Some of Göring’s greatest crimes were not even mentioned in the indictment. Nowhere did the Allies make mention of the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London or Coventry. The Soviets, who had not possessed the capacity to bomb Germany with the same ferocity as the Anglo-Americans, had wanted to bring the matter up, but it was vetoed by the West. For good reason, thought Speer: ‘The ruins around the courthouse demonstrate all too plainly how cruelly and effectively the Western Allies on their part extended the war to non-combatants.’65
Göring addressed the court for the last time on 31 August 1946. He reiterated the precept of nulla poena sine lege and declared that the German people were ignorant of crime and ‘free from blame’. He would expiate their guilt with his martyrdom.66 Less dramatically perhaps, he reminded the court of his efforts to negotiate a peace in 1939 - behind Hitler’s back. More and more was leaking out from the courts. It was not just the Germans who were shocked. In Bendorf in the Rhineland, Elena Skrjabina thought the whole process hypocritical, and the bench’s impartiality compromised by the judges from her own land. On 1 September she wrote:Recently the Nuremberg trials have been creating great interest. Now they are over. The accused have been most severely punished and rightly so. However, who were the judges? When I think that the most savage measures of punishment were being demanded by the representatives of the Soviet Union, I cannot help but feel oppressed by the injustice of it all. Indeed, the Soviet Authorities have destroyed and are right now destroying millions of their own people for nothing whatsoever. No other country in the world has so many jails and camps.67
The French academic Robert d’Harcourt had no reason to love the Germans, having had two sons pass through Buchenwald. He was even harder hitting in his accusation of hypocrisy: the Germans ‘are not angry with the fliers who destroyed their towns today, it is the judges. By their attempts to forcibly convert them the Allies have lost most of the moral high ground that they had obtained through victory. To take on the role of Solomon presupposes a moral qualification. It is this moral authority that the vanquished no longer recognise in the victors.’68
The summing up began on 30 September. The judges rehearsed the entire history of the Third Reich, giving the impression that the trial was entirely political. It was Lord Justice Lawrence who read out the sentences: his speech lasted a day and a half. The defendants slept ill that night. Lawrence began with Göring, who was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to death on 1 October. Apart from Hess - who was given life - similar sentences were meted out to those seated on the front bench until the judge reached Schacht. Göring flinched when Schacht was acquitted, then slammed down the earphones in disgust. Hess was not wearing his earphones and later told Speer that he had assumed he had been awarded the death penalty, but he had not bothered to listen.69 In the back row there were custodial sentences for Dönitz and Raeder, then came Papen, who was also acquitted. In Berlin 25,000 workers downed tools in protest when they heard the news about Papen.70 The Russians still insisted he was an important Nazi.
Göring’s counsel entered a plea in mitigation, again mentioning his efforts to maintain peace in 1939 - moves that must have been known to the British government at least. The British had no desire to modify the sentence, and the government issued an instruction to Sir Sholto Douglas in Berlin that such a thing would not be politically expedient. As it was, the Soviet judge, Nikitchenko, had called for the three acquitted men, Schacht, Papen and Goebbel’s deputy propaganda chief Hans Fritzsche, to be convicted, and wanted the death sentence for Hess.71 Schacht had been liberated because his role in the expropriation of the Jews was a pre-war internal matter, but Streicher had been sacked as Gauleiter of Franconia in 1940 and banned from public speaking two years before. Fritzsche believed he had been tried because Goebbels was not around to take the rap.
After the sentences those on ‘death row’ were creamed off - Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Streicher, Sauckel, Frick, Rosenberg, Seyss-Inquart, Frank and Kaltenbrunner. The cellar of the courthouse emptied, leaving the condemned men to themselves. The seven men who were eventually to be transferred to Spandau Prison in the British Sector of Berlin were provided with new cells upstairs: Hess, the economics minister and Reichsbank chief Walter Funk, the Grand Admirals Dönitz and Raeder, the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, the former foreign minister and ‘protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia Constantin von Neurath and Speer. They had been given sentences ranging from ten years to life.
