Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  In the circumstances of 1945, the strength of these proposed post-war trials was, of course, that the German state no longer existed. Therefore the legal proceedings were completely in the hands of the Allies. No Germans need be involved, except as defendants and defence lawyers. No risk of repeating the Leipzig fiasco. This was, however, also the weakness of the legal process, especially in the eyes of the German population at large. The trials, however punctiliously conducted, were self-evidently ‘victors’ justice’. The fact that German judges would not be asked to try their nation’s most high-ranking criminals – who had committed many crimes against German citizens, too – implied, by this very absence of meaningful participation, that Germans in general shared their leaders’ culpability. This fact was not lost on the post-war public.

  Nor was it only the aggrieved defeated who found the legal foundation of the trials at best doubtful. Lovat Fraser’s qualms in 1919 about the legitimacy of trying a ruler for his life found echoes in 1945. The Chief Justice of the United States, Harlan Fiske Stone, later referred to ‘[Chief US prosecutor Robert H.] Jackson’s high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg’.10 Stone didn’t so much care what Justice Jackson did to the Nazis, but he disliked claims that this was a normal court, proceeding according to common law. So strongly did he feel that, when asked to swear in the American members of the International Military Tribunal, he said he ‘did not wish to appear even in that remote way, to give my blessing or that of the Court on the proposed Nurnberg [sic] trials’.11

  Although Jackson believed strongly in the justice of the trials, he was aware of other weaknesses in the Allies’ claim to dispense impartial justice, which might be exploited by the accused. The Allies themselves had ‘done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies* asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.’12

  But how could there be no legal reckoning with the elite of the Third Reich? Clearly, massive and terrible crimes had been committed throughout Europe in the course of the war by German forces at their leaders’ behest; crimes that in many cases would be clearly considered as such in all the countries that had signed the Hague Convention forty years earlier, and even centuries before that. Mistreatment of prisoners, violence against and killing of innocent civilians, starvation and brutalisation of occupied populations – all these offences had been perpetrated on a grand scale between 1939 and 1945 by Germans acting on their government’s behalf. Surely there must be punishment for those ultimately responsible? Were not justice and revenge in this case the same thing?

  The Allies agreed on the final legal basis of the trial of the Nazi leaders at a four-power conference in London on 8 August 1945 – two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and coinciding exactly with the Soviet Union’s final declaration of war against Japan. The opening of the war crimes proceedings was set for 20 November. Less than six months would therefore elapse between the surrender of Germany and the trial, potentially for their lives, of the country’s surviving leadership, for multitudes of crimes committed in often obscure circumstances across thousands of square kilometres of Europe and almost six years of war.

  By the time the trials began, the first post-war winter was closing in. They were to be held at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. With a pre-war population of 420,000 the largest conurbation in northern Bavaria, second city of that ancient kingdom, since the Middle Ages Nuremberg had been a flourishing centre for industry, craft and the arts. Consequently it had become one of the cradles of nineteenth-century German socialism – and in peacetime during Hitler’s regime the scene of the massive, overblown annual Nazi rallies known throughout the world as the Reichsparteitage.

  Each Nuremberg Parteitag, held at the vast open space of the Luitpoldhain (‘Luitpold Grove’) to the south-east of the city, had been named after some supposed major theme of German life during the year concerned. So, in 1933 it was the ‘Reichsparteitag of Victory’ (because of Hitler’s successful seizure of power), in 1934 – although initially untitled – ‘Reichsparteitag of Will’ (associating it directly with Leni Riefenstahl’s famous documentary) and so on, through ‘Freedom’ (from the Treaty of Versailles, not the democratic kind), ‘Work’, to the ‘Reichsparteitag of Peace’. This had been scheduled to begin on 2 September 1939 and consciously intended to convince the world of Hitler’s pacific intentions despite all indications to the contrary. It was cancelled without explanation towards the end of August.

  Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September. No Parteitage were staged during the war years.

