U.S. military authorities prepare to hang Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, 74, at Landsberg, Germany, on May 28, 1946.


U.S. military authorities prepare to hang Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, 74, at Landsberg, Germany, on May 28, 1946. In a Dachau war crimes trial he was convicted of using 1,200 concentration camp prisoners for malaria experimentation. Thirty died directly from the inoculations and 300 to 400 died later from complications of the disease. His experiments, all with unwilling subjects, began in 1942.


The testimony of hundreds of witnesses was heard over 218 trial days. One of them was Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz death camp commandant, who “reacted to the order to slaughter human beings as he would have to an order to fell trees,” wrote US prosecutor Whitney R. Harris.

Chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues also had the Nazis’ own meticulous records to work from, quoting document after document in “laying bare the workings of the German conspiracy,” Associated Press correspondent Daniel De Luce reported from the courtroom at the time.

On October 1, 1946, Goering, Hitler’s air force chief and right-hand man, was sentenced to death along with 11 others, including Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, who was tried in absentia. Bormann is now known to have died in Berlin in 1945 as he tried to flee the Soviets. Seven drew long prison sentences and three were acquitted.

Fifteen days later, the condemned men were hanged in the courthouse’s adjacent prison. Goering committed suicide by swallowing a poison pill in his cell the night before.

One of the last surviving witnesses to the trial, Emilio DiPalma, died earlier this year after contracting the coronavirus in the care home where he lived in Massachusetts.

After fighting the Germans on the front lines during the war, DiPalma found himself at age 19 being tasked to serve as a guard in the courtroom, where he stood at the witness box with his arms clasped behind his back while Hitler’s deputies were grilled about their atrocities.

“To this day, I can hardly believe that any human being could do such cruel things to another,” DiPalma wrote in his memoirs

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