Denial was the default mode of Camp SS captives.73 In its most extreme form, it culminated in the claim that all had been well in the KL. “Dachau was a good camp,” proclaimed Martin Weiss before his trial, and Josef Kramer protested that he had “never received any complaints from the prisoners”; former inmates who talked about abuse and torture were pernicious liars.74 The core teachings of the Camp SS had not been forgotten, with the defendants still picturing prisoners as deviants and themselves as decent. “I have served as a professional soldier,” declared Oswald Pohl from the scaffold.75
The self-image as regular soldiers, ubiquitous among KL defendants, was just another form of denial. After all, local initiatives by devoted Camp SS men—who aspired to the ideal of the fanatical “political soldier”—had done much to escalate terror inside. Now many defendants portrayed themselves as underlings without ideological convictions, just as Adolf Eichmann would do in Jerusalem several years later: they had only done their duty. While this tale of the obedient soldier was gender-specific, female SS defendants made a similar point. The former chief of the Ravensbrück bunker, for example, claimed in court that she had been “a small inanimate cog in a machine.” Inevitably, defendants also turned on one another, shifting responsibility up and down the chain of command. True, some old accomplices stuck together, still committed to the ideal of SS comradeship. But these bonds, always brittle, frayed in court. After his former WVHA managers had blamed everything on him, Oswald Pohl was left to lament the demise of the SS motto “My honor is loyalty.”76
Although denials of personal responsibility made little impression on Allied courts pursuing charges of common conspiracy, Camp SS defendants resorted to ever more outrageous lies. Mass murderers denied everything, like Otto Moll, the head of the Birkenau crematoria (he claimed to have worked only as a gardener) and leader of a mobile killing squad (“I didn’t shoot anybody. I was a German soldier, not a murderer”).77 Senior officers feigned ignorance, too. Arthur Liebehenschel said that he had signed IKL directives without reading them and was unaware of any gassings in Auschwitz. His lies were so transparent that even his interrogator lost his cool. “You are like a little child,” he chided one day. But Liebehenschel was undeterred. In a final plea for mercy to the Polish president, he denied all guilt, blamed his superiors, and suggested that he had always helped prisoners.78
Such falsehoods were more than desperate defense strategies. Of course, many defendants lied to save themselves. But the most devoted Camp SS members had become so used to the normality of evil that they continued to believe in the righteousness of their actions, justifying the murders of the sick as a humanitarian act and SS violence as a disciplinary measure. Even outsiders were still infused with this SS spirit. The veteran professor of tropical medicine Claus Schilling, at seventy-four probably the oldest accused at any of the Dachau trials, not only defended his murderous malaria experiments, he asked the court to let him complete his research, for the greater good of science and humanity. All he needed, he said, was a chair, a table, and a typewriter; he got the gallows instead.79
Hidden among the defendants’ delusions and lies were occasional half truths. Only a few came close to making full confessions. Rudolf Höss was the most voluble witness, speaking and writing with surprising candor. At the same time, Höss remained committed to Nazi ideology, and his greatest regret was not his crimes, but his failure to have become a farmer.80 If confessions were rare, remorse was even rarer. One reluctant penitent was the former Auschwitz camp compound leader Hans Aumeier. Arrested in June 1945 in Norway, he soon dropped his most obvious lies and gave a detailed account of the Holocaust; he also lectured unbelieving German army officers about SS deeds. Before the Polish court in 1947, Aumeier conceded his crimes and his hardening toward prisoners, which he put down to his long years in Dachau—where he first caught the eye of Theodor Eicke back in 1934—and to the daily mass extermination of Jews in Auschwitz. In his last plea for clemency, he spoke of his “feeling of greatest remorse.” He was executed in early 1948, just like the unrepentant Liebehenschel.81
How, then, should we judge the early postwar trials of KL perpetrators? Given the immense difficulties facing Allied courts—the chaos in occupied Germany, the absence of legal precedent, the shortages of time, staff, and resources—it is easy to see why most commentators have reached a positive verdict.82 After all, many leading Camp SS men were punished. They included most of the top WVHA officials, with Gerhard Maurer, the powerful manager of slave labor, the last to be tried; he was executed in Poland in 1953. In addition, they included most of the surviving wartime KL commandants. Between 1945 and 1950, fourteen former commandants were sentenced to death by military courts and executed (Hans Loritz hanged himself in British captivity in 1946); at the end of the decade, only seven wartime commandants were still alive.83
