Killing the SS
Page 3
“I liked him,” was Hitler’s simple explanation for the series of promotions.
Hermann Göring, former World War I flying ace and leader of Germany’s Luftwaffe, shown here in 1938, nearly a decade before his death
Between 1941 and 1945 Göring served as vice-chancellor of Germany, making him the second-most-powerful man in the country. In addition to being Reichsminister of the German air force, Göring was also in charge of forestry and economics. In 1940, shortly after the fall of France, Hitler named Göring Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, or Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich, the highest military rank in Nazi Germany. Over the years, the dashing young fighter pilot of World War I bloated into “der dicke Hermann”—Fat Hermann—in the words of many Germans. Göring ate and drank with abandon. He kept lions as pets, confiscated great works of art, and designed his own elaborate uniforms. He was the bon vivant to Hitler’s ascetic, underestimated only by those who did not know of Göring’s great intellect and lust for power.
* * *
Göring does not disappoint on the stand. He alternately charms and philosophizes. It is a performance so full of bluster that it earns him the contempt of his fellow defendants.
Former Nazi armaments director Albert Speer will write: “Hermann Göring, the principal in the trial, grandiloquently took all responsibility, only to employ all his cunning and energy to deny that he bore any specific guilt. He had become a debauched parasite; in prison he regained his old self and displayed an alertness, intelligence, and quick-wittedness such as he had not shown since the early days of the Third Reich.”
Nine days after taking the stand, Göring finally steps down. No other defendant will testify as long. “The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, its happiness, its freedom, and its life. And for this I call on the Almighty and my German people to witness,” he states in his closing remarks, rising to his feet just before delivering the statement.
When the verdicts are finally read on October 1, twelve of the defendants are sentenced to death, three are sentenced to life in prison, four are sentenced to jail terms of ten to twenty years, and three are acquitted.2
“I’ve never been cruel,” Göring will confide to a court psychologist one morning. “I’ll admit I’ve been hard. I do not deny that I haven’t been bashful about shooting 1,000 men for reprisal, or hostages, or whatever you please. But cruel? Torturing women and children … that is so far removed from my nature.
“Maybe you think it is pathological of me, but I still cannot see how Hitler could have known about all those ugly details. Now that I know what I know, I wish I could just have Himmler here for ten minutes to ask what he was pulling off there.”
By 10:30 p.m. on October 15, 1946, fourteen days after the verdict, Hermann Göring has already been served his final meal. The former Nazi leader sits alone in his cell here at the Palace of Justice. The prison gymnasium is just a short thirty-five-yard walk away from Göring. There, U.S. Army master sergeant John C. Woods oversees the gallows where Hermann Göring is scheduled to be hanged in less than three hours. Three black scaffolds now await the former Reichsminister and ten other Nazi leaders fated to die tonight. Each gallows is eight feet high and eight feet square, with thirteen steps leading to the platform. Ropes dangle from crossbeams supported by two posts.
Sergeant Woods has no expertise as a hangman—indeed, he fabricated a prewar history as an executioner in order to get the job. He is an unkempt alcoholic with yellow teeth and chronic bad breath. But the heavyset thirty-five-year-old Kansas native and his assistant, military policeman Joseph Malta, will soon adjust thick hemp nooses around the necks of Göring and the other convicted Nazi war criminals. Woods will then release the trapdoor, commencing their final drop to death. In the case of a normal hanging, the victim’s neck would snap at the bottom of the drop and death would occur almost instantly. But Woods’s inhumane methods leave the neck unbroken and the victim slowly strangling to death, a process that can take more than ten minutes.
Hermann Göring has no intention of taking that plunge. He has already requested that he be shot by firing squad, believing this a more suitable ending for the head of the German air force—the Luftwaffe. But that request was denied two days ago.
Once widely lampooned for his obese figure, the former president of the Reichstag has lost sixty pounds since surrendering to the Allies on May 7, 1945. The time in prison has also seen Göring kick his longtime morphine addiction. Ironically, Hermann Göring is the healthiest he’s been in decades.
Meanwhile, Col. Burton C. Andrus, the American officer serving as security commandant, is marching across the prison yard to death row. He will once again read the official sentence of death that was conferred on Göring two weeks ago. Once that is done, Göring’s hands will be shackled and he will be led to the gallows.
However, as was the case with Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring’s death will come at the time and place of his own choosing—and that time is now. An American guard stands outside his cell, ordered to watch Göring’s every move. The security detail’s shift is just two hours long in order to preclude boredom. So Göring knows to be cautious with his movements.
The significant weight loss has shrunk his torso, leaving great folds of loose skin hanging off his frame. In time, some investigators will believe that the Reichsmarschall hid a cyanide capsule under his skin. In fact, Göring refused to take a shower for more than two weeks before his pending execution.
The cyanide was given to Göring by nineteen-year-old American private Herbert Lee Stivers, a prison guard in love with a young German girl. The girl, who gave her name as Mona, convinced Private Stivers to secretly deliver three pens to Göring inside his cell. A subsequent investigation revealed that two men, never identified, gave the pens directly to Stivers, saying they contained medicine for Göring. It was not until 2005, nearly sixty years after Göring’s death, that Stivers admitted to passing the poison into the war criminal’s cell. He delayed his admission of guilt due to fear of punishment.
