Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  About 4.55 p.m. two sisters who spoke good English came in to discuss something with me, and I took them upstairs to the dining room to have some tea. The only empty place to sit was near where Irma Grese was sitting. So I indicated to go over there but one of them said, ‘No, we don’t want to sit there.’

  I said, ‘Look, I can’t offer you the services of the Hotel Adlon!’

  She said, ‘But you don’t expect us to sit next to an SS officer, do you?’

  I explained that I knew about her, but we had no witnesses, and one of them said, ‘Well I saw her do it. I used to play in the Orchestra in Auschwitz and saw what she did.’

  In the twilight hours of the Reich, the SS, the Gestapo and other Nazis continued to kill Jews. At Stutthof on 25 April 1945, 200 Jewish women were shot. Probably the last atrocity came on 2 May when 500 Jews were shot at Lübeck. They joined the 5,999,500 other Jews murdered by the Nazis. Six days later the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ surrendered.

  ENVOI:

  The Nuremberg Trials

  Sentence Day in the Great Trial at Nuremberg, 1 October 1946

  MAURICE FAGENCE

  The leaders of Nazi Germany who were tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were accused of four different classes of crime:

  i) crimes against humanity, that is persecution, enslavement or extermination on religious or political grounds;

  ii) conspiring or having a common plan to commit crimes against peace;

  iii) committing specific crimes against peace by planning or initiating wars of aggression;

  iv) crimes against the laws and customs of war.

  Maurice Fagence was a reporter for the British newspaper, the Daily Herald.

  NUREMBERG, Tuesday

  When Goering [Göring] came into court to hear the sentence – he was first – he play-acted in the most terrible few minutes of his life.

  Maybe he meant to show the judges how superhumanly uninterested he was in anything they did to him.

  Whatever the reason, this is the scene as we saw it. The judges had been the last people to take their seats in the packed court. Before a sliding walnut panel that serves as a door to the dock a teashop-size table had been placed. On it was a pair of earphones plugged to the wall near the floor.

  Every guard in court, we noticed, including the two in the dock, appeared without a revolver for the first time.

  Even Colonel Andrus, Court Marshal, had discarded his. The astonishing security proceedings had reached the point at which no risk was being taken of a condemned man seizing a gun from a soldier’s holster.

  I thought the court was without a gun till I saw one young officer with his hand firmly on a Colt in his belt, as he lurked in an alcove near the dock.

  Noiselessly the panel slid aside at the touch of a remote electrical button. Two unarmed soldiers stepped through, and a second later, to stand between them at the table – Goering.

  He had donned his lavender-coloured Air Marshal’s uniform, discarded three months ago, for this occasion. No insignia on it now. There was not even room on the breast of this thinner Goering for the medals he used to wear.

  His rarely still face was now almost cheekily composed. He donned the headphones casually as if testing somebody’s set, stood at attention. When the words of Lord Justice Lawrence reached him ‘The tribunal sentence you’, he waved the judge into silence.

  By actions he conveyed to the judges that no sound was coming through.

  What followed was unforgettable. Goering himself took turns at bending to the plug at floor level to see if there was good contact, always finishing by conveying that the earphones were not working.

  Guards who had tested the earpieces and expressed themselves satisfied rushed into the dock. One vaulted a prisoner’s seat. Goering handed them the earphones in turn, but although they were satisfied everything was working, he denied it with a faint smile.

  They took turns at another pair of earphones, and Goering tested the floor contact again. And after two minutes he agreed all was well.

  Lord Justice Lawrence read the sentence again – right up to ‘death by hanging’. Goering, the man who ordered the bombing of London, and who now himself had to die, flashed a look of contempt on the court, turned ponderously on his heel and walked through the panel.

  The guards maintain that never while they were listening through those two sets of earpieces did they fail to work.

  We always knew Goering would take his sentence bravely. Did he prefer bravado?

