So much for laying the ghost of Hitler.
Moreover, to the question:
Which of these types of government would you, personally, choose as better:
A) A government which offers the people economic security and the possibility of a good income?
B) A government which guarantees free elections, freedom of speech, a free press and religious freedom?
. . . over a polling period of two years around 60 per cent consistently answered A) and only around 25 per cent, sometimes appreciably less, B).48
Despite these discouraging poll results, the facts nevertheless remain that during the occupation there was no Allied ‘Hunger Plan’ comparable with the Nazis’ criminal conspiracy to starve twenty million or more Russians in 1941–2. And there was no equivalent of the Holocaust.
Instead, the Allies’ project was indeed to penalise but also at the same time to purify Germany, to make its beaten, hungry population ready for a future in which the country would not be a threat to the world. This was perhaps the most ambitious scheme to change a nation’s psyche ever mounted in human history. The process was called denazification.
Whether punishment and re-education could be combined was doubtful. And much of the observable evidence in post-war Germany seemed not to bode well for the country’s democratic rehabilitation on this basis.
9
No Pardon
Just short of three hundred years before the Second World War reached its bloody conclusion, Europe had seen the end of a conflict that was arguably even worse, more violent, poisonously divisive and more corrupting of Europe’s soul than that started by Adolf Hitler on 1 September 1939.
This seventeenth-century catastrophe involved just about every European country at some stage, including nations such as Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland, which remained neutral in Hitler’s War. The fighting also lasted a lot longer, which is why it was known and is still known as the Thirty Years War. The preamble to the comprehensive agreement that finally ended it, the so-called Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (which was actually two treaties, themselves the completion of a sequence of truces and treaties), nonetheless contained a notable paragraph. This declared, according to an English translation dating from the early eighteenth century:
. . . that there shall be on the one side and the other a perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that has been committed since the beginning of these Troubles . . .1
The proposal that all participants be forgiven, no matter how appalling their behaviour – perpetua oblivio et amnestia in the original Latin text – was not unique, but after a war of such length and ferocity it cannot have been easy to agree. Germany had lost between 15 and 30 per cent of its population through war, famine and disease. Thousands of towns and villages had been devastated. This was recognised as a peace of exhaustion, with no clear outright winner – but perhaps in precisely this lay the possibility for an abandonment of the idea of guilt or the punitive principle.
The end of the Thirty Years War also saw an end to wars of religion between the European states. Another reason to ‘leave well alone’. But in May 1945, when the Second World War was declared over, this peace – or perhaps more accurately, absence of war – came about because of the total defeat of Germany and her satellites by the coalition headed by the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France, known collectively as ‘The United Nations’. Germany could fight no more, and so the war ended. There was no treaty. Unlike the Treaty of Westphalia, which was even incorporated into the body of law of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, there was no universal agreement among the war’s participants. Not then, and only partially later. Just ‘facts on the ground’. And, above all, no ‘amnesty and oblivion’.
The notion of a negotiated peace between the Allies and Germany had been rejected more than two years before the end of the war when Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca. Stalin, originally scheduled to attend the conference, had stayed away because of the critical situation on the Stalingrad front, but he too agreed that there could be no conditional end to the war. From January 1943, ‘unconditional surrender’ was the Allied mantra. It made things easier in at least two respects – solving the moral quandary of who on the German side was fit to be negotiated with, and minimising opportunities for the Germans to divide their enemies by targeted peace offers. In other respects, it made ending the war harder.
Unconditional surrender could be, and was, used by Goebbels as a unifying bugbear. The Allies, he told the German people, were out to ‘destroy Germany’ (politically though not literally true). Apart from stiffening popular resistance, and thereby lengthening the war, it also weakened the case of those within the ruling caste who planned to overthrow Hitler. After all, if better surrender terms were not to be gained by a revolt against the Nazi regime, what was the point? Was it not better to resist to the bitter end and hope for a miracle? The 20 July plotters suffered from the fact that moral nobility alone was insufficient for most of their fellow countrymen.
But unconditional surrender it was, and the bitter end came in May 1945. The official date was 8 May, but the actual conclusion had come four days earlier. After two meetings on successive days at Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters on Lüneburg Heath, at 6.30 p.m. on 4 May, four German senior officers had filed into Montgomery’s famous caravan in order of seniority to sign the instrument of surrender, followed by the British commander on behalf of the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower. The document surrendered specifically to Montgomery not just the German forces fighting in north Germany, but also those throughout what was left of the Third Reich and its occupied territories, including Denmark, Norway, the besieged, starving part of Holland – and Flensburg, where Dönitz’s tragicomic little Reich government was encamped.2
Even before the signing of the surrender, Germans had been tossing away their weapons en masse and giving themselves up to the Americans and the British – anything to avoid the clutches of the Russians. The reasons for the four-day delay until the official announcement of the war’s end were fairly simple. First, the Americans based at Reims, hundreds of miles to the south-west, insisted that the Germans surrender to them as well, for formal reasons as well as those of news management. The same went for the Russians. And the Germans themselves were in no hurry either. Few soldiers on either side were being killed as a result of any delay, but every hour without a formal, all-encompassing surrender permitted more Wehrmacht units to place themselves in the hands of the Western Allies. So it was, after a great deal of renegotiating of matters already settled perfectly satisfactorily in the 4 May surrender instrument, that the next big surrender moment came in the small hours of Monday 7 May 1945. At 2.41 a.m., General Jodl, Hitler’s former Chief of Staff, finally signed on behalf of Germany; Eisenhower’s own Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, and General Ivan Susloparov, Soviet representative at SHAEF headquarters, also put their names to the document.
