After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  On top of these he had nineteen death sentences from the Buchenwald trial to ratify, including Ilse Koch - the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ - who had managed to get herself pregnant.40 She was the wife of Karl Koch, the camp commandant, and was renowned not only for her collection of lampshades but also for her fondness for riding through the camp on a horse and lashing out at the prisoners. Her case presented particular difficulties. She had left Buchenwald in August 1943 and no one seemed to know what she had done after that. Clay commuted her sentence, but by doing so he aroused a storm of protest. He found a way out of ‘double jeopardy’: she could be transferred to the German courts because there were German nationals in Buchenwald. This stratagem worked, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.41

  Dietrich’s life sentence was severely criticised, as no link could be found between him and the murderous command. Unfortunately for him, Clay was not prepared to revise the decision. On the other hand now only twelve men remained on death row. Clay later halved that number again. The last six were let off in 1951, at the same time as the revision of Dietrich’s life ticket.42

  Germans accused of atrocities conjured up some ingenious arguments in their defence, but as the courts had been able to impose their own rules they stood little chance of success. So it was that the SS man Fritz Knoechlein, accused of killing ninety-seven British POWs in cold blood, claimed that there had been a Standgericht - or drumhead court - before the massacre, something that was permitted by the rule book. On the other hand the court was told that such a tribunal could not be set up once soldiers had laid down their arms. POWs are entitled to protection by the opposing army.43

  The SS regimental commander Kurt Meyer was tried by a Canadian court for ordering the killing of forty Canadian POWs. Meyer was effectively being tried for atrocities committed by his regiment, as no evidence could be produced to show that he had issued the fatal orders. Allied commanders were mercifully spared this ‘chain of command’ principal. In general Meyer impressed the court by his dignity at the trial. He was convicted, however, of responsibility for the deaths of eighteen soldiers and sentenced to death by firing squad. This was later commuted to life imprisonment by the general commanding Canadian forces in Germany whose conscience, it is alleged, was not entirely clean when it came to the actions of his own men in dealing with German and Italian POWs. Meyer was imprisoned in New Brunswick before being transferred to the British high-security prison at Werl near Dortmund, where he had Kesselring for a cellmate. He was released in 1954.44

  The Canadians lost heart after that, and allowed the British to look into atrocities perpetrated against their men after D-Day when widely circulated rumours that Canadian and British troops were not taking prisoners led to some scenes of savagery on the part of the SS.ei Once again the orders to refuse quarter appear to have come from Wilhelm Mohnke. The killings at a first-aid post were carried out by an SS man called Wilhelm Schnabel. His superior officer, Bernhard Siebken, actively resisted implementing the orders and was not present when the shootings took place. The trial began in Hamburg on 28 August 1948. When Siebken was sentenced to death, a plea was entered in mitigation, but the deputy judge advocate, Lord Russell of Liverpool, decided that the court had pronounced the correct verdict. Both men were hanged in Hameln by Pierrepoint on 20 January 1949. It was a classic case of vis victis, or victor’s justice.45

  Another Nazi who was imprisoned in Dachau was the former Gauleiter of Mecklenburg. Tisa von der Schulenburg travelled to Dachau to see Friedrich Hildebrandt, who was implicated in the shooting of two American airmen. She was told that she could not save him, even though he had protected her and her sister-in-law after 20 July 1944. She tried to understand why Hildebrandt, a ‘harmless’ man, would have ordered the shooting of the fliers, and she remembered that it was in response to the strafing of a train, in which a hundred people, chiefly women and children, had been killed. Hildebrandt had decided that the next ‘terror-bombers’ that fell to earth alive would suffer accordingly.

  The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis

  Those who were liquidated first tended to be those who had committed atrocities against Allied citizens. Hence the Russians wanted the heads of the generals responsible for invading the Soviet Union; the Yugoslavs and the Poles those who had performed that role in their lands; the Czechs those who had administered their country. The Russians killed the SS chief Friedrich Jecklen in 1946; the Yugoslavs the minister Siegfried Lasche and the general Alexander Löhr; the Poles executed Josef Bühler, Jürgen Stroop and Rudolf Höss, and the more prominent Nazis in Danzig were also passed though the Polish courts: the Gauleiter, Albert Forster, was caught by the British and handed over to the authorities in Warsaw. He and Richard Hildebrandt, head of the RuSHA, were executed. Before his despatch, Greisser, the head of the Danzig Senate and Gauleiter of Posen, was paraded in an iron cage through the streets of the city that had reverted to its Polish name of Poznań.46 The Czechs killed Karl-Hermann Frank, Hanns Ludin and Dieter Wisliceny.

