Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Capitalists could be equally subject to rough justice, especially in the Soviet Zone. In Berlin during the early days of the Soviet occupation, a manufacturer of meat-processing machinery, eighty-one-year-old Richard Heikle, was identified to a Soviet patrol by ‘anti-fascists’ and shot on the street in full view. His son, who ran the company, was arrested a little later and disappeared to the Russian Gulag. He was never seen again.24

  Sometimes Russian officers combined class warfare with other pleasures. The head of the Soviet Information Bureau in Zittau, eastern Saxony, named in the records only as ‘Lieutenant R.’, invited a group of local German industrialists and their wives to his birthday party. The ‘celebration’ involved his raping one of the women in front of the other guests. It appears that his ‘punishment’ amounted to an enforced leave of absence.25

  Although the initial Soviet line opposed radical social and economic change – Stalin was keen not to frighten either his Allies and co-rulers or the moderate and bourgeois majority of Germans – many industrialists and businessmen were, in fact, immediately subject to arrest and to confiscation of their businesses.

  At around the same time as the ‘land reform’ was being pushed through, the property and businesses of ‘fascists and war criminals’ were also being declared forfeit. SMAD order no. 124 of 30 October 1945 authorised the requisition of the entire productive property of ‘Nazi activists, armaments manufacturers, war criminals, and financiers of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party; Nazi Party) in Saxony. The breadth of the definition was, of course, sufficient to include almost any business enterprise the SMAD and its German helpers saw fit, especially as the forced mobilisation of previously harmless, consumer-oriented industry in the interests of the war effort had reached almost every corner of productive manufacturing during the latter stages of the conflict.26

  A few days later, another order authorised the immediate expropriation of all property of the former Nazi Party and its affiliated organisations. The German communists, meanwhile, began organising a plebiscite that would approve expropriation of the large landowners and farmers as well as this radical move in the direction of industrial collectivisation. In June 1946 this vote – approved by 76 per cent of the electorate – would legitimise the nationalisation of around 1,000 larger business or branches of businesses employing more than 100,000 workers in Saxony alone. These and other concerns, nationalised when the rest of the Soviet Zone followed suit, included holdings belonging to Krupp, IG Farben, and especially the Flick steel and armaments empire, which at its height had 120,000 employees and three-quarters of whose plants were situated in the Soviet-occupied area.27 Similar developments were afoot elsewhere in the Eastern Zone.28 A year into the zone’s post-war history, major changes were well advanced there, and contrary to the Soviets’ protestations they were very radical. Already, despite the Western Allies’ insistence on their own commitment to purging their parts of Germany of alleged feudal, militaristic and anti-democratic elements, a clear political and socio-economic divide was emerging between the Soviet Zone and the other three.

  Suspected major Nazis and war criminals were subject to arrest by all the victorious powers, under the agreements reached between them before the end of the war. The ‘big Nazis’ – Goering, Himmler, Speer, Ribbentrop and co. – were obvious targets. And then there were the industrialists in the Western zones. There are no records of any of their wives being publicly raped by the likes of the notorious ‘Lieutenant R.’, but the spirit of Morgenthau was pretty strong among many men and officers of the American army as it advanced into the Ruhr, the Saar and the middle German industrial areas – especially those who had been the first to enter the concentration camps and see for themselves what horrors the regime and its servants, however respectable seeming, had been capable of.

  On Wednesday 11 April 1945, American troops in armoured vehicles and jeeps cautiously advanced into the grounds of the Villa Hügel, on the southern outskirts of Essen in the Ruhr. The palatial, 260-room residence of the Krupp armaments dynasty, grandly positioned above some seventy acres of parklands overlooking the Baldeneysee lake and the Ruhr river, had been completed at the beginning of 1873 after three years of construction. The extended building schedule was largely due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870, which, while it may have delayed the family’s move into their new quarters, appreciably increased their wealth and power.

  Finally, at around 1.45 p.m., troops of the 313th Infantry Regiment approached the Krupp residence, which had suffered no damage despite the extensive bombing of Essen itself. They were reportedly forced to disperse a hundred or so anxious Krupp domestic staff, who were milling around the front entrance. Then the officers in charge, advancing with pistols at the ready, found themselves faced with an imposing figure who by appearance and manner might have been mistaken for the master of the house himself. He was, in fact, merely the personal valet of Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ this German Jeeves said calmly, ‘Herr Krupp is waiting for you. May I ask you to step this way?’29

  Myths abound as to what exactly happened next. Some claim that the American officers were kept waiting for a further twenty minutes, others that threats brought the tall, distinguished, thirty-seven-year-old head of the Krupp concern quickly to the ground floor, where, once his identity had been established, he was taken into custody and driven away in a jeep. A photograph shows the impeccably dressed Krupp, looking slightly bemused in a smart coat and felt hat, his long legs folded awkwardly into an army jeep, sharing the back of the cramped vehicle with a large swing-mounted machine gun and its operator.

