Pust was one of the 27,000 POWs who learned that he would not be released until 1974, but despite that cruel verdict prisoners began to be freed in more regular batches. The first to leave were the Hungarians and the Romanians, probably because their countries had now become Soviet satellites. Books became vital. A comrade in arms had given Pust a copy of Faust Part One, much of which he now knew by heart. Some books published by the Aufbau Verlagdt appeared in the camp: German translations of Gorki and Tolstoy as well as suitable German literature: Plivier, Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig. The regime lasted as long as Stalin, then Pust went home.
Otto Engelbert had a different experience to Pust. He volunteered to attend the ‘Antifa’ school in Talizy - freedom at the price of ideological indoctrination. He went in November 1945. Talizy had been built as a penal colony during the First World War. The area was rich in peat, which was used to fuel the local power stations. The prisoners were assessed on their arrival, by being questioned on their positions regarding East Prussia and Silesia and what they thought about the Oder-Neisse Line. Then they went on to the next stage: history according to the Marxist dialectic. They were given courses on the reasons for Hitler’s defeat; the sources of the USSR’s victorious power; the main stages of Germany’s development to industrial capitalism (1500-1815); the foundations of capitalism; the Revolution of 1848; the creation of Prussia-Germany; reactionary Prussia and Prussian militarism; imperialism; the growth of the workers’ movement; the November Revolution etc, etc.133 When Engelbert finished his course he swore an oath to fight Hitlerism. The reward was a proper feast. A pig was slain; there was hot food, cake and tea, wine and schnapps. The intellectuals, however, were not released. Engelbert was sent back to Germany to spread the word.134
Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia
Poland was well and truly a Soviet client and retained tens of thousands of German soldiers. In the summer of 1948 Clay was concerned about this: ‘I always pushed for the return of German prisoners of war.’ His reports told him there were still 40,000 of them, more than three years after the cessation of hostilities. A paltry twenty-one had reached the American Zone that year. The German agencies involved in tracking them had informed the American commander that ‘they also believe the POWS to be receiving very bad treatment’.135 In the Neuhammer mines in Silesia, the mortality rate was 15 per cent: 5,400 dead. The Jaworzno camp claimed 1,817 military and civilian lives. The total number of deaths in the camps is given at 4,500, but the figure seems suspiciously low.136 In Warsaw the Germans rebuilt the historic centre, putting back the buildings destroyed in the Blitzkrieg of 1939 and the wide-ranging destruction of the historic heart of the city which was effected after the Warsaw Uprising. There were still 4,240 German POWs left in Poland in 1950.137 One who never returned was Gauleiter Koch, who lived to a remarkably ripe old age in a Polish prison.
There were still 600 Germans toiling in the uranium mines of the Joachimstal of Czechoslovakia in 1950 to feed the Russian A-bomb programme. 138 The Czechs claimed that 1,250 POWs were killed of the 25,000 prisoners they had.139 The Yugoslavs were among the most draconian. The official figure for deaths of POWs in their custody stands at 6,215, but that number is considered ‘too low by far’. Around 80,000 would be closer to the truth.140 One of the lighter duties these prisoners had to perform was the construction and decoration of Tito’s new summer palace and later guest house on Lake Bled. A painter was called in to decorate a double-cube room on the first floor with blood-curdling scenes depicting the battles between Tito and Hitler’s forces. The German POWs played all the roles, from the slain who littered the field of battle to the Yugoslav warriors who pierced them with their bayonets.141 The final batch of 1,300 Germans was sent home in 1949.142
The Return of the Warrior
Once the POW was released, the homecoming could be bitter-sweet. Ruth Friedrich was horrified by the sight of returning German warriors in the American Sector of Berlin. ‘Oh, great God! How bad misery can be!’ The rags of the Germans contrasted with the smart uniforms of the Americans as they walked through Steglitz on 30 July 1945. Some lacked arms, others legs, they showed signs of illness and plague, they were abandoned and lost.143 The experience of returning soldiers forms the background to some of the early stories of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, and provided the theme for the play Draussen vor der Tür (Outside the Door) by the writer Wolfgang Borchert.