  Officers who had ordered the killing of Allied POWs could expect death sentences. Many who had ordered the killing of thousands of their own citizens escaped scot free: Mengele, Gestapo Müller, Alois ‘Jupo’ Brunner and others managed to elude the Allies, and some say that the Allies connived at their disappearance. The Allies’ fury was quickly spent. In the main Nuremberg trials sentences became lighter with the passage of time; and even those given capital sentences or life often had the tariff commuted or reduced. As the trials edged towards the end of the 1940s, the fear developed among the judges that the Soviets were about to invade western Germany and wind the proceedings up.

  There was a large element of hypocrisy. Since that time many Allied atrocities have come to light, particularly the killing of POWs at Biscari, on orders from General Patton. The sinking of the French fleet at Oran by the British, with the loss of some 1,500 French lives was no secret. It was a continuation of a British naval tradition that originated at Copenhagen in 1801. The last German Kaiser had feared that it would happen to his fledgling fleet. It was possibly a ‘usage’, but it can hardly be called any more legal than the German Blitzkrieg.

  The British made the decision to stop the trials in April, and in September they handed the business over to the Germans. They passed Nazi Party members before the Spruchkammer according to the American Law for Liberation issued on 5 March 1946. Nazis were now being judged by Germans, essentially their former political enemies in the SPD or the KPD. The biggest calls for retribution came from the American Zone, as a response to pressure from OMGUS, the American military government. One of those arraigned before the courts was Winifred Wagner, who was reduced to penury, cycling up to seventy kilometres a day to forage for kindling. In between foraging for wood, she put together a sixty-four-page document on her relations with Adolf Hitler, appending copies of documents showing how she had gone out of her way to help the oppressed of the Third Reich. She also quite rightly pointed out that she had not broken the law by joining the NSDAP at the time.47

  In her deposition, Winifred claimed to have only the vaguest knowledge of the concentration camps, though other documents showed that she had been involved with trying to get someone out of Auschwitz. She had probably been given poor advice, but by that time she had seen how savage the courts had been with some of her friends, who had been guilty of little more than Party membership. Particularly galling had been the treatment accorded to her doctor Helmut Treuter, who was dispossessed and imprisoned, largely as a result of denunciation by a rival. It was not until November 1949 that he was able to practise again. Winifred feared the worst.48

  She had no problem understanding the methods of her interrogators. They were similar to those employed by the Gestapo, ranging from threats to normal chit-chat. She learned that she had been indicted because she had made Hitler ‘socially acceptable’. Meanwhile her daughter Friedelind - an American citizen - was telling the world that Winifred’s former lo
ver, Heinz Tietjen, had been used to interrogate British spies. It transpired that she meant Hermann Göring (or ‘Teddie’, as he was known in the Wagner household). Indeed, the case against Winifred relied substantially on the account of the family’s history provided by her daughter’s book.49

  Winifred Wagner’s trial took place in Bayreuth. The principle was sauve qui peut. Heinz Tietjen, who had directed the festival after Siegfried Wagner’s death, cried off. His own denazification trial was coming up, and he preferred not to venture out. Winifred was again scrupulously honest about her belief in Hitler, which had seized her as early as 1923. Hitler’s love of Wagner and Wagner’s hatred of the Jews were also aired at the trial, though neither could have been said to have had any bearing on the case against Winifred. The Spruchkammer showed an unfortunate bias towards conviction that must have reminded many Germans of the proceedings of the infamous People’s Court it had to some extent replaced. When one witness said that she saw things ‘from a different point of view’, the prosecutor rejoined, ‘Your different point of view is of no interest to us here.’ It might have been Roland Freisler himself. 50

