Erich Koch - Trial and Imprisonment

Trial and Imprisonment

The Soviet Union demanded Koch's extradition, but the British government decided to pass him on to the Polish government instead. On January 14, 1950 he was handed over by the British to a prison in Warsaw, the Mokotów Prison, where he remained imprisoned for another eight years before his trial began on October 19, 1958. He faced charges of war crimes for the extermination of 400,000 Poles, but was never indicted for his crimes in Ukraine.

Found guilty of these crimes, he was sentenced to death on March 9, 1959 by the district court in Warsaw for having planned, prepared and organized the mass murder of civilians.

His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment due to ill health, although many believe he was spared because the Russians thought he possessed information about art looted by the Nazis during the war; in particular, information about the whereabouts of the Amber Room of Tsarskoe Selo palace near Leningrad which was dismantled on Koch's direct orders. The Russians believed he had ordered parts of this famous room to be hidden on board the Wilhelm Gustloff cruise liner, which was torpedoed and sunk in the Baltic whilst evacuating refugees from East Prussia in early 1945. Salvage attempts by both Russian and Polish diving teams in the 1950s revealed no evidence to substantiate this theory.

Koch appeared in a television report on Königsberg's history in 1986, interviewed by West German journalists in his Polish prison cell. He remained unrepentant to the end, arguing that he would never have surrendered as "it was a matter of honour". He died shortly thereafter of natural causes in prison at Barczewo, Poland (formerly Wartenburg in East Prussia) at the age of 90, as the last war criminal to serve a term in Poland.