Göring cheated the executioners by taking cyanide from a phial he had managed to conceal from his guards. One of the reasons he gave for his choice of end in the note he left in his cell was the Allied decision to film the deaths of their prisoners. The gallows equipment arrived at Nuremberg on the night of 13 October. The next day hammering could be heard from the gymnasium, and the slave-driver Fritz Sauckel had begun to scream. In the absence of Göring, the other Nazis went to their deaths at the appointed hour on the 16th. Ribbentrop was now the leader. The hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty minutes before he expired. The others died as planned.ef Speer could hear them being collected from their cells: ‘scraps of phrases, scraping of boots, and reverberating footsteps slowly fading away’. When Streicher’s name was called, someone cried, ‘Bravo, Streicher!’ Speer thought it was Hess. As they went to their deaths, the others shouted words of defiance. Keitel’s last utterance was ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland über alles’ (All for Germany, Germany above all else). Ribbentrop, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart said something similar. Streicher chanted, ‘Heil Hitler! This is the Purim Festivaleg of 1946!’72 The bodies were photographed. On 16 October they were taken to a house at 25 Heimannstrasse in Munich-Solln which the Americans had been using as a mortuary. They were inspected by Allied teams before they were cremated. The ashes were scattered into the Conwentzbach seventy-five metres downhill from the house - a muddy, Bavarian ditch. The cremated were entered in the books under false names: Hermann Göring was Georg Munger, and the scourge of the Jews, Julius Streicher, received the name of Abraham Goldberg.73
The next morning the seven men they left behind to serve out their sentences were called to clean out the cells. Speer observed the remains of the last meal in their mess tins. Papers and blankets were strewn about. Only in Jodl’s cell was everything in apple-pie order, the blankets neatly folded. On Seyss’s wall he noted that the former Austrian chancellor had put a cross on the calendar for the 16th, the day of his death. In the afternoon Speer, Schirach and Hess were handed brooms and mops and sent into the gym where the men had been hanged. The scaffold had already been taken down, but - spotting a mark on the floor he took to be a bloodstain - Hess stood to attention and raised his arm in a Nazi salute.74
17
The Little Fish
A Prosecutor cannot also be a judge . . . Justice is by its nature light, which also renders the shadows starker. The less passion is reflected in its source, the clearer the crime emerges in its hideousness.
Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 50, 51
Lesser Nuremberg Trials
The Allies put a brave face on it, but the International Military Tribunal had not been deemed a success and it was put in mothballs. Robert Jackson was ‘thoroughly disenchanted’ with the trials. He had particularly disliked the methods of the Soviets. The Allies had in fact taken stock of the criticisms levelled at the trials. The presence of a Russian judge on the bench (and a general rather than a jurist) had been an embarrassment. It was decided that the Allies should try their own Nazis in their own zones. That way the ideological differences between the Allies would be less immediately obvious. Jackson had recommended to Truman that any more international trials of this nature would have to be held in Berlin. This never happened, of course.1 Nuremberg would go on, but as a solely American jurisdiction. After the first eleven victims had been despatched, the cells filled up with new inmates who were to pass before the tribunal.