  The officer who had arrested Alfried Krupp, Lieutenant Colonel Sagmoen, wanted to show him to their CO at 313th Regiment headquarters. ‘Colonel,’ said Sagmoen, ‘I’ve got Krupp. Do you want to talk to him?’

  The CO spat on the floor. ‘I don’t want to see the son of a bitch,’ he snarled. ‘Take him to the prison cage.’30

  Surprisingly, after a few days of interrogation, the iconic industrialist was released and returned to his estate. The divisional command had taken over the main building, but Krupp was allowed to stay under house arrest in the so-called ‘kleines Haus’ (little house), a (sixty-room) annexe to the Villa Hügel.

  In the weeks that followed, security tightened. It became clear that, with his seventy-five-year-old father, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach, too sick to stand trial, the Allies, largely at the behest of Robert Jackson, were discussing whether to prosecute Alfried in his place.31 Alfried was fortunate only in that, partly because there was little time to prepare his case and partly because the judges were unwilling simply to substitute one Krupp for another at short notice, as if the name ‘Krupp’ were the sole characteristic required of the accused, he did not stand trial alongside the major Nazi leaders in November 1945. Had he done so, at a time when feelings were still running high, as an exemplar for the willing complicity of German industry in the waging of total war and the mistreatment and starvation of foreign and slave workers – up to 100,000 may have died in the last stages of the war, not forgetting concentration camp inmates – Alfried might have been lucky to escape the gallows.*

  Elsewhere, in the case of less celebrated captains of German industry, matters ran less dramatically. In nearby Mülheim, just over ten kilometres to the west of Essen, a week after the peaceful American occupation of the town, leading local industrialists (who were for the most part equally complicit in the criminal aspects of the German war economy) were invited – not ordered – to meet the new city commandant to discuss the stabilisation of the supply situation and the continuation of industrial production. These included Walter Rohland, forty-six years old, General Director of the huge United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke), dubbed ‘Speer’s Steel Dictator’ or, because of the number of tanks his company produced for the Wehrmacht, ‘Panzer-Rohland’.32 Rohland was eventually arrested and used as a prosecution witness against Krupp. Unite
d Steelworks was eventually decartelised, but Rohland was never convicted.

  All major industrialists were, in the end, at least subjected to interrogation. There were some who were actively and urgently sought by special Allied investigation teams. Apart from Krupp, there were the directors of IG Farben, the vast dyes and chemicals conglomerate, at one time the fourth largest company in the world after General Motors, US Steel and Standard Oil.

  IG Farben had produced poison and nerve gas, explosives and weaponry for the Wehrmacht, as well as the Zyklon B poison gas used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka – even the chemicals used in live human experiments by Dr Mengele and his cohorts. IG had also been notorious for its eager use and cold-hearted abuse of slave labour, most notably at a large plant that made up part of the infamous Auschwitz industrial complex.

  Dr Georg von Schnitzler, sixty-one years old in 1945, was a board member of the chemicals giant, closely involved in defence matters and an enthusiastic member of the SA and the Nazi Party. Agents of the American Military Government’s Cartel Division finally tracked him down to a country estate near Oberursel, north-west of Frankfurt. A doctor of law rather than a scientist, von Schnitzler had been involved in the ruthless plundering of occupied Europe through mass-kidnapping of slaves, and in organising the forced expropriation of foreign companies. A historian of IG Farben describes the meeting between the predatory lawyer and his nemesis:

  He received them wearing his trademark Scottish tweeds and English brogues, sitting with his beautiful wife, Lilly, in a room enhanced by a large Renoir over the fireplace. After offering them a brandy (which they declined), he said he was happy ‘all this unpleasantness is over’ and that he was looking forward to seeing his old friends at ICI and DuPont again. When he was asked to accompany his visitors back to Frankfurt, he politely declined. As the SHAEF report of the meeting recalled: ‘He replied that he was unable to do so as the way was so long and he was so old. The next invitation came from a sergeant with a tommy-gun . . . This time the Herr Direktor did come.’33

  Hermann Schmitz, sixty-four, was von Schnitzler’s superior. Born into a working-class family and with only a basic commercial training under his belt, in the years before the First World War his natural business gifts were such that he had nevertheless forged a meteoric career at Frankfurt-based Metallgesellschaft, the largest producer of non-ferrous metals in the world. Still in his early thirties, he then moved on to a prominent position under Imperial Germany’s First World War armaments chief and chair of AEG, Walther Rathenau. Shortly after the end of that war, Schmitz joined BASF, one of the chemicals companies that in 1925 were subsumed into the IG Farben cartel. A devious and hard-nosed negotiator and an expert in company financing, Schmitz was a director of IG Farben for twenty years, a Nazi member of the Reichstag from 1933, and succeeded Carl Bosch as chairman of the company in 1935.

