Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  Between April and the beginning of July 1945, when the area had to be handed over to the Russians, these teams and their accompanying T-Force units (whose job was to secure the objectives, clear them of possible booby traps and so on, so that the scientists could move in) worked feverishly to strip it of machines, equipment and what was left of its precious product. Everything – every last nut and plate and bolt and wire – was shipped west into the safety of the US Zone. In one eight-day period, 400 tons of equipment was transported to Antwerp, whence it was shipped to New Orleans.10 And under a highly secretive programme codenamed ‘Overcast’ – later changed to ‘Paperclip’ – 765 selected German engineers and scientists who had worked on Hitler’s missile programme were magicked away to America without any denazification process at all, as were the sequestered rockets and their spare parts. Partly this was to complete the debriefing process, partly to keep them from the Russians, but in any case America’s post-war missile programme was given a good head start.

  These compulsory but often by no means unwilling emigrants were not all apolitical boffins. Some, such as Arthur Rudolph, were also directly responsible for abuse of the complex’s slave-labour workforce, whose mortality rate was horrendously high. Initially, Rudolph had been designated a ‘100 percent dangerous Nazi type’ and recommended for internment. He was not alone. Conscientious State Department employees – or fanatical ‘Morgenthau boys’, depending on your point of view – refused to issue entry paperwork and fought a stubborn battle of attrition with parts of the military to refuse the men residence until they had been properly processed, which would have involved sending them back to Germany. The tug of war went on for many months. Finally, after former Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall was appointed Secretary of State at the beginning of 1947, he broke the log jam by simply declaring that in these cases, national security took priority over the imperatives of denazification.11

  It was not just in the case of Americans that from a (very) early stage new post-war exigencies undermined noble intentions. The Soviets and the British also scooped up what German rocket and weapons scientists they could find, with scant or no regard to these useful men’s previous political allegiances.12 The Soviet equivalent of ‘Paperclip’ was Operation Osavakim.13 The Russians have since been accused of mass abduction. In fact, it seems that many German scientists went willingly, attracted by ration and accommodation privileges, not to mention excellent research facilities, and they were on the whole decently treated by the Soviets.14

  Neither did this greed for German know-how apply only to rocket scientists. In June 1945, American investigators, driving through the French Zone with Otto Ambros, a senior IG Farben scientist whom they had arrested on suspicion of leading key wartime chemical weapons projects and of involvement with the Auschwitz factory, found themselves stopped, questioned and their arrestee whisked away. Ambros was promptly debriefed by the French at IG Farben’s Ludwigshafen factory complex, which happened to be situated inside their allotted territory.15

  The Americans themselves also effectively abducted not just elite German rocket scientists but a great many other technical and scientific experts from the Thuringia/Saxony area during their brief period of occupation between April and July 1945, in order to find out what they knew and to ensure that what valuable knowledge they had did not fall into Soviet hands.

  They promised attractive working conditions, scientific books, equipment and instruments, a salary commensurate with my qualifications, and replacement of the personal items I would have to leave behind. I asked for a few days to think it over, but was told by the CIC agent that I would be taken the next day whether I wanted to go or not.16

  Extravagant promises were made, but by no means all these experts were offered fat contracts and tickets to California; in fact, many were ruthlessly abandoned in the Western zones, far from their former homes and jobs in the East, once the Americans had finished squeezing them for what they knew. Many such ‘rejects’ were nevertheless not permitted to return home. These unfortunates were held within the Western zones, often unemployed or at least with no job appropriate for their talents, often for some years, under a kind of semi-arrest. One such, a professor at the University of Jena, complained of life in this professional limbo:

  At 3 p.m. my family, my two assistants, and I left Jena. Only when we were underway did I learn that we were going to Heidenheim, where we were interned. None of the promises made to me . . . have been fulfilled. I lost my position, my income, and about 80 percent of my property. All of my furniture and household utensils and a large portion of my library are gone.17

  Often the aim of such restrictions was to prevent these men from being recruited by the ‘other side’ – even though the Americans themselves did not want them. And indeed some, once released, drifted back to the East, drawn by the payoks (packages of food and goods) offered by the Soviets, which were of a generosity comparable to those of the rocket scientists recruited under Operation Osavakim.

  In varying degrees, the attitude of the Allies changed very quickly from one of fairly good mutual cooperation to open competition. This was most clearly, though by no means exclusively, illustrated in the changes in the relations between the Americans and the Russians. Almost from the outset, the denazification process was directly affected. It could only become more so as passions faded and post-war reality impinged on wartime dreams.

  The chore of filling out the Fragebogen was, for most Germans, just that. Even for those who had been Party members, the worry was not so much that this fact could come to light as whether, when it did, they would be classified as activists. This revelation could bring serious consequences up to and including imprisonment. Then they could be listed as Mitläufer (fellow travellers), which would probably mean a fine, and/or temporary restriction of employment prospects or civil rights.

