The legal case against the eight accused men, scarcely noticed by the public, was heard by the Munich District Court between 8 August 1963 and 21 January 1965. On 30 January the decision was made by the District Court not to hold a full trial of seven of the defendants because at the time of the crime they would have been adjudged to have found themselves under a putative (claimed) threat from the Nazi authorities (
Putativnotstand). Amongst the seven defendants were five of the accused who later appeared in the Sobibor trial: Dubois, Fuchs, Jührs, Unverhau and Zierke. An appeal by the prosecution to put on trial all the defendants was rejected by the High Court in Munich, and all seven were set free. In the trial that began on 18 January 1965 and ended on 21 January, the only defendant was Josef Oberhauser. A total of 14 witnesses were heard, including Professor
Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, who with
Kurt Gerstein in August 1942 witnessed the gassing of Jewish victims at Belzec; Belzec survivor Rudolf Reder, who could neither name nor describe the defendant, and the accused – Dubois, Unverhau, Schluch, Zierke, Gley and Fuchs, against whom no proceedings were opened – and a former member of the camp staff at Belzec, Hans Gierzig, who was unfit to attend the trial due to illness. Oberhauser, who did not comment on the case, pleaded that he was acting under
superior orders, as did the other defendants in the Belzec trial, and also drew attention to the jail sentence he already served out in the
GDR. After consultation with the
Attorney General of the GDR, however, it was ascertained that Oberhauser had only served a portion (eight years) of his fifteen-year prison sentence in the GDR and that he had not been convicted in
Magdeburg of his role at Belzec extermination camp, but for his involvement in the
Action T4 euthanasia programme. The court did not agree his defence that he was under a putative threat, because Oberhauser, as the adjutant for
Christian Wirth (Camp Commandant of Belzec), must have had a good relationship with him. His subsequent lenient sentence by the Munich District Court took account of the more rigorous conditions in the prisons of the GDR and the potential maximum sentence of 15 years, if the two crimes (Belzec and Action 4) had been handled together in a single judicial process. An appeal to the
Federal Court confirmed the sentence against Oberhauser. In addition, the defence of obeying
superior orders, at least in the Belzec trial, was a factor that inhibited the award of sanctions. It is not entirely clear why this defence was accepted for seven defendants in the Belzec trial but not for the five defendants in the Sobibor trial nor even Josef Oberhauser. As part of the trial of
John Demjanjuk in 2009–10, witness' statements from the 1940s and 1960s were made available relating to yet another former security guard at Belzec, Samuel K. who was 88 years old at the time and living in Wachtberg im Rhein-Sieg-Kreis. The
Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg has undertaken preliminary investigations in January 2010 but no arrest was made. ==See also==