  The prosecution called for Winifred to be classed grade one. If she had provided help to victims of the regime, it had not been from sentiments of opposition. They called for a sentence of six years in a labour camp and the confiscation of her assets. As it was, Winifred was condemned grade two. She had to do 350 days’ community service and yield up 60 per cent of her assets. She was later reclassified as a ‘lesser offender’ on appeal. The initial sentence proved controversial. Some Germans howled about the leniency of the court. Foreigners sent her food parcels. As one Jewish friend conceded, her chief crime was succumbing to the widespread delusion that Hitler had not been responsible for the crimes committed in his name. It was a view she was later to express to a like-minded person, the historian David Irving. To the end of her days Hitler was ‘USA’ - ‘Unser selige Adolf’ (Our blessed Adolf ).

  The Western Allies started out well. In the summer of 1945, for example, they sacked 90 per cent of legal officials in their zones, but they soon realised that by doing so they were greatly adding to their own workload, and that they would have problems rebuilding the German legal system. Many of the German lawyers were able to receive testimonials from colleagues attesting to their ‘inner’ rejection of the system. Once these had been approved, a Persilschein was issued: named after the soap powder, it ‘washed white’ the former Nazi. Similarly, prison officials who had been responsible for myriad murders and who had carried out a policy of unrivalled brutality were absolved for the simple reason that the prison service was short staffed. In the new state of Baden-Württemberg the proportion retained was an astonishing 96 per cent.51

  Once washed clean, the jurists returned to the bench or ministry. About 80 per cent of Nazi jurists went back to work in the Federal Republic, including seventy-two former judges and prosecutors from the notorious People’s Court. Some of these continued to serve as late as the 1970s. The German courts proved incapable of sentencing any former Nazi judge or prosecutor. Their excuse was that they were applying the law as it existed at the time.52 In the East the situation was different. After the initial teething problems, when a lot of very dodgy men were elevated to the bench, of 1,000 GDR judges in 1950, only one had been a member of the NSDAP. To deal with the shortage of skilled jurists, judges were given crash-courses. These judges however, would not have been impartial. The prison service was similarly purged, but again this hardly made the prisons of the GDR preferable to those administered by ex-Nazis in the West.53

  The Americans pulled the plug on denazification on 8 May 1948. By then US, British and French courts had tried over 8,000 cases and sentenced a tenth of the accused - 806 - to death. Fewer than half of those were commuted, and 486 went to the gallows. The Americans tried 1,672 people for war crimes. Of the 255 they executed at Landsberg-am-Lech, 102 were skilled workers, thirty-seven civil servants, with a few academic titles here and there, twenty-three were academics, twenty-two workers, eleven soldiers, and the rest were made up of the professions, Nazi functionaries and schoolboys. The oldest was Dr Schilling at seventy-four. (Twenty more died from naural causes.) All the lifers were eventually released, with one exception - Hess.54 German courts reopened in the summer of 1945, and they too passed judgment on former Nazis. Between 1945 and 1950 the courts sentenced only 5,228 defendants for Nazi crimes. Sentences were either short or the criminals were swiftly pardoned. In the years from 1951 to 1955 there were only 638 convictions. It is now clear that many of the worst culprits, the operatives who sent thousands to their deaths, were not punished at all.55

  PART IV

  The Road to Freedom

  18

  Peacemaking in Potsdam

  18 July 1945 Now it will be decided whether we can carry on living in Europe or if we must try to live our lives as a refugee God knows where. A year has elapsed since the [assassination] attempt of 20 July. A year filled with blood and misery which might perhaps have been avoided. But our people had to drink the cup down to the dregs, and in the end, it was all for the good.