Now the path was clear for the Allies to do with Germany as they wished, and as they had already promised: to eliminate Nazism and to arrest and try its leaders as criminals.
As for Stalin, however, the first criminal charges he announced on 7 May were not against Nazi murderers but against sixteen representatives of the Polish resistance force, the Home Army, which had fought for six long years against German occupation of its country on behalf of the London-based Polish exile government. Arrested some weeks earlier in ‘liberated’ Warsaw, where the Soviets were busy installing their own puppet regime, these courageous, betrayed patriots – including the Deputy Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile – had now been flown to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. There they were tortured, interrogated and charged with ‘diversionary activities against the Soviet State’. Like their fellow captive in Stalinist Russia’s most notorious prison, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they were forced to listen to the victory salvos in Red Square from their NKVD dungeons.3 The Poles’ trial, in June, would include no
death sentences – possibly because Stalin was still chary of provoking the West – but put out of action the cream of the anti-communist elite in Poland during the crucial post-war period, which was doubtless its intention.
The reaction in Britain and America was one of mild disapproval mixed with relief that the sentences – from a few months to fifteen years – had been so ‘lenient’.4 Clearly, many in the West had now abandoned any idea that they might be able to influence matters in Poland in any serious fashion, and had moved on to other, more realistic priorities.
From Moscow also came a demand that a second surrender ceremony, this time to the Soviet command in Berlin, must take place on 9 May at its Karlshorst headquarters. And so it did.
Even with Germany now completely at the mercy of the victors, the question of what to do with the main Nazi criminals and the millions of members of the Nazi Party and its affiliated organisations, without whom the regime’s occupation of vast areas of Europe and oppression of the continent’s people would have been impossible, was not simple.
It was, for instance, a clear-cut matter that crimes committed against Allied nationals, whether military or civilian, should be tried by the appropriate governments. So, for example, members of the German armed forces who had executed Allied prisoners of war out of hand (as had happened notoriously at Malmédy during the Battle of the Bulge), or German police or civilians who had lynched downed bomber aircrew (as had happened fairly frequently, especially towards the end of the war when air raids against an already desperate and highly stressed population had increased in their intensity and apparently indiscriminate nature) would be sought out by Allied intelligence, operating in collaboration with the military police, tried and punished. The same went for war crimes perpetrated on the soil of the occupied countries, from France and the Low Countries to Scandinavia, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union. By May 1945, all of these territories had constituted or reconstituted governments that could take on the official quest for the guilty men.
The problems came in dealing, for instance, with crimes against German citizens by the Nazi regime – especially, but not exclusively, against German Jews. Who was responsible for investigating and punishing these offences? There existed, as of May 1945, no independent German civil power, and when, at some future point, there might be, could it be relied on to prosecute such atrocious behaviour?
Above all, what was to be done with the members of the National Socialist Party? Membership of the Nazi Party at the end of the war totalled more than eight million (around 10 per cent of the overall population), with millions more Germans enrolled in large and small affiliated organisations, such as the German Labour Front (twenty-five million members), the League of German Women, the National Socialist People’s Welfare (seventeen million members), and so on. In the twelve years of the Nazi state’s existence, the tentacles of Hitlerism had slithered into every town and village, every social nook and cranny of the German people’s everyday existence. Who would be responsible for dealing with these people – the individuals who had, essentially, run Germany for the past twelve years, who knew what levers to pull and where the bodies were, literally and metaphorically, buried? How were the truly guilty to be distinguished from the merely conformist and careerist? And perhaps equally problematic, what would be done with them once that distinction had been made?
Lists of Nazi organisations had been drawn up by EAC officials well before the Western Allies set foot on the Normandy beaches in June 1944. The forces that finally crossed into Germany in the autumn carried these lists, marked with notes of which state and party functionaries fitted into the categories leading to automatic arrest as the Allies advanced. These were known leading members of the Nazi Party down to the level of Ortsgruppenleiter, senior SA, SS and Gestapo officials. Also, those in clearly delineated leadership positions in separate but affiliated organisations such as the German Labour Front, the National Socialist Welfare, the National Socialist Motor Corps, the Students’ and Doctors’ Leagues and even the German Red Cross (DRK).
The DRK had been heavily politicised during the Nazi period, used as a political and propaganda tool. Several of its leading officials had been involved in the T-4 Euthanasia and other human experimentation programmes,5 hence the arrest by the Americans of its president, Duke Carl Eduard [born Charles Edward] of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, at his castle in northern Bavaria. The British-born grandson of Queen Victoria, the Duke had forfeited a string of British aristocratic titles because, as reigning duke of this tiny state, he chose to stay loyal to Germany in the First World War. He had been a Nazi Party member since 1935 and held high rank in the SA.