* * *
Hermann Göring places the cyanide capsule between his teeth. He bites down hard, shattering the glass vial. Hydrogen cyanide, also known as prussic acid, spills onto his tongue and eases down his throat, filling the cell with its almond-like smell.
Göring dies almost instantly. He is fifty-three years old.
* * *
Among the condemned at the Nuremberg Trials, only Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner is a member of the SS. The others are publishers, industrialists, politicians, ambassadors, and soldiers. It is as if the many crimes of Nazi Germany are being laid upon the men in charge rather than soldiers who cold-bloodedly carry them out.
And while SS-General Kaltenbrunner will be executed shortly after midnight on October 16, 1946, thousands of other SS officers and soldiers are getting away with murder.3 In fact, Adolf Eichmann, the “master” of killing Jews, was actually in custody at the end of the war, although the Allies had no idea of his true identity. Eichmann has since escaped from an American POW camp in Bavaria. He has gone to ground completely, his location soon to become one of the world’s great mysteries.
And Adolf Eichmann will not be seen again for a very long time.
3
DECEMBER 24, 1946
ROME, ITALY
9:00 P.M.
Benny Ferencz is back in Europe.
With the Nuremberg Trials at an end, Ferencz and his bride, Gertrude, are finally taking a honeymoon. The couple steps in from the cold of the Via Vittorio Veneto, eager to spend a few hours resting in their room at the Excelsior Hotel. Though Jewish, they are intent on hearing Pope Pius XII say Midnight Mass at the Vatican before their return to Ferencz’s work in Berlin. The focus of war crimes prosecutions is shifting away from soldiers to civilians, in particular the industrialists who violated international law. Ferencz works for Brigadier Gen. Telford Taylor, who has been ordered by the Pentagon to put together prosecution teams and gather evidence
for twelve more trials.
“My job, as organizer and Chief of the Berlin Branch,” Ferencz will later write, “was to scour the official German records in the Nazi capital to supplement evidence previously assembled in Paris and Frankfurt.”
So it goes, day after day, Ferencz and a team of researchers examine financial documents for signs of grand-scale fiscal impropriety. It is vital work but also quite functional. With the war over and the Nuremberg Trials resulting in convictions and executions, it seems as if the need to place any more military men on trial has passed.
So far Benny and Gertrude’s honeymoon has been a memorable tour of Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Outside Milan, the couple visits the gas station where Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress were hanged by an angry mob. But in Rome, the vacation takes a negative turn, as there are no rooms available at the Excelsior.
“We landed in a fleabag hotel with a solitary light bulb hanging over the bed,” Ferencz will write. “Since we were exhausted by the ordeal, and it was only 10 PM, we decided to rest before heading for the holy midnight celebration. We did not shut off the light and we kept our clothes on since there was no heat. Soon, I was awakened by my wife’s anguished cry, ‘It’s 2:00 AM. Oh, my God!’ That was as close as we came to prayer that night. We had missed the midnight mass. There was nothing left to do but go to sleep and blame it on Divine providence.”
Benny Ferencz will never hear Pope Pius XII celebrate Mass. But this is not the last time the Nazi hunter will cross paths with His Holiness.
New Year’s Eve finds the Ferencz family back in Berlin. 1947 is about to dawn—it will be a year Benny Ferencz will never forget.
* * *
It is the spring of 1947, one year since Benny Ferencz was “persuaded” by the United States government to return to Germany. Ferencz’s research into Nazi industrial crimes continues. Yet there are other war criminals who also command his attention: men like Otto Ohlendorf, who has been in custody for two years, are only months away from going free, and Ferencz cannot let that happen.
The breakthrough that abruptly shifts his investigation away from industrialists comes from a set of reports hidden in a remote annex near Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Top Secret Gestapo files describe the daily operations of the Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing unit in which Gen. Otto Ohlendorf commands group D. The SS, the Gestapo, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) have been designated as criminal organizations in the Nuremberg Trials, akin to a highly organized version of the Italian Mafia. The tales outlining their actions are atrocious, and it is clear they were pursuing very defined goals to further Nazi ambitions. But it is all too clear that these groups also committed slaughter for the sake of slaughter.
“On a little adding machine, I added up the numbers murdered,” Ferencz will write. “When I passed the figure of one million, I stopped adding. That was quite enough for me. I grabbed the next plane down to Nuremberg.”
But Ferencz’s boss, Brigadier Gen. Telford Taylor, is of little help. He has been granted an appropriation for precisely twelve additional trials. He has neither the manpower nor the funding for any more.
“In desperation,” Ferencz will write, “I told him that if no one else was available I could do the job myself. And so I became chief prosecutor in what was certain to be the biggest murder trial in history. I was twenty-seven years old and it was my first case.”
Ferencz will continue: “I was not nervous … I didn’t murder anyone. They did. And I would prove it.”
