Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Four of the men present at the incident stood trial in January 1946. The two signals captains were not mentioned in the account of the proceedings. After a two-day hearing, only the hapless Auxiliary Constable Renoth was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Pelgrim, who had apparently carried out the fatal beating with his service rifle, was given fifteen years in prison, and the two political leaders, as accessories and possible participants, got ten years each.

  Renoth was hanged in 7 March 1946, despite his protests that the pilot was already dead when he fired the shot (which had been confirmed by medical tests carried out on the court’s behalf) and the prosecution’s acknowledgement that he had been obeying a superior order. The brigadier who forwarded the verdicts to the C-in-C Rhine Army for confirmation noted only: ‘I think there was justification for the death sentence on Renoth, but I should have felt happier about it had Pelgrim also been sentenced to death.’27

  By this time, the usual executioner for the British Zone was the well-known British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint. Already involved in a busy career in England, he travelled to British-occupied Germany and Austria to carry out around two hundred hangings of war criminals between December 1945 and the end of 1947. These included several instances of individuals held responsible for killing downed RAF aircrew like the pilot who crash-landed near Elten. He also hanged the British traitor John Amery, and William Joyce, known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, an American-born British fascist who had broadcast propaganda for the Nazis from Berlin. In between these commissions, which made him something of a contemporary celebrity, Pierrepoint ran a public house in Lancashire called Help the Poor Struggler.28

  The Elten trial counted as harsh justice – one example of many – but the forensic process itself, judging from the records of this and similar trials, was on the whole sound. In terms of jurisdiction, it was also straightforward enough. The RAF pilot was a lawful combatant who had been killed after surrendering to the enemy, and so, whoever was held responsible, a war crime had been committed.

  But what about other, less clear-cut cases? Through the winter of 1944–5 there had been a debate about whether crimes committed by Germans, not against British or other Allied nationals (including French, Belgian, Dutch, etc., citizens), but by Germans against those who were technically German citizens (Jews, for instance), could be tried by Allied courts, and if so by what right. Could they be called ‘war crimes’? Apparently not.

  In the first major trial of those involved in the mass murder of concentration-camp inmates – the so-called ‘Belsen trial’ – which began on 17 September 1945, at Lüneburg in the British Zone, the accused were not charged with crimes against peace or against humanity but with being involved in the murder of specific Allied nationals. In other words, they were held responsible in much the same way as the unlucky country policeman Hans Renoth. The accused were thought to have been responsible for thousands of deaths, but, in order to get around this legal problem, they actually stood trial for the murder of a small sample number of Allied nationals, whose deaths could be classified as war crimes. The short list of twenty victims, including three British nationals and others of Polish, Hungarian, Belgian, French, Dutch and Soviet nationality,29 who actually appeared on the charge sheet, stood in for unknown thousands of innocent dead of all nationalities, including Germans and Austrians.

  As the introduction to the United Nations War Crimes Commission report on the Belsen trial put it: ‘Jurisdiction was asserted under the military law, which entitles the Court to punish war crimes, limited under the Royal Warrant to crimes against Allied nationals.’30 This also meant that the trial was carried out under British law, under its habitual adversarial conditions, which included the right for witnesses to be subjected to hostile cross-examination. The British lawyers appearing for the defence of Josef Kramer, formerly of Auschwitz-Birkenau and commandant of Bergen-Belsen in its last terrible months, and his fellow defendants, therefore took every opportunity to argue often obscure points of legal principle, to place their ‘clients’ in the best possible light, and to discredit the testimony of the prosecution witnesses – even if these were hollow-cheeked, still-traumatised camp survivors who had waited months in DP camps to tell their harrowing stories.

  The adversarial nature of the trial led to horrors such as the assertion by Josef Kramer’s lawyer, Major T. C. M. Winwood, that his client’s behaviour might be explicable by the fact that he dealt with ‘the dregs of the ghettos of Eastern Europe’. The lawyer defending Ilse Grese, a sadist who had been in the habit of whipping prisoners to death at both Belsen and Auschwitz, maintained that she was not the ‘beast’ but the ‘scapegoat’ of Belsen, and that, since the camp was a prison, corporal punishment was ‘reasonable conduct in the circumstances’.31

  The trial summing-up by the British Army’s Judge Advocate-General, C. L. Stirling, a civilian, erred to an extraordinary degree in the direction of ‘fair play’, reminding the five-man military tribunal who would judge the cases that much evidence was ‘vague’. The court, he added, ‘would have to be satisfied that a person on the staff of Auschwitz or Belsen concentration camp was guilty of deliberately committing a war crime; just being a member of the staff itself was not enough to justify conviction’.32

  Stirling’s remarks caused international uproar, especially in France and Russia. A reminder from the bench regarding standards of proof in a trial at the Old Bailey of, say, a suburban murder suspect of hitherto blameless character, was one thing. To speak in this way under such circumstances was simply incomprehensible to millions awaiting justice for the crimes of the concentration camps.

