The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  Now the allies were ready to try the Germans for their crimes. Udo Walendy calls Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. Chief of Counsel, the Principle Accuser. 1872 The first was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). It tried twenty-five of the most important Third Reich leaders. That trial lasted from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946. The Allied Control Council, under the jurisdiction of Control Council Law No. 10 (December 20, 1945), conducted a second series of trials for minor war criminals, called the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT). This allowed any of the occupying authorities to charge anyone who they suspected as a war criminal in their respective occupation zones.

  The Allied Control Council, the military occupation governing body of the Allied Occupation Zones in Germany following the war, devised Control Council Law No. 10 (CCL 10) as justification to indict, try and punish individuals of crimes at the NMTs which Professor Kevin Jon Heller characterizes as “inter-allied special tribunals.” Law No. 10, “a multilateral agreement enacted by the Allied Control Council as the supreme legislative authority in Germany” went considerably beyond the capacity of the provisions of the London Charter by creating United States Executive Directive, JCS 1023/10. 1873

  The NMT conducted twelve trials from December 9, 1946 to April 13, 1949. The trials were the Doctors’, the Milch, the Judges’, the Pohl, the Flick, the IG Farben, the Hostages, the RuSHA, the Einsatzgruppen, the Krupp, the Ministries and the High Command Trials. These trials indicted 185 defendants, twelve of which received death penalties, eight received life sentences, and seventy-seven received some various terms of imprisonment.

  On November 21, 1945, in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Jackson delivered his opening statement before the IMT. He referred to it as the “first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world” and “novel and experimental.” He said that they sought to “condemn and punish” calculated, malignant wrongs that “civilization cannot tolerate” or ignore. He said the “four great nations,” the “most mighty of nations, with the support of 17 more,” would “stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.” He stated that the IMT would “utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times—aggressive war.” He referred to the men, more than twenty individuals, who sat in the docket, the Nazi leaders who “once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it.” He said the prisoners represented “sinister influences… living symbols of racial hatred, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.” 1874

  The IMT Dock

  He claimed that these men and their crimes epitomize “pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power.” According to him, they used their hateful power against “scapegoats,” including Jews, Catholics, and free labor in a “campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation.” They initiated the idea of a “master race,” which implies domination and the “serfdom for others.” They “diverted social energies and resources” to construct “an invincible war machine.” These sinister forces enslaved millions of “displaced persons” and brought them into Germany. “Despite the “magnitude of the task,” he claimed that the “world had demanded immediate action.” He said “Did we spend American lives to capture them only to save them from punishment?” 1875

  Jackson claimed that, on February 27, 1933, someone set fire to the Reichstag. He said, given the other Nazi crimes, “we cannot believe they would shrink from mere arson.” He accused Hitler and the Nazi conspirators of “taking advantage of the hysteria.” Hitler, on February 28, 1933, acquired a presidential decree from President Von Hindenburg “suspending the extensive guarantees of individual liberty contained in the constitution of the Weimar Republic.” Jackson did acknowledge that President Ebert had previously invoked this power. He misrepresented this situation and referred to this as the National Socialist coup, based on a conspiracy, the terms of the Hitler-Hindenburg decree. He also attributed Kristallnacht to the German government.1876

  Next, he accused the NSDAP of initiating a continuous battle against the working class, the Catholic Church, and against the Jews. This, he said, was “a practice skirmish for the worldwide drive against them.” He categorized this as a crime against humanity. He accused Germany of planning to exterminate peoples and institutions in order to create a “new world order.” Jackson claimed that Hitler dissolved the three trade unions and seized all of their assets, then on May 10, 1933, appointed Robert Ley to oversee the new German Labor Front and had the union leaders sent to a concentration camp. He claimed that, on June 26, 1935, the Nazis issued the labor service decree which forced the German youth, between the ages of 18 and 25, into the labor ranks. This, was to “impose upon the working class the burdens of preparing for aggressive warfare.” 1877

  Jackson claimed that the Nazi Party was anti-Christian and made every effort to secure the Reich from Christian influence. He claimed that the Nazis persecuted all pacifist and dissenting sects and halted all religious education, and encouraged riots against the Roman Catholic Church and priests and bishops. He claimed that the Nazi’s most egregious crimes were against the Jews. “The Nazis planned and committed the most savage and numerous crimes against the Jews. There were, he said, 500,000 Jews in Germany in l933 who had to wear yellow stars. He argued that the Nazis were envious of the Jews because of their social and economic positions.” He declared, “The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and deliberate policy.” The Nazis, according to him, promoted anti-Semitism “to divide and embitter the democratic peoples and to soften their resistance to the Nazi aggression.” They also prohibited the kosher slaughter of animals. 1878

