Although the Allies had plenty of time to prepare their cases, a lot of their accusations proved groundless, or they were obliged to let a major criminal go free for want of evidence. Papen was still falsely accused of being a member of the Party even when the Americans were in possession of the full Nazi Party membership archive. The case against him was that he had conspired to wage aggressive war, which was a difficult one to prove given that he was nowhere near the inner circle of the regime, and came within inches of losing his life during the 1934 Röhm Putsch, the so-called Night of the Long Knives. His real crime was folly - believing that Hitler could be contained. He was by no means alone in this.
Papen and his friend Horthy had not yet understood the new post-war world. Horthy composed a letter to Churchill pleading for the maintenance of a ‘big’ Hungary with access to the sea as a bulwark against Bolshevism. There was no reply. In August the inhabitants of the annexe were transferred to a wing of the Grand Hotel. Horthy was sent away. Papen now found himself together with the major Nazis, and reflected on how different they looked in their shabby beltless uniforms and worn-out laceless shoes to the last time he had seen them all strutting about at a rally in Nuremberg in 1937. Nuremberg was also where they were now heading. The party was taken to Luxembourg aerodrome.
Göring was housed in a proper prison cell in the courthouse now, as opposed to a maid’s room in Mondorf. He was watched at all hours of the day. Humiliations were arranged for him, such as a formal discharge from the German armed forces (arranged by the Americans), which had the effect of bringing on a minor heart attack. The Allies turned up the heat during the interrogations, but Göring was given a defence lawyer in Otto Stahmer from a short list of jurists who had managed to keep their noses relatively clean during the Third Reich. It should be added that few of them were entirely clean: the list contained 206 names, of whom 136 had been Pgs and 10 were former members of the SS. One, Rudolf Dix, had been president of the Nazi bar association; another, Ernst Aschenbach, had been an expert in deportation attached to the Paris embassy.33 Stahmer was a patent lawyer. Papen chose a Breslau lawyer called Kubuschok, with Papen’s own son acting as his junior. Speer made a wise choice in Hans Flächsner, a diminutive Berliner who gave him useful advice, telling him not to over-dramatise his role in the Third Reich and pointing out that the Allies had already decided he was only a minor criminal and that he was not to put on the airs of a major one. Speer was probably right in believing he owed a deal of his salvation to Flächsner. Being contrite, or undergoing religious conversion, availed the prisoners little. Both Frank and Seyss-Inquart showed contrition. Both were hanged.34
To Papen’s horror he chanced upon Horthy again on one of his weekly trips to the showers. Papen was beginning to learn something of the charges against him: he had instituted the terrible People’s Courts, which had been set up after the acquittal of the Bulgarian communist Dimitrov. It was not a charge that was likely to stick. The Americans were understandably baffled that Papen had continued to serve the Nazis after the Röhm Putsch, when his speechwriters were murdered for writing an anti-Nazi speech for him.35 Another who claimed that he had no idea why he was there was Dönitz. Hitler’s successor stressed that it was not for generals to take decisions to go to war, and had he refused to carry out his orders ‘he would have received the heaviest punishment’. He was also charged with using concentration-camp inmates as workers in his dockyards.36 The charge was pretty pharisaic, given that the Allies had millions of POWs working as slaves for them at the time of the trial.
John Dos Passos arrived in Nuremberg on 19 November 1945 to cover the trials. The arrangements in the courthouse were compact. For the spectators and journalists the facilities were good, and they had their own post office and a smart snack bar.37 The chief defendants were housed in the basement and brought up in a lift. Then it was just a few steps down the corridor to the courtroom.38 There was a consolation for Göring, at last: at Nuremberg he regained his supremacy. He was number one on the list, meaning that he was the first into the dock with a seat on the front bench at the extreme right facing the judges. The hated Bormann - tried in absentia - was down at number nineteen and Speer at twenty-two. Dönitz had been positioned at a measly fourteen.
