by David Talbot
Green Hackworth and his colleagues successfully conspired to hold up Pell’s departure for months. Finally, after FDR intervened on his behalf with Hull, Pell was able to set sail for London on the Queen Mary in December 1943—a full six months after his appointment to the war crimes commission. Pell arrived in a frigidly cold, war-torn London, where heating fuel was in short supply. Fortunately, he had sent word ahead to his English tailor, who was able to supply him with woolen long underwear that fit his large frame.
Pell was shocked by London’s widespread war damage: every block seemed to have at least one demolished building. Three of the friends in his small London social circle were killed by German bombs. One was blown up, along with the rest of the congregation, while attending Sunday church. Only the minister survived. Pell toughed it out during air raids, staying aboveground instead of descending into the crowded, badly ventilated shelters. At age fifty-nine, he thought he was more likely to die from catching the flu than by being blown up by a German bomb or a Doodlebug, as the British called the V–1 flying bombs whistling overhead. When the Luftwaffe bombers roared over London, they dropped huge flares to illuminate their targets, and the city was cast in a spectral glow just before the explosions began. As the president’s man in London, Pell thought it was important to carry on with his life in the same plucky manner as the Brits. One afternoon, he took a visiting cousin for tea at the exclusive Athenaeum Club. Although every one of the club’s windows had been blasted out, the waiters still made their rounds with the same crisp and aloof manner as they had before the war.
As the war crimes commission went about its work through 1944, Pell, despite his lack of legal experience, took a leadership role, developing prosecutorial guidelines for the postwar tribunal that would try Germany’s war criminals. While some commission members were uncertain how to categorize the Nazi brutality against the Jews, Pell vehemently argued that this violence, even if conducted away from the battlefield, must be regarded as a prosecutable war crime, and the commission came to agree with him.
But Pell was unable to finish his work with the war crimes commission. In December 1944, he returned to America for the wedding of his only son—future U.S. senator Claiborne Pell—and to consult with the State Department. Once they had him back in Washington, his political enemies were determined to never let him return. Again, Pell appealed to his old friend in the White House to help him overpower the State Department hacks. But this time, Roosevelt’s health was failing and he could not muster the energy to rescue Bertie. On February 1, the State Department announced Pell’s dismissal.
In early April 1945, Henry Morgenthau went down to the presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where FDR was convalescing, to urge him to directly confront the State Department cabal that seemed hell-bent on appeasing the country’s German enemies and antagonizing its Soviet allies. Sitting down for cocktails with the president, Morgenthau was shaken by the president’s “very haggard” appearance. “His hands shook so that he started to knock the glasses over. . . . I found his memory bad and he was constantly confusing names.” After drinks and dinner, Roosevelt seemed to rally and he asked Morgenthau what he had in mind. The Treasury secretary told him it was time “to break the State Department” and replace the old guard with loyal New Dealers. FDR assured Morgenthau he was with him “100 percent.” The next afternoon, April 12, Roosevelt died after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
That same day, Pell was scheduled to meet in Washington with the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., to discuss being reinstated on the war crimes commission—a meeting that had been brokered by FDR. After he had been fired, Pell had fought on, working the Washington press and stirring up outrage over his treatment at the hands of the State Department. The public controversy put Pell’s enemies on the defensive. But in the wake of Roosevelt’s death, Pell was politically isolated, and by September 1945 he finally admitted defeat.
There were two reasons he was targeted for political destruction, Pell told a group of sympathetic lawyers who had rallied around him: “One is anti-Semitism, which is, to a large extent, prevalent in the State Department.” He also antagonized his powerful enemies, he explained, by going after “German industrialists whose plight arouses the class loyalties of their opposition numbers in Great Britain and the United States. We cannot forget [for example] that one of the big war factories in Germany was the Opel Company which was owned and financed by the General Motors Corporation, a company in which Secretary Stettinius had a great interest. The biggest electric company in Germany was owned and financed by the General Electric Company of New York. We have here very potent reasons why a large and important group in this country is trying to pipe down on the serious investigations of [corporate Germany’s collaboration with the Nazis].”
In the end, Pell would triumph. Because of the uproar in the press over his dismissal, the State Department was finally forced to recognize the inevitability of a war crimes trial. In a statement released in the midst of the Pell melee, the department acknowledged that President Roosevelt had repeatedly made clear his intention. As the first war crimes trial got under way in Nuremberg in November 1945, the spirit of FDR and the president’s justice warriors—men like Pell and Morgenthau—hovered over the legal forum.
But the political foes who had opposed Roosevelt’s day of reckoning for the Nazis did not fully surrender. They remained determined to control the proceedings at Nuremberg and to protect valued members of Hitler’s hierarchy.