  On a practical level, Nuremberg’s large early-twentieth-century court building and its connected complex of holding cells had survived the devastating wartime bombing of the city surprisingly well. On a propaganda level, what better place to bring justice to bear on the Third Reich than in the city where it had celebrated its greatest propaganda triumphs, which had become indelibly associated with Nazi pageantry and oratory, and whose name had even been used to label the notorious set of racist decrees announced by the Führer at the 1935 Parteitag and thereafter known as the ‘Nuremberg Laws’?

  Nuremberg lay in Bavaria, which had been allocated to the American Zone. The Soviets had initially tried to keep the trials themselves in Berlin, but in the end were forced into a somewhat unwieldy compromise: the legal proceedings in the first instance would take part almost 500 kilometres to the south of the Reich capital, at Nuremberg, while the seat of the four-power tribunal authority would remain Berlin.13

  Three hundred and fifty representatives of the world’s press would be granted admission to court room 600 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, and four hundred members of the public would also be admitted. Since this was to be a ‘fair trial’, counsels for the defence of each accused as well as prosecutors would also be present in the spacious chamber, which had been specially renovated and adapted for the purpose. There was no question that the arraignment of twenty-four leaders of the Third Reich (including the missing Martin Bormann, who was tried in his absence, and German Labour Front leader Robert Ley, who committed suicide while awaiting trial) amounted to a ‘show trial’ in the literal sense. And it was a show on a grand scale. The aim was clearly to impress the world with the crimes of the Nazis – but also with the fairness of Allied justice.

  The world might have been impressed, but whether the German public, now realising the full deprivation of post-war life, and with no end in sight, was also impressed, is doubtful. The proceedings, when they began, soon turned out to be long-winded, quite dull to outsiders, and with the evidence overwhelmingly skewed towards the ordering and interpretation of a vast mass of documentation rather than personal testimony. In fact, as one writer has seen it, the entire trial bore more than a passing resemblance to a classic (and classically tedious at times) anti-trust suit, an area of litigation that had become especially common in the United States under Roosevelt’s New Deal. This was the kind of case where many of the American lawyers involved had gained most of their experience back home, and it showed. What the trial was not, by and large, was a rousingly emotional moral exploration that might have forced the world (and especially Germany) to examine its conscience.14

  In one of the odder instances of the importance of translation, or more accurately mistranslation, one of the counts in the indictment – in English ‘crimes against humanity’ – was consistently rendered into German as ‘Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit’, i.e. not ‘against humanity’ but ‘against humaneness’, thus softening or at least euphemising the accusation (an error that is still found in the German literature to this day).15 After all, it could be said, was not the Allied bombing of German cities an infraction against ‘humaneness’? And was this not also true of the starvation d
iet which they seemed wilfully to have inflicted upon the conquered German population?

  The majority of the inhabitants of the American Zone, according to the Military Government’s busy pollsters, followed the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg with interest, at least at its beginning and end. A large majority (79 per cent) said they thought the trial fair (procedurally, that is). As for the lesson to be drawn from it, 30 per cent thought it was to avoid following a dictator, and 26 per cent to never again start a war. A mere 3 per cent of respondents mentioned justice and 2 per cent human rights.16

  The trial went on for almost a year and was extensively covered in the newspapers and newsreels. It was almost like a giant film being projected on to a screen behind the German people, or a radio soundtrack, as the vanquished went about the task of surviving that first post-war winter, spring and summer. Every day, the men who had ruled without pity over the fates of millions sat in their courtroom, crowded in there with their accusers, their defenders and the host of observers in the witness galleries from all over the world, who were hanging on their every word, interpreting their every argument and remark.

  As for the Germans on the level below them – the plausible businessmen, the colourless civil servants and the wealthy and powerful backers without whom such criminals could never have taken power – they were also being subjected to a reckoning all over Germany. In many cases justly, but often not, because the victors’ justice could be ignorant and capricious.