Borchert and Böll both lived through those times and spoke from experience. Borchert, an aspiring actor who had been on the Eastern Front, had been wounded and shipped home but was then obliged to return to the colours before he was truly mended. The illness he incurred from poor hospital treatment was to kill him at the age of twenty-six. Draussen vor der Tür was first performed on 21 November 1947, the day after his death. It was later filmed as Liebe 1947.
In the play, the NCO Beckmann returns from Siberia to find his wife in bed with another man. He tries to drown himself in the Elbe but the river rejects him. He becomes part of the mass of alienated German men, whose defeat and complicity in crime had rendered them rebarbative even to their own women: ‘your Germany is outside, in the rainy night, on the street’.144 Beckmann carries the responsibility for a minor massacre of his own men. He wants to rid himself of it. He goes to see his colonel, in the hope of passing the responsibility on to him. The colonel is prosperous and doesn’t want to know. Beckmann looks for his parents. They are dead. They had been Nazis and had been thrown out on the streets at the end of the war - they also are ‘outside the door’. They had preferred death to denazification. Early on he meets a lugubrious God, but he fails to find him again: ‘Where is he then, the old man who calls himself God?’ Doors are slammed in his face as he looks for work, women and humanity: ‘That is life! There is a man, and the man comes to Germany and the man freezes. He starves and he limps! He comes to Germany! He comes home, and there is his bed, occupied. A door slams, and he is left outside.’145
It is a theme Böll returns to time and again. In Die Botschaft (Breaking the News) a soldier takes the effects of a dead warrior back to his widow. When he arrives she is laughing with another man. He puts down the soldier’s wedding ring, watch and pay-book, and a few well-thumbed photographs. The woman has to sit down, ‘and I realised that the war would never be over so long as there was still someone bleeding from an injury it had caused’. She wants to know whether her husband died in the east. No, says the man who brings the news. “No . . . in the west, in a POW camp, there were more than a hundred thousand . . .”
“And when . . .”
“In July 1945,” I said softly.’
One difference between prisoners in British camps and those in American captivity was that the British allowed the Germans to sport insignia of rank and the Americans did not. In Böll’s story, ‘When the War Was Over’, the little literary type is busy sewing his braid back on his uniform as the soldiers head for Bonn and discharge in October 1945. The narrator recounts his treatment at the hands of the British and the Americans. He has been captured by the latter in April. The corporal asks him, ‘Hitler Youth, SA or Party?’, to which he answers, ‘No.’ The American then bawls at him and accuses his grandmother of various sexual practices that he can’t properly work out as his English isn’t good enough.
When later an English corporal asks him for papers he says he has none. He has sold his pay-book for a couple of cigarettes. The Englishman searches him and finds a diary he has kept in captivity: a hundred closely written pages made out of paper bags stapled together. In fury the corporal tosses it into the latrine. No one is supposed to know what has been going on.
16
The Trials
We had gambled, all of us, and lost: lost Germany, our country’s good repute, and a considerable measure of our own personal integrity. Here was a chance to demonstrate a little dignity, a little manliness or courage, and to make plain that after all we were charged with, we at least were not also cowards.
Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976, 14
The Allies’ decision to indict the Nazi leaders had a precedent. Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles called for a trial of major German ‘war criminals’, with the Kaiser at the top of the list - who, Lloyd George proclaimed, should be hanged. It demanded the extradition of up to a thousand Germans but proved a soggy squib: neither Holland - where William II had been granted asylum - nor a largely unoccupied Germany would agree to hand over the defendants. To show willing, the Germans themselves put on a trial in Leipzig. Thirteen men were convicted, but as they were perceived as heroes in Germany they all managed to escape.1
At their various meetings, the Second World War Allies agreed on the need to liquidate the top Nazis. The question was how? Should they suffer summary execution, a drumhead court martial, or should the victors risk a trial?2 When the fate of the ‘war criminals’ was discussed in Moscow in October 1943, the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was in favour of a drumhead court martial. The Soviet delegation could not have approved more strongly. As their Nuremberg judge, General Iona Nikitchenko, put it: the accused were ‘war criminals . . . who have already been convicted’. It was the British and Anthony Eden who reminded the conference of ‘legal forms’. Legal form was clearly important, but they all knew whom they wanted to eliminate. The British prosecutor, attorney-general Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, put it in a nutshell: ‘Our work . . . is to see the top-notch Nazis tried, condemned, and many of them executed.’ Hull’s master, Roosevelt, was in favour of shooting them, and appointed a judge to look into the possibility. His advisers, however, told the president that it would be illegal. America switched course and called for a trial, and Soviet Russia joined in. By this time the British had changed their minds and favoured summary execution!3
If there were to be trials, there had to be a law to try them by - the old maxim runs nulla poena sine lege (there is no crime without laws, sometimes rendered as nullum crimen sine lege). The Allies had to invent a body of law that would criminalise Nazi offences and backdate it to cover the period in question. It would be a code based on merging two conventions: the Hague Convention on Land Warfare of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1928, to which Germany (and not Soviet Russia) had been a party. It had been argued that the Hague Convention had merely framed laws and usages that had existed for centuries, but it had been assembled at a time when, for example, aerial warfare was unknown and when guerrilla armies were not taken into consideration. Some things emerged with crystal clarity: Article 23 of the Geneva Convention stated that it was an illegal act to kill or wound a soldier who had laid down his arms. It was also illegal to deny quarter. German soldiers had the Ten Commandments printed in their pay-books. It was correctly assumed that those who slaughtered POWs knew they had done wrong, and there were instances when their comrades in arms shunned them as pariahs as a result.
The result of the fusion was ‘Nuremberg Law’. Nuremberg Law was the basis of the Royal Warrant of 18 June 1945 used in the military courts in the British Zone. The British defined the ‘war crime’ as a violation of the laws and usages of war. Stalin threw everything he could at the invading German armies; and he did not play by the book. German soldiers were rightly terrified of falling into enemy hands alive. Savage reprisals were directed towards the civilian populations of the Soviet Union when German troops were slaughtered behind the lines. It was a policy that had been losing German armies friends since the time of the Franco-Prussian War, but it was an accepted ‘usage’ allowed by Article 453 of the British Manual of Military Law. As the Labour MP and KC Reginald Paget put it, ‘It was really unreasonable to expect the Germans to fight these all-in wrestlers in accordance with the Queensberry rules.’4 The Americans were even more ruthless: ‘one shot merited the destruction of a village. You will see the result in some heaps of rubble in Bavaria and Franconia. As they advanced, if a shot was fired from a village, they either stopped, or evacuated, and whistled up the air force. The isolated heaps of rubble in this relatively undamaged countryside are very striking. The result was that the Americans had very few casualties.’5
The Germans were to be judged for their behaviour in foreign territory. This was inserted at the behest of the Russians and the French. It involved the treatment of civilians: murder, abuse, deportation, slave labour; the murder of prisoners of war, killing hostages, plunder of public or private property, ‘the wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity’.6 ‘Genocide’ was a new word for a relatively new crime. The destruction of the European Jews figured as only a small part of the case against the Germans in the early trials. The killing of German and Austrian Jews on the territory of the Greater German Reich was not automatically covered as it was theoretically the legal right of a sovereign state to dispose of its citizens as it pleased. On the other hand there was agreement that Julius Streicher should be done to death, so legal nicety had to be bent a little as he was not really guilty of any other crime that had been brought to the Allies’ attention.7 The persecution of German and Austrian Jews at home was therefore vaguely included under the aegis of ‘aggression and the preparation for unjust war’.