  There were, in fact, five possible levels of classification. The levels were usually referred to by their category numbers, descending from completely innocent to absolutely guilty, as follows:

  V. Exonerated, or non-incriminated persons (Entlastete)

  IV. Followers, or Fellow Travellers (Mitläufer)

  III. Less incriminated (Minderbelastete)

  II. Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons (Belastete)

  I. Major Offenders (Hauptschuldige)

  Categories I and II included those to be subjected to automatic arrest by any Allied forces that encountered them, on the grounds of either criminal involvement or potential danger to the security of the occupation. The Anglo-Americans also had a huge list, put together from various intelligence sources, held at a central point known as CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects). This was held on a Hollerith IBM card-index machine based in Paris. The idea was that photographs, fingerprints and personal details of suspects could be sent in from internment and POW camps, compared with those on the list and processed, thus ensuring that no guilty men would escape justice. The system was up and running by the end of June 1945. More or less.

  Like such systems before and since, CROWCASS immediately ran into technical problems, not least to do with differing electrical systems and frequent power cuts. The American colonel who ran the data operation in Paris wrote plaintively some months later:

  The two buildings (less three floors) occupied by CROWCASS are not adequate for anything like maximum efficient operation. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain the additional three floors in the building at 53 Rue des Maturins. Neither building is well suited for the IBM equipment. The cyclic rate of the electric current available is not correct for the efficient operation of the machines. Also there are long periods when no current is available at all and this condition is expected to last during the remaining winter months.18

  It quickly transpired that many prison camps, particularly the British ones, were in any case reluctant to participate in the scheme. In any case, given the vast numbers of prisoners of all kinds
falling into Anglo-American hands during the final weeks of the war, the sheer quantity of CROWCASS requests arriving at the Paris offices – some 40,000 per day at one point – quickly proved unmanageable. And that even despite the fact that very few camps were bothering to take the prisoners’ fingerprints. Moreover, the existence of CROWCASS as the supposedly omniscient database of evil had the unforeseen, but with hindsight unsurprising, consequence that if a prisoner was not on this (inevitably by no means exhaustive) list, the overworked and inexperienced personnel back in the detention camps would gratefully assume that their prisoner was ‘clean’ and no further investigation was therefore required.19

  A few weeks before Christmas, the Director of CROWCASS in Paris reported that 10,000 forms were being processed daily, and:

  To date about 500,000 forms have been processed. Approximately 4,000,000 POW forms are on hand. There is a potential number of approximately 7,000,000.

  In other words, even if current rates were maintained, on a seven-days-a-week basis, the checks could potentially take more than two more years. Only a vast increase in resources and machines would give them a chance to get through the backlog within some kind of reasonable timescale. As for the fingerprint section, it should simply be closed, he said. They were paying five fingerprint experts aggregate salaries of approximately $660 per month – this not including the pay of the French civilian clerical staff – and their part of the operation took up four floors of the building. ‘So far as can be ascertained, no use has been made of this department, and none is foreseen . . .’20

  It was not surprising, given this level of chaos and misunderstanding, that, at the other end of the process, the innocent could easily suffer and the guilty equally easily go unpunished. In any case, even by the end of 1945, the Allies were far from united in their detailed approach as to who should be prosecuted, for what, and how. In March 1946, discussions between the ‘Big Four’ in Berlin led to a document with the title ‘Disposal of War Criminals, Militarists and Potentially Dangerous Persons’. It listed and categorised at great length the former enemy citizens who should be prosecuted and what the punishments should be. It also set out the principle by which these trials could be conducted by German courts. This was returning just a little bit of German sovereignty – or fobbing off responsibility, depending on how one saw it.

  One who saw it as essential either way was John Francis Warre (‘Jack’) Rathbone. Rathbone, a thirty-six-year-old solicitor, had spent his nights during the war commanding an anti-aircraft battery in London, and reputedly had been recruited into the legal section of the projected British Military Government by an acquaintance he bumped into while strolling along Pall Mall.21 He was now, as he described it, in all but name the ‘Minister of Justice’ of the British Zone. As he later explained his decision: ‘They [the Germans] had created the mess, and I thought they should clear it up. It would be jolly good for them.’22

  And all this time, in the British and American zones some 72,000 Germans had been interned under unpleasant, in fact often harsh, conditions, awaiting a decision. It soon became clear that the British, who had always been in favour of punishing the Germans but strangely reluctant to will the means, had no idea what to do.

  In April, Brigadier Douglas Heyman, who rejoiced in the title of Deputy Chief Internal Affairs and Communications Division, Control Commission, Germany, met Rathbone in Lübeck. Rathbone convinced him of the feasibility and desirability of having the Germans try their own people. This was made slightly easier by the decision by the Nuremberg judges that the SA, the mass Brownshirt organisation that had been reduced to political impotence by Hitler’s purge in June 1934, should not be considered a criminal organisation along with the SS and the like. Junior Party officials, unless suspected of a particular crime, would also be excluded from this category.

