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Werner Lampe

Werner Lampe was a German judge who presided over the deportation of thousands of Jews during the Nazi era, for which he was sentenced to life imprison at the 1948 Nuremberg Trials.

Biography[]

Werner Lampe was born in Germany, and he served as a judge during the Nazi era. Lampe presided over the deportations of thousands of Jews and other victims of Nazism to concentration and extermination camps during the Holocaust, but he did not believe that millions were executed until he was imprisoned after World War II. During the 1948 Nuremberg Trials, Lampe was charged with crimes against humanity for his culpability in the Holocaust, and, not believing the footage from liberating concentration camps and the statistic that 6 million Jews had been exterminated, Lampe asked his fellow prisoner, former SS guard Otto Pohl, to explain how that statistic could be correct. Pohl revealed the Nazis' methods for mass murder and said that the problem was not with how many people could be killed, but how to dispose of the bodies; this experience convinced Lampe that the Holocaust was worse than he had imagined, and he was filled with remorse for his actions. Lampe was too tearful to make a closing statement at the end of the trial, even as his fellow defendant Emil Hahn remained an unrepentant Nazi and Friedrich Hofstetter claimed that he had only upheld the law as it stood. Lampe and his co-defendants, including Justice Minister Ernst Janning, were given life sentences by Chief Judge Dan Haywood. Within five years, all four of the convicted men were released from prison as a means of building German-American relations as the Cold War escalated.

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