  Jackson claimed that the Nazis confiscated Jewish property and compelled the Jews to live in the ghetto, a laboratory for testing repressive measures per the Nuremberg decrees of September 15, 1935. He said, “Extermination of the Jews enabled the Nazis to bring a practiced hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks.” He said that there was an official persecution policy against the Jews which started with “nonviolent measures,” like disfranchisement and religious discrimination. Soon, it involved assaults on their economic life and then accelerated into “organized mass violence… deportation, forced labor, mass starvation, and extermination.” According to him, the goal was the “destruction of the Jewish people,” a conspiracy “to exterminate the Jew.” He said, of the 9,600,000 Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe, they estimated that sixty percent perished and that 5,000,000 were missing from their resident countries. They could not account for over 4,500,000 by the normal death rate or by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. 1879

  In 1933, Robert Kempner, a Jew, bitter and angry, left Germany, blaming Hermann Göring for his deportation. Many Jews left the country, while others, with deep roots, remained. Kempner returned in 1945 as a prosecution lawyer, one of Telford Taylor’s chief deputies, for the IMT. On May 10, he had written to the Pentagon with recommendations for extracting vengeance on Göring. Now, at Nuremberg, he swore revenge—no matter the cost. He habitually threatened or coerced witnesses to extract the evidence to support his hateful vendetta against the Germans. He threatened to turn some witnesses, who failed to cooperate, over to the Soviets who knew exactly how to manage such stubborn people. He threatened Dr. Friedrich Gaus, Ribbentrop’s legal adviser. He wanted him to lie about issues pertaining to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which he had witnessed. 1880

  Kempner claimed to have found the original copy of the Wannsee Protocol which supposedly had the key document in the Final Solution of the Jewish question. However, the document was vague, with no definite references. He found a second copy with exactly the information that he wanted. The second document, which he widely circulated, destroyed the veracity of the original document. The document experts noted that the second document contained four points regarding the Final Solution. Another document, from the spring of 1942
, indicated that Franz Schlegelberger told his staff at the Justice Ministry that Dr. Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich chancellery, that Hitler, had repeatedly said that they would solve the Jewish issue after the war ended, information that displeased Kempner. When officials finally returned the documents used during the trial to the repository, several were missing. David Irving questioned Kempner who could not account for the obvious gap in the files. Irving spoke with Professor Eberhard Jäckel, a German historian, who had located the missing original document in a buried file in the German archives at the Reich ministry. It confirmed what many revisionists have claimed regarding the Final Solution—it was the intended deportation of all Jews, not extermination. 1881

  Immediately after the trials, Kempner took numerous documents, such as the Rosenberg Diary (1936-1944), purportedly with permission, for future research, totally against protocol for documents used in a criminal prosecution. He would return to the United States where he would die in 1993. From the USHMM web site we read, “For the rest of his career, Kempner practiced law in the United States and Germany, mostly representing Jewish clients in Nazi restitution cases. He wrote articles that cited documents kept in his personal library, which other scholars did not have access to.”1882

  Some people justifiably believe that Kempner destroyed or concealed evidence that would have exonerated the defendants, particularly a memo of March 1942 from Franz Schlegelberger, Minister of Justice. Bradley R. Smith, of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), asks, what other evidence did he take and why did he take it? Smith commends the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for rescuing the Rosenberg papers and hopes that it will investigate cases of other stolen and destroyed evidence. 1883

  On June 13, 2013, federal officials announced the seizure of a long-lost diary kept by Alfred Rosenberg after an investigation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). On August 10, 1945, allied forces seized the Rosenberg Diary, along with other private papers of Rosenberg. 1884 On July 3, 2013, Smith wrote the USHMM regarding the Rosenberg papers, asking, “Why do you not simply scan and post the documents publicly so that everyone who is interested in the matter can view and analyze them for themselves? Once that is completed, the papers can then be returned to the Rosenberg family, who appear to be the legal owners.” 1885

  One news report claims that the diary disappeared after the trials, and was found in the “papers held by a one-time secretary to a Nuremburg prosecutor.” Officials at the USHMM refer to the diary as documentation for “the history of the Holocaust.” Rosenberg’s diary, from spring 1936 to winter 1944, gave details about the crisis created by Rudolf Hess’s flight in 1941, and the looting of art throughout Europe. 1886 Officials at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Justice and USHMM announced the recovery at a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware. Kempner, who died in 1993, cited a few Rosenberg diary excerpts in his memoir. The USHMM sought the diary from his children and his former secretary for almost a decade. The USHMM recovered over 150,000 documents from the former secretary, except the Rosenberg diary. 1887 1888

  News reports omit the fact that Kempner was Jewish, and state only that he was a German lawyer who fled Germany, returned for the Nuremberg Trials, and afterwards returned to America. He removed documents, including the diary from U.S. Government facilities in Nuremberg and kept them until his death. The reports state that the diary “could provide historians with a potential wealth of previously unknown information regarding the history of this period.” ICE Director John Morton, U.S. Attorney Charles M. Oberly III, and Henry Mayer, senior advisor at the USHMM announced the recovery of the diary, due to the investigation by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware and the USHMM. 1889

