sentenced to death (including Kramer), and nineteen were sentenced to various jail terms, from life to one year. Those sentenced to death were hanged on 12 Dec. 1945.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005224.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Provenance: Roman Sompolinski
Source Record ID: Collections:
 
Record last modified: 2015-04-21 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1067678