  There were groups of people in Germany, as the Nazi regime collapsed, who could be easily identified as ‘guilty’ in some way or another, at least so far as the conquerors were concerned. Anyone in an official uniform, anyone who had played an active role in the Nazi Party. Landowners, officers and industrialists, who in the official Allied view had nurtured Hitler and benefited from his dictatorship. Leading artistic, sporting and media figures in Germany who had acted as the attractive face of the regime.

  The most horrifyingly immediate retribution against such people occurred in the east. Amidst the general mayhem unleashed by the men of the Red Army, following on the rape, the plunder and the destruction, the treatment of members of the German and more especially ‘Prussian’ aristocratic elite was merciless. They were triply doomed: as an overwhelmingly nationalist group, whether Nazi or not, seen with some justice as aiding Hitler’s rise to power; as the backbone of the German militarism that had allowed Hitler to devastate Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga; and as reactionary class enemies of the communists, Russian or German. Just as the Bolsheviks had massacred the old Tsarist aristocracy during the revolution and civil war more than a quarter of a century earlier, so they and their German protégés now saw little reason to spare the White Russians’ German equivalents.

  Many landowners understood the danger they were in and took steps, along with their families, to flee to the west. It was hard for them to leave lands where they had been established for many years, perhaps centuries. Marion Gräfin (Countess) Dönhoff, scion of an ancient East Prussian aristocratic family, had already lost a brother to a wartime air crash and a beloved cousin to the gallows at Plötzensee prison, where he had died an agonising death along with other aristocratic leaders of the plot against Hitler’s life. Anti-Nazi since her student days, the unmarried thirty-five-year-old Gräfin had spent the wartime years managing the extensive family estates on the flatlands south-west of Königsberg, known as ‘Prussian Holland’, while the males of the family fought – and in two cases died – for Germany. Ever since Hitler’s invasion of Russia, she had expected the tide to turn and her ancestral lands to be lost. Every time she and her sisters and workers bought some new farm machinery, or undertook some improvement on the estate, they had joked: ‘The Russians will be pleased.’17 But old habits die hard, and, despite everything, they worked as if the family would prosper there for another five hundred years.

  Even when the end was very close, when the sound of distant artillery could be heard to the east, Gräfin Dönhoff, her sister and her sister’s husband, who was home on leave from the front, spanned up the horse sledge and embarked on one last afternoon out hunting across the frozen landscape, tracking wild boar and finally a young fallow buck. That same day, she also heard from contacts among the High Command that a Russian breakthrough was imminent – something she would never have learned from the Nazi-controlled press.

  So Gräfin Dönhoff saddled up her horse, Alaric, and with her family and household headed west on a gruelling, fear-driven trek that would take her 1,200 kilometres to Hamburg and a post-war future as a famous journalist. Those who stayed – or fell behind – were not so lucky. In one village in Pomerania, also part of the heartland of the old Junker class, a German witness reported that a Ukrainian boy who had spent three years on one of the local farms as a forced labourer was ordered by the invading Red Army to take them from dwelling to dwelling, from humble cottage to manor house, and report on those who lived there. The witness’s father, a small farmer, had treated his foreign labour well and thus escaped with his life. The squire in the manor house had his eyes poked out by the soldiers before a rifle bullet put an end to his misery.18

  Everywhere, a world unchanged for centuries was forcibly being turned upside down – and not just by the Russian soldiery. Elsewhere in Pomerania, a descendant of another grand Prussian family, Baron Jesko Ludwig Günther Nikolaus Freiherr von Puttkamer, woke up one morning in early March 1945, saw fires spreading across the horizon they had hoped to flee towards and realised there was no escape. He put on his officer’s uniform, complete with medals from both wars, and then roused his family – his wife, the Baroness, and his stepdaughter, Libussa, who was pregnant with the child she had conceived with her serving officer husband. ‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Let us go into the park.’ Both the women knew what he meant, and what the code of their caste foresaw for such a moment. The Baron’s service pistol was loaded and ready. ‘It’s time,’ he explained. ‘The Russians will be here in an hour, two at the most.’

  Libussa, though, feeling the unborn child inside her, refused to go. ‘Mother, wait, please, I can’t do it.’