  When the trial finally reached its conclusion two months later, thirty of the accused were convicted and fourteen acquitted. Eleven prisoners – including Grese and two other women warders – were sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment and the rest to prison terms ranging from one to fifteen years. The hangings took place at Hameln prison, with Pierrepoint once again officiating.

  By contrast, the Americans began their first concentration-camp trial on 15 November and concluded it on 13 December. Of the forty accused staff of the infamous Dachau camp, all were found guilty. Thirty-six were sentenced to death, and twenty-three death sentences were carried out.

  Even the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was moved to send a note to his Secretary of State for War, the Judge Advocate-General’s ultimate superior, expressing concern at the lack of ‘drive and energy’ being shown and citing the example of the Belsen trial. Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British Attorney General (and British Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals), called for an ‘accelerated war crimes programme’, but he knew they would never find all those responsible for the numberless and often nameless cruelties committed during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

  There are tens of thousands of Germans responsible for millions of murders. We must set ourselves an absolute minimum of prosecuting at least ten percent of those criminals in the British zone. That is about two thousand people. I am setting as an irreducible minimum that we try five hundred cases by 30 April 1946.33

  Attlee was not pleased with this, pointing out that such a deadline meant that this ‘would surely have the effect of leaving a large number of criminals unpunished and at large’. The Prime Minister’s instinct was correct. Even this relatively modest target was never met. Just a year after the end of the war, the British Army in Germany stopped investigating any non-British cases. There would be no repeat of the Belsen trial. From then on, it would be up to the foreign nations whose people had been murdered to pursue the cases.

  So far as general denazification in the British Zone was concerned, influential figures, especially in the London Foreign Office, had always opposed a wide-ranging purge.

  John Troutbeck, head of the German section at the Foreign Office, had warned in 1943 that this would ‘lead us into incurring greater responsibility for administration than is wise or necessary’.34 He was backed by senior fig
ures in the Treasury, too, including Edward (later Sir Edward) Playfair, who also fought the Morgenthau Plan and prophesied national bankruptcy if Britain dismantled the German government machinery and tried to run its zone alone.35 A Time magazine journalist gave a coyly bowdlerised version of a British official’s words: ‘We tell the bahstads what to do, you know, so their political beliefs make no difference really.’36 Traditions of realism clashed, in the British case, even more strongly with traditions of natural justice than in other zones, and as the drama of denazification played out after 1945, this battle turned into something of a tragicomic fiasco.

  The situation was complicated by the fact that a left-wing Labour government had been elected in July 1945. Its ranks were packed with passionately anti-Nazi and in many cases idealistic souls, who looked forward to radical and positive change both at home and in defeated Germany.

  Public opinion, war-embittered and appalled by the spectacle of the concentration camps as the Allied advance uncovered the full extent of Nazi atrocities, was also a factor in inhibiting the FO’s natural tendency to surreptitiously favour what might work and make life easier over what might be right but difficult. Churchill’s temporary (though, it seems, for a while genuinely enthusiastic) espousal of Morgenthau’s ‘Carthaginian Peace’ and the full force of the ‘Morgenthau boys’’ intervention in the planning process as the war ended caused problems for the Foreign Office mandarins. However, the punitive view did not quite manage to dominate planning as it did in Washington during 1945–6.

  The British policy, admitted or not, was to dismiss all senior officials in occupied Germany, but to reinstate them if subsequent checks established that they were nevertheless ‘acceptable’ (a fine Foreign Office adjective). Various forms of words were also found to permit some discretion for British officials on the spot in Germany, while at the same time appearing severe, such as: ‘Germans who are permitted to remain in, or are appointed to, official posts (e.g. in the police or the administration) should understand that they hold office only during good behaviour.’ The Americans accepted this but at Potsdam, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, justifiably pounced on it as a possible loophole for the retention by the Western Allies of ‘useful’ Nazis.37

  Unlike the Americans, who initially showed a strong moral/ideological aversion to keeping Nazis in offices or in comfortable jobs in industry and commerce, the British tended to see former Nazis as above all a potential security problem. The Americans also had a large pool of German speakers to draw on, be they ‘Aryan’ German-Americans or German-Jewish refugees who had made their home in the US after 1933. With the exception of émigrés like George Clare and his colleagues, who tended to be inserted into obvious areas where German-language skills were required, most British officers remained resolutely monolingual, and the civilian officials who were increasingly brought in to oversee German industry, as expropriations of companies progressed during 1946, were little better.