  USHMM Director Sara J. Bloomfield was thrilled to have the diary. She said, “As we build the collection of record on the Holocaust, having material that documents the actions of both perpetrators and victims is crucial to helping scholars understand how and why the Holocaust happened. The story of this diary demonstrates how much material remains to be collected and why rescuing this evidence is such an important museum priority.” 1890 Allied forces seized documents, books, and other records while advancing through Germany. The Allies took total control, including the ownership of all documents generated by the German government. HSI currently conducts criminal investigations involving illegal importation, illicit trafficking and/or distribution of cultural property, particularly of items reported as lost or stolen. The HSI Office of International Affairs has seventy-five attaché offices in forty-eight countries to collaborate with foreign governments in joint investigations. 1891

  American authorities took more than 1,000 former members of Lt. Colonel Joachim Peiper’s group into custody. His group instigated the killing of eighty-one American captives on December 17, 1944 known as the Malmédy Massacre. On May 16, 1946, in a courthouse in Dachau, military judges treated seventy-three German soldiers as war criminals and indicted them for murder. During interrogations, American personnel threatened and beat them. The Judges found them all guilty. On July 17, the judge sentenced forty-three of them, including Peiper, to death and gave twenty-two others life sentences. The others received prison terms of ten to twenty years. After years of controversy, officials appealed most of the death sentences and decreased six of the life sentences to twenty-five years. By April 1952, judges commuted the death sentences and released thirty men. They released Peiper in December 1956 and he ultimately settled in France. 1892

  The United States tried several hundred individuals, both military and civilian. Of those, they would execute 275 people at Landsberg Prison. The majority of the prisoners argued that they were simply following orders. By the summer 1948, officials had already executed a total of 152 German soldiers. John J. McCloy, the high commissioner for Germany and Assistant Secretary of War, directed the execution of the remaining individuals on June 7, 1951. 1893

  On January 30, 1945, a Soviet submarine, had without warning, torpedoed and sank the Wilhelm Gustloff, a hospital ship carrying wounded German soldiers and refugees in the closing days of the war. Over 9,300 persons died, over five times as many as perished on the Titanic. On February 10, less than two weeks later, the same submarine that sank the Gustloff, torpedoed the General Steuben. It sank with a loss of nearly 5,000 women, children and wounded men. On April 16, another Soviet submarine sank the Goya, a German hospital ship. Between 6,000 to 7,000 people perished. Officials in charge of the international tribunals did not punish anyone for these deliberate disasters.

  The Germans captured almost 5,700,000 Red Army soldiers (1941-1945). About 3,300,000 of those prisoners perished due to insufficient food resources, probably because of the Allied blockades and pervasive bombing which destroyed transportation. Germany had challenges just feeding its own citizens and soldiers in addition to sustaining a huge number of POWs. In 1941, General Hermann Reinecke, head of the OKW, issued policies regarding Soviet prisoners who, according to the high command, did not warrant treatment normally accorded “honorable soldiers.” General Erich von Manstein prohibited the dispensing of scarce provisions to the Soviets. Often German soldiers took the cold weather clothing from their prisoners as they were so ill equipped and were freezing. 1894

  There were 2,524 German war criminals on the UN’s original list but the Combat Information Center (CIC), organized under the Morgenthau Plan, soon began a search for one million “war criminals.” Terror organizations, composed of Czech, Polish and Hungarian Jews who had taken refuge in London, began to move eastward where they joined the CIC, the OSS, and the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Herbert Lehman directed the CIC and with help from the Soviet police forces, placed his own people into judicial positions in many of the tribunals in order to incarcerate many people who were innocent. The Soviets, supported by FDR,
initially wanted to shoot at least 50,000 German officers, but settled for bringing 200,000 “war criminals” to trial. 1895

  At Nuremberg, the United States announced that the tribunal officials were not obligated to follow the provisions of The Hague or Geneva Conventions because Germany had surrendered unconditionally, the only stipulation under which the Allies would accept Germany’s defeat. The victors then claimed the right to punish all Germans who, like the Allies, had also ignored international law. 1896 Louis Marschalko noted that the Allies convened the tribunal to punish crimes committed against humanity. However, those responsible for the bombing of Dresden and the mass murders of Katyn sat on the bench. There are three vital factors to consider regarding what amounted to revenge trials.

  One, according to the U.S. Constitution, judges cannot convict a person for an act that was not punishable by law when he/she committed the act. Two, individuals may not sit in judgment on their own case. For the trials to proceed in a fair and unbiased fashion, an authentic international court would have been composed of officials from neutral countries who would have adjudicated on the crimes of every nation involved in the war. Three, the tribunal dispensed sentences for barbarism at the very same time that prison guards, under Kempner’s direction were brutally torturing prisoners for days on end until they confessed. Men will admit to almost any crime when interrogators with heavy boots crush the testicles of those they are questioning while their victims lay prostrate on the floor.

  Interrogators smeared feces on the face of S.S. General Oswald Pohl, the economic administrator of the camp system. Then they beat him until he confessed. They flogged other defendants until they were covered with blood. Senator Joseph McCarthy told the Press, “I have heard evidence and read documentary proofs to the effect that the accused persons were beaten up, maltreated and physically tortured by methods which could only be conceived in sick brains. They were subjected to mock trials and pretended executions. They were told their families would be deprived of their ration cards.” 1897