  The Baroness tried to calm her daughter. ‘It will be quick and painless.’

  But Libussa was determined. ‘No, no, it isn’t that. I’m not afraid. I want to go with you, but I can’t. I’m carrying the baby, my baby. It’s kicking so hard. It wants to live. I can’t kill it.’19

  Her words changed all their fates. The Baroness decided not to die, but to stay with her daughter. Baron von Puttkamer followed this conversation in a bemused fashion. The decision that the two women had taken was completely alien to his world view. Libussa’s brother, born of Prussian Junker stock, who later chronicled her life, wrote of the transfer of power that took place at this moment:

  Our notions of right and wrong, our sense of order, our values have for centuries been formed one-sidedly: they are masculine to a fault, Protestant, Prussian, and soldierly. Self-sacrifice in the name of ideals. Obedience to the state and to superiors. Readiness to serve and fight even unto death. It is from these values that our achievements as well as our destruction have come. Our conditioning pushed us toward an either/or rigidity: friend or enemy, all or nothing, triumph or defeat.

  But in defeat, when it suddenly materialises, these masculine principles lose their power and value. Survival in defeat, and ultimately in life itself requires something else.20

  The Baron looked helplessly at the women. ‘And what about me? What am I supposed to do?’

  Libussa was firm. ‘The first thing you can do is get out of that stupid outfit and throw it in the pond, and the pistols with it! If the Russians find any of those things, we’re finished.’

  And reluctantly, he did as she told him. The Baron changed into civilian clothes and they waited.

  When the Russians arrived, they stole everything, but there was no rape. Then a headquarters unit took over. The aristocrats were in luck. They suffered many further tribulations, bu
t they did not die at the hands of the enemy.

  Hundreds of Junkers, sometimes whole families, did commit suicide in these terrible weeks of defeat and violence. Another 1,500 or so have been judged to have died in air raids, in Russian and Polish detention camps, or to have disappeared, presumed murdered, during the trek westward.21 Most aristocrats who survived the initial flood tide of the Russian advance found their way, in the early days of peace, to the Western zones. They had good reason to do so. They were granted a special place in the demonology of the post-war era, alongside the evil business magnates who had financed Hitler. As early as June 1945, the German Communist Party’s first post-war programme called for

  . . . the liquidation of large landholdings, of the large estates of the Junkers, counts and princes and the assignment of their entire ground and land as well as the living and dead inventory to the provincial or state authorities for distribution to farmers ruined and expropriated by war.22

  These estates would be confiscated without compensation and redistributed to the less privileged. ‘Junker land into farmers’ hands’ as the famous communist slogan ran. Towards the end of October 1945, the SMAD (Soviet Military Administration in Germany) published its decree no. 110 authorising just such a ‘land reform’. There was a small ‘escape clause’ in the confiscation law that permitted compensation in the case of proven anti-fascists, but in reality the break-up of the Junker estates was total and universal. Those landowners who stayed on in the Soviet Zone in hope of being allowed some kind of role had made a bad decision. The size of landholding classified as liable for confiscation was fixed at 100 hectares (approximately 250 acres), involving around one-third of the total agricultural land in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The landholdings of ‘activist Nazis’ could also be confiscated, whatever their extent. Thus when the ‘land reform’ began to be implemented, soon after the end of the war, many thousands, including non-aristocratic, merely prosperous farmers – essentially, the equivalent of the Kulaks Stalin had liquidated during his collectivisation campaign during the 1930s – from the decidedly non-Prussian, non-feudal states of Saxony and Thuringia, were rounded up under the supervision of the Soviet NKVD and in many cases transported to the island of Rügen in the Baltic. Here they lived under abysmal conditions, without proper shelter or food. It was one of the stipulations that the owners of these estates lost not only their land but all their other property. During the winter of 1945–6, one letter written to the communist authorities in Saxony from Rügen by a Saxon landowner interned there pathetically detailed the cold, the hunger, the spread of disease. ‘Help us, please . . .’ it pleaded. ‘We are dying.’23