But these sentences cannot obscure the serious shortcomings of the Allied trials, as basic legal standards were sacrificed in the search for swift sentences. The hasty preparation caused procedural nightmares, including wrongful prosecutions and convictions, while numerous confessions were extracted through improper means.84 Few of the accused could mount a meaningful defense, either, with some trials lasting no more than a day. Then there was the haphazard selection of defendants, especially among lower-ranking SS captives. Some were quickly sentenced, others waited for trials that never came—not to mention the Nazi doctors and engineers who were whisked away as technical experts by the Allies, despite their implication in KL abuses.85
There were also major inequities in sentencing. Several senior WVHA and IG Farben managers received far milder sentences than ordinary guards and sentries, even though they bore a greater share of the overall responsibility.86 The timing of trials was crucial here. Initially, Allied judges aimed at strict deterrence and retribution, reflecting the clamor back home for the harsh punishment of KL perpetrators. But by 1947–48, when the former managers were tried, the early outrage had dissipated. As the Cold War turned divided Germany into a strategic ally of both East and West, sentencing for Nazi crimes became more lenient and more defendants were cleared altogether.87
The most troubling aspect of Allied trials was their failure to distinguish between SS officials and prisoner functionaries. From the beginning, the two were often tried together. Unfamiliar with the basic organizational structures of the camps, or unwilling to grasp the many “gray zones” inside, Allied jurists saw Kapos as part of the wider criminal conspiracy (and occasionally as SS members), helping to cement the caricature of Kapos that has endured to this day.88 This approach led to some extraordinary scenes. In the first Belsen trial, for instance, a Jewish survivor, who had acted for two days as a lowly block elder, was forced to sit in the dock with career SS men like Commandant Kramer.89 The number of Kapos on trial was high—in the U.S. proceedings at Dachau, almost ten percent of defendants were former KL inmates—and the sentences severe.90 Indeed, former Kapos were often punished harder than the SS, probably because they had stuck more vividly in the minds of fellow prisoners than the more anonymous guards. They were less likely to be pardoned, as well; the last defendant from the Belsen trial to be released from prison was not an SS official but a Polish Kapo.91
Most Kapos had a mixed reputation among survivors, reflecting earlier divisions between prisoners. Since it was possible for the same person to be lauded as a hero by one group, and reviled as a henchman by another, any notion of perfect justice was illusory.92 But even in the case of universally reviled Kapos, one has to ask whether their punishment fitted their crime. Take Christof Knoll, a particularly vicious Dachau overseer, who made an impassioned plea in December 1945. “A Kapo is a prisoner,” he exclaimed in court, and enumerated the SS threats, abuses, and beatings he had suffered during almost twelve years in Dachau. After his death sentence, Knoll received unexpected support from Arthur Haulot, the Belgian political prisoner who now acted as president of the Dachau International Committee. Whatever the crimes of a Kapo
like Knoll, Haulot explained in the name of fellow survivors, he was primarily a victim of the camp, and it was wrong to punish him as severely as an SS volunteer. The U.S. authorities were unmoved, and hanged Knoll in Landsberg in May 1946, together with another Kapo and twenty-six SS men.93
Even if one comes to a more positive conclusion about the Allied trials, there is the sobering fact that the great majority of KL perpetrators went unpunished.94 Many cases dealt solely with crimes committed against Allied (or non-German) nationals between 1942 and 1945, letting off a large number of Camp SS officials.95 Other suspects committed suicide in Allied captivity, like Dr. Ding, the man behind the Buchenwald typhus trials, and the Auschwitz chief physician Dr. Wirths, who hanged himself in September 1945, shortly after he described the gassing of Jews as an “unpleasant” but “acceptable solution” for illness and overcrowding.96 Many more simply slipped through the net. Some fled overseas, among them Dr. Mengele, who used the same escape route to Latin America as Adolf Eichmann and lived largely undisturbed until his death in February 1979, when he drowned at a Brazilian holiday resort.97 Most fugitives stayed on the territory of the former Third Reich, and once the Allied war crimes trials ended in the early 1950s, their punishment depended, above all, on German and Austrian courts.