The arrests of other survivors of the Nazi elite also came quickly. Goering, having fled his beloved Karinhall – too close to Berlin, too close to the advancing Russians – finally emerged from his castle hideout in Bavaria on 9 May and gave himself up to the local American commander. Bizarrely, and in an impressive example of the Reich Marshal’s formidable ability to charm, the officer ended up shaking his captive’s hand and giving him lunch. There followed an impromptu press conference at which Goering was permitted to sound off to assembled war correspondents on the subject of post-war prospects (‘a black future for Germany and the whole world’ was his prediction). It was clear that Goering hoped to create for himself a mediating role in possible future negotiations, but Eisenhower, when he heard of this, put an embargo on the press reports and had the prisoner quickly shipped off to join the other major Nazis in the ‘Ashcan’.6
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had likewise hoped to negotiate, perhaps until the last. He remained at liberty after VE-Day, in Flensburg until it became clear that the game was up for him there, and then for a few more days as a nomadic wanderer, dressed in the uniform of a sergeant major in the Secret Military Police and accompanied by a small group of last-ditch loyalists. They wandered around the Elbe district, until on 22 May 1945 he was arrested in a routine way at a British road checkpoint near Lüneburg and taken to the local intelligence headquarters for questioning. Realising that, despite his comprehensive set of false papers, he had been recognised by his interrogators, Himmler admitted his identity, then bit down hard on a glass cyanide capsule. Within seconds, the former head of the vast SS empire and engineer of the Holocaust was dead at the age of forty-four.7
Albert Speer was arrested along with the other members of the ‘Flensburg government’ and its hangers-on, when the Anglo-Americans finally closed down that strange enterprise on 23 May. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, was found living in British-occupied Hamburg with his wife and children, and taken from his bed into custody early on the morning of 14 June 1945. The architect of the Nazi–Soviet Pact had apparently spent the last few weeks ‘making the rounds of the city, dressed in a double-breasted suit and homburg hat, reviving old acquaintances’, presumably from his early days as a champagne salesman.8
Other, more obviously criminal types, such as Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SD and the Gestapo, may have taken a more realistic view of their fate once the Allies had triumphed. However, it seems that a surprising proportion of the Nazi elite, including Himmler, Goering and Ribbentrop – plus technocrats such as Backe and Speer – harboured notions that they would prove so indispensable to the Allies in the post-war period that they would not just be spared but somehow be granted an active role, even a new career. They simply did not understand that certain of the Third Reich’s crimes, for which they as senior officials were clearly collectively responsible, were so extreme as to preclude forgiveness, in fact to demand their incarceration and punishment. Accustomed to the cold, utilitarian exercise of absolute power, they did not, in other words, understand that what they viewed as realpolitik looked to others like mass murder.
Plans for mass shootings of German officers, and for the summary execution of the main leadership, from Hitler down, had given way in early 1945 – largely at the Americans’ behest – to agreement that captured Nazi leaders would
be put on trial. The paperwork, mostly put together by officials in Stimson’s War Department, allowed for an ‘international tribunal’ composed of judges from each of the ‘Big Four’ victor nations.
This was not quite uncharted legal territory. After the First World War there had been calls for the punishment of the leadership of Imperial Germany – ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ as the slogan had it. Not all commentators on the Allied side agreed with this – not even jingoistic writers such as the journalist Lovat Fraser, who wrote in January 1919 in a patriotic paper, The War Illustrated:
Sir Herbert Stephen* points out that, because the Kaiser cannot be ‘tried,’ it does not in the least follow that it is impossible to punish him. Napoleon had no trial, yet we interned him until his death upon the island of St. Helena. The fact that he was declared an outlaw by the Congress of Vienna, presumably had no legal sanction. I take it that we based our action upon his surrender as a prisoner of war. Some similar course could probably be adopted with the Kaiser, though as to its legality I can express no opinion. What I am chiefly against is the illegal taking of life; and I cannot recall any case in history where the killing of a monarch under pseudo-legal forms has not in the end done far more harm than good.9
Nevertheless, the Versailles Treaty of 1919 provided for an international tribunal to try German officers and officials, including Wilhelm II, mostly for offences deemed to have been committed against Allied troops and the population of the parts of France and Belgium occupied by the Kaiser’s armies.
The legal precedent was established – in fact, by international treaty – but things did not go as planned. The government of the Netherlands (neutral in the First World War) stoutly refused to extradite the Kaiser, who had taken refuge within its jurisdiction after being forced by revolution to flee Berlin in November 1918. For its part, the new, democratic German government eventually refused to deliver up the alleged ‘war criminals’, insisting that they could and should be tried before its own Supreme Court in Leipzig. The Allies agreed. However, the 1921 ‘Leipzig trials’ of a small number of minor military figures led to several acquittals and, even for those found guilty, sentences more appropriate for housebreaking than warmongering. To a man, the defendants were feted by the German public as patriotic martyrs. In general, the Leipzig proceedings combined farce and bathos in a measure that might not bode well for the new work of the new tribunals a quarter of a century later.
Exorcising Hitler Page 27
