Neave’s British unit was joined in the second week of September by an American team, many of German-Jewish origin, who had a consuming interest in their work. Together, they filleted Gustav’s diaries and correspondence, searching for testimony that would convict. Much evidence had already been destroyed, burned before the Allies invested Essen in April. A painstaking search of the Villa Huegel for secret hiding places revealed nothing until Gustav’s private secretary finally disclosed the existence of two secret safes, one in the bedroom, the other in Gustav’s dressing room, embedded in concrete in the wall of the house. They could not be opened. Neave wrote to his superiors, pointing out that it was impossible to find a professional safe-cracker, and requesting permission – duly given – to use REME engineers to break in. It promised to be the best free theatre in Essen and a crowd of senior officers gathered for lunch in late September to watch. Alas, an afternoon of exhausting efforts to cut through steel, copper, more steel and then concrete bored Neave’s distinguished audience and still the doors remained firmly shut. A week passed before the patient REME experts eventually cut their way in. Neave rushed in, to find nothing but old bills and envelopes. Bertha’s safe contained empty jewellery cases. The Krupps had foiled them. Neave and his fellow officers saw the funny side of the episode and went back to the tedious work of gathering incriminating files. He took responsibility for evidence relating to the conspiracy to prepare for war, and shipped a further ton of material back to the War Crimes Executive at Bad Oeynhausen. Neave’s verdict was straightforward. Gustav was guilty. He had offered his support to Hitler in 1933 when he became Chancellor, and was deeply enmeshed in the preparations for war thereafter. In 1936, Neave discovered, Gustav had even admitted that his firm’s ‘gratifying rise in profits’ was ‘inseparably bound up’ with the fate of the Fatherland, and expressed satisfaction that his firm shared in the rearming of Germany. Neave wrote repeatedly of his anger in his record of those months. It was a bitterness born of the knowledge that Hitler could not have prosecuted his war of subjugation and cruelty without men like Gustav Krupp.
Unfortunately, his tireless zeal was largely in vain: Gustav Krupp von Bohlen was judged too ill to stand trial. The evidence against him was overwhelming, but Colonel Harry Phillimore (later Lord Justice Phillimore), head of the War Crimes Executive, accepted medical testimony that Gustav was senile and ‘virtually dead’. He was tracked down to his hunting lodge, where he was found to be unable to feed himself and suffering from senile dementia, muttering ‘Donnerwetter!’. Nonetheless, he survived until 1950. The Americans, cheated of their prey, argued that Gustav’s son Alfried, who actually ran the great armaments plants, should be indicted in his place as a representative of the German industrial class that had collaborated with Hitler. But the Nuremberg bench rejected this argument, with the British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross arguing that the trial was ‘not a football match in which we could field a substitute’. Seeking to indict Gustav was a mistake. Three years later, Neave had the satisfaction of seeing Alfried Krupp convicted of war crimes, substantially on the evidence he had gathered that hot, dusty August in Essen. However, Alfried served only five years and returned to rebuild the family empire, still a source of some resentment to Neave decades later.
Neave was obliged to abandon his investigation into the Krupp outrage shortly after finding Bertha’s empty jewellery boxes. The momentous trial of the Nazi hierarchy was about to start, and he was head-hunted for a position of judicial aide to the International Military Tribunal. It was a posting he ‘least expected’ and he was not slow to appreciate the irony of his position. Here he was, summoned to Nuremberg to act as a liaison officer between the Tribunal and the defendants, men once looked upon as military demigods and now reduced to the status of common criminals, much as Neave had been during his years of incarceration at their hands. Nor did he relish the prospect of meeting these men, he later confessed. ‘I was afraid to meet them, as they awaited trial. To all ordinary people they were objects of nightmare,’ he wrote. ‘I imagined them crouching in their cells like wounded beasts. I feared to approach them as a man backs from a corpse.’1
He travelled from Bad Oeynhausen in low spirits. In Nuremberg, he was oppressed by the overpowering smell of disinfectant spread everywhere to disguise the stench of putrefying corpses, estimated at between six and thirty thousand, buried in the ruins of the city whose cultural history stretched back through Albrecht Dürer to the Meistersingers and the real Tannhäuser of the thirteenth century. At dusk, the army bus deposited him in front of the Grand Hotel Fürstenhof, an oasis of electric light in a desert of darkness. Next door, Hitler’s personal ‘Guest House’ was being linked to the hotel to accommodate the hundreds of tribunal officials.