In May 1945, Allen Dulles and OSS chief Bill Donovan met in Frankfurt with Supreme Court associate justice Robert Jackson, who had just been named chief U.S. war crimes prosecutor by the new president, Harry S. Truman. During their meeting, Dulles underlined the various ways that he could be of use as Jackson prepared his case, including providing German witnesses for the prosecution as well as secret enemy documents. Jackson was delighted by Dulles’s offer of assistance, noting in his diary that it was a “God send.” Donovan further reinforced the relationship with Jackson’s team by putting a number of OSS agents on his staff. But as the weeks went by, Jackson developed the sinking feeling that he had fallen into an OSS “trap.” It became clear to the Nuremberg prosecutor that Donovan and Dulles harbored ulterior motives and agendas that did not always mesh with the interests of justice at Nuremberg.
The tensions between Donovan and Jackson began to grow in July when the OSS chief moved to take over what Nuremberg prosecutors referred to as the trial’s “economic case.” As Wall Street lawyers, Donovan and Dulles considered themselves uniquely equipped to take charge of the case against the industrialists and bankers who had financed Hitler’s regime. But such a role would have given the two OSS men the ability to control the legal fates of German business figures who had strong ties to their own Wall Street circles—including infamous former clients of the Dulles brothers.
Robert Jackson was a strong New Dealer who had risen through FDR’s Justice Department, where he had taken on powerful corporate interests like the Mellon family and fought tax evasion and antitrust battles. Well aware of the corporate conflicts of interest that Donovan and Dulles brought to the Nuremberg case, Jackson stunned the OSS chief by informing him that he would not be leading the prosecution of Hitler’s financiers at Nuremberg.
Jackson quickly discovered that his concerns had been well founded. As the trial’s start date approached that fall, Donovan began communicating with Goering and Schacht, whom he recognized as the two most financially astute men among the accused. Goering had amassed huge economic power under Hitler’s regime, organizing state-run mining, steel, and weapons enterprises and taking control of heavy industries in the countries overrun by the Nazis. And Schacht, for his part, had remained a well-respected figure in New York, London, and Swiss banking circles even after selling his soul to Hitler. (Schacht later fell out with the Führer and spent the final days of the war in the VIP section of Dachau, where prisoners received relatively lenient treatment.) Th
e banker knew where much of Nazi Germany’s assets were hidden, which continued to make him a valued man in global financial circles.
Behind the scenes, Donovan took the shameless step of working out a deal with these two prominent defendants, offering them leniency in return for their testimony against the other accused Hitler accomplices. When the OSS chief informed Jackson and his legal team that he had cut a tentative deal with Schacht and with—of all people—Goering, the prosecutors were aghast. Telford Taylor, Jackson’s assistant prosecutor, later called Donovan’s actions “ill conceived and dangerous . . . Goering was the surviving leader and symbol of Nazism. To put him forward as the man who could tell the truth about the Third Reich and lay bare the guilt of its leaders, as Donovan appeared to expect, was nothing short of ludicrous.”
On November 26, a few days after the trial began, Jackson wrote a letter to Donovan, making it clear that their views were “far apart” and there was no role for the OSS chief on the Nuremberg team. By the end of the month, Donovan was gone.
But Allen Dulles was a more subtle practitioner of the art of power than Wild Bill Donovan. He would continue to play a crafty role in the dispensation of justice—or its opposite—not only during the first trial but through the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, which stretched from 1946 to 1949. In all, some two hundred accused German war criminals were prosecuted at Nuremberg, and hundreds more would be tried in military and civilian courts over the following decades. But due to Dulles’s carefully calibrated interventions, a number of Europe’s most notorious war criminals—men who should have found themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, where they almost certainly would have been convicted of capital crimes—escaped justice. Some were helped to flee through “ratlines” to Franco’s Spain, the Middle East, South America, and even the United States. Others were eased into new lives of power and affluence in postwar West Germany, where they became essential confederates in Dulles’s rapidly growing intelligence complex.
Near the end of 1945, Dulles returned home to New York, where, on December 3—a few days before leaving government service—he was asked to talk about postwar Germany at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. He felt at home in the council’s headquarters in the historic Harold Pratt House on Park Avenue, and his remarks were frank and unfiltered that day. The first Nuremberg trial had just begun and Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech was months in the future, but Dulles was already sounding the themes of the future Cold War era.
The United States must not go too far in its efforts to cleanse Germany of its Nazi past, Dulles told the meeting. “Most men of the caliber required to [run the new Germany] suffer a political taint,” he said. “We have already found out that you can’t run railroads without taking in some [Nazi] Party members.”
Dulles went on to explain why it was essential to ensure a strong West Germany. Signs of Soviet perfidy were already glaringly apparent. In Poland, he warned, “The Russians are acting little better than thugs. . . . The promises at [the Allied leaders’] Yalta [conference] to the contrary, probably eight to ten million people are being enslaved.”
For Dulles, the wartime alliance that had defeated Hitler was already dead. In fact, he had been planning throughout the war for this moment when the Western powers—including elements of the Third Reich—would unite against their true enemy in Moscow.
On October 1, 1946, after nearly a yearlong trial, the fates of the twenty-one Nuremberg defendants were finally read aloud in the stuffy courtroom. Three were acquitted, including the well-connected Schacht. Seven received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life. Like many convicted Nazi criminals in the early Cold War years, a number of the Nuremberg defendants sentenced to prison were later the beneficiaries of politically motivated interventions and early releases; few of the some five thousand convicted Nazis were still in prison after 1953. A number of the interventions on behalf of fortunate war criminals could be traced to the quiet stratagems of Allen Dulles.