On 8 September 1947, while the Krupp and ‘Stormtrooper’ trials were in full swing, Clay tried to whittle down the number of cases before the Nuremberg court. He planned just six more: the big six banks; the Press and Propaganda Office; the Foreign Office; those members of the military leadership who had violated the rules of international warfare; the military leaders responsible for the POWs; and the directors of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. He could see no possibility of having them all and thought about running some of them together. He was inclined to drop the Hermann-Göring-Werke case, possibly the Press and Propaganda trial as well.2
When the final decisions were made, 185 men were arraigned before a dozen tribunals. First was the trial of the medical doctors, which resulted in seven death sentences; next that of Field Marshal Milch, who was tried in solitary splendour for directing slave labour and sent down for fifteen years. The third trial judged the Nazi judiciary; the fourth Oswald Pohl and the concentration-camp hierarchy. Pohl swung, but two other death sentences were commuted. Next in line were the industrialists from the Flick Group, followed by trial six: the senior administration of IG Farben. The next in the dock were the generals who had fought the battles in the south-east. Field Marshal List received a life tariff. The RuSHA (Race and Resettlement Office) were trial eight. No death sentences were handed out, but RuSHA chief Richard Hildebrandt was shipped over to the Poles. Ohlendorf and the other Einsatzgruppen (death squad) leaders were trial nine. Five men were executed, one by the Belgians. Nine death sentences were commuted. The tenth arraigned the twenty-three directors of Krupps. Alfried Krupp received twelve years. The eleventh judged members of the German Foreign Office and other officials - the Wilhelmstrasse case. The sentences were quite haywire, with Ernst von Weizsäcker receiving a seven-year tariff (later reduced to five) and a man who condemned thousands to death in Auschwitz, like Edmund Veesenmayer, receiving twenty years (reduced to ten). The last trial was for the generals who had invaded Russia. There were no spectacular sentences, nor were they handed over to the Russians.3
Speer and the rest of the seven were still carrying out their menial duties in Nuremberg. The architect was able to offer a smile to Alfried Krupp one day, and on another occasion he saw the Alsatian surgeon Karl Brandt. He had interceded on Brandt’s behalf when Hitler had had him condemned to death for sending his wife and child out of Berlin. Brandt gave Speer a sad wave. Speer claimed that he had not known that Brandt had been in charge of the Euthanasia Programme and had initiated the experiments on human beings in the concentration camps.4 When the SS leadership arrived, Speer observed, ‘These are all candidates for death row.’5
Like many other prisoners, Speer was called upon to give evidence at the trials of his former colleagues. Field Marshal Milch had been in charge of armaments for the Luftwaffe, and had been closely allied to Speer. He had requested labour from Speer, including concentration-camp inmates. Speer’s use of slaves had been an important part of the indictment against him. He permitted himself a philosophic reflection in the secret journals he was penning at the time: ‘Of course all these trials are judgements by the victors on the defeated. In various ways I keep hearing that German prisoners of war, contrary to law, are also being put to forced labour in armaments and supply bases. Who here is the judge?’6
The Americans were insistent on the trial of the industrialists. The old paterfamilias, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, had bequeathed his firm to his son Alfried in November 1943 and gone into retirement. Before he did so, he had Hitler enact a ‘Lex Krupp’ imposing primogeniture in violation of the laws of Weimar, which were still in force in Hitler’s Germany.7 As it was eventually decided that Gustav was too ill too stand trial, the major charges were heaped on Alfried, who had been taken prisoner when the Americans went into Essen on 10 April 1945. Alfried suffered the usual series of camps before being taken to the Nuremberg courthouse. After his arrest American soldiers helped themselves to souvenirs at the Villa Hügel - typewriters, a portrait of Hitler, and a model cannon.8 When the British replaced the Americans in Essen they set about arresting the other directors: they wanted to make an example of Krupps along with Flick and IG Farben as ‘Samson’s hair’ - the symbol of Germany’s industrial might.9 The idea of making Alfried responsible for his father’s crimes came from the French. The Americans got cold feet about this and Gustav received a seat in the dock at the main trial, which he was never to occupy. He died in 1951.
The trial of the generals who had led the campaign in the Balkans was considered a watershed. For the first time the second tier, the generals who had acted on Hitler’s orders, became responsible for massacres. The German advocates made a brave effort to prove that the taking and shooting of hostages as reprisals for acts committed by partisans or guerrillas was permitted in the British, American and French military manuals; and they pointed out that a similar charge had been controversial in the Kesselring trial, which the British held in Venice, and that the Manchester Guardian had thundered, ‘This is not justice as we know it.’eh They accused the British military of sentencing a man to death for being a figurehead.10 Cross-examined, List pleaded a hard fight against non-regular forces. It was a Balkan war, ‘harsh measures’ needed to be taken against partisans who obeyed no laws, who fought ‘Balkan-style, treacherous and atrocious . . .’ It did List no good.11 Tito had been on the Allies’ side.
