prisoners arrived at Landsberg prison in December 1945. These war criminals had been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity at the Dachau Trials which had begun a month earlier. Between 1945 and 1946, the prison housed a total of 110 prisoners convicted at the subsequent Nuremberg trials, a further 1416 war criminals from the Dachau trials and 21 prisoners convicted in the . (These were military tribunals conducted by the American forces in Japan between August 1946 and January 1947 to prosecute 23 German officials who had continued to assist the Japanese military in Shanghai after the surrender of Nazi Germany.) In five and half years, Landsberg Prison was the place of execution of 252 condemned war criminals, all of them by hanging. Executions were carried out expeditiously. In May 1946, 28 former SS guards from Dachau were hanged within a four-day period. Bodies that were not claimed were buried in unmarked graves in the cemetery next to the Spöttingen chapel. The prison was also used for the executions of common criminals. Thirty-three common criminals, including one U.S. soldier who had been court-martialed for murdering a civilian, were executed between 1947 and 1949, 29 of them by firing squad. Prisoners Notable former members of the Third Reich who were sent to the U.S. Army's prison at Landsberg included: Gottlob Berger Paul Blobel Karl Brandt Sepp Dietrich Hellmuth Felmy Otto Hofmann Karl-Adolf Hollidt Hermann Hoth Waldemar Klingelhöfer Gustav Knittel Alfried Krupp Hans Lammers Wilhelm List Erhard Milch Joachim Peiper Hermann Pister Oswald Pohl Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland Otto Ohlendorf Martin Sandberger Otto Steinbrinck Walter Warlimont Martin Gottfried Weiss Fritz Dietrich Friedrich Entress Eduard Krebsbach Closure By 1948 the Bavarian Ministry of Justice's Association for the Welfare of Prisoners (Vereinigung für die Wohlfahrt von Gefangenen des Bayerischen Staatsministeriums der Justiz) managed the needs of the prisoners held by the American military. With the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949 and its abolition of the death penalty, calls from politicians, the churches, industrialists, and artists resulted in numerous petitions being made to close down War Criminal Prison No. 1. as part of a general effort to bring freedom for all Germans convicted of war crimes. In the last half of 1950 and the first half of 1951, thousands of Germans took part in demonstrations outside Landsberg prison to demand pardons for all the war criminals while the