Neave had been brought into this unique legal circus by Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, the British judge at Nuremberg and president of the Tribunal. Lawrence, a compromise choice, was waspishly described by Sir Hartley Shawcross, his Chief British Prosecutor, as ‘better known as a country squire with a good stable than as a great lawyer’. On the advice of Phillimore, Lawrence proposed Neave to the members of the Tribunal at its first (and only) meeting in Berlin, held there at the insistence of the Russians who had wanted the trial to take place in their zone of occupation. Neave’s appointment as assistant to the General Secretary of the Tribunal, Harold B. Willey, was confirmed. It was not what he had been looking for. He was not even sure what the job entailed. Neave had been on the point of taking up another legal post with the Control Commission when he was told to go to Nuremberg and await the arrival of two American judges. The meeting took place in the foyer of the Grand Hotel on 18 October. Francis Biddle, the senior of the two, a former US Attorney-General and a Supreme Court judge, appeared a frightening man: smart, spare and sardonic. He looked Neave up and down and asked: ‘Is this Major Neave?’ Receiving the affirmative, the judge added: ‘You look remarkably young.’ He was twenty-nine, trying to look older but defeated by what the historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, described as his ‘cherubic countenance which made him look even younger than he was’. Perhaps to counterbalance this, he recollected, Neave ‘affected a somewhat fierce and austere manner’.2
Biddle came straight to the point. ‘Are you ready to serve the indictment?’ he asked. Neave most certainly was not and his face showed it. This was the first he had heard of the awesome responsibility that was to rest on his young shoulders. He was to bring the instrument of justice to the top war criminals, personally, to their cells. Moreover, he was to do it the next day. He had not even seen the historic document of arraignment. Biddle continued, as if speaking in court, instructing Neave that under Article 16 of the Charter governing the activities of the Tribunal, the defendants had a right to a fair trial and to counsel of their own choice. ‘We have appointed you to advise them of their rights and select them German lawyers,’ Biddle concluded. The interview was over. ‘Mr Willey will explain everything to you. Is that okay, Major?’ he asked. ‘Yes, Judge,’ replied the dumbfounded Neave. ‘Bully,’ said Biddle, striding into the dining room.
Neave, feeling the measure of his inexperience, tried to stay calm, but somewhat theatrically imagined this was ‘the most dangerous situation since Colditz’. It was not, of course, but it was to be the most affecting episode in his life after Colditz. Time and again he would return to it in his electioneering remarks to voters as he strove to secure a seat in Parliament, and in his own account he tried to rationalise these ‘several minutes of unreasoning panic’. He felt as if he had been suddenly invited to sing at Covent Garden, or lecture in higher mathematics. Far from being elated at such a great honour he was anxious about the lack of clear instructions. ‘I knew that this was a moment of history, that I should be the envy of other delegations,’ he admitted. But like many other young men who had gone through five dangerous years he had become cautious. His insouciant days as a Myrmidon seemed far off.
He found Willey in the hotel’s Marble Room that evening listening to a
German singer doing her folk routine to a largely indifferent audience of officers and secretaries, including the staid pinstriped British contingent sitting in a corner. Willey was more confident than he was. The indictment had been drawn up, and was being translated into German by the American prosecutor’s office. It would be ready in the morning, and in the afternoon Neave could simply ‘shove the bundles into the cells’. This did not sound like the service of the most important legal document in the history of mankind: it sounded more like a newspaper round. Nor was Neave happy with the Article that made him responsible for supplying the accused with a list of German defence lawyers. He expected serious difficulties in persuading the Nazi High Command that they would have a fair trial. Had not justice been a hollow mockery in their own country for more than a decade?
