by Ian Buruma
Twenty years after the Nuremberg trials began, a German court in Frankfurt tried some of the officers and guards of Auschwitz for crimes against humanity. It was not quite the first German trial of this kind. In 1957 an SS officer was charged with having led a murder squad on the Lithuanian border. But this had been an exception. The Nuremberg judges had applied the new law against genocide and racial persecution only to crimes committed during the war itself, as though the Holocaust were simply another war crime. In presenting his case, the French chief prosecutor, François de Menthon, hardly mentioned the Jews at all.
At any rate, after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965. (It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
The scale of the Nuremberg trials was bigger, and the defendants were grander, but the impact on most Germans of the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials (the latter held in Düsseldorf from 1975 until 1981) was far greater. This was partly a matter of timing. In 1945 most Germans were hungry and defensive. By 1964 a new generation had grown up in relative prosperity. And it was partly the nature of the crimes. Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
One of the ironies of modern history is that these crimes—which were not the main business of the Nuremberg court (or, it must be said, of the Allied war effort) and of which the majority of Germans after the war claimed ignorance—became the main focus of (West) German historical remembrance, in courts, in schools, in memorials. As the military campaigns, the crimes against peace, recede into history, the Final Solution continues to haunt the present more than ever. Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
I believe this is right. But the lesson might not have been so convincing had the trials not been taken on by German courts. When a British court tried the Kommandant and guards of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the effect was by no means the same. Stephen Spender ran into a friend in Germany at the time who told him about a visit to “a charming and sympathetic German family, mostly of young people. They all said the Belsen trials were propaganda and that the alleged crimes of Kramer, etc., were humanly impossible … The majority of Germans believed that the trials were a put-up job and that they were only being prolonged because the accused had so much to be said on their side …”
But even the great death camp trials in Germany did not dispel all doubts about the adequacy of trials as history lessons. Trials, by their very nature, limit criminal responsibility to specific individuals; in the case of Nuremberg, to the leaders. In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap. But Jaspers made it clear that an entire people could not be held responsible for a crime legally, morally, or metaphysically. (Political responsibility was another matter.) The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers. And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
Jaspers did not mention the problem of selecting the right defendants; some of the men on trial in Nuremberg probably should not have been there (Schacht, Fritzsche), while others certainly should have (Alfried Krupp), but that is another matter. In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels. Famous or infamous historical figures are never easy to integrate into works of fiction, to be sure. The known facts intrude; history is too heavy. But this does not explain why there are not many biographies of the Nazi leaders either. Historians have backed away from them. The standard biographies of Hitler were written by two journalists, Joachim Fest and Werner Maser. Biographies of Göring and Himmler are virtually all by foreigners. This fear of biography, in fictional or documentary form, is due possibly to an idea common in the 1960s and 1970s—that structures and institutions, not human beings, explain the past. But it must also have something to do with the fear of identification; what Germans call Berührungsangst, literally the fear of making contact.
If this was true of the leaders, what, then, about the lesser-known doctors, administrators, gas chamber operators, and other small thugs who carried out their orders? Is identification with them any easier? Peter Weiss, in his play about the Auschwitz trial, identifies them in an interesting way. The former victims who speak as witnesses at the trial are anonymous, but their torturers have names: Boger, whose specialty was to suspend his victims from a kind of swing and beat them to death; or Dr. Capesius, the death camp’s pharmacist; who had forgotten all about the fact that his inventory contained Zyklon B; or Dr. Lucas, the good Catholic, who claimed to have deliberately shirked his duties on the railway ramp. It was certainly not Weiss’s intention to make the audience identify with these characters. The point was, rather, that Auschwitz was an extreme symbol of industrial exploitation, of capitalism gone mad. The victims were as anonymous as the proletarian masses churned up by insatiable machines. The process went on, even as the Third Reich dissolved into the German Federal Republic. The last words of the play are spoken by Mulka, the adjutant of the camp:
“We only did our duty, all of us,
even when it was often hard
and if we should despair
today
now that our nation once again has
worked its way up to a leading position
we should busy ourselves with other things
than with accusations whose time
surely has passed long ago.”