His neighbour in the dock was Rudolf Hess, who was flown from England to Nuremberg on 8 October. After his mysterious flight in May 1941, Hess had been incarcerated in Britain. He was now brought home for the gathering of the clans. The frugality of prison life in Nuremberg came as a shock to him after the relative comfort of his confinement in Britain. He was pretending to have lost his memory and stared stonily at everyone who tried to remind him of details of his distinguished past. He later announced that he had been acting all along: ‘Good wasn’t I? I really surprised everyone, don’t you think?’ he asked his fellow inmates. Despite being officially compos mentis Hess still paid no attention to the court. He would not wear the headphones, but read books and chatted throughout the proceedings.39
As Hess could not be indicted for most of the juicier atrocities committed by the regime (which had taken place while he was in British captivity), he was given the Streicher treatment and tried for conspiracy against peace and humanity - a charge concocted for Nazi leaders who were earmarked for long detention or execution, and who had been essentially condemned before they entered the dock. His crimes were not great by comparison to some: he was tangentially involved in the drafting of the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws and with the invasion of Poland. Göring laughed off many of the Allied accusations. He swiftly dealt with an attempt to foist responsibility for the Reichstag Fire on him, and the interrogator, Kempner, did not raise the matter again. Göring might well have begun to waver when he learned that the Americans had arrested his wife Emmy in October and put his daughter Edda in an orphanage (although she was later allowed to join her mother in Straubing Prison). Emmy was not a political figure. She and Edda were eventually released when the Americans realised that this sort of Sippenhaft - a method favoured by the Nazis - would not make it easier to justify their cases before the courts.
Göring stood his ground, however. He had a positive attitude towards life and for the time being was not tempted to follow the examples of some others: Ley managed to strangle himself with the hem of a wet towel attached to a lavatory cistern, and the mass-murderer Dr Leonardo Conti also killed himself, leaving a note saying he had lied under oath to cover up his knowledge of medical experiments.40 Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg died of a heart attack in March 1946.eb In 1948, General Johannes Blaskowitz committed suicide by jumping from the third storey of the prison block.ec
In all this gloom Göring might have taken heart at the news that his IQ was placed third among the remaining Nazi prisoners, exceeded only by Schacht and Seyss-Inquart.41ed The time of surveys ceased, however, when on 19 October 1945 Göring and the others were served their indictments by none other than Major Airey Neave, a British intelligence officer who had successfully escaped from Colditz and who would later become a member of Mrs Thatcher’s shadow cabinet.ee German civilians took a muted interest in the show trials. Göring may have impressed the court, but little of this seeped out to the German population. Such reports as there were of the trials were heavily censored. The radio broadcasts delivered by a Gaston Oulman every night were confined to the more sensational aspects of the prosecution’s case.42 In Berlin, Ruth Friedrich thought the indictments had little relevance to ‘good Germans’ but she approved, as it gave heart to the Allies. ‘Not so much for us, but for the farmer in Oklahoma, who wants to make sense of his son’s missing leg.’43
Papen had finally learned that he was charged with conspiracy to wage war. Dos Passos, who arrived on the day before the trials were to start, heard an address from Colonel Andrus, in which he regretted to inform the press that the former SD chief Kaltenbrunner was ill and would miss the first day. He seemed disappointed that he had not managed to keep all of them fighting fit for the première. Frick was paralysed in his
left wrist after a suicide attempt, but Göring was in better health than he’d been in twenty years, having lost weight and been weaned off drug addiction.44 The trial of the major war criminals began at 10 a.m. on 20 November. The president of the court Lord Justice Lawrence was assisted by Francis Biddle from the US, and his deputy John J. Parker. From France came Professor Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, who scribbled away silently throughout the trial without ever uttering a word. The Germans had a particular contempt for General Nikitchenko, the one judge who disdained the use of the gown, and wore his military uniform throughout: ‘We knew what his verdict would be, with or without a trial.’45