Nonetheless, he was seized of the necessity of doing things right. He may have lost friends to Hitler’s brutal regime who never had a chance of a trial, but in this new war, a war of civilised values, Neave was determined that, whatever Churchill’s views, ‘the tradition of the Temple’ must triumph at Nuremberg. He spent a fretful night in the suburban house in Zirndorf where he and other War Crimes Executive officers were billeted. At dawn on 19 October, he was smoking and drinking coffee in the front room, pondering his confrontation with ‘these monsters’. He presented himself in best service dress to the Tribunal Secretary in the Palace of Justice, and was relieved to hear that, on judge’s orders, Willey would accompany him. The weighty stack of documents on his desk made fascinating reading. Each indictment carried the names of the four big powers – the USA, France, Britain and the USSR. The charges named the twenty-three defendants as being members of specific groups – the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the SA and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces. The indictment then went on to accuse them individually of war crimes.
Once again, Neave felt a sense of awe. Furthermore, though he had some German, from his time spent in Germany in 1933 and as a POW, he was not confident of being able to translate to Willey everything the defendants said. A German-speaking American officer was therefore brought in. Then there was the matter of procedure, to which no thought had been given. It was agreed that Neave would introduce himself by name as the officer appointed by the Tribunal to serve the indictments, hand over the documents and offer to answer questions a day later. Over lunch, it was the talk of the mess that the indictments were being served that afternoon, and Neave told a fellow diner, ‘I hope I shan’t make a balls of it.’
The daunting figure of Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the US Cavalry was there to make sure he did not. Andrus, formerly head of the American army’s toughest stockade at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, was a fearsome disciplinarian who carried a riding crop tucked under his arm. His black eyes bored through steel-rimmed glasses, and a pencil moustache completed the grim visage. Neave, Willey, Andrus, the interpreter and two soldiers detailed to carry the heavy sheaf of documents led the way down a silent row of cells in the prison. Another American security officer, a psychiatrist, a chaplain and several military policemen in white helmets brought up the rear. It was quite a posse.
The Palace of Justice in which this drama unfolded was one of the few buildings still standing in Nuremberg after seven Allied air raids in the closing months of the war. A solid, municipal structure, it had been the scene of a last stand by remnants of the SS, and machine-gun cartridges were still scattered about the courtyard. Inside, the courtroom was being enlarged to accommodate the teams of lawyers, guards translators, visitors and journalists. Here, only a year before, Hitler had conducted the show trial of some of the minor plotters in the abortive July conspiracy against his life. Now, some of his captured SS fanatics were put to work reconstructing the court to bring their former leaders to book. Outside, American tanks faced the Fürtherstrasse along which cowed civilians trudged, and heavily armed soldiers stood guard behind sandbags inside the corridors. The new occupiers were taking no chances. Rumours of a fresh Nazi uprising circulated in Nuremberg, the ‘last refuge of evil’.
Behind the courthouse was a prison where the war criminals were incarcerated in a three-storey block linked to the courthouse by a covered way. Here, where Hitler’s opponents had been gaoled, Neave began the process of retribution. At the far end of the first row, Andrus announced simply: ‘Goering.’ Neave looked through the grille as the door was unlocked. He scarcely recognised the short, fat man who got up from his bed as though from sleep. Was this the First World War air ace, rival of Baron von Richthofen? The founder of the Gestapo and Hitler’s deputy? Years of drug abuse had taken their toll, but his gaolers had weaned him off pills and the prison diet had slashed his weight from 20 to 15 stone. His grey Air Force uniform, shorn of rank and other insignia, hung loosely on him. The indictment party crowded in the narrow 13 by 9-foot cell making Neave feel claustrophobic. When their eyes met, Neave found he was no longer afraid, despite the ‘air of evil’ that Goering exuded. Stripped of his voluptuous surroundings, his flunkeys and the panoply of office he was just another prisoner who ate out of a GI mess tin. But he was still a consummate performer. ‘Hermann Wilhelm Goering?’ asked Neave. ‘Jawohl,’ he growled. Neave handed over the indictment and read out the offer of defence counsel. Reality suddenly dawned on the former Reichsmarschall. ‘So it has come,’ he breathed. ‘So it has come.’ Neave handed him the list of lawyers, which Goering studied indifferently. He did not believe they could do much for him. Would it not be better to defend himself? Neave heard the voice of the Temple saying: ‘I think you would be well advised to be represented by someone.’ Goering thought his situation pretty hopeless, but insisted on reading the document thoroughly, adding with sudden defiance: ‘I do not see how it can have any basis in law.’ Neave found his voice soft but threatening. ‘Despite his apparent despondency, he never lacked courage. He was ready to fight,’ he recalled. As the trial proceeded, Neave felt that, alone of the accused, Goering was the only man who might have been capable of governing Germany.