German courts had started in summer 1945 to prosecute violent Nazi crimes against German nationals, with Allied authorization, and the judges had heard hundreds of cases involving KL crimes by 1949, when the two rival German states were founded; in addition to SS men and Kapos accused of wartime crimes in satellite camps and on death marches, the courts pursued perpetrators from the early camps and the prewar KL. Some defendants were severely punished, including the verbose “euthanasia” physician Dr. Mennecke, who was sentenced to death in December 1946 (his old friend Dr. Steinmeyer had killed himself in May 1945). But one could see warning signals in the early postwar years, as well, such as superficial investigations and soft sentences.98 The same applied to proceedings across the border, before Austrian Peoples’ Courts. In 1952, for example, Innsbruck judges dismissed the murder charges against a Plaszow SS man after they discounted the “hate-filled” testimonies of former Jewish prisoners; it was “inconceivable,” the court found, that the picture of daily violence the survivors had painted was actually true.99 Such judgments reflected popular views of the KL at the time, though these views were never uncontested in postwar Austria and Germany.
Memory
Around midday on Monday, April 16, 1945, a large procession of one thousand or more men, women, and children set off from Weimar city center and slowly wound its way through the countryside, up the Ettersberg and past the gates of Buchenwald. They were assembled here on orders of the U.S. liberators, who led the locals through the camp. The Weimar citizens were spared none of the horrors, from the starved survivors in the barracks to the charred remains in the crematorium, while American officers lectured them about their guilt.100 Similar scenes took place in other liberated camps in spring 1945, as the Allies forced ordinary Germans to confront the KL. This included the exhumation of mass graves inside camps and on the trails of death marches; locals had to dig up the dead, wash the corpses, and attend ceremonial burials. During the mass funeral of two hundred Wöbbelin victims, who were lined up in long rows on a nearby town square, a U.S. chaplain accused local citizens on May 7, 1945, of being “individually and collectively responsible for these atrocities” because of their support for Nazism.101
Concentration camps like Buchenwald and Wöbbelin were highly visible in the first weeks and months after the war. During a hard-hitting Allied reeducation campaign, graphic details flashed across occupied Germany, on posters, leaflets, and pamphlets, in newspapers, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. According to one observer, the whole country was “deluged with photographs of corpses.” The campaign in occupied Germany climaxed in 1946, when well over one million viewers saw the harrowing twenty-two-minute U.S. documentary Death Mills, which also placed the blame on the shoulders of the wider population.102 Further details emerged from survivor memoirs and perpetrator trials, which received significant media coverage.103
The public picture of the concentration camps was incomplete, however. The history and function of the KL remained hazy, while the perpetrators were largely depicted as beasts—especially women, whose violent acts were explained as a perversion of female nature. The media obsession with female perpetrators culminated in the 1947 Buchenwald trial in Dachau, where reports centered on the widow of the first commandant, Ilse Koch, even though she had held no SS rank and played only a peripheral part in the crimes (the U.S. authorities later reduced her life sentence to four years’ imprisonment).104
The reactions of ordinary Germans to the KL crimes varied, as they had done throughout the Third Reich. Some continued to look away, preoccupied with their own lot. But it was hard to avoid the topic in 1945–46 and there was plenty of talk, arising from both Allied pressure and personal interest. Some Germans expressed shame and outrage, coupled with the demand for the harsh punishment of perpetrators.105 On the other side of the debate stood those who dismissed stories about the atrocities as Allied propaganda, and defended the KL as well-run institutions for the detention and reeducation of dangerous outcasts, giving a new lease on life to Nazi propaganda.106
