Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  Those who saw or talked to Hoess at Nuremberg described the then-forty-five-year-old as “short, rather heavy set, somewhat red of face, with close-cropped hair.” They remarked on his “weak, high voice” and said he “looked harmless, at least at a distance.”

  Nuremberg’s U.S. Army psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn asked Hoess if the memories of gassings, executions, burning of corpses, if any of those thoughts “come upon you at times and in any way haunt you?”

  No, Hoess said, “I have no such fantasies.” He said he never had nightmares. He said he was “entirely normal. Even while I was doing this extermination work, I led a normal family life.” In fact, Hoess and his family lived just outside the perimeter of the camp, where his wife’s garden was filled with flowers and their children kept pet turtles and lizards. Auschwitz had provided a social life for Hoess and the other SS families who lived near the camp and had enjoyed the services of a nearby pub, a medical center, and the Dresden State Theater, which held concerts and performances.

  Indeed, for many Nazis working the camps, the cruelties of war had deadened their senses of humanity. Albert Badewitz, a former Auschwitz engineer, testified at the Auschwitz atrocity trials in 1947:

  A big part of the Polish intelligentsia died in the lumberyard in Auschwitz, whimpering in the snow. Some moved with a last flickering of survival instinct toward a rotten piece of bone and tried to put it in their mouth. Often they died in this position. Then a fellow-sufferer took the piece of bone out of their hand. I myself and several others have in this condition gulped raw horsemeat. The horse had died several days ago, and the cadaver had already been buried in the earth. I am not ashamed for that, the instinct of self-preservation made half animals in all of us.

  For Hoess, however, evil, and perhaps the ordinariness he found in his life at Auschwitz, came from an unquestioning obedience. When Heinrich Himmler gave Hoess the order to design and build a massive extermination center, “the order was authoritative—the explanation sufficient,” Whitney Harris, a member of the American prosecution team who took Hoess’s deposition later wrote. “In [Hoess’s] mind, he had no alternative but to obey. He did so to the best of his ability, and his ability was such that he became the greatest killer of history. Devoid of moral principle, he reacted to the order to slaughter human beings as he would have to an order to fell trees.”

  Goldensohn asked Hoess whether the destruction of millions of people was justified in his mind.

  “Not justified,” Hoess said. “But Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews.”

  “How could the Jews exterminate the Germans?” Goldensohn asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Hoess. “That is what Himmler said. Himmler didn’t explain.”

  “Don’t you have a mind or opinion of your own?” asked Goldensohn.

  “Yes,” Hoess said. “But when Himmler told us something, it was so correct and so natural we just blindly obeyed it.”

  Hoess told Gustave Gilbert that “it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning,” but that he “never gave it much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.”

  Hoess was certainly aware that what he was directing in Auschwitz was wrong. He later described the small children as they made their way into the gas chambers “playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys.” He recalled that “one woman approached me as she walked past, and, pointing to her four children who were . . . helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?’ ” He said later he “had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings. I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers.”

  In 1942, when Hoess’s wife found out what was actually happening inside the gates near her garden, she confronted Hoess, who told her the truth. “She was very upset and thought it cruel and terrible,” he said later. “I explained it to her the same way Himmler explained it to me. Because of this explanation she was satisfied, and we didn’t talk about it anymore. However, from that time forth, she frequently remarked that it would be better if I obtained another position.”

  In their final session together at Nuremberg, Goldensohn asked Hoess if he was a sadist.

  “No,” Hoess said. “Whenever I found guards who were guilty of treating internees too harshly, I tried to exchange them for other guards.” Besides, he said, “I never struck any internee in the entire time I was commandant.”

  Goldensohn had also spoken with Kaltenbrunner just before his testimony began in April, and Kaltenbrunner’s psychology was similar to that of Hoess, his underling.

  Kaltenbrunner told Goldensohn he knew he was “thought of as another Himmler.”

  But “I’m not,” he said, smiling. “The papers make me out as a criminal. I never killed anyone.”

  AN ESTIMATED SIXTY MILLION men, women, and children were murdered in the twentieth century in mass killings and genocides. After the genocide of the Native Americans in the nineteenth century came the annihilation of the Hereros of southwest Africa by the Germans in 1904, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks beginning in 1915, the manufactured starvation of the Ukrainians by the Soviets in 1932, the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s, the reign of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, and genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Rudolf Hoess was responsible for 1.5 percent of the genocidal murders of the twentieth century.

  Few people believe themselves to be capable of the extraordinary human evil perpetrated by the Nazis, and the inability to comprehend how the Holocaust occurred has reassured or comforted millions since the Second World War. “It helps side us, normal men as we take ourselves to be, against the doers, the Nazi perpetrators,” wrote philosopher Arne Vetlesen. “The doers, we like to think, are not like us; indeed, their being unlike us is the very quality which explains that they could do what they did. Having committed atrocities so outrageous in nature and scope as to explode our faculties of comprehension, they, authors of the unthinkable, must surely be—or have been—abnormal men.”