  Ursula von Kardoff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 1942-1945, Munich 1994, 337

  The wartime conferences had calmly discussed the Germans’ fate, but at the Potsdam Conference the Allies finally realised that ‘Uncle Joe’ had stolen a march on them. He would call the shots. The Allies met from 17 July to 2 August 1945 at the palace of Crown Prince ‘Little Willi’, the Cecilienhof in Potsdam. The Western Allies were able to see their handiwork for the first time. In a fifteen-minute raid on 14 April they had flattened the centre of Frederick the Great’s Residenz.1 The town centre had lost ‘everything that was historic, a memorial or artistically important’, according to Hanna Grisebach.2 There were consolations: ‘The voices that we have had to listen to for over twelve years have been silenced.’3

  Hanna Grisebach was a Jewish convert to Protestantism married to a Heidelberg colleague of Karl Jaspers. For many of the same reasons as the philosopher, her husband was forced into retirement in 1937. The couple moved to the so-called ‘von-Viertel’, the aristocratic quarter, of Potsdam. Frau Grisebach was taken into the circle of the largely royalist nobles like the Wedels, Schulenburgs, Buddenbrocks and an old Princess Trubetzkoy who lived in Potsdam, many of whom subscribed to the ‘confessing Church’ and were wholly opposed to Hitler’s regime. Like Gertrud Jaspers, Hanna Grisebach spent the last few days of the Third Reich in hiding.4

  On 24 April Hanna noted ‘the first Russian in our house’. Their Polish maid Marja was able to interpret and shoo the Russian away, saving the life of her young son. Her teenage daughter she now dressed as a boy, cutting off her long plaits to save her from being raped. By now the Germans had retreated, leaving a sorry spectacle of destruction: ‘battered vehicles, shattered cars, discarded pieces of uniform and weapons of every kind lie scattered around . . .’5

  The Russians showed more respect for Potsdam’s cultural monuments than the Anglo-Americans. During the battle for Potsdam the business of safeguarding the palaces in the park of Sanssouci was given to Yevgeny Ludshuveit, an art historian. He sent a radio message to German High Command to ask them to cease shelling the park: ‘I was very worried about the treasures, and wanted them to be preserved.’6 The Glienecke Bridge, which connected Potsdam with Greater Berlin to the north, was another victim of the bombardment. You might still cross to the Wannsee side, but only by means of a ‘hair-raising climb’ over the pylons that had previously held up the suspension bridge. In their destructive rage the SS had set fire to all the fine boats belonging to the Imperial Yacht Club moored on the Havel.7

  The care taken over the remaining monuments was not extended to the private property of Potsdam’s townsfolk. There was the usual hunt for watches and bicycles. The Grisebachs lost eight watches, as well as all their bicycles. Hanna’s son managed to buy another of the latter with a gold watch, but that was also later stolen. Surviving meant helping yourself t
o what you could. Hanna Grisebach brought back part of a horse and marinated it in vinegar and spices. The dish brought forth whoops of joy. She also received her share of a cow that had trodden on a mine. Possibly the greatest discovery of all was the contents of the cellar of a villa which the owner had thrown into the waters of the Hasengraben, in order to prevent the Russians from drinking it. Hanna’s daughter, together with a friend, had located the booty and they were prepared to wade out to their hips to bring up the precious bottles: ‘top wines from famous sites’. The Grisebachs drank them with relish, while the one who had donated them lay in bed with a cold. The wine put the food to shame. Anything they didn’t want, such as a bottle of Malaga, could be traded with the Russians for bread and bacon.8

  On 5 May Hanna heard a rumour that the Americans were coming to Potsdam. Stories of this sort were rife at the time - there was no connection with the Potsdam Conference in July. The first Russian wave was moving on. A baggage train set off, creating a ‘picturesque scene’ reminiscent of Tolstoy’s The Cossacks or similar episodes from War and Peace. Boys spent their time shooting ducks and riding horses around, while abandoned boats bobbed on the water. The Americans didn’t come, however, and from mid-May there was very little food. Supplies of meat and fat dried up and the Grisebachs lived on potato flakes and whatever fruit and vegetables they could scrump from abandoned gardens. Added to this they caught fish in the Havel or the lake, sometimes picking up a few after the Russians had tossed a grenade into the water - their usual form of angling.

  In their hunger they were pleased to hear that professors were equated with manual workers in the handing out of ration cards: they were eligible for the card I. When a field full of potatoes was located twenty kilometres away in Buckow, Hanna and others set off on replacement bicycles they had unearthed. They had to dodge Russian fire to get at the tubers, as the soldiers wanted to distil them. Still, despite several setbacks, Hanna was able to get away with thirty-five kilos.9