Most Germans probably found themselves somewhere in-between. They acknowledged that terrible things had happened, and sometimes expressed genuine revulsion, but they denied any responsibility. First, they claimed that the crimes had been carried out behind their backs by Nazi fanatics. This was the myth of the invisible camp, which expunged all memories of the pervasive (if partial) popular knowledge of the KL, from the open terror of the early camps to the death marches at the end. Second, many Germans relativized the crimes by equating the fate of prisoners with their own. This was the myth of German victimhood: both prisoners and ordinary Germans, it was said, had suffered under the Nazis and the war. Many Germans therefore bristled at charges of collective guilt, leading to an exculpatory campaign spearheaded by senior politicians and clergymen. As early as Sunday, April 22, 1945, just six days after the U.S.-led tour of Buchenwald, a proclamation read in Weimar churches declared that locals held “no blame whatsoever” for crimes that had been “entirely unknown.”107 These myths became entrenched in the late 1940s, aided by the Allies’ abandonment of denazification, and formed a major part of early German postwar narratives about the Third Reich.108
In the young Federal Republic of Germany, the memory of the KL was initially marginalized, reflecting a wider social and political consensus to leave the Nazi past behind. It was time to move on, most Germans felt, and focus on rebuilding their lives and their country.109 The widespread amnesia in the early 1950s benefited the remaining KL perpetrators. It emboldened calls for amnesties, amid mounting cries of Allied “victors’ justice.” Under pressure from the new West German government, a strategic ally in the escalating Cold War, the U.S. authorities released most SS prisoners; the last Camp SS defendant from the U.S. Dachau trials walked free in 1958. British and French courts also enacted amnesties (as did the Polish and Soviet authorities).110 Some convicts returned to their old vocations. Professor Otto Bickenbach, for one, was allowed to practice as a physician after a tribunal accepted his claim that Natzweiler prisoners had volunteered for his deadly phosgene experiments. Many former Camp SS professionals, meanwhile, found new jobs: having been released in 1954, the Gross-Rosen commandant Johannes Hassebroek earned his living as a salesman.111
With little political pressure on the prosecution authorities, there were few systematic investigations, and convictions for Nazi crimes dropped dramatically; in 1955, just twenty-seven defendants were charged by West German courts, down from 3,972 in 1949. The trials were coming to an end, it seemed, and anyone who had not yet been sentenced would probably never face justice.112 Crucially, most SS fugitives stayed under the radar by adjusting to the postwar norms of liberal society, pointing once more to the imp
ortance of socio-psychological causes of KL crimes; in a different environment, these former Camp SS perpetrators kept their heads down and led law-abiding lives.113 While their behavior altered, their convictions often remained unchanged. Remnants of the core Camp SS networks survived, with former staff and their families held together by nostalgia for the past. Interviewed by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in 1975, the ex-commandant Hassebroek scoffed: “The only thing I regret is the collapse of the Third Reich.”114
While the memory of the camps faded in the early Federal Republic, it did not disappear altogether. This was partly due to the contentious issue of reparations, which vexed leading West German politicians and industrialists during the 1950s and 1960s. Keen to draw a line under the past, the German authorities reluctantly offered direct compensation to some victims and made lump-sum payments to Israel, Western European states, and Jewish organizations (represented by the Claims Conference). Designed to help West Germany gain admission to the international community, rather than to help all victims, these measures resulted in a system riddled with inequities, injustices, and indignities (as we saw in the case of Edgar Kupfer and Moritz Choinowski). Those left completely empty-handed included many former slave laborers, as German industrialists argued that the Nazi regime had compelled them to deploy KL prisoners.115 One survivor who challenged this falsehood was Norbert Wollheim, a German Jew who had survived working for IG Farben at Auschwitz-Monowitz. In 1951, he brought a civil case against the chemicals giant, which turned into a long-running political and legal drama, and ended in 1957 with an out-of-court settlement of thirty million DM paid to the Claims Conference (other big German corporations criticized the agreement, and successfully fought civil actions by survivors).116
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 86