  To think in this way, however, is to turn away from what the Holocaust means, to refuse to fully acknowledge its scope and what it says about the human condition. “It is,” wrote Vetlesen, “to help perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place.”

  Genocide scholar and social psychologist James Waller has written that:

  the greatest catastrophes occur when the distinctions between war and crime fade; when there is dissolution of the boundaries between military and criminal conduct, between civility and barbarity; when political, social, or religious groups embrace collective violence against a defenseless victim group as warfare or, perhaps worse yet, as “progress.” Such acts are human evil writ large.

  Hoess and Kaltenbrunner certainly were killers in some capacity, but were they psychopaths? Gilbert’s diagnosis of Hoess at Nuremberg was that he was “intellectually normal with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.” If not psychotic, was he sane and evil?

  Evil can be defined as any source of suffering or destruction to a living thing and can be divided into two main categories—natural and moral. Natural evil occurs outside of the control of humans and includes acts of God such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Moral evil begins in the human heart. It is the suffering we inflict on one another.

  Waller defines moral evil as “the deliberate harming of humans by other humans.” He breaks down moral evil into smaller harms, such as the destruction of property or psychological harm from the threat of physical injury, and larger harms, which include extraordinary evil. Instead of focusing on the acts of serial killers or
gunmen who attack public spaces, Waller is interested in “the harm we perpetrate on each other under the sanction of political, social, or religious groups—in other words, the malevolent human evil perpetrated in times of collective social unrest, war, mass killings and genocide.”

  Does attempting to understand human evil create a path toward justifying or excusing the behavior that creates evil? Even Rudolf Hoess might present moral philosophers with a problem. When he was a child, Hoess’s closest friend was a black pony his parents gave him for his seventh birthday. He would ride it for hours in the Black Forest near his home in Baden-Baden.

  At one point, Hoess was a seemingly normal human being. And if the perpetrators of genocide can be seen as fellow human beings, do they deserve empathy, or even forgiveness, from those of us who choose to lead good lives?

  In Catholic social teaching, evil is the absence of the good that God gave to humans. Because evil is a lack of something, it can only exist if something else exists. “Evil can only exist in another,” wrote the philosopher Father Paul Crowley. “It is parasitic on the good.” The central question, theologian Robert P. Kennedy wrote, asks why “a creature [would] spurn God’s goodness and deform itself.”

  Evil is certainly problematic for mainstream religious belief. For one, the Hebrew Bible contains stories of God creating great suffering in the world. The prophet Amos asks, “Does disaster befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?”

  Yet the existence of moral evil in humans is even trickier to understand. Kennedy wrote that “the existence of moral evil is the central enigma of human life,” and the corollary of free will. In a theology that holds there is only one, all-powerful God who bestowed humans with free will, must God in some way be responsible for mass annihilation? If an omniscient God knew when he was bestowing free will on humans that “free” meant anything goes, he should have recognized that his greatest creation might commit grave evil in the world.

  So how can a good and just God allow the suffering of his own creation? The medieval Christian philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine said that “either God cannot abolish evil, or he will not; if he cannot, he is not all powerful. If he will not, he is not all good.” In many ways, this contradiction constitutes the central problem for students of theodicy, the study of God’s relationship to evil.

  If the source of the world’s evil is Satan, as many Christians believe, what exactly is Satan? Some believe that Satan’s arrival in Christian lore was the result of a centuries-long dissatisfaction with the mysteriousness of evil’s source. T. J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, scholars who have traced Satan’s biblical roots, ask: “Could it be that along with the development of monotheism is a growing existential frustration that makes it difficult for God’s people to accept a deity who is responsible both for good and evil? Is it possible that at some point, God’s negative attributes . . . are excised—in a sort of divine personality split—and appropriated to an inferior being (Satan)?”

  In a verse from Isaiah, the Lord speaks to Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire. “I form the light, and create darkness,” God says. “I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

  If God creates evil, but also allows his creation free will, is God or man responsible for the Holocaust? Even if evil emerges in the absence of good, in the absence of God, the free will of his creature—bent on evil—is not able to subsume God’s power. So if God is master of both absolute good and absolute evil, he must also claim those of us who choose darkness.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Brand of Cain

  Justice without kindness or mercy is the height of injustice, and mercy without justice is indifference and caprice and the end of all order.

  —ULRICH ZWINGLI

  THE IMPROVISED PRISON CHAPEL may have been the only peaceful refuge in the Palace of Justice. As prosecutors presented more evidence at trial and defendants and witnesses gave more testimony, the prisoners increasingly blamed one another for the crimes being leveled at the group.