  Two minutes’ hush – for each prisoner had to be brought up separately by lift from the prison tunnel – and Hess appeared.

  With a savage swing of his arm he knocked down the earphones offered him, and faced the bench with legs far astride and hands clenched before him.

  Imprisonment for life. He licked his lips and half goose-stepped out noisily in the boots he wore when he parachuted into Scotland.

  Next Ribbentrop, pale and stooping when he appeared, but shaking himself into some sort of composure.

  Death by hanging. He sagged, patted into place a bundle of papers that threatened to slide from under his arm, tried to walk out bravely, but drooped again as he reached the panel.

  Then Keitel – rigid, erect, soldierly as he entered. A quick turn on his heels and he was out again.

  Kaltenbrunner, the Gestapo chief who killed in hundreds of thousands. Tall and impeccable in a new blue suit, with shirt and collar to match, he bowed on entering, bowed acceptance of those words, ‘Death by hanging’, and bowed himself out again. A brave show, but the muscles of that face were twitching and the eyes were haunted by fear.

  Of the first five sentences four were death. Murmurs were breaking the silence of the court. Judge Biddle silenced a tittering woman with a glare.

  Philosopher Rosenberg, the man who would have had us believe he was nothing more. Death by hanging. The small plumpish scholar recoils as if not expecting it, sways slightly and walks out, head bent.

  Bald-headed Frank, who wiped out whole villages and is now a convert to Roman Catholicism. ‘Thank you’ he says to the guards who turn him to face the judges. ‘Thank you’, to the judge who says: Death by hanging. And a final polite ‘Thank you’ to the men who escorted him through the panel.

  Frick, racy in a heavy tweed sports coat. Death by hanging. He continues to listen as if expecting more will follow. Guards turn him and he walks out uncomprehendingly.

  Jew-baiter Streicher, the pervert whose pornographic library here in Nuremburg has been burned by official order – whose eyes have never left a woman in his ten months in the dock. Death by hanging. He flung his earphones on the table with a crash, strutted out in a blaze of temper.

  Funk, financial journalist turned fat banker, who stored the gold teeth of murdered millions in his vaults. Imprisonment for life. His eyes look slowly along the line of judges and he walks out, shaking his head.

  Doenitz. Ten years. He walks out, as if still on the quarter deck.

  Fellow Admiral Raeder. Imprisonment for life. He gulps hard, stands rooted for a full half-minute and droops away.

  The most handsome man in the dock – and youngest – von Schirach, who, as leader of the Hitler Youth, taught the youth of Germany Nazism and militarism – Twenty years’ imprisonment. He pales, strives to whisper a word, and races through the panel.

  Sauckel, who always impressed on the Court he was only a working man, but who sent five million people to slave labour in Germany – Death by hanging. He makes a whining noise. His every utterance in court has been a whine. He goes out helplessly.

  Jodl, the General who ordered soldiers to butcher civilians – Death by hanging. He frowns as if a lance-corporal has cheeked him, glares, marches out.

  Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian traitor who helped to put Austria under the German heel and then crushed Holland for his German masters – Death by hanging. He looks round the court anxiously, as if to see the effect, bows, leaves with swing.

  Speer, t
he genius architect who used slave labour cruelly – Twenty years’ imprisonment. He screws up his eyes and mumbles as if doing a sum in his head. Then bows, and walks away.

  Grey, aristocratic von Neurath, one of the worst oppressors of occupied countries – Fifteen years. He puts the earphones down gently like a good butler, and almost tiptoes out.

  And now sentence on an empty dock. As missing Martin Bormann is sentenced to death, spectators begin to trek to the doors.

  Execution of Nazi War Criminals, Nuremberg, 16 October 1946

  KINGSBURY SMITH

  The author was the pool representative of the American press.