  Hermann Schmitz unquestionably bore ultimate responsibility for every criminal act, every ruined life and agonising death the company inflicted. Nevertheless, unlike von Schnitzler, Schmitz was not arrested immediately at his house in Heidelberg. Only after searching the building several times did American investigators find a trunk stuffed with hundreds of company documents, including papers detailing IG’s efforts to camouflage its illegal ownership of subsidiaries in the United States.

  More sinister secrets were gradually revealed. A British intelligence officer, Major Tilley, managed to extract from Schmitz the location of his personal safe, which was concealed in a cupboard in his office. The documents there included photographs of the branch of IG Farben’s Buna Works in the Auschwitz industrial complex, the construction and operation of which had cost at least 35,000 lives.34

  ‘Page one,’ Tilley wrote, ‘had a picture with a narrow street of the old [town of] Auschwitz. The accompanying drawings depicted the Jewish part of the population in a manner that was not flattering . . . The second page began a section entitled “Planning the New Auschwitz Works”.’35

  Schmitz was finally arrested and prosecuted along with other directors and managers of IG Farben – among them, Heinrich Hörlein, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist – on charges including ‘enslavement and murder’ and ‘plunder and robbery’. Only Georg von Schnitzler ever expressed anything approaching remorse for what he and his fellows had done, admitting that ‘The IG took on a great responsibility and gave, in the chemical sector, substantial and even decisive aid for Hitler’s foreign policy which led to war and the ruination of Germany . . . I must conclude that the IG is largely responsible for the policies of Hitler.’ Later, under pressure from other IG defendants, von Schnitzler temporarily withdrew this and similar candid statements, though he later again admitted that they were accurate.36

  Most major industrialists and managers of German companies in the Western zones were taken into custody at some point after the end of the war and their companies subjected, initially at least, to dismantling, decartelisation or confiscation, as agreed at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945. The list of those arrested by the Americans, the British and the French is long – most of these luminaries, aware of the fate that would await them in Soviet hands, had been cunning enough to ensure they ended the war within the Western Allies’ zones. The names of their companies remain in many cases world famous – Krupp, Henkel (detergents and cleaning), Mannesmann (steel piping, later armaments), United Steelworks, the Flick family conglomerate (in whose mills and factories tens of thousands of slave workers are thought to have died of starvation and overwork),37 the mines and mills belonging to Hermann Röchling, the so-called ‘King of the Saar’, and so on.

  It was relatively easy, in the final analysis, to decide who among the Nazi elite deserved arrest. However, 8.5 million Germans had been members of the Nazi Party, the equivalent of the population of London or New York. Millions more had belonged to associated organisations. What to do with them?

  The mesh of the net was accordingly made smaller, to catch all those extra millions. But of those caught, which should be kept and which thrown back into the water to swim on through their tainted lives?

  * Sir Herbert Stephen (1857–1932), barrister and acknowledged expert on criminal law and practice. Cousin of the writer Virginia Woolf (née Stephen).

  * i.e. the Soviet Union.

  * He was tried at Nuremberg in 1947–8 under less confrontational circumstances and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. In the end, he served less than four.

  10

  The Fish and the Net

  It was not too difficult for the Allies to trace the ‘big fish’ Nazis, militarists and industrial malefactors. Even the second-tier, regional and local bosses were known to intelligence experts. Extensive lists had been drawn up even before the Allies entered Germany at the end of 1944. However, before the millions of minor Nazis – those never mentioned in the Allied monitored press or on lists of prominent functionaries – could be found, investigated and thoroughly categorised as the denazification process demanded, they too would have to be identified. And as the war ended, the Allied investigators still had no foolproof and comprehensive means of tracking down all the eight million or so former wearers of the Party badge.

  There were, of course, many non-Nazis (and turncoats) in cities, towns and villages all over the former Reich who would be only too willing to denounce fellow citizens who had been active Nazis, and in many cases this happened very quickly. All the same, this was at best a haphazard way of identifying the guilty, at worst a wearisome and potentially slow method. As for the millions of refugees already pouring westward away from the vengeance of the Russians, Poles and Czechs, they had little to celebrate – except, or so it seemed, for the fact that wherever they were going they were unlikely to be known, which meant that the former Nazis among them hoped to be able to keep their secret and start afresh in some new corner of the Reich. Usually they said that their papers had been destroyed or lost. As Ulrich Frodien – who had fled Breslau, the Silesian capital, along with his father
and hundreds of thousands of others, recalled, one denazification joke in the West after the war went: ‘So, were you a member of the Nazi Party, or are you from Breslau?’1