Legitimating the criminal state: former Nazi judges and the distortion of justice at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial,1963-65

In the 1963-65 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, the prosecutors used prewar precedents and Nazi standards of illegality to convict defendants of torturing and killing camp inmates. That the court in the 1960s used Nazi standards and evidence to show that the defendants had disobeyed Nazi orders made it more difficult to find a legal basis for judging those who cheated the camp system and used it for genocide. The implication was that the makers of SS policy and the creators of the camp system had acted legally