This was not an uncommon attitude in Germany at the time. Indeed, it was pretty mainstream. Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state. The problem was how to turn millions of former Nazi supporters into loyal citizens in a liberal democracy. This, Lübbe argued, could not be achieved without a certain discretion about the past. Nevertheless, the Bogers, the Mulkas, and the Dr. Capesiuses were accused, albeit twenty years after the war. And their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German
. Why must I be punished?”
The defendants in the Majdanek trial said this over and over in a German television documentary. Why me? Why indeed. But one line in the film stuck in my mind. It was spoken by “Bloody Brigitta,” a particularly vicious female guard. “You know,” she explained to the interviewer, “these former prisoners all complain how hard it was. Of course it was cruel inside the camp. But you have to realize one thing: if you offered these people one finger, they’d take your whole hand.” These were the words of a stupid school matron, a customs inspector, a petty ticket puncher suddenly given absolute power over thousands of slaves.
And yet, despite the shabby mediocrity of these people and the banality of their statements, it proved almost impossible to identify with them. The grossness of their crimes and the scale of their murderousness gave the trials a horrific atmosphere, with new revelations appearing in the newspapers every day. Martin Walser wrote in the year of the Auschwitz trial that Boger became a prince of darkness, a gruesome celebrity identified in the press as “the beast” or “the monster.” Dante’s name was constantly invoked in lazy accounts of the death camps. The unimaginable was compressed in catchy headlines: “Women driven into fire alive,” or “the torture swing of Auschwitz.” Walser wrote: “The more ghastly the slogans about Auschwitz, the more pronounced our distance to it becomes.”
A trial can only be concerned with individual crimes. The “monsters” and “butchers” on trial in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf had committed terrible crimes. So did many people who were never held to account. But, said Walser, “that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument. What is left is horror and fascination. Which is not to say that the trials were wrong. But they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
Not so far from the court where Schwammberger was tried, virtually on the outskirts of Stuttgart, lies the old Swabian town of Ludwigsburg. The dukes of Württemberg had their residence there. Schiller was born there (his house is now a branch of the Wienerwald restaurant chain, next door to McDonald’s hamburgers). And in the eighteenth century, the duke’s financial adviser, Jew Süss, caricatured in Nazi propaganda as the archetypal evil Jew, was hanged there. Outside the gates of the ducal palace is a sign that reads: “This city presents a cheerful and delightful face. Its lively, liberal atmosphere is still in evidence today, provided one is ready to take the time to visit more than just its parks and palaces.”
I was there to visit the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung von NS Verbrechen, literally Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for the Clearing-up of National Socialist Crimes. It was housed in a former women’s jail. Next door was a large seventeenth-century fortress, which served as a prison (the oldest in Germany) until 1990. It is now a penal museum. The young man who let me in smiled politely and listed the treasures of the house: a guillotine, used until the late 1940s, thumbscrews, uniforms, ropes and belts with which prisoners had hanged themselves, a restored death cell, an executioner’s ax, colorful prints of torture scenes, and the menu of Jew Süss’s last meal: meat soup, braised veal, beans, and white bread.
The taxi driver who took me from the station to the Central Office for the Clearing-up of Nazi Crimes—Nazi crimes, note, not war crimes—was not pleased with this mission. At first he pretended not to know the place. Then he told me at length why he thought the office should be abolished: it was high time we forgot about all that old Nazi stuff, as though there weren’t more important things to deal with, what with reunification and all that, as if the Communists hadn’t been just as bad, and so on.
This kind of thing, I was told by Alfred Streim, who heads the institution, used to be much more common. When it was decided to open the center in 1958, the people of Ludwigsburg had protested, firebombs had been thrown, and it had been difficult to find a venue. But now, said Streim, with the younger generation, things were better.