But murder is too kind a word for what these men have done.
Ferencz plans to use another term, newly coined by a Polish American lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazi extermination of the Jews: genocide.1
* * *
Ferencz doesn’t waste any time. Just five months elapse from the discovery of the Einsatzgruppen files and the first day in court. The “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials,” as they will unofficially one day be known, are about to begin.
The indomitable Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg
The date is September 29, 1947. The weather is cloudy, temperatures hovering between cool and frigid. Court adjourns in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, two years after the war ended. Of the thousands of Einsatzgruppen he could have put on trial, Benny Ferencz has narrowed the list to just twenty-four officers—he chooses that number because there are just twenty-four chairs in the docket. Each of these men has participated in Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” by personally coordinating and murdering Jews.
Ferencz could have put many an enlisted man on trial, for they were traditionally the heavy-fisted bruisers who actually did the torturing and killing. But Ferencz’s history as a combat sergeant tells him that the officers gave orders. So it is the officers who will pay the price.
A special elevator carries the accused from their prison cells beneath the courtroom. Ferencz will long remember how ordinary they look as they file into their chairs—not at all what he expected from a man such as Otto Rasch, whose Einsatz unit massacred exactly 33,771 Jews over a two-day period outside Kiev, Russia. However, it will be no surprise at all when these same defendants, Rasch included, respond with a simple reply to the charges against them: “Not guilty.”
Three black-robed American judges stand ready to hear the evidence. The defense counsel—all former members of the Nazi Party—have prepared voluminous evidence on their clients’ behalf, ready to refute any and all eyewitness testimony.
But while the defense attorneys for the SS will present a staggering 136 days of argument on behalf of their clients, Ferencz will not call a single witness. He doesn’t need to—he has damning documents showing precisely how many died, where the murders took place, and exactly who did the killing.
Throughout the proceedings, one defendant appears to be the most self-righteous of all. Gen. Otto Ohlendorf slouches in his chair, hands clasped across his midsection, face tense, looking for all the world like a man ready to pass sentence—rather than receive one.
* * *
“One of the more interesting and repulsive arguments in defense of genocide was put forth by the lead defendant, SS General Otto Ohlendorf,” Benny Ferencz will write. “He was a fairly handsome man, father of five children, and had earned a degree in economics. He was distinguished by the fact that Einsatzgruppe D, the unit under his command, reported they had killed 90,000 Jews. Of course, he denied any culpability.”
Ferencz finds himself in a hard place. His cross-examination of Ohlendorf would have been a masterpiece. But Ferencz wanted to win more than he wanted to impress people. In fact, he didn’t care if he never tried a case again.2
“I decided to assign the (lead) role to James Heath, whose mature stately manner and Southern drawl might make a better impression on the Germans—and avoid any taint of Jewish vengeance. Jim knew he was on the verge of being fired for his incapacitating alcoholism. It would be his last chance and we went over the questions and answers carefully.”
* * *
In a classic courtroom Q and A, James Heath destroys the SS killer:
OHLENDORF: The Jews were collected at one place; and from there they were later transported to the place of execution, which was, as a rule, an antitank ditch or a natural excavation. The executions were carried out in a military manner, by firing squads under command.
PROSECUTOR: In what way were they transported to the place of execution?
OHLENDORF: They were transported to the place of execution in trucks, always only as many as could be executed immediately. In this way it was attempted to keep the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen to them until the time of their actual execution as short as possible.
PROSECUTOR: Was that your idea?
OHLENDORF: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: And after they were shot what was done with the bodies?
OHLENDORF: The bodies were buried in the antitank ditch or excav
ation.
PROSECUTOR: What determination, if any, was made as to whether the persons were actually dead?
OHLENDORF: The unit leaders or the firing-squad commanders had orders to see to this and, if need be, finish them off themselves.
PROSECUTOR: And who would do that?
OHLENDORF: Either the unit leader himself or somebody designated by him.
PROSECUTOR: In what positions were the victims shot?
OHLENDORF: Standing or kneeling.
* * *
PROSECUTOR NIKTCHENKO: In your testimony you said that the Einsatz group had the object of annihilating the Jews and the commissars, is that correct?
OHLENDORF: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: And in what category did you consider the children? For what reasons were the children massacred?
OHLENDORF: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.
PROSECUTOR: Including the children?
OHLENDORF: Yes.
* * *
Benny Ferencz listens to the responses, baffled by Ohlendorf’s arrogance. “He told his men never to use infants for target practice nor smash their heads against a tree. He ordered his men to allow the mother to hold her infant to her breast and to aim for her heart. That would avoid screaming and would allow the shooter to kill both mother and infant with one bullet. It saved ammunition.
“Ohlendorf said he refused to use the gas vans that were assigned to his companies. He found that when the mobile killing vehicles arrived at their destination, where they were supposed to dump their asphyxiated human cargo into a waiting ditch, some of the captives were still alive and had to be unloaded by hand. His troops had to dig out the vomit and excrement—and that was very hard on his men.”