Eleven of the original Nuremberg defendants did face swift and final justice, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. Among them was Goering, whom not even Bill Donovan had been able to save. The Reichsmarschall had predictably proclaimed his innocence to the end. “The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people,” he told the court in his bombastic final statement. This proved too much even for one of his fellow defendants, Hitler’s former vice chancellor, Franz von Papen, who angrily confronted Goering later during a court lunch break: “Who in the world is responsible for all this destruction if not you? You haven’t taken the responsibility for anything!” Goering simply laughed at him.
Goering feared death by the noose, and he requested a soldier’s honorable exit by firing squad. When this last request was denied, Goering resorted to the favorite Nazi means of self-annihilation, cracking a glass capsule of cyanide with his teeth. (For men who had callously dispatched millions to their deaths, the Reich’s high officials proved exquisitely sensitive about their own methods of departure.) According to Telford Taylor, it was likely one of Goering’s American guards, a strapping Army lieutenant named Jack “Tex” Wheelis, who smuggled the poison capsule into the condemned Nazi’s cell. Years after Tex Wheelis’s own death, his widow showed a visitor a small trove of treasures, including a solid gold Mont Blanc fountain pen and a Swiss luxury watch, both inscribed with Goering’s name, that had been bestowed upon the American soldier by his German “friend.”
Goering’s evasion of the gallows proved wise. The following morning, the ten remaining men who had been sentenced to death filed one by one into a gymnasium adjacent to the courtroom, where three black-painted wooden scaffolds awaited them. With its cracked plaster walls and glaring lighting, the gymnasium—which had hosted a basketball game just days before between U.S. Army security guards—provided a suitably bleak backdrop. The chief hangman, a squat, hard-drinking Army master sergeant from San Antonio named John C. Woods, was an experienced executioner, with numerous hangings to his credit. But, due to sloppiness or ill will, the Nuremberg hangings were not professionally carried out.
The drop was not long enough, so some of the condemned dangled in agony at the end of their ropes for long stretches of time before they died. Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s war minister and the second-highest-ranking soldier after Goering to be tried at Nuremberg, suffered the longest, thrashing for a full twenty-four minutes. When the dead men were later photographed, they looked particularly ghoulish, since the swinging trapdoors had smashed and bloodied their faces as the men fell—another flaw, or intentional indignity, in the execution process.
Julius Streicher, defiant to the end, screamed a piercing “Heil Hitler!” as he began climbing the thirteen wooden steps of the scaffold. As the noose was placed around his neck, he spat at Woods, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.” The short drop failed to kill him, too, and as Streicher groaned at the end of his rope, Woods was forced to descend from the platform, grab his swinging body, and yank sharply downward to finally silence him.
After the first executions, the American colonel in charge asked for a cigarette break. The soldiers on the execution team paced nervously around the gymnasium, smoking and speaking somberly among themselves. But after it was all over, Woods pronounced himself perfectly satisfied. “Never saw a hanging go off any better,” he declared.
The hangman never expressed any doubt about his historic role at Nuremberg. “I hanged those ten Nazis . . . and I am proud of it,” he said after the executions. A few years later, Woods accidentally electrocuted himself while repairing faulty machinery at a military base in the Marshall Islands.
The sectors of Germany occupied by the United States and its allies tried to quickly forget the war. Hollywood musicals and cowboy adventures—and their escapist German equivalents—flooded the movie theaters in West Germany. But in the Soviet-controlled East, there was a cinematic effort, though generally party-directed and heavy-handed, to force the German people
to confront the nightmare and its consequences. In the early postwar period, there was a barrage of such dark movies, known as Trümmerfilme, or “rubble films.” One of the more artful rubble films, Murderers Among Us, grappled disturbingly with the Nazi ghosts that still haunted Germany. Produced in 1946 by DEFA, the Soviet-run studio in East Berlin, Murderers Among Us was directed by Wolfgang Staudte, a once-promising young filmmaker who had made his own moral compromises in order to continue working during Hitler’s rule. Staudte’s film reverberates with guilt.
In the film, Dr. Hans Mertens, a German surgeon who had served with the Wehrmacht, returns to Berlin after the war. The city is a monument to rubble; it seems to have been deconstructed stone by stone, brick by brick. Staudte needed no studio back lot or special effects. Demolished Berlin was his sound stage. Dr. Mertens, who wants to forget everything he has witnessed during the war, wanders drunk and obliterated through the city’s ruins. But his past won’t release him. He comes across his former commander, Captain Bruckner, a happily shallow man who, despite the atrocities he ordered during the war, has returned to a prosperous life in Berlin as a factory owner.
“Don’t look so sad,” Bruckner tells the doctor as the two men pick their way through the rubble one day in search of a hidden cabaret. “Every era offers its chances if you find them. Helmets from saucepans or saucepans from helmets. It’s the same game. You must manage—that’s all.”