  Hermann Wilhelm Göring cheated the gallows of Allied justice by committing suicide in his prison cell shortly before the ten other condemned Nazi leaders were hanged in Nuremberg gaol. He swallowed cyanide he had concealed in a copper cartridge shell, while lying on a cot in his cell.

  The one-time Number Two man in the Nazi hierarchy was dead two hours before he was scheduled to have been dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows erected in a small, brightly lighted gymnasium in the gaol yard, thirty-five yards from the cell block where he spent his last days of ignominy.

  Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister in the ill-starred regime of Adolf Hitler, took Göring’s place as first to the scaffold.

  Last to depart this life in a total span of just about two hours was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former Gauleiter of Holland and Austria.

  In between these two once-powerful leaders, the gallows claimed, in the order named, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, once head of the Nazis’ security police; Alfred Rosenberg, arch-priest of Nazi culture in foreign lands; Hans Frank, Gauleiter of Poland; Wilhelm Frick, Nazi Minister of the Interior; Fritz Sauckel, boss of slave labour; Colonel General Alfred Jodl; and Julius Streicher, who bossed the anti-Semitism drive of the Hitler Reich.

  As they went to the gallows, most of the ten endeavoured to show bravery. Some were defiant and some were resigned and some begged the Almighty for mercy.

  All except Rosenberg made brief, last-minute statements on the scaffold. But the only one to make any reference to Hitler or the Nazi ideology in his final moments was Julius Streicher.

  Three black-painted wooden scaffolds stood inside the gymnasium, a room approximately thirty-three feet wide by eighty feet long with plaster walls in which cracks showed. The gymnasium had been used only three days before by the American security guards for a basketball game. Two gallows were used alternatively. The third was a spare for use if needed. The men were hanged one at a time, but to get the executions over quickly, the military police would bring in a man while the prisoner who preceded him still was dangling at the end of the rope.

  The ten once great men in Hitler’s Reich that was to have lasted for a thousand years walked up thirteen wooden steps to a platform eight feet high which also was eight feet square.

  Ropes were suspended from a crossbeam supported on two posts. A new one was used for each man.

  When the trap was sprung, the victim dropped from sight in the interior of the scaffolding. The bottom of it was boarded up with wood on three sides and shielded by a dark canvas curtain on the fourth, so that no one saw the death struggles of the men dangling with broken necks.

  Von Ribbentrop entered the execution chamber at 1.11 a.m. Nuremberg time. He was stopped immediately inside the door by two Army sergeants who closed in on each side of him and held his arms, while another sergeant who had followed him in removed manacles from his hands and replaced them with a leather strap.

  It was planned originally to permit the condemned men to walk from their cells to the execution chamber with their hands free, but all were manacled immediately following Göring’s suicide.

  Von Ribbentrop was able to maintain his apparent stoicism to the last. He walked steadily towards the scaffold between his two guards, but he did not answer at first when an officer standing at the foot of the gallows went through the formality of asking his name. When the query was repeated he almost shouted, ‘Joachim von Ribbentrop!’ and then mounted the steps without any signs of hesitation.

  When he was turned around on the platform to face the witnesses, he seemed to clench his teeth and raise his head with the old arrogance. When asked whether he had any final message he said, ‘God protect Germany,’ in German, and then added, ‘May I say something else?’

  The interpreter nodded and the former diplomatic wizard of Nazidom spoke his last words in loud, firm tones: ‘My last wish is that Germany realize its entity and that an understanding be reached between the East and the West. I wish peace to the world.’

  As the black hood was placed in position on his head, von Ribbentrop looked straight ahead.

  Then the hangman adjusted the rope, pulled the lever, and von Ribbentrop slipped away to his fate.

  Field Marshal Keitel, who was immediately behind von Ribbentop in the order of executions, was the first military leader to be executed under the new concept of international law – the principle that professional soldiers cannot escape punishment for waging aggressive wars and permitting crimes against humanity with the claim they were dutifully carrying out orders of superiors.