Dos Passos sized up the prisoners in the dock: Göring looked like a ‘leaky balloon’, ‘a fat man who has lost a good deal of weight’. Ribbentrop was a ‘defaulting bank cashier’, Schacht, ‘an angry walrus’. The former head of the Luftwaffe was still ‘the master of ceremonies . . . Nero must have had a face like that’; while Hess paid ‘no attention to anything’.46
The charges were read out and Jackson made a speech in which he offered the estimate that 5.7 million Jews had lost their lives as a result of Nazi orders. Most of the defendants claimed they knew nothing of this. Schacht advanced the ingenious argument that he had been helping the Jews to emigrate by framing legislation that would rob them; Streicher claimed to be a Zionist, which, in a way, he was.47 During the recess Göring was asked who had issued those orders. Göring replied, ‘Himmler, I suppose.’48 The camps came back to haunt them: films were shown of their victims. The psychiatrists Kelly and Gilbert took notes as the defendants watched scenes of civilians being burned in a barn. Hess was captivated, others tried to look away; Frank choked back tears; Funk actually shed some at the sight of the crematorium ovens. When Hess muttered disbelief, Göring told him to shut up.49
Göring indulged in a few jokes. There was a strong Jewish presence at Nuremberg in the form of jurists attached to the army, translators and interpreters. At one stage he spotted a group of Jews in the public gallery and whispered: ‘Look at them, nobody can say we have exterminated them all!’50 He was outraged by the testimony of Lahousen, the Austrian Abwehr chief, who spoke on 30 November, giving details of the plans to kill Hitler. Göring blurted out, ‘That’s one we have forgotten to knock off after 20 July 1944.’51 The leading Nazis could not shake off the accusations levelled against them for the very reason that they had been slack about destroying the evidence - too many papers had lain around at the end of the Thousand-Year Reich. The other problem was the officials and SS men who were prepared to give evidence against them. Turning ‘king’s evidence’ for the prosecution was a way of saving your life for the time being. Some of the worst criminals even stayed out of prison while they made themselves available to the courts.52
The apparently honest statements of the state secretaries Bühler and Steengracht were particularly damning, as well as those of the SS men Ohlendorf, Wisliceny, Höttl, Höss and Pohl. One man who outraged all the main defendants was Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, possibly the most brutal of the police generals, and one who was perfectly aware of the crimes he was committing.53 He may have just been buying a sort of freedom (he died in a prison hospital in Munich in 1972). Before 1949 he appeared as a prosecution witness no fewer than twenty times, earning Göring’s loud condemnation as a ‘Schweinehund!’
That opening day was also notable for the surprise announcement from Hess that he wished to take responsibility for his actions, and that he had never lost his memory, he had been pretending all along. Hess was a puzzle even to his own colleagues. Papen confessed that he didn’t know if he were sane or not. He thought he had been compos mentis at the time of the flight to Britain. During the trial he read novels by the Bavarian writer Ganghofer. Göring, with support from his old enemy Ribbentrop and from Rosenberg, persisted in his claim that the court had no authority and that the British and Americans were equally guilty of infringing international law. He was occasionally seen plotting with Hess. Like the other prisoners, he gave Streicher a wide berth. He was contemptuous of Hans Frank, who had been smitten with religion since his incarceration and was much given to tears - he had been behind the brutal treatment of the Poles. Göring claimed to be shocked by what he now learned of the camps, and declared that the story was incredible. But we also know that he tried to save people from the camps, so it was pretty clear he knew that something nasty went on there.54
Göring could not claim so easily that he had had no knowledge of the killings that took place on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. It had been chiefly his party. He dismissed Röhm, however, as a ‘dirty homosexual swine’ and justified himself by saying it was them or him. As Speer and others sought to atone for their roles in the mass murders, or claimed a dubious role in opposition, or - like Paulus - chose to implicate Hitler and his gang in monstrous crimes, Göring started to talk about honour. He didn’t care whether he lived or died, but he was not going to grovel before the court. He urged the generals to be equally resolute. He said they were all going to be treated as martyrs before too long, and their bodies set up in mausolea like Napoleon’s.