  One advantage the British undoubtedly possessed was General Sir Gerald Templer. Aged forty-six and with a successful war record behind him as a divisional commander, Templer was appointed Director of Military Government – largely responsible for the day-to-day running of the British Zone – by Montgomery in March 1945, initially with a staff of only fifty officers.38 Something of a martinet, and certainly a man of great energy and determination, Templer specialised in challenging complacency. In the words of a colleague, the historian Noel Annan, then a senior intelligence officer: ‘Military Government officers who had previously spent happy hours commandeering the best houses and stocking up the messes with wine and schnapps, found themselves working late hours reconstituting the German administration and putting Templer’s plans into operation.’

  Not that all of this solved Germany’s post-war problems in any short order. Here is Annan’s verdict on one particular burst of energy on General Templer’s part:

  Horses were gathered at three centres and sent by train to the main agricultural areas; 800 railway bridges and 7000 miles of track were repaired by the end of the year [1945]. But the food crisis did not disappear, the black market raged, and people left work to deal in it or went to farms to barter their possessions.39

  On the other hand, without such leadership, things might have been even worse. Templer would go on to become the organising genius of a successful British campaign against the communist uprising in Malaya, a model for counter-insurgency efforts from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

  Annan, based in Berlin and speaking fluent German, wrote a number of very influential reports. He was in a good position to observe the vices and virtues of the British handling of their slice of the defeated Reich, and to compare the British view of the country’s problems with the rather different perspectives held by the Germans themselves.

  Annan was also on close terms with the Political Adviser to the Military Governor, Sir William Strang, who had risen from a humble state-school background to the heights of the Foreign Office’s elite. ‘He looked,’ recalled Annan, ‘like a confidential clerk, but if he considered his opponent on the other side of the table obstructive he became a terrier and tore his arguments to shreds.’

  Annan accompanied Strang on a tour of Germany in October 1945. It was assumed, he reported, that the occupation of Germany would last for twenty years, during which time the Germans would have to learn to rule themselves again slowly and from first principles. Accordingly, a former colonial civil servant, Harold Ingrams, was drafted in and set up appointed councils of supposedly reliable Germans, drawn from business men, trade unionists, religious leaders, lawyers and so on, all over the zone. Little initiative was expected of them. They were there, Annan recalled, essentially to carry out British orders.

  Ingrams was apt to treat Germans as if they were a specially intelligent tribe of Bedouins. Discussion in the shady tent was permitted until the Resident Officer struck the ground with his stick and gave his decision. This attitude exasperated the Germans.

  Kurt Schumacher, the Hanover-based anti-Nazi who quickly became the leading figure in the post-war Social Democratic Party, was outraged. ‘Wir sind kein Negervolk’ (‘We are not blacks’) the fiery former concentration-camp inmate told Annan.

  The overriding object of Military Government was to make things work, to keep their zone stable.

  . . . The British were technocrats. They preferred the status quo. From the start they regarded the SPD (Social Democratic Party) with suspicion, because the left endangered the status quo. ‘It therefore had to be discouraged and it was.’ Works councils were forbidden, Nazis might be turned out of their flats by the British, but not by zealous Germans. Some city administrators tried to compel known Nazis to clear rubble: Military Government forbade it. When a committee of concentration camp victims was formed to supervise releases from the camps it was at once banned . . . There was therefore no sense of a new beginning. When Military Government called on the ordinary German citizen to help them distinguish between repulsive, fervent Nazis and merely nominal members of the party, the ordinary German citizen replied ‘Ohne mich’ – count me out.40

  The appearance of denazification in the British Zone was, in fact, superficially similar to that in the American Zone: the interminable Fragebogen, the five categories of Nazis, and of course the arrests of those thought to have been serious supporters of the Hitler regime. However, the British, uninfluenced by the beady-eyed social engineers of the Frankfurt School, did not compel all Germans over eighteen years old to fill out the Fragebogen, as in the American Zone. It applied only to those employed by or seeking employment in public offices and enterprises.41

  This rule led to some bizarre anomalies. George Clare, involved with denazification for the media and entertainment branches in post-war Berlin, reported the scene that greeted him when he entered his office one day and found it full of people who in the unenlightened 1940s were still called midgets:

  Tiny men and women standing on the chairs around the big table were bending over it
filling in their Fragebogens; another group in the middle of the room agitatedly discussed in squeaky voices whether such questions as ‘Did you serve in the general or Waffen SS?’ or ‘What was the last rank you held in the Wehrmacht?’ needed to be answered by them at all; two little chaps, obviously fed up with this nonsense, practised handstands in a corner and as there were not enough chairs for so many – some were reading their questionnaires lying comfortably on their tummies on the carpet.42

  It turned out that these artistes were part of a troupe known as the ‘Lilliputians’ from a well-known circus. Clearly someone had decided that since they performed for the public they counted as security-sensitive media operatives and therefore needed to be checked for political reliability.