  Keitel entered the chamber two minutes after the trap had dropped beneath von Ribbentrop, while the latter still was at the end of his rope. But von Ribbentrop’s body was concealed inside the first scaffold; all that could be seen was the taut rope.

  Keitel did not appear as tense as von Ribbentrop. He held his head high while his hands were being tied and walked erect towards the gallows with a military bearing. When asked his name he responded loudly and mounted the gallows as he might have mounted a reviewing stand to take a salute from German armies.

  He certainly did not appear to need the help of guards who walked alongside, holding his arms. When he turned around atop the platform he looked over the crowd with the iron-jawed haughtiness of a proud Prussian officer. His last words, uttered in a full, clear voice, were translated as ‘I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons – all for Germany.’

  After his black-booted, uniformed body plunged through the trap, witnesses agreed Keitel had showed more courage on the scaffold than in the courtroom, where he had tried to shift his guilt upon the ghost of Hitler, claiming that all was the Führer’s fault and that he merely carried out orders and had no responsibility.

  With both von Ribbentrop and Keitel hanging at the end of their ropes there was a pause in the proceeding. The American colonel directing the executions asked the American general representing the United States on the Allied Control Commission if those present could smoke. An affirmative answer brought cigarettes into the hands of almost every one of the thirty-odd persons present. Officers and GIs walked around nervously or spoke a few words to one another in hushed voices while Allied correspondents scribbled furiously their notes on this historic though ghastly event.

  In a few minutes an American Army doctor accompanied by a Russian Army doctor and both carrying stethoscopes walked to the first scaffold, lifted the curtain and disappeared within.

  They emerged at 1.30 a.m. and spoke to an American colonel. The colonel swung around and facing official witnesses snapped to attention to say, ‘The man is dead.’

  Two GIs quickly appeared with a stretcher which was carried up and lifted into the interior of the scaffold. The hangman mounted the gallows steps, took a large commando-type knife out of a sheath strapped to his side and cut the rope.

  Von Ribbentrop’s limp body with the black hood still over his head was removed to the far end of the room and placed behind a black canvas curtain. This all had taken less than ten minutes.

  The directing colonel turned to the witnesses and said, ‘Cigarettes out, please gentlemen.’ Another colonel went out the door and over to the condemned block to fetch the next man. This was Ernst Kaltenbrunner. He entered the execut
ion chamber at 1.36 a.m., wearing a sweater beneath his blue double-breasted coat. With his lean haggard face furrowed by old duelling scars, this terrible successor to Reinhard Heydrich had a frightening look as he glanced around the room.

  He wet his lips apparently in nervousness as he turned to mount the gallows, but he walked steadily. He answered his name in a calm, low voice. When he turned around on the gallows platform he first faced a United States Army Roman Catholic chaplain wearing a Franciscan habit. When Kaltenbrunner was invited to make a last statement, he said, ‘I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge.’

  This was the man, one of whose agents – a man named Rudolf Hess – confessed at a trial that under Kaltenbrunner’s orders he gassed three million human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp!

  As the black hood was raised over his head Kaltenbrunner, still speaking in a low voice, used a German phrase which translated means, ‘Germany, good luck.’

  His trap was sprung at 1.39 a.m.

  Field Marshal Keitel was pronounced dead at 1.44 a.m. and three minutes later guards had removed his body. The scaffold was made ready for Alfred Rosenberg.

  Rosenberg was dull and sunken-cheeked as he looked around the court. His complexion was pasty-brown, but he did not appear nervous and walked with a steady step to and up the gallows.

  Apart from giving his name and replying ‘no’ to a question as to whether he had anything to say, he did not utter a word. Despite his avowed atheism he was accompanied by a Protestant chaplain who followed him to the gallows and stood beside him praying.

  Rosenberg looked at the chaplain once, expressionless. Ninety seconds after he was swinging from the end of a hangman’s rope. His was the swiftest execution of the ten.