What if Georg Conrad Morgen had managed to expose the Holocaust?

SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Georg Conrad Morgen was the chief investigator and prosecutor in a number of trials against death-camp commandants.

According to him, he was trying to use the little judicial maneuvering space afforded him in order to expose the holocaust, by forcing the Nazi leadership to either formally take responsibility for the orders to kill the Jews, or to abandon the killings.

Assuming he was telling the truth. What would the consequences have been if he had been able to work faster? Would there have been a revolution?


This is from his statement at the Nuremberg trials, where he was called as a witness:

The circumstances prevailing in Germany during the war were no longer normal in the sense of State legal guarantees. Besides, the following must be considered: I was not simply a judge, but I was a judge of military penal justice. No court-martial in the world could bring the Supreme Commander, let alone the head of the State, to court.

...it was not possible for me as Obersturmbannfuehrer to arrest Hitler, who, as I saw it, was the instigator of these orders.

On the basis of this insight, I realized that something had to be done immediately to put an end to this action. Hitler had to be induced to withdraw his orders. Under the circumstances, this could be done only by Himmler as Minister of the Interior and Minister of the Police.

I thought at that time that I must endeavor to approach Himmler through the heads of the departments and make it clear to him, by explaining the effects of this system, that through these methods the State was being led straight into an abyss. Therefore I approached my immediate superior, the chief of the Criminal Police, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Nebe; then I turned to the chief of the Main Office SS Courts, SS Obergruppenfuehrer Breithaupt. I also approached Kaltenbrunner and the chief of the Gestapo, Gruppenfuehrer Muller, and Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl of the Economic and Administrative Main Office, and the Reichsarzt, Gruppenfuehrer Dr. Grawitz.

But aside from taking these necessary steps, I saw a practical way open to me by way of justice; that is, by removing from this system of destruction the leaders and important elements through the means offered by the system itself., I could not do this with regard to the killings ordered by the head of the State, but I could do it for killings outside of this order, or against this order, or for other serious crimes.

For that reason, I deliberately started proceedings against these men, and this would have led to a shake-up of this system and its final collapse. But these activities had another far-reaching effect in the near future, for through the big concentration camp trials against Commander Koch, of whom I spoke earlier, and against the head of the political section at Auschwitz-Kriminalsekretur Untersturmfuehrer Grabner, whom I charged with murder in 2,000 cases outside of this extermination action-the whole affair of these killings had to be brought to trial.

It was to be expected that the perpetrators would refer to higher orders also for these individual crimes. This occurred; thereupon the SS jurisdiction, on the basis of the material which I supplied, approached the highest government chiefs and officially asked, "Did you order these killings? Is the legal fact of murder no longer valid for you? What general orders are there concerning these killings?"

Then the supreme State leadership would either have to admit its mistakes and thereby bring the culprits definitely under our jurisdiction also with regard to the mass exterminations, or else an open break would have to result through the abrogation of the entire judicial system.

Nurember testimony
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-08-46.asp

A short summary of his prosecutions:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/konradmorgen.html
 

abc123

Banned
You don't really expect that a single small judge, in a totalitarian state, can do anything to stop that?:eek:
 
I read about this gentleman just now on Wikipedia. I'm astounded to near-speechlessness that he managed to get away with his work with nothing worse than a warning from Himmler to cut it out and being thrown out of Treblinka when he attempted to inspect conditions there. :eek:
 
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