With its huge quantity of documents, filed under personal and place names, the central office is, as it were, the bureaucratic memory of the Nazi past. Whenever there is a case to be made against former Nazis, this is where the prosecutors turn for their documentary evidence. When I was shown around the premises by one of Streim’s colleagues, people came up with such requests as “Schmidt, Dachau, 1943.” Often my guide, a lawyer, like Streim, would know the answer from memory. If not, he would open one of the steel filing cabinets, filled with papers neatly tagged “Auschwitz” or “Buchenwald” or “Dachau,” and swiftly pull out the required information.
Streim was not a cheerful man. His skin looked as gray as his Bavarian-style horn-buttoned suit. He was a schoolboy when he was bombed out of his home in Hamburg. He was evacuated to Czechoslovakia, and then had to walk back to Hamburg at the end of the war. He said that young people today could not possibly understand the pressures his generation was under. Hitler Youth, bombings, censorship, and the rest. Streim’s father was a Nazi, employed by the railways: “He always said it wasn’t true about the Jews.” Streim would argue with him, but his father denied the truth, even after the war. “My father’s generation was very naive,” Streim said. “He only changed his mind when I showed him the documents.”
The central office has collected more than 1,400,000 documents: witness testimonies, case histories, Gestapo documents, court records, etc. In 1986 the United Nations supplied documents on 30,000 people. Further information came from Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Romania, Hungary, Holland, indeed from everywhere in Europe. There was but one exception: the German Democratic Republic. Only the East German State Security Police, or Stasi, kept all its information to itself.
The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored. Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
The trials were swift. Instead of limiting the powers of the state (or the victors) by allowing the accused to defend themselves, the Communist courts did the reverse. In the notorious Waldheimer trials, in 1950, the appointed judges and prosecutors were informed that since the guilt of the defendants was obvious, there would be no need for witnesses, defense lawyers, or documentary evidence. It was also one of the last Nazi trials to be held in the GDR. There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
The antifascist German people’s republic did a better job than the Federal Republic in weeding out Nazis in high places. But the smaller Nazis were left alone as long as they were obedient Communists. East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder. Shortly after the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, announced the arrest of Eichmann in 1960, the East German press revealed that Hans Globke, a state secretary in Adenauer’s government, had helped to write the Nuremberg race laws of 1935. “Globke is the Eichmann of Bonn” was the headline in Neues Deutschland, the national newspaper of the GDR.
This peculiar state of innocence in the GDR produ
ced peculiar problems after the Communist state ceased to exist. There was, for example, the case of Gustav Just, a politician of the Social Democratic Party, whose career had taken off after unification. At seventy he had become senior president of the Brandenburg state assembly and chairman of the parliamentary constitutional committee. But not long after he achieved this eminence, his career took an unpleasant spill: in March 1992 a newspaper revealed that Just had shot six Ukrainian Jews in 1941, after having volunteered as a soldier. His first response was that he had simply followed orders. His second response, after much pressure, was to resign.
Just was only one of many, and not a very significant one at that. What was interesting about his case was that he had been prosecuted once already in the GDR, in 1957, for counterrevolutionary activities, and sentenced to four years in jail. He had edited a mildly critical weekly paper. His was a show trial meant to scare off other intellectuals who diverged from the Stalinist line. During the trial, the judge actually read out parts of Just’s wartime diary, which described the shootings in the Ukraine. But nothing was made of this. According to Just, he was threatened with a war crimes trial if he should displease the authorities again. “The Stasi,” he said, “were experts on war crimes.”
One might think that the experience of show trials and political corruption of historical memory would have made the eastern Germans chary of political trials and purges after 1990. But this was not the case. There was considerable enthusiasm in the former GDR for putting Communist leaders on trial and for rigorous purges of Stasi agents and informers. The eastern German equivalent to the central office in Ludwigsburg is an institution in Berlin run by a Protestant pastor named Joachim Gauck. His office is the depository and dispensary of documentary information on all Stasi activities. Dispensary is probably the right word, since Gauck sees his work in rather medical terms: he is the dispenser of moral hygiene; his files are the medicine which should cure a rotten society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page.