The US Supreme Court had refused to grant leave of absence to its members to serve in Germany, and the three judges in the Krupp case were a member of the Tennessee Appeal Court, a member of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and another from the Supreme Court in Seattle. This was a reasonable showing. There was resistance to using elected judges, particularly from Clay. Non-professional jurists would lead to further criticism of the trials. Clay also resisted the idea of sending out a number of black attorneys to work at Nuremberg - not because he objected to them per se, but because Germany did not have a black population. 12
Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach had already suffered eighteen months of detention before the trial began, and he maintained a dignified silence throughout. An empty chair had represented his senile father at the international trial. Now it was his turn to be judged - in loco parentis. Thirty German lawyers had been engaged to defend the directors during the eleven months of the trial. More than 200 witnesses were called. The minutes run to 13,454 pages.13 The directors were indicted for crimes against humanity, pillage, appropriation, spoliation and exploitation. They were also accused of participating in atrocities and being complicit in deportation, imprisonment, and racial and religious persecution. A further charge laid against them was planning aggressive war, despite the fact that only two of them - Alfried and Ewald Loeser - had been on their boards at the time. Evidence that would have been inadmissible in an American court was accepted at Nuremberg. Some of it had as little value as common gossip. The directors answered for any act performed by any one of a quarter of a million employees.
Of course Krupps was up to its neck in the activities of the state. It profited from German expansion in all directions and took over the running of sequestered firms in France and Holland. It used armies of slave-labourers who were treated with sickening cruelty. For this reason the sentences were severe: Alfried was sent down for twelve years, to be spent in Landsberg Prison. The other directors received similar tariffs. In addition to this Alfried was relieved of all his personal property. He was the only man tried at Nuremberg to receive this punishment. The president of the court thought the decision ran counter to the law and dissented.14 The Krupp case showed up many of the weaknesses of the Allied jurisdiction: Alfried had wanted to use an American lawyer, but that was not permitted. He had then decided not to defend himself, but that was also not allowed. The German lawyers demanded a conference room, but this was not granted either. When they left the court in protest, they were brought back by force and six of them were arrested for contempt.15
The jurists’ trial opened in March 1947. Some of the worst Nazi lawyers had be
en spared by premature death. Among them was the president of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, who had been crushed under a wooden beam during an Allied raid on Berlin in February 1945. Hans Frank had been executed by the Poles. A large number of jurists had killed themselves as they saw the regime fall. One of these was the minister of justice, Otto-Georg Thierack. In all, sixteen defendants stood trial; including the three state secretaries Franz Schlegelberger, Curt Rothenberger and Herbert Klemm. The others were officials from the People’s Court. The judges examined 2,093 exhibits and questioned 138 witnesses. They reached their verdict in December 1947. They have been praised for their impartial and balanced approach: ‘If anything, the judgment erred on the side of caution.’16 Some of the German jurists were exonerated. Four life sentences were handed down.
The Wilhelmstrasse trial arraigned twenty-one senior civil servants. There was a slight modification of the London Statute and of Control Council Law 10 of 20 December 1945, in that the court finally recognised the principal of nullum crimen sine lege, if only in international law, which was a fairly nebulous jurisdiction.17 The names included Ernst von Weizsäcker, Wilhelm Keppler, Ernst Bohle, Ernst Woermann, Karl Ritter, Otto von Erdmannsdorff, Edmund Veesenmayer, Hans Lammers, Wilhelm Stuckart, Walter Darré, Otto Meissner, Otto Dietrich, Gottlob Berger, Walther Schellenberg, Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland, Schwerin von Krosigk, Paul Körner and Paul Pleiger. It was a hotchpotch of Nazi and non-Nazi diplomats and civil servants which included some who had acted counter to the interests of the regime, some who had simply toed the line - like Schwerin von Krosigk - and murderers like Veesenmayer. Veesenmayer had been allowed to continue at liberty while he gave evidence against his former colleagues. He had freely surrendered to the Allies, but he continued to see them as his enemies: ‘I am a criminal who must be exterminated.’ But he was not executed, despite his role in the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. He was released from Landsberg Prison in 1951.
After the Reich Page 61