For the Russians the massacre of Jews was hardly of interest, although half a million of their Jewish citizens were slaughtered by the Nazis. The reason for this was the rampant antisemitism they themselves experienced after the war in reaction against the upsurge in Zionism. On the other hand the prosecution found the Final Solution increasingly useful when it came to breaking down the defendants. Films of the concentration camps had a sobering effect even on such seasoned performers as Göring and Hess. By the time the trials were under way no German was an antisemite any more. As one later commentator glibly put it, ‘there was hardly a defendant who could not produce evidence that he had helped some half-Jewish physics professor, or that he had used his influence to permit a Jewish symphony conductor to conduct a little longer, or that he had intervened on behalf of some couple in a mixed marriage in connection with an apartment’. 8
There was very little call for retribution from Jewish groups at first. Henry Morgenthau remained a voice in the wilderness, and Truman for one wanted to keep him there. He later resigned in a huff. Zalman Grinberg, president of the liberated Jews in the American Zone, accused the Allies of a lack of concern, and wondered whether this would have been the case if another race had been the victim of a similar purge. Morgenthau continued to thunder, as did the presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the columnist Walter Winchell, but they were not greatly heeded. On the other hand the enormity of the crimes committed by Germans did provoke Americans to calls for the severest punishments in the spring of 1945. Joseph Pulitzer of the St Louis Post-Despatch thought 150,000 Nazis should be shot. Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri advocated mass executions of SS and OKW men.9
The hypocrisy of Nuremberg Law alarmed many people. One was the Indian jurist Rahabinode Pal, a judge in the Tokyo trials, who dissented from the judgments, seeing the sentences meted out as retrogressive, ‘a sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge’. Field Marshal Lord Montgomery also disapproved of the tenor of the trials that ‘have made the waging of unsuccessful war a crime, for which the generals of the defeated side would be tried and then hanged’. He understood that if the Germans had won the war, he might have been put on trial himself.du Shortly after a British Military Court in Hamburg sitting in the aptly named Curio-Haus had condemned Field Marshal Erich von Manstein to eighteen years in prison, the Korean War broke out, and the German press was happy to report that the American army was accused of precisely the same atrocities as the field marshal.10
Many contemporary observers agreed with Pal and believed the scores of trials that took place after the end of the war were simply a case of victors’ justice. These dissenters included soldiers, jurists and judges. The Soviets, who provided a general as their prosecutor in the main trials i
n Nuremberg (he had been involved in fake trials in the 1930s and later became the director of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in its first years under Soviet management) and a more junior officer as a judge, constantly reminded the Western Allies that the purpose of the tribunals was to punish the defeated enemy. Yet the Soviet attitude was in some senses the most lenient, because they of all the nations that had defeated Nazi Germany were the most likely to have committed atrocities on a similar scale.
Reginald Paget KC was one of the most stentorian voices raised against the trials. He agreed to lead Field Marshal von Manstein’s defence team gratis, describing the Royal Warrant as ‘simply an exercise of the power of the victor over the vanquished’. As far as he was concerned, none of the convictions would have been secure in an English court, and they would all have been quashed by the Court of Appeal. For Paget the conqueror had no right to impose a form of trial which he ‘would consider inadequate for his own citizens’.11
And yet something needed to be done. The Germans had performed terrible acts. To claim that what they had done was in no way illegal because they were obeying higher commands or putting through the secret policies of the state was simply not good enough: not all Germans had sat around waiting for homicidal orders; many had acted on their own initiatives. Trials would also have the further advantage of recording the acts of the Nazi regime, providing a huge quantity of sworn evidence about the workings of the state. They would also have the effect of laying the blame. The American prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson made it clear: they were not trying the German people, just the men in the dock. Although many condemned the trials at the time, a precedent was set for war crimes and crimes against humanity and there is little protest against global jurisdictions today. Clay realised that the courts were establishing something. Writing to Jackson’s successor Colonel Telford Taylor on 17 October 1947, he said, ‘At Nuremberg we are establishing procedure for [the] future and not aiming at any specific individuals. History will make no distinction between a von Rundstedt and a von Leeb.’12
After the Reich Page 58