  This change reduced the number of automatic internees to 27,000. However, having completed his consultations, Heyman seems to have decided that a further 45,000 Party officials not yet in Allied hands and some 200,000 SS and Gestapo agents should also be arrested and prosecuted. This, he said, could be effected by the local British Army Public Safety Officers, responsible for security and liaison with the German police in specific towns and districts. So far as ‘persons at large’ (i.e. the general population not interned) were concerned, Heyman added blithely that ‘the cases . . . will be individually examined and such persons will be provisionally classified by public safety . . .’ These officers were already overworked and understaffed. The notion that they would ‘provisionally classify’ all people in their areas was beyond possibility.23

  The minutes of a meeting that Rathbone attended in Lübbecke, twenty kilometres or so north of the British Military Government’s headquarters at Bad Oeynhausen, on 4 March 1946, shows the perceived impossibility of this kind of search-and-arrest process even before Heyman’s fact-finding committee reported. The report of the meeting, which covered the entire British Zone, also shows the gulf in perception between the Americans and the British, less than a year after the war’s end. Under ‘Surveillance and Investigation’, an intelligence officer present informed the meeting that surveillance of category II and III (i.e. the two levels of definite incrimination) raised ‘no particular problem’. However,

  Investigation was a far more difficult question, and it would be impossible for the machinery of Kreis* Tribunals to deal with the number of cases envisaged by the Americans, which would approximate to 20,000 per Kreis. It was considered that something in the region of 1,000 to 2,000 per Kreis was the largest number that was practicable.24

  Heyman’s report, drafted six weeks later, supposed not that an average 10 per cent of the population in each averagely 200,000-strong Kreis (American supposed figure) or 1–2 per cent (British figure) but all civilians would be investigated. His idea was even more of a fantasy than it at first appeared.

  Well before this time, the British occupiers were being forced to make compromises. Thus in October 1945 it was agreed by the zone-wide Standing Committee on denazification that ‘50% of the total number of appointees to the Legal Civil Service in any one Oberlandesgericht† District could be nominal Nazis’ and noted that ‘This concession in fact prevented a complete breakdown in the German Legal Administration’. Given that at its height the Nationalsozialistischer Rechstwahrerbund (National Socialist Lawyers’ Organisation) had 100,000 members – 90 per cent of the legal profession – this was hardly surprising. And it didn’t, in any case, solve the problem. Six months later it was further proposed that, due to continuing shortages and serious backlogs in legal proceedings of all kinds, German law students passing their final examination (Assessorprüfung) should be admitted to the Legal Civil Service ‘regardless of the 50% restriction . . . provided they could prove that they were not more than nominal members of the Nazi Party’.25

  The report carried a strong whiff of typical British pragmatism – or hypocrisy.

  At this point, the Americans, even their eminently practical Deputy Governor, General Clay, were still appalled at what they clearly regarded in the latter light. Missionary zeal was still widespread down in southern and south-western Germany, where the American Military Government’s writ ran.

  Clay himself spent a great deal of late 1945 to early 1946 cancelling exemptions for the likes of railwaymen who had been members of the Nazi Party. He also decided to disenfranchise Nazi Party members when it came to the Kreis elections planned for 1946, the American Zone’s first, tentative stab at post-war German democracy. In doing this, he ignored both his own advisory committee and the State Department, both of which wanted to exclude from the voting rolls only those Nazis in the ‘automatic arrest’ category, leaving the vast majority of the so-called ‘fellow travellers’ or Muss-Nazis, while still liable to economic and financial penalties, with full civil rights.26

  One major problem for the Americans was the pressure both from their own soldiers and from the families they had left behind in the United States to
‘bring the boys home’. US forces were supposed to be withdrawn within two years of the end of the war. Wives of absent GIs were organising ‘Bring Back Daddy!’ clubs that sent baby shoes to congressmen to encourage speeding up the demobilisation process. Where the British faced return to an austerity-racked, pinched homeland where employment prospects might be uncertain – meaning that the relatively well-provisioned life of an official of the British ‘Raj’ in occupied Germany could appear attractive – their American counterparts had, in general, every incentive, including the generous set of benefits awarded under the GI Bill, to get themselves demobilised as quickly as humanly possible. By early 1946, as part of Operation Magic Carpet, a total of around 4.75 million GIs and their officers had been repatriated from the European Theatre of Operations alone by the US War Shipping Administration.

  Washington began to panic about the situation in the occupied areas of Europe, including Germany. There were no plans at this point to keep American forces in Europe indefinitely, but the government did try to stem the flow of returnees by extending the tour of duty for ‘50-pointers’* for at least another three months. There were even attempts to continue imposing the draft on American males, though this later failed in Congress. The slowdown in demobilisation was announced in the US Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, without any reason being given. The result was protests, strikes, even riots, both at home in the USA and in the places where American soldiers were stationed, from the Philippines and Japan to the United Kingdom and Germany.