Pinter, Stephen F.

Stephen Pinter was an Austrian who immigrated to America in 1906 at the age of 17. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1924, and after the end of the Second World War, he applied with the U.S. War Department to become an investigative judge and prosecutor during the Allied war-crime trials in Germany. He got the job and started his duty in early 1946 at the U.S. War Crimes Commission at Dachau. His task there was to investigate events at the Flossenbürg Camp, and he eventually participated as a prosecutor during the respective trial. After that trial he changed to Salzburg, where he became Chief Defense Counsel for all war-crime trials conducted in Austria. In the years after the end of those trials, he made several public statements which clearly show a dedication to the truth. Here are several pertinent excerpts. (For details and sources, see Schwensen 2012):

I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a U.S. War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. […] Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the concentration camps in Germany.

I had nothing to do with Mauthausen. However, since I took some months investigating Flossenbürg and all the outcamps connected therewith, while stationed at Dachau, I can talk about those.

[The Flossenbürg Camp had] neither a gas chamber nor a mass shooting site.

[During the existence of the camp,] fewer than 300 persons died, by executions or due to other reasons.

As far as I could find out in six post-war years in Germany and Austria, a number of Jews were killed, but the number of one million was certainly never reached.

In general, I wrote many years ago to our local daily newspaper, that the allegation of the extermination of the Jewish race was grossly exaggerated, that I had many Jewish clients who had lived in Germany, Poland and other countries at Hitler’s time and for whom I collected hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus getting their stories firsthand and could state that the SIX MILLION story was a myth.

While I did my best to represent the real and decent justice and to prevent a justice of hate, there were a number of persons who repeatedly brought in false or unfounded accusations against the German prisoners, and who, by means of obviously perjured witnesses gained successes before the military courts, which did not accord with the real facts. As a result of such miscarriages of justice, many were unfortunately sentenced although not guilty, and some of them were executed. Of the great trials in Dachau it was especially the Malmedy Trial and the Mauthausen and Buchenwald Concentration Camp Trials which became — during my stay in Dachau but without any involvement on my part in the trials — infamous due to their malfeasances.