Colonel Andrus tried to hurry things along but Goering again remonstrated: ‘Lawyers! They will be no use in this trial.’ He demanded a private interpreter. Neave told him to take it up with his counsel, and indicated that the interview was over. Goering leaned forward in acknowledgement. The posse walked out and Neave felt a great sense of relief that the hardest part of the day’s ordeal was over. Yet it had been a strange anticlimax. Half expecting to meet a legendary monster of cruelty and vice, he found he had crossed Europe to meet ‘a decayed and gloomy voluptuary’.
There were nineteen more indictments to serve that day (two of the defendants had managed to commit suicide, despite being under close guard, and Gustav Krupp was only a technical defendant). Next came Rudolf Hess, co-author of Mein Kampf and Deputy Führer until his mad solo flight to Scotland in May 1941, allegedly to sue for peace through the Duke of Hamilton. Again, Neave studied his subject through the window grille as the door was unlocked. He was shocked by the white-faced, shabby creature, whose sunken eyes beneath heavy brows gave the appearance of a skull. ‘I immediately felt sorry for him,’ Neave recorded. He handed over the papers and explained the accused’s rights. Hess asked if he could defend himself, was told that he could, but that Neave advised against it. It would be in his own interest to have a lawyer. In truth, he knew the judges would be appalled at the prospect. Hess’s sanity was uncertain. And, mad or not, Neave immediately formed the view that he looked it. For now, all he wanted to know was whether he would be tried with ‘other party comrades’. Informed that this was so, Hess said: ‘I do not like to be tried with Goering.’
Von Ribbentrop, former German ambassador to the Court of St James, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, and co-signatory of the treacherous pact with the Soviet Union, came next. He was another deflated figure. Neave felt nothing but contempt for this sloppily dressed, self-pitying ‘Second Bismarck’ in his untidy cell. He scanned his face, while von Rib
bentrop refused to look him in the eye, hunting round the tiny room as if seeking an escape. Scribbled notes drifted from his table while Neave was once more filled with disgust at the sight of a political legend reduced to a balding wreck shuffling about in carpet slippers. He answered to the phoney aristocratic name he had given himself – Joachim von Ribbentrop – and with tears in his eyes implored his captors to tell him where he could find a lawyer. He knew only Dr Scanzoni, a criminal barrister he had met at a cocktail party in Berlin many years earlier. He proffered Neave a list of names, among them members of the British aristocracy who, he insisted, could testify to his desire for peace. An impatient Neave told him they would be sent to the Tribunal office, and strode out.
Julius Streicher, the most notorious Jew-baiter of the Third Reich, hissed as Neave and his Jewish-American interpreter entered the cell he occupied. His enthusiasm for the ‘Final Solution’ was common knowledge in the Palace of Justice, where a substantial proportion of the Tribunal officers and staff were German or American Jews. But Streicher, the foulest anti-Semite in Hitler’s entourage – so unspeakably vile that even the Nazis disowned him – still goaded his captors, even when threatened with a sentry’s blackjack. Strongly built and half-demented, he screeched at Neave: ‘I need a lawyer who is anti-Semitic. A Jew could not defend me.’ He dismissed the list of lawyers as too Jewish sounding and the judges as Jews. With an obscene wink to Neave, he implored ‘The Herr Major is not a Jew,’ until silenced by Andrus. Neave stifled his disgust and asked if he knew any lawyers in Nuremberg. Streicher mentioned a Dr Marx and Neave promised to make enquiries before quitting his revolting presence.
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