  Some, led by Goering, still defended Hitler, and laid the blame for the atrocities on Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Martin Bormann. Others began to disparage Hitler’s legacy. Between trial sessions on June 13, Goering and Hitler’s former chancellor, Franz von Papen, engaged in a shouting match. Goering defended Hitler, referring to him in the present tense as “our Chief of State.”

  “The Nazi Chief of State!” the normally diplomatic Papen yelled back. “A chief of state who murdered six million innocent people!”

  Goering didn’t relent. “You can’t say Hitler ordered it,” he said.

  “Well then, who did order those mass murders?” Papen asked. “Did you order them?”

  Goering was flustered. “No. No—Himmler,” he mumbled and rushed past Papen out of the courtroom.

  At lunch, Speer, Fritzsche, and Schirach laughed about how Goering’s blusterings had begun to grow tiresome, even with diplomats like Papen.

  “No, of course Hitler didn’t order the mass murders,” Fritzsche said sarcastically. “Some sergeant must have done it.”

  The next day Papen took the stand. It was the 155th day of the trial, and Papen, a member of O’Connor’s Catholic flock, told the court about his religious background: “I grew up with conservative principles which unite a man most closely to his own folk and his native soil, and as my family has always been a strong supporter of the Church, I of course grew up in this tradition as well.”

  In recent days, amid all the turmoil, the other defendants had heard a rumor that senior American officials, including Gerecke, were being allowed to return home. Word was going around that Alma was calling him back to St. Louis. As Papen spoke, Fritzsche sat in the dock and wrote a letter to Alma. He passed it around and all the defendants eventually signed it, even those who didn’t attend chapel services. General Alfred Jodl wrote, “I am joining this plea/request even though I don’t belong to the Lutheran church. I do this heartily.”

  Fritzsche then gave the letter to Schirach, who translated it for Alma. It began:

  Frau Gerecke,

  Your husband Pastor Gerecke has been taking religious care of the undersigned defendants during the Nuremberg trial. He has been doing so for more than half a year. We now have heard, dear Mrs. Gerecke, that you wish to see him back home after his absence of several years. Because we also have wives and children we understand this wish of yours very well.

  Nevertheless we are asking you to put off your wish to gather your family around you at home for a little time. Please consider that we cannot miss your husband now. During the past months he has shown us uncompromising friendliness of such a kind, that he has become indispensable for us in an otherwise prejudiced environment which is filled with cold disdain or hatred. . . .

  In his sessions with these men, Gerecke had listened countless times as they moaned about being away from their families. “I had done a little mild griping of my own,” he pointed out. “I probably mentioned my wife’s health, and the fact that I had not seen her for two and one half years. At any rate, apparently they decided that Mrs. Gerecke would be the chief influence for my return home.”

  The Nazis’ note, “written in almost illegible German script,” had been “the most incredible letter ever sorted by St. Louis postal clerks,” Gerecke later wrote. The letter had made its way through regular prison censorship and landed on Gerecke’s own desk four days after it was written. He sent it on to Alma with his own note attached:

  My Dear!

  Here’s the most unusual letter signed on the original by the most talked about men in the world. You are, without a doubt, the only woman in the world to get such a letter containing such a request. It is noteworthy that the Catholics too have signed it. Keep the letter for my book, Honey.

  Love,

  Hubby.

  The last part of the Nazis’ letter to Alma contained a word that history has never associated with the Third Reich: love. “Our dear Chaplain Gerecke is necessary for us no
t only as a minister but also as the thoroughly good man that he is—surely we need not describe him as such to his own wife. We simply have come to love him.”

  In this stage of the trial, the letter continued,

  It is impossible for any other man than him to break through the walls that have been built up around us, in a spiritual sense even stronger than in a material one. Therefore, please leave him with us. Certainly you will bring this sacrifice and we shall be deeply indebted to you. We send our best wishes for you and your family! God be with you.

  “So I stayed on at Nuremberg,” Gerecke wrote later. “Mrs. Gerecke told me to—air mail, special delivery.”

  In fact, the rumor the Nazis had heard was just that. Alma later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she “really hadn’t written a word about demanding that my husband give up his important task.” When he first arrived in Nuremberg, before anyone knew how long the trial would last, Gerecke had committed to staying through June. He never had any intention of leaving until it was over. Gerecke later told the Post-Dispatch, “Chaplain Sixtus O’Connor and I were perhaps closer to them than any others. When we asked them if they would prefer German clergymen in attendance, they told us we had seen them through so much they would insist on retaining us until the end.”

  IN THE FINAL WEEKS of the trial, tensions seemed to ease in the prison. There was an atmosphere of peaceful resignation among the prisoners. After months in tight, stark quarters, the Nazis and prison officers had come to know each other as people, and Andrus’s rules and regulations were now being administered more humanely. The weekly services in the prison chapel “became more and more solemn and moving and gave us much solace,” Fritzsche wrote. “It was in such a spirit that each defendant devised the last words he was to utter at the trial.” No one knew what the others were going to say—they were all too shy to share their drafts with one another.