When the defendants were shown a Soviet film of German atrocities, Göring yawned and scoffed. With a little justification he pointed out that the Russians did not necessarily occupy the moral high ground. As it turns out, he was right to be scornful: the Soviet film showed images of Katyn, and the mortal remains of a large element of the Polish officer corps, murdered not by the Germans but by the NKVD. (The massacre was part of the Soviet indictment.) He was, nonetheless, appalled by the images he had seen.55
The defendants all took the trial very differently. Jodl was calm and soldierly, and awaited his fate. Seyss-Inquart thought he would be acquitted, and told Viennese stories. The one thing that disturbed him was the knowledge that Hitler had appointed him in his will to replace Ribbentrop. Frank admitted his guilt and spent his time in meditation. He, Papen, Seyss-Inquart and Kaltenbrunner were regular in their attendance at Mass. Ribbentrop continued to write long letters in self-justification; Rosenberg made pencil-sketches of the witnesses; Streicher let out cries and screams during the night. To the end he maintained that the trial was the triumph of world Jewry.56 Of the service chiefs Keitel remained his pompous self, pleading not guilty to the indictment, but Dönitz and Raeder - who had been turned over by the Soviet authorities in a rare gesture of cooperation - conducted themselves with dignity, as did Neurath.57
The prosecution opened its case against Hess on 7 February 1946. Göring took the stand at last on 13 March, and remained in the dock until the 22nd. He had waited five months for his moment. He put on a fine performance and refused either to grovel before the court or to deny his role in the ‘movement’. He gaily quoted Winston Churchill’s line, ‘In the struggle for life and death there is, in the end, no legality.’58 He took responsibility for everything he could, thereby removing much of the case against Papen, for example, when he claimed that the Anschluss had been his show.59 Asked about some aspect of mobilisation, Göring answered that the Americans had so far kept quiet about their own strategic plans. The Americans now began to doubt the wisdom of this sort of public trial. Göring was in danger of becoming a hero again. Even the American press reported. ‘Göring wins first round.’60
There was a reluctance among the Allies to produce witnesses for the defence, and it took them a while to locate Göring’s chief of staff, Koller, even though he was in British captivity.61 The British proved more successful at badgering Göring than the Americans had been. Under Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination he began to sweat. The British case hinged on the shooting of the fifty airmen after the so-called Great Escape - a terrible crime and a contravention of the Geneva Convention, but one that looks peripheral now compared to others perpetrated by the Nazis. They had been shot on Emmy’s birthday. Göring may well have known nothing about it, but that hardly absolved the Luftwaffe chief of the ultimate responsibility for the crime.62
One of
the Nazis who dramatically turned his coat at Nuremberg was Frank, the governor of the Polish General Gouvernement. Many of the most repulsive acts of grisly murder and cruelty had occurred on his beat, even if it was not necessarily true that the murderers were in any way responsible to him. When asked if he had participated, however, he replied with a clear ‘Yes’. It had been the testimony of Höss, he said, that had made him want to take the responsibility on to himself: ‘My conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never installed a concentration camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought Jewry for years; and we have indulged the most terrible utterances - my own diary bears witness against me . . . A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.’63
The atrocities in the concentration camps nettled even the most obstinate Nazis. After the camp commandant Rudolf Höss had given his testimony Göring turned to Raeder and Jodl and said, ‘If only there weren’t this damned Auschwitz! Himmler got us into that mess. If it weren’t for Auschwitz we could put up a proper defence. The way it is our chances are blocked. Whenever our names are mentioned, everybody thinks of nothing but Auschwitz or Treblinka. It’s like a reflex.’64
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